Playground: A Novel

On Makatea, Ina builds something out of recovered garbage. She doesn’t know what she’s building, except that she has “a monster growing in her yard” (207). Later, she takes her family on a picnic and collects more garbage for her project. She watches the children as Rafi mentions that “this little family officially controls five percent of the say over Makatea’s future” in the referendum (209). He neither wants to disturb the island’s status quo or decide the locals’ fate on their behalf. He feels like they’re “condemned to choose” (211). They wonder how their two children will vote. When their sacks are filled with plastic, they head home.

Todd recalls the time he spent with Ina and Rafi. She had the idea of a “lecture series” in which each of them would deliver a lecture to the other two about the thing that meant most to them. Rafi was reluctant but went through with the idea to please Ina. Todd remembers spending time with his mother in her small apartment, when she didn’t want to talk about the ways that his father (her husband) “messed [them] both up, badly” (218). For his lecture, Todd introduced Ina and Rafi to CRIK, the supercomputer with the early AI model.