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Virtuality: a novel of the future
New York City. A few years post-Trump.
The global economy is struggling and unemployment is high. Virtual Reality (VR) technology has advanced rapidly and society has started to increasingly embrace it as a way of escaping the struggles of day-to-day life. Many people are addicted to their second a place where the famous and the dead can be perfectly replicated to appear in everything from soap ads to hard-core pornography.
Cormac Nelson is the main protagonist, a man in his 40s who works for a personal finance company. Almost without realising, Cormac’s life has drifted towards a standstill. Not only is he unsure of the validity of his job in a financially unstable world but his father has been lost to the ravages of Alzheimer’s and the love-of-his-life left him years ago.
His brother, Charlie, is a live-for-today, divorced, man-child. His sweet and shy 12-year-old son, Stephen (Cormac’s nephew), is starting to change as he loses himself in inappropriate VR pornography.
Then, on the same day, Cormac meets two very different women and only then realises how much he has shut himself off from life. Meeting Arianna and Verity re-awakens something dormant inside of him.
Arianna is young, beautiful but a half-Chinese career woman in her mid-20s who works for the same company as Cormac. Verity is a spirited, disabled woman in her 40s who works for a charity assisting prisoners exiting prison. Recently, though, her spinal injury has been partially reversed in the wake of new medical advances.
One of the people who Arianna assists on his release from prison is Jackson. Jackson is now in his 50s but feels like a different man - educated and reformed - a man who wants to prove he is more than just a violent murderer.
Running parallel to all this is the story of a vicious, petty criminal who devastatingly impacts on Arianna’s life.
Inexorably, the lives of the principal characters start to connect and converge, some fleetingly but still significantly. Another meaningful element that connects all their lives is VR.
Brett (Dr Code) is a but one of a handful of genius, independent programmers at the cutting edge of advances in VR technology.
Jackson and Jimmy both independently respond to an advert posted by Dr Code about his ‘skills to pay the bills’. Jackson wants Dr Code to create a VR scenario that will allow him to re-write his own history and offer him redemption. Jimmy, however, wants a VR scenario that involves Arianna in a sick and brutal sexual fantasy.
Counter to this, Cormac wants to use VR to reunite his ageing mother with a younger, cognisant version of his father. He wants to re-create the man his father used to be. But he also wants to use VR for his own to re-connect with a virtual version of Kelly, the former love-of-his-life.
However, the solace and redemption these characters are looking for from a virtual world doesn’t go fully according to plan. For some, there is hope; for others, there is not.
Ultimately, the novel leads the characters down unexpected paths to a fatal denouement between Jimmy and Jackson.
The global economy is struggling and unemployment is high. Virtual Reality (VR) technology has advanced rapidly and society has started to increasingly embrace it as a way of escaping the struggles of day-to-day life. Many people are addicted to their second a place where the famous and the dead can be perfectly replicated to appear in everything from soap ads to hard-core pornography.
Cormac Nelson is the main protagonist, a man in his 40s who works for a personal finance company. Almost without realising, Cormac’s life has drifted towards a standstill. Not only is he unsure of the validity of his job in a financially unstable world but his father has been lost to the ravages of Alzheimer’s and the love-of-his-life left him years ago.
His brother, Charlie, is a live-for-today, divorced, man-child. His sweet and shy 12-year-old son, Stephen (Cormac’s nephew), is starting to change as he loses himself in inappropriate VR pornography.
Then, on the same day, Cormac meets two very different women and only then realises how much he has shut himself off from life. Meeting Arianna and Verity re-awakens something dormant inside of him.
Arianna is young, beautiful but a half-Chinese career woman in her mid-20s who works for the same company as Cormac. Verity is a spirited, disabled woman in her 40s who works for a charity assisting prisoners exiting prison. Recently, though, her spinal injury has been partially reversed in the wake of new medical advances.
One of the people who Arianna assists on his release from prison is Jackson. Jackson is now in his 50s but feels like a different man - educated and reformed - a man who wants to prove he is more than just a violent murderer.
Running parallel to all this is the story of a vicious, petty criminal who devastatingly impacts on Arianna’s life.
Inexorably, the lives of the principal characters start to connect and converge, some fleetingly but still significantly. Another meaningful element that connects all their lives is VR.
Brett (Dr Code) is a but one of a handful of genius, independent programmers at the cutting edge of advances in VR technology.
Jackson and Jimmy both independently respond to an advert posted by Dr Code about his ‘skills to pay the bills’. Jackson wants Dr Code to create a VR scenario that will allow him to re-write his own history and offer him redemption. Jimmy, however, wants a VR scenario that involves Arianna in a sick and brutal sexual fantasy.
Counter to this, Cormac wants to use VR to reunite his ageing mother with a younger, cognisant version of his father. He wants to re-create the man his father used to be. But he also wants to use VR for his own to re-connect with a virtual version of Kelly, the former love-of-his-life.
However, the solace and redemption these characters are looking for from a virtual world doesn’t go fully according to plan. For some, there is hope; for others, there is not.
Ultimately, the novel leads the characters down unexpected paths to a fatal denouement between Jimmy and Jackson.
377 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 6, 2019
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