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Overview
Named a Best Book of 2020 by USA TODAY
From the winner of the Orange Award for New Writing comes a blistering, satirical novel about life under a global media and tech corporation that knows exactly what we think, what we want, and what we do—before we do.
One corporation has made a perfect world based on a perfect algorithm . . . now what to do with all these messy people?
Lionel Bigman is dead. Murdered by a robot. Guy Matthias, the philandering founder and CEO of the mega-corporation Beetle, insists it was human error. But was it? Either the predictive algorithms of Beetle's supposedly omniscient 'lifechain' don't work, or, they've been hacked. Both scenarios are impossible to imagine and signal the end of Beetle's technotopia and life as we know it.
Dazzlingly original and darkly comic, Zed asks profound questions about who we are, what we owe to one another, and what makes us human. It describes our moment—the ugliness and the beauty—perfectly. Kavenna is a prophet who has seen deeply into the present—and thrown back her head and laughed.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780385545471 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 01/14/2020 |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 3.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
One
At 2:23 a.m. the BeetleInsight alarm system went off. This indicated a threat to national security. Various people were instantly informed and among them was Douglas Varley, who was woken by his BeetleBand saying “Scrace Dickens.”
Still mired in sleep, Varley heard this as “Disgrace” and leaped out of bed, hoping thereby to avert this calamity, but then Scrace Dickens said: “Varley, it’s one of yours.”
“What’s one of mine?”
“You didn’t hear yet?”
“No, I was asleep until five seconds ago.”
Scrace Dickens, a Very Intelligent Personal Assistant who never slept, paused for a moment to process and discard this irrelevant information.
“So, it seems you have not yet read the initial reports?” he said, eventually.
“It seems so,” said Varley.
Varley was thirty-four, his blond hair streaked with gray, a genetic trait he derived from his mother. He was tall and had once been shy, but now lacked the time for such nuances. He had the practically identical background of most senior Beetle employees, including a gilded academic career at an Ivy League university and a fundamental obsession with chess and beer. This was Beetle CEO Guy Matthias’s background as well, though Guy had dropped out in his third year at Stanford because his degree (in Artificial Intelligence) was insufficiently challenging. Varley had worked for Beetle in the U.S. for the past decade, in charge of lifechain analysis and troubleshooting. This meant he was constantly fending off potential or actual disasters. He had recently been posted to London because the U.K. had the most advanced benign regulatory environment in the world, and Beetle was the world leader in benign regulatory environments.
“Do you want me to summarize everything for you?” said Scrace Dickens, kindly.
Varley generally refused offers of summaries from his Very Intelligent Personal Assistant (also known as a Veep) to maintain the illusion of autonomy, but this morning his head ached, he had drunk a little too much wine the previous night, as doubtless his BeetleBand had registered, and he noted with some alarm that his hands were trembling.
“All right, thanks,” he said ungratefully.
Within a few minutes, Varley had gained a clear picture of the case. His case. The previous day, George Mann—forty-five, tall, and slightly overweight, a partner at AHTCH (a globally recognized brand for flow-control valve technology and engineering innovation), father of two boys, husband to Margaret Collins, a lawyer—had left his office on the fifteenth floor of the Gherkin and walked along the corridor, saying a brisk and distracted good night to his Very Intelligent Personal Assistant, Bob Sykes. He had passed another colleague in the corridor and nodded to him. It was 18:08 and therefore too early for George Mann to leave work. This was logged by Bob Sykes and Mann’s predictive algorithms were realigned, including his projected retirement age, monthly health insurance payments, and bonus prospects. Indeed, a beautiful ripple passed through all the predictive algorithms as they were adjusted accordingly.
After leaving the main lobby of the Gherkin, George Mann seemed to be heading in the direction of the tube, as would have been usual. However, when he reached the station he did not descend, but continued toward the river. He entered the Three Tuns pub at 18:22. There, he sat in a corner, and drank seven whiskies and three bottles of wine over the next six hours. He didn’t speak to anyone, except to order drinks at the bar. The pub was very busy at that time of day, and at one point George Mann was asked if he would mind if someone used the chair to his left. He did not reply, but this was understandable because there was a great deal of noise, and the person shrugged and took the chair anyway. Shortly after midnight, George Mann asked his BeetleBand to order him a car, which was duly requested from Mercury and appeared within minutes. The in-car operating system had no record of Mann saying anything at all. In line with usual Beetle Electrical Company protocols, the Very Intelligent Automated Driving System (VIADS) had simply wished Mann a good evening as he departed, but Mann had not replied. This was also quite usual—lots of people ignored such conversational forays, and Mann had already requested location Home by BeetleBand—this location being a two-up two-down Victorian terrace in a small square by Kennington tube, overlooked by glass-and-steel edifices. Mann arrived home at 00:47, let himself in, and walked to the kitchen. The fridge said: “Good evening, George, you’re back late this fine evening!” Ignoring this, Mann took the sharpest knife from a knife block and went upstairs to his bedroom where his wife, Margaret, was asleep. Mann smothered her with a pillow and slit her throat. After this, he walked to his fourteen-year-old son Tom’s room and smothered him as well, then stabbed the boy four times in the heart, and then walked into the next room and did the same to his eleven-year-old son, William.
At this point the predictive algorithms crashed.
Mann dropped the knife on the floor of William’s room, left his family bleeding to death, and walked out of the house. By the time the police and ambulances arrived, Margaret, Tom, and William were dead.
“Where did Mann go after that?” said Varley, feeling sick.
“At 2:03 a.m. Mann threw his BeetlePad in the river,” said Scrace Dickens. “Then he walked along the river, heading east.”
“But his interface implant is still working?”
“He doesn’t have one.”
“The Argus footage?” asked Varley.
“Of course,” said Scrace Dickens, sounding slightly offended.
Varley excused himself for a moment and went to the bathroom. There, he threw up copiously in the sink. This was disgusting and not cathartic at all, as he briefly hoped. He groaned and said, “For fuck’s sake,” then imagined Scrace Dickens logging this as well. It wasn’t Scrace Dickens’s fault—the record was instantaneous. Second by second, even microsecond by microsecond. He washed his face, cleaned his teeth. His clothes had started vibrating, but that was superfluous. He said, “Stop,” and they stopped. He said, “I need to speak to Eloise Jayne,” and Scrace Dickens said, “Of course,” again, as if this were a redundant request. In a sense it was, because Scrace Dickens operated to the most beautiful and sophisticated algorithms and understood a crucial truth: at every moment Varley would choose a path, and the path of greatest probability was the most probable choice. In the circumstances it was pretty much inevitable that he would choose to speak to Eloise.
What were the other paths? Varley wondered, as he waited for her to answer. To not speak to Eloise, to go back to bed, to lie there groaning, to have a breakdown, to leave his own job, and then he might even hurl himself off Blackfriars Bridge, into the murky depths beneath! They were all paths. He could pick up a gun and shoot himself, except he didn’t have a gun. Therefore, Scrace Dickens had not considered this path of probability. Also, it was absurd to suggest that Scrace Dickens considered anything, in the ordinary sense, because he assessed and rejected available probabilities so swiftly. The analogy to human thought was wholly inappropriate. Yet Varley couldn’t think of another analogy so he used it anyway.
In a glass-and-steel apartment in the Shard, the penthouse beyond all other penthouses, was Guy Matthias, Beetle CEO, a fit, robust, forty-two-year-old man, in the prime of his life yet an urgent addict to longevity treatments, with his cryogenic amulet hanging round his neck. He invested a large percentage of his wealth in shell-shedding research; his hope was that body–body consciousness transfer would become credible before it was too late—for him and those he loved. His hair was expensively dyed, straight back to his original black. Recent skin treatments (this was the euphemism Guy preferred) had made an enormous difference to his face; indeed, he had recently contemplated wiping a decade off his age, and updating the whole of Real Virtuality. This was an ongoing project; Guy needed to test the potential outcomes more thoroughly. He had been awake for some time and had completed his toothbrush test—the result sent to his doctor for immediate analysis, using the in-house Off the Record System (OTR)—and performed his morning yoga satsang. At this point, Sarah Coates, his Veep, conveyed the information about George Mann. Guy’s immediate response was to request that Douglas Varley should be observed more closely in turn. Sarah Coates passed on this request to the relevant people at BeetleInnerSight. Then Guy Matthias OTR-ed his wife, Elska, who had asked him for a divorce the night before. She had been sleeping apart from him for two months now, since he set his Veep to individual voice recognition only. Guy had been obliged to do this because Elska had bothered Sarah Coates all the time, requesting information about Guy’s meetings and even transcripts of his OTR-calls. This made it impossible for Sarah Coates to do her job efficiently. Elska had asked him to remove the voice recognition limitation, or to add her voice as well, and Guy had asked her to trust him, and she had refused to trust him, and now she wanted a divorce. His OTR was brief but conciliatory and he advised her, once again, to think of the children. Guy didn’t really have time to consider this further, because he had to OTR Lydia Walker, twenty-three, a bright young colleague he was mentoring, whom he was about to take with him to New York. He had suggested to Lydia that she might act as his human assistant on a new shell-shedding research project. Together they would radically transform and enhance civilization, he explained. Lydia said she was really grateful for the opportunity. Thanks so much! When could they leave?!
“My Veep will send you the travel plans,” OTR-ed Guy Matthias. “Lots of very exciting things to discuss. We need to progress with this asap!”
“Cool!” said Lydia, adding an emoticon of a rabbit hopping for joy. This disappointed Guy Matthias. To ensure his next trip to the States was not a total waste of time, he OTR-ed Gracie and Nicki, two other bright young mentees of his, to invite them to discuss exciting new research projects in NYC as well. After this, Guy drank some coffee.
On the other side of the city was a high-rise block, with special panels to repel sunlight and other special panels to absorb sunlight, the entire block capturing or reflecting the sun depending on its energy and heating needs. The windows also reflected the towers of Canary Wharf and were darkened every couple of minutes by the shadows of airplanes gliding into City Airport. This was the headquarters of the National Anti-Terrorism and Security Office, with the acronym NATSO—which no one much liked. You entered this building via an entrance lobby, in which an embodied Veep manned the reception. Or not quite manned, rather, Veeped. This was Phoebe Haversham and she tilted her head when you spoke to her, at an angle just too acute to be natural. This was a minor flaw in the design but otherwise the Veep was incredibly realistic. Her skin appeared to be real, and moved with the flexibility of real skin, except that it crinkled and bagged a little around the neck, so the Veep looked young in places and old in others. She had an athletic physique and wore an appealing gray dress, which hugged her curves without revealing too much flesh, which wasn’t really flesh anyway.
Eloise Jayne worked in the highest levels of NATSO, and her desk was positioned in an open-plan area outside Commissioner Morgan Newton’s office. She was a tall, muscular woman of thirty-five, with cropped blond hair. She might have only a decade or so remaining, according to the lifechain, because of the premature deaths of her parents and several other close relatives. This dolorous prediction had caused her to become exceptionally determined, and her ascent had been swift. The other person, or entity, who worked in this open-plan area was Little Dorritt, Newton’s Veep, who was not embodied and resided in a VeepStation and various connected devices instead. Eloise wasn’t sure whether she preferred the Veeps embodied or stationed. She had refused so far to have a Veep at all, and she was aware that this was a major problem for her, as an individual, and also for her individual lifechain predictions, and also for the lifechain predictions for all individuals, now and in the future. Varley had explained it to her. She was anomalous. Anomalies were a pain. They screwed up the system. The lifechain had to accommodate these painful anomalies and this accommodation made the results potentially unstable. Eloise still didn’t want a Veep. They made her feel sad—these assiduous entities with their heads at uncomfortable angles, or trapped in VeepStations or BeetlePads. Confined, either way.
As Eloise walked past the VeepStation, Little Dorritt said: “Good morning, Eloise Jayne, good to see you again. Douglas Varley is waiting for you on OTR.” Little Dorritt operated using the latest face and voice recognition software and received constant updates from the Custodians—a Beetle service for smart cities. Eloise replied: “Hi, Little Dorritt, thanks for that, I’ll take the OTR now.” As she said, “Hello, Douglas Varley?” she was cursing Beetle for sending her so much work. When BeetleInsight failed, she was obliged to investigate the consequences. The consequences of each failure were cataclysmic. Yet, Beetle claimed it had the most accurate predictive algorithms in the world. Due to the astounding and unchallenged monopoly of Beetle as a global media conglomerate and main online reality for two-thirds of the world’s population, Beetle also had every available security contract with the Government and therefore it was the sole resource for those, like Eloise, who were obliged to arrest prospective criminals and terrorists in line with the Sus-Law, the latest extension of the Criminal Intentions Act. This law permitted her, and her colleagues, to arrest on the basis of predictive algorithms, or probability chains, and these were perceived to be legally authoritative in any trial. It worked beautifully for a while and had saved many lives but Eloise had noted a few glitches in recent weeks.
The Mann case was another major glitch. Three lives destroyed, so brutally. Varley was talking about how the lifechain predicts had failed and there would be a full BeetleInsight inquiry and the conclusions would be conveyed by the end of the morning—
Eloise interrupted: “Forgive me for interrupting,” she said, not really caring if he forgave her or not. “Please ask Scrace Dickens to send Little Dorritt every available Argus report, immediately.”
“Yes, they’re copious,” said Varley.
“If we find Mann, he won’t kill anyone else. That’s my priority in the real world. The real world is my priority, not your virtual crap.”
“The real world isn’t just real,” said Varley. “It’s virtual too. Guy Matthias calls it Real Virtuality. Real Virtuality is preferable to reality because it is perfectible. It has greater value.”