Previous
Pages 92–190
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Adoration of Jenna Fox, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity and Relationships
Biotechnology and Ethics
Humanity
Perfection and Purity
Idolatry and Religion
Summary
Analysis
The Unknowable. Jenna wonders whether she’ll ever know if the changes she’s undergone are normal or have made her a new entity. Yet she realizes that that was “the old Jenna’s question” too—and she wonders whether Ethan, Allys, and Dane have asked themselves similar things.
By arguing that the question of identity was “the old Jenna’s question too,” Jenna suggests that it’s normal for her to wonder whether she’s the same person she used to be. In other words, Jenna’s identity trouble is more proof of her humanity than not.
Themes
Environment. Claire goes to pick up Jenna’s father from the airport, and Lily has gone to church, leaving Jenna alone in the house for the first time. Jenna cleans her room, picks up her copy of Walden, and wonders about Thoreau. She feels suddenly grateful to have unique thoughts, which are not reducible to Bio Gel, and the opportunity to make new memories.
When Jenna asserts that her thoughts aren’t reducible to Bio Gel, she is basically asserting that she has an intangible mind distinct from her physical brain. In fact, the existence of a mind separate from the brain is another bioethical and philosophical question that the novel raises but cannot definitively answer, though Jenna’s belief in a nonphysical mind tells the reader something about her.
Themes
Jenna looks at the carpet where she hid Claire’s key. Remembering the look on her father’s face when she mentioned a key, she snatches it up. Suddenly she hears a phantom voice calling her name. Though worried that she is betraying Claire’s trust, she sneaks back into Claire’s room and unlocks the door in the back of Claire’s closet. She examines the middle computer, labeled with her name. Then, looking more closely at the other two computers, she realizes they too are faintly labeled: L. Jenkins and K. Manning. Utterly shocked and horrified, Jenna slowly realizes that the computers are her own, Locke’s, and Kara’s uploaded minds, trapped in the dark void or “hell” that Jenna remembers. She flees the room.
The very existence of a backup Jenna calls her identity into question yet again: if she has two minds on two different “platforms,” which is Jenna? Are they both Jenna? And if there are two Jennas, does it make each Jenna somehow less human? Meanwhile, though readers do not yet know why Jenna’s parents are keeping secret backups of Kara and Locke’s minds, the fact that they are doing so shows them yet again keeping vital information from Jenna despite their intense love of her.
Themes
Shared Thoughts. Jenna flees to the woods near the house and lies on the forest floor for hours. She hears Claire calling her name but ignores it. Eventually, she falls asleep. When she wakes, Claire is still calling for her. She realizes that she needs to go back—but she’s desperate to figure out whether her mind or Jenna’s uploaded mind in the closet is the “real” one.
When Jenna wonders whether she or the disembodied Jenna-mind in the computer is “real,” it makes clear that the existence of two Jennas calls into question both Jenna’s individual identity and her status as a human being.
Themes
Get the entire The Adoration of Jenna Fox LitChart as a printable PDF.
Backup. When Jenna finally walks out of the forest, her father, Claire, and Lily are sitting on the veranda, drinking wine and eating canapes. When Jenna’s father angrily states that other people have had to recover from bad accidents too—Jenna isn’t unique—Jenna says she knows: for example, the people “in black boxes” in Claire’s closet are suffering too. Lily goes inside to get more wine. When Claire asks what Jenna was doing in her closet, Jenna asks what the computer with her name on it is. Her father begins explaining that it’s a backup of the brain scan they uploaded to Jenna’s new body—but Jenna loses the thread of his speech, thinking about the hellish dark void she was trapped in.
Jenna experienced being a disembodied mind on a computer as floating in a hellish dark void. Effectively, Jenna’s parents tortured her for months in the name of saving her life—and they are still torturing the “backup” disembodied Jenna in the closet, as well as Kara and Locke. While it seems that Jenna’s parents don’t understand how painful and traumatic existence as a disembodied mind is, the fact of Jenna’s trauma supports some regulation and oversight of biotechnological innovations that might cause such suffering.
Themes
Eventually Jenna explodes, demanding to know why her parents would imprison another Jenna, Kara, and Locke in that environment. When her father claims that it’s not another Jenna, just information, Jenna retorts that it’s a mind imprisoned in a “nightmare.” When Claire asks for more time to figure things out, Jenna thinks that her parents just can’t accept that it was horrible for her to live as a disembodied mind trapped in limbo. She asks what problem the backup is intended to address, and her father explains that since what they’ve done is so experimental, they wanted to keep a backup just in case of conflict between Jenna’s original brain tissue and the Bio Gel.
Jenna’s parents dismiss out of hand Jenna’s claim that disembodied mental existence in a computer is a “nightmare,” a reaction that suggests they refuse to see how badly they’ve hurt their daughter ironically because they wanted to badly to save her. They won’t recognize any problems with what they did and are doing because it got the result they wanted: Jenna is alive. Meanwhile, Jenna’s father’s worry about conflict between Jenna’s original brain tissue and Bio Gel reminds readers that science is powerful but not all-powerful, even in this science-fiction future.
Themes
Lily returns and pours Jenna a glass of wine, which annoys Jenna’s father. Jenna can’t taste the wine, but it “warm[s]” her. When Jenna demands to know why her parents have scans of Kara and Locke, Claire explains that she begged Jenna’s father to scan them in case they could save them too—but they weren’t able to get samples of either one’s DNA before their bodies were cremated, so they can’t build them new bodies.
When Lily pours Jenna a glass of wine despite Jenna’s father’s annoyance, it symbolizes her support for Jenna and her recognition of Jenna’s maturity, in contrast with Jenna’s parents’ tendency to infantilize Jenna and deny her vital information in the name of protecting her. Meanwhile, Claire’s claim that she wanted to save Kara and Locke too indicates that Jenna’s parents had altruistic motives for scanning Jenna’s friends’ brains—at least initially.
Themes
Jenna asks how long her parents plan to keep Kara and Locke’s scans, and her parents explain that they want to keep Kara and Locke’s memories of the accident in case Jenna is ever brought up on charges for it. When Jenna protests that Kara and Locke are being kept as mere “witnesses,” her father retorts that they aren’t witnesses, just “information.” Jenna wonders whether that’s all she was too—and whether that’s all she is now. She also wonders whether she can consent to leave Kara and Locke in the dark void.
Jenna’s parents are motivated to believe that Kara and Locke are just “information” because it allows them to retain information that might help their beloved daughter—while denying that they are causing suffering to anyone else. Given that Jenna can testify to the suffering of being a disembodied mind, their reasoning seems like another example of them engaging in morally suspect behavior in the name of protecting their adored daughter. Meanwhile, when Jenna’s father casually dismisses the idea that Kara and Locke’s disembodied minds count as people, it causes Jenna to doubt her own humanity and identity once again—since she, too, remembers being a disembodied brain in the dark void.
Themes
Tossing. Jenna, sleepless, longs to free Kara and Locke from the dark void but wonders whether they know something that could exonerate her of responsibility for the accident.
Kara and Locke’s disembodied minds set up a moral dilemma for Jenna: will she free her friends and affirm her own continuous humanity, or will she keep them trapped to protect herself and accept their inhumane torture in the dark void?
Themes
Viewpoint. The following day at school, Jenna’s class is watching a senator break the filibuster record. After the senator finally finishes, a distracted Jenna asks about the bill the senator was filibustering. Dr. Rae explains that the bill would strip authority from the FSEB to oversee medical decisions, giving that authority back to hospitals and doctors. Jenna asks whether that’s bad. Allys erupts that of course it’s bad—unregulated medicine caused her amputations and the Aureus epidemic, and the bill is funded by huge biotech companies, including Fox BioSystems. Jenna notices that Allys looks at her when she says “Fox Biosystems.”
By reminding readers that unregulated medicine caused an epidemic that killed 25% of the world’s population (the Aureus epidemic), Allys helps clarify the possible ramification of unregulated biotechnology—like the unregulated biotechnology that saved Jenna’s life. Her significant look at Jenna when she says “Fox Biosystems,” meanwhile, hints that she has figured out who Jenna’s father is.
Themes
At the students’ lunch break, Jenna goes to the market with Allys and Ethan. Allys confronts Jenna about being the Jenna Fox: Matthew Fox’s daughter, who was in an accident that should have been fatal. When Jenna suggests that perhaps she isn’t that Jenna Fox, Allys says that if she is, “that would mean . . .” and stops talking. Ethan asks whether Allys would “run” to tell the FSEB about Jenna. Allys pulls off her prosthetic arm, rubs her stump, and points out that she can’t run. Then she replaces her arm and storms off.
When Ethan asks whether Allys would “run” to the FSEB to report Jenna, he implies that doing so would make her a bad and disloyal friend—not an identity most teenagers are willing to assume. Yet when Allys pulls off her prosthetic and points out she can’t run, she is making a rhetorical gesture showing the real dangers of unregulated biotechnology. In other words, she is suggesting that she has more important moral concerns than her friends considering her a snitch.
Themes
Maybe. When Jenna starts crying, Ethan leads her to a field behind the market, where they kiss desperately. Jenna asks why Ethan cares about her. When he speculates that it’s because they both have a traumatic “past that’s changed their future forever,” Jenna suggests that maybe Ethan just has a savior complex. Ethan tells Jenna not to psychoanalyze him—he’s himself. Jenna thinks the same is true of her, but she wishes she had a dictionary definition for Jenna Fox.
Earlier, Ethan claimed that Jenna was no more a monster for her cyborg status than he was a monster for attacking his little brother’s drug dealer. He makes the same comparison here, suggesting that he’s emotionally invested in Jenna because they both have a “past that’s changed their future forever.” Given that Jenna is at most only partially responsible for her accident, Ethan’s comparisons suggest that he sees his attack on the drug dealer less as something he chose to do than as a tragic event that happened to him—that his little brother’s addiction left him with no other options. Meanwhile, Jenna’s desire for a dictionary definition of herself shows her continuing struggle to understand her own identity.
Themes
Ethan asks whether Jenna is afraid of Allys and suggests that they can persuade Allys not to tell on her. Jenna says she isn’t afraid. But inwardly, she thinks that she’s scared of herself: how happy she is to be embodied when other minds are trapped inside computers suffering, and she hasn’t freed them. She worries that she lacks an essential part the way Dane does. And she fears that her parents will discover that she wasn’t worth the effort they took to save her because she’s “not special at all.” When Jenna suggests that Allys won’t tell, a worried Ethan reiterates that they’ll need to persuade her not to.
Jenna has already speculated that Dane is a sociopath, someone missing normal human moral instincts and emotions. When she worries that she might be like Dane, it shows that accepting Kara and Locke’s entrapment would lead her to doubt her moral humanity just as she already doubts her physical humanity. At the same time, she worries that accepting her friends’ entrapment would render her less than perfect, “not special at all,” and thus not worthy of her perfectionistic parents’ love.
Themes
Sliding. Allys doesn’t come to school for the next two days. Alone at home, Jenna waits for the police to come. Instead, she hears Kara and Locke’s phantom voices calling for help.
Kara and Locke’s phantom voices calling for help intensify Jenna’s sense that they are suffering in disembodied suspended animation and thus heightens her moral dilemma: will she put herself in danger to save them, or will she condemn them to a terrible fate and thus prove herself morally inhuman?
Themes
Match. Jenna is stomping angrily through the forest by her house, wondering whether Kara and Locke’s voices are hallucinations, when Dane appears and grabs her wrist. When she tells him to let her go, he insists that they’re going for a walk. She refuses. He asks whether she prefers “dangerous” guys like Ethan and suggests that he too could be dangerous. She tries to pull her hand away. When he still won’t let go, she grabs his crotch and squeezes extremely hard. As he collapses, she thinks about “how empty a one hundred percent human being can be.”
This scene, in which Dane is violently aggressive toward Jenna while faking shallow flirtation, further illustrates that he is “empty” of normal human morality despite being “one hundred percent human” in biological terms. Thus, the scene sets up a contrast between biologically human but immoral Dane and morally tormented cyborg Jenna.
Themes
Mr. Bender appears, holding a golf club, and calls out to Jenna. She walks out of the forest with him. He tells her he got his club and came after her when he saw Dane follow her into the forest. When he warns her not to walk there alone anymore, Jenna calls him “Edward” and says that he should know she “can be replaced as easily as a damaged Netbook” with her backup. When Mr. Bender asks how she figured “it” out, she says that she remembered a photo of her father’s very first car—the old car she saw earlier in Mr. Bender’s garage. Mr. Bender admits that he actually doesn’t know very much about Jenna—he just helped her father find the house.
Mr. Bender’s original identity is that of Jenna’s father’s old friend Edward. Since Mr. Bender is currently performing both his old identity as Jenna’s father’s friend—helping the Foxes with Jenna—and his new identity as a reclusive environmental artist, this revelation suggests that it’s possible to hold multiple identities, some of which are continuous. Meanwhile, Jenna’s parents’ failure to tell Jenna that Mr. Bender was their co-conspirator shows them once again attempting to deceive their adored daughter in the name of protecting her.
Themes
Jenna asks whether Mr. Bender has been in contact with her father consistently. Mr. Bender explains that he wasn’t initially, but eventually he needed some link to his first life, and Jenna’s father had consistently helped him—listening to him as well as giving him his escape vehicle. Jenna asks whether Mr. Bender is part of her emergency escape plan. He says yes: Lily is supposed to bring Jenna to Mr. Bender’s, and he’ll take her to a nearby airstrip. When Jenna, sounding like she’s spiraling, suggests her parents could just mail her backup somewhere instead, Mr. Bender brings her to sit down on his back porch.
Mr. Bender’s admission that he needed a link to his first life again suggests that identity is semi-continuous across even traumatic events like his own cross-country flight and name change. Meanwhile, Jenna’s claim that her parents could just mail her backup somewhere safe instead of enacting a complicated plan to evacuate her embodied self shows that she still doubts which of her two selves—the embodied or the disembodied—is the real one.
Themes
Jenna asks Mr. Bender what Dane’s issue is, mentioning that her friend Allys said he was “missing something.” When Mr. Bender says he only knows Dane is “trouble,” Jenna says that at least Dane is “legal.” When Mr. Bender retorts that Dane isn’t legal “inside,” Jenna wonders how legality enters a person. She asks what Mr. Bender sees when he looks at her. When he starts talking about hope, she scoffs, suggesting she’s living a fake life as a fugitive. Mr. Bender says he sees himself in her: he too had “to start over.” This reminder soothes Jenna, and she says she’s glad he was her “first friend” after her accident.
When Mr. Bender says that Dane isn’t “legal” on the “inside,” he means that while Jenna’s physical form may be illegal due to its “inhuman” biotechnological elements, Dane is the really “inhuman” one on the inside. In other words, Mr. Bender is saying that being human in terms of one’s moral responses is more important than being human biologically. While contrasting Jenna and Dane, Mr. Bender compares Jenna and himself, saying they both had to “start over.” This comparison helps to normalize Jenna’s situation, implying that lots of people go through versions of what Jenna went through.
Themes
Jenna and Mr. Bender go into his garden. He gives her his jacket, suggesting that he’s giving her Clayton Bender’s identity for a little while. Then he mentions that birds can smell more acutely than people realize. Jenna holds out her hand, and a bird briefly lands on it. Jenna thinks that identities aren’t separate but shared—and maybe now the birds will see Mr. Bender in her.
Earlier, when contemplating her desire to be friends with Allys, Jenna asserted that identity isn’t “separate and distinct” but built from relationships. Here she asserts the same thing by suggesting that her friendship with Mr. Bender involves him sharing a part of himself with her—not just by sharing his jacket, but by sharing his home and his friendship.
Themes
Listening. Jenna dreams that Kara and Locke are begging her to save them from the dark void. She wakes up screaming, with her father and Claire crowding over her. When her father says she was having a nightmare, Jenna says no—she was hearing Kara and Locke. Her father gently tells her that she’s imagining things, but suddenly, Jenna remembers the accident.
Given that Jenna’s parents deployed experimental and poorly understood biotechnology to save Jenna’s life, it seems possible that cyborg Jenna could be communicating somehow with the disembodied, computer-uploaded minds of her dead friends. When Jenna’s father refuses to entertain this possibility, it simply reveals that he can’t let himself question if there was anything morally suspect about the decisions he and Clare took to protect Jenna—a consistently problematic aspect of their love for their daughter. By contrast, Jenna is clearly tormented by Kara and Locke’s captivity, heightening her moral dilemma about whether to save them.
Themes
The Accident. In a flashback, Kara and Locke are trying to persuade Jenna to take her parents’ car so that they can go to a party. Jenna refuses to drive without a license, but she gets the keys—even though she could have pretended not to know where they were. Locke grabs the keys and gives them to Kara. Later, at the party, a fight breaks out. The friends flee the party, Jenna throwing the keys to Kara—and Kara, panicked, crashes the car on a sharp turn.
Jenna’s memory shows that she is somewhat morally responsible for her friends’ deaths, in that she gave them the keys to her parents’ car even though she could have refused to do so or pretended she didn’t know where the keys were. Yet she is not legally culpable for their deaths: she wasn’t the one driving the car. Thus, Jenna’s memory heightens her moral dilemma because it proves that Kara and Locke’s disembodied minds really could save her from prosecution if the authorities decide to press charges against her.
Themes
Self-Preservation. Jenna realizes that Kara and Locke are witnesses who could testify to her innocence if someone tries to prosecute her for reckless driving—but to benefit from that, Jenna has to keep them “in a box forever.”
In this passage, Jenna just fully realizes and restates the moral dilemma she has already been facing: she can either save her friends and put herself at legal risk or save herself and keep her friends “in a box forever.”
Themes
The Last Disc. Staring at her reflection in a glass cabinet, Jenna searches for—but can’t find—some visible difference between herself and Dane. After all, her friends are suffering but she won’t rescue them. She goes to search for the video of Jenna Fox’s seventh birthday party. As she looks through the cabinet, she notices the family’s camera with a disc “partially popped out.” The disc is labelled “Jenna Fox/Year Sixteen—Disc Two.” Jenna realizes that this, not the first disc of year sixteen, is what Lily wanted her to see.
When Jenna looks for a visible difference between herself and Dane, it shows that she is afraid she is a sociopath like him—that she’s “missing something” in terms of moral humanity—if she doesn’t save Kara and Locke from suspended animation.
Themes
A Recital. Jenna watches herself give a technically perfect but emotionally “dead” ballet recital. She remembers that night: when she spotted Lily in the audience, she saw her grandmother’s “disappointment,” which made her stop dancing. She stood there as the ballet music played, remembering how she’d told Lily that she’d rather “stomp and grind” than dance ballet. When Lily asked why she didn’t, Jenna said it would disappoint her parents, but Lily pointed out that they’d survive it. Yet eventually, at the ballet recital, Jenna finished her ballet piece rather than dancing how she wanted to, telling herself, “I have delivered. That is all that matters.”
Jenna’s “dead” ballet dancing, in contrast to the lively “stomp and grind” she wanted to perform, shows how Jenna’s attempts to “deliver[]” on her parents’ perfectionistic standards have led Jenna to disregard other things that “matter[]”—for example, her own desires or judgments about what is good.
Themes
Pieces. Jenna thinks about how giving other people “pieces” of herself supplemented their identities but took away from her own.
Previously, when Jenna has argued that a person’s identity is built in large part out of their interpersonal relationships, she has largely cast that phenomenon as a good thing. Now, however, she contemplates how it can be bad—namely, if people give away “pieces” of themselves to others while receiving nothing back.
Themes
The Beach. Jenna, Claire, and Lily drive to the beach. When Jenna quietly snarks to Lily that she didn’t need the beach, Lily asks what Jenna does need. When Jenna isn’t able to say, Lily tells her that this “has always been [her] problem”—she wants to “please” everyone even as she “secretly resents” that desire. Then Lily suggests that Jenna’s parents aren’t the ones with unreasonable perfectionistic standards—Jenna herself is. Jenna explodes at Lily, arguing that her parents idolized her, forcing her to be perfect, giving her a “personal tutor” in any subject she didn’t immediately master.
Earlier in the novel, Jenna has clearly recognized that she has internalized and acts on her parents’ perfectionistic standards. For example, she speculated that she might be repressing memories of her guilt in Kara and Locke’s death because she was afraid of not being her parents’ “perfect” child anymore. Yet when Lily argues that Jenna wants to “please” her parents so badly that she’s outdone them in perfectionism, Jenna angrily points out her parents’ culpability—revealing her overwhelming, ongoing resentment at the way her parents’ perfectionism has harmed her life.
Themes
Claire, worried, comes over and asks what Lily and Jenna are talking about. Lily again asks Jenna what she needs. Jenna bursts out that she needs a red skirt—and more space. When Claire asks what’s going on, Lily tells her to listen to Jenna. Jenna says she doesn’t want to be a “miracle” anymore. She wants to be like everybody else. That means she wants the backups destroyed: her own, Kara’s, and Locke’s. Claire stiffens up, agrees to get Jenna a red skirt on the way home, glares at Lily, and walks off.
When Jenna says that she needs a red skirt—the symbol of her friends’ influence on her identity—it suggests that she wants her chosen affiliations, like her friendships, to be a larger part of her identity relative to her unchosen relationships with her overbearing parents. Moreover, when she says she doesn’t want to be a “miracle,” it suggests that she wants her parents to stop loving her in a quasi-worshipful way and start just treating her like their child. Per Jenna, her parents’ reformation would involve allowing Jenna to make the important personal and moral decision of destroying her own and her friends’ backups. Notably, while Claire is willing to buy Jenna a red skirt, she totally ignores Jenna’s demands about the backups, which indicates that Claire has not yet grown past her obsession with her daughter’s “miracle” status or with protecting her daughter in problematic ways.
Themes
Calculations. On the drive home, Jenna remembers Claire visiting her in her hospital room. Jenna wanted to beg Claire to let her die but was unable to speak. Anyway, she was sure Claire would never let her die: she wanted Jenna to be “forever her baby. Forever her miracle.”
By making explicit that Jenna wanted to die after her accident but felt that her mother would never allow it, the novel highlights the dark side of Claire’s love for Jenna, showing how Claire’s adoring insistence that Jenna be “forever her miracle” paradoxically dehumanizes Jenna and strips away her choices.
Themes
Forever. Jenna looks up the definition of “forever” and feels she is just starting to “truly understand” it.
Jenna looks up “forever” just after remembering her near-death realization that Claire wouldn’t let her die like she wanted because Claire needed her to be “forever her miracle.” As such, when Jenna feels that she is starting to “truly understand” forever, it suggests her horror and despair at the possibility that her overbearing parents will always control her life.
Themes
Moving. Claire doesn’t actually stop to get Jenna a red skirt on the way home: “It’s not important. It never really was.” At home, Jenna sees her father talking to a familiar-looking stout man in the front driveway. Claire leads Jenna through the back door to avoid them, but Jenna creeps back through the house to eavesdrop. Her father and the man are talking about moving something to a safer location. When the conversation ends, the man turns and nods to Jenna. She realizes that he’s the man who took her and Ethan’s photograph at the mission.
Claire said that she would help Jenna get a red skirt, which represents how Jenna’s friendships help her identity evolve. Yet Claire doesn’t fulfill her promise because it’s not “important” to her, a failure that shows Claire misunderstands what her daughter really wants and needs: friendship and the ability to grow and change outside her parents’ overbearing control.
Themes
Jenna asks her father who the man was. Reluctantly, her father explains that the man is a “security specialist.” When Jenna asks what the man plans to move, her father goes silent. Then Jenna tells her father she’ll discover the truth eventually, so her father says the man is moving the backups—the house isn’t a secure enough place for them. Jenna fakes thoughtfulness and says that’s “probably a good idea,” which clearly relieves her father. Jenna announces she’s going with Ethan to see their friend Allys, who’s ill; her father asks her to come back before nightfall.
That Jenna fakes thoughtfulness when she says moving the backups is “probably a good idea” hints that she only says it to reassure her father—and foreshadows that she will somehow try to interfere with the plan to move Kara and Locke’s backups.
Themes
Waiting for Ethan outside, Jenna wonders whether she’ll still hear Kara and Locke’s voices after her parents move the backups. She recalls that she was “stupid” enough to leave the key in the closet door when she fled the computers the last time, so she no longer has access. She feels an internal battle between “survival and sacrifice.” As Ethan’s truck appears down the street, Lily suddenly appears and offers to help Jenna. She says that Jenna is entitled to her own backup—and maybe to the others, since she’s the only one who knows what being a disembodied mind is like. Jenna reveals to Lily that the backups will be moved tomorrow. Lily suggests that they talk more that night.
Through Jenna’s battle between “survival and sacrifice,” the novel reiterates Jenna’s moral dilemma: she can choose “survival” by keeping Kara and Locke’s backups as proof that she’s not responsible for the car accident that killed them and thus protect herself against potential future prosecution. Or she can choose “sacrifice” by saving her friends but exposing herself to legal danger, thus proving her own moral humanity to herself. Her conversation with Lily suggests that she will choose “sacrifice.”
Themes
They Know. When Jenna gets into Ethan’s truck, he points out that she’s shaking all over and tells her not to worry: they would’ve heard by now if Allys had reported Jenna. Jenna sarcastically suggests that maybe the FSEB’s “bureaucratic machine” is just processing her “guillotine order” slowly. Ethan begins a quotation from Thoreau; when Jenna finishes it, she stops shaking. Jenna speculates that maybe Allys is faking sickness to avoid seeing her, but Ethan points out that Allys wasn’t looking well the last time they saw her.
Jenna and Ethan’s back-and-forth quotation of Walden as a form of comfort illustrates how Jenna has taken something that was done to her—her parents uploading academic information into her cyborg brain without her consent—and incorporated it into her evolving identity through her romantic relationship with Ethan. Meanwhile, Jenna’s sardonic speculation that the FSEB’s “bureaucratic machine” might be processing her “guillotine order” slowly reminds readers that the stakes are high—though unclear—for Jenna if government regulators find out about the illegal biotechnology used to save her life.
Themes
At Allys’s house, Jenna and Ethan are about to knock when an exhausted-looking woman opens the door. When Jenna and Ethan ask to see Allys, an exhausted-looking man appears behind the woman and suggests they come in. When the woman argues that Allys might not have the strength, the man says, “If not now, when?” He leads Jenna and Ethan down the hallway to a sickroom, where Jenna can “smell death.” The room is stuffed with “medical equipment.” When Ethan asks why they haven’t brought Allys to the hospital, the woman—Allys’s mother—explains that Allys is now receiving palliative care for organ failure. Allys’s father starts weeping.
Allys’s impending death emphasizes that Allys has good reason to fear abuse of scientific innovations—after all, her original sickness was due to an infection whose antibiotic resistance was ultimately due, according to the book, to medical overuse. Thus, the novel acknowledges that regulation of medicine and science could be a good thing—that is, regulating antibiotic use more strictly would have been a good thing—even as scientific regulation may threaten Jenna’s freedom or even life.
Themes
Allys weakly invites Jenna and Ethan to approach her. When Jenna asks whether there’s anything she or Ethan can do, Allys says no: her numbers are “way over the top,” so additional interventions would violate the law. She thinks the FSEB can eventually solve the problem, but not soon enough to save her. Then she asks Jenna to take her hand. When Jenna does, Allys pulls her close and whispers something into her ear. Shortly thereafter, Allys falls asleep. As Jenna and Ethan are leaving, Allys’s mother asks whether Jenna lives on Lone Ranch Road. Jenna says she does. On the drive back, Ethan speculates sadly that Allys won’t tell on Jenna now, but Jenna disagrees: Allys whispered to Jenna that she’d already told her parents to report Jenna.
Even as Allys’s original infections point to the dangers of unregulated science and medicine, her impending death is arguably due to overregulation. The current regulatory system won’t let her receive more interventions because her biotechnical intervention numbers would be “way over the top.” In other words, the FSEB would condemn Allys to death rather than let her survive in a “less human” physical form. This condemnation shows a problematic valuation of human physical “purity” over a person’s survival—yet Allys clearly accepts the regulatory regime, as evidenced by her telling her parents to report Jenna.
Themes
Leaving and Staying. Jenna contemplates whether to flee her whole life like Mr. Bender. She could escape not only the law but also the guilt of saying yes to Kara and Locke about the car keys, thereby indirectly causing their deaths. On the other hand, she thinks about remaining where she is to rescue Kara, Locke, and “the old Jenna.” That way, she could avoid Mr. Bender’s regrets and bask in Lily’s love, because Lily does actually love her.
By telling her parents to report Jenna, Allys has raised the stakes of Jenna’s preexisting moral dilemma: if Jenna stays where she is even one more night to save Kara and Locke’s disembodied minds from torturous suspended animation, she might be arrested. Yet in addition to seeing her predicament as a moral dilemma, Jenna now sees it as an acceptance or rejection of her relationships and thus her identity: will she run away from Kara and Locke, or will she rescue them and retain her newly loving relationship with Lily?
Themes
A Plan. In the early morning hours, Jenna waits behind her bedroom door to execute her plan, wondering whether her old self would have risked her safety for other people. At dawn, Jenna starts to scream. As her father and Claire rush to Jenna’s empty bed, Jenna exits the room—and Lily locks the door. Lily hands Jenna another key. Jenna flies downstairs, where she grabs a crowbar from Lily’s room before rushing to Claire’s and unlocking the door at the back of the closet. She uses the crowbar to pry the computers containing the backups from the table. She knows that once the backups are removed from their power sources, they’ll “die” within half an hour. She gathers up the backups, runs outside, and throws the backups into the pond. Claire and Jenna’s father watch from her bedroom window and cry out in horror.
Interestingly, Jenna wonders whether her old self would have saved Kara and Locke—suggesting that, having chosen to save her friends, Jenna has discovered a new level of humanity, compassion, and morality. By choosing self-sacrifice, Jenna seems to have come to greater acceptance of her identity as a fallible human being who happens to have cyborg parts.
Themes
Jenna thinks that she is now the sole Jenna Angeline Fox. Lily walks up behind her and says that she released Jenna’s father and Claire. Jenna and Lily hug, and Jenna heads inside to talk to her parents. She finds Claire hunched over on the stairs. When Claire laments the loss of the backups, which could have “saved” Jenna, Jenna points out that keeping the backups would have destroyed her in another way. Jenna’s father comes downstairs, shaking his head, and claims that Jenna doesn’t “know the risks.” Jenna suggests that she “know[s] different risks”—but at any rate, she’s here now. Jenna and her parents hug.
Jenna’s parents are sorrowful and disapproving rather than enraged at her decision to destroy the backups, which suggests that they partially understand her moral perspective even as they are still too overprotective to agree with it. Thus, Jenna and her parents’ group hug is a real but merely partial reconciliation.
Themes
Lily appears. She and Claire stare at one another for a long moment. Then Claire, sighing, suggests making coffee. Then, abruptly, someone knocks on the door. Jenna’s father opens it, Claire right behind him. Outside are Allys’s parents. They explain that they know what Jenna’s parents did for her—and ask whether they can help Allys too. Jenna’s father leads them into his study, while Claire asks Lily to bring the coffee when it’s done. After Jenna’s parents and Allys’s have entered the study, Lily says, “Here we go.” When Jenna says that Allys wouldn’t want her parents’ help, Lily points out that “time and perspective” often change.
By having Allys’s parents ask Jenna’s parents for help saving Allys, the novel implies that the regulatory system that would condemn Allys to death is too strict—and that Jenna’s parents have made understandable and loving even if sometimes flawed choices. At the same time, when Lily says, “Here we go” in response to Allys’s parents’ request, she seems to imply that a huge amount of biotechnological innovation will result from this initial action. Yet she also suggests that “time and perspective” might change Allys’s mind about accepting currently illegal prostheses, indicating that both Allys’s identity and the culture’s bioethical assumptions may be fluid.
Themes
Baptism. Lily and Jenna enter the mission church. Lily is going to talk about her seed project, and Jenna is finding Ethan. After Lily crosses herself with holy water, she crosses Jenna with holy water too. Jenna asks how Lily “know[s],” and Lily says she doesn’t—she “believe[s].” Then she sprinkles Jenna’s head with holy water. Jenna concludes that both she and the world have “changed.”
When Jenna asks how Lily “know[s],” she is presumably asking how Lily can know that Jenna is her pre-accident self or a legitimate human being. In tandem with her rebaptism of Jenna by sprinkling her with holy water, Lily’s response suggests that definitions of humanity and identity are fundamentally spiritual or religious questions about belief rather than scientific questions about knowledge. Meanwhile, Jenna seems more comfortable with the fact that she has “changed”—indicating greater comfort with having a fluid, evolving identity.
Themes
Two Hundred and Sixty Years Later. Jenna, sitting in Mr. Bender’s garden, thinks about how she moved into his house after her parents’ house burned down. Mr. Bender, Jenna’s father, and Claire are all dead now. Jenna’s father underestimated how long Jenna would live, but Jenna isn’t “bitter” about it: she feels that “faith and science,” like Jenna’s father and Lily, are “two sides of the same coin”—while Jenna herself is “the space in between.”
When Jenna claims that “faith and science” are “two sides of the same coin,” she seems to suggest that they answer complementary questions and address complementary problems—for example, Jenna’s scientist father saved Jenna’s physical life while her religious grandmother helped restore Jenna’s belief in her own humanity. As the product of both science and faith, Jenna constitutes “the space in between” the two.
Themes
Allys—22% of the original—comes looking for Jenna. She and Jenna have done a lot of outreach work to make the world more accepting of biotech hybrids, but Jenna’s 10% is currently the minimum allowable amount: “The Jenna Standard.” Jenna assumes that this will change in the future, as all things do. Allys tells Jenna that Kayla is here—Jenna and Ethan’s biological daughter, whom Jenna had long after Ethan’s death. When Kayla is very old, Jenna plans to move back to Boston to avoid surviving her. For now, young Kayla bounds up to Jenna, and Jenna gives her birdseed. Kayla and Jenna hold out their hands for the birds, and many birds alight on them.
Jenna’s assumption that “The Jenna Standard” will change even further implies that the culture’s bioethical intuitions are always moving in the direction of greater acceptance of technological innovations in human life—much as Allys’s intuitions moved toward greater acceptance as a result of her own life being saved by unregulated biotechnology. Meanwhile, Jenna’s decision that she will die when her daughter grows very old shows Jenna finally able to exercise the agency over her life that her parents consistently denied her—while at the same time showing she loves her daughter passionately, just as Claire loved her and Lily loved her and Claire.
Themes
