This is the story of Olga, a retired mathematician, and Mateo, a college student passionate about robotics, and their plot to influence Google.

"This book has excited me more than any that I have read this year."—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"This is a beautifully written, endlessly provocative meditation on humanity's relationship to technology, monopoly, memory and fate."— Dave Eggers, author of The Circle and The Every

After a chance encounter at the public library, two new friends begin to meet up regularly. Together they decide to submit an application for Google sponsorship to an elite technology-training program. Hoping to stand out, they frame their submission as a direct appeal to the "conscience" of the seemingly all-powerful corporation.

Olga, a retired entrepreneur, and Mateo, a college student, find unexpected connection and solace in their conversations. Ideas and arguments open into personal stories as they debate the possibility of free will, the existence of merit, and the role of artificial intelligence. They ask the most basic and important of questions: What does it mean to be human in a reality shaped by data and surveillance? Is there still space for empathy and care? What could we be, what could we build, if we used our resources in different ways?

"This is the story of Olga, a retired mathematician, and Mateo, a college student passionate about robotics, and their attempt to influence Google. They meet to ponder ideas such as free will, merit, and the possibility of synthetic humans, and together they craft an extremely unorthodox job application, a direct appeal to a seemingly all-powerful corporation. Tension grows as their relationship becomes strained due to ideological differences, and while Olga confronts a terminal illness, Mateo plans an attack on Google. Author Belâen Gopeguâi has been compared to Cervantes, Nabokov and Borges. Here, she offers a literary equivalent of My Dinner with Andre, creating a hermetic, compelling world in which two characters engage in an extended conversation about the rights, roles, and obligations of humans whose choices are determined by algorithms and surveillance. As Olga and Mateo examine the possibility of what it might take to confront something as all-prevailing as Google, they ask the most basic and important of questions: What could we be, what could we build, right now, if we used our resources in different ways?"--