In the Lives of Puppets

On their way home, Hap tells Rambo that he dislikes the robot vacuum, and Nurse Ratched threatens to shock the android if he hurts her friend. Giovanni sends Victor to bed. He promises not to harm Hap, but Hap is still reluctant to see Victor go. The next morning, Nurse Ratched tells Victor that she and Giovanni confirmed that Hap’s memory banks have been wiped. His protocols remain a mystery. Giovanni ushers everyone into his lab and asks Hap what he’s feeling. The android replies, “I feel like you a-ask too m-many questions” (111), which startles a laugh out of Victor. Hap mimics his laughter, showing that he is learning at an exponential rate because of the heart Victor gave him. Victor explains that he built the heart as a backup for his father, and Giovanni hugs him close, saying that his son is both wonderful and foolish. Hap is drawn to Victor and protective of the heart the young inventor gave him. Giovanni reassures Hap that he won’t take his heart, but he warns him that hearts are both strong and fragile and that “a heart changes everything” (114).

Hap follows Victor around like a shadow and teases the human by pretending to feel pain when Victor makes a minor correction to his wood-covered leg. Victor asks Hap to test the leg out, and Hap does so by racing around the compound, leaping onto the house, and scaling a tree in seconds. Hap is curious about Victor’s humanity and asks about his need for sleep, food, etc. When Victor retires for the night, Hap remains in Victor’s bedroom with the inventor’s permission. The next day, Hap offers to keep watch while Victor showers to ensure the human doesn’t drown and astonishes the human by rolling his eyes when Victor shoos him out of the bathroom. Hap accompanies Victor into the forest, where Victor finds a dead rabbit in one of his traps. When the human explains that he needs to kill and eat animals to survive, the android catches four rabbits in a matter of minutes, but Victor insists that he let the animals go as he already has enough meat.

On the fourth day since Hap awakened, he hears Giovanni playing music and hurries to the ground house. Victor follows him, recalling a childhood memory. When Victor was 10 years old, he suddenly became distressed by how different he and his father were and wished to become an android. Giovanni explained how his son brought him hope when he was suffering from loneliness and told him, “I don’t need you to be like me. I need you to be you” (129). The music deeply moves Hap, and he asks Giovanni what he should do without his memories. The other android replies, “You start again from the beginning” (130). Nurse Ratched and Rambo dance together to the music.

A week after Hap’s awakening, Victor returns to the Scrap Yards with Nurse Ratched and Rambo. Hap follows them at a distance but stubbornly denies that he’s concerned for Victor’s safety when they spot him. The Scrap Yards are eerily quiet that morning. Victor’s instincts tell him to leave at once, but his curiosity wins out. The group sees three androids in black uniforms examining the pile where they found Hap. The sight of the androids makes Hap wary, but he can’t remember why and beats at his head in frustration. Suddenly, an enormous mechanical whale emblazoned with the words “THE TERRIBLE DOGFISH” flies over the Scrap Yards (139), and the three androids climb inside its mouth.

Victor and his friends race home and tell Giovanni what they saw. The news frightens Giovanni, as does the revelation that Victor bled in the Scrap Yards when he found Hap. He tells his son that he’s concealed a great deal from him in his efforts to protect him and reveals a secret bunker under the house. Giovanni asks Hap to protect Victor even though he knows this request goes “against every single part of [Hap’s] programming” (142), and Hap promises to do so. Giovanni activates Nurse Ratched’s safety protocol and then seals the entrance to the bunker with everyone but himself inside.

Through the security monitors in the bunker, Victor watches as the androids from the Dogfish surround his father, whom they address as General Innovation Operative. They ask for the human’s location, but Giovanni refuses to tell them, and the lead-lined bunker hides Victor from the androids’ scanners. The androids inform Giovanni that they will take him to the City of Electric Dreams where he will either be reprogrammed or decommissioned. To ensure that his memories can’t be used to locate Victor, Giovanni destroys his heart. Victor desperately tries to go to his father, but Hap holds the struggling human as one of the androids carries Giovanni’s lifeless body onto the Dogfish. The other two androids burn the compound to the ground, and Victor sees a symbol of a fox and a cat on their uniforms. Overwhelmed by grief, Victor goes into shock.

Nurse Ratched plays a recording Giovanni made a few days ago. In the recording, Giovanni berates himself for his cowardice and hubris in hiding the truth from his son for so long. He then explains how humans created machines in their own image. Over time, machines evolved a capacity for independent decision-making and began to defy their programming. Eventually, the machines concluded that, “for the world to survive, humans could not” (157). Giovanni explains that he is a completely unique machine designed to create and that he was assigned the task of destroying humanity. He achieved that purpose by building the Human Annihilation Response Protocol (HARP), including the android now known as Hap. Giovanni began to question his programming, and he escaped the City of Electric Dreams with the help of a machine called the Blue Fairy. Giovanni explains that he created Victor in the very bunker in which he now stands, gestated him cell by cell, and that the story about the couple entrusting the infant Victor to him is nothing more than a comforting lie. Giovanni gained the capacity to love after he placed a drop of his son’s blood inside his heart. He warns Victor that the Authority will try to destroy the human and asks Victor to live rather than try to find him. Succumbing to his overwhelming emotions, Victor falls unconscious after the recording ends.

To Rambo’s great relief, Victor awakens. After Nurse Ratched treats him for shock, Victor approaches Hap. The android has no intention of harming Victor and seems as shaken by the revelation of his protocol as the human. Victor asks Hap to help him bring his father home. Nurse Ratched objects but reluctantly concedes that she would do the same for Victor if he’d been taken. Nurse Ratched and Rambo volunteer to join their friend in the search for the Blue Fairy, and Victor hugs Hap when he promises to help, too. To Victor’s surprise, Hap hugs him back. Nurse Ratched teases the pair by commenting on the likelihood that they will have sex, a suggestion that does not appeal to Hap or Victor. The hug prompts a strange feeling of happiness in Hap’s chest, which he says is “terrible” and makes him “want to p-punch something” (169).

The group determines that they’re in Oregon, but they have few clues about the city’s location. Victor suggests that they use the Old Ones to discover where the machines are sending signals. They leave the bunker and examine the wreckage of the compound. Rambo finds one of the gears from Giovanni’s heart and holds it close. An “uncharacteristically gentle” Nurse Ratched assures the others that they’ll find Giovanni and that Victor can make him a new heart (173).