This story is intimidating me.
Here’s why: although the events that transpire in each one I’ve written are dramatically different, they’re all really telling the same story. There’s a core message running through this whole book that accepting the life that’s handed to you can never be a recipe for success, and that a life led unthinkingly, dictated by unseen powers (benevolent or otherwise) might be happy but will always ultimately be hollow.
The other characters have discovered this to varying extents. The nightwatchman stumbled into the job he would keep for the rest of his life almost by accident. The chef fucked up so spectacularly, only to find an ambiguously hopeful thread at the end of a very frayed rope. The assassin was exiled and ended up coming out of a shell that would have otherwise felt like second nature.
The farmer went through a violent ordeal and a hopeless trial, only to be yanked back from the precipice by a stranger with too much time on her hands and a shared understanding. And the journalist found catharsis against a bleak, blood-streaked outlook.
There’s a deliberate mirror to these five, too. The nightwatchman and the journalist are about being spectators of events far bigger than their understanding. The chef and the farmer are largely about salvation. The assassin is a funny one, and maybe stands on its own. But then again, maybe not. The more I think about it, the more I feel like this story contains echoes.
Setting the stage, then:
The Reserve begins with a giant computer matrix, designed to attune to people’s desires and ambitions so minutely that it promises to give everyone a perfectly meaningful life. And it does - hundreds of years of research and development conducted underground in the aftermath of a global catastrophe have made it impossibly intelligent, far beyond the understanding of any individual human.
The protagonist of this story, Alex, is one of the second generation released to the surface. His life is steady, assured, and a joy to live - he goes into work every day, full in the knowledge that his road to a fulfilled retirement and a sense of completion on the day of his death will be completely uninterrupted.
And then it is.
The supercomputer - nicknamed The Narrative Strategy after its purpose - starts precipitating deaths far too often. People arrive on the surface, live a few powerfully cathartic months, then die in freak accidents or by the hands of others. The people in charge panic. They’re told that diagnostics will take upwards of a decade, but with no other options, they bite the bullet. Every algorithm, every line of code from the Strategy’s servers prior to the mortality trend is manually downloaded, and the Reserves are stolen away, given instant synaptic training (think I Know Kung-Fu) and put to work.
There are two people in charge of each underground pod. Hundreds of pods underground. Five people in each.
The rest of the story unfolds as a series of snapshots as Alex and his partner attempt to give the lives of the five characters in this book some direction, with more or less nothing going to plan.
The key to this story, I think, is the frame. This is told from Alex’s deathbed. It’s a retrospective. And I want to explicitly state the core of this book with some of his last words. Plenty of people have died in the preceding stories, but none of the protagonists, and I want to deal with that. I think shying away from it in a book about how to live one’s life would be short-sighted. And I want him to be old, dying of natural causes rather than something dramatic and pointless. I want him to know that his life had value despite the odd twists and turns. I want him to have a sense of paternalism to the people he was assigned to, and a strange sense of kinship with his partner.
I want to communicate those bonds as genuinely as possible, because while I think there are plenty of ways to glean meaning from your life, coming back to family, or something like it, is as powerful a reason as any other. Really, though, family could just as easily be the completion of a perfect work of art, or a sense of fulfilled duty to society, or something just as neat. What matters is that it comes out of chaos.
And if this all sounds hopelessly pretentious (it is when I put it like this), then try and keep in mind that this is a short story collection with BDSM sex robots, chatroom murder trials, the violent murder of teenage boys, a silicon scavenger unit roaming the desert and disintegrator beams in the hands of mysterious people wearing dark glasses. People like the protagonist of this story. Standing in front of the sentimentality is a big pile of weird.