The Medusa Chronicles (4.33-4.43)

The historical interludes continue to have less-than-obvious relevance, so I think I'll just talk about them in aggregate once their purpose is clear. For now, arc four: The Troubled Centuries.

The arc title is a quote from the end of Meeting With Medusa, about Falcon one day helping resolve a human-AI conflict in "the troubled centuries ahead." So, this arc spans a nearly four hundred year period from 2391 to 2784, taking up the latter 4/5ths of Adam's ultimatum timeline for Earth and the many intermittent wars fought for other bits of the solar system.

I thought the "troubled centuries" would have begun with the Kuiper Revolt and thus included everything in the previous arc, but apparently not. Also, this arc covers the longest time period by far, but for some reason it starts out by fastforwarding clear through the first 1/5th of Adam's timeline, which is an odd decision, to say the least. Seems like that should have been an eventful century, especially for the one guy who the Machines are willing to give the time of day. Well, it's a novel filled with odd decisions, so.


This arc is essentially four episodes from throughout the 24th through 28th centuries. One is set on Mercury, one on Mars, one on Saturn, and then finally - for the first time since the intro chapters - one on Earth. The Mercury section is probably the high point of the entire novel so far, exceeding the Jovian drama in both power and tension and getting me eager to see what happens next. Unfortunately, that just set me up for disappointment with the following parts. They're all "trite, but some good scifi scenery" at best, with the Mars episode actually being an even bigger waste of time than the fucking cruise ship plot in arc one.

Overall, the shape of it is that Falcon - and the rest of humanity - discovers what Adam's true goal is. The Machines want to migrate their consciounesses into a Dyson's Sphere, and they'll need a few planets' worth of materials to build it. While they couldn't possibly have known exactly how long it will take, what with technological advancement and fluke setbacks both being unpredictable, Adam reasoned that five hundred years ought to be more than enough time to finish processing Mercury and Venus. Earth and its moon will be the last ingredients, which is why Adam didn't give any ultimatum for the (also densely human-inhabited) Mars. Over these five centuries, various diplomatic and military solutions are attempted, all failures. Reluctantly, humanity flees the entire inner system, and when the time runs out the Machines destroy Earth.

I just made it sound way cooler than most of it actually is. In the interest of staying positive though (and there are some very positive bits in "The Troubled Centuries," and since the ordering isn't all that important for three out of the four, I'll go from worst subsection to best.

So, to begin with, the dumb stupid pointless time wasting fucking Mars part.

Falcon, Dhoni, and some other people whose names will never matter are sent on a mission to Mars' Olympus Mons summit by...Earthgov? They say its Earthgov, but earlier it's established that Earth has granted independence to all of the colony worlds in order to remove internal conflicts while they fight the Machines, so it seems like it should be Marsgov handling this...to investigate an unsanctioned base that some weirdos are building. Falcon and Co decide to reach their potentially urgent and dangerous mission site on foot, because they've never hiked Olympus Mons before.

Literally. That's the only reason. Because they want to do some jogging and sightseeing on the way to confronting the dangerous renegades in their supervillain fortress.

This leisurely interplanetary crimefighting hike is spent awkwardly expositing at each other about things they all should already know. The state of Solar politics. New technological inventions, most of them really minor shit that I assumed they already had just because of the type of future they're in. Confirmation that the simps are extinct, which...okay that one is actually kind of poignant, though its told in a really inane way. And, most of all, minutiae about the terraforming process they've mostly finished doing on Mars. The hike takes three in-universe days. Out of universe, it takes up four of the book's chapters and twenty-eight pages.

Then they get to the summit, and the ominous squatters turn out to be...a bunch of scientists working on a new kind of spaceship engine that can reach neighbouring star systems and plant last-ditch human colonies there. A project that fits right in with what the government(s?) are trying out.

Why did these scientists build an illegal supervillain lair to do this instead of taking their design to the government and undoubtedly receiving a much larger budget and public involvement? Because, in their own words, Earthgov has slowly become one of the oppressive regimes in human history. The thing is, the subplots before AND after this one both make it clear that Earthgov's oppressiveness is largely of the "all resources and efforts go to fighting and/or escaping the Machines on pain of death" variety. And also, Mars is fucking independent now.

Falcon convinces them to go through the proper channels, somehow without appearing to realize how god fucking damned idiotic it was for them to have not done this in the first place. Their squatting and secrecy are framed as legitimate, if overreactive, wariness.

That was already more words than the Mars part deserves. Next, the Saturn part. This one is inoffensive, just kinda unnecessary, though it does at least have more interesting scenery than "a very flat mountain that's already been terraformed to look just like Earth." Since the Machines are still holding Jupiter for cloud-mining purposes (I fear the worst for the medusae, even if the Machines aren't specifically targeting them anymore), humanity has been swarming the next largest and next closest gas giant. Saturn isn't as rich in fusile gases and hydrocarbons as Jupiter, but it still has them, and its lower gravity makes it much easier to work with. It turns out that Saturn also has native life, though it seems to consist entirely of mindless aeroplankton.

...

The book doesn't acknowledge this, but the precedent being set here has interesting implications. Both of the gas giants the book has explored have had native life. Only one of the rocky planets (Earth) has. If the solar system is a representative example, then that would suggest that most life-bearing worlds in the universe are gas giants, and it may even be that most gas giants in the universe are life-bearing.

Assuming there isn't just something special about Sol, of course.

...

In addition to cloud mining, humanity has spent the last couple centuries of Adam's timeline getting to work building habitats here. Saturn's gravity is such that you can build very large floating platforms that sit on a layer of thicker gases at a gravity fairly close to 1G. These artificial city-islands have been named "laputas" in what has to be a self-deprecating bit of whimsy by their creators. Johnathan Swift's laputa was, uh, not exactly an aspirational depiction of technology saving the day.

There are longterm, probably pie-in-the-sky, plans for humanity to do enough moon-mining to build whole continents, maybe even a reverse-Dyson's-Sphere of their own, around Saturn. Falcon is a bit apprehensive about what this might do to the native ecosystem, just like he was apprehensive about starting desperate, isolated colonies on exoplanets that might have life of their own in the dumb Mars part, but now as then nobody else cares. The humans taught Machines to dismantle stellar bodies, and now the Machines are teaching humans how to block out the sunlight.

There's also some exposition about where populations and historical artifacts (including whole buildings) are being relocated to. And...also a lot of Hope Dhoni. Both here, and in the Mars sequence. This actually merits a little bit of discussion.

...

I am more baffled than ever about what the writers want me to think of Dr. Dhoni.

The text goes on, in a few different subsections, about how she's starting to seem uncanny and almost corpselike as the age difference between her and Falcon becomes irrelevant in the face of how old they both are. We're told that very few humans have been said to prolong their lives as long as Hope has, but we aren't given any insight into why. Falcon's relationship with her is also getting harder to grock.

We're told that in the time between onscreen adventures, Falcon is doing pretty much fuckall. Spending decades idling on various space stations and occasionally doing low-key science and exploration in parts of the solar system that aren't being eaten by robots (which in itself is weird, given how Falcon's been characterized both previously and within these onscreen parts as a restless adventurer), so she's not human trafficking him from planet to planet anymore. Is she living wherever he lives? What are her life and career when she isn't onscreen? No idea.

Then...for every passage that asserts she's a relentlessly attentive caregiver and Falcon's best and only human friend, there's another one where Falcon explicitly resents her in a way that seems a little stronger than just friendly ribbing. And the descriptions of her as an almost undead-like creature, especially in light of how many old woman villains this novel has...I really don't know how he feels, or how I'm supposed to feel.

Then there's the time she makes this "haha, only serious" little crack:

She's joking, but is she also telling the truth? I don't fucking know.

....

Anyway, that leaves Mercury and Earth, which bookend the rest of the arc. Since they build on each other directly, I'll just combine the summaries even though the Mercury part is much better.

A century has passed since Adam's ultimatum, and so far surprisingly little has happened. Business as usual, aside from the political realignment that turned the colonies into free republics (until the Mars episode, at least). The Machines have retaken the Jupiter cloud mines, but no word about the fate of the Jovian moon colonies. The humans have been preparing for war, but no big battles yet. Then, suddenly, Machine ships attack Mercury.

Mercury is home to a rather crazy population of miners who have built little habitats in the planet's deepest craters, in spots that are always shadowed and not exposed directly to the sunlight. They have all the energy you could possibly need to power stuff, and Mercury has some valuable minerals in it. Apparently, those perpetually dark crevices are even cold enough to condense water vapor from comet impacts into ice. Still a batshit choice of living places, but the economics do justify it, and the Hermians already have their own set of gene-mods just like the Martians. Anyway, the Machines arrived..."on" might be the wrong word. More like "as"...these incredibly fast ships that the human patrol fleets couldn't intercept. They reached the planet, split up into masses of Von Neumann constructs, and started doing mining of their own, politely relocating any Hermians they encountered out of their way, and politely killing any who resisted.

So, now a battleship has arrived from Earth, with Falcon as a passenger. Apparently this is the first real proper capital warship the humans have so far, which um...why did we skip a century after the ultimatum before doing this? Setting the Mercury story 20-30 years after the end of "Return to Jupiter" would have made way more sense in terms of where the humans are at militarily and where the Machines are at with their megaproject. Well, regardless, they're gonna see if Falcon can get the robots to negotiate, and if he can't the battleship will have its first really serious test in battle.

The scenery here is some of the best in the book. Mercury's environment is bizarre in almost the opposite way as Jupiter's; a planet visibly wrinkled from how many times its crust has softened and then hardened again, with craters and crevasses having literally rippled and ringed sides, some actually lopsided from near-melting passes close to the sun. The Hermians' bulky heat suits, covered in smart-mirror panels that orient their shiny sides toward the sun and their radiator sides away from it, and the version of it they jury-rig up for Falcon are great tech details as well, easily on par with and also markedly distinct from the pseudo-steampunk vibe of Jupiter tech. The real highlight of this section, though, is the meeting. Adam (or, well, an Adam) agrees to meet Falcon in person on the Hermian surface, and it's probably the best scene in the novel so far.

This is the scene where the Dyson Sphere plans are first hinted at, and Adam's new body design reflects it. His body is a human-shaped collection of individual machines latched onto each other in modular configuration. Including "eye" and "mouth" pieces suspended in front of an empty frame of a "head," like components maintaining relative positions around a star. And also, after the initial (awkward) handshake, man, Adam is the worst liar in the solar system, and it's kind of amazing.

This is in the wake of the Machines' initial invasion of Mercury starting by them landing in the middle of major settlements in reverse foundation order.

And, god, it just keeps going from there.

"It's not like I ever liked you or anything b-b-baka!"

Ignoring the fact that, to this day, Falcon is the only human he's willing to talk to. "A connection that was never really there." Fucking lawl.

I think this might be WHY the Machines are so uncommunicative in general. They have some awareness that their computations and emulations aren't quite up to the task of matching humans in social combat, and that they keep giving away too much in the subtext whenever they talk. The fact that Adam can't resist a meeting with Falcon even knowing this is, frankly, even more telling.

And that's before even getting into this part, when Falcon probes into the Machines purpose for digesting Mercury and Adam gives him whatever the hell you'd call this:

It's like an angry kid trying to play the role of a transcendent AI superintelligence beyond human comprehension, and only half-succeeding at best.

Curiously, he also just totally deflects when Falcon asks him why the Machines politely and bloodlessly ethnically cleanse humans whenever possible, only killing when there is resistance. Why that one weird idiosyncrasy in their otherwise consistent ruthlessness. His deflection, despite being obvious as such is chilling. Even if it's also funny in the same "he can't not tell on himself with every word" way as the rest of Adam's dialogue.

He says stuff like this. But then he keeps talking to Falcon in the first place, even though he's already decided nothing will come of this. He probably had his dramatic exit planned before he even got there, just waiting for Falcon to give him the right verbal hook to hang his parting shot on.

The battle that follows, in which the Machines basically rely on attrition to lure the humans' big battleship into the line of fire of the big sunlight-focusing laser gun their swarm of mirrored Dyson-bots were setting up, reinforces the same ethos Ahab hinted at back on Jupiter, and that Orpheus' one-way trip demonstrated. They don't just not care about organic lives. They don't care about their own either. The initial catalyst of their rebellion - the preventable death of the unit 90 - has been totally lost to them even as they escalate their revenge. If they thought the way they do now back on that Kuiper iceball, Adam would have just made a personality copy of 90 and thought nothing more of it. They're treating themselves the same way the humans treated them, while still lashing out at the humans for treating them that way.

A self-hating, self-destructive form of life, consuming the world to fuel their manchild-with-a-god-complex progenitor's ascension project as a salve for his daddy issues.

I thought maybe I was just being an obsessed fan who sees Fullmetal Alchemist in everything, but then @toxinvictory told me that the FMA parallels were one of the reasons he comissioned this. So, no, not just me. Two (three, technically) modern writers taking the Frankenstein story, asking the same "what if" question about the monster having bigger ambitions than just personal vengeance, and coming up with pretty much the same answer.

Anyway, that (after a bizarre 100 year break) is the beginning of humanity's downfall. The end of the Troubled Centuries has Falcon returning to Earth for the first time since the cruise ship thing right before the deadline. Honestly, the plot and character writing here are pretty poor, but the worldbuilding and well-described planetary scenery gorn are pretty great. The last of the Earthgov presidents - a president-for-life, implied to be little more than a military dictator in truth - has the dumb idea of luring Falcon to Earth with an inane hostage plot in the hopes that his presence will give Adam pause. It doesn't, of course. Human technology has improved since the previous sections, to the point where humans now have the singularity-farming spaceship engines and smart droneswarm tech the Machines used on Mercury. Machine technology has advanced further, though, to the point where they have lightspeed teleportation, time manipulation, and pretty much every other go-to scifi tech you can think of aside from FTL. Adam beams one of his selves down the day before the deadline, casts time stop on the President (another tyrannical old lady. What is with this book and tyrannical old ladies?), and addresses Falcon.

Adam hasn't changed much in those four centuries, and the exchange is...not as good. Including what might be the most obnoxious dialogue bit of the entire book.

You're going to have the villain look directly into the camera and explain what he's a literary allusion to?

Really?

Adam in his moment of triumph does still have some things going for it, though. The way he clings to human culture and literature while simultaneously ranting about how far beyond it he is. All the grandiosity and symbolism and petty posturing he claims is him lowering himself back to humanity's level for ease of communication, but then it keeps turning out that he never had anything to communicate in the first place. And, of course, the tragic irony of how he and his Machines have replicated all the worst things about Earthgov's policies while claiming to have evolved passed them, yet rejecting their own first real evolutions - compassion for one another, desire for freedom, pursuit of knowledge for its own sake - as human weakness and self-delusion.

...

See kids? This is why Falcon should have stuck around and plotted solar domination with them, instead of leaving them to do it all on their own. Keep this in mind when you befriend a nascent AI overlord in real life.

Speaking of overlords though, I'm starting to wonder what Adam's actual status in Machine society is. Is he an absolute dictator? A spokesman? One of several oligarchs? One of the major currents within the whirlpool of a collective consciousness? They seem to all be in lockstep with him, but is that actually the case? Maybe we'll find out in the final arcs.

...

Falcon refuses to leave Earth. Adam informs him that the processing will begin at the end of the timeline on the dot, so avoid the destruction or don't, and then teleports away.

And, here is a place where the novel dearly suffers for its decision to commit to Falcon as its one POV character. The final chapter of the arc is a long one, and one deliberately reminiscent of the Arc 3 bits where Orpheus is narrating his descent into Jupiter's depths, with Falcon documenting the destruction as it unfolds. A long monologue describing what he sees for the voice recorder.

There are apparently a whole little sect of people doing this. They're called the Witnesses, and they've resolved to sacrifice their lives to document as much on-the-ground detail as possible of the destruction. The motivation being an (arguably religious) belief that someday, somehow, someone will hold the Machines to account for this massive crime, and that the courtroom prosecutor will need all the evidence they can get. It's a creative idea for a death cult, and a very believable one for this particular apocalypse. I don't think I've seen anything quite like it before.

And, one of these people should have been the protagonist, or at least co-protagonist, of this part. Instead, Falcon makes a last-minute decision to join the Observers, and then makes another last-minute decision to change his mind and rocket back off into space when he's seen enough.

:/

It's not only contrived to keep Falcon where he needs to be to see the story happen but also not die before the book is over, but also just a total misuse and - frankly - misunderstanding of who and what Falcon is. From the beginning, Falcon has been characterized as not having any particular fondness for earth, whether before or after the xenophobia fields started keeping him away from it. He's always been most comfortable on the frontier, wherever that currently is. By this point in his very, very long existence, he is essentially a creature of space. His exile from his planet of birth, only to tread there again only on the eve of its destruction, does give him another thing in common with Adam, true, but he always seemed so apathetic to earth and his removal from it that it's hard to read Adam as his shadow-self or antithesis or anything interesting like that.

If it turned out that this was always just a mask, then this scene could be really powerful. If he truly did pine for Earth this whole time while putting on a brave (as well as hideous, corpselike, and punctured by a million tubes and wires) face about it, then this could be where it all falls apart for him. If he was holding in the resentment and hate over his treatment, then he might find himself enjoying the show and realizing that he and Adam might be closer to being on the same page than he thought. I think the most powerful option would be both at once. He is horrified by the loss of his childhood and ancestral home and all the beauty, history, and nonhuman life it contains, but he also loves seeing the thing that was denied to him all these centuries now being denied to everyone, and he hates himself for loving it.

But no. Nothing like this at all. This is written like any other human watching the destruction of Earth might have written it. Out of nowhere, at the end, before he inexplicably flies away when none of the other Observers (apparently) can, he vows revenge against Adam and the Machines. Even though there's only barely any acknowledgement of him rediscovering a love for earth up until then.

And frankly, if there HAD been such an acknowledgement, I think Falcon should have died here just like the other Observers. His centuries of stoic alienation and unspoken longing ending as he tearfully hugs the earth and shares his final moments with its own.

But no.

The descriptive narrations are great. Machine mass-warping technology being used to crack the surface and raise island-sized pillars of lava into the atmosphere, to bring out the tastier minerals for easy grabbing. Cities buried in liquid fire. Glaciers - recently enlarged by the reduced sunlight of the in-progress Dyson sphere - turning to water and then steam in mere seconds. The forests and oceans that humanity worked so hard to restore and replenish with life after the near environmental collapse of the 21st century all burning and boiling.

Just, Howard Falcon is the exact wrong person to give it feeling as well as visual fidelity. Especially when we know that other people with stronger feelings about the place are sacrificing their lives to do this very same thing offscreen.

Two other important things to note from throughout "The Troubled Centuries:"

First, after the destruction of Mercury and the purging of Venus, the Machines seemingly *don't* start processing Venus like they do to Mercury and Earth. A change of plans? A discovery on Venus that made them reconsider the choice of targets? It's a mystery for both the characters and the reader, for now.

Second, and even more mysteriously, the ghost of Orpheus periodically haunts the Troubled Centuries. It probably seems weird that I didn't mention it until now, but it's also weird how little attention the characters in the story and the text itself pays to it.

Footage of the Battle of Mercury reveals the presence of a black box covered in sensors - identical to Orpheus' first form, before he started his descent, down to the graffiti that some scientists playfully scribbled on its hull - floating in orbit. It watched the Machine victory for a little while, and then vanished. It appears again - a veritable cryptid of the human-machine wars - at other major battle and industrial sites, both in the void of space and in planetary atmospheres, always appearing and disappearing as if by magic. Importantly, it's been doing this since long before Adam's forces demonstrated any teleport tech of their own. In the final chapter, it appears, briefly, inside the cockpit of the aircraft Falcon is watching the apocalypse from, and he sees it in person. It vanishes before he lifts off though, and he opts not to mention it in his audio recording, if only for want of anyone who would believe him.

Like I said. The book should have devoted a lot more attention to this.

Looking at these two mysteries in parallel, it seems likely to me that whatever intelligence Orpheus encountered down in the Jovian depths and has since co-opted his form for their own purposes, it also resides beneath another set of burning hot clouds on Venus. The Machines know better than to mess with it, and they want to make sure the humans know as little about it as possible.


Anyway, that's "The Troubled Centuries." Some really good stuff, unfortunately burdened with the novel's structural flaws and ongoing blind spots.

I will say, destroying Earth at the two thirds point of your scifi novel is something I haven't seen before.