This is a story about "reality," and also a story about "performance."
Three couples, three predicaments, brought into a cutting-edge project called the "Marriage Checkup Report." Led by mysterious tech fanatic Wen Shixu and the AI he developed, Qinse, the project uses AI to analyze marriages. Lin Ye and Su Xiao appear to be a "model couple," but each is secretly waging a battle of control and resistance within their marriage. Chen Jianguo and Li Xiufen's quiet middle-aged marriage conceals erectile dysfunction, ovulation-inducing injections, and a secret about selling eggs. He Jianguo, a seventy-three-year-old retired worker, and Wei Hong, a sixty-seven-year-old widow with one leg, share a "twilight romance" that their daughter does not approve of.
At first, the project is just an experiment. But when the AI begins to "feel," the director starts to "raise the stakes," 200,000 people watch a man's impotence in a livestream, and the entire internet votes on whether to break up a marriage, the experiment spirals out of control.
The three couples go from "test subjects" to "awakened ones," only to discover that the biggest challenge is not the algorithm, but figuring out how to keep living authentically in the real world once they step away from the cameras.
The book has 60 chapters in three volumes. It does not give you the "right answer" about marriage. It only asks a question: Do you dare let the people around you see the real you?
