The Die: A Novel
“Berman crafts a fast-paced thriller from gaming, app-building, and a reworking of the principles once offered to the American ‘hippie’ movement via a book called The Prophet.”
Why should the usual Silicon Valley trope of brilliant software designers with limited emotions take over? Jude Berman turns it upside down, offering a close-knit group of friends bathed in warm praise for their virtual reality game designs, moving into beta testing and phenomenal results while giving each other 24/7 support. It’s heaven on earth, including communal living, tons of emotional support, and spiritual growth focused on yogic ideas.
Until suddenly, this living garden of brilliance and tenderness is under attack. A rival group in the corporation sweeps them out of security and into threats to their livelihood and lives—and most painfully, their creations. Trapped by a clever wager, the six-person team loses its workspace, its plum assignments, its respect from the corporation. And stands to lose far more.
The story unfurls cleverly through alternating first-person accounts. There’s Darah, who opens the book with her joy about students, teachers, and data. How could she know she’s being conned and set up for humiliation by the rival group? Or Jedd, quiet and a strong ally, and able to track what’s happened to Darah’s results: “Your data were compromised.” He’s delayed discovering this, because as he explains in his narrative, “The night Darah told us something was fishy with her data, June brought up a possible cyberattack, but we cold-toweled it. Now I’m saying human meddling is no longer off the table.”
As the team members pull snugly into a shared home, struggling to hold onto some slim connection with their employer while their reputations are slashed, the forces behind the hacking become more clearly international. Could it be Russians? Could there be a link to national politics and an American leader known as the Dictator, being maneuvered by sinister global forces? Can Americans become ensnared by an app that absorbs both their attention and their emotions?
Berman’s plotting is both outrageous and highly believable and is a forceful distraction from a set of subplots that insist on both psychic abilities (not Darah’s!) and the potential of yogic teachings. Inserted mysteriously into the pod of friends is an unexplained arrival without even a name, other than “the kid.” His self-assigned task seems to be bringing June, an unlikely savior out of the group, into alignment with how the team will be rescued. It’s not that she’s afraid, she asserts—“I’m an activist, a hacker. A warrior. Fear isn’t a warrior’s MO. Warriors are confident, in control, intrepid.” She admits to the kids that “Everything is stacked against us in a situation where failing is not an option.”
On a cyber-battlefield, can any or all of the team “out-code” what looks like “the Russians” and their American collaborators?
Coders should not read the finale of The Die, since the battle narrows down to who can best manipulate the circumstances, which won’t exactly satisfy that urge to code. But Berman crafts a fast-paced thriller from gaming, app-building, and a reworking of the principles once offered to the American “hippie” movement via a book called The Prophet. It’s clever, and memorable, and offers a challenge to the usual memes of espionage, evil, and heroism. It’s also frustrating, does a lot of talking down, and makes it seem as though the 2024 political landscape could be simplified and corrected. Choose your tolerable level of frustration before tackling this book.