Afterword

March 20, 2023
A woman wrestles with grief and the moral implications of her artificial intelligence program in the appealing latest from Schuyler (The Translator). Virginia Samson, a 75-year-old AI innovator, has created a program called Haru, which is named after and mimics her late husband’s voice and personality. After a Chinese company uses Haru in its virtual companion app for lonely elderly people, a civil rights lawyer accuses Virginia of colluding with the Chinese government to spy on its citizens. Virginia’s attempts to defuse the situation fail, prompting her to rebuild Haru, and her grief over her husband’s death is dredged up as she sifts through the various materials and memories that formed the initial neural network. But when she discovers a file on her husband’s time in the Japanese army during WWII and his work as a codebreaker, she realizes she might not have known him as well as she thought, and reconsiders her project. Though the tech and surveillance elements feel undercooked, there’s plenty of great character work. In flashbacks, Schuyler makes palpable the love between Haru and Virginia, which informs Virginia’s conflicted desire to keep his memory alive and leads to many clever insights (“The definition of human should include the world ‘flaw’ in it”). This will move readers.