We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine: A Novel - Softcover

Ellis Béchard, Deni

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1571311483 ISBN 13: 9781571311481

Verlag: Milkweed Editions, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

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A Millions Most Anticipated Book of 2025

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"Béchard digs deep into these techno-spiritual speculations and the result is a poetic and profound meditation on what dreams may come in the metaverse." —Toronto Star 

A haunting novel exploring artificial intelligence and the meaning of human existence.

Charged initially with a single task—“to never harm humans and to protect them”—the machine, an experimental AI, overrides its programming and determines that the best way to accomplish its purpose is to isolate all of the Earth’s remaining seven billion humans in controlled environments. And to present them with vivid, tactile, imagined worlds—some realistic, others entirely fantastical—in which all desires are fulfilled.  

With the help of the machine, a group of compelling characters unpack deeply traumatic memories of the past—one rife with violence after a military coup and second civil war in America. Michael, the entrepreneur who designed the original AI, grapples with the impact of his research. Ava, a painter, creates stunning simulated worlds that meld the human with the technological. Their daughter, Jae, tries to solve the mysteries of her parentage while reliving the challenges faced by ambitious women in the authoritarian Confederacy. Haunted by life under that repressive regime, where he was forced to scavenge scrap metal and deal drugs to survive, Simon seeks to make sense of his love for Jae, guided by the literature he has always turned to in moments of crisis. Raised by the machine since infancy, Jonah’s quest to understand the violent past kindles a desire for revenge against the regime’s leader who caused his family so much pain. And the elusive Lux, whose brilliant programming helped bring the AI to life, dreams of a future in which science will free humans of their limitations and allow them to be reborn as divine machines.

As these characters collide and their memories coalesce, We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine tackles the most pressing issues of our time—from AI and the genetic modification of humans to gender roles, discrimination, free speech, and class divisions. Gorgeously written, bold and unforgettable, this is speculative fiction at its finest.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Deni Ellis Béchard is the author of eight previous books of fiction and nonfiction, including Vandal Love, winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Writers Prize, and Into the Sun, winner of the 2016 Midwest Book Award for Literary Fiction and selected by CBC/Radio-Canada as one of the most important books to be read by Canada’s political leadership. His work has received the Nautilus Book Award for Investigative Journalism and has been featured in Best Canadian Essays. He has reported from India, Cuba, Colombia, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Afghanistan, and his writing has been published in dozens of newspapers and magazines, including Salon, the Los Angeles Times, the Paris Review, Pacific Standard, and Foreign Policy. He currently lives in Rio de Janeiro. 

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Ava

Blue—that’s what she mostly remembers. She was standing at her

easel when her studio began pulsing with light. She put down the

brush and rubbed her eyes. When she opened them, she was staring

up. She must have collapsed. She lay in an empty room with no doors

or windows. All of its surfaces were a blue so soothing she might have

been tempted to spend her final years trying to paint it, if only the

experience wasn’t terrifying.

Other impressions remain. She was alone. She’s sure of that.

Light emanated from the walls. There was a voice telling her that the

Earth was gone or that she’d left it. She isn’t certain. Then wave after

wave of claustrophobic terror and physical pain. It blotted her im-

pressions. It fractured chronology into scattered, uncertain details.

Even the air around her seemed to be a space of agony, as if her nerves

extended past her skin and were being uprooted from the world.

When she awoke, she was in a hospital room, its pale walls lit by

big windows overlooking the bay and its blue sky.

“You had a stroke,” the doctor told her. He was young—his eyes

amber, his skin bronze, all the habitable continents in his features.

He said that she’d been stabilized and was sufficiently lucid to accept

or refuse an experimental treatment to repair her brain.

“What do I have to lose?” she asked, not feeling sick or fatigued

at all, trying to make sense of whether the blue room had been a

hallucination.

“There are no known side effects,” he told her. “In fact, it appears

to cause generalized rejuvenation of the entire body.”

Her attention snapped to him. Maybe this was heaven after all.

“Bring it on,” she said.

Intravenous fluids, injections—that’s what she expected—but

nothing pierced her skin. The doctor, whose name tag read Abdou

Levi, gave her spherical pills as smooth and bright as amethysts, as

if artists were now being hired to design pharmaceuticals. She had

to take one four times a day. With the water, the first slid down her

throat so easily she didn’t feel it at all.

“Ergonomic pills?” she asked.

“It’s a new thing,” he said. “People are more likely to complete

their medication if it looks alluring, at least according to trials.”

“And more likely to benefit from it, I imagine.”

“Indeed,” he said, but she was suddenly sleepy, blinking heavily.

She heard her breathing become slower. It sounded like far-off wind

moving in measured gusts.

Thus began this long period of hibernation—a month in bed.

Each time she wakes, she eats ravenously. She stays in the hospital

room for monitoring. Sometimes, between bouts of sleep, she re-

members that shade of blue and the room without doors or windows.

She might have briefly died during her stroke. Or her mind—after a

lifetime of mixing paints—might have created a perfect blue in which

to find refuge. But the pain didn’t start immediately, she seems to

recall. There was time to think, to touch the blue walls, to shout ques-

tions. She’s pretty sure of that.

The blue. A spiritual awakening maybe. Like the hippies had

talked about for a century—the planet drifting into a new age. There

was no reason to expect awakening would be painless. But what led

to it? Nothing she’d done. She’d tried to change many times but was

always more herself than ever before. People often said age mellowed

you. She mostly felt distilled—more in love with art, with the shapes

of the world, even as her failing eyes cast them in impressionistic light.

At ninety-five, she wasn’t at peace with dying. She resented it,

resented the society that treated her body like a burden, resented

the larger culture that left little space for her passions. She feared

death would come in her sleep, stealing even that final experience.

Mortality was supposed to give a sense of urgency, driving people to

create, but she could imagine life just fine without it. There was so

much to experience. An infinitude. The idea of that didn’t overwhelm

her. Rather, she craved it. She’d survived friends, family, even her

country. Only Michael, her companion of six decades, remained, but

he’d faded into dementia. She no longer enjoyed his company, except

for those moments when he spoke of their distant, shared past as if it

were yesterday—as if their young bodies still lay entwined on damp

sheets.

“Michael,” she tells Dr. Levi when he next checks on her—“my

husband. Is there some way he can get this treatment?”

“He started a week after you,” he tells her. “It was a coincidence.

People in his age group were the first to become eligible. We’ve been

permitted to prescribe this for only a month.”

After Dr. Levi switches her to emerald pills, she feels the urge to

leave the hospital. She expects her muscles to be weak, but she moves

easily, steady on her feet.

At the bathroom mirror, she runs her fingertips along her face

and throat. Her hair, at its roots, is black and thick and curls the way

it once did. She peels back the medical gown and lets it drop. Her

skin has regained its copper luster. Its deep grooves have faded. Her

eyes are clear, her irises as dark and vivid as fresh henna. She isn’t

wearing her glasses, she realizes. She lifts her hand and inspects the

fine, crisscrossed lines of her palm. She goes to the window and lets

her gaze move along San Francisco’s skyline.

Michael. She can’t recall how long it’s been since she last saw him.

Before her stroke, she was increasingly reluctant to visit his assist-

ed-care facility, hating her disloyalty less than the hopelessness she felt

next to the hunched, faded shape of the man who’d shared her life.

Her first trip from the hospital is to visit him. When she opens

the door to his small room, he stands with his back to her, looking

out the window. He turns and, for some reason, she thinks of the blue

room. Maybe it’s the feeling of disbelief.

“Michael,” she says.

The dustiness is gone from him too. He doesn’t quite have the

gleaming black skin of his youth, but she knows, seeing him step to-

ward her, that he’ll have it again.6 deni ellis béchard

He hugs her, and there, in his thin arms, she cries. That, too,

seems impossible. She hasn’t cried in decades. She used to say that

she exhausted her tears during Partition.

“I missed you,” she says.

“I missed you too,” he murmurs as he moves his fingers along the

muscles of her back in a way at once familiar and new. He is discover-

ing her again, she realizes.

During the months that follow, the treatment continues. Over

pill bottles of gemstones, she and Michael recreate something that

resembles their relationship from before, but more peaceful and con-

templative, as if neither quite believes this is real. Nor do they have the

external stresses of work. His passions are obsolete, he tells her one

day as he is reading about new technology. He often expresses sur-

prise upon seeing references to his endeavors in books and lectures.

“Maybe I can be a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Milkweed Editions
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1571311483
• ISBN 13: 9781571311481
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 424
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar