An audio book.
Cassie visits some kind of addiction meeting. She hasn't been for a few months. She sees a man there, Lewis, who she senses has the same problem as her. They talk. They'd both been addicted (and banned from) a VR product create by Imagen. She wants to sleep with him. He's half-hearted, saying he's just left a relationship (later he says that his partner had a VR-related death). They sleep sexlessly together.
By the time Cassie was 16 her mother had died and her father was planning to start a new life in Australia. She began living with classmate Alan and his mother Vanessa, who has just died. She attends the funeral. When she was sacked by Imagen she became poor. She started a company offering support to students (essay-writing, help with deadlines, etc). Nikol, one of his employees, is a tech-wizard. Imagen finds that their clients' VR logs give helpful info for targetted advertising.
She visits Alan in a lock-up ward. Who's paying for his treatment now? Who's his next of kin? He doesn't remember her. She has a sister Meg who has children Ella and Finn. When they overnighted with her once she neglected them, losing all track of time on Make-Believe.
Imagen, based in a grey tower on campus, was spun off from the university. Its genius is Prof Morgan. Because it received government funding - a flagship project - there's pressure on it to succeed. There was hope that Make-Believe would one day be a shared world, useful for education, mental therapy, and sex entertainment. Cassie talks to Morgan, who tells her that some users can connect longer than the allowed 2 hours/day, and that shared worlds can't happen. There's a section from Morgan's PoV suggesting that she's worried about Cassie's questions. Cassie goes to an exhibition about Make-Believe (a way to deliver an info-dump - there are also FAQ section). Bioware is inhaled and an earpiece used to connect to secure 6G network. She connects to Make-Believe though she's been banned. She meets Alan there - or is it her imagination? Imagen bring her in - she's broken her agreement. They explain that they want to stop users interacting with each other - it's a bug. Their plan is to update her bioware so that it will spread among other users and fix the bug. If she agrees, they'll give her back her job. She agrees because if she passes the upgrade onto Alan he'll suffer less (she thinks he's a victim of the bug). She's been suspicious of Lewis. Now she finds evidence that he's working for Imagen.
She breaks into Prof Morgan's house. Morgan says she had a partner who she lost because of Make-Believe. She's privately been working on a real remedy. Imagen are planning to do product placement in the VR world. Cassie tries the remedy. She wakes in Meg's house. She reads that Imagen's share values are sinking - Prof Morgan has been whistle-blowing? She visits Alan (in VR?), who remembers her now (his expenses have been paid by Imagen). The "campaign for real life" has gained pace. She realises that her VR meeting with Alan are in her imagination.
Other reviews
- thewallflowerdigest (I did find the first half of the book stronger than the latter. Some things were easy to see coming, and I wasn’t entirely satisfied with where the plot went but I did I like how the unreliability of Cassie’s point of view was played with.)
- The Only Gaijin in the Village
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