In Jayson Greene's ‘UnWorld,' dealing with grief and communicating with AI

Boston Globe

5 hours ago

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Anna and her husband, Rick, have just lost their 16-year-old son, Alex. While out with his older friend Samantha, Alex fell from a cliff: No one, including sole witness Samantha, is quite sure if this unusual, troubled boy's death was an accident or a suicide. As the novel opens, Anna is enduring a second, stranger loss. She has stopped 'syncing' with the AI doppelganger 'upload' that has assisted and accompanied her for almost a decade. These uploads can mind-meld with their creators by way of 'chips' humans have taken to wearing. They can also flit from networked device to network device, so that an upload can travel and have its own experiences, which it then relays back to its originator in the daily sync. Although the uploads are bodiless, much of the world has been arranged for their convenience; they can see through wall-mounted sensors and speak through concealed speakers.
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Anna narrates the first and last of the novel's five sections; the other narrators include Cathy, a former addict now teaching about uploads at a local college; Alex's friend Samantha; and Aviva, the upload who has departed from Anna and bounces around the town's networks with a new name and a dark secret.
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In magical realist or lightly fantastical stories, writers often portray something very much like our world, just tweaked with a single metaphorically loaded impossibility. Greene's novel doesn't work like that, but perhaps it would be better if it did. Instead, we're told that uploads have transformed society, with huge swaths of the workforce fully automated, such that 'you were liable to find yourself embroiled in three rounds of interviews for a restaurant hostess job.' For at least a decade, almost all cars have been machine-driven. While she's communing with Cathy, Aviva demonstrates that she can get 'glimpses' of life from a fox's perspective because 'all the wildlife around here has been caught and tagged' with AI-friendly sensors. When Sam looks out over her hometown, she's struck by 'the processing centers ringing the edge of town,' which she knows are 'related, somehow, to AI, which increasingly powers the town.'
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The world-building here is distractingly thin. Artificial intelligence has, apparently, transformed Greene's world, but the unnamed town of this novel's future bears an eerie resemblance to Anytown, USA, circa 2025. Every scene suggests new questions about the world, and most go unanswered: Who is making money from AI? What happened to all the people who can't get jobs anymore? Do uploads of dead people stick around their loved ones? How much does a personal AI cost? Is AI wrecking the environment? Why do those foxes need AI-compatible sensors anyway?
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Still, if the setting of UnWorld doesn't convince, the emotions do. Alex, we learn, felt trapped in his own body and his own mind; he aspired to the bodiless freedom of the upload. A digital life would surely be preferable to 'lying on the floor of your bedroom, staring at the ceiling, imagining how it was your brain made screams and wondering if you could also use your brain to stop your body from ever making noises again.' He worried that the 'right thought' at the right moment could end him. Alex's obsessions are harrowing in their inscrutability, but also believable: Here is a mind run away with itself.
Samantha's struggles are more typical; she feels guilt, shame, and embarrassment despite knowing that none of these feelings is justified. In the derangement of her grief, Anna is seized by bizarre and ugly compulsions, 'this demon that suddenly ran around inside of me, wanting only disgusting things.' Those readers who don't know Greene's own story will recognize that this is a writer who knows grief. And, although the Aviva chapter doesn't entirely persuade the reader what it might feel like to be an unembodied intelligence — a hard task for any writer — the rawness of the upload's pain, fully commingled with love and guilt, is easy to believe.
'UnWorld,' like most of its characters, seems caught between states. It's not quite a fable, but neither is it speculative fiction. Is it a story about survivors' grief or a mystery about Alex's motivation? The 'UnWorld' of the title is a computer game that Alex plays. It seems to be a creative sandbox title like Minecraft or Roblox, in which exploring the game world is less important than creating the game world and populating it with your own visions. Even if Greene's first fiction feels a bit patchy, the best of 'UnWorld' marks a writer to watch.
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UNWORLD
By Jayson Greene
Knopf, 224 pages, $28
Matthew Keeley is a freelance writer who has written for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Review of Books.