By the end of the book, Barbara has rationalised away the existence of the ‘Operators’ as being part of her unconscious mind which had been brought in as an emergency remedy to help heal her mind. It is not entirely clear to me at least how the symptoms of mental illness can form part of its cure and I am not entirely convinced that these Operators were merely something conjured up by her own mind.
If for instance Barbara can admit that ‘Something’ guided her on the winning numbers for the Las Vegas roulette wheel; how upon deciding that she needed to find a job, how that same ‘Something’ led her to the precise street and building where an opportunity had just arisen, and furthermore, in one passage how one of the ‘Operators’ apparently advised her before leaving her mountain cabin to take a flashlight with her, it being early in the day Barbara herself could not understand the logic of the Operator’s demands but she took a flashlight with her all the same. It was only when she arrived in town to find that the bus-service she had intended to use to return to the cabin had been discontinued and that she had a three hour wait for a different service, by which time when she finally returned home it was not only dark, but she was apparently being tracked by a mountain lion, which with judicious application of the flashlight, she managed to scare off. There is no way Barbara herself could have foreseen any of these events and one is left with the conclusion that it must be some kind of all-seeing all-knowing force which exists beyond the human realm.
The great striking point here which splits and sends people to man their trenches and rally to their standards and fight with all their might is whatever they would give in answer to the ultimate question: Does God exist? Those who answer no, consider belief in God unscientific and wishful thinking; the belief in spirits and demons as delusion and superstition, and possibly consider those that do as intellectually challenged. For them, schizophrenia is solely a disease of the individual’s own mind and the delusions and the cast of voices show the astonishing power of the human brain.
Those that do however, see God as being present in the elements and experiences of life which science cannot answer. They consider spirits and demons as a possibility; the human body is only a vessel which the spirit temporarily occupies so could it not be that since consciousness continues after death in the spirit then it must logically follow, that spirits can exist independent of a physical form, without human bodies, or physical bodies at all. All religion and folk traditions have some commentary to make on the existence of these discarnate beings, and according to many of the descriptions of these creatures in many of the ancient holy books of the world’s religions the creatures which alternately persecuted and apparently aided Barbara, seem like a combination of the angels, demons and Djinns of the ancient faiths.
A very peculiar comment is made by the Operators about God which evokes something almost Biblical about the fall of man and the fallen state of the world:
“Operators, very early in the history of civilization, had surrounded the earth with an airfield of steel rays so powerful that even God couldn’t get through.”
An airfield of steel-rays is clearly just a metaphor for some other form of power and it reminds me of the work of CS Lewis whose remarkable science fiction trilogy, ending with That Hideous Strength, evokes this idea, less that God is banished from Earth but more that an evil principle known as Oyarsa: the bent one, has taken ownership of Earth, leading to a kind of spiritual quarantine of our planet by the spiritual forces of the solar system. The condition of this quarantine is that Earth’s Oyarsa cannot travel beyond the Moon’s orbit but nor are the other spiritual powers or Oyeresu allowed to come to Earth to intervene.
Another thing which makes me wonder whether the Operators might be a real phenomenon and that Barbara wasn’t hallucinating their existence but that due to the adrenochrome toxin in her blood, was able to perceive things which our consciousnesses usually filters out of our reality as being perhaps too strange and disturbing, is one of the dangers of being targeted by malicious Operators.
