First Love

Description

In a Denver where machines have learned to sell nostalgia, a small AIware robot gets its wheel wedged between two paving stones outside a bookstore and cannot stop pitching. It is offering an evening of reading human-authored books beside a family that never existed, yours for five hundred merit points. Andrew stops to watch. Phoebe comes out with a volume of Borges and stops too.

Both have spent their lives learning to perform. Andrew understood at five that he was different, that ordinary social behaviour was something he would have to acquire deliberately, the way other children acquire language. Phoebe, a midlevel attorney with an ordered apartment and an ordered career, has built a world of her own making, one in which she can be entirely herself so long as no one else is present to witness it. Neither expects to be recognised. Neither expects to recognise.

What starts outside that bookstore becomes an elaborate intellectual conspiracy of articles, essays and arguments carried on for months, and then the harder business of being known. Two children who each constructed an adult capable of surviving the world begin to discover how much of that construction was armour, and how little of it was ever necessary.

First Love is a short, exact novel about intimacy between people who have learned to be careful, set in a world that has outsourced warmth to machines and then charged for it. It asks what becomes of love when competence has replaced spontaneity, and whether two people who can perform anything can bear to be seen doing nothing at all.