The Fox Inheritance ~ Mary E. Pearson

It is 260 years since a distraught Matthew Fox illegally scanned his daughter's mind into a program designed to hold her being in limbo until her body, destroyed in an auto accident, can be repaired.

He also scanned Jenna's two best friends, Locke and Kara. However, they didn't have sufficient original tissue survive the accident to be deemed human, even illegally human.

As in most things, greed led to duplication and theft of the scans of Locke and Kara. They have spent 260 years in hellish dreams of not quite being. But now they are made new. Still illegal. And nobody they know is alive.

They have been awakened in new biotech wonder bodies as floor models. Their "savior" wants to sell this technology to rich people who do not want to face death. And they are the mostly living proof that the technology works. Mostly.

They have bodies. They have memories. They have intellectual capabilities. But are they really human? And what does it mean to be human in a world where many functions are now performed by uncannily human-looking robots? Robots who can think and dream beyond their programming.

The Fox Inheritance is one long examination of this question. Where is the line drawn between human and everything not? Does a line need to be drawn?

There is plenty of action. Locke and Kara are illegal. They have to escape the mad scientist who revived them. They are driven to find the only person they know to still be alive — Jenna Fox. And for that they have to cross a continent that is still recovering from a civil war.

There are now two interwoven countries and a host of vagabond non-citizens. Byzantine regulation and totalitarian control are the hallmarks of the new world. You can't even navigate a car. The grid does it for you after you receive an identification pass. Of course, there is still a rampant black market; the underworld still thrives.

Locke and Kara ride this underworld across the continent to find Jenna. They each find their way to friendship, love and humanity along the way, finding help in unexpected places and kindness from people of all degrees.

But not everybody can survive in this new world.

I do have problems with the ending. There does not seem to be anything to motivate it. But that aside, The Fox Inheritance is a highly relevant discussion of the ethical questions humans will face as we continue to create and innovate, especially in the fields of artificial intelligence and biotechnology.