Day 525: The Gods Have Not Died in Vain

The third story in 'The Gods Will Not Be Slain' series has thrown me for a bit of a loop. It's a thought provoking story in more ways than one, and not at all what I was expecting. I like having my expectations defied, especially when a story goes above and beyond, but I'm not sure how I feel about it overall. I'll give a quick synopsis first.

The story feels as ephemeral as the mind of the machine intelligence that pervades Maddie's life throughout, and most of it takes place from just one little room. First it immediately resolves a cliff hanger from the second story by introducing Mist, Maddie's cloud-born sister. She is a child of David, and possibly many others, who has inherited their traits, including David's love of Maddie and Ellen. The structure of the story is built around Maddie getting to know Mist as they strive to keep a new threat from rising. After burying the last vestiges of David, Mist informs Maddie that a new company called Everlasting has been scouring what networks remain after the world wars have cooled, searching for pieces of the old gods that brought civilization to its knees. Its obvious that the mysterious CEO, Adam Ever, is trying to piece together a new way to upload people's minds to the cloud. Their systems are bulletproof too. Mist can't seem to hack her way in to stop them but she does get ahold of all the scraps of code they've compiled and sends them to Maddie.

Maddie, meanwhile, studies the scraps and tries to piece together what it was that made the gods turn on the world they left behind. Again, all this takes place from one room. Mist gives Maddie regular news reports relating to Everlasting's progress and the general state of the world beyond. Ellen has been working as an advisor to the city of Boston, and also serves as an inlet so the reader can learn new things about the world. Basically everyone is starving and civilization is on the brink of collapse. Its just not possible to support billions of human lives without the advanced infrastructure destroyed in the wars.

The milieu and the inquiry into Everlasting and the gods are the plot threads that drive the story forward. The relationship between Maddie and Mist ties back in when Maddie starts buying up robot parts to build Mist a body so she can interact with the 'real world.' Mist however, doesn't seem to have much of an interest. The body she builds is a cute little rover with a bunch of sensors and mechanical arms, and very neat. Maddie built it to assuage the crippling nostalgia for the real world that she discovers in the leftover bits of code. She comes to realize that this nostalgia is what drove Chanda and the others to destroy the world (a point I'm not completely clear on, but I'll get to that). Mist however does not have this critical flaw. Her body extends into every machine and network on the planet, and since she never lived a corporeal life, she feels no lost connection to the world. The small addendum that Maddie built for her is inconsequential by comparison the vast legion of machines and sensors that Mist can take advantage of.

In the end, Adam Ever makes contact with Mist. And yes, it kinda does just come out of nowhere. Through Mist, he meets Maddie, and explains that the world is too fragile to support mankind's ambitions any longer, and that his ultimate goal is to upload as many human minds as possible so that humanity might live on in the cloud. He overcame the flaw by willingly destroying his healthy body in the upload process, and to save the world, everybody else will have to join him. The end.

The structure is ... pretty weird, honestly. The antagonist is really slippery, and by that I mean, hard to identify. If I had to classify this story, I'd call it a man vs self. From how I'm interpreting this, I think Maddie is in the process of overcoming her own nostalgia for the world while still living in it. Not a single scene takes place outside of her house, indicative of how withdrawn she already is. Adam Ever is also not really the bad guy despite serving the role for most of the story. The natural conclusion after their meeting would be for Maddie to upload her mind and escape from the limitations of the human world (in my opinion) although the end is left more open than that. If I could change any one thing about the story, it would be to introduce Adam Ever much earlier in the series. His turnabout into a figure that's not actually trying to destroy the world, but save it, would be a lot stronger if he had existed for more than, like, ten pages. There are other things I would change too though.

I think the main goal of this story was provoke deep thought about the corporeal nature of human existence. It feels like the point that Liu was trying to get across all along, and in that way, it resolves the other two stories pretty well. I can't help but feel wanting for a more solid conclusion for Maddie, Ellen, and Mist though. I guess that must be my own nostalgia for corporeal existence showing. I never got got much of a sense of rising action or stakes in Maddie's personal life (though the world is clearly going downhill fast), and her relationship with Mist is pretty tragic since they can't ever see eye to eye by nature of their existence. Ellen's plot felt forgotten by the end, but all she really did was inform Maddie about the world anyway. She didn't even interact with Mist once, come to think of it. Shouldn't she want to meet her dead husband's daughter?

I'm left feeling hollow at the end of this one, but maybe that's what he was going for. It reminds me a lot of Phillip K Dick's stories actually. The plot just kinda happens and you're left to make sense of it after the fact rather than in the moment. I felt that a lot of the heavy lifting of the story was left to me the reader rather than the writer. It makes it feel thought provoking to be sure, but also meandering, and a little confusing. Its hard to tell what the next step is at any given moment, even compared to the previous two stories in the series. That's not to say it wasn't worth a read. Its just not your typical plot is all.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley