A Strange and Brilliant Light: Winner of the Writers’ Guild Best First Novel Award

by Eli Lee

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

WINNER of the WRITERS' GUILD BEST FIRST NOVEL AWARD: A riveting, thought-provoking speculative literary novel exploring the impact of the AI revolution through the eyes of three very different young women.

Lal, Janetta and Rose are living in a time of flux. Technological advance has brought huge financial rewards to those with power, but large swathes of the population are losing their jobs to artificial intelligence, or auts, as they're called. Unemployment is high, discontent is rife and rumours are swirling. Many feel robbed - not just of their livelihoods, but of their hopes for the future.

Lal is languishing in her role at a coffee shop and feeling overshadowed by her quietly brilliant sister, Janetta, whose Ph.D. is focused on making auts empathetic. Even Rose, Lal's best friend, has found a sense of purpose in charismatic up-and-coming politician Alek.

When vigilantes break in to the coffee shop and destroy their new coffee-making aut, it sets in motion a chain of events that will pull the three young women in very different directions.

Change is coming - change that will launch humankind into a new era. If Rose, Lal and Janetta can find a way to combine their burgeoning talents, they might just end up setting the course of history.

Release date: July 22, 2021

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 416

Sample

Lal was starting to realise that even when you got what you wanted, there was something more to want. When she was very young what she wanted most was ice cream from Popotops. She didn’t get it often, but on special occasions – her and Janetta’s birthdays, and at the end of summer – their father would drive them to Conaus Square and she’d run through the glass doors into the café and excitedly announce her order. Coffee fudge, chocolate, banana marshmallow. Caramel sauce, cookie crumbs and chocolate chunks. For a moment she was in heaven, but all too soon her want would irrepressibly return – more, again, now.

There had been Popotops adverts on television back then, the screen filling with soft snowy spirals of white, rising to a perfect peak. She’d been rapt, begging her parents to take her there more often so she could stand in line between the cherry-topped tables and gaze at the bright silver coffee machine and banks of ice cream and shelves of cake and pie. Her father said that when she was eight, she actually lay down on the floor and screamed for it. He’d done an impression on the living-room carpet, fifteen years later. Take me to Popotops! he’d squealed in a high-pitched voice, writhing like an untrained puppy. Take me to Popotops!

Now she sat in her office at the back of the café, surrounded by boxes of tiny pink tubs and flimsy spoons and waffle cones. She’d invested a lot of time in becoming manager, including three years on the shop floor, standing, smiling and serving. It was the first time she’d sensed her own worth, and this wasn’t something she’d ever felt before. Before had only been the wishing. She still gorged herself on ice cream with her friends who worked there, after hours when they were closing up, in their uniform of red baseball caps and white tunics with Popotops scrawled across the front. But she was capable, she seemed to love hard work, and when she became manager she was momentarily fulfilled, even if it was within the smallest world, just a chain café in a sleepy city on the western coast.

Today she was attending a conference at Tekna, the corporation that had acquired Popotops two years ago. It was the first time store managers had been asked to join, and she’d shut her office door as if to make a point – that she alone had been invited somewhere special. She could hear Rose and Van chat to customers outside or barge down the corridor to the storeroom. Van whistled or sang to himself. Rose was quieter, beyond the occasional box thudding to the floor and a sharp Fuck!

She drew the blinds over the single high window and in the gloom her screen awoke to show an empty stage; then the view changed, panning to the rows of Tekna managers and executives in the audience. They were waiting for something not just to start, but to happen, their faces alert, their bodies upright and expectant. They were five hundred miles south in Mejira, and she could see how pleased and proud they were to be there. She tried to picture herself actually there, sitting amongst them.

Suddenly the camera panned to a stark bone of spotlight and a woman appeared beneath it. She looked a lot like Lal. She had the same round cheeks, button nose, and plump lips, but on this woman they were sculpted more perfectly – the cheeks and nose more innocent, the lips plumper and fuller. She had the same short brown hair, too, except hers gave off a golden shimmer. Her eyes were placid and gentle, where Lal’s were full of want, and she was thinner, too, in a way that someone full of want could never be. As she stood spotlit and alone, surrounded by darkness, a wild applause erupted before her. That elite audience, those managers and executives, came to life. There was whooping and cheering and the thunder of feet on the floor, pounding out approval. Lal was seized with an envy so intense that for a moment she couldn’t breathe. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to be the woman or the audience, but it didn’t matter – she simply felt that old, pulsing need, a sense she deserved more than what she’d got, more than her soft body and her ordinary brains, more than being the waitress and then being the boss.

When she was younger she had not been promising, had not distinguished herself at all. At home she begged for attention, jealous of her older sister’s intelligence and ease, but beyond this she was not memorable, nor did she try to be. There was a photo at someone else’s birthday party, a few years before the carpet tantrum, in which all the other kids sat together with heaped bowls of cake and ice cream. Lal didn’t have one – she’d been forgotten – and she was open-mouthed and helpless, frozen in time with this look of lack.

On-screen, meanwhile, the woman stood motionless, her hands cupped together, her face preternaturally calm. A man in a leather jacket strode onstage a moment later and came to stand beside her. Lal knew who he was – Uhli Ranh, Tekna’s CTO, in charge of technology for all its brands, Popotops included. He looked underslept, rumpled, and utterly in command of himself. He scanned the audience with a wide grin and basked in their applause. For a moment his gaze rested on the camera, on the store managers sitting in their poky offices all over the country, and then he turned to the woman beside him.

‘They want to meet you.’

Lal’s office grew darker, as if the sun had disappeared completely, and she focused on the woman’s eyes, so bright they seemed lit from within. The woman stared straight ahead and minutely opened her mouth, and the audience went still.

‘Hello, I’m Karina,’ she said warmly. ‘How can I help you?’

For this, she received a standing ovation. She continued to smile, fluttering her eyelashes, and Lal peered more closely. Her neck, she realised, was tilting at an angle that looked a touch too far down and a little too much to the left. She scanned the audience, her smile at halfmast now, and when her eyes came to rest again on the camera this time Lal saw it – the absence in them, the gentleness that had shaded not into something remote, not an unwillingness to connect, but instead had given way to a total vacancy. And then Lal understood. She was an aut.

‘One day,’ the aut said, still smiling, ‘I will be just like you.’

After the applause had died down, Uhli Ranh took over. He was proud and bullish onstage. ‘Karina here is a humanoid aut,’ he told the crowd, ‘a prototype, the first of her kind. To start with, we’re putting her on the front line at Popotops, and then we’re going to take her global.’

He looked at her affectionately, and the audience’s whistles and claps and cries of joy continued. Lal took a picture of the aut and sent it to her sister. She was curious to see what she’d say – would she recognise what it was? The answer lit her phone up straight away; of course she did. You couldn’t get around Janetta – she knew everything already. But then she asked if it was conscious.

What a strange question. Lal had no idea.

The door opened a crack. ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ Rose said, coming in. ‘I need some Alti Bay.’

Lal didn’t respond except for pulling her chair close to the desk so Rose could step past and plunder the coffee stores in the corner. The aut left the stage with a beatific smile and Ranh held out a black oval, as small as a seashell, in his palm.

‘In a few months,’ he said, eyeing them all knowingly, ‘these server auts will be standard in every store across Iolra. Want to see how they work?’

Rose tore open a box behind her so Lal couldn’t hear the answer, but Ranh lowered his palm to someone in the front row. ‘Go on, ask it for a coffee.’

The woman said something and the aut flickered enigmatically blue.

‘You think it got that?’ Ranh said.

The audience was mesmerised. A tiny drone buzzed into view from the wings and deposited a coffee into the woman’s hands.

‘Great,’ said Rose miserably.

‘Shhh—’

‘How can you lap this up? That aut is going to take our jobs.’

‘Please, Rose—’

Behind her Rose was staring at the screen, balancing several bags of beans against her chest. Ranh was explaining that the server aut scanned your body and tracked wherever your payment device was – no need for you to do a thing.

‘That’s a horrendous privacy breach,’ Rose said. ‘Is he for real?’

‘Can you please get out?’

They could talk to each other like this because they’d been best friends almost all their lives. Lal could give Rose a pleading stare and they’d both know it wasn’t about her being left alone to do anything managerial, it was purely about her weakness for Tekna. It was common knowledge that Lal was in love with the company, while Rose hated it. But she decided to push the seniority angle anyway.

‘This is for managers, Rose – you’re not supposed to be here.’

But Rose didn’t move, and she didn’t take her eyes off the screen. Lal returned to it, too, to see Uhli Ranh standing with his hands on his hips, watching a small white cylinder do nothing. The top of a strawberry milkshake began to emerge slowly from it, then the rest of it too, as if from the depths of the earth. He handed it to a man in the audience, the broad, delighted grin never leaving his face.

Lal knew what this was doing to Rose. She could feel the heat of her anger, heard her breathing more loudly, prepared herself for recriminations. She imagined her spitting her wrath at Ranh, throwing bags of beans at the screen, boxes of spoons and cones. She turned and moved in front of the screen as if to shield those faraway executives from her friend.

But Rose was stunned. Her lower lip dropped and her face had taken on a greenish hue and she didn’t say a word.

Lal said defensively, ‘I told you – this is for managers only.’

Rose looked at her, dismayed, grabbed a stack of napkins and left. Lal almost flinched from the ice in her wake. Then she remembered Janetta’s baffling question and quickly responded.

Back on the screen, amid the applause, an image of the Mejira skyline appeared, a horizon of chrome and glitter and glass, and at the centre was the Tekna Tower, vaulting into the clouds. After this there was a video on the origins of Tekna. Its founder had been an orphan, his parents killed in the Second Yalin War. He’d owned an integrated steel mill and diversified into shipbuilding, car manufacturing, retail and entertainment.

Watching this, Lal’s eyes brightened. She thought of her years of want, her childish cravings when Popotops meant just scoops of thick sweetness, the weight of desire fulfilled. She was boxed in now by the very same thing, trapped in this world of her youth.

Outside, she heard the familiar cadences of Rose and Van talking, louder and more quickly than usual, Rose probably complaining about the auts she’d just seen. Lal blocked it out and focused on the screen. It appeared to her like gold, and her surroundings as a dull reproach. She wanted to put her hands through it, reach out to what was there – she wanted to disappear into it and enter that other world.

 

It had turned into a beautiful day. Rose was glad of it, because it meant her brother’s barbecue could go ahead. She was in the mood for cracking open a beer or two in Naji’s big, messy garden and chatting to his mates and not really having to think about anything too much. It had been a long time since her brother had decided to have people over, and while she knew it was partly because his girlfriend, Hela, was pregnant, and they wanted to celebrate it, she also knew that there was something symbolic about him finally opening his house up to guests again.

She had a day off, and before the rain had cleared and they knew the barbecue was going ahead, she hadn’t known what to do with all that time on her hands. She had thought she would try to do some studying, or maybe see Lal, but she’d woken up depressed, so it was good she’d been given her orders for the day. There was a chance otherwise – quite a large chance – that she’d have ended up getting stoned and sitting in her room and thinking about things, or not thinking about things, just staring out of her window for hours at the block opposite. Her mum would have come in, she would have told her to go away; her brother Yash would have tried too, and although she liked his company, she’d have told him to go away as well. Now, though, they were all leaving together at two on the dot, all walking around to Naji’s to spend the afternoon with his mates.

In the kitchen, her mum and Yash had made piles of sandwiches and her brother was wrapping them while her mum finished the washing-up.

‘They look really nice.’ Rose reached for a roll, but her brother slapped her hand away.

‘Get off!’

Rose held her hands up. ‘Sorrysorrysorry.’

‘You can eat them when we get there.’

‘Okay, okay,’ she said, sloping over to her mother and resting her head on her shoulder.

Her mother wiped her hands on a towel, gave Rose a hug, and kissed her on the forehead. ‘Come on, love, we’ll have a nice afternoon.’

Rose stayed a moment longer, allowing the hug she’d asked for, then jerked away and, folding her arms, went back to her bedroom, fell onto her bed and exhaled.

They’d moved to this small flat a year ago and Rose’s room was so close to the kitchen that they could probably hear her breathing. You knew when someone was sad here because they were all packed in together, breaths and sighs and cries criss-crossing constantly. The story was that Rose was sad right now because she’d broken up with her boyfriend, and it was true, she was somewhat upset about this. But it didn’t explain her sense that she was moving underwater all the time, that everything good and real was far away and out of reach. It didn’t explain the fact that even when she’d been with her boyfriend she’d felt like this. It didn’t explain why every morning she woke up and felt a heaviness, had to force herself out of bed.

But her brothers were acting normally now, her mum was acting normally, and her dad, they’d all apparently decided, was the pictures on the mantelpiece. They walked past them however many times a day and that’s how he stayed in their lives. She hadn’t heard her mum cry for weeks. She didn’t want to be the only one still struggling. She didn’t mind looking weak, she just didn’t want to be weak.

So let it be the boyfriend. The boyfriend she’d long grown out of and had chosen to get rid of herself. Let it be the boyfriend, and then she could leave thoughts of him at home and go to Naji’s barbecue, and try to have some fun.

 

Her mum saw what was happening the moment she walked through the back gate, her arms filled with food.

‘It’s his bloody mates from the warehouse,’ she hissed, mostly to Yash. Naji worked in a warehouse outside of town; the company that made and distributed electrical parts. He’d been there since he left school, almost a decade, so long now that it was hard to think of him ever working anywhere else. Yash found his brother’s workmates intimidating and would have easily chosen the safety of his computer games over these scary, hulking guys. But Rose thought her mum and brother were being ridiculous – she recognised some of them and they were good people. Around her father’s death, she’d even considered a couple of them to be friends.

‘I’ll go first,’ she said, pushing past. Naji and his girlfriend, Hela, lived on one of the hills on the far side of Upper Sunset, in a dirty yellow house with a dark red roof that overhung it like a sunhat. The house was old and dilapidated, but it was Naji’s kingdom; his first assertion that he was an adult, making it in the world on his own.

She gave Hela a hug – Hela who was alternately a perfect saint or famously bossy – though right now she was all smiles, her stomach the gentle round of the second trimester, her make-up – foundation, eyeliner, glossy lipstick – as intact as ever, but her dark hair for once unstraightened and curling at the bottom a little – and asked her how the baby was. It would be Rose’s first niece or nephew, but she knew Hela wanted a brood; she’d made no secret of it. Naji didn’t seem to care either way, though Rose felt he must have some private misgivings, but he left his friends and came over now, kissing his mum, hugging his younger brother and Rose, then finally putting his arm around his girlfriend.

‘You see the next generation!’ he said, nodding towards her stomach.

Hela elbowed him away. ‘Go and help your mum with the food.’

Naji did what he was told and Rose watched, amused, as her domineering older brother scooped up the bags from his mother’s arms and took them all indoors. When she turned around again, Hela had gone, and she wondered whether she should go and say hi to Naji’s colleagues. They were all standing at the other end of the garden in groups of twos and threes, a radio blaring on the grass beside them. Someone Rose didn’t recognise was watching over the barbecue, assiduously turning hamburger patties and sausages; the smell was delicious. She went over to get a beer from the table stacked with drinks next to him and a sudden whiff of weed came from nowhere. She looked around again, saw that at least two people had spliffs, and realised that her mother wouldn’t be staying long.

‘You’re the sister, right?’ said the guy on the barbecue.

‘I am . . . the sister.’ Rose gave him a semi-friendly nod.

‘You all look the same – the whole family—’ The man pointed towards the kitchen with his barbecue tongs, indicating Naji, Yash and her mum, who were inside. Rose smiled wryly at this, for it was true. They all had thick eyebrows and dark, flashing eyes which could turn angry at a moment’s notice. That was from their mum. Their dad had been tall and handsome, with cheekbones that she and Yash had inherited, and a regal bearing that Naji definitely had, even though he worked out and looked like he was always up for a fight. Yash had it, too, and he was still skinny – would probably always be skinny. Rose, like her mum, was in no way regal, but she was pleased at least to have got the cheekbones.

‘I never noticed.’

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘A stupid thing to say.’

Rose walked off without replying, seeking a spot where she wouldn’t have to talk to anyone. She wasn’t usually this unfriendly. She had thought the party would cheer her up – it was just that when she got there and saw all of Naji’s friends, she realised she hadn’t spoken to any of them since the funeral, and that it was disconcerting to see them now. She slipped indoors and past her family in the kitchen, where her mum was giving Naji directions on how long to heat up some sausage rolls. In the living room, his dog, Deo, sprawled lazily on the sofa. She went past her and up the stairs.

‘Come on, Deo, come on!’ Suddenly enlivened, Rose clapped her hands at her. ‘Come on, Deo, good girl!’ Deo was a good girl. She jumped up, panting happily, and bounded up the stairs after Rose. Rose took an immediate right, into the small room that was going to be for the baby and was currently full of old furniture and piles of clothes. She sat on the floor and buried her face in Deo’s soft golden fur.

‘I can’t fucking face it.’

Deo sat patiently for a few moments and let her do this. Rose lifted her head and gave the dog a grateful few strokes, and then Deo settled more comfortably onto the floor, as though she was going to stay, and Rose, exhausted, rolled down beside her, lay on her back, and looked at the ceiling. Through the open window she could hear noises from the party, the chatter, the radio, briefly, her mother’s voice. She closed her eyes. She would go down when she was ready.

 

But you can’t stay hiding in the upstairs bedroom forever. You can’t expect a dog to find your miserable, horizontal self entertaining for that long. Deo got up before her – it had only been twenty minutes, and she could have had another half hour, another hour – but once she’d been left dogless, lying on the floor staring at the ceiling in a room that was not your own felt weird, so she reluctantly got up, too. She followed the dog’s wagging tail down the stairs, and from the back door watched her spring happily into the bright, hot day outside, not quite ready to join her.

Her brother was in the centre of the garden now, knocking back a beer, and while the scene was still to all appearances casual, she knew that something else was going on. A group of his friends stood around him in a semicircle and almost everyone else was facing him, as though all the action was focused on this sole point. Her mum and Yash were in the corner by the wall, Yash thoughtlessly chomping on a burger, out-of-place and distracted, and her mum anxiously surveying the attendees, perhaps trying to remember who she recognised from the funeral, too.

Nearby, Hela chatted to some women Rose had never seen. They all had a similar look – the long, glossy hair, make-up and painted nails, the shiny leggings and tight dresses. Rose felt they were a different species to her, though she had nothing against Hela and in fact felt almost sorry for her, because as much as she’d appeared to domesticate and subdue Naji, Rose knew her brother was really incapable of doing anything anyone else wanted.

He stopped drinking then, looked around as if to assess something, glanced at Rose, and fumbled for something in his pocket which glinted in the sun. As he held the bottle in the air and tapped against it, she saw it was a pocketknife. The noise, sharp and high, shut everyone up.

‘I’d like to say a few words,’ he said into the stillness.

She’d never seen him make a speech before, although their whole childhood he’d lectured her and she’d gazed back with almost as much solemn adoration as she’d given their dad.

‘It’s been a long time since we’ve had this many people over,’ he said, ‘and it’s a good day for it – we’re blessed with blue skies and a reason to celebrate.’ He extended his arm to Hela, who was squeezed by her excited friends. ‘But there’s something else. A lot of you have asked me over the years to run for union rep, and that’s never been something I could easily do – not with a background like mine.’

Since her dad died there had been speculation – from friends, family, people who’d known them for years – over whether his son had inherited his mettle, his ability to fight, and his doggedness – these t. . .