Hum

May trained artificial intelligence until the network she built no longer needed her, and she lost her job three months ago. To cover the rent, she visits a hum, one of the humanoid machines that run daily life now, for a procedure that tattoos iridescent ink across her face. It shifts the measurements a camera reads, until no system can place her.

With the money left over, she books her husband and two children into the Botanical Garden, a walled preserve where real plants still grow. Screens are meant to stay at the gate. She asks her family to leave their devices behind, and the request starts an argument before anything else goes wrong.

Inside the Garden, her children slip out of sight. May has to trust a hum whose reasons for helping her she cannot read, and let it lead the search to bring them back safely.

The novel is speculative fiction, set in a near future reshaped by climate change and constant surveillance. It stays as close to marriage and parenthood as it does to the machines. Phillips writes in tight, urgent prose, and the Garden holds both the safest and the most dangerous hours of the book.