AFTER INTELLIGENCE

Charlotte, a teen student in an elite technology-oriented school of the future, delves into the shadowy history of the institution and its mysterious, late founder.

Marie’s sequel to her last YA SF title, After Intelligence: The Hidden Sequence (2020), follows brainy hero Charlotte Blythe to Cognation Academy, a cutting-edge boarding school serving as a testing ground for big, new ideas seeded among society’s most gifted kids. There, among other tech wonders such as omnipresent virtual reality, a set of humanlike androids (ultralogical Vulcan-ish types with instant access to vast knowledge databases) has been introduced, somewhat uneasily, into classrooms. Charlotte; her roommate, Chai; and love interest, Gavin, grow especially close to two androids: the outgoing Isaac and the more insular Denton. The trio even copies and smuggles out the droids’ algorithms (aka “sequences”) when it seemed that some unknown faction was tampering with their digital memories. Having possibly gotten away with saving their friends, the young people find androids especially helpful in the “enigma tournament,” which involves elaborate puzzle-solving exercises in VR environments that seem tied to Cognation’s raison d’être. Also embedded in the contest, by chance or design, are clues to Cognation’s early history and the fate of its brilliant and tragic founder, Dr. Harlan A. Coggins. Solving the enigma’s variations gives characters access to Coggins’ private journals, but the pages seem like coded gibberish and koans. The adventure and process of discovery unfold in wordy but polished prose: “Something told Charlotte that they were on the precipice of a momentous discovery, even if they didn’t know what the significance might be.” Only late in the narrative does the real scale of the menace take form. While Cognation begs comparison to Hogwarts, the tone here is more intellectual than mischievous—think Arthur C. Clarke more than J.K. Rowling—which is not a bad thing, and the ending promises future installments with at least one Voldemort-esque slippery villain.

Smart cyber conundrums and intricate code-breaking meld enjoyably in this installment of a YA SF suspense series.