#blackbox

- Orion 🤝 Winnie: obsessing over A and loving her music

- It's really interesting how Orion is sort of deifying A through this art. Also really fascinating that he places her across Pine. Like, pining for Pine and A in a sense, as well as how A is connected to nature (literally having a nature planet)

- Also interesting that A has picked up a love of painting and drawing and Orion has found a love of drawing/etching

- I do love Ketu and his squads badass cyborgs. A sniper cyborg and someone cloaked in living nanotech is so badass

- Ahhh so there is a huge colony in the ring that is literally fighting the machines. Interesting.

- West having leg exoskeletons with rocket packs is so fun. God I'd love those. We still don't know what her son can do yet

- Rhine is fucking amazing and horrifying. An Intelligence Programmer who chopped off his own head and copied his brain into a chip, then inserted it into a mechanical body that sounds like a crossover between General Grievous and a Necron, with cyborg animal limbs and heads.

- Oh and he's also copying and chipping people in his "colony", sometimes multiple times, and sticking them in mechanical bodies attached to their original body's corpses. Lovely.

- I feel so bad for Tyrant: sent into the Belt with chip technology that lets him mindcontrol anyone it touches, refuses to do so out of morals, and is now stuck inside of one of Rhines machines…

- Also poor Spur: Rhine wants to copy her mind, take her apart mentally and physically, and basically torture her to "cure" her while keeping her trapped in a mechanical body. Good on Orion for stopping that

- Tyrant joins the party! Love that for him

- Oh god, Blackbox got hit with a Glyph that makes it so that anytime he is about to doze off, he's hit with 300x the normal adrenaline in his brain and not even his Onboard can suppress it with sleep influencers. He says he's about to die nooooo

- We also learn from Rhine, that the animal machines are made by an Intelligence, but that Intelligence was ordered to by someone with A's appearance

- I say A's appearance because there has been a lot of discussion of how A has a lot of doppelgängers in story: Hruby was one of them, Zia is another (including A's brain scans!), and the fake A created by the conspiracy that influences Onboards. And this chapter introduces the idea of copying and cloning people via brain scans with some degradations.

- Is this really A? A duplicate? A fake? All of the above?