The opening pages of Lindsey Harding’s Pilgrims 2.0 introduce a world that is familiar, but slightly off-kilter. A cruise ship is being prepared to set sail, only the purpose of this trip is reinvention. The Canterbury Cruise Line promises to give caregiving a “facelift,” a vision born from the captain’s late wife, Rebecca. Aboard the PILGRIM, traditional gender roles are reversed, and for two weeks, the crewmen cater to every need of the women on board: women who are not merely seeking a relaxing vacation, but the adjustments to their bodies that they believe will change their lives.
Rebecca lives on in the Artificial Intelligence system (BECCA) that manages every cruise detail. BECCA is all-powerful and always listening, anticipating cruisegoers’ needs with so much accuracy it’s like the system knows them better than they know themselves. On deck, BECCA adjusts the volume of the music based on levels of conversation, ensuring there are no awkward silences. At dinner, it uses passenger history to create a seating chart that will minimize conflict or negative interaction. BECCA employs constant alterations to curate a perfect environment, one so irresistible that passengers almost always come back for more.
The ship includes walking paths with different atmospheres, from the Park, complete with chirping birds and gurgling streams, to the Cemetery, populated with headstones symbolizing the old selves of the women who were transformed under Dr. Heston’s care, and the Mall, a confluence of nostalgia and capitalism, the air scented of buttery soft-baked pretzels. The ship pushes the limits of technology along with what’s capable with bodies; the lead surgeon and crew members ask, “What can a body become?”
The novel moves quickly, with chapters no longer than five pages, written in the third-person limited. By shifting perspectives between characters, and materials, within the story, the reader understands the motivations behind the expertly crafted facades. The titles of the chapters reflect whose mind we are within, for example, “Dr. Walter Heston” or “The Room Stewards,” as well as the timing, with each chapter containing the day and the precise hour in military time over the course of the two-week cruise. One-page passenger profiles and itineraries are interspersed throughout the chapters, further building this world and offering a more neutral explanation of the characters and events in the story.
We first meet the women boarding the PILGRIM the same way the crew meets them, through their Passenger Profiles. The Passenger Profiles tell us the distilled version of their stories: their names, occupations, medical history, and plans for surgery. In the chapters named for each woman, immediately following her Passenger Profile, we learn a bit more about her motivations or her insecurities and experiences that the cruise has capitalized on. Lyla, a labor and delivery nurse unable to conceive, is scheduled for a “Maternal Body Makeover.” Nicole, the stay-at-home mom and unsuccessful saleswoman of anti-aging and beauty products for a multi-level marketing business, is booked for “Breast Augmentation,” “Total Body Trim,” and “Lip Plump,” surgeries she chose believing they would make her “enhanced and capable of marketing skincare products that claimed to do what plastic surgery could.” Annalie is the grieving high school English teacher. Devastated by the loss of her twin sister, she seeks a “Signature Look” and “Cruise Counseling.” Lastly, we meet Bianca, a mother of two with dreams of becoming a tennis star, resentful of the tennis lessons she currently gives to toddlers and the elderly. She is scheduled for “Body Rejuvenation” and “Cruise Counseling,” placing a hefty gamble on her ability to finally win the trophies she believes she has a right to, with some adjustments to her body.
The women’s motivations are hardly visible in their Passenger Profiles, just as the driving forces behind the crew are invisible to the women. Dr. Heston strives for constant innovation in memory of his late wife; the risks of his unsatiated ego and devastating grief reveal themselves as he continuously pushes the limits of what can be achieved through surgery and carries on conversations with his wife, who has left this earth. Cedric, the broken-hearted waiter, joins the crew to prove to his ex-wife that he can break his addiction to video games and tries to seduce Nicole over the course of two weeks after his ex-wife wants to remain divorced. Larry finds a seductive pull in petty and not-so-petty theft, spoiling the pristine environment that the crew worked so hard to cultivate. He switches passengers’ drinks as they nap in the sun, plucks hair from their heads, and creepily mounts their unconscious bodies as they are transported from surgery to recovery. Rocco is a doctoral degree holder who is displeased with being a crewman. He strives for excellence in everything he does, up until his unfortunate murder.
The cruise seems like paradise, an opportunity for women to step out of the demands of day-to-day life. Everything appears sanitized and charming, but from the beginning of the novel, something sinister lurks beneath the surface like an ocean creature below a calming panorama of waves. An opportunity to complete plastic surgery and recover at sea is promoted as the ultimate rest and relaxation, but there are other benefits of creating things this way; open waters allow for looser regulations, and most surgical technicians on board didn’t pass their boards or complete residencies.
The realities of the surgeries are hidden, just like the “cottage-sized” container of Biomedical Waste stored in the lower chambers of the ship and disposed of at the end of each journey. No one on the ship refers to “surgeries” or “procedures”; if they do, they will quickly be corrected to the preferred language of “excursions” or “itineraries.” Patients are unconscious after the surgery during the “Days at Sea” portion, where they subsist on a feeding tube custom-tailored by BECCA to their recovery plan. They rest in a way only women drugged unconscious can, free at last from the mental load of running their homes and families. Passengers are protected from the unsightly reality of their choices, waking up rejuvenated, a bit sore or wobbly at worst. From there, they begin to hide the evidence as well. An unspoken rule keeps them from sharing what they had done with those at home. They return, changes nearly undetectable to those around them. Friends and family notice something different, but can’t quite put their finger on it. They are left with a longing to be just as happy and relaxed.
The PILGRIM sails on the belief that they can engineer something better than the original, from bodies to the “ButterNot” they use to cook the passengers’ meals. This fat-free gel with minimal calories activates more taste buds than the churned cream it imitates, its effect so powerful that the cooks sneak spoonfuls of it on their shifts. The women on the ship aim toward improved versions of their biology and, as a result, their lives, attempting to correct their problems with ampoules of silicone. Each first-time passenger is required to attend a consultation to learn about various “excursions” led by women who had completed one themselves. BECCA found that women booked more surgeries with female consultants who had the procedures they wanted, rather than doctors who could provide more medical details. Some, like the rumored Grandma Barbie, have completed so many excursions they are no longer recognizable.
The consultants minimize any risk to the patient. When questioned, the only response is that the surgery is “safer than flying from Richmond to L.A.” Surgeries range from the traditional liposuction and breast augmentation to experimental surgeries imagined by Dr. Heston. Lyla’s “Maternal Body Makeover,” for example, involves a pig-liver belly that expands over the course of ten months and then more rapidly shrinks back to its previous size, simulating a pregnancy without the baby. Dr. Heston promises an authentic experience, including HGC levels high enough to turn a long-awaited second line blue on a pregnancy test and induce vomiting at the smell of coffee. To Bianca, Dr. Heston promises time travel: a body that works as if it’s younger, a mind reprogrammed to believe it is.
On PILGRIM, they can be whoever they want to be. By the end of their journeys, no one is the same.
Annalie and Dr. Heston meet one night by accident in the Cemetery, where, after a bit of conversation, they discover they are both grieving their other half. For Dr. Heston, it’s his late wife, Rebecca. For Annalie, it’s her twin, Aimee. They connect through their grief and heal each other in strange ways. Dr. Heston transforms Annalie’s face to look like his late wife, so that he can see her again, and Annalie becomes Jordana, and no longer has to see her dead sister in the mirror.
Larry mounts Bianca on her ride on the TRACKZ, the computer-controlled passenger transportation system. He completes his most dangerous theft yet, removing the protein pump from her open wound and spurring an investigation through the ship when she nearly dies. When Rocco confronts him about his potential participation in this, he murders him. Larry draws up another scam that will allow him to start over, pretending to be an escort from the ship and hitching a ride with a cruisegoer to an unknown destination.
Dr. Heston discovers a tumor in Nicole. He cannot complete her itinerary, and she is sent home with the bad news, no longer wishing for success or a perfect body, but for more time with her husband and child. Lyla is horribly sick, the kind of pregnancy that they make documentaries about. She realizes that as her stomach deflates, her husband will likely leave as well.
We see the world on the ship isn’t so different from the world beyond its walls. The men are hired to serve the women, but are put in positions in which they can take advantage of them. Larry steals “souvenirs” from relaxed or unconscious women for his own gratification. Cedric tries to push Nicole down onto a chaise while forcefully kissing her and sedates her to forget about the incident when she resists.
To BECCA and the other staff members on the ship, “Bodies were just data,” things to be experimented with and improved upon. Some transformations are clearly artificial, a pig-liver stomach programmed to expand like a pregnant belly. But with them come real consequences: changed dynamics, relationships, and perspectives.
The novel ends in the future, one where political parties have dissolved and the youth have returned to an analog way of being. In this future, Annalie and Dr. Heston meet biweekly, upon his disembarkation of the ship. I was left wondering how the passengers’ cosmetic surgeries affected their lives at home.
As we enter an increasingly augmented reality, with AI-generated images becoming less recognizable in the sea of content we all gulp daily, Lindsey Harding’s debut novel begs the question: what’s real? What’s not real? Why does it matter? Does it matter? The PILGRIM promises something better than real, but we find that we are still bound by the limitations and desires of the creator.
The novel questions our relationship and use of AI, referencing ELIZA, the early natural language processing computer program invented in the 1960s meant to emulate a Rogerian therapist. In Pilgrims 2.0, the AI goes a bit beyond what we use it for currently. But not in an unimaginable sense. The AI therapists in the novel are said to be better than their human counterparts, with their ability to “customize an interaction in terms of language, tone, and conversational style to best suit the participant’s own speech mannerisms and vocabulary.”
As AI is more frequently proposed as a solution or improvement on the human mind and capability, this novel expertly interrogates the impossible expectations set upon women and mothers, the allure and danger of artificial intelligence, and our never-ending pursuit of something better.
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Pilgrims 2.0. By Lindsey Harding. Cincinnati: Acre Books, 2023. 396 pp. $20.00.
