Illuminae

As characters attempt to deny their feelings and suppress their grief, they soon see it pop up in new emotions and feelings until they fully embrace it. This theme emerges in Kady’s relationships with her mother, Ezra, and Byron; Ezra’s relationship with his father and Jimmy; Syra Boll’s relationship with Captain Chau; and AIDAN’s relationship with General Torrence.

Kady suppresses her grief by deflection, and this causes her the additional grief of others not understanding who she is and the depth of her true feelings and struggles. For example, rather than directly lying to Ezra or telling him the truth, Kady instead engages in avoidance of his questions about her mother, such as when he asks her, “How is your mom anyway?” and Kady responds by changing the subject (192). This stems from her belief that her mother may have survived the attack on the Copernicus, which further fuels her denial.

Even in therapy, Kady refuses to be herself fully. Instead, she admits in her private journal that she played the role of “Being A Surly Teen” (123). She is so much more than a surly teen but is happy to act a part if it means she gets to be in denial about her painful feelings. When the realization that her mother is dead hits her hardest, she finally grapples with the probability that her dad at the Heimdall station might be dead too, and she writes in a burst of pain, “I am not okay with that. I AM NOT OKAY WITH THAT” (197). All the grief and pain she attempts to bury eventually bubble up when she is forced to tell the truth or when she is overwhelmed to the point of exploding.

However, the eventual emergence of Kady’s grief gives her the opportunity to move on and rebuild. For example, Byron Zhang’s death in front of her is gruesome and horrifying, leaving her in tears over her mentor, but the knowledge she learned from him lives on not only in her code but in the memory of his words to her, that “[i]f I even leave a seed of it, it’ll grow back’” (592). This memory of Zhang allows her to preserve AIDAN later on, leaving a meaningful legacy of his work and its impact on her in ways that will benefit many people in the future.

Like Kady, Ezra faces similar issues in coping with the loss of his father, which is demonstrated by his attitude toward the psychologist. He seems to default to and get stuck in the anger phase of grief, which is also evident in his reaction to learning about his friend Jimmy McNulty when he says, “THOSE MOTHER******S/A SILVER STAR FOR HIS ****ING COFFIN?” (172). The all caps and cursing show Ezra’s righteous anger about the treatment of his best friend, but they also act as a buffer for his grief because being angry at what’s happening allows him to deny or at least delay the processing of the reality that will happen: Jimmy will die. Acting Captain Syra Boll similarly lingers in denial by insisting on her title as “acting” captain, rather than just captain, because she is forced to play a role she doesn’t want. By keeping that adjective before her title, she can retain the sentiment that the real captain is still out there, even though Captain Chau is dead.

Even though AIDAN is a machine, it too has a remarkably human response to grief, even though it tries to deny its feelings by saying things like:

Numbers do not feel. Do not bleed or weep. …At the very apex of callousness, you will find only ones and zeros. …<Error> Torrence has a wife and three children on Ares vI. He spoke to me of them often, in quieter times. We played chess, he and I. (299)

Here, it is evident that AIDAN tries to numb itself to the horror of its actions. To preserve its own existence, it has to eradicate anyone who might shut it down, which means killing people. It tries to justify this by reminding itself of its calculating nature and reduce the situation to mathematics, but after it experiences an error, it circles back to the personal details it knows about Torrence and uses these to critique him as a man but also to provide comfort to Torrence in his final moments. Like the humans on the Alexander fleet, AIDAN tries to suppress its grief through some form of denial but instead finds a multitude of emotions bubbling up in response. Throughout the book, this theme acts as a mirror for all emotions and an illustration that accepting and embracing emotions as they come is healthy and the repression thereof causes issues.