In the Company of Mind, by Steven Piziks (sci-fi novel, 1998)

[lb_lee]

Though I don't think I'll be telling our clients about it any time soon, Lance mused. Somehow I don't think they'd be interested in hiring a man with forty-odd alters and a nanobot hive living inside him.

Blurb: The Company, a cyborg security specialist with MPD and a sentient nanobot hive, has escaped their abusive father and built a productive, if not necessarily happy life for themselves. But when your father is richer than God, sometimes it's not easy to escape the past...

Why is it worth your time?: This one was solidly entertaining! The author alternates chapters between the Company's present as an adult and their past as a child. Each time period merges to climax at the same time, both dealing with their abusive father, who is a kind of terrifying that is hard to write well, but we found the depiction credible and scary. (What if YOUR abuser was as rich as Elon Musk and as spiteful and powerful as Donald Trump?) The climax was especially satisfying. This is very much a '90s MPD book, and the Company is definitely a type we have seen many times before, but there are worse things than to do that well! If you want a cyborg multi revenge fantasy, give it a try!

Plural Tags: abuse high focus (mind the content warnings!), closeting, cofronting, fusion/integration, identityblending, children, nonhumans (AI), family, enmity, and teamwork relationships, medical (MPD) type, switching, voices

Content Warnings: contain spoilers; see comments

Access Notes: Available on paperback and audiobook... and also in Italian, under the name La compagnia della mente! Someone has also bootlegged a digital copy on archive.org, the closest to an ebook you can get.

Misc Notes: Has a sequel, but this book stands alone totally fine.

Comments

Content Warnings

[lb_lee]

Abuse is a HIGH focus in this book, and it is the hardest part of it to read. Explicit, violent, repeated rape and incest, burying alive, whipping, feces and urine, nonconsensual and totally unnecessary repeated bodily modification (the Company did NOT become a cyborg voluntarily), emotional abuse, eye trauma... it's BAD. Also dynamics where Dad abuses everyone and the other family members turn away from each other because they're unable to deal with it, which is realistic but also GRIM. Oh, and explicit cutting self-harm.

A lot of the cyborg modification of the Company was their dad trying to make an idealized copy of himself, and ranges from replacing their hair and eyes with synthetic idealized versions of his own, to giving this kid an enormous dick that he takes inordinate creepy interest in. This is very clearly made out to be a horrible extension of abuse, and Lance (the core headmate) has a lot of revulsion and self-hatred because of it, very understandably.

This is an unusual book, however, in that while the Company are male-vesseled and have EXPERIENCED hardcore violence, and have a dickbag headmate named Patrick who calls the love interest a racial slur and smacks a client once for putting illegal lethal gas in their security system, they otherwise commit no acts of violence except in self-defense.

There is internalized ableism on the part of both the Company and their cyborg singlet love interest, but both of them specifically say they love each other's differences. (That said, the love interest very justifiably says, "I'll be with you, but you gotta get your shit together and go to therapy."

The love interest also hears racial slurs from the dad, but the dad is terrible in all fucking ways; it's obviously not supposed to be all right, and she gets to help take him down.