Book Review: Milo
Milo (01001101 01101001 01101100 01101111). Alexander Pyles. Radix Media, Chapbook, October 2019, 18 pages.
Reviewed by Mike Freveletti.
Alexander Pyles has given us a story that hits a lot of familiar notes usually associated with science fiction. I submit to you that this is not a bad thing. Milo is a story about what it means to endure, and if you had options to make your life better, would you explore them?
The main character, Milo, has a nerve disease that slowly deteriorates his body from the inside out and confines him to a wheelchair. He understands his situation. He realizes he didn’t do anything to deserve this disability and that there's nothing he can do.
Well, maybe there is something.Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Milo’s best friend, Darius, shows him an article about a new robotics breakthrough, and readers are off to the races on an artificial intelligence (AI) romp that hits the notes we’ve come to expect from robot stories. It’s a robot story you’ve encountered before, but what keeps you reading is the layered human emotion that weaves in what the future of AI might look like. Well, not only what it might look like, but also what might be one of its biggest hurdles.
The technology is boilerplate and is described as a new synthetic body in which they swap out the brain and place it into a shiny new AI shell. It sounds reasonable, and I imagine even more enticing to someone who feels like they don’t have any other options, such as Milo. I quickly found myself imagining if I had a disease that made the things I take for granted simply disappear. What if I couldn't go to the bathroom without someone leading me? What if I couldn’t get up and kiss my wife due to the loss of my legs? What if I couldn’t talk? Or eat without help? I think it’s safe to say I would try just about anything to erase those problems.
Another interesting component of this story is that you assume the robotic alternative is flawless. If you’re going to replace your human body with something better, you expect no issues, right? That’s where another layer gets added to Milo. While his new body is head and shoulders above what he was working with as a human, it is a more basic version and not yet perfected. Think for a second about your smartphone and the upgrades you are prompted continuously to make even with how impressively powerful that little thing is in the palm of your hand. Imagine if you were required to follow the same update process to keep your body running at tip-top shape. Milo is beset by what I would call technological Tourette syndrome, a side effect of his new existence. His thoughts are constantly interrupted by flashes of binary code, hence the code you see in the book title.
The flaws of his new body creep into the prose as he bursts into fits of binary episodes while trying to process emotions or think critically. The insertion of binary code right onto the page feels like the way a surplus of footnotes within a text fractures a story and forces the reader to break up the rhythm of their reading. The binary code disrupts the narrative, just like it disrupts Milo. I won’t give away what happens, but, as you can imagine, the new body has its own set of challenges.
Science is not perfect, and while it aims to be empirical, it takes a lot of testing to get to that point. In Milo, we see our main character painted into a corner and given a choice. We see science and technology offering him a way out, but what we come to realize is that even if we get to the point where transference to robotic bodies is a realistic alternative, we’re still going to have a quality-control period. The consequences? The trade-offs? Those are the interesting parts, at least from a fictional perspective and something the author explores in a logical way.
Milo is a work of science fiction that reasonably considers the advancement of technology and poses the question: can you be both human and robot? The answer in Milo’s world is maybe you can and maybe you can’t.