The Medusa Chronicles: Peace Envoy (5.44-53)

Last time on The Medusa Chronicles: we destroyed Earth.

This time on The Medusa Chronicles: we destroy my investment in the story.


So yeah. Arc 5. "Peace Envoy." It's a series of words that was written down.

Sixty-six years have passed since the destruction of Earth. Howard Falcon has spent them building a shrine to Hope Dhoni.

I wish I was just shitposting.

As usual with The Medusa Chronicles, there's some cool scifi worldbuilding and sociological speculation behind the disappointing main character actions. A lot of people died after the fall of Earth, either by choosing to stay on the homeworld and die with it, or in the mass incidence of suicides and "just didn't care to continue the life extension treatments" that occurred in the following couple of decades. Species-wide depression, basically. Anyway, there are billions of little ice and dust "worldlets" in the outer system, most of which don't have anything valuable on them and only barely have enough gravity to stand on. So, there's been a whole trend of hollowing out these worldlets and turning them into elaborate memorials for people, places, or cultures lost. A landing pad, an airlock, and a network of hollowed-out chambers containing museum exhibits full of memorabilia, texts, and virtual recreations. They're called memory gardens, and their total number has reached the low millions.

See? This is cool. It's something I'd never have thought of, but it makes anthropological sense and it's really unique. There's also a potent irony in these memorials being built into the same type of iceballs that the Machines were originally forced to labor on.

But...having the protagonist retire from solar affairs and spending fifty-plus years on one for Hope Dhoni? Really? Really?

Like, let's pretend that Dr. Dhoni *wasn't* horribly botched in the early arcs, and that she never came across as a diabolical manipulative slavedriver. Has she had enough presence in the story to warrant this? She shows up at least once per arc, sure, but she barely ever does anything besides annoy Falcon for a few minutes and maybe perform some tune-ups. There's also never been a sense that Falcon cares that much about Dhoni, even if he occasionally says he does. It's always been her seeking him out or hunting him down, when he otherwise seems to be content spending 50 years between each arc sitting in some random space station staring at a wall and taking interest in no one and nothing. And...Hope never seemed that attached to Earth herself, to be frank, so her being one of those to die in the planet's wake in itself seems to come from nowhere.

This just feels unearned, from both the story and from Falcon.

...

You know what might have made this work?

I said that the witness at the end of the last arc who narrated the destruction of Earth should have been a different character. What if that character was Hope Dhoni?

She's either been tailing after Falcon or dragging him after her off and on for centuries, so it's far from unlikely that she'd have picked up a ballooning hobby from him at some point. She's always kind of acted as his link to Earth and mainstream humanity (though she often does a very bad job of filling this thematic role, it still seems to have been the author intent). She's earthborn, fully organic, and not a pseudo-pariah, so her caring enough about Earth to not want to outlive it is something I can buy (or could, if she'd had just a little bit more characterization to this effect in previous chapters).

So, it's Hope who took the balloon ride over the melting crust of Earth, and who vowed the Machines would pay for this with her final breaths before glimpsing the Orpheus-ghost and her airship getting caught in a Machine space-warping beam and vaporized. Maybe it's important that Falcon be the one to see the Orpheus-ghost, but if so he can just have a live feed from her headset or whatever. That would have both made the Fall of Earth scene feel less contrived, and made Hope's memorial here feel far, far more earned at least from an audience perspective.

...

Anyway, Falcon is in the middle of performing his thirty millionth little improvement to Hope's memory garden when an invited spacecraft docks with it and someone forces entry. It turns out to be a pair of (sighhhhhhh) Springers. Brother and sister Bodan and Valentina, grandchildren of the hereditary president-for-life Amanda IV. It's not clear what their official government positions are, but it's implied to not matter on account of their last name. They board the station, dare Falcon to try and attack them, and basically spend the entire conversation looking under tables and inside closets for puppies to kick to make sure that we hate them.

Cue a little exposition dump about how tyrranical the regime that used to be Earthgov has become as it bashes the remnants of humanity against the Machines over and over without regard to the cost. I'd wonder how people are able to scrounge up the time and resources to create these memory gardens if the regime is really that demanding in terms of resources and manpower, and the way the memory gardens were described earlier really didn't make them sound like a state-sponsored propaganda device. I guess we're meant to infer that the gardens are being made by people who live outside of the regime's control or awareness.

I still really, really do not understand why the evil political dynasty has to be descended from that famous astronaut dude. Or what the significance of having a rare non-evil member of said dynasty be Falcon's companion in "Return to Jupiter" was, in light of the above.

Anyway, they wheedle and threaten Falcon into coming aboard their ship to take part in a last-ditch diplomacy-backed-up-by-threat-of-new-superweapon attempt to end the war with the Machines. This takes them some effort, because Falcon has apparently gone back entirely on his fiery statement at the end of "The Troubled Centuries."

So yep, Falcon's passionate and weirdly atypical-for-him vow of revenge at the end of the last arc didn't actually mean anything and had no reason to be on the page.

...

Gee, it's almost like the witness should have been a different character or something.

...

They're only able to get him aboard their ship by pointing out that his body is in dire need of maintenance, and also that if he doesn't they'll have to use their superweapon without trying diplomacy first, and that their target is on Jupiter. Meaning that if there are any medusae the Machines haven't exterminated since they took the Jovian atmosphere a few centuries ago, they'll probably be wiped out for good now.

Then, once they've bullied Falcon onto their ship and taken off, they put the memory garden iceball he spent the last 50+ years working on onscreen and blow it up in front of him.

At this point, like...

We keep being told that Falcon isn't sure how much he values his life at this point ("this" point being a long list of times and places throughout the last couple of arcs). He's clearly at his lowest point now. Just a few pages ago, one of the Springer Duo dared him to try attacking them, and Falcon seemed to be vaguely considering it. His body, even long overdue for maintenance, is established to be insanely strong and fast, and one of the douche duo is standing right next to him within arm's reach gloating about what they just did, what other terrible things they're likely to do to him next, and how none of their promises to spare the things he cares about in return for his cooperation can be trusted.

Why doesn't he just crush her fucking skull?

There is a guard a few paces behind them, sure. Said guard might turn out to be faster on the draw, sure. But frankly, in this situation, even a small chance of taking Valentina down with him should be enough.

He's so goddamned passive, except for very occasionally when he suddenly isn't.

...

I mean, the other good option would have been to have Valentina reassure him that this is for his own good, and turn him over to the world-class psychotherapist they brought to start helping him recover from Dhoni's centuries of brainwashing, with Falcon thanking her and her brother for destroying the garden after he's completed therapy. I'd have accepted this too.

...

They bring Falcon to Io, which apparently is still under human control. Even though the Machines have (for some reason?) turned Jupiter into the center of their entire interplanetary civilization. Despite having been shown to be vastly militarily superior to humanity, and to understand the strategic significance of holding a moon over an enemy's homeworld, the Machines have apparently stood idly by and let the humans convert Io into an obvious death fortress.

In fact, the humans still hold all of Jupiter's moons. Even though the Machines are said to be conducting successfully, highly-destructive raids against the civilian population of Saturn.

I do not understand this war. Have the Machines lost their tech advantage since they destroyed Earth? Did they really not make a point of clearing the Jovian moons before that point? Did they do so, with humanity having retaken the moons since then?

...wait wait wait hold the fuck up a second. Isn't the Dyson sphere the center of Machine civilization, at this point? It was already pretty substantial by the time they took Earth. With how fast their Von Neumann tech seems to work, they must be at least *pretty far* into the process of digesting Earth at this point. There's a mention that they did end up processing Venus as well (not sure what the point of them having briefly had second thoughts was...). In this very chapter, it talks about how much weaker the sunlight throughout the system is on account of the sphere. Why the hell is Jupiter the Machine capital at this point?

...

Future me reporting in:

That Dyson sphere will never be relevant again for the entire rest of the novel.

It's mentioned as still existing, but it's significance to both the story and to the Machines is utterly forgotten after the end of "The Troubled Centuries."

I wish that was the worst of it.

...

There's an incredibly tone-deaf segue into hard-scifi-nerd techwank that forgets all about the grimness just loses itself in STEM jizz when the siblings explain their superweapon to Falcon. Basically, they've reverse-engineered the Machines' reactionless drive and hollowed out the entire fucking moon to build a giant version of it where the core used to be. Their plan is to launch the entire moon into Jupiter itself at high speed, which would disrupt Jupiter's weather system enough to...well, they don't actually have any way of knowing how much damage it would do to the Machines' operations down there, but they're sure it will do a lot. And uh. Apparently they think that this will be able to threaten the Machines into making a truce, provided they also have Falcon on hand to do the talking.

Because the Machines have been casualty-averse and infrastructurally centralized so far, amirite?

Before sending Falcon down to hopefully get the Machines' attention in a souped-up modern version of the Kon-Tiki (the Machines do not exchange any complex longranged comms for fear of cyberwarfare attempts), the Springers give Falcon the medical touch-up they promised. Mostly to make sure he doesn't die as soon as he comes in contact with Jupiter's strong gravity rather than out of any actual concern. He's prodded at by a terse, prickly medical orderly named Tem who hates her job and hates being forced to ignore the latest crop of industrial and/or war injuries in favor of Falcon even more. Granted, if this pair of Springer grandchildren are the ones who have been in command of Io for a long time, then I imagine every single person on this moon hates their jobs, so I can't really hold this against Tem.

Falcon tries to talk to her. And...well, in the previous arc, when Falcon was visiting one of the floating Laputas on Saturn, there was a part where he returned a dropped toy to a little girl even though she was afraid of his hideous biomechanoid self. Turns out that Tem is that little girl. Um...okay? Cool? Whatever? Her Laputa got destroyed in a Machine attack at some later point, unfortunately. And she actually barks at Falcon a little for having helped the Machines become what they currently are.

There's actually a nice little moment here, where Falcon does a double take and momentarily thinks that she knows what he did in the Kuiper belt, before realizing that she's just talking about his previous mentorship of Adam and playing it cool. I liked this. Wish I could say as much about anything else in this arc.

Take this exchange from a little later in the conversation, for instance:

When was the last time Falcon saw any Machine display anything like empathy?

Like, they MIGHT still have that. He's only seeing their society from the outside, and yes, it looks a lot like human society from the outside in terms of ruthlessness and rapacity. But how does he know what's going on beneath the surface? Hell, his inner monologues in arcs 4 and 3 both suggested that he believes the Machines have lost that empathy long ago.

Then there's...whatever the fuck this:

This moment ends up being important later. In particular, Tem's weird line about fearing contamination by his inferior DNA. But I don't think the authors themselves realized how weird it is for Falcon to think it's weird that a 29th century doctor might accidentally cut her thumb. Especially while she's complaining about how overworked she is and rummaging around inside a one-of-a-kind cyborg full of sharp mechanical bits that she's not used to operating on. It later turns out that she did this on purpose, thus vindicating Falcon's reaction to it.

...

I know, this is an extremely minor detail within the arc, but I can't help but fixate on it.

Genetic enhancement is suggested to be very widespread at this point, sure. But these are still flesh-and-blood humans, even if they're healthier, smarter, and live much longer. They can still cut themselves on sharp objects when doing finnicky fingerwork in unfamiliar environments full of sharp surfaces. There is nothing in their material circumstances that would make this different for the book's twenty-ninth century humans than it was for humans throughout the previous 500,000 previous years.

The authors could have written a world in which cut thumbs are no longer likely to ever happen, on account of super-reinforced skin or total reliance on remote-controlled smartknives or whatever, but they didn't. They're just assuming it should be so anyway, because it's the STEM spacefuture where everything is executed perfectly all the time and only acts of god or enemy sabotage can make it otherwise. The authors obviously intended for these future humans to be (very) flawed, of course, but not this kind of flawed. Not the *lame* kind of flawed, where people make mundane, boring, silly mistakes and we don't have complete control of our physical environments unless acted upon by an outside agent. How could a spacescience world - even an evil one - be that lame?

This sentiment making itself spoken so matter-of-factly and without any hint of self-awareness is honestly a really informative look into the minds of this type of futurist.

...

There's some more awkward exposition conveyed in this dialogue. Apparently there's a widespread and somewhat-effective resistance movement against the Springer regime, led by an enigmatic Emmanual Goldstein-esque figure known only as "the Boss."

Awkward exposition is awkward, but whatever.

After the tune-up, Falcon and the Kon-Tiki 2.0 get dropped into Jupiter's atmosphere. He's given the regime's terms in the form of a tungsten cylinder inscribed with intricate microglyphs; a form of information storage that can carry a lot of data with minimal risk of being a cyberweapon vector or a concealed grey goo bomb or the like.

Even before his descent, just by looking at Jupiter from orbit, Falcon can tell that the clouds are behaving differently; evidence of massive geo-engineering going on below the upper storm layer. Whatever the Machines have been doing down there, it probably bodes very, very poorly for the native life (other than the superintelligence implied to be lurking down near the core, obviously). Once he begins the drop, the Jovian storms are described in a very different, very much more anxiety-inducing manner than in arc 3, even though the visuals aren't much changed. Again, this is one area in which the writers continue to be very talented, even as this arc is also really, really, really laying bare their flaws. These positives and negatives combine in this next little scene:

He sees this. The relief that the medusae aren't extinct is followed up by the possibility that it might be even worse than extinction. Are they zombie slaves being controlled by brain implants? Conquered serfs being forced to labor with precision learned from their masters on pain of death? Or, more optimistically, are they simply adapting new behaviors (and possibly learning from the Machines by immitation) in order to survive in the changing environment?

I don't know. And...Falcon doesn't try to ask them.

Like, he just drives on passed without attempting communication.

Maybe his airship doesn't have the neccessary computers to do the interpretation, but like. He doesn't even think about how he wishes he could. He doesn't linger around here to follow them and try to learn more. His main stated reason for going along with this mission is concern for the medusae, but he barely displays any of that now.

...

Future me again, with some bad news.

This is the last appearance - or even substantial mention - of the medusae for the entire rest of the novel.

The story basically forgets about them after this.

We never find out what's causing them to act like this, or what their general state is like under Machine domination of their planet. No one asks. No one thinks of asking.

-____-

Why is this book even called "The Medusa Chronicles" anyway?

...

He descends passed the layer containing the preferred medusa habitat, and discovers a network of laser-shooting pinwheels covering the entire inner atmosphere of Jupiter in a constant thin layer of plasmafied gases. This ridiculously overdesigned network is apparently how the machines protect the lower layers of Jupiter from human sensors and comms. And apparently hasn't completely destroyed everything in the layers above it beyond recognition. Um. Okay. Falcon gets close to the layer, and one of the stupid laser-pinwheels shuts itself down long enough to let him pass.

Beneath the stupid laser-pinwheel layer is an array of giant crystalline AA guns floating in place. Apparently they can either aim through the laser-pinwheel field, or the Machines can turn the latter off to repel any serious invasion attempts. Beneath that, in turn, is an extensive mess of city-like islands made entirely of hydrogen metamaterials held in shape by Machine spacewarping tech. A big, blocky ship rises from the nearest one, approaches the Kon-Tiki II, and does the thing from "The Matrix: Revolutions" where it forms a giant face in front of itself and starts talking. The face matches Adam's from his most recent meeting with Falcon back on Earth, and the voice - though calibrated to carry in this high-pressure energized gas environment - is made to be recognizable.

On one hand, it makes sense that the Machines would do this if they're afraid of using radio signals etc. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure the writers literally just ripped this particular implementation of the concept from the Matrix.

At first, Adam just postures and (politely) threatens, but then starts being a little more diplomatic. And...mentions that he's been "nominated" to be the one who receives Falcon by the other Machines. And also says that he and some other "moderates" were the ones who convinced the Machine collective to not just shoot him down as he entered low orbit.

...say what now?

Like, this isn't just me, right? In every single one of his appearances so far, Adam was presented as - if not THE leader of the Machines' hierarchy - then at least pretty damned close to the top. And he absolutely was never so much as hinted to be one of the pro-human moderates within the Machines' political milieu, insomuch as they seemed to have "politics" at all.

When he leaves his Zardoz face ship and teleports aboard the Kon-Tiki II in a smaller body, my disbelief that this could possibly be the same being who appeared on Mercury, Earth, or even in the ultimatum at the end of "Return to Jupiter" only intensifies.

Adam wants to try and work with Falcon to make the more bloodthirsty members of their respective peoples see reason.

...

HOW THE HELL IS THIS CHARACTER SUPPOSED TO BE ADAM?

I'll grant that there's more obvious continuity in both outlook and in character voice between this entity and the Adam we met in "Adam" than between the latter and any of the intervening appearances. Like, I can readily believe that the character in this scene is an older, more cynical version the character from the Kuiper Belt sequence.

I cannot believe that he is the same guy who gave that cackling, Milton-quoting villain speech before turning Earth's crust inside out.

I guess these could be different Adam forks that branched off at different points, with the one Falcon is talking to now being an earlier instance who didn't change as much. But in that case, I have two questions:

1. Why isn't the text just saying this outright?

2. Why do this at all in the first place? Why have multiple Adam instances instead of just different Machine characters?

...and, when writing down the second question, I realized that this is the same damned problem the book has been weighing itself down with the entire time. Nearly every Machine character is Adam, and nearly every human character is Falcon, with both of them having their personalities and motivations twisted into absolute pretzels to make them play the roles that should have been filled by ten other characters.

On further reflection, I still think the root of the problem is Falcon. Or rather, the writers' bullheaded insistence and Falcon being personally important at every major event in the human-machine war. If Falcon is our only POV, then that means he needs to be the one who the Machines always talk to. Adam is the Machine who has a personal relationship with Falcon, so therefore he needs to be the only Machine who ever talks to humanity; because if it wasn't Adam doing the talking, then it wouldn't make sense for Falcon to be the one listening, and Falcon always, always, always needs to be the one listening.

The consequence of this is that four fifths of the way through the novel, spanning 600 years of human/machine history, we have only had four Machine characters, three of whom (Orpheus, Charon, and Ahab) had only a single scene apiece. All three of them being in the same few chapters' worth of "Return to Jupiter" where it was more-or-less natural for Falcon to be interacting with multiple Machine characters and thus the authors were free to have him do so. Everything else was Adam. Every other Machine in the entire story was forced to be Adam, and Adam was forced to be all of the other Machines.

...

Anyway, Falcon shows Adam the tungsten cylinder with the armistice terms inscribed on it. Adam confirms that it's a very, very complex and detailed proposal for dividing up the solar system and its resources in the longterm that leaves no possible point of conflict unaddressed. He'll have to show it to the other Machine decisionmakers to determine if it's sufficiently equitable, but for now it does at least appear to be a serious peace proposal.

Then, Adam realizes that there's something wrong. He has a malware infection, but it didn't come from reading the script on the cylinder. If anything, reading the highly complicated peace proposal was just serving to distract him from a completely different cyberattack vector. Falcon remembers Dr. Tem cutting her thumb and then saying that weird thing about being corrupted by his DNA, and realizes she was trying to warn him about what the Springer siblings were having her do to him.

Basically, the same quantum bullshit technology that lets them beam inertia between unconnected molecules also lets them beam information from the DNA in Falcon's organic components into the code that Adam's mind runs on. In a form that it can read and execute. As soon as he came physically close to him.

I can't tell if this is really creative and clever scifi theorycrafting, or really fucking stupid. My gut reaction is that it's really fucking stupid, but that may be my lack of computer science and/or quantum physics knowledge talking. So, I guess I'll just have to let each of you judge this plot device for yourselves.

And, um. How could they have known that Adam or another machine would come that physically close to Falcon, rather than using a dumb drone to take the cylinder from him, or having him drop it out an airlock?

Adam realizes that he's already been disconnected from the Machine internet before he came aboard the airship, and Falcon quickly intuits that the Machines suspected this was a trap and that Adam's political opponents may in fact have been counting on it being one. A suggestion that Adam is shocked and disbelieving of, but is slowly forced to conclude is probably the truth.

Erm...haven't we been told in as many words in "Return to Jupiter," and then repeatedly shown in "The Troubled Centuries," that Machines place no value on their individual lives and see personality backups as equivalent to never dying? Why would Adam be surprised by this? Why would Adam be bothered by this? Why would Adam have not gone into the situation already knowing this to be SOP?

If we were going with the egotistical child-tyrant version of Adam from "The Troubled Centuries," it might make sense that he'd think he was the lone exception to this ethos. If we're retconning Adam into being just one influential voice among many though, then it doesn't make any sense at all.

The ensuing dialogue between Adam and Falcon goes on to paint Adam as a naive sap rather than a raging hypocrite, even though he was personally present at the Battle of Mercury when the machine army fed a thousand of their own to the human warship just to lure it into their superlaser's line of sight.

-______-

Anyway, Io starts hurtling toward Jupiter. The plan was clearly to infect the Machine collective with the magic teleporting computer virus to distract them while Io falls on them. The first part of that plan is a bust, but the second part is still on for whatever that's worth.

The arc ends with Adam and Falcon deciding to plunge the Kon-Tiki II down passed the Machine-inhabited stratum of the atmosphere and let themselves be crushed by the gravity of Jupiter Within to prevent either of their remains from ending up in magic computer virus teleportation range of another Machine. And, while they're on their way down, Adam figures he might as well tell Falcon about what Orpheus found down there and how the Machines have been proceeding with that since.


Like I said, this arc killed my investment in this story and its main characters.

It made me finally understand that this story doesn't actually have any main characters. Just a couple of free-floating names and physical descriptions.

I'm curious to learn the final reveal about the Deep Jovians and those ghostly copies of Orpheus that they've ostensibly been probing the solar system with, but it's the "I'd go on the wiki page and spoil myself if I could" level of curiosity. Not the same thing as investment.

I have quite a few thoughts about how this book could have been written to make it work, but I might as well save those for the final post. For now, and taking the prognostications of future me into account, pretty much everything good about "The Medusa Chronicles" was confined to arcs 2, 3, and the first third or so of 4.