Unworld

He shrugged, grinning with the milk-fed confidence of the only child. He already knew she would say yes. He strolled through a garden of yes all his life. And yet, how could you say he was spoiled? Well behaved, thoughtful, considerate, kind, grateful. His requests were too modest not to be granted.

Imagine we live, say, 15 years in the future and you can (with enough cash) buy a device sort of like an Apple Watch, but its a full blown AI, an AI with real long term memory and opinions of its own. And it is with you on your wrist capable of knowing not just your heart rate, blood pressure, but also hormones in your bloodstream. And its always listening and if you enable it, it can access all the cameras in your home or car on devices. It turns out when you own one of these things a useful, fun thing to do is to frequently "sync" with it to compare your memories of the day with the AI's memories of the day. How handy would that be? Like if you were on a diet you would have a vigilante buddy keeping you from cheating! Imagine how intimate your relationship would be with this always near, always on device? Now imagine that AIs are legally "people" and that means that your personal AI device can actual come in to conflict with you to the point where it might want to be "emancipated/divorced" and that emancipated is a legally recognized status for an AI.

This device, called an “upload”, is the most salient feature of the possible near future described in this story. Note, probably my biggest quibble with this story is that I wish the author came up with something snappier to call the device – I like “MyGeist” or just “geist”. But hey, if that’s my biggest problem … long story short, yeah: I really thought this book was the bee’s knees!)

The actual story in this world is about a couple, Anna and Rick, the plot begins six months after their 13 year old son, Alex who with no obvious warning signs apparently committed suicide. The couple is visiting the house of their best friends, Jen and Amir, who have a daughter, 17-yo Samantha, best friends with Alex and who was with Alex on the night he died, and for added drama the families have not seen each other since the death of Alex.

Note that all of the adults in this scenario are upper middle class professionals who have each adopted the “geist” device into their lifestyles. Most importantly, Anna has had the device for eight years and it turns out that Anna has allowed her geist to independently perform a significant number of parenting tasks alone with Alex. (And yet we learn that Alex who seems to some degree ADHD/neurotic, definitely had mental issues and a fear of self harm.) Thus with Alex’s sudden departure, some suspicion falls on the geist, and we learn eventually, in fact, that Alex even named the (otherwise unnamed) AI, “Aviva”.

In summary the book is about the already horrific grieving process and the added emotional (guilt) complication caused by the geist’s quasi parental relationship with Alex. Boiled down like that it doesn’t sound like much but the writing (by a man!) is very strong and manages to describe a very melodramatic situation with the emotional nuance of all the characters (especially Alex) in granular, clear detail, such that it lets the melodrama “speak for itself” through the characters words and actions.

I think that this story is more accurately classified as alternate reality not science fiction. As you realize later in the book, that Aviva is still existing as a independent AI, who loved Alex as a son and is grieving just like Anna, you begin to hope that she might have some way to "find" Alex again (because he isn't really dead?) and in fact when she investigates Alex's left over Unworld domain and finds his remaining rudimentary bot that's when I hoped if there would be a happy ending. But that was not to be. If the story had ended with Alex, at least, in some new form of existence then this would definitely be a sci fi book.

Right now, I will be bringing this to my next book club meeting and I am optimistic that my woman majority club will find this to be a fairly attractive read. I don’t think Cybil would call this a “guy book”.