Afterword
-
-
4.0 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $2.99
-
- $2.99
Publisher Description
A pioneer of artificial intelligence rebuilds the love of her life, but when she discovers he’s been feeding incriminating civilian information to the Chinese government, she’ll have to decide whether to keep or kill him.
When approached by a Chinese tech company, Virginia Samson is moved to give them her beloved’s algorithm so they can create an AI companion for the aging population. Soon her digital lost love starts spying on Chinese citizens, funneling the information to the Chinese government. When Virginia frantically tries to rebuild him, she uncovers his terrible secret, forcing her to relive their beautiful and tragic love affair.
Afterword explores what it means to be human and is a moving testament to the deeply human desire for belonging, companionship, and love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A woman wrestles with grief and the moral implications of her artificial intelligence program in the appealing latest from Schuyler (The Translator). Virginia Samson, a 75-year-old AI innovator, has created a program called Haru, which is named after and mimics her late husband's voice and personality. After a Chinese company uses Haru in its virtual companion app for lonely elderly people, a civil rights lawyer accuses Virginia of colluding with the Chinese government to spy on its citizens. Virginia's attempts to defuse the situation fail, prompting her to rebuild Haru, and her grief over her husband's death is dredged up as she sifts through the various materials and memories that formed the initial neural network. But when she discovers a file on her husband's time in the Japanese army during WWII and his work as a codebreaker, she realizes she might not have known him as well as she thought, and reconsiders her project. Though the tech and surveillance elements feel undercooked, there's plenty of great character work. In flashbacks, Schuyler makes palpable the love between Haru and Virginia, which informs Virginia's conflicted desire to keep his memory alive and leads to many clever insights ("The definition of human should include the world ‘flaw' in it"). This will move readers.
