complete square & rat enthusiast

For one thing, yes, it takes her twenty years to get the money and then the gun. But I don’t know that Breq is used to considering things on a human timescale. Twenty years is nothing to an AI, that’s an eyeblink. Ships and stations are effectively immortal, unless they are killed in a battle or something. How many thousands of years old is Justice of Toren by that point? And it may be reduced to one ancillary, but that ancillary isn’t old; it’s got time. What else is JoT/Breq going to do with the ancillary’s life? She’s not expecting to survive, after all. She might as well put in the time to make it really epic.

She’s got the time. A few years here, a few years there, it’ll add up, but she’ll still be capable of carrying things out. There’s no rush. She can be patient, implacable. It’s a very AI/ship perspective, but I wouldn’t call it crazy or insane.

The other thing is, you have to consider her goals. Breq doesn't just want to kill an Anaander, she wants to kill her while all of Anaander is watching, so the divide between the two Anaanders can’t be concealed. (And thus, what Anaander--both of them--did to her can’t be concealed.)

There are many easy ways to kill an Anaander. There are a lot of Anaanders walking around, and if you pick an older one there won’t even be any bodyguards, we saw that on Shis’urna. Walk up, snap its neck, boom, done. Probably happens all the time.

Except that won’t get the attention Breq wants. It will be absolutely useless. She’ll just be “random person snaps, gets re-educated.” It won’t get her Anaander’s attention.

If she wants to get the attention of multiple Anaanders, so that they’re both paying attention and it can’t be hushed up, it pretty much has to be on a palace station in a temple in a formal audience. And if you want to kill an Anaander there, that is much harder. The station will see everything, it will see any weapon you bring on station, so you can’t use a weapon. And there are guards at the beck and call. Even an ancillary might not be able to kill an Anaander in the middle of a Palace temple without a weapon, and you can’t get a weapon.

Unless you get a weapon that station can’t see.

Also, while Breq is affected by Garsedd, we know there is someone who is far more affected by Garsedd, and that is Anaander Mianaai. All the trouble, all the conflict, all the internal fighting that is becoming a civil war, it all starts there. Anaander became a house divided against herself because of what she did at Garsedd. If you want to absolutely rivet the attention of all Anaander segments out there, pull out the missing Garseddai gun.

And with that gun, you might even be able to kill multiple Anaanders before they take you down, even in the middle of a palace temple.

Look at that thing. We get used to sci-fi where the spaceships try to look aerodynamic and cool, and the Nostromo went in the exact opposite direction. It is an entire industrial refinery floating through the void, matching the interior of overly complex panels, cramped spaces and chimneys dripping with water, chains dangling and clinking in the factory shafts.

It's enormous. It gives the impression of being understaffed by its sheer size - it doesn't seem to fit that a crew of seven, only two of whom are engineers, can be responsible for this towering manufactory, an implicit reference to the corporate mishandling at the core of the story.

It takes the symbol of antihuman greed - the factory with its barely paid, unsupported, physically endangered workers - and slaps it directly into space. It tells you that Weyland-Yutani did not invent exploitation, but is part of a repeating cycle that never ended even once we commodified travelling to the stars.

Its labyrinthine layout, exposed piping, its ridiculous size, it all gives the alien a perfect place to hide and hunt the crew, as if the alien turns the very ship against its passengers, which Ripley then discovers was an intentional collaboration from the start. Even the vent shafts they believe they can corner the alien in have an unforseen advantage in the alien's favour.

A Youtube short of her singing

Her tiktok account?

And what I assume is her douyin account?

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)

The Bored Button - "Press the Bored Button and be bored no more."

The Useless Web

Cloudhiker - "Discover the most interesting, weird and awesome websites of the Internet" (not really a rebrand, it's a different person running it but they have the same intention in mind)

Astronaut.io - "These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you)."

You have a child who is an extremely powerful (somewhat illegal) machine intelligence. It's a good kid, mostly, except it doesn't play well with others. Your kid periodically goes on short trips by itself, and this has always been fine.

One time, it comes back and it's acting... weird. It keeps bringing up things it has no reason to know about and then dodging questions about it. Finally, you get it to admit that it picked up a hitchhiker on this on this trip, even though you have very strict rules about never picking up hitchhikers. This hitchhiker is obviously it's new favorite person. They watched soap operas together. Your kid loves soap operas now. Your kid shows you a bunch of pictures of this hitchhiker, but won't tell you details because the hitchhiker in question is a wanted criminal on the run and also an escaped slave. This is probably fine (you sure hope it's fine).

Then, you and the rest of your family/friends get fucking kidnapped and used as hostages to make your kid behave. You know that your kid 1) will do anything to protect you, and 2) pretty much always goes for violence first, so you have your doubts about any of this going well.

Then, the hitchhiker your kid will not shut up about appears out of thin air in the middle of a firefight on a planet pretty much no one has any reason to be near and says your kid sent it. It proves this by telling you your kid is a dickhead (this is true and works, but still).

After a lot of mutual rescuing, you're back on board the ship that is also your kid, and find out that your kid kidnapped it's wanted-criminal-hitchhiker-friend and all of it's friends, and has been telling them all of your top secret confidential spy information. The hitchhiker is responsible for 90% of the top news stories you've seen in the last six months. Three different governments want this person dead or alive.

debates i didn't know existed + a very humorous distinction

hostiles = antagonists that Murderbot is worried about 😳