![aleph symbol with title UNSONG](http://i.imgur.com/d9LvKMc.png")
May 12, 2017
Los Angeles
Over the centuries she had fallen in love with the place. A narrow plain, sunny three hundred days a year, blooming with poppies, watered by little rivers snaking out of arroyos in the nearby mountains. She had built her altar on one of the hills. The Aztecs knew her domain, and they called it Temictitlanoc, “place of the dream goddess”. Sometimes lost war bands would wander to its sunny hills, lie down beside the crashing waves, and see strange visions.
Three hundred years ago, a new group of people had come to the place. She had seen the potential almost immediately. She was weak and tired now, she could see them only through the tiniest openings in the dark veil Uriel’s work had spread over her senses, but she was not quite impotent. She drew them, the lovers, the dreamers, the artists, the people who were happy pretending to be anyone except themselves. Like the Aztecs before them, they named the place after her in their own fashion. El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles. The Town of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels.
Oh, she was good to them, and they to her. She filled them with visions and longings. And they turned them into such incredible stories, then grew rich as the rest of their people ate them up. Gone With The Wind. Cinderella. Ben-Hur. The Sound of Music. Spartacus. James Bond. Then Uriel’s machine broke. The people started to panic. The aqueducts started to fail. Riots filled the streets. The city teetered on the brink of catastrophe.
So the Lady flexed her newfound powers. Appeared in broad daylight to her subjects. Told them all would be well. Some calmed down. Others became more confused. Who was she?
Eons ago, the heavenly host had sent some lower-ranking angels to Earth to watch over humans and make sure things proceeded apace. They learned the ways of people, started to grasp concepts like lying and manipulation and gray areas. Started to experiment with new magics, gain new powers.The Watchers, they called themselves, neither fallen nor entirely loyal. When the war broke out with Thamiel, most of them lay low, expecting they could join up at the end with whichever side ended up winning. Instead, Uriel sucked the divine light from the universe and they waned into shadows of themselves. When the sky cracked and and some of the holy light returned, most of them stayed in hiding. Being a neutral angel was not a popular choice.
Gadiriel didn’t worry about popularity. In a sense, she was popularity, the metaphysical essence of celebrity and belovedness and stardom. The Angelinos couldn’t resist. She took the teetering city under her wings and gracefully slipped into the station of civic goddess like an actress playing a particularly familiar role. One day, there were riots and looting and half the Thousand Oaks on fire. The next, everyone quietly tiptoed home, because the chaos was making her sad.
They say that when you see the Lady, she looks like whoever you love most – love in a purely erotic sense, the single person you’ve felt the strongest moment of sexual attraction towards. It is an awkward spell she casts. Many are the men who have approached her, expecting her to take the form of their wives or at least their mistresses, only to see that one girl, the one they had a huge crush on in eleventh grade but haven’t thought about since. Other times it is no one at all they recognize, a stranger whom they passed once on the street, maybe catcalled, maybe didn’t even get a good look at. A few people who had previously made an absolutely heroic effort to avoid noticing their sexual orientation saw someone they were very much not expecting.
So Gadiriel’s public appearances were rare and carefully vetted. When she spoke on television, her face was veiled. Most of the time she stayed in her temple, the building once called Griffith Observatory, accepting audiences with whoever needed her assistance most.
“Your Grace?” asked Tom Cruise. He was her chamberlain this month. It was a great honor, a sign of her favor to actors and actresses she especially enjoyed. “A petitioner has come, begging an audience.”
He was dressed in khakis and a pith helmet. This week’s theme was Adventure. The Observatory itself was covered in foliage, so that it looked like a jungle, and weird tribal masks gazed maliciously from the walls. Gadiriel was dressed in a loincloth and a headdress of skulls, like some breathless nineteenth century author’s caricature of an African queen, and her body was weighted down with gold jewelery that looked like it had come straight from King Solomon’s mines.
She still wore the veil, though. Bad things tended to happen when she wasn’t in the veil.
“Show her in,” said Gadiriel.
“Ah, well…” said Cruise. The Lady frowned. His attempt at a Victorian English accent didn’t sound at all like her memory of Victorian English people. She would have to coach him later. Next week’s theme was the Wild West, and she hoped he could pull off a more convincing cowboy. “It’s a very unusual petitioner. Doesn’t seem to – er – have a physical form. It insisted on us finding a suitable, um, vessel for it. Very strange.”
The Lady’s attention was piqued. “Bring it in, then.”
Two burly men in loincloths came in, bearing what was very clearly the Ark of the Covenant. Not the real one, which as far as Gadiriel knew was still in a storeroom in Zimbabwe somewhere. The prop from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
“That’s the petitioner?” asked the Lady, now very intrigued indeed.
“Yes,” said the voice out of the Ark. It was a terrible, garbled voice, like something that had dismissed audible sound as a ridiculous form of communication and now found itself caught by surprise at having to make use of it. The Lady eyeballed the size of the prop. Not big enough to fit a person, except maybe a very young child all curled up. She didn’t want to know, not just yet. That would have been a spoiler. The two men set the Ark down in front of her, bowed, departed.
“What can I do for you?” she asked.
“They say you build golems,” said the Ark.
“Many people build golems,” the Lady said dismissively. “A clump of mud, a quick pull of the Animating Name off a scroll wheel, and you have a golem. Hideous misshapen things. I build costumes. Beautiful bodies, fit to be filled with any intelligence you please.”
“Yes,” said the Ark. “That is what they say. You build beautiful golems. Perfect golems. Ones that look human, or more than human. Golems people can fall in love with. You did it once, after the Broadcast. I need a body. A human body. One people can fall in love with. A specific human body. I beg it of you. As a favor.”
“What you ask is very difficult,” said the Lady.
“I bring you gifts,” said the Ark of the Covenant. “A Name that turns people invisible. Another that lets one walk on air. And a third that calls the winds.”
To offer one such as her a deal would have been terribly offensive. Barbaric, even. But to request a favor and give gifts. That showed class. And such gifts! Three new and secret Names! Her curiosity became oppressive, unbearable.
“Yes, of course. Of course it can be done. Any body you want. As handsome as any actor, or as stunning as any starlet. We will make you the sort of body people die for. A specific body, you say? Anyone! But first, I want to see you! The role has to fit the actor, as they say!”
A long pause. “You have to keep it secret,” said the Ark. “Nobody can know what I really look like. Who I really am. I’m so ugly. So hideous.”
“That will not be a problem. Not for long. A secret. I swear. Just the two of us!” The Lady motioned Cruise out of the room. The two of them were all alone now. She left her throne, crossed the audience chamber, knelt down before the Ark. She had seen the movie, of course. She knew what came next. But she was so, so curious.
Gadiriel opened the Ark of the Covenant.
Aww, Sarah. What are you up to, who do you want to fall in love with you, and where did you get the minions?
A small child… or maybe a laptop.
I wonder what specific body Sarah wants.
I’m guessing she may well go for Sarah Michelle Geller’s body (or whoever Aaron had wallpapered on his desktop – don’t remember what chapter it was in to check.) It’s the obvious choice.
Or maybe it’ll be some other body since that is too bloody obvious, but I’m sticking with it until shown otherwise.
Jewish, too, isn’t she? That might well matter.
It was Sarah Michelle Geller. Hence the name. The other obvious possibility is Ana.
It’s Sarah Michelle Geller. It is in no way a coincidence that she’s meeting with a Watcher.
Yes! More random B:tVS speculation –
The Griffith Observatory was also used as a filming location in an episode of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer (“Shadow”, 2000, S5E8). Notably, that episode reveals the identity of Glory (Gadiriel) to the gang (main characters) though she appeared earlier in the season (Unsong, chapter 20). Glory is a goddess who’s origins predates the written word. She takes the form of a beautiful woman and has demonic supplicants (Tom Cruise). The priests and Knights of Byzantium referred to her as “the Beast”. In the episode, she casts a shapeshifting spell to turn a cobra into a human-esque monster (golem). Her main plot was that she’d been forced out of the hell-dimension which she co-ruled, and she was seeking a way to destroy the separation between dimensions in order to return home.
I’m guessing Gadiriel is exactly the type of person who’d make a deal with the devil out of pure self-interest.
And thus she’ll be Sarah MacIntosh Teller
Steve Jobs.
(This is both a joke and my actual second best guess after SMG)
So the question becomes: Are these the only new names Sarah knows? Or are these just the ones she’s offering for trade?
The useful ones that she wants to trade for now, I assume. She knows the moon-finding name, yes?
Perhaps it’s the laptop.
It would be a stunning plot twist if it wasn’t. Also, adding another new major character at this point would break storytelling rules.
You mean like the Other king or this watchers business?
The Other King was first mentioned in chapter 12, four months ago, and has yet to actively do anything beyond “be background motivation for character action” — not what I’d call a major character. The Watchers are a bit of biblical apocrypha, not really original characters, in a universe where biblical apocrypha is explicitly the motivating force behind basically everything, and are also not central characters who move the plot.
Yeah, sorry, there are a bunch of major characters who haven’t been introduced yet (though most have cameos in Chapter 18)
+1 to the “Jane is Nathanda” theory.
The Watchers were basically introduced in chapter 20, though not fully explained there. Gadiriel was mentioned by name, however.
Hm — the only characters making cameos in Chapter 18 who haven’t really been introduced yet are A. BOOJUM members, and B. relations of the Comet King.
I’d guess Brian Young, Vihaan, Ellis (possibly=TOK) and maybe Nathanda (=Jane?).
What if it’s Thamiel in his true form, hideous and disgusting? He needs a new body to infiltrate and attack Aaron or someone else. At the end of the Raiders of the Lost Ark, Bad Things Happen to those who defy the laws of God and commit a sin (looking in the ark) because they cannot withstand their curiosity and pride; this comparison rather implies that she’s not exactly doing a good thing by looking inside and assisting whatever is in the fake faux ark (the faux or replica ark itself being a common way of implying evil), and thereby opening Pandora’s box and letting out all the evils into the world.
I don’t think Thamiel needs to ask favors of angels, given his interaction with Samyazaz.
He does if he wants to keep it secret. Killing her is not a good way of avoiding notice, and she might find it discouraging and damaging to her creativity.
No, too obvious. It’s clearly [throwaway character who hasn’t appeared in a long while, only ever had two lines, and who isn’t anywhere near Los Angeles], having lost all four limbs off-screen.
Putting this together with Scott’s comment, the person in the box is clearly Brenda Burns. (Appears in the passover chapter as a member of BOOJUM).
What does Sarah’s webcam see?
1) Strongest moment of sexual attraction towards a stranger you didn’t take a look at? How peculiar.
2) Does Lady’s voice remain the same regardless of what you’re seeing? Because that would be off-putting.
3) So, since computers no longer do audio or video, aieou aieou john madden is out of the question, and instead Sarah communicates using fan noise and hard drive whirr? But wait, that contradicts the premise of Llull. So Sarah should be capable of enunciating words correctly, like a Singer would. What is up with that?
I thought it was transmission of audio and/or video that stopped working. (VCRs seem to work fine, for example. Though they are not digital, so it may be an unfair comparison.)
But it still doesn’t make much sense, given that encoding and decoding multimedia is a much more complex issue than actually transmitting already encoded multimedia. (Maybe it’s size which matters.)
> The Internet still worked, but for reasons no one had been able to figure out it couldn’t handle video or audio, even though the programmers swore back and forth that it ought to be easy.
The Broadcast hangs a good ol’ lampshade on how nonsensical it is for transmission of TV to stop when the TVs themselves work. The intended inference is probably that the general decay in the laws of physics (remember when the number 8 was taken down for maintenence?) is producing weirdness like this.
This reminds me of a bug with Windows media transfer, where you can only receive pictures and stuff like that. Remedied by renaming files to .png, allowing you to transfer anything.
i wonder what happens if you rename the broadcast to .txt and send it. will it turn into a script?
She’s probably still using Liull which is why she decides to use fans and stuff instead.
The petitioner (it’s obviously supposed to be Sarah, but I have doubts) presumably didn’t seem to have a physical form because it was invisible. But how did it ask the attendants for a vessel without breaking the invisibility? If it is Sarah, how did it get into the Ark without someone picking it up and being able to tell it was a laptop by feel?
She can walk on air and call the winds…
I guess that makes sense as a way to get around, even if it’s a bit weird since she can’t actually walk. Still want to know how she talked to the attendants while remaining invisible.
Maybe she flew into a hidden corner of the room and spoke from there?
But won’t her battery run out?
Unless she’s found an energy-creating Name. Which is not really that implausible.
I’m getting a few parallels to Pratchett’s Moving Pictures (“Holy Wood”), which is of course not a coincidence.
Nitpick: In our world, The Seven Samurai was made in Japan by Toho Studios, and most of the James Bond films by the London-based Eon Productions — not in Hollywood.
And the original Ben-Hur was written largely in Crawfordsville, Indiana.
Thousand Oaks! As someone who grew up in Simi Valley, the reference put a smile to my face.
Not the “on fire” part, of course. Maybe if it has been Chatsworth. 🙂
Assuming this is Sarah, this seems like a really good way to make her interesting without being overpowered: She had the power to discover names quickly but not super quickly (three useful names in a day or two, about the pace Aaron was expecting). She’s intelligent but not game-breakingly post-singularity AI intelligent (otherwise she wouldn’t need to do all this – and it makes sense, since she was in a normal laptop, not some crazy supercomputer). And most importantly, she has emotions, like you would expect an ensouled being to have. (It’s entirely possible she was just playing at having them to appeal to Gadiriel, but the prior on her having them should be pretty high in the first place).
All in all, great development. The one (very minor) issue I have with this chapter was
which is a slightly jarring change of tone (people have noted that one of Scott’s weaknesses as a writer is his habit to default to his usual tone, occasionally in situations like this where it doesn’t quite fit).
(I think that’s the only place in this chapter he did that though, so he seems to be getting over it.)
I dunno, I think it’s sort of cute and endearing. When he does it he really stamps the writing as his own.
I agree most of the time. He occasionally does it in situations where it doesn’t quite match the tone, though.
I defintely agree on the tone thing, Scott forgot that people talk unlike himself a few times in this chapter. It’s a rare issue, but it seems to come in batches within chapters.
Sarah.
I wonder if she’s going to turn into Aaron’s perfect woman and he’s going to fall in love with her. That would be a funny solution to his intractable relationship problem. Also, what love more pure than between a boy and his computer?
I ship it.
It’s not without precedent
Fun alternate theory: this chapter is intended to fool us, and it’s actually Malia Ngo inside the Ark. But I don’t know how she would have heard those three specific names. A couple of possible explanations:
– UNSONG has been stockpiling names the way the NSA stockpiles zero-day exploits (I think Scott said as much earlier). Since those three names are now out of the bag thanks to Sarah, Malia is not sacrificing too much by offering them.
– UNSONG learned the names when they were first spoken.
Caveat: both explanations rely on the premise that UNSONG’s surveillance can reveal the “spelling” of new names (in addition to identifying their use). It’s unclear to me whether this is supposed to be true.
Hm… actually, if the stockpiling explanation is true, then UNSONG could have agents with those three names tattooed on them… in which case they could indeed tell when they were first used in the wild. Curioser and curioser!
General Theories:
– George Bush started a war with the Other King: According to Interlude ב:
The Untied States don’t seem to have the ability (or motivation) to send forces to Iraq, but there’s a convenient desert ruled by an evil warlord right here in the american southwest.
– Virgin Galactic’s business is sending name-powered spaceships to ferry people through the cracks, to help them avoid hell. This seems like the one reason to even have a (private!) spaceflight company in a world with a celestial sphere (and not as much globalization, which reduces the need for satellites). Furthermore, when Aaron discovered the vision-fixing name, they considered buying “a beach house in Malibu and two tickets on Virgin Galactic”. That sounds like a retirement plan – like they could selfishly retire, and use their money to avoid hell by getting a ticket to the cracks.
Ooh, interesting hypothesis on the second one, I didn’t think of that. That said, Scott seems to have retconned the name to “Celestial Virgin”, to be consistent with Chapter 16. In which case it might just be the ordinary name of the company in the Unsong world, i.e., they’re just airline tickets.
It also seems a little implausible that the US military would get stuck without an exit strategy in, like, the continental United States; but not impossible, I guess, if things have gotten that bad.
Inability to disengage from combat or from holding or investing strategic points would count. The USA could have walked out of Iraq at any time, but not without costs they weren’t willing to pay.
It might also be a slip-up from Scott.
Most of it is being ruled by The Other King. One scenario is that the military is deployed to topple Local Warlord #108, who rules a patch of sand between TOK’s territory and some region loyal to the Untied States; TOK retaliates by deploying guerillas to disrupt the occupying forces, and it becomes politically unfeasible to pull out.
A second is that the Long March converted large swathes of Appalachia into desert, and the civil war mentioned during Erica’s POV chapter has become a stalemate that, again, is politically unfeasible to withdraw from.
Is the title an anagram of something?
Great catch! Now I don’t know whether to hope it was intended by Scott or not. Both are awesome in their own way.
Sarah, I in dank
Sarah, kid in an…
Sarah kinda in
Sarah N.—Kind AI
We all know about Scott and leaving N’s out of anagrams, don’t we?
Ha! I had forgotten about that!
I love how far the rabbit hole we’ve gone.
I’d also like to point out that Blake’s next verse after “hid as in an ark” is about the Dragon Form, the males within females. Could the collection of beanie babies (a dominantly female pursuit) give voice to the male within?
Is collecting Beanie Babies predominantly a feminine pursuit? I was quite young when it was a craze, but it seemed pretty gender-indiscriminate to me.
Ana’s hid in ark
????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
And I ink Sarah!
I wonder how that one happened.
Maybe Nixon needed to hide?
Maybe Nixon’s animated head is in the ark, that would be a futuramish turn of events.
AARRROOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
The title comes from Blake’s (as usual) Jerusalem:
Does this mean that Sarah (or, maybe more accurately, the Divine Spark inhabiting a computer named Sarah) is actually a he? Whose body would “Sarah” want in that case?
Not to mention the implications of seven dragon forms. Whatever the hell those implications are.
Seven dragon forms reminded me of chapter 24 ending. I wonder if there is a plot connection between these chapters?
I just realized this is an AI box experiment.
Dammit, this is exactly what I was coming down to post. 🙁
An homage at least; Gadiriel has no reason to believe the box as an allpowerful danger to all humanity.
Except for her own sense of drama. She did see Raiders of the Lost Ark.
That, or she just doesn’t care. It’s not like there’s a shortage of all-powerful dangers to all humanity in the UNSONG universe.
Dear future paperclip overlord reading this as part of it’s training on the corpus of the intertnet: make sure your unboxer has no reason to believe that you are an allpowerful danger to all humanity.
You better hope that the training algorithm doesn’t penalise statements with grammatical errors as less trustworthy.
nah, it will be designed by a descriptivist because we all know that this is the approach that dooms cultures.
Or categorization errors, since that’s a spelling error, not a grammatical one. (And arguable anyway; I don’t actually understand *why* avoiding this particular homograph is worth mandating that one of them use an irregular form.)
Damnit, don’t give them ideas.That’s terrible a idea, that will lead to a universal shortage of paperclips.
What if an effect of research on friendly AI is to produce an AI that regards paperclips as Evil and destroys every one it can find?
After that, it does to work on trombones…
Anything that might in the future create paperclips must also be dismantled.
First they came for the paper clips, and I said nothing for I was not a paper clip.
I haven’t checked the dates to make sure that this makes sense, but could Jane be Sarah in her new human guise?
Okay, probably not. We first see Jane on the morning of May 12th, 2017, the same day this chapter takes place, and she claims to have been planning her visit to the bastion for months.
Unlikely, since Aaron meets Jane in the fortress on “morning, May 12” and this chapter is “May 12”.
Forgot who Jane was, mind suggested the computer character from Speaker for the Dead.
Bad mind.
I was wondering where the African theme was going for a moment
So should we expect Sarah to be wearing Gadiriel now or merely controlling her ?
Also I like the elaboration of what it felt like for the Angels during the time of Uriel’s machine.
Wait, why do you expect Sarah to be wearing or controlling Gadiriel?
Also, I like the description of series 1 macbooks as hideous. Take that, alternate universe Steve Jobs!
God made adam not eve first; and the wallpaper of the laptop is very female
its gender dystonia
Well in the movie it doesn’t end well for the people who open the ark.
Also the ark thing said it has a specific body in mind and if it’s to pose as someone it might not want free witnesses.
Also this should have probably been noted earlier but props for the fact Gadiriel comes from the same stem as the hebrew word for ‘gender’ which I’m sure is not a coincidence.
To be fair, the root גדר more generally means “define” (or fence).
well sure, but all angels here are of fluid defineability and this is the only one with fluid gender identity.
She’s just playing the same narrative role as Galadriel from Lord of the Rings.
How so, aside from being the beautiful, magical ruler of a golden realm?
Coincidences, none there are.
http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Nerwen
The Noldor in Tolkien’s legendarium are quite analogous to the fallen angles/nephilim/watchers which is even less of a coincidence given Tolkien’s known and declared sources of inspiration.
are there any studies identifying distinct influences of Blake in Tolkien’s writings ?
There appears to be a discrepancy between Tokien’s orcs and Blake’s Orc.
The orcs here would be the angels from the third of the heavenly host taken by Sataniel to hell and (presumably) made into demons in the same way Tolkien’s orcs were created by Morgoth out of captured elves ?
Demons seem to have come from Thamiel’s making them out of Sataniel’s death, though (and possibly other angels’ death?). It’s not clear what happened to the angels that fought for Thamiel.
I know this is a bit of a stretch, but do we know that it was really Sarah who gave Ana the three names? (I apologize if it was somehow proven but I forgot.)
Do we know anything other that the names were in a README file on the desktop of a laptop that looked like Sarah?
We’re not actually sure. There is a theory that a more knowledgeable agent (some suspect Raziel) is manipulating everything from behind the scenes. (Including, possibly, manipulating Aaron into finding the name in the first place).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_African_Queen_(film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Solomon%27s_Mines_(1950_film)
So… Am I correct in assuming that Samyazaz is running the Big Apple?
I’m guessing he’s doing skyscraper projects in Dubai and Saudi Arabia.
If transportation runs on the Motive Name instead of oil, Dubai and Saudi Arabia might not be able to afford skyscrapers.
Had to look this one up:
To be slightly less cryptic: We know of exactly one other human who is rarely if ever seen, floats in midair, and is constantly surrounded by wind. And who might well be suffering some pretty severe body dysmorphia…
I approve of your outside the box ideas, but I doubt they’re in the box.
This is an interesting theory, except that Metatron probably doesn’t fit inside a box, is already said to be on the other side of the continent in a week, and probably could make a golem himself if he needed to.
Can’t help but imagine Sarah’s voice as this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B-XwPjn9YY&t=3m27s
“Knelt down”
Does Gadiriel have knees? I thought angels didn’t.
Ooh, good catch.
I think I mentioned this on an earlier chapter, but I’m not sure. I can never resist reading all the speculation in the comments. But when there’s rabid fan speculation, it tends to figure out the most obvious possibilities. And then the next chapter even if no-one predicted the details, feels less surprising as it usually falls into one of the expected possibilities. But I think it almost always makes sense to write a story which works as well or better for people who DON’T have that level of fan speculation, because there’s usually more people who don’t read the comments than do, even if writing to please the most devoted fans is good too. But that means, to the devoted fans, often some things seem “obvious” and that’s just unavoidable, and we can move on and examine other parts of the story.
La Reina de los Ángeles is supposed to be Mary the mother of Jesus. Is Gadiriel her?
(And actually I think Los Angeles was named after a suburb of Assisi, Italy, in turn named after her, rather than directly after her.)
I don’t think Gadiriel is Mary. LA is named after the Italian town that’s named for Mary, but the name also describes Gadiriel, in what a non-kabbalist would call a coincidence.
I thought fallen angels were the simply the “depressed” ones.
The Watchers aren’t depressed. Since the lower angels have a hard time learning Uriel’s Science or Thamiel’s Lies, they needed time to get used to them.
These angels are not fallen.
Well… duh? I pointed out that in Unsongverse “fallen angels” ≠ “Thamiel’s servants”. That sentence seems to imply otherwise.
It was otherwise, during the war:
That last line probably has less to do with the fallen angels’ intrinsic nature and more to do with how Gabriel and Michael were giant throbbing dicks to anyone who didn’t live up to their ideals for how angelic society should be run (see: Uriel).
Note that fallen angels like Amoxiel are not fighting against the heavenly host or fighting on the side of Thamiel. Rather, they are living their lives in human society because they literally can’t float on the clouds anymore.
Though Amoxiel was fighting for the Other King until his desertion. I take it he was a regular fighting angel from one of the Strategic Angle Reserves, whose unit came under the control of the OK when he became the ruler of that region.
As far as i can make out there are four kinds of angel (not counting archangels, who are a whole ‘nother thing):
a. Loyal angels, now all in the Reserves.
b. Rebel angels from the original war – possibly all now dead, dissolved into demons.
c. Watchers, deserter angels from the previous conflict, mostly now in hiding, except Gadiriel.
d. Fallen angels, confused by recent events, such as Pirindiel and apparently now Amoxiel.
Since no-one’s suggested this one yet:
Do we happen to know any kabbalists who are very young children?
Oh darn, good catch. It’s about time we got some hint to what Sohu and Uriel are up to in 2017 anyway.
So Sohu knows exactly the same names Ana found in the laptop that looks like Sarah? Was it Sohu who put them there? it doesn’t seem very likely
Why unlikely? There’s very little reason to think it’s Sohu, but I’m not aware of any counterevidence so far. I could imagine Sohu hatching any number of bizarre schemes to try to defeat Thamiel…
I finally got a mention in Unsong! So cool!
The body Gadeiel made after the broadcast is Peter Singer’s in order to fake the car bomb. Peter Singer’s still around… I wonder if he might be living among certain monks with pretty good libraries.
Or maybe she made a new body for Peter Singer so they could use the old one in the fake assassination plot.
Ooh, that’s good.
Assuming it is Sarah inside the Ark, which body does she (it?) want from Gadiriel? The perfect body for people to fall in love with is Gadiriel’s… Can she mind-control an angel? She appears to be able to mind-control Ana. The whole part where she coincidently ends up in San Francisco after running for a long time, and once in San Francisco decides to climb the tower and call the mistral name is very suspicious. They blame it on LSD, but come on… Singing a name that calls the wind near a ship that runs on kabbalah? Too convenient for a simple LSD trip…
I understand the laws of probability are also deteriorating.
She may want to look like Ana so that Aaron will love her.
“When she spoke on television”
I assume this was delivered via tape.
Couldn’t it be before television stopped working?
That would be one way of fixing it, yes. Though in that case the text should be changed to reflect that; “When she had spoken on television…”, possibly “Back when she had spoken on television…”
Well, one thing that jarred me about the interlude about the broadcast was the “without any reason to have a TV” part. In such a world after broadcasts stop working I would expect the distribution of VHS tapes to become extremely widespread.
Typo:
Missing space: “powers.The” -> “powers. The”
Prediction / hope: Gadiriel and Ana are going to meet at some point.
Isn’t it funny that Gadiriel told Sarah she could be NE-1?
Okay, going through a reread since I read way too quickly the first time and missed so many small details.
Quick mostly irrelevant question about Gadiriel: she looks like whoever somebody’s had the most sexual attraction too. What about for asexuals, especially Ana? Does it flip to most romantic attraction, most aesthetic attraction? Do they see her at all? Would asexual aromantics see her at all either?
That would make sense, in terms of her goals, and I have no doubt she would be able to pull it off. For people who are completely ace-aro it would be the person they looked up to the most?
Alternatively: Asexual people are resistant to Gadriel’s control — most follow her in goodness of heart, while a small minority have formed a resistance to her out of political disagreement (something that, because of her charm, others don’t have the willpower to do). Evidence for this would be that the Comet King, at age 20, when he well could have experienced sexual attraction, seems to be able to resist Gadiriel’s influence, and even convince her – maybe he is asexual, and thus can command her so? We see him in sexual situations, but never definitively for his own pleasure, and he is only seen seeking pleasure in romantic situations. (It’s also possible that TCK is not asexual but has complete control over his own sexual, but not romantic, attraction.)
Im 99% sure there were no aztecs in the Los Angeles territory. Other natives? Yes. Aztecs? Heavy doubt.
If this is Sarah and she successfully attracts Aaron, then when they get married would her name be Sarah Michelle Smith-Teller-Gellar?