WHAT a fantastic follow-up to the first Cas Russell book, Zero Sum Game, which was one of my favorites of 2018. Two things I adore in fiction are aftermaths and superheroes being stripped of their superpowers, and Null Set (kinda) has both.
Cas and her friends are dealing with the fallout from their takedown of Pithica in Zero Sum Game, and trying to cope with the uptick in crime that Los Angeles is seeing as a result. Rio is God knows where; Arthur and Checker and Cas are chasing down child trafficking rings, while Cas grows more and more frustrated with the small scale of the good work they’re able to do. They also have a new staff member called Pilar, who does admin and has demanded that Cas teach her how to shoot a gun. (Pilar is a treasure.)
In other bad news, Cas’s mind is starting to break down. Whatever Dawna did to her at the end of Zero Sum Game, it’s eating away at her memory, letting through flashes of the life she used to know. She’s become prone to hallucinations that she struggles more and more to ignore, control, or work around — even, at times, to the detriment of the jobs she’s working. Arthur and Checker, who love her, are worried. I am heartwarmed that she now has people to love her apart from just Rio, whose faithfulness to her is very sweet but it’s not like you can lean on the guy for emotional support. Meanwhile, a mysterious figure from her past, a psychic called Simon, is following her around and asking uncomfortable questions.
(PS I can’t see why nobody has asked Rio or Simon if Cas has been psychically told to trust Rio. But like — she has, right? I know he’s been unflinchingly loyal to her, etc., etc., but at some point she had to *start* trusting him in order to find *out* that he was going to be unflinchingly loyal, so — she’s been psychic-influenced, no?)
Two main questions occupy Our Heroes over the course of Null Set. One is whether Cas will allow another psychic to mess around with her brain, if their doing so means that she’ll survive the things that brain is currently doing to her. The second is how to stop the crime wave in Los Angeles, and our Cas unfortunately comes up with — okay, not the worst idea in the world, but an idea that is p R e T t Y bad, if you have ever read a book before, are Rio, or prefer not to mess around with the fragile and unpredictable human brain. Drawing on technology developed by the collapsed tech firm Arkacite, she creates a method of doing what she calls “brain entrainment” — basically, disrupting/shutting off the thing in the human brain that makes us form mobs and commit inhuman acts of violence. This is already pretty bad because don’t play God, brains are fragile, you never know what’ll happen, etc. etc., but then the actual worst idea in the world follows close on its heels, that being to implement the brain entrainment at scale and without testing.
Maybe superheroes should be required to undergo peer ethics supervision, like social workers. Wouldn’t that be good? Or like, bring their superplans before an Institutional Review Board and get some feedback. My instinct is that I would love to be on a superhero IRB. My thought-out response is that members of superhero IRBs would probably have really short life spans on account of all the superheroes who would turn evil and have a grudge against them. But what if it were like jury duty and everyone took a turn? But then you couldn’t have like a board full of experts on superheroics.
(This is the kind of internal conversation that ideally would take place in the tags of this post, but WordPress doesn’t let me post tags in the order EYE want to post them. They insist my tags be alphabetized. WordPress would probably try to brain entrain me given half a chance.)
I’m fascinated by the conflict Huang ends up creating about Cas’s brain. Spoilers begin here, so I’ll put a gif to give you a chance to get away before the spoilers. And I’ll put another gif after the spoilers are over, so you’ll know where to start reading again.
We find out Cas’s original identity in the best way, when a friend of Arthur’s mentions it to her in the full assumption that Cas has already figured it out. I love this fucking shit. The idea that the answer to a central mystery can be an absolute nothing can be hard to pull off without the reader feeling cheated, but I thought Huang managed it. Anyway, her original self was a Bahraini girl named Valamarthi, a child prodigy in math, and that person’s brain was completely broken by what Pithica did to it. In an effort to save her, Vala’s then-boyfriend knocked out all her memories, creating essentially an entire new person: Cas.
I love this problem. I love it. Cas is clearly not Vala; wiping Vala’s memories eliminated that person. But she questions her own right to live, palimpsested on top of the forcibly blank slate of Vala’s memory and Vala’s life. The memories are still inside her, though, struggling their way to the surface — so what does that make her? A person or an occupying force? Or both?
(If you were anywhere near me in early to mid-2018, you’ll have heard me raving about a fic called A Change in Energy, by kvikindi. It shares many of these very concerns! I still rave about it! If what I’ve just said about Null Set sounds interesting to you, perhaps I can interest you in a 450,000-word fic, based on a by-all-reports-terrible SF show, but which nevertheless explores interesting questions about what it means to be a human and a body and a person.)
Though I wasn’t quite as enthralled by the mystery of Null Set as by Zero Sum Game, the counterbalance is that Cas has found a real community in this one. If you are a lover of found family vibes, as who would not be?, Null Set has them for you in spades. It’s lovely to see Cas in the bosom of people who care about her, particularly in contrast to the little we learn about her past life and self. Null Set finishes on — not a cliffhanger, but a resetting of the board (my favorite way for a middle book to end), where we know the immediate next thing that will happen to Cas, but just have no fucking idea about what might come after that. It’s a great entry in a great series, and I recommend it entirely.