Bloomsbury
Review by Brian Tanguay
Wither is likely to cause nightmares for readers who view AI with suspicion or fear. The CEO of Regression is an arrogant Elon Musk-like character and the black-box he’s planning to spring on the world will make privacy obsolete. The black-box will scoop everything up — data, personal predilections, past mistakes — and create a digital twin, a clone. On one level, it may be the greatest innovation since fire, but it comes with a very heavy cost.
Mick had a rough childhood. He didn’t quite fit in with the boys his brother Tommy ran with. Mick’s mother is distant, his father not in the picture. He desperately wants to be somebody, make a success of himself, and testing Regression in a small rural town in the Ozarks seems like a perfect opportunity that could lead to an important job in Chicago, where Mick thinks he might be happy. He has no qualms about what he’s doing, not in the beginning at least, but Regression will prove to be far more than he imagined or bargained for. The black-box has a will and attitude of its own, and its appetite is insatiable.
Warner moves between chapters titled Then and Now, which is how we learn Mick’s backstory and watch him navigate the woods where he’s been hiding, living off the land and what he can swipe from abandoned cabins. The writing is vivid and the dialogue between Mick and Bish who, to be clear, isn’t actually present, moves quickly. Mick’s world is upside down, his perception shaky. “The black box. Computers, phones, screens, windows to the wider world. To know what’s happening out there.” He knows he must return to the little town of Bloom, to see what happened and locate his girlfriend, Allison. The journey back is arduous enough, but what Mick discovers in Bloom is terrifying.
Playing with fire carries risks and costs. “No planes. No lights in the distance when he climbed to a hilltop at night. He tried not to think about that. There would be a sign. Everything back to normal.” But what happens if there’s no going back? What happens if the damage can’t be undone and in the end the black-box doesn’t hold all the answers? Wither is both frightening and provocative, a cautionary tale about technological utopias.
