- After Atlas discovers the Alexandrian Society’s terms of initiation (i.e., the elimination clause), he and Ezra decide to fake Ezra’s death in order to avoid committing murder. Atlas claims the point of this deceit is to overthrow and eventually revolutionize the Alexandrian Society. Do you think Atlas Blakely is telling the truth?
- As researcher, Atlas lives alone in the Society manor house for an extended period of time. During this time in isolation, Atlas’s resentment for the Society grows and his clinical depression worsens. Do you think this is why he allows his fellow cohort to die repeatedly in ignorance rather than confess to them the truth? Do you agree with Atlas that he is essentially a murderer?
- When Atlas discovers that his failure to fulfill the terms of initiation has begun killing the members of his cohort, his personal motivation undergoes a dramatic shift. The possibility of a parallel universe and respective alternative outcomes (i.e., his own personal redemption) begins to override his philosophical opposition to the Society. Is this a healthy emotional way to process his sense of loss?
- After Dalton Ellery determines that the Society’s archives will not give him the information he needs in order to produce the quantum fluctuations that summon alternate universes, he asks Atlas to attempt a form of telepathic surgery that obscures his true ambitions from the rest of his conscious mind. Despite Atlas’s private certainty that such a thing will 1) hurt, 2) cause irreparable damage to Dalton’s consciousness, and 3) be a potential danger to the world at large, he agrees. Should someone have killed Atlas as a baby?
- Before Atlas performs significant, irreversible damage to Dalton’s consciousness, he decides to test it on someone he cares less about. He chooses his father. Rather than isolate a portion of his father’s consciousness as he later does for Dalton, however, Atlas instead creates a loop inside his father’s thought processes, like a hamster wheel that overrides his natural thoughts. Every month, like clockwork, his father has the sudden, undeniable compulsion to visit a dilapidated flat in London with groceries and a vase of fresh flowers, and thus he is forced to remember on an unresolvable loop that the destruction of a woman’s mind is entirely his fault. Does the fact that this is true and richly deserved justify Atlas’s decision to punish his father telepathically? He knows what this will do to his father’s mind; he has already seen it happen naturally to his mother’s. Is permanently damaging his father’s brain a healthy emotional way for Atlas to process his rage?
- When Atlas performs the necessary telepathy to sequester part of Dalton’s consciousness, he can tell it is physically painful to Dalton. In fact, Dalton screams “stop, stop, you have to stop” no fewer than five times throughout the process. Even when the troublingly powerful animation of Dalton’s ambition taunts to Atlas “you fucking idiot don’t you understand there’s no such thing as spontaneous creation do you have any idea what you’ve done,” Atlas continues. At what point did Atlas Blakely relinquish his soul in exchange for cosmic omnipotence?
- In order to become the next Caretaker, Atlas Blakely telepathically overpowers his own Caretaker, corrupting his cognitive process and damaging his brain for the remainder of his life. Does Atlas’s justification that William Astor Huntington was born to a life of leisure and would certainly retire to a convalescence of leisure actually mean anything to William Astor Huntington’s family members? Does it matter? Does anything actually matter at all?
- Do you think Atlas Blakely is a bad person?
- Do you think the fact that Atlas Blakely is definitely a bad person means that he should suffer?
- Do you think the only defensible moral outcome to this story is Atlas Blakely’s death?
- Is that a joke?
- Is that a joke?
- When Atlas Blakely opens the house’s wards to allow Ezra Fowler’s final entry, he does so on the gamble that Ezra, who is morally opposed to killing and unwisely allied with several people with arguably more detestable motives than Atlas’s, can be persuaded back to Atlas’s side. Is Atlas the asshole?
- Although Atlas has no way of knowing that Libby Rhodes will overhear Ezra admitting that logically he has no choice but to kill her now, Atlas’s provocation in that moment is consistent with the petty bullying of Ezra that has worsened over the course of twenty miserable, secretive years. Objectively speaking: Atlas believed that Libby would return; he could have predicted, then, that her return could have happened at any moment, including that one. Thus, while Atlas cannot have known with certainty that he created the circumstances leading to Ezra’s murder, he cannot have reasonably ruled it out. Does this mean his actions definitively killed Ezra, bringing his murders up to five?
- How many lives has Atlas destroyed in pursuit of power? If more than one (and it is definitely more than one) does that make him a worse person than his father? Does it make him worse than Ezra Fowler?
- Is there such a thing as too much power?
- Or is power just a body count after all?