Published by Gallery/Scout Press on March 3, 2020
The Companions would have benefitted from a more purposeful plot. The story recycles themes that are common in science fiction — storage of human memory in an artificial body, the exploitation of artificial constructs that have a connection to humanity, the faint line that separates what is human and what is machine — yet the exploration of those themes serves an unclear end. While characters occasionally have moral reservations about their conduct, the story never brings into focus the message, if any, that Katie Flynn wants to convey.
Companions are cheap robots that have been programmed with memories uploaded from people who are about to die. They are available for lease, not for ownership. They are said to have consciousness but no soul. Companions are useful for people who are quarantined or living in eldercare facilities. Plenty of people need them because of a virus that continues to do its deadly business. The quarantine is in the background so if you are looking for a story that provides insight into the world’s present plight, this isn’t it.
The story begins with a girl named Dahlia and her companion Lilac. Lilac retains the memory of her death as a teenager at the hands of another teen. She knows her friend Nikki was present when she died but doesn’t know what became of her. Her consciousness was uploaded shortly before her death. It then became the property of Metis, the company that manufactures companions. Flynn largely ignores the legal and ethical questions that surround private ownership of another person’s consciousness, except to suggest the obvious, that it might be a bad thing to own the equivalent of another person’s living brain.
Dahlia and her mother live in San Francisco. Dahlia’s mother resents paying for Lilac, despite purchasing a first-generation unit with an inexpensive processor that does not allow Lilac’s mind to mature. As Dahlia begins to outgrow her need for Lilac, and as it seems clear that Lilac will be recycled, Lilac lets loose the rage that she has kept contained.
From that opening chapter, the novel covers a period of years. For the most part, each chapter is told from the perspective of a different character. Novels that change narrators in each chapter must find a way to build a connection between the reader and at least some of the narrators. Flynn never made me care about any of them. Part of the problem is that few of the narrators felt like a unique individual. With the exception of Gabe, whose uneducated dialect is exaggerated, the characters speak in the same narrative voice. If the chapter headings did not announce the narrator, it would be difficult to understand whose voice the reader is hearing.
In any event, a damaged Lilac visits the person she believes to have killed her human body. She thereafter goes through various incarnations, hooks up with other renegade companions, and deals with an evolving world that eventually decides companions should be recalled and scrapped. A pivotal chapter in the novel’s middle tells of a woman approaching death whose plan to upload her consciousness to a companion is interrupted by an attempt to hijack the companion so that another consciousness will have a body. A later chapter introduces a farmer who takes on the recycling of defective companions as a side job and the daughter who eventually carries on that business. Those chapters also introduce a disturbed child named Andy who seems to prefer the company of companions, if only to have control over a consciousness other than his own.
Because it jumps from character to character, the story has a disjointed feel. Investing in or sympathizing with any character is difficult. That’s a drawback in a novel that is probably intended to make readers feel something for the plight of companions. Lilac turns out to be a disagreeable consciousness; her eventual reinterpretation of her own death made me shrug. A good deal of care went into the construction of a plot that is intermittently interesting, but if Flynn had a purpose in mind when telling this story, it eluded me.
RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS