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SF author Calvert envisions a blighted Earth in which AI and technological enhancements nudge humankind toward extinction in the late 21st century.

Advances in quantum computer processing, medicine, robotics, and other fields have spawned an “Enhanced” group of ruling elites, superior in intellect and physical health to other humans. They see the have-nots as an underclass of disposable “surplus people.” China, India, and the Americas operate along stratified, super-predator capitalist lines; a humane, democratic European Union does not, and the elites regard it as an irrelevant pauper society. In the United States, trainloads of the surplus perform dangerous clean-ups of hazardous materials under robot supervision. Twelve-year-old Adam escapes and heads for New York City to reunite with his long-lost father. In that metropolis, a man named James, despite being “Unenhanced,” has ingratiated himself with the Enhanced VIP set as a servant/nanny. One of the Enhanced is Stuart Furlong, a cutting-edge virtual-reality designer who seeks James’ help in finding his daughter, Luise, who’s been missing for 20 years now in a VR simulation of an unauthorized pleasure trip off Singapore—an escapade that’s somehow tied to the fate of trillionaire Dieumon Moreau, the architect of this dystopia. In another VR simulation, sisters Phoebe and Rhea tend to the cloned population of a deep-space colony, awaiting the downloaded consciousnesses of the superrich, who are ready to abandon the ruined home world. Things begin to go awry in all these storylines, and while AI gone amok is the fulcrum, Calvert sneakily renders automatons, androids, and AI assistants as sideline figures, rather than as primary menaces. His labyrinthine plot engagingly depicts a human race that has programmed its own obsolescence: “The first tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft realized early on that data is the last resource we humans have to offer.” There’s also a heavy infusion of cyberpunk-ish VR mind expansion that adds a classic type of SF paranoia: If you’re visiting a sham reality, how do you know your own reality isn’t also fake, one level further up? Complicated, ominous intrigue will effectively fuel readers’ technophobia.

A tangled but transfixing variation on a computer-takeover plot.