Review:
In this novella's present, Bailey, a children's TV show host, is being held by government agents who are convinced that he was involved in an effort to use his show to transmit secret codes to a resistance group. Meanwhile, flashbacks to the past show how Celeste was let go from her job as a journalist, only to be hired on as an intern at the same children's show Bailey worked at, given instructions to somehow work various codes into episode scripts as naturally as possible.
The dystopian society of this novella is a near-future United States in which the Department of Freedom and Truth has declared that the news must only report "true facts, not anti-government sedition or un-American lies" (9). Ophelia, an un-hackable government-controlled AI, is just about everywhere and hears everything. People opposed to the government, or who can't prove they're American enough, are being jailed, disappeared, and/or deported.
I prefer my fiction to be more escapist, but this was at least short. The idea of codes being transmitted via children's show that sounded like a mashup of Carmen Sandiego and Sesame Street was interesting, and I was intrigued by the few details we got about how Celeste slipped things into the script.
The novella's narrator is Secret Agent Limby, the puppet controlled by Isabel, one of Celeste's new coworkers. Initially, I thought the Limby bits were maybe snippets from the actual show. Then I thought maybe "Limby" was actually Ophelia communicating via Limby. I didn't learn until later that this story was originally an Audible Original, so maybe the Limby bits worked better in audio. I liked them at first but eventually found them to be more confusing than anything.
All in all, this was a decent story.
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