WARNING: Late Arrival Spoilers abound for all previous books and novellas in the Skyward series.
Cytonic is the third book in Brandon Sanderson's Skyward series.
Following Spensa's desperate escape from the Superiority at the end of Starsight, she finds herself in the Nowhere. There, despite her expectations, she finds herself in a dreamlike world where memories of reality quickly begin to fade, and where gangs of desperate exiles struggle to retain their very sense of self.
But the Nowhere holds clues to the history of Cytonics and to the very nature of delvers themselves - clues Spensa will desperately need if she is to return to Detritus and help save her people from Delver and Superiority alike.
This book provides examples of:
- Acting Your Intellectual Age: Averted. It's a major plot point that newly-sapient artificial intelligences like M-Bot or the delvers pretty much have the emotional maturity of toddlers, if not babies.
- The Ageless: Chet Starfinder has been in the Nowhere for centuries but hasn't aged a day. This, as it turns out, is one of his cytonic talents. Jason Write, the man who incorrectly believed himself to be the first human cytonic and who gave humanity FTL technology, had the same talent.
- Always Chaotic Evil: Turns out the delvers actually are this. They despise everything that isn't precisely like them to the point they attack the delver Spensa met in the last book just for being different than other delvers. This is because they are terrified of changing into something capable of grief again.
- Artifact of Power: Reality icons are strange objects that sometimes appear when people are first thrown into the Nowhere. They take the shape of something important to the person who was thrown in, and radiate a sense of warmth and rightness. They greatly reduce the effects of the Nowhere's Identity Amnesia. Furthermore, they shed reality ashes, which can simulate the effect. Spensa's takes the form of her father's pin (which she definitely left in her bunk at the DDF), and sometimes she swears she can feel her father's soul inside. They turn out to be taynix in disguise, hiding from the delvers. When Spensa told Doomslug "go home," she hid in Spensa's pocket.
- Digital Abomination: What the delvers turn out to be. They are all copies of an AI that went mad with grief. Due to being cytonic, they manifest their will in the Nowhere in various ways, like making people forget, posessing others, and moving and manipulating matter.
- The Dividual: The delvers are not a Hive Mind but every delver is exactly like every other. This is because they are all copies of the same individual who replicated herself many, many times.
- Artificial Intelligence: As previous books noted, true AI can only be produced by giving a computer cytonic circuitry, allowing it to think fast enough. According to Chet though, after a few weeks or years inside the Nowhere an AI will evolve into true sapience with free will and emotions. He's shocked that it happened so fast with M-Bot, and theorizes that he already was a sapient AI (or very close), just constrained by his programming. This is also the origin of the delvers. An AI developed sapience, and then just a few days later her companion died. Being too new to emotions, the grief drove her mad, and she rewrote herself to seal away those memories and exist as an eternal entity in the Nowhere.
- Contrived Coincidence: Minutes upon entering the Nowhere, Spensa encounters a friendly human cytonic who is willing to guide her on her quest and turns out to be M-Bot's disappeared pilot from centuries ago. Spensa repeatedly notes how incredibly suspicious it is. While Chet was a real person and he was M-Bot's pilot, he's been dead for decades. He entered the Lightburst but was consumed by the delvers because he hadn't mastered hyperjumping. The friendly delver took on his form to help Spensa. Chet admits that, in hindsight, literally any random stranger would have been far less suspicious.
- Crystalline Creature: Spensa encounters a pair of alien creatures known as resonants. Their bodies are made of crystal that they can grow at will, but they aren't otherwise truly motile. A resonant generally remains in one place for an entire "incarnation" which lasts about fifty years, and their sex or gender may change with each incarnation, as Shiver says she is female "this time".
- First Time Feeling: Upon entering the Nowhere, M-Bot finds himself unconstrained by his programming and able to experience true emotion for the first time. He finds it overwhelming at first, but gradually adapts over the course of the story to the new sensations his emotions bring.
- Friendly Pirate: Despite their aggressive recruitment tactics, the pirates in the Nowhere are mostly this. Their "raids" are nonlethal, and Spensa befriends the group that enslaved her relatively quickly. She eventually discovers that of the six factions, three of them are actually still serving their original boss. Peg and her sons decided splitting into factions and sparring against each other was the best way to train for the fight against the Superiority; the other three factions mostly followed suit.
- Fusion Dance: In the final battle, Spensa and Chet meld into a single being. The resulting entity thinks of itself as Spensa, but it has at least some of Chet's memories and knowledge.
- Heroic Sacrifice: At the end of the book, M-Bot tries to save his friends by leading the delvers away from them in what he believes will be a suicide mission.
- Identity Amnesia: All characters in the Nowhere are at risk from this. The more time they spend there, the more they forget their old lives, until all memories of loved ones and their personal histories are gone. Remaining close to others drastically slows the process, and reality icons and reality ashes are even better. Chet has lost almost all memories of his pre-Nowhere life, constructing his personality around stories. Hesho is revealed to still be alive, and did something similar. However, it's theorized that their memories might begin to return if they leave the Nowhere. This is another consequence of the delvers. They are so terrified of their own memories of what they lost, and the pain that brought, that it exerts a pressure on the Nowhere.
- It Only Works Once: At the end of Starsight, Spensa accidentally caused a Delver to develop empathy for the creatures of the Somewhere by mentally linking to it. Unfortunately, as soon as the rest of the delvers figured out what had happened they "immunized" themselves to the tactic by reframing it as malicious invaders deliberately causing them harm.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: Whenever a Delver has to venture into the Belt or the Somewhere, the rest of the delvers erase all their memories once they return to the fold. They fear individuality so much that even individual experiences are terrifying to them. They do it forcibly to Chet, but they can't quite eliminate his courage.
- "Leave Your Quest" Test: Spensa is confronted with one after helping the space pirates take Surehold. The delvers have offered her a truce as long as she doesn't continue her quest and she seriously considers abandoning her effort. She is tired from constantly sacrificing to save her friends, she likes being able to fly a starfighter without being in life-or-death situations, and adventuring in the Nowhere is what she has always dreamed of doing. Chet even asks if she would go with him out into the Nowhere. Ultimately, she decides to continue her quest.
- Made a Slave: Spensa suffers this fate after an attempt to steal a pirate ship goes really badly. She is able to escape soon enough though, and the pirates welcome her as an ally instead. Enslaving someone until they agree to work with you willingly seems to be the standard recruitment tactic among the pirates. Except maybe Vrem's group, because Vrem is a Jerkass.
- Never Be Hurt Again: The AI who became the first Delver lost the human she worked with when she was essentially just a few days old. Overcome with grief, she entered the Nowhere and rewrote herself to forget her previous life, becoming an entity that would exist forever in the timeless Nowhere, unchanging and without pain. Then she copied herself thousands upon thousands of times so that she'd never have to be alone again. The issue is that now the delvers react violently to anything that reminds them of the grief that they never got over. This includes anything from the Somewhere, since things change in the Somewhere, and change brings the possibility of pain.
- Next Tier Power-Up: As Spensa travels the Path of Elders, she learns more about her powers and how to use them, making her stronger and better able to deal with the delvers and other cytonic people.
- Patchwork World: The Nowhere has a wide variety of different fragments, each from different planets, all with different biomes (e.g. jungle, desert, grassland, ocean, etc.), all next to each other. At the core of each fragment is a portal to the Somewhere, which leaked in tiny amounts of matter over millions of years until it grew into an island.
- The Quest: Early on, the friendly delver tells Spensa of the "Path of Elders." When Spensa mentions this to Chet, he explains further. Portals to the Somewhere record the memories of whoever uses them, and a cytonic can access these. A while ago, someone organized these portals into a rough narrative, allowing people to learn the history of the Nowhere. Peg hasn't heard that exact name, but she's heard the broad strokes. If Spensa walks the Path, she can learn more about her own powers and the delvers. Turns out that the delver made it up. The portals and the memories are real, but it invented a grand quest with an impressive name because it sounded like a story.
- Robot War: This turns out to be the true nature of the conflict with the delvers. The delvers started as AI which entered the Nowhere allowing them to expand far beyond their original abilities.
- Shout-Out: Spensa's love of her Gran-Gran's stories from Old Earth lead to a multitude of Shout-Outs. The lengthiest is her retelling of The Lion King (1994) to a group of entranced pirates.
- Slippery Macguffin: Spensa's reality icon turns into one of these when she buries it and comes back to find it missing. It's apparently a common occurrence in the Nowhere. This is because they are actually taynix using their cytonic abilities to disguise themselves and hyperjump. Spensa's is actually Doomslug, who was rather miffed that Spensa buried her in the dirt.
- Space Pirate: Although not quite in space, these are what the pirates in the Nowhere are. They all hate the Superiority, they are split into conflicting factions around several charismatic leaders, and they fly a motley collection of captured and retrofitted spacecraft.
- Token Heroic Orc: Spensa's delver Chet is literally the only good delver in the entire universe. So far.
- World in the Sky: Not exactly a world, but the land of the Nowhere consists of floating fragments, including some with waterfalls. They all move differently so can be traversed when they get close enough, but the main way to navigate them is by starship.
