Chaos: Uncharted Hearts
By Constance Fay
Bramble/Macmillan
Can love survive the AI age?
Will we still be able to connect in a deep way with each other as tech fixes render us part-human, part-machine?
And what about non-human but human-like robots and “companions” with whom we increasingly interact? Can those interactions lead to affection or loyalty or deep connections?
Those are among the most pressing issues writers are exploring these days to help us make sense of our fast-changing world, in nonfiction reporting by journalists like Kashmir Hill, in novels like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and Maggie Su’s Blob: A Love Story.
Constance Fay offers a fresh, and hopeful, take on those questions in her latest sci-fi romance novel, Chaos. She chose the violence-packed action-hero format to present a vision in which love — emanating even from androids and bionic beings — can triumph over the human apocalypse of the superintelligent AI doomsday scenario.
Fay has her main character, a futuristic planet-hopping engineer/mercenary named Caro Ogunyemi, navigate two complicated relationships. One is a love affair with a part-human part-coded-zombie killer warrior named Leviathan (aka “Levi”) who (that?) initially tries to murder her. The other is a fight-to-death partner relationship with a robot guard named GR81.
Ogunyemi slips into a distant-planet prison to try to free Levi and other humans who have been transformed into horrific super-soldiers based on coding she had originally written (since further developed by an evil force). She escapes his programmed efforts to kill her; they fall in love as she frees him from the tech spell. Along the way, she and GR81 work to thwart the prison authorities while uniting the prison’s robots. The robot develops loyalty to his human coconspirator and her cause, willing to sacrifice his own “life” for her larger cause of freeing his fellow robot guards.
Like Isaac Asimov in his day, like Joe Haldeman and Octavia Butler in theirs, Fay proves with this book that science fiction has a unique role in helping us wrestle with how to preserve our humanity in the face of evolving technological threats.
Fay first and foremost has an action story to tell. For many readers the fun of the book may lie in following Caro’s near-death battles with lasers and poisons and cyborgs. We know she will prevail — especially when hundreds of pages remain in the book, and a fourth installment in this series seems likely. But how will she outsmart her foes?
Fay is at home in the action genre. She grew up hearing adventure tales from her dad with gender-swapped heroes. As an adult she has devoted herself to providing audiences with “reckless, competent, confident” female main characters who overcome “insurmountable odds.” Caro Ogunyemi is all that.
For those of us not tuned in to Marvel movies or knock-em-sock-em battle books, the interesting mystery here isn’t how Caro vanquishes her enemies. It’s how she navigates her relationships with Levi and GR81. She shows the relationships develop through the action, then weaves philosophical dialogue to bring home the points.
For instance: In the midst of death-defying maneuvers, GR81 evolves from telling Caro he doesn’t care about “flesh-bots” like her to saving her life and employing humor to help soothe Caro’s injuries.
A human fellow space-mercenary named Victor challenges Caro about why she’d risk her life for “that robot.”
“Android,” I mutter. “That robot,” he continues, “is insane. It isn’t a people. It doesn’t have people motivations. You heard it call us flesh-bots. You may have this fantasty that you’re some sort of messiah to it because you have a way with machines, but you aren’t, and it will shoot you in the back whenever it gets what it wants.” “He already got what he wanted!” I hiss back at him. “And the whole point of this is that he is a people. .. A person. Maybe not a human, but a person.”
Soon after, Caro finds herself crying over GR81’s demise. She looks at “GR81’s crumpled smoking body on the floor, fractured and crushed.” The coolant “leaking’ blue” looks to her like blood. Then she sees a message GR81 had sent her in advance of his death: “Look upward and remember me.”
“I’m sorry about the robot,” a sympathetic human colleague tells Caro, to which Caro automatically responds, “Android.” The friend considers GR81’s sacrifice and concludes it indeed displayed sentience that transcends programming: “GR81 valued its life … so much it was willing to give it for something it believed in.”
The relationship with Levi is more complicated. Caro frees him from the super-warrior bionic spell. But she is indirectly responsible for the code that imprisoned him. She lets him discover who he was in his fully human life before he was captured and programmed. But he can’t go back to that previous life. His experiences as a super-strong cyborg warrior has changed him. He can live as fully human again, but in part a new human with new traits and a new history. “Maybe there’s even more possibilities in who he can be than in who he was,” Fay posited in a recent interview about the book on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
Meanwhile, Caro must wrestle with the fact that she not only liberated him, returned to him his humanity, but created the code that was misused to enslave him in the first place. Even though she didn’t mean to. She must wrestle with the fact that he had tried to kill her. Even though he didn’t mean to.
It makes for gripping emotional tension, not to mention passionate sex. It’s all as messily human as human can get — which, I think, is author Fay’s point. Love can, and will, evolve from the ashes of inhumanity.
Click on the video below to watch the full conversation about android and robot love, about tech optimism and pessimism, and about the role of female lead characters in romantic sci-fi with author Constance Fay on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.” Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.”
