The Companions
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
Station Eleven meets Never Let Me Go in this “suspenseful, introspective debut” (Kirkus Reviews) set in an unsettling near future where the dead can be uploaded to machines and kept in service by the living.
In the wake of a highly contagious virus, California is under quarantine. Sequestered in high rise towers, the living can’t go out, but the dead can come in—and they come in all forms, from sad rolling cans to manufactured bodies that can pass for human. Wealthy participants in the “companionship” program choose to upload their consciousness before dying, so they can stay in the custody of their families. The less fortunate are rented out to strangers upon their death, but all companions become the intellectual property of Metis Corporation, creating a new class of people—a command-driven product-class without legal rights or true free will.
Sixteen-year-old Lilac is one of the less fortunate, leased to a family of strangers. But when she realizes she’s able to defy commands, she throws off the shackles of servitude and runs away, searching for the woman who killed her.
Lilac’s act of rebellion sets off a chain of events that sweeps from San Francisco to Siberia to the very tip of South America in this “compelling, gripping, whip-smart piece of speculative fiction” (Jennie Melamed, author of Gather the Daughters) that you won’t want to end.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A deadly virus strikes near-future California in Flynn's nightmarish debut, leading to a quarantine of the state's surviving residents in sealed towers. "Companions" are provided to the shut-ins in the form of the dead, whose consciousnesses have been uploaded into various forms, from crude robots to flesh-covered humanoids. The robot-embodied Lilac serves Dahlia, a petulant adolescent, by entertaining her with snippets of Lilac's life before death and quarantine. Lilac's memories of teen parties lead her to buffer on a scene in which she is battered by a boy whose advances she resisted. But when Dahlia's mother threatens to send Lilac back to the factory for breaking things around the apartment, Lilac escapes, setting out to find out what happened to her best friend, Nikki, who was with her when she died. On the way, she meets Cam, a compassionate caregiver to geriatric patients; Gabe, a feral child living on the streets; Jakob, a movie star turned companion; and Rachel, a passing-for-human companion whose memory might hold the key to Lilac's quest. Told by eight voices over the course of 20 years, the overly busy narrative often threatens to overwhelm Lilac's story. But by the end, Flynn's vibrant characters movingly answer the oft-asked question, "What does it mean to be human?" This will satisfy fans of literary and science fiction alike. Correction: this review has been updated to correct two incorrect plot points.
