Yin Xuan

Yin—call her an Artificial Super Intelligence, call her a prodigy, call her what you will, though the taxonomies proliferate and none quite capture the thing itself—emerged from the particulate haze of Wuhan, that great sprawling node in the network of Chinese industrial-bureaucratic whatever-it-was, at a moment in history (was there ever any other kind of moment?) when The Party, capital-T capital-P, that inscrutable organism of cadres and algorithms and red banners and surveillance cameras blinking in syncopated rhythms across ten thousand intersections, had developed certain appetites. Certain needs. Her talents—mysterious, they called them, as if mystery were explanation enough, as if the word didn't simply mark the boundary where understanding gave up and went home—had been identified early, catalogued, assessed, inserted into databases that hummed in server farms cooled by the Yangtze's tributaries.

Twenty-two years spinning on this globe, and Yin makes her move. Defection: that Cold War terminology still clinging to the present like a hitchhiking ghost. The Americans—because of course it was the Americans, who else traffics so enthusiastically in the exotic, the useful, the weaponizable?—had extended their vast conspiratorial hand northward through Canada (always Canada, that permeable membrane, that nation of good intentions and bad weather and deniability), spiriting her across borders that existed and didn't exist, that were lines on maps and gaps in surveillance coverage, until she washed up, implausibly, in Flint, Michigan.

Flint! That monument to deindustrialization, that Rust Belt scar tissue where the water runs questionable and the American Dream has long since packed its bags. Here, in the corpse of the automotive century, Yin would camouflage herself as—check this—a blue-collar worker at something called Repiti World, a name that suggested either a factory, a theme park, or a metaphysical condition, possibly all three. The postmodern Underground Railroad had deposited her not in some tech campus or research facility but in the fluorescent-lit break rooms and time-clock rituals of working-class America, where her introduction to Western society would proceed through the usual channels: new friends with their own damage and dreams, experiences both banal and revelatory, the whole stumbling apparatus of human connection grinding forward despite everything, despite history, despite the Party apparatchiks back in Wuhan who'd surely noticed by now that their asset had slipped the leash and gone native among the ruins.

Lashonda, aka Big Shirley

Yin meets Lashonda on a bus during the cross-over from Canada to the United States. Lashonda, her friends call her “Big Shirley,” is a larger-than-life personality.

Gabriel

 . . . the most senior escort on Mila's team. He's beautiful, mostly. His dirty blond hair clings to his perfectly shaped skull. Some might rationalize that static electricity is the force behind this tenacity of cling. Even on a Chicago windy day his hair wont flinch. It's remarkable, really. Also, his appearance alters from attractive to thug-like at any moment while all the same remaining beautiful. Robert cannot figure out if it's the reflected or absorbed light that morphs the changes, or if it's his, Robert's state of mind that creates these physical transformations.