BUBBLEGUM is set in an alternate present-day world in which the internet does not exist, and has never existed. Rather, a wholly different species of interactive technology --- a "flesh-and-bone robot" called the Curio --- has dominated both the market and the cultural imagination since the late 1980s. Belt Magnet, who as a boy in greater Chicago became one of the lucky first adopters of a Curio, is now writing his memoir, and through it we follow a singular man out of sync with the harsh realities of a world he feels alien to, but must find a way to live in.