Delillo, however, exposes how absurd what we consider to be "normal" really is in our technology-dependent society and our compulsive desire to have machines save us from ourselves and reaffirm our personal identities:.
In the morning I walked to the bank. I went to the automated teller machine to check my balance. I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval. The system hardware, the mainframe sitting in a locked room in some distant city. What a pleasing interaction. I sensed that something of deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed (42).
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One day an industrial accident occurs and a lethal black chemical cloud descends upon the town. Jack is forced to stop and fill up his tank as his family attempts to comply with the evacuation orders. In those few minutes he is exposed to the cloud and the looming black cloud as a metaphor of death takes on a new significance. Jack is told that in about thirty years the doctors will be able to determine just how damaging the exposure was to his system. But one thing is sure, it's a death sentence at the hand of modern technology. The sorry news is also confirmed by technology in the shape of SIMUVAC, a state-run computer program specializing in simulating disasters.
Jack is thereby forced into recognizing the inevitably of his own demise as an unfortunate direct result of mankind's imperfect technology. In addition to feeling "like a stranger in his own dying" (142), Jack begins to experience the scientific certainty of his death: "We are all the sum total of our data . . . just as we are the sum total of our chemical impulses" (202) with an overpowering sense of dread.
