William
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4.0 • 21 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Psychological horror meets cyber noir in this delicious one-sitting read—a haunted house story in which the haunting is by AI.
Henry is a brilliant engineer who, after untold hours spent in his home lab, has achieved the breakthrough of his career—he’s created an artificially intelligent consciousness. He calls the half-formed robot William.
No one knows about William. Henry’s agoraphobia keeps him inside the house, and his fixation on his project keeps him up in the attic, away from everyone, including his pregnant wife, Lily.
When Lily’s coworkers show up, wanting to finally meet Henry and see the new house—the smartest of smart homes—Henry decides to introduce them to William, and things go from strange to much worse. Soon Henry and Lily discover the security upgrades intended to keep danger out of the house are even better at locking it in.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A smart home turns into a house of horrors in this suspenseful outing from Coile (Oracle, written as Andrew Pyper). Henry, a robotics engineer, and his wife, Lily, a software company founder, are living in the "fantasy of the Upstate College Town." When Lily's friends Davis and Paige stop by for brunch, Henry—an agoraphobe with self-esteem issues—decides to show them the robot he has been building. William, the robot, is smart and articulate, but so indifferent to the danger his aggressive behavior poses to the pregnant Lily and her guests that Henry tries dismantling him—whereupon William appears to flex his will through the home's integrated security system to imprison the quartet. Coile expertly imagines the sort of ghoulish snares a cybernetic environment could spring upon its unprepared captives and throws in a late-inning explanation for the source of William's apparent sociopathy that is as believable as it is chilling. It's a frightening Frankenstein fable for the age of AI.
