The Ghost in the Machine

Who really knows you by heart? Is it the people who share your home or apartment? The co-workers you can communicate with in a single glance? The friends you text memes to all day long?

Or is it a faceless algorithm that assembles scraped bits and bytes into a dataset shaped just like you?

C.J. Farley unpacks all this in his new novel Who Knows You By Heart. Like The Other Black Girl and Black Buck, Who Knows You By Heart shines a light on the realities of being Black in a predominantly white corporate environment. Set at a tech behemoth, the novel also explores the devilish side of AI.

Farley has things to teach us, but fortunately, he’s also a storyteller. (His previous books include biographies of boldface musical names like Aaliyah and the young-adult novel Around Harvard Square, which won a NAACP Image Award.) That makes Who Knows You By Heart first and foremost a character-driven thriller, a workplace story laced with modern dread.

Who Knows You By Heart
By C.J. Farley
William Morrow; 288 pages

The novel revolves around Octavia Crenshaw, a brilliant Jamaican American coder who snags a job at audio entertainment giant Eustachian. Farley deploys second-person narration to great effect, plunging readers immediately into Octavia’s world. Her multi-stage interview at Eustachian, replete with NDAs, probing personal questions, and a decision by computer-scored rubric is a funny set piece that skewers biases of all stripes.

“The human interviewers might not like a woman acting like a man, but the algorithm might just eat it up. You decide to answer all your interview questions like a man. You are arrogant. You interrupt. You speak boastfully of your individual role in projects you worked on that were actually team efforts. When you are asked to discuss your greatest failure, you sit in silence for a full thirty seconds until the interviewer moves on. You riff about the back nine at Augusta National, the brilliance of the first two Godfather films, your love for Grand Theft Auto. You monologue. You mansplain. You manspread on the conference chair. You can feel the Y chromosomes coming alive in all your lady cells.”

Octavia’s employment twists and turns at Eustachian raise thought-provoking questions about workplace ethics and technology. As she seeks answers to what’s really going on at the company, she’s also mulling her own personal history. She pores through the pages of her mother’s old diary and then her father’s journals, seeing herself and her parents’ marriage through their eyes instead of the lens of her own childhood memories. Octavia’s text exchanges with BFF Kenise add another facet to this fully realized character, not just a puppet for commentary.

“You felt the same way when you found out about your mom’s reverse mortgage and the massive debt she had left behind for you to deal with,” Octavia thinks after a budding romance goes sour. “It hurts when someone you think you know, someone you think you’re sharing a life with, betrays your trust by hiding a secret. You can’t ever trust them again. You can’t ever trust yourself. You have no idea what’s real and what’s not.”

What’s real and what’s not snakes throughout the book, as Octavia wrestles with the shame of being duped by tech and just how far over the line she’s willing to step to find success at Eustachian. Her journey peels back both the masks she adopts at work and the personas others project onto her as she learns to trust her own North Star.

Whether some aspects of Who Knows You By Heart feel like discoveries or merely reflections of reality will depend on the reader’s own background, like the litany of “technoaggressions” Octavia shares: “Technoaggression #273: You are writing an email, and the in-house proprietary spell-check autocorrects ‘Lauryn’ to ‘Lauren,’ ‘DuBois’ to ‘the boys,’ and ‘Afrofuturism’ to ‘botulism.’”

Indeed, AI is only as good as the source material it draws from, and a key plot point hinges on Octavia and another Black Eustachian coder building a more inclusive model. They muse on webcams that can’t adjust lighting for brown and Black faces, and sentencing algorithms that produce lighter punishments for white offenders.

“The solution isn’t a Fog of Forgetfulness, to pretend the bias we all have isn’t there,” Octavia thinks. “The solution is to be mindful of one’s failings so you can account for them in the code.”

Which failings depend on you, of course. But whatever your background, the questions this novel poses about work, morals, technology, and humanity will haunt you.