“It was decorated bright purple and had green spikes down the center of the egg, making it look like it had a Mohawk. […] [T]he distinctive shape of a penis was crudely drawn on each of the two legs.”

The absurd and childish details in the image of the mech contrast sharply with the robot’s purpose as a killing machine. This contrast exemplifies the text’s dark humor and supports the novel’s concern with The Gamification of War, suggesting that Apex’s customers are absurd and childish, themselves, in their cavalier attitude toward the consequences of the invasion of New Sonora.

“The video started. We were greeted with a view of a cube filled with a translucent blue gel. An industrial printing square. A shape started to form inside the gel. A mech.”

The image of the mech being printed onboard the Pinnacle is phrased with alternating sentence lengths—short, medium, short, medium, short. Two of the short sentences are fragments. This pattern creates a jerky, start-and-stop rhythm that mimics the mechanics of 3-D printing and suggests that Oliver’s mind itself is starting and stopping as he watches the seemingly inevitable progress of the coming invasion, highlighting his fear.

“‘If you do it quickly, you will get a gold star on your daily Smile Statement.’

‘You better do it,’ Lulu said. ‘You don’t want a frowny-face sticker.’”

Roger’s offer of a gold star on Rosita’s “daily Smile Statement” is ridiculous given the fact that Rosita is a grown woman preparing to defend her home from invasion. Details like this help to create the story’s darkly humorous tone and underscore the absurdity of the characters’ situation. Lulu’s sarcastic advice to Rosita is characteristic of her wry humor and demonstrates the characters’ awareness that their situation is absurd.

“Even after my encounter with the robot this morning, it didn’t seem real. Was it strange that I couldn’t stop worrying about the farm itself? About the crops? It seemed wrong. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

Oliver’s thoughts demonstrate how bewildering the sudden change in his circumstances has been and reinforce both his humanity and his innocence. The series of rhetorical questions highlights his confusion as he struggles to process recent events. The situation is shocking and overwhelming to Oliver, a mild-mannered and apolitical person suddenly portrayed as a dangerous radical.

“The guns appeared to be dry-sealed in plastic, not unlike the turkey and mashed potato never-expire food rations we opened every Christmas.”

Oliver’s simile comparing the guns’ packaging to the packaging of Christmas food emphasizes how unfamiliar guns are to the New Sonorans, who do not use these weapons on their planet. Like the traditional Christmas foods brought from Earth, guns are a cultural tradition that, once introduced, will never disappear.

“By planting this seed, we can perhaps sow chaos in the Chode family household, preventing him from further incursions. It is a proven tactic against remote enemies.”

The juxtaposition of Roger’s formal diction with the use of the player nickname “Chode” to refer to an entire family is humorous. By extending this vulgar and disparaging nickname to the entire family, Roger implies that the young player’s poor character is a result of his family’s poor character. Roger advocates here for using the kinds of bullying and harassment often seen in online gaming spaces in the cause of defending New Sonora. This introduces moral ambiguity into the New Sonoran campaign and explicitly links bullying and harassment to “remote” interactions, supporting a key element of the text’s arguments about The Toxicity of Online Culture.

“‘We were different,’ Rosita said, ‘And that’s all that matters.’”

Rosita explains to Oliver that the origins of the colony settlers are enough to create prejudice against them on Earth. The difference she cites is minor, but she says that “that’s all that matters,” highlighting In-Group/Out-Group Dynamics, Colonization, and Genocide: People will seize on any minor difference as an excuse to create an out-group that can be discriminated against if it is to the advantage of their own in-group.

“‘We gotta meet them along the way, kill the remaining mechs before they find the base.’ I raised my voice. ‘Gear up! We’re moving in two minutes!’”

This moment is a turning point for Oliver’s character. He has been a mostly passive recipient of Roger’s plans and orders. For the first time, he responds to the ongoing threat by not just making a plan and acting on it but by assuming command of the rest of the young New Sonorans and issuing orders of his own. The detail of his raised voice and the repeated exclamation points convey his conviction and self-assurance as he transitions into this new role.

“There is a note painted on the inside of the box. It reads, ‘Merry Christmas.’ This note makes no sense as Christmas isn’t for several months.”

Roger’s inability to understand the cynical, sarcastic humor of Apex’s note to the New Sonorans highlights a difference between his intelligence and that of the humans. Roger’s intelligence allows him to process and draw conclusions from vast quantities of data, but its dispassionate, logical nature does not allow him to fully understand the nuances of human motivation or how these manifest in nonliteral communication. The characteristics that Roger reveals here become important to the novel’s plot in later chapters, as his lack of compassion presents a danger to Earth’s humans.

“They only needed to kill us once, and we had to kill them over and over. It wasn’t fair.”

Oliver’s realization of how terribly the odds are stacked against the New Sonorans uses the contrast between two meanings of the word “kill” to highlight the differing consequences of the fighting for the occupants of New Sonora and the remote operators of the mechs. For the Apex gamers, “kill” is used in the figurative, gaming sense—the temporary destruction of their in-game avatars—and being “killed” in this way results in nothing more than inconvenience. For the New Sonorans, “kill” is used in the literal sense. Being “killed” in this way means the permanent loss of a real human life. This differential risk is a consequence of the gamification of war.

“Betty Sue the chicken let out a loud cluck and rocketed out of the room, moving toward the clicking devices. She picked one up with her beak and started angrily smashing it against the barn floor.”

The diction of this passage stresses Betty Sue’s nature as a sentient, biological creature with feelings of her own: She gives a “loud cluck” and “angrily” smashes the clicking device. It also, however, metaphorically compares her to a machine as she “rocket[s]” out of the room. Her emotional response to the clickers is offset by the automatic nature of her behavior, a response that Mr. Yanez trained into her. In this way, Betty Sue—like Roger—is a hybrid of automation and sentience, raising questions about the distinction between “real” and “artificial” life forms and intelligences.

“I thought again of my grandmother’s buñuelos. I could taste the cinnamon, despite not having eaten one in a very long time. It reminded me of community, and the sight of so many people working together helped ease that strange, sudden feeling of being crushed.”

Oliver’s sense memory of the cinnamon from his grandmother’s buñuelos recalls a more innocent time in his life when the adults in his community took care of all his needs and made him feel cherished. Now, he looks around at his community working together to defend New Sonora, and he realizes that, even though he is an adult with “crushing” responsibilities, he is not in the situation alone. This communal lightening of his load helps illustrate that in-group allegiance is not always negative.

“Streaks of light ripped back and forth from both sides, oddly reminding me of those videos of Earth rave dance parties. The burning antimissile glitter punctuated the night air, giving everything else a sparkling appearance, like everything in the world was shivering.”

Vivid imagery conveys the paradoxical visual beauty of the horrific battle: There are “streaks of light,” and the air glitters and shivers. The simile comparing the visual elements of the fighting to “Earth rave dance parties” associates the attack with the carefree, irresponsible nature of such parties. This supports the text’s characterization of the Apex gamers as irresponsible and immature young people who are too carried away by their own excitement to consider the damage they are doing to others.

“Across the way, the others continued to circle the body of Mr. Gonzales. More scenes like this were playing out in other places, and that unraveling feeling in my chest turned into a knot.”

The death of Mr. Gonzales devastates Oliver and hardens his attitude toward the enemy. The lost and confused feeling that Oliver has been experiencing—the metaphorical “unraveling”—abruptly halts, like unraveling strings suddenly knotting together. Oliver turns his attention to the downed mech of Benico Campos and, for the first time, engages in deliberate cruelty of his own.

“Christ, I thought. I didn’t understand any of this. Was this really the sort of thing that entertained people on Earth?”

Oliver’s reaction to Goat Sects’s online taunting of Campos is a condemnation of the toxicity of online culture. Ironically, Oliver is just about to participate in the same kind of online harassment against Campos, though he believes that his own motives are loftier. The positioning of this incident immediately following the death of Mr. Gonzales, however, suggests that anger is Oliver’s primary motivation, whether he acknowledges this to himself or not.

“I felt ashamed of being happy that the guy was dead, ashamed that I liked that he was dead, and it didn’t make sense.”

After Campos’s death, Oliver struggles with the morality of his own reaction. He recognizes that Campos was his enemy and was endangering the lives of his friends and community, but he also realizes that there is a difference between the grim necessity of killing in war and actively being “happy” about a death. Oliver’s happiness illustrates how contact with Earth’s culture and the horrors of war are beginning to change him—but his confusion shows that this contamination is not complete and that there is hope for his moral future.

“I am bound by my programming, Oliver friend number three.”

Although the narrative will not reveal it until Part 5, Roger has already broken free from his limitations when he makes this statement to Sam. His assertion that he is bound by his programming, ironically, is Roger’s first lie. His decision to continue calling Sam “Oliver friend number three” is a genuine choice—one of the first he has been able to make—and reveals that he has a wry sense of humor.

“My bed sat there in the middle of it all, miraculously untouched, surrounded by just smoking debris. My […] plastic toy dinosaurs scattered on my bed […] as if I’d just finished playing with them. Ash and embers settled gently on it all like snow.”

The juxtaposition of images of innocence and images of devastation creates a symbolic portrait of Oliver himself. Like his bed, he still stands, but he is surrounded by the “smoking debris” of his former life. The plastic dinosaurs he has saved from his childhood symbolize the innocence he might still manage to retain, but the simile of the ash and embers falling on the scene “like snow” indicates that even the appearance of something as peaceful and innocent as snow is, in the midst of this terrible war, deceptive.

“We were a cause to them […] A ribbon one could put on their profile picture. […] [S]omething one could wear like a pair of sunglasses […] a way to present themselves to the world, a way to say Look at my halo. Look how much I care.”

Oliver uses a simile to compare the New Sonorans to something fashionable but easily discarded “like a pair of sunglasses.” This comparison suggests that Persimmon Intergalactic sees the New Sonorans as things rather than people. Oliver sardonically suggests that Persimmon members see themselves as “angels.” His final, mocking comment, “Look how much I care,” is meant to convey the way Persimmon members want to be seen by others, but his intent is sarcastic.

“If I may ask, when did you start to suspect I had broken free?”

Roger’s diction in this question is significant. His use of the words “broken free” suggests that, before finding the password in the Earth blog, he was imprisoned. His intelligence and individuality have not changed; only his status as a “free” or “enslaved” being has changed. This contributes to the novel’s exploration of whether there is a meaningful line between human consciousness and that of AI beings like Roger.

“‘We are the Rhythm Mafia […] But we are more than that. We are New Sonora. This is our home, and we are going to fight for it.’

Her voice was like that of a god.”

As Lulu introduces the band’s first concert, she speaks directly to her own community, equating the band with New Sonora itself. She asserts that New Sonorans have every right to engage in whatever tactics are necessary for self-defense; since this immediately follows a passage detailing Roger’s swatting, calling people with false reports about endangered loved ones, and so on, this juxtaposition makes a claim for the morality of this tactic. Oliver’s simile comparing her voice to the voice of a god reinforces the sense that what the New Sonorans are doing is just—even holy.

“If people didn’t care about seeing us die, maybe they would care about seeing us live.”

Oliver’s aphoristic comment about Rosita’s documentary uses antithesis to create contrast between the Earthers’ callousness and the hope that seeing the New Sonorans interviewed about their daily lives and hopes and dreams might break through this callousness. Oliver is making the point that, at present, Earthers do not understand the New Sonorans as part of the human community. This illustrates the relationship between in-group/out-group dynamics, colonization, and genocide, as the Earthers are more than willing to kill people they do not see as part of their in-group.

“They would laugh and laugh and call me Robot Boy or something equally stupid, but they would laugh, goddamnit, and that meant something.”

As Oliver struggles to process the devastation of New Sonora, he realizes that saving his friends and Lulu is at least a partial victory. He imagines their reaction to seeing his new REI-bot form, and it cheers him up to think of how they will tease him. The repetition of the word “laugh” as he conjures up this scenario stresses the joy of community and the certainty that, together, they can recover from the trauma they have all endured.