AFTER INTELLIGENCE

In Marie’s YA SF series installment, a third-year student in an elite science school is troubled when her cohorts—and her parents—unquestioningly accept an implanted brain-enhancement device.

Cognation Academy is an intrigue-ridden science and technology boarding school of the future, first unveiled in After Intelligence: The Hidden Sequence (2020), which introduced teen hero Charlotte Blythe as a second-year student. Now, she’s in her third year at an institution that produces such inventions as contact lens digital “viewers” and startlingly humanlike androids, which are later incorporated into wider society. The latest paradigm-shift invention is the “soulmate”—a small, implantable data capsule that promises to upgrade virtual-reality sensations, enable new skills, and link human minds (“an amazing innovation that is going to significantly help people everywhere”). Despite the hype, Charlotte is wary of the soulmate’s intrusive nature, especially after her discoveries (in previous novels) of the dark secrets of Cognation’s late founder and his rogue artificial-intelligence projects. What if a soulmate can be hacked and abused—perhaps allowing mass mind-control? Her fears are not allayed when she finds out that the pioneering developers and first adopters of the soulmate are none other than her own parents. Soon, a growing number of students and faculty members are happily undergoing soulmate procedures, including some who’d vowed not to do so—including Charlotte’s boyfriend, Gavin Hooper. The ultra-logical androids aren’t swept up in the soulmate wave, and a few assist Charlotte in investigating whether the tech is part of a nightmarish conspiracy. Marie’s boarding school SF series entry is kind of a YA cousin (and perhaps even a soulmate) to Jack Finney’s influential and oft-filmed The Body Snatchers (1955). The narrative is low-key but effective in how it creates an atmosphere of rising paranoia as the walls close in on a dwindling number of students and adult characters unaffected by the new tech. It finishes on a cliffhanger, even though the story generally prioritizes dialogue, codebreaking, and puzzle-solving over more action-oriented thrills. Invested readers will want to continue to follow the curriculum in future series installments.

Dense but engaging speculative fiction that focuses on the disquieting misuse of new tech.