The Anomaly

“Having spent fifteen years writing, he views the small literary community as a farcical train where crooks without tickets ostentatiously take first class seats with the complicity of incompetent conductors, while modest geniuses are left on the platform.”

This quote describes the opinions of Victor Miesel, but because Victor’s career has many parallels with Le Tellier’s, it is easy to trace Victor’s opinions back to the author (whether true or one of Le Tellier’s tricks). Victor laments the fact that his literary fiction gets no recognition while popular fiction (and American genre fiction especially, since Victor makes a living translating it) finds easy success. That he uses the metaphor of a train in a novel about air travel emphasizes that Victor’s position is old-fashioned.

“I would have liked the two of us to walk the longest possible path, together, and even the longest of possible paths.”

André writes a convoluted email to Lucie after reading Victor Miesel’s The Anomaly, as if his thinking is infected by Victor March’s existential musings. The somewhat nonsensical distinction between “the longest possible path” and “the longest of possible paths” implies that a defined set of possible paths already exists, suggesting that André (and by extension Victor March) are thinking probabilistically.

“All smooth flights are alike. Every turbulent flight is turbulent in its own way.” 

“The Spin Cycle” opens with a line that echoes the opening line of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” As the allusion suggests, the statement points metaphorically toward emotional turbulence, but it is also true mathematically; if turbulence is measured as motion in excess of a straight line (where smooth = zero excess motion), then smooth will always be zero while turbulence can be any combination of numbers. Metaphorically, turbulence is an added variable to the expected result, meaning the same can be said of narrative.

“As I sink today, my eyes open onto an abyss where no theorem holds sway.”

This line from Victor March’s The Anomaly captures the sense of meaninglessness that the book becomes known for. On the surface, this might mean that Victor experiences an emptiness that cannot be solved by any diagnosis. It also references the “null symbol” that Victor uses in his author name, which represents an “empty set” or result that cannot exist according to proven theories.

“Someone somewhere in the galaxy has tossed a coin, and it really has stayed suspended in the air.”

When Adrian and Tina write the protocols for air-traffic emergencies, they are asked to also create protocols for “low-probability” events: events that are as rare as flipping a coin and having it land on its edge. They also included Protocol 42, which accounts for no expected result at all (an empty set), which Adrian likens to a coin that never lands because something impossible has happened.

“His friends are aging along with him, but not the women he loves. He’s running away, he’s scared. He can have dinner with impending death, but not sleep with it.”

André is only attracted to women much younger than himself. He self-diagnoses this problem as arising from as a fear of aging. But there is specifically a physical element to that fear; intellectually, he is okay with aging, but when it comes to the human body—mainly the degradation of his own—he becomes repulsed.

“It operated a little like a photocopier, then? A scan taken in one place and a copy delivered somewhere else, like a sheet of paper coming out of a machine.”

One of the theories meant to explain the Air France 006 anomaly is the possibility that a super advanced biological 3D printer scanned the plane and delivered an exact replica of it in a new part of the sky. This theory implies the presence of both an original and a copy. It also likens the lives and bodies of the passengers to paper, drawing attention to the fact that they are fictional entities that only exist on paper: in a book.

“With a computer the size of a very small moon, the history of the human race from the birth of Homo sapiens could be simulated a billion times.”

The Bostrom simulation hypothesis posits that there will one day be computers powerful enough to simulate sentience and complex civilizations so many times that, in terms of probability, it would be virtually a certainty that any sentient human would be one of those simulations. The image of the “small moon” also invokes the Death Star from Star Wars, suggesting that such a computer would be capable of destroying civilizations.

“A hypertechnical civilization can simulate a thousand times more ‘false civilizations’ than there are real ones. Which means that if we take a ‘thinking brain’ at random, mine or yours, it has nine hundred ninety-nine chances in a thousand of being virtual and one chance in a thousand of being a real brain.”

The laws of probability are used here, as elsewhere in the novel, to illustrate the sense of meaningless that confronts the characters in the aftermath of flight 006. It’s not only the possibility—indeed, the probability—that one is a simulation; it’s the recognition that everything is a matter of chance.

“Why does he never break free of influences and tutelary figures? Why, when he’s not afraid of being an imposter, is he just a little boy on a quest for accolades?” 

Victor June realizes that there is a false binary dividing original art and art that is derivative of (or influenced by) previous works, because he argues that the act of striving to create original art is itself derivative of (and influenced by) the strivings of previous artists. He attempts to “break free” of the cycle by writing a version of Le Tellier’s novel, which unabashedly copies other styles with the acknowledgment that nothing is original anyway.

“Where in the Torah, the New Testament, the Koran, or any other text can anyone identify the least sentence, ambiguous sura, or obscure verse that predicts or justifies a plane looming out of the azure skies and turning out to be in every way identical to one that landed three months earlier?”

The Air France 006 anomaly throws into doubt all systems of meaning, including all forms of religion from Buddhism to Islam. This is because all religions share the same premise, whether it concerns the soul or reincarnation: that the individual is singular.

“This plane’s appearance can’t be a bungle in the simulation—it would have been so easy to ‘erase’ it, to rewind by a few seconds. No, it’s obviously a test: How will billions of virtual individuals react when confronted with their own virtuality?” 

If he assumes that the simulation theory is correct, Adrian concludes that their awareness of the simulation must be intentional because, if it wasn’t, the program would have corrected itself. If it is a test, however, there are no parameters for passing. Adrian suggests it is more of an experiment by their author to satisfy curiosity.

“No author writes the reader’s book, no reader reads the author’s book. At most, they may have the final period in common.”

This is a quote from Victor March’s The Anomaly. The reader of a book will always interpret it differently than the author intended. In other words, there are two books that are doubles of each other; they are identical and yet are understood from a different position, just like the Air France 006 passengers.

“When he cuts up the penis, his penis, he can’t suppress a shudder of disgust. Three hours later he’s filled about a hundred hermetically sealed freezer bags.”

Blake June murders Blake March and disposes of the body. Blake thinks purely logically, but even he experiences discomfort when he must cut his own body into smaller pieces; when viewed part by part, the experience is not so different than looking down at one’s own body.

“Not everyone gets the chance to witness their own downfall from afar, to pity themselves without actually feeling self-pity.”

André March observes André June in the hangar as he worries about Lucie’s opinion of him. He finds his double’s behavior to be pathetic, and he feels sad for André June. In doing so, he conceptualizes André June as a different person—because André March feels that he has changed since then.

“Neither the ‘we’ nor the ‘our’ is premeditated. But they anchor into the language a sort of balance between Joanna Woods and this Joanna Wasserman, who’s carrying Aby’s baby. She’s not the perverse intruder, she’s the poor insider who got left behind.”

Joanna Woods (June) struggles to think of herself and Joanna Wasserman (March) as separate people leading separate lives; she accidentally uses pronouns that group them together. Until she can see herself as a different person, she cannot move on with her life.

“Mallarmé wasn’t wrong when he said a throw of the dice will never abolish chance: it certainly won’t abolish this unholy mess.”

Louis’s psychiatrist responds to the boy’s idea to use dice to determine which version of Lucie he will spend time with on any given day. It is a reference to Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 poem by the same name, which is an intentional mirror: Chance cannot undo chance. In other words, using probability to make decisions will have no effect on the events of a world which is itself (if a simulation) determined by probability.

“When you have a hammer, everything ends up looking like a nail.”

Victor June learns that everyone has been reading Victor March’s The Anomaly for clues to his suicide. Victor June comments that readers influence their own interpretation of a text when they already have an interpretation in mind. He seems not to care why his counterpart wrote The Anomaly or died by suicide, modeling a more objective approach to interpretation.

“What’s happening to me, what’s happening to us, could have happened to anyone in this theater. I’m just anybody.”

Adriana June gives a practiced speech on The Late Show. On the one hand, she humanizes herself and Adriana March by equating herself with anyone in the audience (in the theater and watching TV elsewhere). On the other hand, her speech draws attention to the fact that everyone is a simulation.

“And at the very heart of this endless fire that has always consumed America, with this war waged by darkness over enlightenment, a war in which reason gradually backs down in the face of ignorance and the irrational, Jacob Evans puts on the dark breastplate of his own primitive and uncompromising hopes. Religion is a carnivorous fish in the abyssal depths. It emits the feeblest of light and needs a vast darkness around it to attract its prey.”

Le Tellier is critical of religious extremism in the United States, tracing its presence back to the start of the country. He calls this brand of religion predatory, comparing it to an anglerfish, a fish that lurks in the darkness and dangles a glowing piece of itself to lure its prey. He suggests that religion can only be a successful predator in places where education (light) is rare, implying that these religions actively sabotage education in order to thrive.

“I think, therefore, even if I’m simply a thinking program, I am. I feel love and pain in the same way, and I’ll die just as surely, thank you. And the things I do have the same consequences, whether my world is virtual or real.”

Philomedius makes the claim that life is no different whether everyone is flesh and blood or merely a simulation. Descartes’s famous line that thinking proves existence is previously rewritten by the Protocol 42 task force to suggest that thinking instead proves simulation. But here, Philomedius reverts the phrase back to its original meaning.

“But I still don’t really like the word ‘destiny.’ It’s just a target that people draw after the fact, in the place where the arrow landed.”

Victor June finds his life to be fortuitous; he has no double because Victor March committed suicide, he has renown and built-in writing success because of Victor March’s book, and he gets together with the love of his life because of Air France 006. But he refuses to believe that “destiny” plays a part because, he claims, destiny is just a misreading of random events after the fact. Philomedius says the same thing about religion (362).

“Nothing. Nothing will change. We’ll wake up in the morning, we’ll go to work because we still have to pay the rent, we’ll eat and drink and make love just like before. We’ll carry on behaving as if we’re real. We’re blind to anything that could prove that we’re fooling ourselves. It’s only human. We’re not rational.”

Victor June believes that life will go on as normal despite the undeniable fact that everyone lives in a simulation. He argues that humans have a built-in capacity to go against logic and will always choose ignorance over inconvenient realities.