we could be burger just for one day

book grace loves to go on and on about rocky’s intelligence. every page he’s like rocky is SO smart, and so talented and skilled, eridians are probably WAY smarter than humans right rocky (and rocky’s like no, i think we’re of similar intelligence just in different ways) and grace is like NAH eridians are smarter, especially rocky, who’s probably the smartest one of all, who can fix anything and do anything and god i miss him i wish he was here right now. i wonder if he wants to do surgery on me. because i would let him if he asked

I think eva stratt has detailed files on all petrova taskforce personnel that contain more information about their subjects than the subjects even know about themselves. several people in her employ have mild food allergies that she noted and had cut out of their diets via requests to the catering staff but that the people themselves have never consciously noticed, ilyukhina just thought she stopped getting regular stomach aches when she arrived on the vat because she's god's specialest engineer and not because all the dairy in her diet got swapped out for alternatives. grace does some shopping on the mainland at one point and doesn't realize he bought a different scent of moisturizer than usual so stratt just goes into his room and switches it with a hypoallergenic formula in an identical bottle. this is because she has never been normal about anything in her life.

ohhh my god thinking about how rocky attached himself to grace so quickly makes me sick. he was alone for 46 years. of course he moved in with grace almost immediately. of course he started the whole interaction with grace by sending the cylinders to the hail mary despite not knowing whether he was going to be hostile or not. rocky got angry when grace didn’t come back at exactly the time he told him. rocky made a little gift for grace before even meeting him. rocky was willing to sacrifice himself if it meant grace lived.

one thing from the phm book that didn't quite make it into the movie, quite understandably so but saddens me nonetheless, is just how much ryland was attached to ilyukhina. they became friends on stratt's vat, although it wasn't explicitly shown through the flashbacks. when he sees rocky's ship the first thing he thinks about is how ilyukhina would be jumping around and cheering about it. he constantly refers to how she had this bright smile and could make anyone crack a laugh with her jokes. even yao. when ryland first meets rocky and needs to go to sleep because he's been awake for two days, he immediately thinks about how ilyukhina would have powered through and stayed hours and hours and hours with him without needing to sleep because of how ecstatic she would have been. while he doesn't mention yao as much, ilyukhina is a constant. he remembers her as this smiling, wild beam of light. they were close. they were friends. and he has to deal with the fact that when he gave discovered her body and gave her this joke of a burial, he couldn't even remember the smile he loved so much.