EMORTAL

Schafer presents a YA SF adventure about a gifted teenager and her rapidly developing artificial intelligence invention.

Houston high schoolers Liv Smithwick and her best friend, Lana Owens, define themselves proudly as “dorks,” and they chat with each other about every detail of their daily lives. Such chats are especially easy for them because they’re next-door neighbors, often shouting from window to window. Lana is the bookish daughter of a doctor, while Liv is a science and engineering whiz, and her latest invention, an AI bot named “Breck,” is her attempt to win a design contest whose prize is a summer internship with her idol, Jessica Anders, the head of the Department of Recreational Computation (DoRC). At first, the competition doesn’t go well—Breck even initially fails to pass his first test, which involves finding a way out of a box—but when Liv has a breakthrough and programs her bot to be the first of its kind to benefit from rest, his powers suddenly soar, and he begins winning successive levels of the contest in a video game–like progression. He does it so quickly that Anders herself takes notice, eager to see what Breck will become. Liv’s mother isn’t as keen on the project as Liv is, and soon the teen must deal with the extraordinary consequences of being Breck’s creator. Schafer’s novel, which shifts between Liv and Breck’s first-person perspectives and Jessica’s emails to her team, reads quickly and cleanly. The author has a knack for stating complex ideas in simple terms, such as certain pitfalls of AI: “I am trying to create someone who thinks like a human,” Liv opines, “but hasn’t experienced a huge chunk of what it is to be human. Homo sapiens spend a third of our time in sleep. Resting. Reflecting…Being creative.” There’s enough SF material to satisfy fans of that genre, and the characters, and Liv especially, are so well developed that it may have some crossover appeal.

A well-constructed coming-of-age novel that stands out in a crowded field of AI-focused literature.