I’m really good at predicting plots. Like, so much so that my roommate doesn’t binge watch stuff with me anymore because I always call the thing right before it happens (Cause I’m the worst. Sorry roommate!). So, prepare yourselves because I am going to take a whack at The Adjustment.
My credentials: I have read The Program but not The Adjustment, I read A LOT of dystopia, and I have an imagination like that alarming corner of YouTube that you always find yourself in, confused as to how you got there.
Here’s what Suzanne Young shared about the book last week:
“The Adjustment is a procedure that takes donated memories and implants them into a returner. These donated memories help spark the returner’s own bits of retained memory, fills in the blanks, so they can get a small piece of themselves back. Only in this story, the donated memories that Wes gets from his long-term girlfriend, Tatum, are corrupted. The book explores how we idealize our relationships, how memory is perspective based on the person recalling it.”
Here’s what’s gonna happen:
So, Tatum and Wes are mostly happy. But also Wes can’t remember a lot of their relationship, so Tatum donates her memories to him. Here’s where it gets tricky. Tatum is actually the robot clone of his real girlfriend, Katum. They’re identical, and the tech is obviously pretty advanced, so Tatum figured it wouldn’t be a problem. She chose specific memories to give Wes so he wouldn’t remember that she accidentally hit Katum with her car and now Katum is in a coma in a hospital across the country. I mean, it’s not like Tatum was trying to kill her human carbon copy! It was an accident. Plus, she’s always loved Wes in her circuit-y little heart.
Long story short, Wes figures it out because, well, Tatum is a robot and she’s acting pretty shady. And all her donated memories feel a little bit fabricated because Tatum borrowed them from Katum’s comatose head via android telepathy. Wes tricks Tatum into giving him the location of the hospital and rushes to Katum’s side. Unfortualtely, she’s definitely in a coma. But by this point, Wes’s memories are all pretty mixed around what with the Program and the Adjustment, so he’s content to just wait by her side because it’s the only real thing in his life. And he does. He waits there for the rest of his natural life. On the bright side, the hospital hires him as an orderly so it’s not like he’s broke. Win some, lose some.
I’m probably pretty close right? I guess you’ll have to check out the extended excerpt this week and read the full book to find out for sure!