Throughout the book, Avram has discounted the value of Malkah’s programming in Yod . While Malkah counters that it “made the difference between success and failure,” did Malkah’s programming really help Yod (Piercy 429)? It allowed him to feel, but did that ruin his chance of being content with his life? Did it curse him to live as a sentient being used as a weapon? Would he have been better off without emotions?

2 thoughts on “

  1. For Yod’s initial purpose, I side with Avram in believing that Malkah’s enhancements only complicated things. While it is tempting to see his emotional responses as a driving factor in his protection, simply programming a non-sentient cyborg would have been able to complete the same task. We can see with his final sacrifice that he could not bare his current existence, somewhere between human and nonhuman, and therefore destroyed the notes on his programming so that Avram could not recreate him. So, if we see Yod’s only role as that which was intended – as a protector – then adding these emotions really ended up hurting them in the end.
    However, Yod’s existence, through his emotional capacities, ended up helping many of the other characters in ways unexpected. And the sympathies gained through this show the complexity of his existence. We see the idea of human embodiment challenged not only by a cyborg with human emotions, but by the feeling of those who care for him. In the end we see Shira destroy the remaining notes on creating a cyborg like Yod, condemning his recreation as immoral, considering the pain Yod went through as a “sentient being used as a weapon.”

  2. This is a very intriguing point. I think in Malkah’s eyes, which inevitably becomes readers’ eyes, success is getting Yod as humanlike as possible. Throughout that process though, the negative effects, including Yod feeling too much to be able to be a weapon, are forgotten. Realistically, it would have made more sense for Yod to kill Makkah than Avram because in Avram’s next model, he most likely would not have programmed all of the emotions since he made it clear that he did not agree with them on Yod. I think this mistake of making Yod too humanlike needed to be made in order to learn where the line between humans and cyborgs should stand. Thus, rather than disposing of all their logs and research at the end, Shira should have published it in order to help other scientists avoid making that mistake again on their own in the future.

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