The Cloud Intern
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
" With his signature precise, erudite sentences, [Greenwood] brings humor and lightness to otherwise bleak portraits of what it means to be a person. He' s a tightrope walker crossing a chasm of loneliness, doing cartwheels." — Kate Reed Petty, BOMB Magazine
" Greenwood skewers our fetish for innovation while poking tenderly at the brittle human bits underneath the cloud-based sheen… . Delicious… weird and wonderful." — Brian K. Mahoney, The Chronogram
While social and environmental woes roil the world below, Chris Curtis, lesser cofounder of tech giant eddy, spends his days afloat, cloud watching and chatting with an emulation of his not really dead father on the luxury blimp serving as eddy's corporate campus. As it approaches a last-gasp summit of world powers, Chris is forced from the swimming pool into the forbidding shoes of his revered, and really dead, cofounder.
At least his new intern appreciates the sunrises, so maddeningly ignored by his colleagues, and also doesn't seem to be of the entitled intern class, even if it becomes hard to ignore that her motives aboard are less peaceable than resume building. Her name is Zoraida, and her closest friend is an emulation of her former self.
Together, they become embroiled in a mass protest movement, revealing that underneath Zoraida's desire to change the world and Chris's desire to withdraw from it lies the collective loneliness of a society in which the deepest human connection has become a commodity, and deepest human weirdness may be our best hope.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Greenwood debuts with an acerbic near-future tale of tech and the desire for connection. Eddy, the company cofounded by Chris Curtis, has reshaped the world with its handheld communication devices and emulations of real people, designed to bring comfort to users. Now, in the wake of his business partner's death, Chris has become unmoored, spending his days on Sky Yacht, the company's dirigible headquarters. After the yacht's security system flags suspicious messages sent by his new intern Zoraida Simpson, he becomes fixated on her. He surreptitiously reads Zoraida's messages and learns of how she relies on an emulation of her younger self for advice. Eventually, he gleans her true intentions and makes a series of impulsive decisions, which steer the novel toward its crisis point. Greenwood captures Chris's mental state with wry humor ("It was... gratifying to make such use of my unsung facility for justifying my own inertia") and offers surprisingly moving insights on the characters' relationships with technology (when ordering emulations, Chris's customers gravitate toward the "beloved people who have since for whatever reason ceased to love you"). This appealing satire has plenty of bite.
