In the book Reboot by Amy Tintera certain human beings can come back from the dead with heightened senses and abilities. However they also apparently come back with less emotion. We see a company trying to control these people to use them as weapons. Are emotions what makes us human? Throughout the story we see the controlling value: Embracing emotions leads to making connections with others. And the Counter Idea: Suppressing emotions leads to loneliness, oppression, and isolation. Why is Wren so capable of change, when she was so embedded in her controlling idea at the start of the novel? Maybe it was because the easiest way to do her “job” is to force herself not to feel anything. Or maybe she just needed someone to love her in order to feel something. She says she doesn’t understand her feelings for Callum, because her parents did not express much love for her; she didn’t know what it looked or felt like. However in the last act’s climax the controlling value is: Putting others safety before your own can bring freedoms and happiness to everyone. The counter idea being: Putting yourself first can lead to oppression and less freedom. Although the answer seems simple. Let the reboots out so that HARC does not have power to control the humans in the slums, the question still remains, will letting the reboots out cause more harm than good? ““You’ve killed us all,” he whispered. “How do you figure?” I gestured to the vials around me. “I’d say you’re the guilty ones, injecting us with this crap.” “We’re trying to protect ourselves from you,” he said, wiping his hand across his nose and setting the second case on top of the first. “Now you’ve…” he pointed to the ceiling, to the eighth floor, where he must have also recognized the sound of reboots running. “You’ve let them all out”” (Tintera, 352). However, if there has been a reboot camp the whole time as the book tells us, why didn’t any of the reboots know? HARC was keeping the secret for a reason. They know that humans do not stand a chance against the reboots. On the other hand there has been a reboot camp the whole time and the reboots did not go around killing humans the way HARC says they would. Obviously this was to keep the reboots trapped. “Their eyes followed me as I walked to my room. They weren’t drugged. They were rebelling” (Tintera, 172). This is just one example of the reboots just wanting to be free. They were not interested in killing people; they did that because it was an assignment, they just wanted to be free.
The genre of this book is Young Adult, Action & Adventure, Science Fiction, and Romance. Wren is a 17 year old reboot which is the right age for a young adult protagonist. The action and adventure portion of the book takes place when they are assigned missions and when they eventually break out of HARC, rescue Addy, get the antidote for Callum, and make their way to the reboot reserve. “I lifted the gun. One, two, three. I shot each one in the chest, ignoring the bullets that tore through my jacket and bounced off my helmet” (Tintera, 196). Lastly, the book has a bit of romance in it between the characters Wren and Callum. “Now I was only confused as to why a person would want to kiss anyone but Callum” (Tintera, 201).
A Hermeneutic Code that is portrayed in this book are the shots. At the beginning of this book Wren’s roommate Ever is given a mysterious shot while she is asleep by a scientist at HARC. Why did they pick her roommate? “I closed my eyes briefly. “What is the point of this? Is HARC trying to get rid of us? ” “Oh no. they need you guys. But they need you as aggressive, mindless soldiers. They’re not getting that, particularly from under-sixties. This is the solution. Or it will be, if they ever get it to work right”” (Tintera, 324). The numbers they are given is how long it took for them to reboot in other words to come back from the dead. Apparently the more time it takes you to come back the less emotion you have as a reboot. So they pick people under sixty because apparently they have more emotion, and in order to control them they need to be more mindless like the 120’s. However we don’t find this out until the last couple chapters. So the book leaves this constant question of: Why are they giving them these shots? What is the shot doing to them? How are they injecting them? As we go through cycles of Ever becoming a beast feeling the need to feed on flesh and then back to normal again we continue to wonder if these shots are going to have any consequences. These consequences can also be an example of proairetic code. Then Ever kills a guard, steals his gun shoots and kills some other guards and then gets gunned down in the cafeteria. Not long after Ever is killed Wren and Callum escape only to find out that Callum was being injected as well. This creates a tension that we feel throughout the book wondering if Callum is going to survive. “He started feeling weird and shaking three days ago, I think. But he just started blacking out and losing it yesterday” (Tintera, 324).
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A part of the book that really stuck out to me was on page 58. Wren is talking to Ever about the incident that happened the night before where Ever was going crazy and attacking Wren. Ever falls into Wren and begins to sob. “I almost pushed her off. No one had used me for comfort, perhaps ever” (Tintera, 58). Wren already seems to be changing since the beginning of this story. You asked the question: Are emotions what make you human? Venesa, I like how you pointed out that maybe it was easiest for Wren to just suppress her emotions in order to do her job and complete her assignments. It isn’t until Wren meets Callum that she begins to feel these unusual emotions. Were all of the reboots over 120 emotionless or was it just Wren because of how she grew up and where? Just a thought, but just how the reboots themselves made the rules of sitting with the numbers similar to them, maybe it was some type of persona the higher numbers took on to not show emotion because they wanted to be perceived a certain way.
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I spent many of my formative years reading this genre of novels. My familiarity with the genre made very suspicious of the circumstances surrounding Ever’s death. Venesa, your mention of Ever brought back my thoughts on the subject. I have learned from this course that my hunches always have a reason, whether I realize them or not. It may just be my own projection of what I know about the codes of the genre or it could be that I subconsciously picked up on clues from the author to lead me to be suspicious. First, in their parting interaction, Ever is very calm, clear-eyed, and apologetic towards Wren. People who are about to virtually commit suicide rarely react in such a way. Second, when Wren first talks to a rebel, she finds out that they help reboot escape. She also discovers that one of the reboots she believed to have died in action actually escaped to the reboot reservation. Thirdly, the book has a sequel and it is not out of the realm of possibility that Ever’s last act of rebellion was actually a rues to escape and that the friends reunite in the sequel.
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