In Lauren Gunderson’s polished, pacey but sporadically absurd play a programmer called Merril constructs an AI model of her younger sister Angie, who went missing and was presumed murdered a year before, using her social media data, messages, purchasing history and so on. No prizes for guessing that the virtual construct soon becomes more than a mere tool of consolation.
To say much more about the plot would risk spoilers, but the story unfolds like a tech-savvy version of The Lovely Bones, where the ghost is quite literally in the machine. Are our physical selves more real than our accumulated online data? Might an edited, tweaked computer version of a person be better than the complex, combative human – or at least, “real enough”?
