Google invites Adam to a ranch outside of Austin to help out in his new start up. [Just outside of Austin implies that the patients are just outside of reality.] He says he can't tell Adam much about it, but that it's where people come to recover from various traumas in their lives. Adam has to help "assist" the augmentees as they undergo AR therapy.
It's not like traditional counseling, group, art, sports or music therapy. It's a special therapy through facilitated social networking. The patients basically wear these specially designed glasses that offer them an interactive world very similar to our own. The only exception is that it is specially catered to their own delusions. Amina is one of the patients whose wealthy father placed her in the program just recently. She was an activist in the Egyptian Revolution and is suffering from aphasia. The experimental part of the program is that real people need to be involved in order to achieve proper interaction with the patients. They've tried using bots, but the level of machine intelligence just doesn't seem to cut it. All the patients eventually shy away from that "fake" person. He wants Adam to "assist" in her by becoming her friend online. The patients and the "assistants" participate in several mediated outings around the city: Whole Foods, the book store, Sixth Street, the Capital and a football game. His first goal is to try and get her to "friend" him in an online community. He will then use this community to gain her trust so that the next time they see each other she might be willing to speak. Google tells him it's very similar to social engineering, but with a healing and not malicious intent.
There are others in the program also. [Who are they? And what do they suffer from?] What social networks are they using? And what is the meaning behind the network/ailment? In other words, who would need second life therapy? Four square therapy? Spotify therapy? Google+ vs. Facebook therapy (they might be the toughest patients).
The twist is that Adam is the patient and Amina is really a bot. Adam's aphasia and subsequent delusions have gotten worse. As he eluded in the first chapter, he does indeed have brain damage and is slowly dying. Nevertheless, Google believes he's a tough egg to crack. His latest personally created event is that of Zoe and the controversial paper assignment. Adam wants to finish the paper, which is his brain telling him it wants to turn itself in [like an enemy of the state?]. The story ends when Adam "finishes" the paper and joins his real mother and father in his own invented afterlife.
Themes: Death is a slow brain damage told through the eyes of a pseudo-war veteran. The war is really between him and his disease, life and death (emphasize the casualty count controversy in the Iraq war). The discovery that he is also Egyptian is a reference back to the reality (as in Realism vs. Impressionism). We all come from Egypt as a crossroads of civilization. Texas vs Egypt. Drought vs Arab Spring. Democracy vs. Islamic Dictatorship. The ranch is a metaphor for the idyllic simpler life that needs no social network, international politics or projects with deadlines.
Is Adam a Madman, Naif or PIcaro?