Hum

May, a Brooklyn mother of two, has just lost her job to an AI. To pay down the family debt, she sells her face to a cosmetic-surgery firm, accepting subtle surgical changes that will make her unrecognizable to the city's facial-recognition network. With the payout she books a weekend at the Botanical Garden, the only patch of nature left inside the city, hoping to give her children a memory of trees. The "hums," bipedal AI service workers, are everywhere around her. Phillips builds the book around May's quiet attention to her children, her marriage, and the slow erosion of the world they are growing up inside.