About

About Neurovia

In a near-future setting, twenty-four teenagers are selected for an exclusive new institute where being admitted also means being the first to receive a brain-computer-interface. They are the most promising adolescents their schools have ever seen, and most of them have spent their lives being told so.

At the institute, they are introduced to Catalyst: a small neural device that amplifies whatever cognitive ability is most developed in its user. One can read rooms with uncanny precision. Another can shape group decisions without raising her voice. A third can map systems most adults cannot see. The implant turns these gifts up.

For a while, it works the way the institute promised it would.

Then the device starts doing things it was not designed to do.

Neurovia is a coming-of-age novel set in a near-future world where human enhancement is becoming technically possible and is being trialed on adolescents because adolescent brains adapt faster than adult ones. The cohorts at the institute compete with each other, form friendships and rivalries, struggle with parents who do not fully understand what is happening to their children, and discover that the technology meant to enhance them is also doing something else. Something the adults running the trial are still trying to characterize, and may not be able to control.

The novel sits inside the experience of the cohort. The reader meets Julian, who returns home to East LA for Thanksgiving and discovers that the vigilance he has carried since childhood has not gone away; but he finally has somewhere to put it down. Aisha, whose ability to read a room has always been her superpower and is now a question. Mateo, who realizes his family has been quietly steering itself around him his whole life and that the device has only made him able to see it. Leena, who comes home with an injury her mother will not stop looking at, and a mother who needs to know if she made the wrong decision in letting her daughter go.

Around them: an institute that knows more than it is telling, faculty who are not in agreement about what to do with what they are seeing, and a device that is starting to act on its own.

The novel asks questions that are starting to move from fiction into the actual world.

What does it mean to consent to a technology you do not fully understand?

What happens when the system meant to help you starts making decisions about you that nobody authorized?

What does it cost to discover that the gifts you thought were yours have been amplified to a level you cannot turn off?

The novel does not answer these questions. It sits with them, in the company of teenagers who are figuring out what is happening to them in real time, and adults who built the system the teenagers are inside.

If you have ever read a story about gifted students at a mysterious institute and wondered what it would actually feel like to be one of them; Neurovia is for you.

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