Mathieu Bablet's Carbon & Silicon follows two androids through their lives, intertwined with a rise-and-fall cycle of human history. The passage of time is marked by how many years the two androids have been aware/alive, starting with when they're first turned on, and are simply faces set onto a machine. We see them given bodies, albeit ones decided on by a group of shareholders. So Silicon is given a the body of a black male, but the shareholders specifically insist the body have a smaller penis size. Carbon ends up with a blonde woman's body, and when one of the shareholders insists on bigger breasts, a designer mentions they're going to have to do something to counter the additional weight.
Bablet does not draw them as perfect gods. They look like the regular people that inhabit the world. Lumpy and oddly shaped. Necks that seem too long and thin, heads too small for their bodies. Noriko, one of the chief designers explains their primary purpose would be to care for the elderly, who are increasing in number, while the rest of the population has no time to care for them. They're a product, designed to look friendly and non-threatening.
And because they're product, there's the matter of planned obsolescence. Otherwise, how will money be made? Their bodies are designed to shut down after 15 years, so it's a matter of finding ways around that. Carbon is aided by Noriko, while Silicon figures out his own method after he makes an escape.
After year 15, Bablet begins to jump forward at irregular intervals. Essentially offering snapshots not only of Carbon and Silicon's lives, but humanity as well. Some last only a few pages, a brief encounter. Others go on for twenty pages or more. Carbon jumps from body to body, and each new snapshot starts with a full-face view of her in her current form, distinguished by a vertical scar on the forehead. Silicon keeps repairing his body, so it's always the same face.
We see changes in the world, as people spend more and more time hooked into a network consciousness of sorts. Carbon likes to meet Silicon at an airport in Hong Kong, but there are fewer and fewer people. Why physically travel if you can just project your mind? Presumably that declines as resources grow scarce. People are kept out with high walls, drought is rampant, medicine is lacking. There are fires and riots. The company that bought the company that created Carbon and Silicon still hunts them nearly two centuries later, which seems improbable to me.
With the jumps in time and space, we don't always know exactly what's happened. At one point, Carbon and Silicon are living in the upper level of what seems like it used to be an urban neighborhood, but is now almost completely underwater. There's no one else in sight for that entire segment, although Silicon sees whales traveling through the streets like underwater highways.
And that's not the end, humanity continues in its own fumbling way, but the way we only see it in pieces contributes to Carbon's growing sense of disconnection. Silicon never seems terribly concerned about people. His goal is to travel the world and see it. Carbon is the one who, after her first escape from death, travels halfway around the world to Noriko. She lives with people for years, helps them pay bills or feed their children, but gradually she stops. She finds Silicon in the middle of a riot and they just slip away. Let the humans burn themselves out.
But where Silicon explores the physical, Carbon delves into the mental landscape. She spends more and more time in a wireless network consciousness where time stretches out, which Bablet represents as a sort of architecture on overexposed film. She can process a million thoughts in the time it takes to speak a word aloud, so why exist in such a slow, degraded place?
These differences drive the two of them apart, more than once, though it's interesting the blind spots they have. Carbon reminds Silicon that one of these days, he won't be able to be repaired. True, but one of these days, all the wireless networks Carbon relies on for this connectivity will fail as well. From her perspective inside that world, that may be the equivalent to how far I am from the heat-death of the universe, but it will happen. Also, for all that time and collective intelligence, they never seem to actually come up with any useful ideas. Or at least, we never see any sign they've devised something to materially improve their circumstances. I guess the idea is, they don't need to, just stay in the virtual bubble forever.
There's also a whole thing about Noriko very obviously neglecting her biological children in favor of Carbon, and the resentment this produces in her youngest daughter. Carbon honestly seems more bothered by it and sympathetic than Noriko, who says her having kids was a mistake, selfish. Which also comes up a lot. Human inability to reconcile individual needs or desires with collective good. I don't think Bablet has a solution, or at least neither of the leads are interested in that problem. Perhaps to be content with less. Carbon encounters a woman from a nearby village that says she and her family are pretty happy with what they've got. Is that a life without the relentless comparison to others Carbon says humans suffer from?
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