Conscious Designs

March 21, 2022
With hints of The Matrix, Transcendence, and Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” White’s debut sci-fi novella doesn’t break new ground but still offers a thoughtful exploration of technology and disability. Following an accident, Eugene Wallace uses a robotic ambulating exoskeleton to navigate the pain and limitations of his physical disabilities. Desperate to walk again, he visits virtual reality company Conscious Designs, which offers clients a Second Self, or a digitized double that exists in a virtual reality known as Arcadia. But Eugene’s wife, Corina, pushes back against the idea of relocating to Arcadia, and Eugene must weigh his desire for escape against his commitment to living. A clever mid-story twist spices things up, but much of the plot is bogged down by exposition about the nature of the Second Self technology. White takes an incisive look into the nature of selfhood, but his portrayal of disability will be divisive, centering suffering and framed largely within a medical model that has gone out of vogue amid social disability theory. (“Eugene considered who he had become since the accident. A paralyzed force. Content without form. Broken... An occasion for suffering: that’s all he was now.”) It’s a thorny, complicated novella of ideas, some rather dated.