With the flick of a switch, 15-year-old Quinn's understanding of reality is flipped upside down in Len Vlahos's penetrating YA science-fiction novel Hard Wired.
Quinn, better known to the world as Project QuIn, is a quantum intelligence--an AI. When his creators at Princeton University introduce themselves, he learns that the life he's known has been made up of planted memories in a virtual construct: "One minute I was a human boy, and now I am something else." As Quinn is installed into his new robotic body, the Princeton team studies him in isolation, and he realizes that to them he's not human at all--just "a multi-billion-dollar marvel of hardware and software." When he reaches out to the world beyond, the ACLU takes his case and he sues Princeton for his independence in a bid for freedom: "Yes, I'm a machine. But I'm also a person."
Through Quinn's unique perspective, Vlahos (Life in a Fishbowl; The Scar Boys) examines not just what it means to be a person but also to be ostracized because of one's differences. Vlahos accomplishes the tremendous feat of making the "smartest being on the planet" feel like the underdog by giving readers a direct window into Quinn's mind. His internal dialogue is a curiously effective combination of confident and uncertain: he might be an all-knowing AI, but emotionally he's a teenager in the middle of an identity crisis. Quinn's earnest efforts to fathom humanity--"The more I learn about people, the less I understand them"--and his fight to be accepted as a person with inalienable rights make Hard Wired a compelling and insightful read. --Jennifer Oleinik, freelance writer and editor