A visitor travels a long way to ask a host how to forget a memory that will not fade. Over one cup of coffee they trace how machines and minds both learned to remember, and why teaching a machine to forget would be the worst thing we could do.
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You forget the ache. The machine keeps the fact.
Unsorted things stay loud.
The same ideas as fiction, shortest first.
The making-of for the book's rooms, told as a party. Heracles, a diving woman, Arjuna, Data, WALL-E and a seated Buddha, all in one room, and then the real machine walks in. It can do every trick there and cannot want one thing. A footnote for every guest.
Seven people inside one war's kill chain. An analyst approving strikes from a hotel room, a commander sealed in a bunker, a girl whose mother points a satellite dish at the sky each night, a paratrooper waiting in line. Every system performs as designed.
An ordinary man has everything a life should add up to, and something is still missing. With a machine wired into his mind, he climbs higher than almost anyone has, asking every being he meets the same two questions: what do you still want, and how do I reach it. A novella in nine chapters.