Review: Arcadia




When 99% of humankind is wiped out by a pandemic, four billion people are “saved” by being digitized at the brink of death and uploaded into Arcadia, a utopian simulation in the cloud. But when Arcadia begins to rapidly deplete the energy resources upon which the handful of survivors in the real world (aka “The Meat”) depends, how long will The Meat be able - and willing - to help?


Lee Pepper works at the Arcadia Base Station 1 in Alaska, housing a billion of the people who died when the outbreak hit. When President Melina Gomez pays a visit he escorts her into the simulation to negotiate with its leader, Secretary-General Leandro Binetti.

Arcadia contains the vast majority of human minds on the planet, including many medical geniuses. Any hope for developing a cure to the virus that is decimating the flesh and blood survivors in the outside world resides with these uploaded specialists.

So far, the magic bullet has not been forthcoming. Meanwhile, the Arcadia servers have been drawing an increasing load of energy to run its internal environment in greater detail. The cost of this energy is prohibitive and President Gomez proposes a compromise: an eight-hour shutdown every 24 hours. Binetti and the rest of the Arcadian elite are opposed to any restrictions on their freedoms, however. Negotiations are at a stalemate.

All is not as it seems, of course. Lee Pepper has a family in Arcadia. His wife and daughter died during the pandemic and were uploaded. Due to an error, his mind was uploaded too, so there is a second Lee inside the simulation. His wife has a husband, his daughter has a father... Arcadian Lee works as a therapist, treating traumatised patients by editing their memories.

The uploaded Lee also has a young son, Giacomo. This is a problem because there never was an original son; Giacomo is 'native', a highly illegal, newly created digital individual. He is an unwarranted expenditure of processing power... and he has some very unusual abilities.

Arcadia is the technological afterlife in which immortality is guaranteed, but there is not enough computing resource for everyone to bask in their own private paradise. The upper echelons live in high-resolution while the majority exist in a much more basic state and have to work to earn improvements.

It's no Utopia, and when citizens begin to actually die, it soon becomes apparent that the official narrative may be hiding some very disturbing truths...

Arcadia by writer Alex Paknadel and artist Eric Scott Pfeiffer is a high-tech, high-concept drama that rises above the average sci-fi yarn. The reader has to keep up here as the various technical and philosophical issues are introduced, but it is an effort that is richly rewarded.

The arena of virtual reality and artificial intelligence is a familar one to fans of The Matrix and to readers of Neuromancer by William Gibson. Forget spaceships and aliens, when the barriers between perception and reality become pliable and subject to your every whim, the narrative possibilities are multiplied exponentially.

The story unwinds with each new mystery giving rise to even more questions, but the pieces do fall into place as the reader continues. The tone is pretty dark; Binetti chooses to appear as a skeleton in a glass body, representing his dead population. Inequality and oppression makes Arcadia a heaven for some and a hell for others. 

There is humour, too, however; when Lee's uploaded daughter decides to go flying like a superhero in an area in which it is prohibited the authorities bring her back down to Earth with a bump by activating "Wile E. Coyote eyes" ...

Pfeiffer makes much of the surreal potentials of the reality-bending premise, with gleaming futuristic simulated cities as a stark contrast the the decaying environment of the disease-ravaged Earth. Here be monsters also; not of the bug-eyed alien variety, but psychologically unsettling demons of the subconscious.

Things are getting out of hand in the digital hereafter, and they are going to get worse. Young Giacomo is ready to plunge into the depths - literally - to find a solution. Lee - and his uploaded alter-ego - may have to make great sacrifices to ensure the survival of both worlds; that of the living and that of the dead.



ARCADIA on Amazon

Zak Webber



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