Stay This Day and Night with Me

This is the story of Olga, a retired mathematician, and Mateo, a college student passionate about robotics, and their plot to influence Google.

After a chance encounter at the public library, two new friends begin to meet up regularly. Together they decide to submit an extremely unorthodox application to Google’s Singularity University, framed as a direct appeal to the seemingly all-powerful corporation. Ideas and counterarguments open into personal stories as they debate the possibility of free will, the existence of merit, and the role of synthetic humans.

As Olga and Mateo craft their confrontation with Google, they ask the most basic and important of questions: What does it mean to be human in a world driven by data and surveillance? Is there still space for empathy and caring? What could we be, what could we build, right now, if we used our resources in different ways? Tension grows as their relationship becomes strained due to ideological differences, and as Olga confronts a terminal illness, Mateo begins to plan an attack on Google.

Author Belen Gopegui has been compared to Cervantes, Nabokov, and Borges. Here, she offers a literary equivalent of My Dinner with Andre, creating a hermetic, compelling world within an impassioned conversation that opens into a rich examination of the rights, roles, and obligations of humans in a world made by algorithms.