Sentre Mode 6
The narrator says with the arrival of the Mode 6 update in 1996 for the Sentre Stimulus virtual reality device everything suddenly became irregular. With that update, what apparently had been just another form of entertainment became dangerously addictive. Sentre Mode 6 is simply a symbol of the addictive power of technology, it is a broadly comprehensive symbol of extreme addiction that corrupts one’s basic essence of humanity.
Lasagna
During one of the narrative accounts of the mysterious Walter, the first-person speaker recounts watching a man named Max get shot during the war while in the middle of a conversation about lasagna. The shot blew the top of his head off, scattering his brain everywhere. This results in the revelation that everything that Max knew about lasagna could be retrieved if there was a way to pull all those scattered parts of brain matter back together again. Lasagna thus becomes a rather ghastly symbol for the complexity of the mind is more than merely the brain. The mind is the inexplicable way that the physical brain and all the external input of experience work together.
Skip
Skip is introduced as the protagonist’s constant companion, a little yellow robot. Except that Skip does things that robots usually don’t do, like sleep and drink. The story relentlessly moves toward a major revelation about Skip that effectively situates him as a symbol of the lurking danger of modern science relying too much upon technology. Not in the conventional sense of a robot uprising, but rather in the sense of people eventually losing a part of their humanity by becoming actually physically integrated with machinery.
War Drones
The story commences with a brief overview of a seven-year-long war conducted using enormous drones like giant chess pieces engaged in a battle that were controlled by “pilots” situated miles away from the battlefield. The promise was that this technological innovation would reduce military casualties. This was accomplished at the cost of heavy casualties to civilians caught in the crossfire and fatal birth defects in children conceived by pilots. The massive death toll of non-combatants symbolizes the gruesome toll of collateral damage that has been inflicted over recent decades by similar advances in war technology designed to reduce the death toll among soldiers but which actually resulted in increased death rates of civilians.
The Convergence
The first-person account in the “Walter” sections of the book eventually reveals the existence of a group calling itself the Convergence. They believe that the virtual reality program developed during the war produce a super-intellect called the Inter Cerebral Divinity that was capable of conceiving one fetus that survived birth. This child is a sort-of half-human Jesus-like entity the Convergence believes is the carrier of a “perfect nonhuman genome” and they want to get their hands on it. It remains ambiguous as to whether the Convergence is actually onto something or not, but they are defined as a symbolic representation of the tendency of humans to collectively veer toward wild conspiracy theories at the onset of hard times.
