A moon mission fired by dreams

AFORTNIGHT ago, in the Guardian, Naomi Klein charged proponents of artificial intelligence with misappropriating terms from psychology and mysticism to give the impression that “they are in the process of birthing an animate intelligence on the cusp of sparking an evolutionary leap for our species”. By a happy coincidence, this is similar ground to that covered by Alice Thompson’s latest book, a hauntingly cerebral science fiction novel that makes use of terms drawn from psychology and mysticism, but is arguably even more beholden to poetry.

It’s established in the framing chapters that Chimera has been written by Artemis, an astronaut, upon her return from a mission to the moon Oneiros to seek bacteria which could consume the carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere and pull the planet back from the brink of ecological collapse. Artemis can’t remember being on Oneiros, or what happened to the rest of her crew, but hopes that if she writes about it, the facts will unconsciously spill out on to the page.

The Earth that she set out to save is an environmental wasteland ruled by an oligarchy of tech corporations and populated by people hooked on the AI-created virtual realities they sell. On board Chimera, the human crew is assisted (or should that be overseen?) by 12 androids called dryads, hybrids of synthetic cells and cloned human DNA, capable of only the most limited emotional range. It had been assumed that the development of AI would lead inevitably to machine consciousness, but that has yet to come to pass.

Artemis’s specialisation is dream research, and she had run a project aimed at giving androids dreams, shut down on the grounds that it was an attempt to introduce consciousness into AI by the back door. Ostensibly, she’s on board Chimera because astronauts aren’t allowed to dream and she has to supervise their welfare. But Mission Control have hinted that her knowledge will be vital when the ship reaches its destination.

The crew seem disconnected, each locked into their own separate world. Artemis, almost compulsively, ticks off their personality traits: their commander, Seth, is inflexible, his life governed by rules; Luther’s faith in technology is akin to religion; Masami is mentally the strongest of the crew because, like Seth, “she lacked all imagination, or originality of thought”. Everyone else she meets in the course of the story is, to varying degrees, obsessive, anti-social, manipulative, untrustworthy, a hologram or an AI. Thompson works this chilly atmosphere of alienation into one of suspense and foreboding, keeping our curiosity piqued as a crewman disappears and suspicions arise that the dryads may be evolving beyond their programming, developments to which Artemis responds by growing closer to the most advanced dryad, Troy.

The sense of dislocation is heightened by a hallucinatory otherworldliness, and once the crew have reached Oneiros to find an AI-created virtual reality awaiting them it becomes harder than ever to be sure what’s real and what isn’t.

Chimera is a restatement of that old question, “What makes us human?”, but Thompson takes a distinctive approach, the notion of “dreams as poetic metaphors of thought” allowing for explorations of the nature of consciousnes, the fear of losing one’s identity, the omnipresence of AI, the frightening implications of virtual reality and the suggestion of forces powerful enough to override both machine programming and human nature all overlapping in interesting and inventive ways.