# The Click in Sundial: A Symbol of Control and Inherited Violence

What the Click Is and How It Works

The click is a genetic modification delivered by injection. In chapter 14, Rob watches Mia prepare a coyote puppy for the procedure: Mia takes a syringe from a bright yellow case, and the injection contains instructions encoded in bacteria that have been taught to copy DNA. Once inside the animal, the bacteria cut out sections of DNA—the so-called psycho murderer gene—and replace them with copies of good material. Rob imagines the process as millions of tiny little scissors snipping away at the genetic code, a sound she renders as click click click.

The click is not only an injection. It is also delivered through a remote controller, a detail that connects the procedure to the Langley experiments Mia replicated. In chapter 27, Mia explains that the dogs served as a control group for the human subjects, and that the remote-control element helped hide the true purpose of the work from outsiders. The controller reappears in the present-day timeline: in chapter 26, Callie finds an old controller and presses its buttons, speaking a command, and Rob later opens it to find decayed circuitry—it cannot work. The blue plastic case that holds the click's syringe becomes a recurring object, passed from Mia to Rob, and eventually stolen by Callie in chapter 33.

The Click as a Tool of Control

From its first appearance, the click is framed as a mechanism of control. Mia and Falcon use it on the dogs to make them good before they join the pack, and they use it on Rob and Jack after rescuing them from the puppy farm. Mia describes the decision as a necessary intervention: a tiny edit to the MAOA-L gene. The click is meant to remove the capacity for violence—the tendencies that led Rob to attack Mia with wire and to put a screwdriver in Jack's neck.

But the click is also a tool of manipulation in a broader sense. Mia's replication of the Langley experiments—with the remote control—means the dogs can be directed, and the same logic extends to the human subjects. The click is not just a medical procedure; it is a way of deciding who gets to be normal and who does not. Rob's desire to blend in, to disappear into the unremarkable mess of women with families, is itself a product of the click's promise: the procedure was supposed to make her ordinary. The click, in other words, is a technology of conformity as much as a technology of healing.

This control is also maternal. Mia's insistence that she would do the same to save her child—a line she repeats to Rob—frames the click as an act of sacrificial love, however misguided. The click is administered by a mother figure who believes she is protecting her charges from themselves. That maternal logic echoes throughout the novel, from Rob's own decisions about Callie to Callie's later wish that the click could help Annie.

The Click and Inherited Violence

The click's central irony is that it is designed to prevent violence but is itself a form of violence—an intervention into a person's fundamental makeup. This tension becomes explicit in chapter 27, when Mia reveals that the click doesn't stop cutting. It starts pasting the wrong material back into the code, causing the subject to process fear incorrectly. Twenty-Three, the rottweiler, attacks Mia not out of aggression but because she is experiencing a traumatic memory—something imagined. The click, meant to remove the capacity for violence, instead produces a distorted version of it.

This failure is inherited. Jack, the sister who received the same click as Rob, begins to deteriorate: she sees ghost dogs, hallucinates, and eventually threatens her unborn baby with a knife. Mia and Falcon's work on the dogs is explicitly a way of predicting what will happen to the human subjects later—we had to know what would happen to you later, Mia says. The click is thus a mechanism of inherited violence in two senses: it is passed down genetically (the modification is heritable, as Jack fears when she worries about her baby), and it is passed down experientially (the violence of the procedure itself becomes a kind of inheritance). When Rob wonders whether she, too, is deteriorating—asking if she is a bad dog, too—she is asking whether the click's failure is inevitable, whether the violence it was meant to suppress will eventually surface.

The Click's Failure and the Question of Inheritance

The click's unreliability is a recurring theme. Pawel, the first human subject, killed his entire family before the click; the procedure stopped working for him years ago, and he found outlets in hurting animals. Jack's deterioration follows a similar arc. Mia's repeated attempts to fix Twenty-Three—her insistence that she has got it right this time—suggest a pattern of failure and revision. The click is not a permanent solution; it is a temporary patch that eventually wears through.

This failure raises the novel's central question about inheritance: if violence is genetic, can it be edited out? And if the edit itself fails, what does that mean for the next generation? Jack's fear that the alteration may pass to her baby—and her refusal to leave Sundial because of it—makes the click a literal inheritance, passed from parent to child. Callie, in the present-day timeline, is the product of this inheritance: Rob's daughter, raised in the shadow of the click, and herself suspected of the same tendencies that the click was meant to suppress. The novel's treatment of engineered violence and inheritance is thus inseparable from the click's own failure.

The Empty Click

The click's final appearance is its most telling. In chapter 33, Callie steals the blue case from the table and opens it, expecting to find the syringe loaded with the click. Instead, she finds it empty: there's nothing in the reservoir. Rob has already emptied it—in chapter 36, she reveals that she emptied the syringe of the click and intended to inject air into Irving's heart, using the click's own mechanism as a weapon. The click, the novel's symbol of control, is hollow. The control it promised was always an illusion.

Callie's reaction to the empty click is complex. In chapter 37, she reflects that part of her wishes her mother hadn't gotten rid of it—maybe it could have helped Annie. Annie, the younger sister who has been framing Callie and hiding dead animals, is herself a figure of inherited violence. Callie's wish that the click could fix Annie is a wish for the same control that failed everyone else. The click, empty and broken, becomes a symbol of the novel's refusal to offer easy solutions: violence cannot be edited out, and the desire to control it is itself a form of violence.

Study Questions

1. How does the click function as both a literal technology and a metaphor in Sundial?

The click is a genetic modification delivered by injection, designed to remove violent tendencies by editing DNA. As a metaphor, it represents the novel's central concern with control and inheritance: the attempt to engineer away violence, and the failure of that attempt. The click's literal mechanism—cutting and replacing genetic material—mirrors the novel's exploration of how violence is passed down, both genetically and experientially. The click's failure in Twenty-Three, Jack, and Pawel suggests that violence cannot be simply edited out; it returns in distorted forms.

2. What does the controller add to the click's symbolism?

The controller, which Callie finds in chapter 26 and which Mia used to replicate the Langley experiments, makes explicit the click's function as a tool of manipulation. The dogs are not just treated; they are directed. The controller's decayed circuitry in the present-day timeline suggests that the control the click promised is no longer functional—the mechanism of manipulation has broken down. Callie's pressing of the buttons, and her later claim that the dogs came, adds an ambiguity: even a broken controller can seem to have power, especially to a child who wants to believe in it.

3. How does the click's failure complicate the novel's treatment of inheritance?

The click is designed to prevent the inheritance of violence, but its failure suggests that violence cannot be so easily contained. Jack's deterioration, Pawel's relapse, and Twenty-Three's psychosis all indicate that the click doesn't stop cutting—it continues to alter the subject in unpredictable ways. This complicates the question of whether violence is genetic or environmental: the click is an intervention into genetics, but its failure suggests that the underlying tendencies cannot be fully removed. The novel ultimately leaves this question open, with Callie's wish that the click could help Annie standing as a poignant acknowledgment of the desire for a fix that does not exist.

4. Why is the click empty when Callie opens the case in chapter 33?

Rob emptied the syringe of the click, intending to use it as a weapon against Irving—injecting air into his heart. The empty click is a powerful symbol: the mechanism of control that was supposed to prevent violence has been repurposed as a tool of violence. It also suggests that the click's promise was always hollow—the control it offered was an illusion. For Callie, the empty click is both a relief (she does not have to be changed) and a loss (she wishes it could have helped Annie). The empty click thus encapsulates the novel's ambivalence about the possibility of controlling violence.