Today’s interview is with author Ben Wakeman, a brilliant and stirring author and musician whose songs, short stories, essays, novels, and immersive audio, to name a few, explore deeply thought-provoking themes. For the sake of our Unfixed audience, in this interview I explore his serialized speculative fiction novel Memory of My Shadow, a gripping tale of technological advancement, human emotion and the perfectly flawed code of sentient beings that redeem us in the end. It is a stunning example of human fallibility/vulnerability and how it interfaces with technology.

Here is Ben’s brief introduction to the novel:

It is the year 2052. Artificial Intelligence has arrived and already become big business. Magdalena is a brilliant and tenacious computer scientist who led the A.I. charge and profited greatly when she founded Commune, the company that successfully planted Digital Companions, or DCs, into the heads of most of the world’s population. But at the height of her success, she mysteriously walks away from it all.

From a remote compound deep in the mountains of North Carolina, Magdalena writes her story with the help of her latest creation, Meela, a DC imbued with the personality and emotional intelligence of a human. Magdalena’s obsession with mapping the personalities of real people to DCs is fueled by a longstanding obsession that is far more than scientific curiosity. At sixteen, she survived the deadliest school shooting in American history—and the shooter was her twin brother, Joe, who died in the aftermath. When Magdalena begins mapping her latest model, a charismatic West Coast artist named Evan, a confluence of events forces her to confront her motivations for her work. But is it too late? The virtual monster she has created could prove to be a destroyer of worlds, just like her brother, whom she simultaneously reviles and mourns.

“The Memory of My Shadow” is an exploration of consciousness and technology, the origins of violence, and the price it exacts from those in its wake. The story unfolds through the eyes of a boundary-breaking woman at her breaking point as she exposes the wiring of the human brain and its complicated connection to the heart.

Reading this novel, I was bowled over by the detailed, plausible universe Ben builds and the philosophical implications that flourish within it. It is a masterful allegory about love as the penultimate code, one that predates understanding and complexity, and how it intuits what is most needed to save us.

If you haven’t already, please take a moment and subscribe to Ben’s spanning, illuminating, (and wholly entertaining!) body of work.