Sleeping Giants recap

On her eleventh birthday, Rose Franklin falls through the ground in the woods outside Deadwood, South Dakota and lands in the palm of a giant metal hand buried in a lighted chamber. Seventeen years later she leads the team studying it, backed by an unnamed man of unexplained wealth and influence who conducts every interview in the record. The hand proves to be one piece of a two-hundred-foot figure made of an alloy Earth cannot produce, older than any civilization that could have built it. Because the buried pieces disturb electronics and magnetic readings, the rest of the body is located and dug up from sites around the world. Kara Resnik, an army helicopter pilot, and Vincent Couture, a Montreal linguist, turn out to be among the very few people the machine's controls will answer to, and they become its pilots and its couple. Rose is killed partway through the project and is replaced by a woman identical to her who cannot say where she came from. Genetic work shows the pilots carry sequences the rest of humanity does not. The completed machine, named Themis, is used, and the world learns what it is; switching it on also announces to whoever left it that their machine has been found.

Riding her new bicycle in the woods outside Deadwood, South Dakota on her eleventh birthday, Rose Franklin falls through the ground into a deep square shaft and lands in the open palm of a giant metal hand, in a chamber whose walls are lined with panels that glow. Seventeen years later she is a physicist leading the team that studies that same hand, questioned throughout by an unnamed man with unexplained authority and apparently unlimited resources. The hand is made of an alloy far denser and more durable than anything that occurs naturally on Earth, and the carvings on the surrounding panels are thousands of years older than any civilization capable of producing them. Rose establishes that the symbols are a written system rather than decoration, and that the panels light up for some people and not for others. She concludes that the hand is one piece of a far larger figure. She also works out how the rest of it might be found: the buried pieces disturb magnetic fields and interfere with electrical equipment nearby, so records of unexplained interference around the world can be read as a map of where the other pieces are lying.

The search for the remaining pieces begins. Kara Resnik, a United States Army helicopter pilot whose instruments failed over a remote site near the Turkish border, is drawn into the project when the anomaly she flew through turns out to mark a buried leg, and she is assigned as the project's pilot. Vincent Couture, a linguist from Montreal, is recruited to work on the script carved into the panels, and he makes progress on it that Rose's team could not. Pieces of the figure are recovered one at a time from sites scattered across several continents, a number of them in places where an excavation cannot be conducted openly, and the project's patron arranges the diplomatic and financial cover that makes the digs possible. The team also discovers that the panels answer to only a handful of people: most of those tested produce no reaction at all, while Kara and Vincent can make the symbols respond. The recovered pieces are moved to a secure facility and assembly gets under way.

With most of the body recovered, the search narrows to the head, the last and hardest piece to reach. Assembly continues at the facility, and the team works out how the figure is meant to be operated: two people stand inside a control room whose walls are the same lighted panels, and the machine copies their movements, one of them handling the lower body and the other the upper. Kara Resnik and Vincent Couture are the only pair available to whom the controls will answer, so they are trained together. The training is physically punishing and keeps them in each other's company constantly, and their working relationship becomes a personal one. Ryan Mitchell, who flew with Kara before the project existed, takes a post on the site in order to stay near her. Rose Franklin grows steadily more uneasy about who is funding the work and what they expect in return, and about the fact that the people who can operate the machine appear to differ from everyone else in a way nobody has yet explained.

With the figure assembled, the project moves on to testing it, and Rose Franklin is killed. The work continues without her. Some time afterwards a woman turns up alive who is physically identical to Rose and who remembers being her, but who cannot account for the accident or for where she has been; nobody can explain her, and the team is left working beside someone they have already buried. Genetic testing of the operators confirms what the panels had implied: the few people who can make the controls respond carry sequences that do not appear in the rest of the population, which raises the possibility that whoever left the machine on Earth left more behind than the machine. Alyssa Papantoniou, the geneticist who runs that work, is resented by much of the team and by Kara in particular. The completed figure is named Themis, after the Greek titan associated with order and divine justice, and the pilots begin working it as a whole machine rather than as separate limbs.

Themis is finished and functional, and the question stops being what it is and becomes who controls it. The people who funded the search have always intended it to be used, and it is. The machine is a weapon on a scale nothing on Earth can answer, and Kara Resnik and Vincent Couture, as the only two people able to make it move, are indispensable and have almost no say in what it is pointed at. Its existence cannot survive its first use as a secret, and governments react to what they have seen; the project's patron manoeuvres among them. Rose Franklin, restored to the work but not to her former standing, is left with the consequences of a discovery she made as a scientific question and that has been answered as a military one.

By the close of the book the giant is whole, walking and publicly known. It was assembled from pieces recovered around the world, named Themis by Rose Franklin, and is operated by Kara Resnik and Vincent Couture, the only pair the controls will answer to. Rose herself died during the project and was replaced by a woman identical to her, who remembers being her and cannot say where she came from; the team has accepted her without understanding her. The genetic work has established that the people who can operate the machine carry sequences ordinary humans do not, which means whoever left the machine buried also left descendants on Earth. The unnamed man who built the project out of nothing has what he wanted from it and turns to what comes next. The final files leave the reader with the implication the whole story has been building toward: a machine of that size was made to be noticed, it has now been switched on in front of the world, and the people who buried it have every reason to come back and look.

The figure is complete, named Themis by Rose Franklin, and operated by Kara Resnik and Vincent Couture, the only pair the controls will answer to. It has been used, so neither its existence nor its destructive capability is a secret any longer, and every government on Earth now has an interest in who holds it. Rose is not the woman who began the book: the original died during the project, and the Rose who continues is physically identical to her, carries her memories, and cannot account for her own existence. The genetic findings stand, and they are the largest thing the project has established: the ability to operate the machine runs through a small number of human bloodlines, which means whoever left it buried on Earth left descendants here as well. Kara and Vincent are bound to the machine and to each other with no realistic way out of either. Ryan Mitchell remains near Kara; Alyssa Papantoniou remains on the project with the genetic work in her hands. The unnamed man who assembled the whole enterprise out of nothing has what he set out to get and turns to whatever comes next. The book closes on the implication it has been building toward from the first file: something that size was made to be noticed, it has now been switched on in front of the world, and there is no reason to assume the people who built it are not watching.