Day 523: The Gods Will Not Be Slain

Continuing Ken Liu's 'The Gods Will Not Be Chained' series, the second story is a lot more action focused. Again I'll be mostly comparing this to the TV adaptation, 'Pantheon,' and this one has some really interesting contrasts that arise from the difference in medium.

Sometimes, the story read almost as if poking fun at the way the show portrays the UIs fighting each other in a virtual realm. The show uses a ton of cool animation to portray how the gods might fight each other, usually from the perspective of Maddie's virtual reality setup. The stories take a different approach though, and are a lot more vague and realistic, but because of that realism, they make the show seem a little hokey by comparison. It's kinda funny sometimes.

One of my favorite moments comes when Maddie's father David and another UI named Vinod Chanda are going at each other. Chanda, unlike in the show, is a straight-up warmonger without any redeeming qualities. He's the primary antagonist of the second story, and wants nothing more than to watch the world burn for how humans turned him into a machine intelligence. To that end, he and several other violent UIs have been starting conventional wars between destabilized nations by cutting off power and other utilities, sending the world spiraling. David and has been fighting him tooth and nail across all digital fronts to prevent him from getting his hands on the nuclear codes he'll need to wipe out all life on the planet.

And unfortunately, he's winning. Chanda takes out one of David's allies, Laurie Lowell (who I was bummed to find out that Maddie never actually meets in the story), and then goes after David. Its hard fought, but without Laurie's help, David can't hold off Chanda's onslaught.

Here's an earlier quote that gives some insight into how the UIs fight each other.

But wars among the gods happened in a matter of nanoseconds. Within the darkness of the memory inside some server—missile command, power grid, stock exchange, or even an ancient inventory system—the programs slashed and hacked at each other, escalating privileges, modifying stacks, exploiting system vulnerabilities, masking themselves as other programs, overflowing buffers, overwriting memory locations, sabotaging each other like viruses. Maddie was a good enough programmer to at least understand that in such a war, the need to reach over the network for some piece of data could mean a delay of milliseconds—an eternity in the context of the gigahertz clock cycles of modern processors.

Maddie makes a roadtrip with her mother to tearfully resurrect her father by using the vestiges of David that have been running on the Logorhythms server he was originally installed on. To her horror though, she discovers that she's accidentally brought Chanda right to David by means of a tracking virus he implanted in David's code during their earlier confrontation. After a quick back-and-forth, David makes his final stand as Maddie watches from the physical world. This is where some of the unintentional humor begins.

Unlike the movies, there wasn’t going to be some fancy graphical gauge showing her what was happening in the ether.

That and the earlier explanation are pretty much all you get. Its much more focused on the emotional stakes for Maddie. It's pretty cool to see the veil of calm that falls over the room, knowing that the battle going on just right there in those computers could end the world.

Compare this to the equivalent scene in the show though ...

https://youtu.be/xlJIaa2ZHA4?si=c2GI6_Ntz_0CVwy_

Which is a five-minute long, fully choreographed and animated fight scene. There's just a lot more going on, and it's funny how the story avoids this kinda tropey virtual fight scene by leaning into a human character's perspective.

For all the extra bells and whistles in the show, Chanda doesn't get to drop this epic line though:

"These wars are too slow. I’ve made up my mind, even if I must burn with the world. It’s time for the nukes."

I won't spoil it any more than I have. The story is pretty good, but what's missing is actually the main antagonist of the show, Stephen Holstrom, the pioneer who invented the technology to upload human minds to the cloud in the first place. I'm not sure how he'll be handled in the third story, but it seems like a pretty tight time constraint to explain who begot all this violence and why without even having mentioned him in the first two-thirds of the story. I'm excited to see where it goes though.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley