So, with the spooky season, I dug out John Saul's Shadows, copyright 1992. Keep that in mind, and try not to giggle as I explain the situation contained within.
So, we opeen on Josh, a gifted kid in Southern California, who's been skipped ahead two grades due to his intelligence. Mom is single, has a younger daughter, and waits tables. Josh gets bullied at school a lot. Josh tries to slice his wrists open (cross the street, not down the road.)
So, Josh ends up getting accepted at a school for the gifted in Northern coastal California, where he meets Amy (two years younger) and Jeff and Adam, twins about his age. Jeff is the social twin, Adam is the introverted computer nerd. Who has a VR headset on his PC. In 1992. That produces realistic moving images.On what one can only assume is Windows 3.1 and DOS 6.
Anyway, We're lead to believe Adam commits suicide by getting hit by a freight train. In the meantime, Josh and Amy get moved into the seminar conducted by George Engersol, the man running the academy who is also studying the students living at the Academy. Said Seminar being about creating AI, while using Skinner taken to extremes to experiment on cats.
So, at the risk of spoiling a 30 year old book, it seems that what's actually been going on is that Engersol, along with Housemom Hilde, has been removing the brains of certain students, putting the brains in a life sustaining apparatus, and using them to power a computer in the basement that can magically connect to almost every computer in the world (presumably using AOL or a VAX machine, or maybe UNIX...) One attempt to do so before Adam failed, but Adam seems to be doing ok. Amy, who gets the treatment following an experiment Engersol put her up to (which leads to Hilde throwing the body over a cliff, then using the only interesting character in here, who teaches English, over the cliff along with his car) also reacts well, but she ain't happy about it.
Josh finds out about this stuff as Adam is able to reach out to his mother and Josh through computers and TV. Adam's mom thinks its his twin Jeff playing games and pulls him out of school. Jeff gets even by using Adam to give him directions on how to screw with the computer in their car, sending Mom and Dad spiraling off a bridge over a canyon on the 101.
By the end of this, Amy and Adam become murderous psychopaths, not that Engersol and Jeff aren't psychopaths as well, but yeah, it gets ugly, and Josh reveals the truth to the world, which promptly tries to forget about it. Josh goes back to normal school and seems to have readjusted ok.
As I may have mentioned, here in the 30+ years later vantage point, one can't hep but laugh at how ridiculous the plot is. The brains in jars are straight out of a 50's creature flick, and technology in the current era is nowhere near being able to do any of the stuff they do in here. Even 5 years past the release, the dancing baby on Ally McBeale was probably as advanced as it got. On the other hand, such wonderfully similar shows and movies like Lawnmower Man and Oliver Stone's Wild Palms were all about similar technophobia about the horrors of Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence, and this was an era when all a cartoon villain needed was a 3.5" floppy disk to control/destroy the world.
Honestly, I was entertained, even if my suspension of disbelief failed quite a bit.
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