Jayd Din was a therapist who, after the death of her child, closed off emotionally and turned to treating machines suffering from PTSD from fighting in an interstellar war. Aksum Muse is man who fought and was scarred in that same war, with cybernetic implants that allow him to communicate with machines. Or from his perspective, allow the machines to hound him relentlessly. Muse might also know something certain parties want buried, and its through those attempts to close the loop he and Din come together.
So there's an obvious hook her between the woman who ran towards machines to escape the pain she associates with being flesh, and the man who ran away from machines because he thinks they want to kill him for something he did or didn't do. Grief running in opposite directions.
Still, the most interesting part of this book is that humanity somehow decided the best way to advance machine consciousness was to give them religion. Make them believe in the Machrist and the Control-C as some underpinning for the three laws - sorry, commandments - about not harming humans and whatnot. Then humans decide they need machines to fight their wars. But wars involve killing humans, and that's against the teachings of the Machrist. So they had to come up with justifications - they're evil humans, not of God - and it still fucked the machines - or "talents", as Luceno calls them - up real good.
One of the more disturbing parts is when a government is trying to gather intel on the thing someone else wants to keep buried. They question a talent under the guise of an "inquisition", possibly causing the intelligence to collapse entirely by threatening to excommunicate it because it won't (can't) give them what they want.
The political maneuvering is important to the plot, but Luceno can't keep it interesting. It's operating on a level so far above the threads with Din and Muse that it interacts obliquely for most of the book, and ends up feeling like a distraction from where the focus is clearly intended to be.
Likewise, there's a subplot with a man who is a serial killer of sorts, targeting talents out of serious mommy issues, that too often feels divorced from the larger story. His actions are pinned on Muse as a way to try and get other people to catch Muse, and the killer is angered by how Din dismisses his acts as being of limited skill. Again, though, most of his impact is so secondhand or indirect it almost feels comical. He tries to strike at Din by killing the talent that runs the apartment complex she lives in, and by doing so, traps the extraction teams of the two different factions in an elevator together, preventing either of them from catching Muse.
Overall, the book takes a while to get moving, and since much of the delay is things that feel tangential to the plot, it comes off as padding.
'Early on when the machine beckoned, Ax believed he could keep a lid on the noise. He'd had trouble in the past, but he was as eager to make a fresh start as SOLTAIR was to converse. Wasn't it time he made his peace with them, as Professor Dobler had suggested years earlier? With one of them, at any rate? So he paid a call on SOLTAIR's residence, placing himself near enough to allow the machine a tour through his mind, access to his Machrist-encoded thoughts.
Ax's mistake.'
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