In a research lab in the near future, Dr. Mali Beeko is chronicling in her notebook the disappearance of Yonghun, whom she refers to as Patient One. As a young man, he died of cancer, and his body was restored through a process called nanotherapy, in which his cells were replaced with android cells called nanites. The newly reconstructed Yonghun is essentially immortal—so now that he has vanished quite literally into thin air, Mali is faced with questions of what this means for her research. In her search for Yonghun, she turns to Panit, an artificial being whom Yonghun, a PhD in Victorian Poetry, trained to analyze and appreciate literature.

This is only the start of Anton Hur's expansive novel, which spans centuries as it explores the unwanted ramifications of scientific progress into the study of artificial intelligence. Hur, the Korean-to-English translator of many ...