Cormac “Bright Boy” Wallace, a warrior sitting on Archos’s electronic carcass in Alaska, discovers a “goddamn black box on the whole war” written in Robspeak. He realizes that the vanquished machines “want me to remember and write it all down,” and so he presents a series of vignettes of the crucial moments in humanity’s battle against robots. Each of these short chapters begins with a clunky explanation, e.g. “This account was reported by a fourteen-year-old,” “A handheld digital recording device was used to record the following audio diary,” “This transcript was taken during a congressional hearing,” etc. But none of these narrators sounds authentic. No matter who’s supposedly doing the telling, they all come out speaking the same synthesized melodrama.
Disposable characters who are obviously about to be killed say things such as: “I’ve got a bad feeling. . . . Something is in our technology. Something evil.” Computers that sound as though they’ve been infected by the voice of Ming the Merciless announce: “In less than one hour, human civilization will cease to exist as you know it. Major population centers of the world will be decimated.” And everywhere we get exposition in beta to bring us up to speed on each mini-crisis: “The government made IVC chips standard more than a decade ago, same as they did with seatbelts, airbags, and emissions criteria. This way, the cars can talk to each other.” No, Herbie, no!
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