“Two headlights. I wake to the sight of them. Odd because of the distinct green tint. Not the usual white headlights you see around here. I spot them through the window, at the end of the lane. I must have been in a kind of quasi slumber; an after-dinner daze brought on by a full stomach and the evening heat. I blink several times, attempting to focus.”
Junior is the narrator of the book, and this is the opening paragraph. The paragraph is an example of one of those openings to a novel that seems absolutely mundane but that eventually turns out to be far more significant and contains far more important information than it seems. Those two headlights which are the very first words of the book will, in fact, prove to be absolutely integral to the working out of the plot’s intricate design that leads to unexpected twists and revelations by the time the story concludes.
“It’s complex. I’m not an engineer, but to explain it very crassly: It’s been designed with our most advanced computer software and produced using a 3D printer. We’ve been working with prototypes for a decade or so. It’s remarkable. You can’t tell the difference. Even Hen will not be able to look at it and see any disparity between the replacement and the original. There’s nothing distinct. Not in any way.”
This quote basically outlines the plot of the novel. What he is talking about is an artificial version of Junior. The real Junior is being sent to a space station orbiting around the earth. A biomechanical duplicate has been created using the technology described in this quote. The key point here is the idea that Junior’s wife won’t be able to “tell the difference.” This assertion and the reality surrounding it becomes the foundation on which the conflict of the story rests. Before it is all over, this concept of not being able to tell the difference between humans and machines will be tested in a variety of different ways. The real question the book is answering is not so much whether the confidence that no distinct difference exists, but rather whether it’s a good thing if this turns out to be true.
“Everything is old in here, I know. It’s my house. It’s my stuff. At least, I think it’s mine. Lately I’ve been puzzling over this. Some of these things—the furniture, the dishes in the kitchen—don’t feel as recognizable as they should. I eat off these dishes every day, but they don’t tell a story, not the way some of our stuff does, and yet I know they’re ours. Still, I feel no special attachment to them. Another unintended symptom, I guess, of the stress of this whole scenario.”
The book is an exploration of the effects of isolation. Junior is isolated in ways having nothing to do with being sent to a space station. In fact, the bulk of this story takes place on a completely average, everyday farmhouse. Large farms are themselves examples of isolation from communities, though not to the extent of a space station, of course. Except that Junior’s narrative presents an argument to this conventional wisdom. Isolation is ultimately not about distance, but environment. In this passage, Junior is experiencing a strange dislocation from his environment. This moment in the book speaks to those rare but incredibly disturbing moments everybody experiences when the familiar suddenly becomes strange. It is an illustration of that weirdly unsettling experience of stepping into the void of the uncanny in which the conscious brain for some reason forces an examination of routine. Junior’s paradoxical feelings of things being recognizable but detached is an accurate manifestation of those occurrences. They are those times when something happens in the working of the brain that takes us momentarily out of habit just long enough to make us actually think about things that otherwise operate on autopilot.
