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Intro
Seventeen-year-old Jenna Fox remembers almost nothing of her past since waking up from an 18-month coma two weeks ago. Her mother Claire quit her job in Boston so that Jenna could recuperate in California, but Jenna doesn’t really understand the rationale behind the move. One day, Jenna goes outside and runs into her new neighbor Mr. Bender, a famous artist. Later, Jenna remembers the faces of her friends Kara and Locke.
Jenna’s grandmother Lily takes Jenna with her on an errand. On the drive, Lily explains that Jenna’s biotech-pioneer father invented Bio Gel, which allows for organs to be preserved indefinitely, among other things. Lily brings Jenna to a Catholic mission. While Lily talks to a priest, Father Rico, about a seed bank they both contribute to, Jenna spots a handsome boy working at the mission.
Jenna tells Claire she wants to go back to school. Claire refuses to discuss it, ordering Jenna to go to her room and rest. Yet a few days later, Claire tells Jenna she can attend the nearest village charter school. That day, Jenna goes to visit Mr. Bender, whom she confronts about his identity: per the internet, Clayton Bender should be in his 80s, but Mr. Bender is 50 at most. Mr. Bender admits that as a teenager, he got into some trouble. A friend lent him a car, and he fled home. He drove to the original Clayton Bender, a reclusive artist, looking for work. When Clayton Bender died, Mr. Bender assumed his identity. Jenna agrees to keep the secret. In exchange, Mr. Bender tells her what he found out about her online: she was in a car accident and wasn’t expected to live.
At school, Jenna meets her teacher Dr. Rae, as well as Ethan, the handsome boy she saw at the mission, and Allys, a girl who walks with braces. She learns that Allys’s limbs are protheses—Allys had a serious infection and couldn’t get a Restricted Antibiotic Waiver approved in time. Jenna admits that she was in a terrible accident and has a spotty memory. Ethan is sweet to her about it. One day, Ethan is driving Jenna and Allys to school when Allys explains the Federal Science Ethics Board (FSEB) to Jenna. The FSEB regulates medical procedures, including the amount of prosthetic material allowed in a body. Brains have to be 51% original material.
One Saturday, Jenna pokes around Claire’s bedroom. At the back of the closet, she finds a locked door through which she hears humming. Searching under Claire’s mattress, she finds a key, which she pockets. Suddenly Lily calls for her: there’s someone here to see her. Outside, Jenna finds Ethan. They end up sitting by the backyard pond, where Ethan admits that he spent a year in juvenile detention after badly beating a man. In response, Jenna kisses him—until a horrified Lily interrupts. Later, Lily tells Jenna her relationship with Ethan is “not right.”
Another day, Jenna sneaks back into Claire’s room and unlocks the door in the back of the closet. She finds a table bearing three computers. The middle computer is labeled with Jenna’s name and riveted to the table. Trying to remove it, she gashes her hand. Beneath the blood, she sees blue goo and prosthetic bone. Horrified, Jenna confronts her mother. Hesitatingly, her mother explains that only 10% of Jenna’s brain survived the accident and subsequent infections: the rest of Jenna is prosthetic, lab-grown from her DNA, or Bio Gel.
Jenna’s father, who has been working in Boston, flies out to California. He explains to Jenna that they scanned Jenna’s brain and re-uploaded her mind to her new brain after using Bio Gel to supplement the surviving 10%. She’ll remember everything once her brain and the Bio Gel have finished forging new neural links. Jenna asks whether the family fled to a remote part of California because what they did was illegal. Her father says that’s one reason—the other is that Bio Gel lasts much longer in temperate climates. If Jenna stays in California, she could live 200 years. If she moved back to Boston, a handful of years.
At school, Jenna ignores Ethan. He confronts her outside the school building during a break and then storms off. Back at home, Lily tells Jenna that, shortly before Jenna’s accident, Claire told her to go to her room—and Jenna didn’t. Jenna realizes that she now feels compelled to go to her room whenever Claire tells her to. Later, when Claire is video-calling Jenna’s father in the kitchen, Jenna starts smashing plates. When Claire tells Jenna to go to her room, Jenna uses all her willpower to resist. She confronts her parents, who admit that they uploaded a “subliminal command” to make her go to her room if ordered, in case FSEB agents came snooping around the house.
Jenna goes to the mission. Ethan finds her there. When Jenna tells him that their relationship isn’t “right” because of her, not him, he asks her to explain. Jenna tells him the truth about her prostheses, calling herself a “monster.” Ethan says that people called him a monster after he beat up the dealer who hooked his little brother on drugs—but he’s not a monster, and neither is Jenna.
Jenna visits Mr. Bender and asks to use his Netbook, on which she discovers that her friends Kara and Locke died in the car accident that Jenna survived—and that the police only didn’t prosecute Jenna for reckless driving without a license because no one expected her to live. Later, Lily reveals to Jenna that if the authorities find out about Jenna, Lily is supposed to rush her to Edward, a friend of Jenna’s father, who will help Jenna flee the country.
One day, while Claire is picking up Jenna’s father from the airport, Jenna reopens the door at the back of Claire’s closet. She discovers that the other two computers are labeled with Kara and Locke’s names. She realizes that her parents uploaded her friends’ minds to computers—and that the hellish dark void she remembers from her “coma” was really disembodied animation inside a computer. That night, Jenna confronts her parents about what she’s discovered. They admit that they’re keeping Kara and Locke’s mental “information” in case it can exonerate Jenna of responsibility for the accident—as well as a backup of Jenna’s brain just in case.
At school, a sickly Allys confronts Jenna about being the Jenna Fox—the Bio Gel inventor’s daughter who was supposedly in a horrific car accident from which no one could recover. When Ethan asks whether Allys would report Jenna to the FSEB, Allys storms off. She doesn’t come to school for the next few days.
One afternoon, Jenna confronts Mr. Bender about being her father’s friend “Edward”—her father was the one who helped Mr. Bender get out of town when he was a teenager. Mr. Bender admits it. Suddenly, Jenna remembers that Kara was the one driving when she and her friends crashed Jenna’s parents’ car. She realizes that their memories can exonerate her—if she keeps their minds in suspended animation. At home, Jenna overhears her father talking to his “security specialist” about moving something precious. When she confronts her father about it, he admits that he was talking about moving Jenna, Kara, and Locke’s backups the next day.
Jenna waits outside for Ethan, with whom she plans to go visit Allys, when Lily approaches her and offers to help Jenna destroy the backups. At Allys’s, Jenna and Ethan discover that Allys is dying—and that Allys told her parents to report Jenna to the FSEB. Jenna has to decide whether to flee that night or to go through with her plan to save Kara and Locke from the dark void. Ultimately, she chooses to save her friends. At dawn, she screams. When her parents come to help, she darts out of the room while Lily locks Jenna’s parents inside. Jenna grabs a crowbar from Lily’s room, uses it to pry the computers off the table inside the room in the back of Claire’s closet, and throws the computers into the backyard lake. Afterward, Lily releases Jenna’s parents, and Jenna explains that she couldn’t have lived with Kara and Locke’s disembodied captivity. As Jenna’s family is reconciling, Allys’s parents show up at their door—not to turn Jenna in, but to beg Jenna’s father to save Allys, too.
Two hundred sixty years later, Jenna and Allys are living together in Mr. Bender’s house in California. Jenna had a 70-year relationship with Ethan. Long after he died, she used his DNA to have a daughter, Kayla. Kayla is currently a young girl, but when she gets old, Jenna plans to move back to Boston so she doesn’t outlive her daughter.
