"The war had been fought and won by drone pilots—men and women in control rooms far from the battlefields, where unmanned machines fought each other in a strategy game played over seven years. The pilots of the federal army had lived a good life in brand-new suburbs where they could choose from thirty kinds of cereal on their way home from work. The drone technology was praised because it spared us meaningless loss of life."
The bulk of this story is narrated by a girl named Michelle. This opening paragraph is set off against her narrative by being printed in italicized bold type. After the initial introduction of Michelle’s narration, this bold and italicized type will show up again, but the narration will be written in the first-person perspective by an unknown speaker. It is not entirely clear whether this introductory narration belongs to that secondary narrative voice or not. What is clear is that this opening paragraph and the second shorter paragraph which follows situate the contextual backstory against which events of the story play out. The irony is immediately introduced in the succeeding paragraph with the essential information that the movement to a remote control war did not quite result in no loss of life. In addition to countless civilian casualties across the crossfire, the drone “pilots” themselves were negatively impacted in some way: children born to these pilots were all stillborn.
"When did it all start? I can’t really remember. It started like any recreational activity, I guess. Like TV. Sometimes they watched TV, and sometimes they sat there wearing their neurocasters. I didn’t care. It was after the big update of 1996 that things got weird. Mode Six."
This quote is about a specific event that happens to Michelle which by extension is a presentation of the bigger picture. The subject of that bigger picture being presented is the commercial VR program developed from the original private military technology. The commercial version is called Sentre and the “weirdness” to which Michelle refers is a zombie-like state of loss of interest in everything that players were interested in before. The effect of this weirdness is similar to becoming addicted to hard drugs like heroin or cocaine. The succeeding paragraph goes on to explain how the “they” she refers to here—her foster parents, Ted and Birgette—went from the more normal effects of being “addicted” to watching TV to the hardcore addiction of Sentre. They were both literally so zoned out that Michelle and her friend Amanda had some fun dressing them up and even painted a mustache on Birgette without either taking the slightest notice.
"The progress made in neuronics in the 1960s all had to do with our ability to read, copy, and send information into the brain, and the biggest discovery was how to send all that data between pilot and drone without latency. Neuronics was never really about our understanding of the mind. It’s basically a cut-and-paste technology, developed to create a suitable user interface for the advanced robots that were built by the federal army in the early ’70s. An advanced joystick, basically."
The secondary first-person narration is distinguished as Michelle’s, as previously indicated, by appearing in italicized bold type. This book is a combination of text and illustration with the pages containing illustration outnumbering the pages containing text. This structural framework is done not in the service of merely visualizing the action being verbally described as is usually the case in illustrated novels. The illustrations are complementary to the narration and fully weighted with significance to the job of piecing together what is going on. Michelle’s limited perspective does not offer the opportunity to introduce important information necessary to figure out what is going on. That job is left up to both the illustrations and the irregular appearances of the unidentified secondary narrator. For instance, the only way of concretely making a connection between the VR technology used to control drones used in the war and Sentre is through information found in the secondary narration like the quote above. Having established a link through the metaphor of the joystick, the narrator goes on rhetorically ask what would happen if the limited interaction involved in military use were to be applied to the entire civilian population. For all the concrete information conveyed by this narrator such as the history of neuronics, however, there is also the conveyance of more abstract information about things like “an Intercebral Intelligence” and the potential for a “hive mind” and mysterious group calling itself “the Convergence” which also serve to produce more ambiguities and increase the unsolved mysteries in the tale.
