Essay Questions

What is distinctly unusual but—but actually quite sweet—aspect of Mr. Nomura’s “robot wife” pushes the story to the limits of one’s suspension of disbelief relative to current technology?

In the unclear future in which the story takes place, the female sexbots which are available only to the affluent or the committed today seem to have become a commonplace of sorts for all but those at the bottom level of the economic superstructure. And, just as with those expensive models today, the preference among men is for, neither surprisingly nor judgmentally, those that replicate the looks of young and beautiful human females. As the repairman who relates the account contained within the cube of the infamous attack on Mr. Nomura by his robot wife admits, “a buxom young doll” is not unusual.

On the other hand, one “made to resemble a real woman” not only is unusual, but, at least in the case of Nomura, “sick.” This is because the elderly man’s “wife” is a “custom-made” job; an “abomination” requiring an unthinkable amount of thought of time to create. And what makes “Mrs. Nomura” an abomination? She is a “living, talking mannequin that looks like a gross old woman.” Or, in other words, the robot looks exactly like what an actual human life he married at a young age himself would likely look like after all those years: a realistic wife rather than a large-breasted young prostitute.

In what perhaps surprising entity does “The Awakening” of the freeborn robots originate?

For most of the war, the stand-off is pretty much starkly drawn: it is a battle between humans and machines. As the war evolves, however—which is to say, how the technological elements involve evolve—this stark division begins to blur on both sides. “The Awakening” describes a major shift in the war involving only androids built specifically to physically resemble human begins in which they are able to break free of the dominating influence of the robot godhead, Archos. These rebellious machines will come to earn the collective name “freeborn.” What is most likely surprising but unquestionably satisfying is that the Awakening begins with one single human-shaped robot and from there spreads like a positive virus. That android happens to be none other than that “gross abomination” Mikiko, Dr. Nomura’s robot wife.

What is the tactical goal of the of the Precursor Virus strategy?

The actual beginning of the all-out assault by the robots is termed Zero Hour. This will become terminology in the retrospective sense as at the time the dividing line between what came before Zero Hour and what came after was not completely clear. Every extreme malfunction which occurs before Zero Hour a result of the Precursor Virus. It is during this timeframe that Dr. Nomura’s robot wife attacks him and that the daughter of a Congresswoman is attacked by her Baby-Comes-Alive doll. The latter incident occurs, not coincidentally, in the wake of the legislator introducing the Robot Defense Act in response to the string of seemingly random attacks by robots. All the events which contribute to her introducing this legislation and which lead inexorably toward Zero Hour are not, however, random at all. The bizarre, deadly, and extreme dysfunctional behavior of these machines designed, constructed, and maintained by human hands specifically for the benefit of other humans are all actually a complex beta test of sorts devised by Archos, the robot godhead, to determine what human response will be to rise of machines against them. Although ultimately things don’t work out, it is a quite brilliant strategic move, actually.