Jane is a fictional character in Orson Scott Card's Ender series. She is an energy based artificial sentient creature called an Aiúa that was placed within the ansible network by which spaceships and planets communicate instantly across galactic distances. She has appeared in the novels Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind, and in a short story "Investment Counselor". Her 'face', a computer-generated hologram that she uses to talk to Ender, is described as plain and young, and it is illustrated in First Meetings as having a bun. This article is arranged to reflect the Ender timeline. However, the Ender Quartet: Ender's Game (1985), Speaker for the Dead (1986), Xenocide (1990), and Children of the Mind (1994) was written first; then Ender's Shadow (1999), First Meetings (2004), and Shadow of the Giant (2005).
Origin
Ender's Game The Fantasy Game is the faculty's primary method of obtaining information about their students in Ender's Game. It is designed to secretly map out the psyche of the players, providing valuable data on each student's thoughts and decision-making processes. Colonel Graff refers to the game sarcastically as the Mind Game. In the course of its service at the Battle School, the Game successfully analyzes every student but one: Bean, who realizes the game's true purpose and refuses to play. The student chooses a character and plays through a number of scenarios. One scenario, called the Giant's Drink, offers the player a choice between two beverages, with the promise of admission to "Fairyland" with the correct choice. However, the scenario is actually a no-win situation which invariably results in the player's death. By tracking how frequently a player attempts it, the Giant's Drink detects and warns teachers of suicidal tendencies among the students. To their consternation, Ender confronts the Giant obsessively, failing dozens of times. Finally, he refuses to choose a drink and instead attacks the Giant, killing it and becoming the first student to enter Fairyland; the Game generates this new scenario on the spot, orienting it specifically to Ender himself. This creates a deep connection between him and the Game, with significant consequences later on.
Ender's Shadow The Fantasy Game is discussed in greater depth in Ender's Shadow. It is described by the teachers themselves as an extremely complex program that generates content procedurally. The Mind Game is never meant to be conclusive, it only makes connections and discovers patterns that are too subtle for the human eye.
Shadow of the Giant In Shadow of the Giant, when Bean suspects Peter Wiggin of embezzling Ender's trust fund for his Hegemony uses, he recalls the nature of the Fantasy Game and requests that Graff place it in charge of Ender's trust fund. The Game, whose original purpose was to seek out patterns across wide fields of data, is modified to predict markets and invest Ender's trust fund appropriately. Alarmingly effective in this new capacity, it is later called upon to review demographic data and help Bean find seven of his eight stolen embryos/children. The Fantasy Game is assumed to have grown in complexity during the 3000-year gap between Shadow of the Giant and Speaker for the Dead, especially as Graff describes the Mind Game as being able to reprogram itself, and finally becomes the sentient Jane.
Appearances
First Meetings "Investment Counselor", a short story in First Meetings, describes the first meeting between Jane and Ender where Jane presents herself to Ender as a computerized program meant to help with taxes. Ender takes her up on the offer, and begins a lifelong friendship with this computer entity.
Speaker for the Dead Jane is first introduced in Speaker for the Dead as an advanced computer program. She is extremely complex, capable of performing trillions of tasks simultaneously, and has millions of levels of attention, even her most unaware one being much more alert than a human. Jane is hesitant to reveal herself to humanity, because she knows that she is the epitome of humanity's fear: an intelligent, thinking, computer program that cannot be controlled. She decided to reveal herself to Ender after she found out he wrote The Hive Queen and The Hegemon, in hopes that he would eventually understand her and one day reveal her true nature to humanity. She also "remembered" he was the only student to pass the Giant's Drink, one of the many Fantasy Game situations. An electronic "jewel" in Ender's ear allows both of them to communicate and for her to see and hear everything from Ender's vantage point. She helps Ender with many things. For example, in the very beginning, she contacts an orbiting ship and pays $40 billion for it and the cargo. Ender's reliance on Jane becomes obvious when she no longer helps him; he must ask young Olhado to help him with his finances and computer searches, and does not know the password to his own bank account. Jane plays a pivotal role in the development of the book. Jane guides Ender to Lusitania and helps him out considerably in obtaining information. In a pivotal scene, Ender impatiently disconnects her by turning off the jewel; Jane panics and is forced to reorient her vast amount of concentration which was focused on him. Concluding that Ender needs a common enemy to unite all of Lusitania together to help the piggies, she runs analysis on data and subversively gets Starways Congress to order the destruction of the planet. She makes it appear as if Lusitania has cut off their ansible (she did this mainly to save a xenologer from being killed), triggering Starways Congress to send the "Evacuation Fleet," which is actually carrying the Molecular Disruption Device to destroy the planet. With the threat, Ender unites the colony to form a treaty with the piggies to assure mutual cooperation and peaceful coexistence. No longer attached to Ender, she bonds with Miro, Ender's depressed paralyzed stepson.
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