www.RachelOrmont.com (2024) Spoiler-Free Summary – What It's About

In a dystopian alternate 1991, the North American Assessment and Advertising Agency operates at the disturbing intersection of commerce and human exploitation. This media conglomerate has normalized the unthinkable: the sale of human beings into institutional servitude as test subjects for the entertainment industry. Within this sterile, screen-dominated world, reality itself has become malleable, and the boundaries between person and product have all but dissolved.

Rachel has known no other existence. Sold to the agency as an infant, she has spent thirty-one years in captivity, her development deliberately stunted to serve corporate interests. Her assigned role is that of a devoted consumer — an artificial fan tasked with assessing Mommy 6.0, her favorite pop star and the latest cloned iteration of a manufactured celebrity. Rachel's world is defined by glowing monitors and a glitchy AI chatbot named Poorspigga, her only tether to anything resembling social connection. She has never experienced physical human contact, never learned to distinguish between living people and the flickering images that populate her isolated cell.

As Rachel begins to develop confused, muddled feelings toward the figure she's been conditioned to idolize, she starts to act out in ways the corporation cannot ignore. Her stunted emotional development collides with an awakening she cannot articulate, and the company sees an opportunity. What follows is a descent into a world where intimacy becomes content, desire becomes commodity, and the human need for connection is weaponized for an audience that hungers for spectacle at any cost.