The Ones Who Look - bookrastinating.com

32 pages

English language

Published Jan. 20, 2020 by Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom.

ISBN:: 978-1-250-76862-9

(1 review)

Ethical Empire built the gate to heaven, and their employees hold the keys. By offering custom-built afterlives through full-brain uploads, they answered the needs of a society pushed to the brink by climate change and cascading antibiotic failure. But for Zoe, who works daily to assess the sins of users and decide who's worthy of salvation, heaven is not so simple. Despite the urging of the angels on her shoulder, she is determined to uncover heaven's secrets, no matter the cost.

1 edition

Soh Kam Yung reviewed The Ones Who Look by Katharine Duckett

When Heaven isn't what you think it is.

3 stars

In the future, Heaven is a digital uploaded copy of a person. And the company that decides who gets into Heaven is Ethical Empire, who employs people to look at people's lives and to give or subtract points.

The story concerns one such person who looks into the lives of others and gets involved in a romantic relationship with one of the engineers behind Heaven. But as the relationship develops and company secrets (under NDAs) get quietly shared between them, a disquieting revelation is made about the true nature of Heaven and how it may not really be what people think it is. At the end of the story, the main character asks to see her uploaded father and to judge for herself whether what he inhabits is really a kind of Heaven; or not.