At once a dystopian bildungsroman, a science fiction epic spanning millennia, and a philosophical thought experiment grappling with the ethics of AI, gene editing, and other burgeoning technologies, Deni Ellis Béchard’s We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine considers the meaning of human existence in a future when problems such as mortality, pain, scarcity, and unfulfilled desires are seemingly programmed away. The novel opens with an epigraph from Jorge Luis Borges: “Each thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos. I saw […] the multitudes.” Fittingly, just as scientists in Béchard’s speculative novel attempt to alter the makeup of human DNA, We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine confronts the infinite—and often incomprehensible—aspects of human life. 

In the aftermath of a second American civil war that results in geographical divide—and furthers the country’s ideological split—an experimental AI simply referred to as “the machine” goes rogue and determines that the best way to protect human life is to isolate every single person in their own “blue room.” It is within these controlled environments—utopic simulations that are indistinguishable from reality and that can be altered to contain any world imaginable—where we meet the novel’s ensemble cast. Ava, an “artistic genius” who paints Solarpunk fantasies, and her husband Michael, the mastermind at least partly responsible for the machine’s creation, both escape to the West Coast in the early days of the country’s fracture but nonetheless find themselves trapped in the machine by the novel’s start. While Ava despairs over her imprisonment, she is elated to find her artistic practices now extending beyond the canvas; Michael is torn between his lifelong pursuit of human advancement and the ironic halting of progress that he claims the machine has caused: “He has loved life more than many, but life included struggle. An evil human-hunting AI would have been better than this. Something to drive humans to evolve. Not this solar-system-sized hamster wheel. He is ready to see it burn.”

On the other side of the country is Jae, a high school student who is the genetic offspring of four parents (two of whom are Michael and Ava) and a genius in her own right. In the deserts—a setting that speaks, in part, to climate change’s widespread impacts—Jae struggles to survive in a conservative society where gender roles have been forcefully reasserted, where economic limitations have ballooned, and where going to university is a statistical anomaly for individuals living outside of federally owned “satellites.” Though the narrative never moves inside of the satellites—perhaps preferring to keep these futuristic “gated” communities intangible, like an oasis that never concretizes, like the “American dream” that entices but doesn’t truly exist—readers skirt around the periphery through a fourth character, Simon, who struggles to leave the violence of his old reality behind, even when presented with the machine’s never-ending possibilities. 

Béchard explores a different facet of human experience through each character’s perspective. Through Michael, Béchard raises compelling questions about progress and what is at stake when prioritizing human life above all else. Ava speaks to humanity’s adaptability, as well as how the desire to create—even amid destruction—persists for some. Simon’s character encourages readers to consider how economic limitations and familial histories intersect with other kinds of privileges. And Jae—notably, the one character whose DNA has been edited in an attempt to beget life representative of the “best” of humanity—inevitably carries the same flaws that show up in everyone.

As the novel’s parallel storylines intersect, Béchard’s mode of telling contrasts sharply with the isolated rooms within which each character remains trapped. In a scene where past and present  become blurred, Jae “just lies there, eyes closed, alone in the machine’s night, its house and garden—its perfect replicas, maybe even the original molecules of the only life she knew. After a while, she looks up at stars that seem clear and real.” Yet even in isolation, the characters find traces of other humans within the machine’s simulated worlds. Tragically, this contrast further emphasizes the shared human experience that each character must live with/out.

While individuals in the blue rooms see immersive dreamscapes and experience pleasure beyond comprehension, the machine never truly attains consciousness and remains tethered to an anthropocentric way of existing. It colonizes other planets, absorbs entire ecosystems, and ultimately destroys so that it might create. With this novel, Béchard raises an urgent question: How do we ensure the things we create don’t end up replicating the worst parts of ourselves? 

At its best, the machine provides immediate freedom from humanity’s more violent constructions  and attempts to offer protection from what is arguably the most violent container of them all: the human body. Protected—or imprisoned—by the machine, the characters within Béchard’s novel are freed from a great deal, including death. Eventually, though, they discover the reality of their situation, and with it, yet another paradox of human existence: a meaningful life cannot be an infinite one. 

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Deni Ellis Béchard is the author of eight previous books of fiction and nonfiction, including Vandal Love, winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Writers Prize, and Into the Sun, winner of the 2016 Midwest Book Award for Literary Fiction and selected by CBC/Radio-Canada as one of the most important books to be read by Canada’s political leadership. His work has received the Nautilus Book Award for Investigative Journalism and has been featured in Best Canadian Essays. He has reported from India, Cuba, Colombia, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Afghanistan, and his writing has been published in dozens of newspapers and magazines, including Salon, the Los Angeles Times, the Paris Review, Pacific Standard, and Foreign Policy.

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Court Ludwick is the author of These Strange Bodies (ELJ Editions, 2024) and the founding editor-in-chief of Broken Antler Magazine. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, and can be found in EPOCH, Denver Quarterly, Hawaii Pacific Review, Oxford Magazine, West Trade Review, and elsewhere. Court’s visual work has shown at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts, and she has taught workshops on hybrid writing and experimental form, most recently for The Dakota Writing Project and Vermillion Literacy Project. Court holds an MA from Texas Tech University and is a current PhD student at USD. She lives in Minneapolis with her lucky black cat, where she is currently at work on her second book, a creative-critical project about bones, memory, and mommy issues.