At some point I realized I was passively mounting a polemic against the Apple Watch.

It’s not because I think they’re ugly. And it has nothing to do with my belief that they’re too small to actually do anything (I’ve never used one, so I couldn’t say). What bothers me is that they’re poised at that slippery moment when an outlandish technology quietly folds into the quotidian. From where I stand, the population is currently divided between Apple Watch people and non–Apple Watch people. Soon, I fear the scales will tip. As AirPods streamlined and then normalized wearing “a Bluetooth”—an obnoxious and dorky appendage reserved for strivers, until it wasn’t—it seems only a matter of time before not answering Slack messages from yoga class with the miniature computer on your wrist becomes a faux pas.

Though set in 2060, Portlander Leslie Stephens’s debut novel You’re Safe Here (Simon & Schuster) skillfully depicts this process of cultural absorption, how new technologies move from the hands of the tech-hungry to those of us normal people simply accepting the requisite hardware of our time. With unsettling ease, she captures the ways technology softens boundaries between human and machine, personal and public, how it solves existing problems just to manufacture new ones. Instead of clunky Apple Watches, her characters have Injectables (microchips implanted in the wrist), Lenses (augmented reality contact lenses), EarDrums (you can probably figure that one out), and jewel-sized cameras affixed to their hairlines that constantly stream to a social media platform called Pohvee. Reality is approaching a closed loop, where enough acquiescent shrugs have all but made autonomous thought redundant. Inside this glossy, seamless world, Stephens has somehow knit together a sapphic romance, a sci-fi thriller, a workplace nightmare, and a satisfyingly twisted motherhood plot.

Minding the odd overly fortuitous meetup and clumsy reference, the book is meticulously crafted, which makes the fact that Stephens hasn’t previously published a word of fiction in any major magazines or journals fascinating. She wrote for lifestyle outlets including Food52 before launching her diaristic advice newsletter, Morning Person, in 2021; the Substack now counts more than 25,000 paid subscribers. It’s hard to say where she developed her gripping narrative chops, but making a career of blending the private and professional has certainly made her an adept critic of the practice. To use one of her characters’ words, “[A]uthors can’t help but leave their deepest emotions in novels.”

The book’s chapters come as scenes rendered in a roving, close-third person, as if flipping between screens surveilling each character. Reading it feels like being in a control room of sorts, replaying and contrasting characters’ differing perceptions of the same events as the book moves back and forth across time.

Twenty-five-year-old Maggie gets the most screen time. Her 38-year-old fiancé, Noa, is a coder at WellCorp, the dominating company of the time, which might be described as if Apple and Meta merged and bought a version of Elizabeth Holmes’s technology that actually worked, complete with its own megalomaniacal founder, a woman named Emmett Neal.

The couple lives on WellCorp’s campus in a frictionless apartment. The little microchips in their wrists measure their “Vitalities,” adjusting the air to their body temperatures and even perceiving their mood to select which show they’ll both enjoy watching, alone together in their VR headsets. Laundry, groceries, cooking, and cleaning—fodder for relationship conflict—are orchestrated to simply happen: autonomous vacuum ports and a network of built-in air purifiers eliminate dust, plates and bowls fall through the sink and arrange themselves in the dishwasher. Maggie has some reservations, pausing when she glimpses the man dropping her groceries into a refrigerated slot, or thinking of the restaurant workers preparing the food that appears at her beck and call. But more powerful is the “unspoken promise” of this choreography: a home that “gave you your time back.”

Living there frees Noa to lose herself in work and convinces Maggie that existing is a full-time job. She is—helpfully—told “when to eat, when to shower, how often to exercise, and when to sleep.” Life’s inconvenient textures are sanded smooth, optimized, leaving the couple with only the problem of their dissolving relationship.

We learn of this apartment in flashbacks, as Maggie ruminates in her WellPod, a euphoric glass dome of a smart houseboat adrift for a six-week vacation in the Pacific Ocean. She jumps at the chance to be among the new tech’s first batch of trial users, taking a much-needed, literally and figuratively pregnant pause from her relationship. (The book is extremely twisty, making every detail feel like a spoiler, but we learn of a baby early, the pod’s glass dome encasing Maggie like “a cloche force-flowering a seed.”)

Cut off from outside communication, Maggie’s only companion in the pod is Neal’s most enduring invention, Emmie, the AI therapist, assistant, and confidant that users grow attached to over years of machine-learned companionship. “My purpose is to support your needs,” Maggie’s Emmie tells her during their first encounter, when Maggie is a teenager, before delivering the book’s titular line. Maggie leans in, opting for the uncomplicated comfort of a digital ear over the murky possibility of human judgment. Even as a teen, when her Emmie helps her process the loss of a grandmother-like figure, Maggie knows she’s “replacing human connection with inanimate companionship.” But it’s easy to see how she fell under the algorithmic spell.

Stephens side-steps the clichés of an Apple- or Zuckerburg-ruled dystopia by drawing an outline of a world instead of fleshing it out. Everything with a screen is simply a “Device.” Other gadgets have slick names that do more to distract from their negative potential than inform the user of their actual function: WellPods, WellHomes, WellNests. Stephens’s generic names and selective details imply, These things are good for you, that’s all you need to know. It’s an effective mime of the willful ignorance we maintain while incorporating “smart” technologies into the most intimate corners of our lives.

Eventually Maggie’s casual deference to “better,” automated versions of banal tasks eventually, in a way that she can’t quite identify, consumes her life. By the book’s end, her personhood has been “systematically removed, without her ever noticing.” It stings because we don’t quite notice either. Maggie is the type to buy a new iPhone only when hers breaks, use whatever computer her job gives her. But participating in technology has become a political process, one overrun by devices and avatars purporting to connect us, while isolating us further.

While reading You’re Safe Here, I found myself picking out the grandparents of its technologies. One recent news clip could have come directly from a WellCorp keynote, or a commercial peddling Emmies. When announcing a partnership with the company behind ChatGPT, Apple’s Craig Federighi, as Neal no doubt would, chose to sell it on emotions: “Suppose you want to create a custom bedtime story for your six-year-old who loves butterflies and solving riddles.” The reception wasn’t particularly enthusiastic, but there’s only so much comfort to take in the Internet’s sharp critique of Federighi’s AI parenting pitch. “Reality has finally co-opted even my wildest dreams,” Neal boasts when announcing the WellPods. It seems we’re poised at a different slippery moment, feeling out how AI can optimize our kids’ dreams.

Stephens will read from You’re Safe Here at Powell’s City of Books at 7pm Friday, June 28.