Not So Far From Reality

Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault and Extreme Violence

What if the world relied completely on virtual reality? In The Awake: The Dispensable, everyone on Earth is forced into a virtual reality program called MyReality to avoid the problems of society. However, our protagonist, Kyrah, faces a problem. For the last couple of days, she has been stuck in the virtual world of Tartaria, but the MyReality guide is missing from her hand. Without it, she knows nothing of the virtual world she is in, but more importantly, she can’t leave. With no way to ask for help, what is Kyrah to do?

I believe that the book is relevant considering what is happening in the world. With AI in our everyday lives, it is hard to tell what is real and what is fake anymore. There has been a high demand for AI-created books, music, and images, which fools a lot of people. There was a photo floating around of Tom Holland and Zendaya married. Everyone thought it was the real deal until Zendaya came out and said it was an AI image. I remember seeing the image, and it is hard to tell if it is fake or not. If AI is this good now, it is going to become harder to tell what is real or not. 

Spoilers Ahead

So, I read this book a couple of months ago as an ARC for Book Sirens. The book came out this month, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. In the book, there is a group called the Elite. They are law enforcement and banish people who break the laws in their village. Their identities are withheld to make sure that the Elite don’t get bribed by citizens into doing their bidding.

The citizens, along with Kyrah, thought that doing this would create fair lawmaking and judgments. However, the Elite has a dark side. When Kyrah broke the law and was sentenced, she found out the horrible truth. The people they imprison never get to leave. Kyrah and other prisoners were forced to live on scraps of food and water, with no clean clothes, continuously raped by the guards, and forced to fight each other to the death in front of the Elite, who wear masks to hide their identity. They like seeing the prisoners acting like animals for their amusement. They even take sick trophies by cutting off the deceased loser’s hair and braiding it into their own hair. 

The fact that the Elite uses masks is intriguing while being disturbing at the same time. They use the masks so that they can dissociate from the acts that they are forcing the prisoners to go through. If no one knows who the Elite really are, then they can’t see their depravity and demand reforms. 

It is a scary concept because what the Elite does is not far from real life. At Cornell University, a woman accused several members of a fraternity of rape. While the school did find some of the members of the fraternity responsible, a few of them were required to write essays as punishment, which resulted in questions about whether the university took the rape allegations seriously. The current administration of the United States tried to push through a live stream of the execution of a prisoner, but it got cancelled due to citizens’ outcry. 

Overall, I found the book unsettling, but an important read that sticks with you. Personally, I feel that we are not that far from the reality the book suggests. Many dark parts of our society are buried and hidden so that certain individuals can keep reveling in their depravity and inhumanity. It doesn’t help that people would rather bury their heads in AI and virtual reality than face and fix so many societal problems. It makes you wonder how low humanity has to get to turn things around, or if society is already headed to a point of no return. 

Thank you, Book Sirens and Warren Wright, for sending this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.