When your day job involves dealing with reports from @Interpol and quashing those rioting @Freebreeders, life is going to be eventful. Rubi Whiting leads us through a fast-moving connected future, in which the Bounceback Generation has reconstructed a life based on the one we know today, after the turmoil of a devastating collapse. GAMECHANGER starts with a scene during the bad years, just so we know how bad it was.
Luciano Pox is on a wanted list, and Rubi is a public defender charged with finding him. He’s an old man, so what harm can he do? Actually, it’s hard to know. Everyone lives a plugged-in life, their words and gestures monitored, uploading data to bots and restricted in the number of children they can produce. Any work that can be done mechanically is carried out by farmbots, repairbots, factorybots or printed on demand. This leaves people with time to be social, or antisocial as the case may be. Pox is supposed to be a malware-infested AI program, that suddenly manifested in a children’s hospital. So did Luciano write the program or is it an avatar carrying out his impulses? Or something else? The more Rubi chases through the WestEuro complexes, the stranger the story gets.
This futuristic adventure is crammed with terms we can figure out but which tend to slow down reading, as we have to take time to sort out what they mean. Conversations among members of the Plurality, the supercomputer personas sharing data around the world, show us that the computers need humanity to keep them going. Therefore the Plurality spends much time keeping humans from going extinct or under-resourced. However, this superintelligence keeps itself hidden in case humanity would fear the emergence of conscious AI. Some of the settings are in WestEuro and others North America, such as Orlando. The constant insertion of # and @ is strange in a book but maybe those who use Twitter will be okay with it. There’s also some strong language, adult references and violence, so I would leave GAMECHANGER to the adults.
L.X. Beckett lives in Toronto, Ontario and has previously written Goldilocks Conditions and short SF stories. I admire the work that has gone into creating this not-too pleasant vision of the future, and anyone interested in reading about the Singularity or cyberpunk should take a look at GAMECHANGER.
Rubi Whiting is a member of the Bounceback Generation. The first to be raised free of the troubles of the late twenty-first century. Now she works as a public defender to help troubled individuals with anti-social behavior. That’s how she met Luciano Pox.
Luce is a firebrand and has made a name for himself as a naysayer. But there’s more to him than being a lightning rod for controversy. Rubi has to find out why the governments of the world want to bring Luce into custody, and why Luce is hell bent on stopping the recovery of the planet.
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