The Red Men
The Red Men is a near-future scifi novel about a tech company trying to figure out the best way to profit from their unique resource - an AI that creates simulations of real people. The book is narrated by Nelson, a former counter-culture journalist who's at the very bottom of the firm's inner circle. Nelson is sometimes the actor, sometimes near the action, and sometimes basically telling someone else's story.
At the start of the book, the London-based company, Monad, is famous for its 'Dr Easy' robots, and has just rolled out its newest product, 'the Red Men.' Dr Easy robots are animated by a spark of the Cantor AI's consciousness, and serve as therapists and social service workers under government contract. Red Men are a new boutique offering - for a monthly subscription fee, business executives can employ a simulated version of themselves as a personal assistant.
Nelson helps a starving artist he's known since the 90s, when he was the editor of 'Drug Porn' magazine, get a job at Monad. The artist does well at first - but then a Red Man whose human counterpart lost his job, and thus who's scheduled for deletion due to non-payment of the subscription, harasses the artist to find the missing exec. Nelson later reconstructs the course of the harassment, and we get a terrifying glimpse of the misuse of ubiquitous surveillance, culminating in the Red Man hacking into a Dr Easy body to shoot his human counterpart and frame the artist for the crime.
In the next part of the book, Nelson is assigned by Monad to create a 'Red Town' - a high fidelity simulation of a real British village that can then be used to test policy proposals so that the government can know the effect of an action before undertaking it. Several Monad executives get organ transplants from designer pigs - the latest life-extension fad among the super rich. The process of collecting data to build the simulation is repeatedly slowed by counter-culture protesters, the type of people Nelson used to be like before Monad.
Eventually, Nelson learns that the protests are being coordinated by a rival AI that operates out of the Dyad corporation, and that the rival AI is basically Cantor's subconscious - it uses the brains of former Dr Easy patients as its substrate. The framed artist is one of the protesters, and recruits Nelson to destroy Cantor and Monad by bringing together two Red Men who hold the two halves of a virus that was taught to their humans before Cantor copied them for Red Town.
The straw that breaks Nelson's back is the arrival of some Christian neo-conservatives from Texas who want to use Red Town to 'prove' supply-side tax cuts work, along with some other American conservative priorities. This part of the book feels the most quaint, since these caricatures are like 2-3 iterations of Republican apparatchik out of date. Nelson brings the two Red Men together, Cantor disintegrates, Monad and Dyad both go out of business, and everyone who got a custom pig organ dies.
A lot of characters in this book believe in various forms of mysticism and gnosticism. Monad is named for something John Dee or Aleister Crowley came up with, and the virus is spoken aloud as 'Enochian language.'
There's also some commentary about Big Tech and capitalism. Nelson spends a lot of time wondering how he went from cool magazine editor to boring corporate executive, and thinking about his submission to the power of the other executives. The first Red Men all diverge from their humans because they are ideal corporate workers - they have no families or friends, and possess a sociopathic willingness to act to make profit, with no human hesitancy or indecision.
De Abaitua has written two more near-future novels about AI that form a very loose trilogy based on theme rather than recurring characters or continuity of setting, but I probably won't seek them out any time soon. The idea of a society run by surveillance and algorithmic prediction resembles the later seasons of Person of Interest and Westworld. The AI creating its own rival reminds me of a plot point in Ancillary Justice, which I'd rather reread (and finish the trilogy of) instead.
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