Character Analysis
The secret to having a confident 13-year old like Miri is to be like Bob and Alice: loving, protective, and with access to weapons of mass destruction. Alice and Bob share many traits, but the two most important are probably:
- They are both in the Marines
- And they both have very strained relations with Robert (Bob's dad and Alice's dad-in-law).
Send the Marines!
Considering that Robert is obsessed with poetry and his little corner of the world, it's useful for us to have two characters that show us what another area of the world looks like. Alice and Bob give us a view of what the modern military looks like…which is a little different from the modern espionage world of Alfred and his friends.
We get hints from Bob of how the military responds to threats and why. When Bob and the military powers launch at the end, they have a huge amount of firepower—a reminder that all the new technology isn't just devoted just to medical cures and wearable computers:
Their manifest was a catalog of extreme possibilities: rescue lances (500), damage-suppression fogs (100), HEIR lasers (10), thermal flechettes/isolation variant (100)... and then the last three, the nightmares — sterilization-fog dispensers (10 by 10), HERF area munitions (20 by 20 by 4), strategic nuclear munitions (10 by 10 by 2). (29.103)
We might not understand how dangerous all that stuff is (what's a "rescue lance?"), but through Bob's POV we get some commentary on them: they are "extreme possibilities" and the last three are "the nightmares." So when the Marines have to blow something up, they can blow it up good. Thanks, future technology!
We seriously mean it when we say "Thanks." Because Bob and Alice might have access to scary weapons, but they might need those weapons. After all, in the future, Chicago has been totally destroyed (14.158) and there are lots of threats popping up all over the world, from Asuncion, Paraguay to Almaty, Kazakhstan (29.104). Bonus: Alice's parents were in Chicago (before it got leveled) so the only grandparents Miri has left are Robert and Lena (13.1).
While Bob has a more traditional role—he's in charge of whether things blow up—Alice's job in the Marines is a little more futuristic. She gets many various jobs thanks to her ability to go through JITT multiple times without breaking down. The first time we see Alice, she's running virtual support for a U.S. delegation in Jakarta, Indonesia, and she's speaking multiple languages (2.29-30). So she's a diplomatic expert.
But later, she prepares to conduct a security audit of the biotech lab at UCSD—so now she's a security expert. When Robert startles her in the bathroom, she trips him—and he thinks maybe she's also JITTed as a black belt (19.45). (Robert doesn't consider the equally likely possibility that he's a klutz and/or maybe she learned martial arts the old-fashioned way. That said, we can't rule out his guess.)
Alice is so special in her ability to be multiple JITTed, that she seems to belong to many different governmental organizations. When her most recent JITT training puts her on edge, her clothes flicker, showing various uniforms: her usual "dumpy hausfrau dress"; naval whites with the insignia PHS; US Marine Corps full colonel; civilian business suit with Department of Homeland Security ID (16.48-50). It's a weird moment—even Bob calls it out for being strange and he should be used to this stuff by now. So this scene both reminds us that Alice is very stressed by her most recent just-in-time training; and that her skills are much in demand. (This scene might also serve as foreshadowing for her JITT breakdown later.)
And all of this is a nice reminder that the world doesn't actually revolve around whether Robert regains his poetic ability.
Send the Marines—to Deal with this Family Mess!
If you thought Bob and Alice's jobs were hardcore, you should see their home life, particularly their relationship with Robert. Bob's feelings about his dad are… complex. He has happy memories of his dad, from before Bob realized Robert was a terrible jerk, but those times are gone. When Bob remembers the good days, it doesn't last long:
Actually, Bob felt a happy nostalgia for those evenings. He looked back at his father. "Dad?" No answer. Bob leaned forward and tried to shout diffidently. "Dad? Is there enough light for you? I can make it lots brighter." (2.36)
And now, Bob is put in the weird position of having to protect his daughter from his father—and he can't use "strategic nuclear munitions" for this job. After the Ezra Pound Incident between Robert and Miri, Bob seems to flip roles with his dad, yelling at him to sit down and calling him "mister" (the way that angry parents do with kids) (8.18-9). This scene may remind us that Robert is out of his element—he's in the position of the kid here, the one who doesn't really understand the world. But it's also a reminder that if Bob has to choose between Miri and Robert, Robert's chances don't look so good.
Alice's relationship to Robert and Miri looks simple by comparison. Alice may have some "kookie ideas" about parenting according to Bob—for instance, it's her idea for Miri to call them by their first names—but at heart, Bob thinks of her as "motherly" (2.27).
Even when it comes to Robert, Alice starts out with some motherly advice, pushing him to get out of the house and into the high school. She also would choose Miri over Robert—that's not even a real question (even Robert knows that (14.100))—but Alice is so consumed with training for her next job that she doesn't have much time to deal with family issues.
How Do They End Up?
Curiously, after all the stresses of their job and home life, Alice and Bob end up pretty much how they left off: Robert still is living at home; Alice is back in JITT and Bob has conflicted feelings about his dad, who sort of is behind his wife's breakdown but who also saved Miri's life by letting his arm be burned off by lava. In some ways, this almost seems like a happy ending to us, that after all the terror and near-death (and near-family feuds), the Gu family has survived.