Literature / Exordia

"I need your help. The whole world depends on it."

"What would you think if I said that, by cosmic coincidence, your species is destined to liberate the galaxy?"
"I would call total bullshit. The inbred porn apes? No way, we can't even save ourselves."
"Good. You're learning."

Exordia is a science fiction novel by Seth Dickinson, released January 23, 2024.

Anna Sinjari, a 32 year old office worker in New York City, hates her boring life, and longs to be important again, like she was one fateful day in her home village of Tawakul, Kurdistan, during the Anfal, when a man in a red beret put a gun in her seven-year-old hand.

Anna unfortunately gets what she wants when she discovers an alien in central park, a giant snake-centaur-hydra eating turtles out of a pond, an alien that only she can see, and slithers away as soon as Anna starts drawing attention to her. Later that night the alien, a Khai named Ssrinsahautha-ku-Ssraaa, comes to her, injured, and tells Anna that she needs her help to save the galaxy.

The tale features the following narrative weapons:

• Alien Arts Are Appreciated: Ssrin is introduced as a voracious consumer of human media (possibly literally, in some bizarre alien-technology way), although this is mainly because she's looking for common threads in the stories humans tell that could lead her closer to her goal. Having eight separate heads means being able to split her attention eight ways at once.
• Alcubierre Drive: Discussed and subverted. The pinpoint singularities surrounding the Blackbird object are initially theorized to be components of an Alcubierre drive (described as "the least impossible version of a warp drive humanity has discovered"), but it turns out they're part of a Natario metric instead, a different form of warp drive that utilizes an expansionless sliding warp (in contrast to the compression/expansion involved with Alcubierre's solution).
• Almighty Idiot: Blackbird is the disembodied appendage/tool/persona of one of the Sufficiently Advanced Aliens who created the universe, and theoretically still has the ability to edit it on the same godlike level. The first problem is that it doesn't understand what's going on inside our universe. It lacks the context to make sense of all the particles, forces, etc. impinging on its awareness, and kills several people because it has no idea that the patterns of information it's altering are people. The second problem is that it doesn't know how to make those edits, as it's only a fragment of a much greater entity.
• Arc Number:
  • Seven. Anna was seven years old when she saved Tawakul. There are seven passions, seven afterlives, limbs that branch seven times on the Blackbird neuroscythe, and ultimately seven human characters who survive at the end of the book.
  • Eight, for the khai. Eight heads, each with pupils shaped like figure-eights, an eighth passion, and it's hinted that they're the product of aeVea, the only one of the eight acalept-gods who still lives. Also, Ssrin is the eighth survivor aboard Blackbird.
• Always Chaotic Evil: The Khai are not all ontologically evil, but the fact that they are all ontologically condemned to Hell means that the Khai that make up and lead the Exordia have decided to embrace their unavoidable damnation by deliberately choosing to be as evil as possible.
• Ambiguously Bi:
  • Erik and Clayton both have moments when they comment on how attractive the other is, and they and Rosamaria played around with the idea of a threesome in the past.
  • Anna seems mostly straight (her previous partners are all men, and she has a threesome with Erik and Clayton at the end of the book) but her gaze and thoughts obviously linger on Ssrin, and they spend a lot of time absentmindedly sharing physical contact when they aren't fighting for their lives.
• America Saves the Day: Skewered. It's no coincidence that most of the book takes place in Kurdistan, which America has a very specific relationship to, and makes it a metaphor for Earth's place in the rest of the galaxy. In particular, the Americans have been manipulated and armed for the express purpose of furthering the goals of a remorseless empire, and their intervention soon makes things worse than ever.
• A Million Is a Statistic: Discussed. The projected death toll if the Exordia begins nuking human population centers is in the hundreds of millions, but the one most horrified to hear it is Li Aixue the mathematician. Clayton, as usual, focuses pragmatically on the bigger picture, which is that even if hundreds of millions die, that still leaves billions of humans alive to save.
• Arcadia: Tawakul, Anna's home village, is repeatedly described as paradisiacal or Edenic, fitting for a book concerned deeply with free will and choice. It even has an evil snake slithering around. Founded by survivors of the Anfal genocide, Tawakul's egalitarian principles and environmental values position it as the best of what people are capable of after being scarred by misfortune and evil, in a book full of people who turned worse.
• Asian and Nerdy: Of the whole Multinational Team, the one who first realizes the true nature of Blackbird is Li Aixue, a genius-level mathematical prodigy from China.
• The Atoner: Ssrin is a defector from the Exordia, the galactic hegemon, and was previously responsible for a fair number of atrocities on its behalf. Notably, she doesn't seem to feel any actual guilt about it — she fights the Exordia because she understands intellectually that it's the right thing to do, with no contrition attached.
• Batman Gambit:
  • The book is moved in large part by Iruvage's manipulation of Clayton and Erik, playing off their mutual dislike of each other, to culminate in both of them entering Blackbird at the same time so it will generate a soul from the rath connecting them (so he can steal it with his atmanach and use it to unlock the secrets of the universe).
  • Ssrin attempted the same trick using Anna, tempting Blackbird's desire to fill in the incomplete by arriving on Earth and metaphorically dangling her lost serendure in front of it. As a result, Blackbird arranges for her to meet Anna, and Ssrin manipulates Anna into leading her to Blackbird.
• BFG: Iruvage totes around a gun described as being big enough to make Rambo proud. It shoots guided bullets at hypersonic speeds with an effective range of over ten kilometers, and is capable of shooting down modern aircraft let alone human infantry.
• Body Horror: Exposure to Blackbird slowly causes exaggeration and fractal duplication of organs and extremities, as it works by identifying patterns and replicating them. Eyes multiply inside their sockets (before new sockets start appearing), fingers branch and multiply, lips bisect themselves into cruciform shapes. In the most extreme case shown, Sivakov becomes a horrific monster of tiled faces and endlessly branching limbs too thin to support his weight, still conscious and screaming in terror.
• Big Dumb Object: The Blackbird object, a huge (larger than a US Navy destroyer) thing that materialized in the Qandil mountains one day, emitting a signal that blew out radios all the way to Turkey in the process. A crescent with a tail (embedded partially in the mountain) and bizarre spiky Absurdly Sharp Blades all along its inner face. Attempting to study it infects you with a Mind Virus that also causes Body Horror, except when it doesn't. Figuring out what it is takes up most of the book, let alone what it's doing.
• Brown Note Being:
  • The khai are afflicted by the Cultratic Brand, a metaphysical mark that triggers horror and revulsion in people — the instinctive knowledge that what they're looking at is utterly, unimaginably evil. Anna doesn't experience this with Ssrin because of their serendure.
  • People with souls are this to the soulless victims of the atmanach. Any decision made by an ensouled person becomes unbearable for a soulless person to witness, which rapidly escalates to violence to try and get them to stop doing that.
  • People affected by Blackbird have their souls grow too large, which has the same effect on regularly souled people as the regularly souled have on the soulless:
  How can the mind process the sight of a gesture that never happened? The sound of a word never spoken? Neurons fire at stimuli that revoke themselves, never were, never could have been, incompatible at their root with the world as empirically observed.
• Butch Lesbian: Chaya
• The Call Knows Where You Live: Anna and Ssrin were literally forced together by fate thanks to their serendure.
• Cold Equation: The math of spending lives to save lives is the most persistent theme of the book: Anna sacrificed her family to save her village, Erik killed Americans to prevent them from perpetrating war crimes, Clayton nuked Kurdistan to try to appease Iruvage, world governments throw hundreds of soldiers at the alien ships to try to prevent nuclear Armageddon, and in the end Ssrin and Clayton decide to sacrifice the earth to save the galaxy.
• Crazy Sane: Victims of the atmanach lose their souls, making their brains purely material. Without a soul to bridge the gap between the material world and the aretaic, they see people as they truly are: every action they take and every word they speak a violation of the fundamental material logic of the universe — horrifyingly, gut-churningly wrong. Everyone with a soul is a Humanoid Abomination.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: The Exordia, a galactic superpower that has spent centuries, if not millennia, fighting wars and putting down rebellions against species far more advanced than humanity, versus the human race.
  • Iruvage versus a platoon of Chinese special forces commandos — only described in passing, but the survivors make clear he was Just Toying with Them.
  • Iruvage versus a platoon of American special forces operators. Iruvage slaughters them to a man without taking so much as a scratch, again without even taking the fight seriously.
  • Humanity's entire nuclear arsenal — over three thousand nukes — versus a single Exordia strike cruiser. Result: the strike cruiser heats up slightly from the effort it takes to shoot every single missile down. Described in one passage as "a war of wheat against the scythe."
• Curb Stomp Cushion: On the other hand, the Exordia's representatives consist of a single khai and his personal ship against literally the entire human race (at least, every nation with military assets capable of reaching Kurdistan on short notice). The constant assault eventually demonstrates they have one weakness in the form of heat buildup: hit them enough times and they'll eventually overheat and cook inside their impervious armor. Too bad Iruvage never reaches that point, but it's a major contributor to the destruction of his ship.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts:
  • The last battle against Iruvage amounts to this. Iruvage is invincible, but his armor heats up a little whenever he takes a hit. Erik expressing anger and disbelief every time the latest volley fails to harm him, only for Clayton to point out the small things that prove he can be hurt. By the end he's run out of tricks almost completely, but so have the defenders — Iruvage only loses because Davoud's finally gotten Blackbird mobile, and takes off just seconds before Iruvage can board.
  • The battle against Iruvage's ship plays out the same way, as it depletes ever more of its weapons and slowly overheats against the continuous Zerg Rush of human planes and missiles, until finally it's brought down by Davoud ramming it with Blackbird.
• Dirty Bomb: The bombs that the Exordia threaten to drop on Earth cities are specifically colbalt-salted nukes, designed to make the Earth as irradiated and unlivable as possible. Erik says that the cobalt salt doesn't actually do much to enhance the total lethality of the nuke, it just ensures the people who survive the initial blast die more horrifying deaths For the Evulz.
• Disability Immunity: Li Aixue's autism enabled her to embody the great passion of prajna, which made her soul self-similar like the fractals she loves. This made her immune to the corruptive growth caused by the Blackbird, because when it gave her more soul, it just created more of what she already had.
• Eldritch Abomination: The atmanach, a... thing made by the Exordia and wielded by Iruvage as a terror weapon. It looks like a centipede made of Alien Geometries. Its size, speed, and even physical presence are all indeterminate. It eats souls and transfers them to a personalized hell dimension designed to extract everything they know. It has no senses except the ability to detect free will — every time you make a choice, that brings it closer to you.
  In the orchards north of Tawakul, Brennan's fireteam shoots at the alien atmanach. Little puffs of fire pick out the positions of riflemen and gunners. The squirming antithing jags and bobs like a Counter-Strike hacker, snapping from place to place: discontinuous, horror-movie throb of impossible motion.
  God, it's walking up the bullets. It's eating the decision to fire off the fucking bullets.
• Eldritch Location: Blackbird. The majority of the book is spent trying to determine how exactly to interact with it without dying in a bizarre and horrifying way. The answer is to give it a soul, born of one of the seven great passions, which ends up being the rath between Erik and Clayton, embodied as their greatest disappointment, Rosamaria.
• The End of the World as We Know It: The Exordia ship in orbit above Earth is single-handedly capable of erasing all human civilization and potentially all life on Earth completely, has already destroyed all civilian electrical infrastructure with a global EMP, and the majority of the book is spent trying to activate a weapon capable of stopping it from doing that. They fail, and the Exordia do destroy human civilization on a global scale, but the people of Tawakul, it is noted, thanks to their remoteness from any major population centers, fared much better than most and will likely be able to survive, just as they always have.
• Evil Empire: The Exordia, who go beyond merely oppressing and killing but attempting to alter the narrative of the galaxy itself to make it so that they cannot lose.
• Exact Time to Failure: Iruvage gives Clayton 14 hours to figure out how to get inside Blackbird without succumbing to its effects before the Exordia strike cruiser in orbit starts nuking population centers across the globe, as per standard procedure for dealing with objects capable of disrupting the pinion. This is a compromise; the strike cruiser's commander was ordered to start the bombing immediately.
• Fate Worse than Death: The Exordia excel in devising these. The Atmanach in particular will eat your soul off of your body, rendering you into a husk innately horrified by very existence of people who still have their souls.
• Flanderization: In universe. Blackbird isolates a thing's central essence, the bit of it most responsible for the whole thing, and repeats that bit over and over again, overwriting the nonessential bits. This includes personalities. Everyone in contact with Blackbird is slowly stripped down into a caricature of themselves: Li Aixue the mathematician starts losing the ability to think of anything other than math (though already being obsessed with math, she doesn't face the most destructive effects of the process), Davoud the pilot has his love of planes take over the rest of his personality, Erik the Knight Templar grows increasingly obsessed with justice, and so on. This effect mostly stops when Blackbird becomes Rosamaria.
• Foe Romance Subtext: Erik and Clayton, to the extent of being a plot point. Their rath is stoked and exploited by Iruvage to get them to give Blackbird a soul.
• Galactic Superpower: Exordia reigns unchallenged over the galaxy, abusing and manipulating other species as it sees fit. It maintains control by pinioning the souls of its subjects, dooming them through Theory of Narrative Causality to forever be supporting roles in the story of the Exordia's supremacy. In other words, it's an analogy for the worst aspects of the United States.
• "Gender-Normative Parent" Plot: Chaya is a Butch Lesbian who left the Philippines because her family refused to accept her homosexuality, and even as the world ends and Chaya calls home to make amends, her mother hangs up on her because she's still gay. This is contrasted by Li Aixue, who is more femme and unassuming, and her family is much more accepting. When she calls home at the end of the world, her family is all there to say goodbye, and her mother is happy to hear that Aixue found a girl she likes.
• Genre Shift: The first three chapters are about Anna having a cool alien roommate (in the author's words) and getting roped into saving the galaxy. The rest of the book is a techno-thriller that reads like a fusion of Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy.
• Giant Corpse World: After the acatalept-gods died, their corpses precipitated out of the cosmic microwave background after the Big Bang, as the universe cooled. One of them, the corpse of Auno, ended up in the Milky Way, and became what Ssrin describes as both a shrine and a slum, a hotbed for the rebellion against Exordia. This is where she directs Blackbird to go at the end of the book, hoping to link back up with her allies.
• Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex: After her brush with death and a brief time in Hell, Anna finds herself very keyed up and horny, and ends up having a threesome with Clayton and Erik to both feel alive again and get the two of them to work out their feelings about each other.
• Government Conspiracy: Played with. Task Force MAJESTIC, the American team assembled to secure the alien object Blackbird, is never connected to the fabled Majestic 12 of UFO conspiracy theories. It's implied Clayton devised the name because he thought it would be funny.
• Greater-Scope Villain:
  • As bad as Iruvage is, he's working for a mysterious "sponsor" who wants Blackbird in order to destroy the Cultratic Brand and reprogram the universe to make khai dominance a law of physics and the Exordia suzerain over all life and death. At least, that's what Iruvage believes.
  • On an even greater level, the ending reveals that the Cultratic Brand that damns the khai and motivates so much of what they do is an illegal amendment to the universe, and the only entities capable of making such amendments are supposed to be dead. Blackbird intends to seek this being out in order to understand how to make amendments of her own, and repair the broken universe — begging the question of why this being hasn't done so itself, and why its only known action is to damn an entire species to Hell.
• Genius Loci: The Blackbird has a mind, but because it lacks a soul it is reduced to randomly flailing at reality in the hope it can get one for itself. Once it does, it immediately becomes less dangerous and actually capable of helping humanity.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: The people who get their souls devoured by the Atmanach become homicidal upon seeing creatures with souls exercising their free will.
• Good Thing You Can Heal: After discovering that the Blackbird can heal lethal wounds and even bring people back to life, Erik and Clayton's plans start to more and more involve shooting one another to disable the other without worry of death. Anna even gets on it by temporarily paralyzing Erik with two point blank shots directly to the spine.
• He Who Fights Monsters: Erik and Clayton were the founders of Paladin, a extrajudicial task force within the US government designed to hunt down and kill military contractors proven to have committed war crimes but existed outside of any jurisdiction that could bring them to justice. Eventually Erik found out that Clayton had set up his own personal group of soldiers who were willing to go even further to get the justice their targets deserved, and this shattered both their friendship and Paladin.
• Hidden Elf Village: Tawakul is an isolated Kurdish commune high in the Zagros mountains that escaped from the Anfal genocide mostly unscathed. Its egalitarian and environmentalist values add to the Arcadian vibe.
• Hobbes Was Right: Iruvage claims that, as gleefully evil as the Exordia is, it's better than the previous state of the galaxy. Before the khai conquered everyone, interstellar wars of genocide annihilated no fewer than 125,604 different intelligent species; afterwards, that number dropped to 104, and the Exordia itself carried out three-quarters of those. For all of their very real oppression and cruelty, the galaxy is stabler under their control. Not happier, but stabler.
• Humanity Ensues: Iruvage's machinations allow Blackbird to replicate a human soul, giving it cognition capable of actually understanding the universe around it. The human soul it replicates is Rosamaria, the shape of her extrapolated from the gaps in both Clayton and Erik's souls. This means Blackbird now has a mind sympathetic to humanity and capable of acting on their behalf... which is a problem, because the next step in Iruvage's plan is to bypass all this by eating Blackbird's soul with his atmanach.
• Humans Are Special: Lampooned by Ssrin. Human fiction is filled with stories of humans triumphing against all odds, but in the grand scheme of things, humans don't even rate as average. According to her, humanity's most notable feature is being good at running. Its second most notable feature is being extremely inbred. The story of man is a story of mediocrity... but so are most stories.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: Wrongspace drives offer near-instantaneous interstellar travel. They do this by spoofing the aretaic machinery that transfers souls to the seven afterlives so it swallows up your entire ship, sending it on a one-way trip to Death Itself. To avoid actually dying, you need to alter your momentum to slingshot yourself around Death without falling into it. And since the only thing the machinery of Death recognizes is souls, you gain that momentum by ejecting the soul of someone onboard, killing them. Do it right (minor course corrections accomplished by shooting off bits of your own soul) and you'll end up wherever you want in time and space, since the afterlife naturally connects to all of them. Do it wrong and you might catapult yourself into Hell. Not even Ssrin, a callous (former) operative of Exordia with countless atrocities under her belt, is comfortable using a wrongspace drive.
• I Have No Son!: Anna's mother Khaje disowned her for after witnessing her (seven years old) execute the rest of her family on behalf of the man with the red beret. Khaje promised herself she would kill Anna if they ever met again; by the time they do, things have gotten complicated, and Khaje ultimately ends up reconciling with her daughter to a certain extent.
• Insignificant Little Blue Planet: The first thing we learn about Earth's presence in the wider galaxy is that the Exordia knows about it but doesn't care enough to conquer it. After Earth gets bombed, it gets compared to the Kurds: the only thing most aliens will ever know about it now is the genocide.
• Incompatible Orientation: Clayton repeatedly has to remind himself that Chaya is gay and thus not a potential partner.
• Infectious Insanity: Mutating effect of the Blackbird can spread from person to person just via observation.
• Mechanical Insects: Khai hives are tiny multipurpose Attack Drones in the shape of insects. Controlled by Electronic Telepathy, they're sturdy enough and fast enough to deflect bullets, and are capable of injecting bombs into people through their stingers.
• Mega Manning: Blackbird learns about the world by copying it. Anything it learns about, it can replicate, generating the necessary matter and energy from nothing. The problem is that it has no context for anything it's looking at, being a newborn intelligence that used to be part of an entity that was not technically part of our universe, so first it's trying to work out from first principles what things like "atoms" and "gravity" are. Things get much easier after it copies a human soul, with all the built-in context for the universe that entails.
• Mind Virus: Blackbird spreads its mind- and body-altering effects through information. To be specific, all attempts at analyzing Blackbird return the attempt at analysis reflected back at the analyzer, corrupted by an infohazard. The Canadian oil drillers are infected simply by looking at the display of the ground-penetrating radar they were using to scan its interior. This takes several hours to become apparent. The Russian team, dissecting rats mutated by Blackbird's effects, start losing their minds and mutating in seconds.
  So few bits of information on a radar screen. So many in the flesh of a mouse.
• Multinational Team: The team assembled to study Blackbird consists of soldiers and scientists from Russia, China, Iran, Uganda, and America, not to mention the Kurds who were already living there when Blackbird materialized. This is not because of any cooperation between their governments (aside from the Chinese and the Iranians) but because they all showed up at the same place at about the same time and made the logical decision to work together. There was a Canadian team too at the beginning, but Blackbird's effects killed them all before the others arrived.
• Multiple Head Case: Ssrin, like all khai, has eight heads. Instead of each head having its own brain, she has a single central brain at the base of all those necks, and a cluster of nerves in each cranium that gives them enough intelligence to act semi-autonomously without input from the brain.
• Nigh-Invulnerable:
  • Iruvage's armor renders him invincible to human weapons short of a direct hit from several hundred tons of high explosives, somehow converting incoming damage into heat which it then dissipates.
  • Ssrin is equipped with a suit of the same armor, but Exordia weapons are fully capable of penetrating Exordia armor, hence why she's bleeding out in the first chapter. As luck has it, the one time a human shoots her, one of the bullets lands in the exact same spot where her armor was broken, reopening the nearly-fatal wound.
• No Biochemical Barriers: Ssrin is capable of eating Earth food because she's equipped with a "scout stomach" that very slowly simmers it into molecules she's capable of metabolizing. Likewise, she fine-tuned her various venoms (her fangs are cybernetically enhanced) to make sure they would work on humans before coming to Earth, because what would be the point if they didn't?
• Obviously Evil: Iruvage is cartoonishly evil, seemingly deliberately. After all, reality itself has declared him and his entire species an irredeemable stain upon the universe. Why not ham it up a bit?
  The alien is butting up against a threshold in the human mind, a maximum of malice, past which any further evil just becomes absurdity. If you wake up every morning and eat pulled baby on flatbread, as Iruvage surely could, then there is simply no way for the mind to think of you as more repulsive. Iruvage is the kebab koobideh of evil. You know exactly what you're getting.
• One True Love: Anna and Ssrin are in serendure, meaning their souls are the same shape, meaning they share an unbreakable bond of trust, understanding, and vulnerability. While not explicitly romantic, it wouldn't be wrong to call them soulmates. Their bond is so intimate that, under certain circumstances, the areteia considers the two of them to be the same person.
• Only One Afterlife:
  • The universe has seven afterlives "curled up in the universe's extra dimensions." This has been observed empirically by tracking where peoples' souls go when they die, although it's impossible to know what goes on in there without dying yourself. These afterlives are vital to the universe's purpose, but nobody knows what that is.
  • For the khai, the Cultratic Brand damns every single one of them to Hell from birth, no matter how good they are in life. As you might expect, this has profoundly influenced their psychology.
• Our Souls Are Different: The soul is the record of every choice a person has ever made and why, or at least a lossy compression of it. It interfaces with the nervous system to provide people with true free will in an otherwise deterministic universe.
• Physical God: The Blackbird is capable of altering the universe as a result of being a fragment of something or someone from before the creation of the universe. It/she just needs to learn how to control these abilities.
• Ramming Always Works:
  • After taking on several hundred aircraft and winning, Iruvage's exhausted ship is ultimately brought down by Blackbird ramming it. Blackbird doesn't hit it physically, rather its massive drive field neutralizes the smaller ship's when they intermesh, and due to the effects of gravity on warp field physics, spikes it into the ground many, many times faster than terminal velocity.
  • Later subverted when Davoud tries the same tactic against the Axiorrhage. It turns out that a real Exordia warship with a competent captain is more than ready for this sort of trick, and the only reason Blackbird isn't destroyed is because the attempt was actually a Batman Gambit by Ssrin to get Blackbird to copy the Axiorrhage's wrongspace drive and warp away at the last microsecond.
• "Ray of Hope" Ending: A very bleak variant. The book ends with the Earth decimated by nuclear bombardment, but Blackbird escapes with seven human survivors and Ssrin, who points the way to their next destination: a place where they can bring Blackbird to the rebellion. And in the long term, Blackbird herself plans to go to Khas, the homeworld of the khai, where she hopes to find a way to repair the universe. Furthermore, it's taken for granted that humanity will survive its decimation, despite a death toll in the billions. And the people of Tawakul escaped the destruction mostly unscathed.
• Reality Warper:
  • Ssrin and Iruvage are both fighting over the Blackbird because they believe it has the potential to either destroy or make permanent the supremacy of the Exordia.
  • The art of operancy: exploiting the glitch-filled boundary between the areteia and the material universe to inject illegal physics into the world through computations in living thoughts. Ssrin is skilled at this, but it takes a lot out of her and requires a substantial amount of water to absorb waste heat.
  • Operancy is possible because having a soul allows everyone to very slightly bend reality, giving them true free will in an otherwise deterministic universe. Blackbird's effects cause people to develop too much soul, letting them bend reality in more noticeable ways, which normally-ensouled people find viscerally horrifying to witness.
• Robots Think Faster: Defied. The metaphysical architecture of the universe specifically prevents artificial intelligence from outperforming naturally evolved minds, primarily to keep Gray Goo from eating everything. Unfortunately, this means the next best thing involves enslaving the minds and souls of sapient beings.
• Sin Eater: Ssrin's sister Ssenenet believed this was why the khai were inflicted with the Cultratic Brand — they existed to take on the damnation of other species in order to grant them heaven. Most khai think this is stupid, Ssrin included.
• Snakes Are Sinister: The khai are snake-like aliens who bear the Cultratic Brand, a metaphysical designator of pure evil. They're organized into a brutal empire, the Exordia, that dominates the galaxy and enslaves countless species.
• Snake People: Ssrin's people, the Khai, who Anna describes as Snake Centaur Hydras: Snake from tail to chest, with two mostly humanoid arms and six-fingered hands, and then instead of a head they have eight snakes, each with their own slightly distinct instincts and personalities.
• The Soulless: People attacked by the atmanach lose their souls, rendering their cognition purely material. They remain conscious beings, but no longer truly have free will, by the standards of the areteia. Inversely, Blackbird's victims develop too much soul, which people with a normal amount of soul find just as horrifying.
• Spider-Sense: Ssrin and Iruvage are equipped with premonition tracers, sensors that detect when something is going to harm them. They don't work on attacks caused directly by the Cultratic Brand, since that sort of violence has the universe's sanction.
• Sssssnake Talk: The Khai wouldn't be proper Snake People if they didn't talk like snakes, but since Ssrin and Iruvage both use Translator Microbes to communicate it only really shows through in their names and their non-verbal noises. On the other hand, after Iruvage begins physically puppeting Clayton through his communicator implant, speaking through someone else's vocal cords instead of a translator, Clayton's mouth starts elongating his S'es.
• Sufficiently Advanced Aliens: The Architects, also known as the AcatalepticA or acatalept-gods, are responsible for creating the universe, and did so as a slipshod rush job that they were still arguing over even as it came together. Then something killed them before they could properly finish it. Being by definition external to our universe, they were incomprehensible entities from a realm of incomprehensible physics — and they would have found the universe, with its broken symmetries, just as incomprehensible.
• Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: Anna decides, somewhat arbitrarily, that Ssrin (a multi-headed snake alien with no external sex organs) is female for the sole reason that the coloration of her arms looks like "fancy lady gloves".
• Then Let Me Be Evil: Currently the dominant strain of thought in khai society. If the universe has damned you from birth for no fault of your own, you might as well be the cruel, selfish monster it thinks you are, and enjoy your place at the top of the pecking order for as long as you live.
• Theory of Narrative Causality: A soul is the image of the choices a person has made and allows them to make non-deterministic choices (which bends reality); a story is a map of choices; when someone learns a story, it gets embedded in their soul; the more people who know a story, the more the story bends reality into its shape. The rules of narrative are not just known to the rest of the galaxy, but they are enshrined as rules of nature: aretaic science is what allows the Exordia to enact the pinion, restricting and editing the types of narratives their subjects are allowed to participate in to strip them of agency and turning them into side characters in the narrative of Exordia dominance. It doesn't matter how many guns and ships a rebellion gathers, they will never succeed because they're trapped in the story of Exordia, which says they will never succeed. And since stories affect reality, the more people they pinion, the more the narrative becomes physically true.
• Three-Way Sex: Or as Clayton calls it, "a Manager Troi"; Erik, Clayton and Rosamaria contemplated having one in the past but their friendship shattered before they could pull the trigger on it. Anna, fully recognizing the sexual tension that exists between the two men, takes Rosamaria's spot as their third in order to get them to talk to one another again.
• Token Heroic Orc:
  • Ssrin is the first khai to successfully rebel against the Exordia in galactic history. This does not mean that she will fight to save humanity: she's here to save the galaxy, and securing the weapon that will allow her to do that takes priority over any number of human lives. Notably, as afraid as she is of how the Cultratic Brand damns her to hell, she's just terrified of having the Cultratic Brand removed from her, making it possible for her good deeds to be judged accurately by the universe.
  • Ssrin's sister Ssenenet was an Internal Reformist who wanted to turn the Exordia into a Hegemonic Empire that benefited the lives of its subjects, in the selfless belief that the khai existed to save other species from Hell. Even when Ssrin put her in the path of those subjects (who understandably wanted to kill khai) to try to teach her a lesson about naivety, she accepted her own death and refused to fight back, forcing Ssrin to defend her. She never forgave Ssrin, and has seemingly taken a darker path as a result.
• Translator Microbes: In her very first interaction with Ssrin, Anna wonders why Ssrin was speaking to her in perfect Sorani Kurdish, before realizing it must be "alien translator bullshit". They work through aretaic means, translating meaning through narrative analogy, and do so almost perfectly with the notable quirks of:
  • The Exordia being described as "servants of Angra Mainyu" (the devil of Zoroastrianism, which Anna grew up learning about from her father) when Ssrin was merely trying to describe them as objectively evil.
  • The words for various arataic concepts, which humanity mostly lack, and so get translated as new made up words that evoke the right meaning, such as serendure sounding similar to surrender (to evoke it's inescapability) and rath sounding like wrath (to evoke it's innate conflict).
  • Occasionally getting confused by puns and synonyms; at one point Ssrin says "Latitude Cats" instead of "Siberian Tigers".
• Was It Really Worth It?: A main theme throughout the book is asking Anna, Erik, and Clayton if what they've done in the past was really worth the good that came of it. Anna had to kill her brother, father, and 4 others, but the rest of her hometown was completely spared from genocide. Erik became a hired killer for the US government, and when he came clean it cost him his two best friends. Clayton went even further, and it cost him not only his best friend but his marriage. All three are forced to make the choice again before the end of the book.
• Weirdness Censor: Ssrin possesses an "operant camouflage" that makes her appear as a middle-aged woman in a pantsuit to any onlookers, completely unremarkable (except that her wardrobe never changes). It even covers blood samples. Anna's serendure allows her to see through it.
• We Used to Be Friends
  • Erik never forgave Clayton for his secretive expansion of the Paladin program, believing Clayton turned it into personal hit list — a tool for advancing his own agenda, rather than the straightforward punishment of evil. When they're forced to work together again, a lot of Teeth-Clenched Teamwork ensues.
  • The first act of the book ends with Ssrin severing her friendship with Anna with an act of shooting the dog (sparing Anna from having to do it herself). Their relationship is very fraught from that point on, but ultimately (mostly) mended in the end. After all, serendure can't be broken.