Book Review: William by Mason Coile

Once upon a time, Henry and Lily were happy. They bought a beautiful house in the kind of suburban neighborhood that affords its privileged inhabitants a healthy dose of privacy and set about giving their home the kind of fancy high-end trappings befitting their careers as a robotics engineer and a tech entrepreneur respectively. But as Henry’s agoraphobia set in, he became more and more obsessed with making the house the perfect place in which to keep Lily and their growing family safe.  

Perhaps it was this obsession that helped lead to their estrangement. Henry isn’t sure, though he’s certain that their relationship isn’t completely unsalvageable:

Things are bad between them, but not too bad. This is the estimation he’s held to for so long it’s become a truism, comforting as believing there’s a heaven awaiting us after death. But sometimes, like now, he worries that his assessment of the bridgeable distance between himself and his wife is an error of judgment—the same made by millions of husbands right before the end. He doesn’t normally wish he had friends, but when this thought comes to him, he does. It might be helpful to know a man of his age and experience who could tell him whether his troubles were benign or terminal.

It’s not, however, their strained relationship that haunts his dreams. That honor belongs to the robot he’s building in the attic, the only room he’s secured with a physical padlock instead of the state-of-the-art security system he’s had installed throughout the rest of their home. William, as Henry calls his greatest achievement so far, should be a source of pride. Instead, Henry finds himself adding a fear of what he’s created—this strange, almost alien intelligence that keeps insisting on more, and more intense, experiences—to his growing list of phobias. 

Things come to a head when Lily invites some of her former co-workers over for brunch. Henry doesn’t like either handsome Davis, who is clearly too involved with Lily, or smart-mouthed Paige, who meets every situation with bravado and sarcasm. In an effort to prove to them that he’s a productive member of society and not just some weirdo hermit, he decides to show them William. The encounter does not go well.

As William’s fascination with his visitors takes an ominous turn, the house’s systems begin working against its inhabitants. A rattled Lily asks Henry if William could be behind the strange goings-on, but he insists that that’s impossible. He almost instantly regrets what he said:

This was a mistake. Defending the robot with such certainty but without clear evidence to support it. It reveals that he’s emotional. Not very Henry. Not very good. And being emotional about the robot? Even less Henry, less good.

 

Does he actually believe there’s no way William could have done this? As a matter of programming and access—no, he doesn’t see how. But if William could figure out a way of manipulating the house’s system, would he? It strikes Henry that this is the kind of error likely made by a billion parents before him: he assumed his own sensibilities would limit his creation’s capacity for harm. But now there’s something else shaping William. Bloodless, loveless.

Is William actually using the house against them? Or has something else entirely taken hold of the robot for its own diabolical purposes? Will Henry and Lily be able to figure it out before anyone gets hurt or, even worse, killed?

I’ll admit that I had to keep putting down this book at first because it was so hard for me to sympathize with Henry, who is very incel-coded despite having a wife and expecting a child. Lily isn’t very sympathetic either, especially when she’s making incredibly poor choices straight out of a bad horror movie. But then the big plot twist hits and everything makes sense, as the book careens towards its shocking conclusion.

My ambivalence towards the characters aside, I was really impressed with the philosophical questions on artificial intelligence and personhood that Mason Coile raises in this thought-provoking tale of terror. How liable is a parent for the acts of their child, even if that child is built and not born? What is the price of secrecy? Why do we trust technology so blindly when it can be hijacked and used against us? That’s a lot to ponder in this cinematic, cautionary tale of bleeding edge robotics gone terribly awry.