To dredge up some lingo from high-school, that was hard-core! This is my favorite Escape Pod that I have heard thus far! I think this story is amazing because it manages to be huge in scope, deep in characterization, complex in concept and yet extremely concise and focussed, like absorbing a 1000 page Tad Williams novel in 30 minutes. This is the first EP story that I might describe as "a rush" to listen to.
I thought the most striking aspect (and that most salient to the plot) is how Rosenbaum treated minds as souls within a matrix. The soul of the Pilgrim, of Matthias, of all the characters, are defined as information, compilations of code, which require a processing space in which to execute. He considers the body and brain of a person as just such a processing space: The brain is the matrix is which the spirit runs, in the same sense that my MiniMac is the matrix in which my web browser runs. The characters in the story have learned to build bigger and better spaces for their spirits, "palaces of being," to replace their brains. I love the idea of many spirits sharing one matrix and all the good and bad that such an arrangement could lead to. These ideas ideas are just mind-blowing, and they are handled perfectly here.
The religious speculation that necessarily comes into such a scenario is fascinating. You have a guy who creates and has power over universes full of intelligent beings, and yet is not God, and if fact recognizes God as a being infinitely more powerful and mysterious than himself. At the same time you have the possibility of people in the universes Matthias creates simulating their own universes, in which there will be beings living in yet another ontological layer. How should these people understand god? Heady stuff.
Along those lines, I also see a parallelism between the way Rosenbaum describes his characters and the sort of language used in the Bible to describe Heavenly beings. In both cases, the language is highly symbolic. Jeffry the parakeet becomes a hawk with bombs in his mouth. Matthias flees from skeletal hands through labyrinthine corridors. We have concepts that are ontologically beyond human comprehension described poetically, through metaphor, so that 4-dimensional minds can get some idea of what is going on. This is really the only way a human writer could describe super-human persons and events, and Rosenbaums use of this language creates a beautiful sense of wonder and dread at the vast scope and implication of the story's events.
But despite this bigness, the characters in the story remain real and sympathetic. As bizarre as the situation sounds, I can understand Matthias' grief in dissecting the dead Pilgrim to find the remains of his mother inside.
Although I confess that I was somewhat confused as to what exactly the "keys" are and what they do, the thought of them being embedded in a little girl's teddy bear is very cool. The story ends with an object of vast cosmic significance being tucked away in the most innocuous and unlikely of places, just waiting for someone, someday to find it and figure out what it does
I also loved the use of "big" philosophical and mathematical words (even though I had to look up some of them). "Ontic bomb." Sweet!
I guess I'll quit gushing now. If case anyone hasn't figured it out by now, I thought this story was GREAT. This is BIG in a "2001" sort of way. Five stars. I'm glad there is interest in and a market for ideas like these.
