The Virtual Boss

Frankenstein meets Brave New World in Kemske's second novel (after Lifetime Employment ) of distopian corporate culture in the not-too-distant future. At Information Accuracy, Inc., workers are discouraged from interacting with one another by a CEO who has turned the successive failures of his managerial relations into a quasi-philosophy of isolationism. The company's sole manager is an artificially intelligent software program that ``sleeps'' only four hours a day and requires humans to be on call during the other 20. The story centers on Arthur, who is browbeaten by the eponymous software system; Linda, who installed it but now lives in deathly fear of it; and Linda's former lover, deluded CEO Donald F. Jones, the only person who believes the system is benign. Kemske does a good job mining the quirks of human psychology--indeed, his characterizations outstrip his plotting. The software's reign of terror, however, could have been fleshed out by including more of the eerie, futuristic ``conversations'' between the employees and the machine that give the story its paranoid tone. The novel succeeds nonetheless in metaphorically justifying our fear of technology by playing out a scenario that seems very nearly possible. (Oct.)