Valuation: The Way We Live Now

Everyone came. Not one of them could tell you a single true thing about him. Augustus Mell steps off a plane with no verifiable past and one enormous promise: Meridian, the largest artificial-intelligence network the country has ever seen. The money comes first, then the senators, then the old families - everyone certain they got in early, no one willing to ask the single question that would end it. Because the data centers barely exist. The revenue is the same dollar wearing two hats. The whole gleaming enterprise runs on belief, forged signatures, and the modern faith that a thing becomes real the moment enough people agree to pay for it. Only two men won't look away. Paul Montague, a board member cursed with the habit of reading to the end. And Roger Carbury, an Ohio farmer whose land - and the water beneath it - the flagship site cannot be built without, and who will not sell, at any price, for reasons the age has forgotten how to hear. Around them turns a full cast of the believing and the bought: an author who manufactures her own bestsellers, a beautiful son gambling everything on a marriage, a daughter who alone knows where the money really sits, and a press that arrives, as it always does, to perform the autopsy it declined to fund. A modern retelling of Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now, Valuation is a novel about the distance between what a thing is worth and what a room will pay for it - and the one field, two hours west of anywhere, that the machine could never quite turn into a story.