The Medusa Chronicles: “Jupiter Within” (6.54-6.67)

The final arc of "The Medusa Chronicles." On one hand, "Peace Ambassador" basically killed this story for me, and "Jupiter Within" just serves to bury the corpse under even more arbitrary, unsatisfying shit. On the other hand...there are a few moments in this final arc that hint at totally different scifi stories that I really would want to read. It's just enough to tease the imagination, which makes everything else about the ending - and the book in general, honestly - even more disappointing.

So. They set a course for an opening in the Machines' construction and let the Kon-Tiki II take them and the stupid teleporting computer virus they're infected with down into Jupiter's depths. Falcon is afraid that Adam's people will shoot them down before they even get to see what's down there (not that that really makes much difference, since they think they're about to die anyway), but then Adam says...um...

Why the hell would they risk this?

Wouldn't they be afraid that an infected Adam - or a treacherous Falcon - would do exactly this in order to trick them, before changing course at the last second and delivering an info-viral payload into the city?

What if they take the Kon-Tiki down under the city, but then rise back up and hit them somewhere else?

But wait, it gets better! Notice how Adam referred to an opening in the underside of the platform as a "weapon port." Falcon asks about this, and - as they plummet down through said port and see the whole battery of giant superlasers pointing down into the planet's depths with at least as many gunpoints as the anti-orbital battery pointing upward - Adam explains.

The Machines were never able to recover Orpheus' personality from a point after his realization that he wasn't alone. However, since their conquest of Jupiter from the humans, they've sent subsequent missions into what they call Jupiter Within. Some of the probes simply went dark and never returned. Others floated back up with their hulls turned inside out and their AI pilots suffering in irreparable insanity. When they tried sending an armed expedition down there, the expedition was wiped out completely, and a reprisal attack from below using exotic physics weaponry dealt massive damage to the Machines' lower-atmosphere construction.

So, since then, they've avoided venturing - let alone building anything - below a certain depth within the Jovian atmosphere, and they've lined the underside of everything at that depth with weaponry. As I predicted several arcs ago, the Machines have been keeping the existence of the eldritch abomination(s) in Jupiter Within a secret from the humans for fear of them trying to poke it as well.

...

Okay. So. Let's think about how this intersects with the other recent plot points.

First: the Machines are afraid of provoking Jupiter Below again. And yet, they're letting an airship containing two very skilled (and likely very disillusioned, at this point) explorers AND A HIGHLY DANGEROUS INFOWEAPON tumble freely down there?

Second: the Machines have learned that an extremely hostile, extremely powerful agent inhabits Jupiter, and that it could decide to come upstairs and ruin their day anytime it feels like it. And yet...they made Jupiter the center of their entire system-wide civilization?

It's that second one that's really hard to justify. The entire plot for the last couple of arcs revolved around the Machines turning themselves into a Matrioshka Brain. They had enough of it built to significantly lower the sun's output long before they started disassembling Earth for more material, and it's been another seventy years since then. We were also told that they overcame their hesitance to chow down on Venus, and that they have indeed been chowing down on it as well for some time. Suddenly saying that most of them are living on Jupiter instead of the sun at this point - and indeed never going anywhere with that Dyson Sphere at all during the book's conclusion - is already a real wtf. Now we're being told that on top of that, the Machines have very good reason to specifically NOT want to live on Jupiter, let alone make it the lynchpin of their entire operation. So, why the fuck are they here?

It makes sense for the Machines to be defending Jupiter to prevent the humans from discovering the Deep Jovians. But this isn't just a military base or a defence perimeter, it's explicitly the Machines' adopted homeworld where most of them live. Why?

...

The first half or so of "Jupiter Within," even more so than the destruction of Earth at the end of "The Troubled Centuries," echoes Orpheus' descent in "Return to Jupiter." Granted, this time it's a dialogue between Falcon and Adam rather than the narration of a single observer, but still. It's got the same energy, the same scenery, and the same alternating between the descent and something else happening somewhere else.

Unfortunately, the dialogue itself is pretty disappointing. On account of Falcon and Adam both having shed all their points of conflict with one another offscreen and behaving like family again after something like one paragraph of apologies. Which means it pretty much defaults to them agreeing with each other about how dumb and stupid their respective societies are, commenting on the scenery, and adapting to the ever-increasing gravity and air pressure.

That last bit is at least somewhat interesting. When the pressure gets too high for the airship to handle, Adam turns himself into a smart liquid and covers Falcon like a suit. When the pressure gets too strong for this membrane form to handle, Adam (with Falcon's consent) dissolves Falcon's cybernetic body and concentrates his mass around his brain, keeping his mass thick enough to handle the pressure and also apparently forming life support equipment within said mass. When the pressure and heat get too intense even for that, Adam turns himself into basically a myelin-sheath around each individual neuron. And then, when even that can't keep the organic material intact, Falcon permits Adam to replace his neurons bit by bit with virtual analogues, digitizing Falcon's consciousness and making him share his own robotic body entirely.

That's pretty intense. And simultaneously serves as an undoing of everything that's happened to Falcon since that 21st century blimp crash, and a maximization of it. All the ugly kludgework of cybernetics and burned up bits of leathery skin are wiped away, but Falcon has less and less and less of anything he can even pretend to call "himself" afterward. His entire existence is now contingent on someone else actively deciding, each and every single millisecond, to keep making him exist. No agency. No autonomy. No hope for ever being any other way again.

Not that it matters. In time, even the perfect sphere of high tech supermetal that Adam and Falcon now inhabit will fall to the Jovian surface where even it cannot survive.

Like I said, this stuff is good. It's just that it would be equally good if the man and the robot were two new characters who were only introduced at the beginning of the descent. Nothing about Adam is relevant to it. For Falcon...his previous cybernetic history IS relevant and does make it stronger, but none of that really intersects with his relationship with Adam. For the climax of a full-length novel, it only benefits a little bit from all the stuff leading up to it.

...

Also...every now and then, Adam reminds us that the stupid teleporting computer virus is clawing at him from within and interfering with his ability to function, that it's taking the brunt of his attention and leaving him with only a fraction of said attention for anything else. And yet, he's able to do delicate brain surgery and life support on Falcon, and even upload his entire consciousness and keep it running without any noticeable change in Falcon's personality (insofar as he ever had a consistent one to begin with) and cognitive ability.

Now, I can accept that the Machines have become so advanced that Adam can do all that with just the processing power that this one little person-sized mass of smart metal disconnected from any larger power or computational infrastructure can provide. But then I have to look at the Io thing, and the general framing of the war between the Machines and the humans, and it just doesn't add up. Aside from the stupid teleporting computer virus, human technology just doesn't appear to be anywhere close to this level. I have trouble believing that the Machines failed to stop the development of the Io superweapon. Or even that they failed to evict the humans from Jupiter's moons a long time ago.

"The Troubled Centuries" made it clear that this is not war, this is pest control. Then, in "Peace Envoy," it seemed like it had become war again after all, somehow. But now, looking at human versus Machine capabilities, I don't know how it could NOT still be pest control.

...

Anyway, this is all intercut with Dr. Tem back on Io. The evil siblings come back down to sickbay to yell at her for letting Falcon figure out what she'd done to him and warn the Machines about it, but she manages to play innocent convincingly enough for them. Granted, the way that that scene played out I don't know that her warning to Falcon actually *did* make a difference, but oh well. Anyway, all hands are to abandon Io now as it's about to launch itself into Jupiter, but this won't give her time to evacuate her patients. So, Tem ops to go down with the moon. The Springers shrug and get to their own ship.

Once the supervillain siblings are out of earshot, Dr. Tem opens a commlink to her resistance cell's leader, the Boss.

So yeah. The simps faked their own extinction and have spent the last few centuries growing their numbers in secret. Somewhere. Without anyone knowing.

The Boss is the same individual simp who was on the cruise ship in "Encounter in the Deep" and who gave Falcon a verbal dicksucking. This is apparently ALSO, under an alias, the "last" simp who climbed Olympus Mons before faking his own death of old age. Now he's the leader of the entire system-wide resistance movement. Resistance against a regime ruled by the asshole descendants of the asshole astronaut who gave an annoying speech on that same cruise ship.

As for how and why Doctor Tem ended up joining them, well:

"For you, the day that Howard Falcon handed you a toy that you dropped was the most important day in your life. For him, it was Tuesday."

Yeah. This lady became a dedicated member of the resistance who devoted her life to saving the solar system almost literally because Howard Falcon passed her in the hall once. Her composition was altered when she came in contact with the center of the universe.

...

A story about the simps faking their species' death, settling somewhere hidden in the solar system, and forming the backbone of a rebel alliance against the regime while avoiding notice by the Machines would be way more interesting than all but a few chapters of this one.

Maybe nix Ham being their president-for-life for six hundred years, though. Ngl, that kinda makes them seem just as autocratic as the humans, if less bloodthirsty. To be fair though, I think that this unfortunate implication is just yet another symptom of Falcon being a narrative Sagittarius A. Ham is the only simp Falcon has been seen interacting with, therefore he's the only simp who can do anything important for the book's entire multi-century timeline. Loose the Falcon obsession, and we'd be able to have a succession of diverse simp leaders.

...

Well, regardless, on the topic of being touched by God, Falcon and Adam fall deep enough into Jupiter within for contractually mandated Superior Godlike Aliens of this Clarke-derived story to snag them. What, did you think there wouldn't be Superior Godlike Aliens? These writers are doing a very uneven job of approaching Clarke's quality, but they do at least know how to check the list.

The Adam-Falcon fusion is grabbed by what they can only vaguely perceive as something like living mass effect fields and pulled through the distinctly artificial-looking exotic matter structures that Orpheus described at the end of his transmission. Then, they're in a virtual(?) recreation of Falcon's childhood home from the prologue, separated again into Falcon in an organic kid body and Adam as the toy robot he was named after.

Adam doesn't appear to find this demeaning, which, um, what the fuck? Maybe he's just too glad about the computer virus being gone to care.

At least, I assume the virus is gone. He never actually says it is, but him appearing to forget all about it implies that it is in fact purged.

The sky outside the house is pink and swirling with hydrocarbon clouds, and the toys and nick-knacks on the shelves include several models of Orpheus in various sizes. Outside, a snowman is beckoning for them to come talk to it. Turns out that the snowman is...Orpheus!

Why his new First Jovian-granted telepresence power manifests as ghostly versions of his original box-form from before they ever found him, I couldn't tell you.

Anyway, the First Jovians have taken a dim view of the Machines darkening the sun and destroying the inner planets, but the humans dropping a moon on them is the last straw. They're about ready to wipe out the humans and all of their creations. Seeing a human and a Machine sacrifice themselves in an attempt to save their people's from each other has given the First Jovians pause, though, so now they're having Orpheus ask the two of them to suggest a course of action other than extermination that will make them stop wrecking the solar system.

Okay, I guess we're doing a Day The Earth Stood Still/Star Trek Errand of Mercy type deal. Kinda saw it coming, but it's a golden oldie, I can dig.

...unfortunately, the book goes and ruins it a few paragraphs later.

Orpheus teleports Falcon and Adam into the sun (which they perceive as the living room of Falcon's house, with the fireplace representing Sol's internal fusion reactions and the user interface for the First Jovian machinery controlling it manifesting as a poker) and tells them to deliver a message to the humans and Machines. What message? Well, we never actually get to hear it, aside from a few little bits. But the important part is that Orpheus tells them to come up with a peace proposal, and then - just paragraphs later - proposes one of his own that he makes them use.

A deus ex machina ending where the superior godlike aliens show up and dictate the solution to us savages is a genre staple. I'm not sure if it's a GOOD genre staple, but it's got enough precedent that even if you dislike it it only merits a shrug, an eyeroll, and maybe an exhausted sigh. In this case though, the protagonist(s?) have an important decision point dangled in front of them, only for the deus to snatch it away again without warning.

Also, as Superior Godlike Alien edicts go, this one is erm...well, I wouldn't put it in my top ten.

Unilaterally order the Machines to all come back to Jupiter and let the First Jovians warp them to stars and gas giants in other star systems. Humans stay in what's left of the Solar system. No learning to coexist. No compromises. Just sending the two sides away from each other.

-________-

If that's the solution, then why did it matter that Adam and Falcon just demonstrated the possibility for human/Machine cooperation and empathy? "You've proven you can tolerate each other, so we'll separate you?"

And...the First Jovians think that the Machines will be useful in helping them figure out other, similarly-tiered civilizations. Okay, on one hand, Orpheus is a Machine, and he was useful in something sort of adjacent to that, so there's kind of a precedent. On the other hand, they want to use a society that they were just on the brink of wiping out for being too wantonly destructive as ambassadors? Really?

It's especially baffling that Orpheus would phrase the offer to the Machines like this:

Offering the Machines access to thousands of new planets, ones with native ecologies, after seeing how they've treated literally every other life form in the solar system, is nothing short of insane. I mean, you could tell them "fuck with the native life here and you're dead," but in that case you might as well threaten everyone into behaving right here in the solar system.

Maybe the First Jovians just want this to be someone else's problem.

...

Oh, speaking of native ecologies, I still can hardly believe that the medusa ending up having nothing to do with the resolution of this conflict despite their name being in the title and their homeworld being the site of the final mission.

I was kind of expecting it to turn out that the medusae and the Deep/First Jovians are one and the same, with the medusae as we know them being either a luddite offshoot or just a paleo LARP using pseudo-natural bodies. True, that would make this ending even closer to the twist with the Organians in Star Trek's "Errand of Mercy," but that would still be better than them just being a red herring with no importance outside of being victims in arc 3.

...

So. They use the poker to cause a hiccup in the sun's core fusion to get everyone's attention. It takes a long time for the heat and photon waves of this hiccup to escape the sun's mass, but the neutrino fluctuations are detectible immediately. Good on the book for establishing that neutrino sensors have been a thing for a very long time (with the "orchestra" back in arc 2) and thus everyone has them by now. Once attention has been gotten, Orpheus has Adam and Falcon lay their hands on the poker and speak, so that the First Jovian godtech bullshit will carry the vibrations of their voices down into the fireplace and modulates the sun's neutrino output to encode their voices like a radio signal.

We only get to hear the first few sentences of the message, and one little aside from near the end.

We actually don't get to read all, or even most, of this novel-ending, history-changing speech.

The one bit we do hear from toward the end, incidentally, is this hilariously stupid inclusion of Falcon's:

So, basically, Falcon wants her dead.

The Supervillain Siblings' soldiers end up turning on them after hearing the message, causing them to reverse Io's direction and not carry out the orders to summarily execute Tem. But there's no way in hell that Falcon could have known that things would play out that way. Hell, for all we know, someone still DID kill Tem for being a traitor as soon as they'd finished complying with the First Jovians' demands.

...

In situations like this, I try to put myself in the character's shoes and ask myself: if I was as scared, stressed, and short on time as the character, would I be able to make better decisions than they did?

Usually, the answer is no.

In this case, the answer is yes.

Even if I were as confused and stressed as Falcon was right now, I still would not say something that stupid. Neither would you. Neither would almost anyone who isn't a literal child.

...

And, that ends the arc. There are two epilogues.

The first finishes off the interlude series about Grandpa Seth Springer's suicide mission to deflect the Icarus meteor. I've been reading those to see if they ever become relevant to the main story. Aside from the main story also ending with a suicide mission, they really don't. No foreshadowing. No rugpull recontextualizations. Total waste of pages.

The second epilogue has Falcon and Hope Dhoni being resurrected in a virtual heaven in the far future. They resurrected Falcon by reassembling the personality files and DNA records that the First Jovians eventually spat back out of Jupiter. They (not sure who. someone.) resurrected Dhoni by scanning the cloud of dust and water vapor left from the destruction of her Memory Garden, using their superadvanced big brain computers to virtually reverse each particle's trajectory, reconstruct the intact Memory Garden, and then create a simulacrum of her based on Falcon's meticulous memento-collection. This resulted in a faithful reincarnation of the woman who was.

Yes. Really.

Anyway, it's like the rapture or whatever. But also a working vacation afterlife, because apparently the First Jovians have met another alien species that they're having trouble figuring out, and these impossibly advanced reality-warping godlike superbeings decided that their best bet for establishing an understanding was to resurrect this one human and his doctor from a bazillion years ago. The adventure continues. The end.


This setting has potential. This story never had any.

A series of novels and short stories exploring the simps, the Human-Machine wars, and the Jupiter discoveries might have done the concept justice. Howard Falcon should have fulfilled Clarke's sequel hook by being relevant at the beginning, at the end, and maybe at a couple points in the middle. Other than that, we should have had dozens of different protagonists, some of whom had nothing to do with Falcon at all. Human protagonists. Simp protagonists. Machine protagonists. Hell, maybe even medusa protagonists if the writers were up to that kind of xenofiction challenge.

If Baxter and Reynolds didn't want to commit to a whole sprawling scifi universe that would require that much work to do justice to, then that's understandable. But in that case, they shouldn't have made a whole sprawling scifi universe that would requite that much work to do justice to.

...

I've already pointed out plenty of examples of things that should have been their own entire stories, characters who should have been multiple characters, and spotlight moments that should have focused on someone other than Falcon and Falcon's tiny circle of immortal co-stars. I'll point out another example that occurred to me early on, though, because I think it's really illustrative: Trayne Springer should have been a full co-protagonist in "Return to Jupiter."

Like, sure, have Howard Falcon in his airship be the one who goes off to see what Ceto and her tribe need help with and ends up uncovering New Nantucket. But the whole spy mission with the intrigue that never really ended up paying off except by accident? That should have been Trayne's story (also, change his last name, because holy fuck was the Springer thing stupid lmao). Altenate between Falcon doing field detectivework out in the Jovian clouds, and Trayne immersing himself in a dangerous game of political intrigue on Io or Ganymede. He's torn between family loyalty and national loyalty as his Earthgov aunt has him uncovering the dirty secrets of a Martian government that he really wants to think the best of. Since Trayne and Falcon are established to already know each other, it makes sense that they'd occasionally radio each other for help; Howard asks Trayne for data on Martian-Machine-Combine cargo shipments as he starts to suspect the truth, and Trayne asks Howard to scan this or that region of Jupiter for signs of illegal activity he's picked up hints about.

They end up cracking the case during the Orpheus launch ceremony, with Trayne's political detectivework leading Falcon to New Nantucket, and Falcon transmitting the data back to Trayne as he does the dogfight to rescue Ceto. Now, Trayne has to make the hardest choice of his life; does he relay Falcon's footage to his handlers and put his official witness stamp on it, knowing that by doing so he'll be starting a war against his own people? How will his Martian nationalism handle the revelation about the atrocities they've been committing to fuel their proud success story? Falcon gets the dogfighting action sequence, but Trayne's decision is the real dramatic climax of "Return to Jupiter."

And then you can have Trayne as the solo protagonist of other stories not involving Falcon, as a highly-placed POV for the Martian side of the coming political and military developments. While meanwhile Falcon does other things. And Adam does other things. And Ham does still other things. And other protagonists who are more than one degree of separation from Howard Falcon do yet other things. Falcon can still be important without him needing to be the most important all the time.

The story would still have issues. There'd still be the techno-fetishist tangents. There'd still be the unintentionally unlikeable characters. I imagine there'd still be a lot of Great Man Theory biases, even if it was less ridiculous. But still, if all else went well, it could have been a generally good scifi series with a few charmingly autistic writing tics. Rather than the dragging, schizophrenic, disappointing mess that the book ended up being despite its occasional moments of strength.

Also that ending would have still sucked no matter what.