The Eye of Minds

“Michael thought of Lifeblood Deep, the next level, the goal of all goals. Where everything was a thousand times more real, more advanced, more intense.”

Michael’s desire to access Lifeblood Deep reflects the intense importance that he ascribes to in-game achievements at the beginning of the novel, which are linked to access to levels of reality and therefore intensity. This longing offers both foreshadowing and a red herring, as Michael learns at the end of the novel that he has actually been living in Lifeblood Deep his whole life, but he also does access the “next level” of reality when he enters a human body and goes to the real world for the first time.

“Yeah, you could go off to some nasty battlefield in the Civil War or fight dragons with a magic sword, fly spaceships, explore the freaky love shacks. But that stuff got old quick. In the end, nothing was more fascinating than bare-bones, dirt-in-your-face, gritty, get-me-out-of-here real life.”

Michael’s observation about the most thrilling part of the VirtNet being the part that imitates a (grittier) version of reality explores the novel’s theme of The Tensions Between Appearance and Reality. Michael’s interest in playing the games that come closest to paralleling the real world indicates that he seeks to make this boundary as blurry as possible, as this is where having a digital self holds the highest emotional impact.

“Never before had he been so relieved to be done with the VirtNet, done with a game, ready to get out of his box and breathe in the polluted air of the real world.”

Though Michael does not actually live in the real world, the fact that Lifeblood Deep has polluted air suggests that actual reality, in the world of The Eye of Minds, is an ecological