It’s a book The Toronto Star calls “A poetic and profound meditation on what dreams may come in the metaverse.”Béchard joins me this week on The Chat. 

Deni Ellis Béchard is the author of eight previous books of fiction and nonfiction, including Vandal Love, winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Writers Prize, and Into the Sun, winner of the 2016 Midwest Book Award for literary fiction and selected by CBC/Radio-Canada and one of the most important books to be read by Canada's political leadership. His work has received the Nautilus Book Award for Investigative Journalism and has been featured in Best Canadian Essays. He has reported from India, Cuba, Colombia, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Afghanistan, and his writing has been published in dozens of newspapers and magazines.

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In your notes, you explain that you had originally intended the novel to be a short story, but that it continued to grow. Can you talk a bit more about the process of writing, and when you really knew you had a novel on your hands?

I began with a thought experiment—the question of what happens to humanity if everyone wakes up alone in separate spaces that an AI has created to keep them apart and thus protect them. The AI then gives them whatever they desire, even surrounding them with replicas of humans that it controls while never again allowing them to be with real people. While the idea seems fanciful, it grew from my perception that technology is increasingly shaping our realities to reflect our desires and beliefs and that AI will accelerate this process of individuation.

So I just set out to see who people become in such a situation, and I found that they all inevitably turned toward the past that felt real before. The early drafts weren’t so much a short story as free writing that I thought might turn into a short story, but as I began to discover the characters, I realized that there was a much larger story to tell—not just about how people would adapt to that situation but also how humanity got itself to that point in the first place. Once I discovered the characters, I threw away a lot of the original material and started over, and by that point I knew that there was no way that I would succeed at exploring their stories without writing a novel.

Part of the novel hinges on the idea of AI achieving consciousness—or at least the ability to escape human control. What does the research tell us, and how confident are you that this may happen in our lifetime?

Interestingly, despite its immense power, the machine never achieves consciousness. I spent a fair amount of time reading the philosophy behind machine consciousness, and decided that the story would be more compelling if the machine were super powerful without being conscious. It reshapes humanity according to its design but not any inherent desires such as we might recognize when speaking of consciousness.

Given the speed at which AI is currently evolving, I would say that within the next few years we will have artificial general intelligence (AI with human-like reasoning, learning, and adaptability) and super powerful AI (greater than human-like reasoning), though neither of these requires consciousness. Both would mean that AI has a much greater ability to solve problems than we do whereas consciousness is more than intelligence; it involves subjective experience and self-awareness. We may arrive at that, but I’m not sure exactly how it would happen. The path to powerful AI, however, is much clearer, and the fear that has already been expressed by scientists who have been building AI systems is a clear indication that there is a risk of it becoming too powerful for humans to control.

The characters in the book are so haunting and compelling—Jae as a young person struggling to survive in the Confederacy after Partition; Ava the devoted artist; Michael a visionary entrepreneur; Lux a genius geneticist; Simon a conflicted young man from challenging circumstances. Which character was most difficult to bring to life and did any character resonate with you personally more than the others?

The character who was perhaps the most challenging was actually Jae and Simon’s son, Jonah. He enters the world of the machine when he is two, and though he has grown up inside a paradisal reality within the machine, he has faint memories of having suffered or wanted things that he couldn’t have. Those impressions are enough to compel him to try to understand the world from which he emerged. As for the characters resonating with me, I think that they all did in different ways. As I wrote the book and tried to imagine myself in their situations, I related to their various responses to the machine and to the world before.

You’re writing across incredible scales—of time and geography and conceptions of human life and its possibilities. What delights you most about writing speculative fiction on this scale?

I love the challenge of bringing many different narratives together. Often, I don’t know how they will connect, and I just keep developing until I see the connection form. The larger the canvas, the more I find that I can let myself explore and discover perspectives that I might not have otherwise perceived.

There’s such a strong sense of the struggle to find meaning in human life—and the question of whether struggle, or conflict, or threat gives our lives some kind of meaning or purpose. Have your own ideas about meaning or human purpose changed in any way through writing the novel?

I struggled a great deal with questions of meaning and purpose while writing the book. A lot of the meaning that we give to the world arises from our need to find a way to live with struggle and the certainty of loss and death. Writing the characters within the machine’s realities, I found myself asking if all those forms of meaning vanish when the risk of harm and death are eliminated. For people born into the machine, meaning is not experienced in that way, but for those born on Earth and brought into machine, the way that they shaped meaning in a difficult world remains the meaning that they carry with them into realities where there is no risk of harm. I sensed that our humanity, in the way that we currently recognize it, can’t be separated from the world in which we live. Born without context, we remain biologically human but our sense of meaning and purpose are entirely different.

So while I don’t know that my ideas about meaning and purpose necessarily changed—I have always generally viewed them as arising from context—I did deeply question how a person can continue to have meaning absent the forces that originally gave rise to it in their life. This is the struggle for all the characters at the end of the book, and even those characters who continue to find meaning in creativity question its value in a world where there are no other humans.

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Excerpt from We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine

He jerks awake, calling out. “Hey! What?” But he’s alone. This isn’t his cell. Solitary maybe, except everything’s blue. Whatever he did must have earned him one hell of a beating. He can’t remember anything. He feels his face, wincing out of expectation, but there are no bruises. Maybe he took drugs. He’s naked. He touches the floor. Solitary was mildewed concrete and darkness. He’s never seen anything in prison this nice. Maybe he’s still on drugs.

He sits up. The tattoo just below his shoulder is gone. That explains it. The prison must have started erasing league signs. It seems unlikely—but good riddance. The day Jae saw it—a thread-thin bloody chain at the top of his biceps—her eyes became cold, almost empty. He wanted to say his brother had forced him but was afraid of sounding weak.

“Hey!” he shouts. “I’m hungry.”

He isn’t actually. He just can’t think of what else to say. Where am I? or What happened? sound scared. He has things he talks about when he’s trying not to talk. Hunger is one of them. It’s what he hates most about himself. The urge to speak. A lifetime of nicknames. Chatterbox. Blabbermouth. What made it all the funnier for others was that no one expected someone so big and strong to talk so much. If his hate for Jae sometimes fades, it’s because she liked listening. But just as quickly it returns—for putting him here, for seeing the worst in him. No—not the worst. He’d managed to keep that a secret.

He catches his breath. He’s heard the hardest thing in solitary is being alone with your thoughts. Older guys say the anger wears out after decades, softens around the edges until it stops hurting others and remains as only a weight. He pictures Jae, the way she used to look at him.

“I’m not a bad person,” he says and is instantly grateful he’s alone. Sometimes he tries to say one thing but other words come out, as if the strongest thought flickers like electricity from his brain right into his mouth. No one answers. Maybe solitary isn’t so terrible. “I didn’t have opportunities,” he says, painfully aware that he’s parroting fellow inmates—men he has little in common with, who’ve never read a book or spent hours repeating the lines of a poem. “I made mistakes because I didn’t have a way out,” he says, softly now.

This feels good. The drugs must be new. And he’s not cold. His cell is always too hot or too cold, and too loud. It’s quiet here. Maybe he really did something horrible and had the memories beaten out of him. Maybe he died.

Suddenly, he’s tired. The air seems to change. It feels humid. He yawns. The mess in his brain is unraveling. He rests his forehead on his knees and closes his eyes. He’s not sure how much time goes by before he looks up as if seeing the room for the first time. No door. No windows. Nothing to explain the light. He studies his body again, tightly muscled from years of labor.

Tattoos—even his scars—they don’t just vanish. His body has never looked so white.

“Shit,” he whispers. None of this feels like any drug he’s tried, and he knows—has always known with a conviction he couldn’t explain—that there’s nothing after death.

“Where am I?” he says in a small voice.

Excerpt from We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine by Deni Ellis Béchard (House of Anansi Press copyright 2025), reprinted with permission of the publisher.