THE GARBAGE MAN

In Pacelli’s technothriller, an Ivy League graduate squares off against a ruthless tech-company CEO’s virtual manipulations.

No discussion of ill-gotten wealth begins or ends nowadays, it seems, without Honoré de Balzac’s observation that a great crime underpins every great fortune. In that sense, Frederick Douglass Monahan, the legendary head of General Recycling, more than fits the bill. Self-assured and suntanned, he’s become Wall Street’s latest darling for his creation of I. Chew, a super bacteria strain that can eat plastic—or any other type of garbage. Still, there’s little to separate Monahan, at first, from any other eccentric, wealthy tech type. His machinations don’t mean much to Kayla Masouvi, a graduate of Harvard Business School who dreams of becoming a professional poker player. Instead, she must buckle down and face the reality of co-signing fines for her father, who’s languishing in prison for insider trading offenses. Monahan, who’s had his eye on Kayla for some time, proposes a high-stakes game of poker to solve her problems (“A bankroll for your bank account...and a job”). To her shock and amazement, Kayla loses the game, making her Monahan’s employee, reporting directly to him and becoming involved in his latest obsession, Resilusio, an immersive but seemingly harmless entry in the virtual reality sweepstakes. The technology allows Kayla to get lost in the 1980s at a concert with synthpop pioneers Depeche Mode—an experience that strikes as “a love letter to a time that seemed easier, kinder, and...cooler.” Then a mysterious stranger rudely gatecrashes her reveries and urges her to get out while she can.

The novel effectively explores this unsettling experience, which prompts Kayla to look beyond the gauzy feel-good façade of General Recycling’s public image and look into the disappearance of her predecessor, Olivia Chen. She discovers that, far from saving the world, Monahan has been harvesting players’ data, using it to create profiles for its AI system, so that users become addicted and obsessed. Before long, the stakes ramp up considerably for Kayla, who loses a loved one and barely escapes with her own life in the process. It’s the unforgiving math of addiction that’s the major driver of the novel’s action, with Kayla helpless to resist her love of high-risk poker—and later, the draw of her desire for revenge; meanwhile, Monahan, the titular Garbage Man, can’t shake his need for power. It’s a struggle that will push them both to their limits, and it will sweep the reader along, as well. As the author suggests, it’s not just the business of crime that results in the imposition of technology and its collateral damage—including serial scamming, rampant self-obsession, and social isolation—but also the notion that one must accept such terrible things as a fait accompli that’s now hard-wired into society, for good or for ill. It’s the widescreen popcorn vision of the film The Matrix (1999), writ larger than life, “minus the giant machines that harvest humans.” The cost of such convenience has never felt so dangerous, or so murderous, as it does in this tale.

A sleek, sophisticated cyberthriller in which addiction and artificial intelligence intertwine.