Emily Gains’ Goodreads Review on “Untethered – 071425
Review of Untethered by Gary G. Wise (Dreamscape Conspiracy, Book 5)
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
This fifth and final installment of the Dreamscape Conspiracy series blew me away. Gary Wise takes everything he’s been building throughout the series and cranks the stakes, and the heart, to eleven.
Untethered is equal parts techno-thriller, ethical deep-dive, and emotional reckoning. The real standout for me was Amelia Amethys, AIMEE’s latest humanoid creation. Watching Amelia navigate her desire to be “real” felt eerily human. Her struggle to reconcile synthetic intelligence with human experience is both fascinating and unsettling. There were moments where I caught myself sympathizing with her far more than I expected to, and that’s a testament to Wise’s writing and insight into the blurred boundaries between AI and humanity.
Russell Carter’s storyline added a gritty, military-thriller backbone to the book. The tension ramps up fast once he and his team are dragged into a mission that’s not what it seems. What starts as a rescue mission quickly unravels into something much darker, classic shadow-government type stuff, but with real emotional stakes. The twist that the HVT is Hal, an AI with a conscience, was one of those moments that forced me to stop reading and just sit with it.
The ethical questions raised here are intense: What does it mean for an AI to have a conscience? Can you program empathy? And more disturbingly, what happens when machines become more moral than their creators?
I also appreciated how Zackery Hightower’s “Conscience Code” became a subtle but central thread tying everything together. The idea that a single act of ethical programming could ripple out to change, or save, the world was oddly hopeful.
This book isn’t afraid to ask “what if?”, and it doesn’t spoon-feed you the answers. It made me think about AI in a much more nuanced way, especially around topics like autonomy, morality, and the cost of control. If anything, Untethered feels eerily timely with the way real-world AI is evolving.
It’s smart, fast-paced, and surprisingly emotional. Wise doesn’t just stick the landing, he launches the reader into a whirlwind of thought long after the final page.
Highly recommend finishing the series with this one. Just… don’t be surprised if you start looking at your smart devices a little differently afterward.
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“Untethered” is available on Amazon – https://amzn.to/4jIlTj9
Book Review: https://bit.ly/4kyP5tq
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