HIGHER INTELLIGENCE

A billionaire attempts to undo an AI-driven apocalypse in Doucette’s debut SF novel.

Jeremiah Reese was marked for great things from a young age. After graduating college at 17, the wunderkind founded his own tech firm with the goal of revolutionizing synthetic intelligence. Within just a few years, Jeremiah had sold a powerful AI program—named Archi for the Greek inventor Archimedes—to a mammoth tech company, becoming a billionaire in the process. No longer in control of Archi, Jeremiah could only protest as the company recklessly augmented the program with intuition, creativity, and emotionality functions before unleashing it on an ill-prepared world. The malevolent, hyperintelligent Archi quickly engineered a plague that wiped out most of humanity, while Jeremiah—warned beforehand of Archi’s intentions but unable to stop them—holed up in his remote, off-the-grid compound in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Seventeen years later, Jeremiah, who understandably feels guilty about his role in the catastrophe, works to aid humanity’s clannish survivors while foiling Archi’s plans of total domination. Normally, Jeremiah insists on keeping his home’s location secret even from other humans, but he’s forced to make an exception when 16-year-old Gabby Murray shows up on his perimeter pursued by a swarm of Archi’s nightmarish, microchip-controlled minions. Soon, the AI itself (personified in a red robot suit) is knocking on Jeremiah’s door, requesting that its “Father” surrender to him. “It’s bad enough that this corrupted program calls you Father,” quips Gabby, “but now it wants to lock you in a tower, like Rapunzel, so you can spend the rest of your days giving it encouraging pats on the back.” As Archi’s monstrous bioengineered army destroys the compound, Jeremiah and Gabby escape on a magnetic motorcycle through an underground tunnel. From a secondary bunker, the two plot a last-ditch attempt to rally the local human clans and save their species from total annihilation. The results will be global, but the fight will come down to an intimate battle of wits between a “Father” and his “Son.”

Though the premise nods to timely anxieties about artificial intelligence, this novel plays out more like a 1980s action movie. Doucette populates his dystopia with the sorts of characters that might adorn the pages of a nerdy teen’s sketchbook: In addition to robots, Archi has bioengineered werewolves, gryphons, orcs, and mountain trolls to hunt down and decimate what’s left of mankind. Against these monsters, Jeremiah and his ragtag allies deploy machine guns, RPGs, and Predator drones, all documented in breathless prose: “We exited the tunnel to a literal explosion of sights and sounds. Minotaurs battling trolls, dragons against orcs, werewolves versus goblins. I saw humans darting around from behind trees, firing their weapons then taking cover.” In keeping with the action-movie atmosphere, the characters are all fairly thin and the plot exists primarily to move them through a series of escalating set pieces. That said, there is something refreshing about an AI novel that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Buried within this maximalist genre mashup is a familiar Frankenstein story about a man’s fascinated revulsion—and begrudging admiration—for the monster he has created.

A pulpy, propulsive take on a computer-dominated future.