Immaculate Conception

Set in a near-future world where sleek sculptural barriers called buffers physically and digitally separate communities by wealth, the novel follows Enka, an aspiring artist whose consuming jealousy of her best friend slowly destroys everything she loves.

The story opens with Enka hiding in a bathroom at a gala celebrating a new museum atrium named in her honor. She reads an alert informing her that her closest friend, Mathilde Wojnot-Cho, is missing and presumed dead. She resolves to find someone who might know where Mathilde is. From this frame, the narrative traces their friendship across past and present.

As freshmen at the Berkshire College of Art and Design (BCAD), Enka first glimpses Mathilde working amid trees in her studio. Mathilde is already famous for protest performances against the buffers and possesses a knowledge of art history that eclipses their classmates'. Enka, one of the few "fringe" students, those designated as lower-class by the buffer system, feels both intimidated and equalized by Mathilde's genius. Enka grew up in Gainesville, Florida, where the buffers severed her family from their community and upward mobility. Her parents developed disdain for anything cultural, so she hid her artistic pursuits and eventually won a technology-art scholarship funded by the Dahl Corporation, abandoning her true passion for oil painting after realizing her skills would be mediocre at BCAD.

Late one night, Enka finds Mathilde slumped in a bathroom stall, bleeding from splinters. She begins pressing her palm against Mathilde's studio window each day, and weeks later discovers a faint handprint on her own window. Their friendship deepens into inseparability. For the Freshman Exhibit, Mathilde wins the top prize with a devastating installation recreating a plane cabin, featuring a carved wooden sculpture of her father, who died on September 11, 2001. Visitors hold his wooden hand while a recording of his final words plays. Enka weeps and stays with Mathilde through the night.

Mathilde spirals into severe depression. Enka learns that Mathilde's mother died by suicide shortly after her husband's death. Enka stays on campus over the summer to care for Mathilde, whispering what becomes their shared mantra: I breathe in, you breathe out. When Enka discovers sketches of a cactus labyrinth from Mathilde's childhood on the family's desert cactus farm, Mathilde refuses to discuss them, insisting that part of her life belongs only to her. A commission from the Whitney Museum revives Mathilde, who announces she is moving to impermanent works as a way to reconcile with the absence that defines her youth.

A crisis strikes the art world when students at Caltech create the Stochastic Archive, generative software that produces art from text prompts. Enka discovers someone has already generated something nearly identical to the sculptural "umbilical cords" she built for the Sophomore Exhibit. She withdraws, devastated. Mathilde's impermanent works bear no resemblance to anything in the archive, making her appear prescient.

Enka spends a miserable summer at home while Mathilde travels to Europe. In Rome, Mathilde launches He Is Risen, an online project in which she photographs priests' erections after fabricating lurid confessions. At the Venice Biennale, she performs Umbiblical, consuming her own preserved umbilical cord onstage in a performance that reduces the audience to collective grief. A wealthy patron establishes a $10 million foundation in Mathilde's name. The chasm between the friends widens as Enka begins screening Mathilde's calls.

Enka reaches out to Pathway Labs, a technology company run by Logan Dahl, son of billionaire Richard Dahl, whose corporation funds Enka's scholarship and invented the buffers. In Argentina, Logan explains his invention, the SCAFFOLD: a brain-linking device that downloads one person's experiences onto another to deepen empathy. When a test goes horribly wrong, Logan proposes Enka create an exhibit to distract the media. The resulting show, Neon Séance, displays the electrically stimulated brains of historical figures at the Gagosian gallery and becomes a sensation. Logan offers Enka an artist-in-residence position, and they fall in love.

At a celebratory lunch after Logan proposes, Enka meets his mother, Monika, a neurobiologist and arts patron who will come to dominate Enka's life. At the gala in the present, Polina Ma, a former foundation board member, reveals that Mathilde has been missing for about a year, not days, and shows Enka a disturbing desert video of Mathilde with blistered skin.

In flashback, Mathilde arrives at Enka's wedding visibly pregnant. She reveals her creation: Specialized Plasma Exempting the Requirement of Men (SPERM), a process allowing women to conceive without male chromosomes. Her daughter, Beatrice, is the first child born this way. Enka walks through her wedding in a daze, feeling eclipsed. Back at the gala, a projected video reveals a shimmering structure behind Mathilde in the desert. Enka recognizes it from the cactus labyrinth sketches Mathilde drew years earlier and flies to the abandoned Cho Cactus Sanctuary near Marfa, Texas.

At the center of the maze, she finds Mathilde dressed in cactus flowers, cradling the decomposing remains of Beatrice. Enka repeats their mantra until Mathilde weeps. Mathilde grinds Beatrice's remains with foraged herbs into a large incense cone and asks for time alone to say goodbye. Enka walks away and hears the match strike.

Mathilde is placed under a conservatorship and moves into Enka and Logan's home, where she slowly heals. Together, Enka and Mathilde create Mnemosyne, a tactile sensory exhibit credited solely to Enka at Mathilde's request, though its most praised elements are Mathilde's ideas. The foundation orders trauma scans at the Dahlhouse, Richard Dahl's compound. When a technician tells Enka that Mathilde's unedited brain shows extraordinary creative potential, Enka is seized by jealousy. She lifts the developing scan from its chemical solution, prematurely fixing it and distorting the results. The falsified data suggests Mathilde will never recover, and the board pushes for trauma editing that would erase her memories of Beatrice.

That night, Toru Nakajima, who raised Logan as a surrogate father, reveals that Logan is a clone of Richard Dahl, the first prototype for a cloning program called Project Naiad. He warns Enka never to tell Logan.

Logan proposes the SCAFFOLD as an alternative to trauma editing: Enka could inhabit Mathilde's mind and absorb her trauma while preserving her memories. Enka volunteers, seeing it as atonement. After the procedure, she discovers that Mathilde perceives her as wise, powerful, and creative.

Over the following years, Enka grows addicted to inhabiting Mathilde's mind. She discovers Mathilde's deepest trauma, childhood sexual abuse by a priest, and uses it without consent to create Absolution, an exhibit at MoMA in which the priest sits in public silence for months while survivors confront him. Mathilde is furious and demands a break from the SCAFFOLD, but Monika overrules her.

During a vicious argument, Enka tells Logan he is a clone. Devastated, he drives to the Dahlhouse and severs the SCAFFOLD link, permanently damaging Mathilde's brain. Toru reveals that the original Logan's mind could not be saved; a backup was loaded onto his healed body, erasing his memory of the truth.

Over subsequent years, Mathilde loses language and memory, though she retains an inexplicable happiness. After years of worsening headaches, Enka discovers that Mathilde's brain has fused with her pairing device and that Mathilde is deliberately transmitting pain as a cry for help. Enka re-enters Mathilde's mind and finds her consciousness fully intact, trapped and aware for years. Mathilde reveals she knows every betrayal: "You nursed your envy. Used it to punish yourself" (266). But she adds: "I loved you. So much, Enka. And I love you, still" (267).

At the opening of Born Again, Enka publicly confesses to sabotaging Mathilde's scan results and announces she is leaving the art industry. As the crowd erupts, she feels warmth spreading through her mind: Mathilde's unconditional embrace.

Five years later, Enka is 45, teaching art at a community college. Logan, restored but without memory of the truth, has stayed with her. The world believes Mathilde died the previous year, but she lives under Enka's care. At Enka's birthday party, a maid delivers urgent news: Mathilde has asked for a pen and paper and has begun to draw.