Transparence by Marc Dugain (review)

The year is 2068. The setting is a remote village on the northern coast of Iceland, belying the intense activities of a secret tech startup collaborative situated there. It is directed by Cassandre Lanmordottir, French by birth, who years earlier developed the matrimonial computer program, Transparence, matching individuals who agreed to be surveilled constantly through computer chips, cameras, physiological testing, emotional sensors, etc., to eliminate all unknown and random risks to a successful marriage. She and her team of twelve are working on something much more world-changing. Whereas science and technology are focusing on extending life, Cassandre's Endless (sic) project aims at immortality, demanding complete digital transparency from anyone seeking an afterlife. To backtrack: of course, Google wants Cassandre's marriage algorithms, and she works in California for several years. Her ninety percent success rate is in stark contrast with the vast divorce rate prevalent. That world, as Dugain describes it, suffers, among others, from an over reliance on artificial intelligence. And with it the subsequent loss of spontaneity, spirituality, imagination, the arts, and literature. Transparence is a cautionary tale, foreboding, at times confusing, sometimes annoying. The novel has the pace of a thriller, interspersed with humanistic pensées and less-than-subtle arguments for a "less connected" society, which, I believe, readers of literature already share. For example, Dugain poses the question whether mankind will "vivre ensemble" or "survivre ensemble" fifty years from now, and so on. Cassandre's program can create an identical (or younger) artificial body with all personality and intellectual traits intact, needing neither nutrient nor requiring other bodily functions. (Amusingly, sexual drive remains intact.) At death, transhumanisme transpires. The life spirit migrates to the waiting recipient. Cassandre orchestrates her own death and resurrection and becomes a celebrity. Endless, she proclaims, will be the means to a paradise on earth, populated only by ethical beings, whom the algorithms have deemed worthy. The Calvinistic parody continues as Cassandre speaks to the need of returning to the true spirit of the Gospels and an egalitarian society. Cassandre, especially after having acquired Google (through her team's manipulating the stock market), has become a celebrity. And this gives Dugain his greatest opportunity for satire and social criticism. She is invited everywhere: Washington, by President Samantha Williamson, "d'un savant mélange entre Afro-Américain, Mexicain, Chinois et Blanc" (113) and whose disgraced husband has preceded her in the office; the Vatican, where prelates's faces, as red and purple as their vestments, are alarmed by her prophetic vision; and the Élysée Palace and Versailles, where bises, façade, and ceremony still reign. These caricatures and episodes are especially entertaining, particularly because the political and ecclesiastical worlds are our own. Not everyone, however, is interested in immortality, and that is taken up by various persons in this tale, especially by Cassandre's novelist father and her husband, a renowned seismologist. Their confrontation with mortality and technology is at once noble and touching. This is followed by a surprising (fictional) epilogue which will have the reader revisit Cassandre's story and ponder Dugain's trepidations.