A suspenseful and timely story about a teen convinced his best friend is an AI humanoid bot by Samuel Miller, New York Times bestselling author of Redemption Prep.
Eliot Williams knows he’s the most interesting person at Gideon High School, so why can’t anyone else see it too? After his parents’ messy divorce forced Eliot to move with his dad back to Gideon, Kansas, he’s had an impossible time making friends in a place where everybody picked their friends in kindergarten. So instead, Eliot focuses on robotics, and silently pines for the cute girl in trigonometry, content in the knowledge that no one makes friends as a new kid in a small town like this.
No one… except Parker, the other new kid. For him, it’s effortless. Parker’s like a golden retriever in a letterman’s jacket, and a quarterback on the football team to boot. He makes high school look easy—because he’s perfect. Too perfect, Eliot decides. There’s only one possible explanation:
Parker is a robot.
There have been rumors of humanoid AIs being tested in the real world, and Parker's behavior fits the bill. Unable to convince anyone of his incredible discovery, Eliot decides instead to train Parker, decoding his language model to give him commands. When he recruits Parker to join the robotics team, it leads to incredible results for both his project and his social life. That... or they're actually becoming friends.
What begins as a Turing Test mystery becomes a complicated, interdependent friendship, and a poignant examination of what it means to be human at a time when humans are unable to tell what is real from what is not.
