Robopocalypse and Poking at Mystery
In Daniel H. Wilson’s Robopocalypse, an artificial intelligence becomes sentient, takes over the machines of the world, and nearly annihilates humanity. But then the people who survive fight back.
The novel opens with a “briefing,” which takes place in Alaska “twenty minutes after the war ends” and works more or less like a prologue to introduce the bigger story of the war itself. In this briefing, a team of humans fight off some robot stragglers to recover a mysterious… something… that is buried deep beneath the ice. It is first described as “a black cube the size of a basketball.”
I sense that this thing is important. It’s gotta be, with so many decoys and this shaft so close to where the war ended…. What treasure is buried under these frozen plains, where humanity sacrificed everything?
I squat down next to it. A whole lot of sheer black nothing stares back at me. No buttons or handles. No anything. Only a couple scratches on the surface from the [device used to retrieve it].
My literary brain kicks in here. Sure, I want to know what this cube is in a functional sense and how it matters to the story—especially whether it’s about to shoot somebody or blow up. Butwith such serious consideration, such weight, given to the object, I’m also sparking off at what it can represent. And what it means to me is the unknowable. “Sheer black nothing” is mystery.
Cormac, our narrator, begins to interrogate that mystery. After he describes the surface, he compares it to other devices he’s known, speculating about whether it is intelligent or not.
It’s not very rugged, I think.
A simple rule: The more delicate a Rob is, the smarter he is.
Then he performs a series of tests to see if the object can hear or see, whether it has a brain. He whispers to it: “Speak up or die.”
I sling my thrower off my shoulder slow, so the cube can see. If it can see. With my thumb, I mash the lighter. So it can hear. If it can hear.
He’s shaking the gift under the Christmas tree. He can’t unwrap it, but he’s using every tool he can think of to learn about it.
He also approaches the puzzle of the object by thinking about it in different ways. He’s already described it in a straightforward manner (“black cube”), so now he thinks about it more poetically:
It looks like a volcanic rock, perfectly carved by alien tools. Like some kind of artifact buried here for eternity, since before man or machine.
I especially like how the phrase “before man or machine” pulls those more or less knowable concepts, “man” and “machine,” into a space that holds something of both and also of neither. Something much harder to comprehend.
Eventually Cormac does solve the puzzle of the box. He threatens it with fire, and, to survive, the device offers its secrets. But it’s notable that it takes a bit. Consider how a different writer might have skipped the various steps of figuring it out, or simply summarized the process.
So what does it do for the story that we take the time to learn all the “wrong” answers, that we get a list of pokes and prods before they yield any results?
On a purely functional level, the various inquiries contribute to world-building. The interrogations are giving give us informationthat will help us to understand the specific circumstances of the characters and state of their world. The device was buried deep in the earth. It might have a brain. It might be dangerous. Thus, in this world, machines have brains and are dangerous.
But there’s more to it. The box represents the mystery that is at the heart of the entire book—something unnamable about what it means to be human.
We’re circling what can’t be known, looking at it from one angle, then another. The mystery is illuminated by the poking, the prodding—the drawing of its shape. Even though Cormac will later solve this particular and very tangible puzzle, as we learn small details about what it is, and more especially about what it’s not, we’re invited to linger in the wondrous space of not quite knowing.
When Cormac finally gets the device to reveal its secrets, we learn that it contains an archive of data about the entire war, including video and audio recordings of the human “heroes” who stood up to machines in a variety of big and small ways.
Cormac can’t understand or explain all of the data collected or all of the language the robot speaks. But he can transcribe the recordings—and these transcriptions make up the rest of the novel.
It’s significant to me that when the mystery of the box is solved—when we know the concrete function of the device—it is still not solved. We can’t comprehend all parts of the robot’s way of chronicling the war. We can approach—but never quite reach—the full truth of the box or the truth of this war or the truth of what it means to be human.
But just like how Cormac’s poking at the box, the transcripts that follow—describing fragmented but emotionally resonant experiences of a handful of the humans who fight against the machines—will poke at these greater questions. Instead of a single narrator who processes the greater story for us, we will get many perspectives, each detailing encounters with robots and other humans. They are ways to see the war itself—as well as the strange sentience of the artificial intelligence and the various relationships people have with machines—from different angles and perspectives. It will be up to the reader to process them, to poke at them, to draw connections, and to feel the contours of the parts that could not be recorded or transcribed. And so, over the course of the novel, the reader will grow to understand the shape of a much greater and more important mystery.
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