NEUROGARDEN

A high-tech company’s intern becomes forcibly linked to an artificial intelligence neural network in this debut SF thriller.

Leading a graduate-student presentation on branding at NeuralTech, Jenny Mercado impresses the surveillance analytics company’s brilliant, beautiful, and formidable CEO and founder, Brenna Patrick, with her bold ideas—and sex appeal. Brenna hires Jenny as an intern, soon revealing her erotic interest, which is returned, although Jenny has a boyfriend, fellow student Leo Marino. Accompanying Jenny to a company function, Leo snoops around and discovers that what appears to be a server room is something very different. The room’s coffin-sized black boxes are pods filled with a viscous fluid—and live people. It seems they constitute the living computer behind NeuralTech’s new AI–assisted technology that allows near-instant facial and location recognition. When Brenna discovers the breach, she forces Jenny into The Garden—as she calls the pods—where the intern’s mind is programmed and assimilated into the network. With The Garden’s help, Jenny gets a message to Leo; his rescue efforts give Gen. McAllister of the United States Department of Defense (a NeuralTech partner) justification to usurp Brenna. But she and The Garden have a few tricks up their sleeves. In his gripping series opener, Vaughn draws on some not-unfamiliar tropes such as the self-aware AI surveillance system (seen, for example, in the TV show Person of Interest). The plot’s complex tech, action scenes, and the nebulous, chilling world of The Garden are deftly described. On the other hand, the intern–CEO affair has a disturbing power dynamic and seemingly comes out of nowhere; it’s especially hard to buy after Brenna forces Jenny into a pod. Still, the novel is an involving read.

Intriguing and tense, with a nightmarish scenario featuring the loss of personal identity.