Now that we’re alone and we won’t spoil the fun for the others, let’s get down to the real stuff.
Runciter and his company are lured to a space outpost for a job, where they are ambushed and struck by a bomb, killing Runciter and injuring the others, leaving Joe Chip and the crew scrambling to figure out where to go from there, as they frantically try to get Runciter sealed into a “cold-pac” in time. In the book’s universe, people who “die” can be frozen and put into a coma-like “half-life” state, where they can be hooked up to machines and communicate with people in “full-life.” This concept is the crux of the novel and leads the gang down into a zany reality that degrades before their very eyes as each of the initial group of inertials begins to be picked off one-by-one.
At this point, the novel’s main protagonist becomes Joe Chip, Runciter’s right-hand man, and follows him as he attempts to piece together what force is causing things in their reality to regress in time, and who is causing the inertials to die and shrivel up as though they have been rotting away for decades.
Within this narrative, the novel functions like a mystery, as Joe Chip and his friends follow clues left to them to figure out what is going on. It’s a well-crafted mystery that gives you enough to let you try to figure out what’s happening, but not enough to make it obvious. I, myself formulated a couple of different theories throughout the plot, all of which were wrong in the end!
I was delightfully surprised by an ending that pretty much came out of left field, but was still satisfying in that everything involved in the ending had been introduced earlier in the narrative. It turns out that Glen Runciter was really alive all along, and that the group of inertials had died in the bomb blast and were then connected together in one half-life state. The whole time, Runciter was attempting to connect with them and save them from fully dying. Their entire reality post-bomb blast was constructed and manipulated by outside forces. While there is a bit more to the ending that I don’t care to spoil for all of you that chose to keep reading, this bit of it is an eerie and nightmarish idea that will leave you thinking about the nature of our own reality.
And, in a turn that once again makes you question the validity and absurdity of reality, the story leaves us with the image of Glen Runciter, who is supposedly alive in the real world, taking a coin out of his pocket that bears Joe Chip’s face. Whaaaaaaaat. Although I’m not usually partial to cliffhanger endings like this, I thought it was entirely appropriate and left me thinking for a long time after I finished reading. What is reality? How can we discern what’s “real” and what isn’t? Maybe Elon Musk is right. Everything is a simulation.
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