The Family Experiment | John Marrs | Full plot summary and ending

Are you looking to understand point-by-point what happened in The Family Experiment in detail? I summarized the full book. If you’re looking for shorter spoilers plus a review, head to the main spoiler review for The Family Experiment.

What is The Family Experiment about?

As the population grows and cities become over-crowded, families are trying to make ends meet with less income than ever before. Despite initiatives such as the Marriage Act designed to support couples starting families, many can no longer afford it.

A company called Awakening Entertainment promises to provide parents the technology to order MetaBabies—children that exist entirely in the metaverse but who grow up and interact like real children. Parents can choose the age, sex, appearance, interests, and the speed of their growth.

With pre-orders opening, the company is launching a reality TV show called The Family Experiment hosted by a woman named Autumn Taylor. The show will follow several carefully selected couples over the course of nine months as they raise their MetaBaby. Parents will wear virtual reality headsets and full-body suits that feel like a second skin and allow them to interact with their child the way biological parents can.

Viewers will be able to watch the parents and their MetaBaby 24/7, and the nine months will cover infancy through adulthood. There will be votes throughout the show that allow viewers to influence the game and eventually select a winner. The winning couple can choose to keep their MetaBaby and whatever stipend they have left over from the experiment, or to permanently delete their child from the metaverse and take cash to start a real world family of their own (dispersed only on the day of the live birth of their real world child). Losers will have their MetaBaby permanently deleted.

Things become tense as couples navigate parenting in the metaverse while trying to appeal to viewers to favor them in votes. And in this experiment, no one will escape without something being exposed…

What is Rufus and Kitty’s story?

Rufus Green and Kitty Carter are in their late twenties and have a MetaBaby named Olivia. They aren’t long for the story (they only have one chapter), as they are the first couple we see eliminated when Rufus shakes the virtual child to death on camera, after a sleep-deprived early parenthood and relentless crying drive him to the edge.

What is Salena and Jaden’s story?

Salena and Jaden Wilson are in their early thirties and have a son named Malachi. They last longer than Rufus and Kitty, but still drop fairly early. We learn that Salena doesn’t fully trust Jalen since she discovered he had been gambling in a metaverse casino and had lost all of their savings while taking on tons of debt. Salena stayed with Jaden because he is her genetic match (shout out to those of you who read The One!), though they can no longer afford IVF. During one of her appointments with the counselors sponsored by the show, her therapist is taken over partway through the session. The mysterious avatar hands Salena a folder showing three other women in the real world raising children alone. They were all fathered by Jaden.

During a live tv interview with Autumn, Salena confronts Jaden about the other women. Jaden reveals that he had been selling his sperm to help single women who can’t have children. This wasn’t exactly done in a petri dish though—he slept with them, but only to pay off the gambling debts he incurred. As the two argue on air, Jaden’s avatar suddenly drops. Salena pulls off her headset to discover that one of the women has murdered Jaden in the real world. It’s revealed that she lost her pregnancy early and Jaden declined helping again. In a split from reality she thought Malachi (the MetaBaby) was hers and that Jaden had taken him from her.

Through a news report, we learn that Jaden’s murderer was arrested and Salena had declined to continue in the Family Experiment. Thus, the show terminated their child, Malachi—much to the distress of the online audience.

What is Woody and Tina’s story?

Woody and Tina Finn have been married for fifteen years and have a MetaBaby named Belle. Early in their story, we get tidbits about what their secret may be when Woody privately muses that he has already demonstrated what he would be willing to do for his family. Not long after, we learn that the Finns had to relocate seven years earlier to find a “suitable” house (though one they don’t love) far away from where they used to live. Interesting!

It turns out that Tina and Woody had a previous child who is very much alive—Issy. The fifteen year-old is kept locked in their basement on arrangement with law enforcement. Issy will stay there until she is eighteen, and has a government tracker installed in her arm to ensure she doesn’t violate the conditions. Issy was a difficult child who demonstrated signs of psychopathy and manipulation from a very young age. Tina and Woody see their metaverse child Belle as a chance to get to be parents after not being able to with Issy.

Tina and Issy’s relationship is particularly strained, and Tina privately wishes she could swap her two children’s places so she could pull the plug on Issy. This seems harsh (and it is), but this also comes after Issy stabs her while she is visiting, and Tina is forced to care for the wound at home so viewers don’t find out who they really are. It is revealed that Issy was convicted of murdering another child from school. Police allow Woody and Tina to choose if Issy serves out her juvenile sentence with them or in a facility, and Woody pressured Tina to have Issy with them. This prompted their move.

One day while Tina and Woody are out, someone breaks into their home and leaves Issy a device that allows her to circumvent the security systems. Issy still has the tracking device to deal with, but she discovers her mother while checking out the upstairs and realizes that Tina is in the metaverse and speaking to a child. This is when Issy learns about The Family Experiment and that they have been hiding a new child from her. Belle is designed to look exactly like Issy.

One day at work, Tina’s coworker tells her that she saw her avatar on the livestream. Tina and Woody rush home to find Issy in the headset logged in as Tina. Tina uses Issy’s headset to find her and asks Issy to leave the metaverse. Issy (in Tina’s avatar) won’t do it. Tina watches in horror as Issy (who appears to viewers to be Tina) tells Belle that she has disappointed them and strangles her. The metachild dies live on television, to the horror of viewers around the world.

Tina doesn’t face legal consequences for the murder of Belle, since the law states that an avatar cannot be killed unlawfully since it was never alive to begin with. In the real world, Issy has pulled out her tracker and fled.

What is Cadman and Gabriel’s story?

Cadman N’Yu and Gabriel Macmillan have been together for seven years and have a MetaBaby named River. Cadman is a social media influencer dating Gabriel, who is ten years younger than him and used largely as a prop for Cadman’s fame. While Cadman uses every moment spent with their son River to get brand deals, Gabriel gets increasingly irritated with him. We learn that the couple was once opulently wealthy, but now have sold off almost everything they own in the real world.

The reasons behind their current situation are told through flashbacks. Gabriel went to a party where he first tried a highly addictive drug called Amazonite (AZ). Someone stuck the AZ patch onto Gabriel without him knowing, and he initially attributed his decreased anxiety and improved confidence to the alcohol. Gabriel refused to try it again, until another public event he was asked to attend for Cadman made his social anxiety spike. Eventually, Gabriel succumbed to addiction. When Cadman found out, he explodes and Gabriel moves out.

Gabriel moves back in a few months later and checks himself into rehab with Cadman’s support. But while in rehab he began to hemorrhage, and doctors confirmed he has a brain tumor. Insurance won’t cover treatment because the type he had is largely caused by AZ addiction. Cadman paid for the treatment out of pocket, but it came at a huge hit to his finances. This is why Gabriel feels trapped now—Cadman saved his life.

Before you feel too heart warmed by Cadman, know that nothing he does in this entire book (except maybe at the very end) is done with any care about Gabriel or anyone but himself. He pushes Gabriel to reveal his cancer to get votes, then gets jealous when the public responds more favorably towards Gabriel than him. In retaliation, he drugs Gabriel again so he makes a fool of himself on tv. This prompts Gabriel to open up about his addiction to AZ, winning over the fans even more.

When River is found giving out AZ patches to kids at school and one of the kids dies, everything changes. While humans can terminate the life of an avatar with no consequences, the same isn’t true if an avatar causes another avatar’s termination. Since no laws govern all metaverse spaces, the consequences are up to the company sponsoring The Family Experiment, and they decide to terminate River’s avatar immediately (this scene was actually so heartbreaking). After being kicked out of their metaverse home, Gabriel sinks into depression, until a mysterious man visits and tells him that Cadman paid to frame River for the girl’s death. Interesting…

What is Dimitri and Zoe’s story?

Dimitri and Zoe Taylor-Georgian are in their forties and have a MetaBaby named Lenny. They have a bit of scandal in their past involving a former son of theirs named Adam, though it is awhile before we learn the details about what happened to him. Adam went missing and was presumed dead several years earlier (his body was never found). One day after the experiment has started, Zoe receives a package in the mail that terrifies her. It contains sealed court documents, and she hides it from Dimitri.

Though both parents grieve the son they lost, Zoe has a much harder time. She slips and calls Lenny Adam sometimes, and she keeps a lifelike doll that she pretends is Adam in the loft. Dimitri doesn’t know about this. Dimitri has secrets too. One day during the experiment, he receives a postcard that inexplicably reads, “To Mum and Dad”. Who sent it? In a flashback, we learn about Adam’s disappearance. The family were at Loch Ba in Blancaster Moor when Adam disappears. They call emergency services, but Adam is never found.

In the present, Adam unknowingly throws out Zoe’s Adam doll and his baby clothes, and Zoe is devastated. But as sad as she is, nothing can prepare her to receive the Adam doll in the mail with no note attached, but it is able to speak to them in the real Adam’s voice. Who is doing this? Zoe asks Dimitri to try holding the doll. If I’m honest as strange as this all was, I was touched by their grief and desire to see their son. Until the end, that is…

What is Hudson’s story?

Hudson Wright is a single man aged 22 who joins The Family Experiment to prove that single parent families can provide as much love as two-parent families. Hudson’s metachild is named Alice. Hudson is familiar to us for a different reason, though. Remember those flashbacks we get to twelve years earlier? A boy called Hudson was taken to facility with other children whose parents couldn’t afford to keep them. That facility is referred to as Ararat, and it is not a nice place.

Hudson’s chapters largely focus on his memories from Ararat and how that all led him to participate in The Family Experiment. In the present, Hudson is a fantastic parent to Alice, and slowly wins over skeptical viewers who found it creepy that a single man would want a daughter. But it’s clear Hudson has another goal in mind that he has kept hidden, and it all ties back to his years at Ararat.

What is Ararat?

In the past, Hudson meets another child at Ararat named Eva who arrived with her brother Cain. Hudson and Eva form a close friendship, but Cain doesn’t take to Hudson and wants him away from Eva. Hudson has no memory of his past before arriving, but many other kids do. It seems that parents who can’t afford their kids hand them over to this organization in exchange for the debts being paid off. The parents think they are sending their children to have a better life, but the reality is much worse. The kinder of this group of parents has their child’s memory wiped to prevent the emotional pain of being abandoned. It’s still horrible.

After months of testing, the children at Ararat are led to a different floor and sent through either a door on the right or on the left. Cain, Eva, and Hudson are sent to the right, and told that they scored high in empathy, emotion, and resiliency. Their job is to act in place of child avatars for customers who are beta testing what will eventually become the metachild program. This will help them develop children that look, act, and feel like real kids in the future. Hudson learns that any time someone misbehaves or disappoints the people in charge, they are sent through the door on the left. They don’t know what happens there, but they can tell it is bad.

Eva questions the people in charge and is sent to the left, and Cain never forgives Hudson whom he blames for putting ideas in her head. Cain and a group of boys jump Hudson, and Hudson uses his leadership position to put information on Cain’s device that gets him sent to the left side. While working with a client named Charles who lost his son, Hudson realizes what it would be like to have a parent. He is pulled away from that assignment without warning. Eventually, Hudson receives a message from someone who works at Ararat telling him to leave as soon as the opportunity presents itself. When that opportunity comes ten years after his arrival, he finds himself reassigned to a different part of the project in England, where he eventually encounters Cain again. Cain was the person who warned him to leave, and they have planned whatever is about to happen together.

What happens in the door to the left in Ararat?

After Hudson is pulled to be promoted to a broader role, he finally is taken to the left door. Inside the room are the children who were deemed to not have the qualities needed for the room on the right, where they teach AI happiness, resilience, and other positive emotions. On the left, the children teach AI about sadness, anger, and pain (both physical and emotional). The children are subjected to abuse in many forms, with a goal of understanding how far humans can be pushed. When a child reaches a point where they are no longer able to respond, they are given treatments that erase the part of the brain that remembers what they experienced so that the research can start again (this is apparently “the humane thing to do” according to the woman in charge). She refers to this as recycling the children until they are repurposed (brutal). Hudson sees his friend Eva, a shell of her former self.

What happens at the finale of The Family Experiment?

The finale is down to Hudson versus Dimitri and Zoe with a vote to determine the winner. The contestants are live on stage with Autumn, when Hudson drops a bombshell—he knows that Dimitri and Zoe’s son didn’t die that day at Loch Ba—in fact, he wasn’t even there. Hudson explains how they sold Adam to pay off their debts and faked his disappearance and death to cover it up, including Dimitri risking hypothermia to plant Adam’s jacket and trainer in the loch so they would wash up on shore.

Twelve years earlier, Zoe and Dimitri were unable to afford to live after incurring large medical bills when Adam’s appendix burst. They can’t find jobs with health insurance, and their current jobs keep being reduced and outsource to AI. Eventually, they make an arrangement with someone who will take Adam overseas and the family who takes him will pay their bills. They believe this will offer Adam a better life than they can afford. They wiped his memory before he went, hoping that made it easier.

At this point myself, Dimitri and Zoe, and everyone watching (and probably every reader) is certain that Hudson will reveal he is actually Adam. How else could Hudson know so much detail about the events that transpired twelve years earlier? Autumn asks Hudson directly if he is Adam, and Hudson says he is not Adam. The real Adam died the night he was taken. In fact, he was the boy who we saw help Hudson make it to shore when the dinghy transporting the children capsized.

Zoe and Dimitri deflect, arguing that many families in the UK are forced to make decisions like this to survive. It turns out that the whole story hasn’t been revealed. Zoe was driving when she struck two bicyclists, paralyzing a father and killing his son. To avoid prison, Zoe had to pay half of her wages to the victims until their death. In a twist, it’s revealed that Hudson’s assignment at Ararat to act as a child to a man named Charles after he tragically lost lost his son ended abruptly. Charles took his own life after the company pulled Hudson off the assignment. The client was the same man who Zoe hit, paralyzing him and taking the life of his son.

In the wake of these revelations, Autumn announces that the actions they admitted to on air in regards to selling their son Adam violated the terms of the show. Therefore, they are being pulled from the competition and their metachild Lenny will be terminated. This leaves Hudson as the sole remaining contestant, and he has a decision to make. Will he keep his metachild Alice, or accept the money and terminate her? Hudson reveals that he will take neither, and after an embrace with Alice, Hudson presses the button and deletes her.

Who is Hudson really?

One year later, the reader meets a man named Leo Hamilton, who is back on Mermaid Beach—the pebbled beach where the trafficked children are gathered and set for Ararat. Leo was not one of the trafficked children—at least not by his parents. Leo was an orphan and had a terrible life in community housing. He followed children who he was told were headed for better lives, down to Mermaid Beach. He soon realized the truth, but it was too late. He was forced on the boat where he met a scared boy wearing a New York t-shirt who had no memory of who he was. Leo called him ‘Hudson’ because of his shirt.

In a twist, Leo reveals that the boy he called Hudson didn’t survive the capsized dinghy—he helped Leo get to shore but died later from water in his lungs. Leo took his shirt and tags that revealed his identity, taking his place. This is how Leo eventually learned the identity of the child who saved him—Adam Taylor-Georgiou. The boy whose place Leo took was Dimitri and Zoe’s son. Leo (as Hudson) continued to pretend and eventually went on to be the person to expose everything.

Leo and Cain meet on Mermaid Beach where it all began and Cain explains the plan to expose Awakening. Awakening Entertainment never plans to release the children, they will either continue to be used for training or repurposed. Eventually, they will be sold off for medical use or to be used in brothels. Leo is shocked, having spent most of his time believing Awakening Entertainment was doing something to help people who wanted families achieve that. Cain says that Awakening plans to cast Leo on The Family Experiment as a single dad. The people at Awakening know he isn’t really Adam through DNA tests, but they don’t know who he is. He has no past and he is malleable. They will pack the cast with other contestants who can be manipulated due to their secrets, and ensure Hudson (Leo) wins.

What happens to the contestants after the show?

Woody and Tina meet up a year after the events of The Family Experiment. They are divorcing, but relatively amicably. At a restaurant where they are finalizing paperwork, Tina reveals that she found the bag with the phone and watch belonging to the boy Issy was accused of killing. She knows Woody hid them for Issy. However, Woody reflects that while Issy hit the boy with the brick, he was still alive and threatening to tell on her to the police. Without thinking, Woody hit the boy again, killing him. He cleaned up the fingerprints and DNA and took the phone and watch home to hide. When Issy is arrested, Woody can’t turn himself in and leave her with Tina, who despises her. He doesn’t admit to Tina that it was him, and the two finalize their divorce. Meanwhile we learn that after Issy left home, she made her way into a cargo container on a shipping boat intended for Russia. The container tips into the ocean and Issy perishes at sea.

Meanwhile, after they were expelled and Gabriel was told that Cadman had set up River, the two finally have a confrontation. Cadman accuses Gabriel of cheating on him, hoarding his money, and planning to leave him. Gabriel doesn’t know what he is talking about, but Cadman said an anonymous source provided him proof. Gabriel scoffs and says the proof is as credible as the stranger telling him Cadman had set River up. Cadman doesn’t deny it because it is true, and Gabriel leaves. Cadman waits for Gabriel to expose him or lash out, but Gabriel never does. A few days later, Cadman receives a video showing how all of the evidence against Gabriel was faked. Cadman gets an alert that Gabriel has gone on to be the public face of a campaign to help provide funding to adoptive parents. Cadman wants to reach out, but knows Gabriel is finally doing well without him. Cadman makes an anonymous donation to the campaign.

Salena has formed a friendship with the other women Jaden fathered children with. Netflix made a dramatized version of her story and Jaden’s murder on The Family Experiment, and Salena used that money to pay for IVF. She’s finally pregnant with her own child.

Dimitri and Zoe do not get charged with trafficking their own son after the retracted their confession that aired around the world. They now live in a police safehouse after an arson attempt on their home.

Cain and Leo worked on the team for Awakening Entertainment producing the show, but they also worked together behind the scenes to expose the company. While Leo worked with producers to make sure he was a viable winner, Cain helped identify applicants who could be exposed or manipulated. Rufus and Kitty, for instance, had a racism scandal in their past (one that wasn’t used because Rufus got them ejected all on his own). Selena and Jaden obviously had Jaden’s gambling debts, as well as Jaden’s name on three different birth certificates with three different women. Woody and Tina had a daughter who was found guilty of killing a fellow student and was living with them in house arrest. They set up Issy to have access to leave the basement, and the story took off from there.

Leo objected to the inclusion of Cadman and Gabriel, but producers overruled to get the celebrity element. Leo and Cain set up the fake documents and videos, sending them to Cadman. Cain then contacted Cadman and suggested that rather than expose Gabriel, he set up River to gain sympathy and make Gabriel look bad. Leo had a personal vendetta against Zoe and Dimitri, due to what they did to their son Adam (Leo’s first friend in memory of his second life) and what they did to the father and son that Zoe hit with her vehicle.

How does The Family Experiment end?

After Ararat was exposed on The Family Experiment, it was burned down. Leo went to New York when filming ended and found Eva in a hospital suffering from smoke inhalation. He brought her with him overseas, and they traveled around every time they worried about being discovered. In their final scene, Cain and Leo are caring for Eva who is emotionally stunted from the abuse she suffered at Ararat, but is slowly improving. The three have formed a family.

In a flashback, we meet a boy called Matheo who was discovered by a family in France and had no memories of where he came from. The family were worried that there was more to the story and scoured the news for missing children. They knew immediately this boy was Adam and that his parents were looking for him. They offered to get in contact with his parents, but Matheo told them not to. Matheo remembered a boy on the boat (who we now know was Leo) telling him that some parents wiped their children’s memory before trafficking them. He has no interest in connecting with his biological parents who gave him away.

Matheo grows up with the family and learns to work on their vineyard. When his parents saw the finale of The Family Experiment, they told Matheo about his parents being exposed. He watched it and realized that Hudson must have been the boy he saved that night when the dinghy capsized. Matheo and his parents started including photos of missing children on their wine bottles in the hopes that some may be recognized. He is invited to appear with Gabriel and the charity he worked for but declined, not wanting to expose the parents who took him in to scrutiny in case someone were to recognize him.