It’s 2049 and in a rural North Devon village, a retired Tech entrepreneur wistfully reflects on the ravages of old age and the lost wonder of youth. Following a strange visit from an old colleague and ex-lover, he is offered an unexpected opportunity to reboot his brain inside the body of an android, the key, he hopes, to an eternal life. As he tries to create a duplicate of his own consciousness, he ponders nervously on the likely success, and indeed the wisdom of the act. After all, he has done it before, in 2014, but the sentient machine he unleashed almost cost him his life and the rest of humanity their very future. Geoff Duck’s second novel probes many disturbing questions about our relationship with technology and its development in the coming decades. His protagonist addresses thorny issues like the evolution of the smartphone into something more sinister; the rejection of “always on” devices; the inevitability of human-like domestic robots and how on Earth we’re going to cope with them; and the biggie we all fear – can we ever share our lives with artificially conscious machines?
