The primary story in Michael Keefe’s All Her Loved Ones, Encoded occurs over a single night. The setting is a bleak vision of California in 2057, sketched out by extrapolating negative trends in the environment, economy, and public health.

The protagonist, Kiana Olsen, seeks to illegally upload her dying husband’s consciousness to a Matrix-like program called Level Up. As she faces one obstacle after another, the narrative intercuts with backstory on Kiana and generations of her family. These standalone episodes from the past make this book feel historical as well as futuristic, with a structure akin to a collection of linked short stories.

Early on, we get an explanation for why the government banned emigrating to virtual reality:

“But a dark side of Level Up emerged when the developers added consciousness uploading technology. Kiana knew plenty of people who, when faced with the choice of living their increasingly shitty real lives or permanently inhabiting their avatars in Level Up or similar programs, opted to digitize their minds and then off themselves. As a rash of suicides swept the planet throughout the 2040s, the daily news tracked the dwindling populations, the dwindling tax bases, the dwindling GDPs.”

Kiana’s husband, Javi, however, has an especially powerful reason for wanting to live on in the cloud. Their only child, felled during a pandemic, is growing up there.

Many of the component stories feature escapes of one type or another. Scenes from World War II, Cold War Berlin, and 1990s America come alive with detail and action. Keefe’s pacing is energetic, jumping from one era to another like a squirrel skittering among the branches of a hundred-year-old family tree. Throughout, the characters, including the villains, are rendered with a fair share of sympathy and nuance.

The novel points to perhaps the ultimate escape question — Would you want your consciousness uploaded to an algorithm-scented afterlife? — but to its credit, it does so indirectly. There are only minimal glimpses, shown in retrospect, of Kiana and Javi weighing the pros and cons of Level Up. By the time the story kicks off, they’ve made their choice, and the only unknown is whether, against the odds, she’ll succeed in executing it.

Now for the story’s challenges. With all the shifting back and forth in time and among generations (not to mention the name changes and twists and turns), it takes effort to keep track of everyone and how they’re connected to Kiana. Likewise, the author’s depiction of the technology is puzzling. If the living can have avatars in Level Up, why did Javi — who already had a persona in server-land — need a special procedure in the first place? Further, the plot’s various inherent conundrums, including the ramifications of having two versions of your mind running simultaneously, never get addressed. Nor was it clear to this reader what degree of autonomy, if any, your encoded self would enjoy.

Perhaps as a way of subtly acknowledging such imponderables, or maybe just to provide a bit of fun, Keefe nods to a classic dilemma from the adjacent time-travel genre. Two of Kiana’s great-great-grandfathers face each other from opposing sides of a WWII battlefield. Both soldiers already have children, so neither’s survival is required for Kiana to exist. A ploy like this risks coming across as contrived because (let’s face it) it is pretty contrived. But the author handles it well.

None of these quibbles significantly detracts from the enjoyment of the various dramas, the development of the characters, and the way in which they all interconnect. Each well-crafted scenario moves briskly to its endpoint, and we then return to Kiana and her night-long quest to upload her husband. All Her Loved Ones, Encoded is an entertaining, swift-moving dystopian pleasure. In addition to pointing out where we could be headed if we don’t address our current AI-fueled problems, it conjures several interesting, eminently discussable scenarios that future technology might bring.

Tom Navratil is a former diplomat. His debut novel, an embassy satire entitled Dog’s Breakfast, is forthcoming from Willow River Press in January 2025.