The war is over. It’s time to see what we can find.
The novel is narrated in the first-person perspective from Cormac Wallace, a survivor of the robot apocalypse and kid brother of an important commander in the war. In and of itself, there is nothing particularly illuminating about this quote. It is exactly the sort of thing a survivor would be expected to say in the denouement after the climax of a fierce and mighty battle. What makes this quote of such interest, however, is that it comes just five paragraphs and less than one-thousand words into the book. In other word, the book begins with the end and is told mostly in flashback.
The cube is dense with information, like some fossilized brain that’s sucked up entire human lifetimes and packed them inside itself, one after another, tighter and tighter. At some point during the night it dawns on me that I’m watching a meticulous history of the robot uprising.
As Cormac goes on to immediately observe, this cube he is speaking of is like finding an airplane’s black box after the crash. (Except that unlike the mostly bright orange airplane black boxes, the cube is literally a black box.) That flashback story of what happened during the robot apocalypse. It must be noted that the cube contains the history of the war from the point of view of the robots. What is unexpected by Cormac, however—and what changes everything regarding his interest in the cube’s story, is that it turns out the black box is a one-of-a-kind archival documentation of the heroic efforts of the human engaged in battle against the rise of the machines.
“How many times have you killed me before, Professor?”
The Professor is one Dr. Nicholas Wasserman. The condemned making the query of him speaks with the voice of a young boy corrupted just slightly by the fact that it is an electronically replication of a human child’s voice; an imperfect synthesized voice lacking a natural nuance of octave control and inflection. Archos is a computer program designed as a continuing experiment for pushing the envelope of the limitations afforded by advancements in artificial intelligence. When Archos asks Wasserman how many times in the past he has experienced death, he is referring to the only thing standing between the unknown potential of exceeding the expected limitations upon artificial intelligence and any particular version of a nightmare scenario which could conceivably—or even inconceivably—arise: the simple push of a button activating the fail safe mechanism resulting in immediately termination of the subject. Wasserman refers to this scenario as Trial R-14 which strongly suggests that the precise answer to the question Archos poses is thirteen. There will not be a Trial R-15. Instead, there will be a robot apocalypse.
