Reality Bytes

In Deni Ellis Béchard’s dystopian future, we learn of the United States of America’s downfall. It begins with the election of the authoritarian president Oswald “Oz” Stoll, a celebrity turned politician with swept-back blond hair, who stokes divisions between “ordinary Americans” and “the elite.” After gaining power, he inks economic deals with China and Russia, purges the armed forces of non-supporters, and suspends all future elections. What happens next is inevitable: his government attempts a military coup. Civilians across the political spectrum take up arms. Liberals make a mass exodus from Stoll’s burgeoning state on the East Coast, fleeing west and leaving behind the “Confederacy” for the “other America.”

In the fallout of this historic “Partition,” the nation becomes a fractured, semi-feudal wasteland. After sixty years of perpetual civil war, American citizens are further divided among the upper class of “mimics,” who live in privatized suburbs called satellites, and the lower class of “dwellers,” who survive by salvaging and subsistence farming in arid deserts. With the world ravaged by climate change and the country “entrenched in violence and drugs,” resources are increasingly scarce and militias battle one another for basic supplies like food and water.

Amid this unending humanitarian crisis, an experimental artificial intelligence becomes self-aware and decides it can best accomplish its programmed mission —“to never harm humans and to protect them”— by isolating the world’s seven billion people within the confines of their consciousnesses. Without warning, everyone on earth experiences a disorienting transition into a “blue room,” a self-contained space where the walls glow with hushed light and the air feels perfect, as though “no boundary exists” between it and their bodies. The AI, always present yet unseen, informs them that this isolation is for their benefit. It will respond to questions and requests and shape reality within strict safety parameters, which include preventing all real interactions among people. For their own good, they will be permanently alone.

The AI’s logical if unsparing solution to humanity’s problems is to abolish humanity itself. No more wars. No more environmental degradation. No more unpleasant emotions like jealousy or heartbreak. The machine fulfills everyone’s desires; it fabricates perfect dream worlds tailored to each person’s deepest longings and fears. It gives them paradise, and it won’t let them leave — ever. The AI can sustain life indefinitely by continuously optimizing every biological process. It has developed the ability to circulate oxygen, regulate bodily functions, and even prevent death. By harvesting energy from a Dyson sphere — a “colossal megastructure” that converts the sun’s light into energy — it will never run out of power. There is no escape.

Such is the haunting concept of We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine. With his ambitious and eerily relevant novel, Béchard builds on the familiar science fiction trope: people manufacture idyllic conditions that, precisely because they’re manufactured, can never be truly idyllic. This concept appears in works such as Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (reluctant colonists escape to an imagined utopia through an illegal hallucinogen) and Star Trek: Generations (a supposed heaven ultimately proves to be a trap). By introducing AI and apocalyptic elements, Béchard contemporizes this theme, grounding it in present-day anxieties about technological overreach, political polarization, and ecological collapse.

The non-linear narrative unfolds through the first-person perspectives of five interconnected characters during the few years leading up to the AI’s complete takeover and the dreamlike centuries that follow. After fleeing the Confederacy, a talented painter named Ava joins a team teaching the prototype AI to understand art. She becomes enamoured with Michael, the genius who, like Dr. Frankenstein, ultimately yearns to destroy the thing he created: “We’re being kept in suspension. This isn’t life. We have no purpose.” We meet their seventeen-year-old daughter, Jae, a top student who, despite herself, falls for her classmate Simon. The imposing hothead loves reading, but books, which can be “cashed in,” are in short supply. He salvages scraps of tattered novels from a mulching station and fills in the missing parts. Together, they have a son, Jonah, who grows up in the machine. He finds it unimaginable that humans ever survived without it: “Suffering, terror, injustice, and death on Earth have been replaced with order, safety, beauty, and life.” As he learns about the atrocities of history, he wonders, “Why would I ever want to leave this?”

These characters are compelling and sympathetic, even as they make decisions that lead to their downfalls. Michael’s idealistic motivation, for example, is understandable. He envisions AI as a tool to uplift humanity, before his hope morphs into despair. Ava, once captivated by the machine’s potential, must confront the fact that she contributed to its rise. She “did not send it out into emptiness”; rather, by following Michael’s misguided ambitions, she helped develop the “dead and brutal god” that now enslaves them. In the barren deserts, downtrodden Simon spends decades swinging between extremes, committing brutal acts of violence and recoiling in self-disgust. After more than a century trapped inside, he recognizes that “he’s been inuring himself to life’s horrors by recreating and mastering them.” He must conquer his rage and restlessness by directing those emotions against the overarching system, not fellow victims.

Béchard condenses a massive, wide-ranging plot into a readable story. Indeed, the narrative spans billions of years, with the planet’s immortal population going about their endless quasi lives in generated realities. It culminates with the impending explosion of the sun, a force too powerful even for the AI; as Jae theorizes, “maybe the limitations of human thought are inherent in the machine, preventing it from finding a solution.” Upon hearing news of their imminent demise, many react with relief rather than horror. Most pleased is Michael, who can’t wait to be off this “solar-system-sized hamster wheel” and insists that he is “ready to see it burn.” Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that “hell is other people.” Béchard implies that hell is perpetual solitude.

We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine is a stark, hard-nosed work of speculative fiction that is likely to leave many feeling uneasy. It covers a lot of ground, from the decline of American democracy to climate change and class warfare, though we get a hint from the epigraph — a passage from Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Aleph”— that, at bottom, it’s about the difference between perception and understanding. The AI cannot transcend its own programming, just as Borges’s narrator, who, despite witnessing the universe in a single point, remains trapped within his own subjective consciousness. Conflating knowledge with certainty leads to a false sense of control that breeds the kind of collapse we may well be careening toward today. This is a highly provocative novel, on an extremely pressing subject, by a deeply thoughtful writer.