The Cloud Intern

" With his signature precise, erudite sentences, [Greenwood] brings humor and lightness to otherwise bleak portraits of what it means to be a person. He's a tightrope walker crossing a chasm of loneliness, doing cartwheels." -- Kate Reed Petty, BOMB Magazine " Greenwood skewers our fetish for innovation while poking tenderly at the brittle human bits underneath the cloud-based sheen... . Delicious... weird and wonderful." -- Brian K. Mahoney, The Chronogram While social and environmental woes roil the world below, Chris Curtis, lesser cofounder of tech giant eddy, spends his days afloat, cloud watching and chatting with an emulation of his not really dead father on the luxury blimp serving as eddy's corporate campus. As it approaches a last-gasp summit of world powers, Chris is forced from the swimming pool into the forbidding shoes of his revered, and really dead, cofounder. At least his new intern appreciates the sunrises, so maddeningly ignored by his colleagues, and also doesn't seem to be of the entitled intern class, even if it becomes hard to ignore that her motives aboard are less peaceable than resume building. Her name is Zoraida, and her closest friend is an emulation of her former self. Together, they become embroiled in a mass protest movement, revealing that underneath Zoraida's desire to change the world and Chris's desire to withdraw from it lies the collective loneliness of a society in which the deepest human connection has become a commodity, and deepest human weirdness may be our best hope.