i'm approaching the ai bubble with a very sharp needle

grace was not particularly dark skinned to begin with, and then spent years in a coma with literally no sunlight. he is downright vampiric by the time that he wakes up, and upon seeing his white ass skin, assumes that he is in his own words, a Caucasian male.

unfortunately for him, this fits in really well with his theme of lack of identity and lack of connection. i think for most Black people it would be extremely hard to forget that we’re Black regardless of how light or dark our skin tone is. but throughout the book, even when Grace is thinking about his old, slowly resurfacing memories, he never thinks about family, he never thinks about friends. except for his students and Project Hail Mary, he is completely unmoored.

i’ve seen a few different headcanons for why this might be: he was an only child whose single parent died young, he was cut off by his parents for some reason or another, he just isn’t ever triggered to remember. but no matter the reason, grace is disconnected from crucial aspects of himself. i think that by making him Black, and his Blackness something he can’t remember, it add an extra heartbreaking layer to his characterization. Blackness is such a communal experience, and when it’s not, it leaves behind an ache. growing up Black in White Suburbia i know well both the experience of clinging to one’s own in a hostile world AND the hurt that comes with being severed from one’s community. grace loses so much of himself with the amnesia, unable to recall who he is at the deepest of levels, and i think if he could remember to grieve it, it would devastate him.

i do think he would remember eventually, either when his hair starts growing out (because in the book Armando shaves him iirc), or when he can finally catch a glimpse of his reflection clearly, or when he has a memory of someone in his family. my personal belief is he has a memory beamed directly into his brain of asking “Mama, am I white?” and his poor, long-suffering mom saying, “Now who the hell told you that?”

In Singular Point, Archetype is a new material that appears to break the laws of physics at first glance (Just like Astrophage). Unlike astrophage, it's an inert material that reflects time and that we only can see the 3 dimensional parts of, since it actually exists in a higher dimension. The archetype we see is equivalent to a shadow being cast by an object.

Cue Grace and Rocky going nuts trying to understand how this weird space rock is creating energy out of nowhere. Cue Simon dealing with the Blood Ocean being made out of Archetype and essentially a living quantum computer. Cue time and multiverse shenanigans that explain how Simon and Grace meets

Cue the Blood Eel getting it's shit fucking wrecked by Godzilla! Aquatic form Godzilla looks like something Simon would totally run into

Maybe Yun, Mei, Grace, and Rocky are all doing big math to figure out how to make the Orthagonal Diagonalizer work to make all the red dust inert. If they suceed, Simon might be able to just outright destroy the Blood Ocean and walk free

Give me Jet Jaguar and Rocky pondering human behavior!!!

Dwell on the horror of the eye Simon sees being one of *many* alien superintelligences that don't give a shit about humanity, but they see us