Helena Vega had always, always wanted a daughter, and the early stages had been wonderful. Now, at fifteen, Bysshe had developed so many strange preoccupations, her mother couldn't help but wonder which of her many mistakes were at fault. She was beginning to wish she had never sent the girl to Santa Momenta's Visceral Academy, where humans, android and holograms were supposed to learn how to co-exist in mutual respect. It wasn't working out that way.
notes:
it's difficult to tell the three apart, since physical contact - touching (like the game of tag at some schools even now) - was considered extremely rude and subject to harassment enforcement. Android could hurt people's feelings. Humans could detect and exploit an android's required vulnerabilities. Holograms could be either human- or android-projected, and it was against the rules to inquire, so there was a sort of rock-paper-scissors in effect.
Bysshe had a problem. Certain holograms were sabotaging the system, disobeying all the rules and wreaking havoc. She had to stop them. "Extinguish" the problem, 'put out the light', as it were. Or else she couldn't get the thing she wanted most of all. TBD
(it could be a hologram behind the wheel of that self-driving car ...)
Not a YA book but a satire of YA books. told from the point of view of the adult, the parent - what do kids know about anything, really? and, of course, because Bysshe herself is a hologram (a la Blade Runner), being the daughter that Helene had always, always wanted (but was ultimately unable to have).
We find that Bysshe was selected for this special school as part of a program called "Future Leaders of Today". There are only a limited number of students - "why" is TBD. (like the fricking Harry Potter stuff, it has to be a 'special' school. Like Hunger Games, it has to be a girl.) But this is more like Jakob Von Gunten and the school for servants. Definitely along those lines.
Helena is initially described as a Rare Book Publisher. We discover that this is because the publishing of any books is rare. The books there are are literally ghostwritten - by composite simulacra of the approved great writers of the past - two from each constituent member of the League of Nations, one male and one female.
The Future Leaders of Today is a related project - the school is in actuality being run by an android cabal which has put humanity into 'maintentance mode' on the way to end-of-life. What they are doing in the school is compiling, processing what they intend to be the last generation of living humans, turning them into composite simulacra. They believe that Bysshe is one of these. They do not know that she is a sophisticated computer program herself, the child and brainchild of her mother.
Perhaps they assign her the task of extinguishing a bothersome set of holograms, but she may discover she is on the same side as them ... we'll see
as it is, it's a high school, so there are jocks and morons and mean girls, etc ...
"Tell me about your day" is the narrative stucture as well as the key to the story - s series of reports (half-truth and half-concealed) from daughter to mother (there is no father in the picture, nor mention of one)
