The Event
Before getting to the narrative proper, there is a short Prologue featuring first-person narration by Dr. Rose Franklin recalling an event which occurred when she was eleven years old. The narrative proper immediately skips ahead to the present-day when that young girl has earned an doctorate and is employed by the Fermi Institute. But it is that event—riding a bike into the woods and falling into a hole—which happened all those years ago which is the stimulant for everything that happens afterward:
“The hole I was in was perfectly square, about the size of our house. The walls were dark and straight with bright, beautiful turquoise light shining out of intricate carvings. There was light coming out of just about everything around me. I moved my hands around a bit. I was lying on a bed of dirt, rocks, and broken branches. Underneath the debris, the surface was slightly curved, smooth to the touch, and cold, like some type of metal.”
Giant Alien Robots
When you really start to think about it the world of science fiction has been pretty tepid when it comes to stories about giant alien robots. After all, who can’t get excited at the sight of a giant robot especially if it was brought here from another world. There’s Gort (sort of) and The Iron Giant and the original Mechagodzilla and the Transformers and that’s a good start. But there’s something definitely missing when it comes to all the famous giant alien robots. Hmm, what could be?
“—Definitely a girl! I couldn’t stop grinning when they brought the chest in. Her breasts aren’t that large, given her size, but they’re still bigger than my car. Perky…She must have been the envy of all the giant girl robots back in her day…The breastplate and the middle of the abdomen are smooth. I think she’s wearing some type of sleek armor, like the Amazons. Two large turquoise arteries are running down her sides behind large ribs. It’s as if part of her anatomy is exposed. There is a large-scale V-shaped armor piece carved into her back, going all the way to her waist. It’s magnificent, very humbling.”
Acceptable Losses
The worldwide search for the buried giant robot parts needing to be reassembled is not a mission accomplished without risk. And eventually the risk quotient works its way into the political calculus. Of course, that calculus is—as always—rigged so it is far from being pure mathematics. Still, at least there is enough concern to give it lip service, so that’s something:
“Eight people died while we raced the Soviets to the moon. Another fourteen lost their lives in the Challenger and Columbia accidents, and yet the space program is still around. Space exploration exploration is important enough to justify the death of twenty-two people. Had 22,000 people died, things might have been different. We lost about three hundred soldiers liberating Kuwait. Most would think that was reasonable. Over four thousand Americans died in Iraq. Some might say it was too high a price to get rid of Saddam Hussein, some might not.”
David Ferrie?
The entire enterprise is, to an extent, an exercise in the phenomena of paranoia government conspiracies. The presentation of the story through a series of interviews with a clearly quite powerful but otherwise utterly mysterious interlocutor—each interview identified with a specific case number as well as the location of the interview—actually does absolutely nothing to serve the purpose of establishing the in-story viability of the information. A little over the midway point of the book, an interview with an unidentified subject who identifies himself only as “Mr. Burns” takes place. The imagery describing him features a description of one specific aspect of the man’s appearance that seems to be a gently comical allusion to perhaps the most infamous of all the incompetent loonies that JFK assassination conspiracy nuts hitched their unsteady wagon to:
“There is a short, stocky, old man entering the restaurant. He appears to be in his sixties or early seventies. He is wearing a tan trench coat, about two sizes too small, and a brim hat. He…He has no eyebrows…I sincerely hope he is not the man I am waiting for…Unfortunately, he is now approaching my table with a large smile on his face.”
