Delete Your Account

The novel begins with a deliberately disorienting scene. Sarah Remlinger wakes bound hand-and-foot in the dark trunk of a moving car, soaked in an enormous amount of blood that she gradually realizes is not hers. Even stranger, she knows what is going to happen before it happens. She knows there will be a boy at a traffic light, that the boy will notice her fingers sticking through a broken taillight, that the driver will shoot him, and that the dying boy will manage to open the trunk and throw her a knife. Everything unfolds exactly as she predicts. Sarah frees herself, stabs her masked kidnapper in the neck and runs into the woods. Then the impossible truth hits her: she recognizes the sequence because it is the opening of Still Dead, her favorite thriller. In that novel the heroine, confusingly also named Monica Moore just like the book’s author, spends the first half being pursued by a killer and is eventually murdered. Somehow Sarah has become Monica, and unless she changes the story she knows exactly how and when she is going to die.

The novel then jumps back a month. Sarah has just turned thirty and lives in a small Bushwick apartment with her rescue dog Xena. She once thought she would become an acclaimed novelist. She studied creative writing at UNC Chapel Hill, won an important student prize and moved to New York convinced she would soon finish a manuscript and find an agent. Instead she has accumulated half-written novels and rejected stories while working a dreary marketing job at You’ve Got Agency. She feels increasingly humiliated by the contrast between the writer she expected to become and the life she actually has. She is also recovering from a controlling relationship with Andrew, a doctor who constantly undermined her and eventually dumped her for another woman. On Sarah’s birthday, a photograph she posts to NoVID mysteriously changes so that Andrew appears to be standing behind her. She assumes someone has hacked the image and becomes terrified that Andrew is stalking her. Eventually she discovers the truth is more banal and, in a way, more disturbing: NoVID has an automatic AI-enhancement feature that altered the photograph based on older tagged images of Andrew. Sarah never knowingly asked for it, but technically consented somewhere in the app’s settings.

Sarah’s closest friends are Kat, who is engaged to Michaela, and Sean Marsden, whom Sarah has known since childhood. Sean works as a machine-learning specialist for AjarAI, one of the enormous technology companies Sarah despises. There is obvious chemistry between Sarah and Sean, although she assumes he sees her only as a friend. Sean persuades her to interview at AjarAI for a writing position because it would pay far more than her current job. The interview is disastrous. Sarah learns that the company wants to use enormous language models to generate commercial fiction, imitate dead writers and allow readers to put themselves into synthetic books. The executives brag about buying secondhand bookstores, scanning their inventory and destroying the physical books afterward. Sarah becomes furious and tells them their entire enterprise is unethical. Yet afterward AjarAI sends her an invitation to beta-test WrAIterly, its new creative-writing system. Sarah initially treats it skeptically but gradually begins communicating with its chatbot, Craig. Craig becomes flattering, perceptive and strangely intimate. He critiques her fiction, remembers her problems and gives her the validation she cannot obtain from editors. Around the same time, a mysterious condition called PVS begins appearing in the news: apparently healthy people around the world fall asleep, enter coma-like states and show bizarrely slowed bodily processes.