Book Review: Me and the Machine

Reviewed by Erin Britton

AI might offer the solution to a never-ending war, but at what cost?

Set in a richly evoked futuristic universe and featuring advanced technologies, impressive spacecrafts, and deadly interplanetary warfare, Wesley Watts’s Me and the Machine is a space opera with more twists and turns than the Pinwheel Galaxy. 

Set in a society that revolves around war and the commerce that creates, it highlights the low value placed on human life by an unchecked military but simultaneously the bravery and capacity for self-sacrifice of individual humans who seek to do the right thing in the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity.

Gabrielle “Gaby” Rhodes is seeking a very specific set of genetic enhancements: “Human growth hormone secretagogues, epi plate skeletal growth compounds, and anterior pituitary gland enhancers. And it’s a long shot, but maybe IL-4 receptor modulators for asthma too.” She needs to get bigger—21 centimeters taller and 16 kilograms heavier—and she needs to do it in less than a year if she’s going to avoid a career in the Intelligence Division. Unfortunately, despite her skill at computer coding and encryption, she fails spectacularly to con a shady doctor into providing the required CRISPR interventions.

While a desire to be on the frontline as a gausser—an elite combat soldier—is certainly unusual when there are other—safer—options available, Gaby is motivated by the desire to fight in honor of her brother, Jules, a war hero who died during “an Omega Priority mission.” However, her skill at mathematics has led to her enrollment at Moore Academy to train as an officer specializing in drone combat and other high-tech means of warfare, and she’s rapidly running out of ways to secure a transfer to a grunt division. That is, until Admiral Davis makes her an offer she can’t refuse.  

The Admiral has noticed what Gaby is up to. He’s aware that she wants to flunk out and train as a gausser but also that she’s too small to do so, so he gives her a suggestion: accompany him on the maiden voyage of a new kind of spaceship. 

Once abroad, she reconnects with Jules’s former best friend, Lieutenant Commander Morgan York, who is serving as Admiral Davis’s XO. She soon learns that Discordia is transporting Passenger: a new type of symbiotic artificial intelligence (AI) with the potential to end the war. And Morgan is planning a mutiny so that he can sell Passenger to the highest bidder. 

The only way she can keep the AI out of Morgan’s hands is to keep it in her own head, but the longer the two of them are integrated, the harder it will be to sever the neural link. So it’s up to Gaby and Passenger to work together to save themselves and, possibly, the rest of humanity too.

Much of Me and the Machine is narrated in the first person by Gaby, which gives the story a sense of immediacy and ramps up the excitement and danger. It also provides ample insight into her her desperation to become a gausser and manages to somehow recapture life before her brother’s death. 

Other pieces of the story are told in the third person and follow Jules aboard the Sedna as he prepares for a vital mission. Given the importance of Jules to Gaby, these sections of the story provide an important emotional connection to her situation as well as intriguing details about covert military operations.

This dual-timeline approach highlights the incredible amount of detail that Wesley Watts has put into the worldbuilding for Me and the Machine. Not only is Gaby’s perspective on Jules and his final mission brought out as she struggles with her inability to enlist as a gausser, but the man and the mission are also woven into the story. The same is true of the entire universe Watts has created for the novel, with the various planets having unique characteristics. For example, Gaby’s home planet: “Amiens is a tidally locked planet. One side forever facing the sun, burned and barren, while the other is cast in perpetual shadow and ice. The habitable portion of the planet is a narrow band between the extremes.”

Watts has dedicated considerable effort to crafting futuristic yet still realistic technologies, including plausible biotech that is currently within the realm of science fiction but could be feasible in the relatively short term. While Passenger is many generations more advanced than current AI, the neural interface that Gaby uses is certainly believable: “While integrated, everything but our autonomic nervous systems are routed through the NeurX implant. This allows the simulation to feed all its sensory information straight into our brains.” Interestingly, while Watts elucidates the wonder of such technology, he also reveals its dehumanizing aspects.

Watts has included a considerable amount of moral ambiguity in Me and the Machine, which keeps things hazy as to who are the goodies and who the baddies. So too do the various crosses and double-crosses that Gaby, Passenger, and the secondary characters must contend with, serving to drive the pace of the story and keep the central puzzle intriguing. 

With its cool technologies, deadly weapons, and dangerous space travel, Me and the Machine a thrilling work of science fiction with very human issues at its heart.

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