It's been overcast here the last couple of days. I don't think it's actually that cold out there, but the heavy clouds make it feel that way. At least the leaves have changed color nicely.
Van and Rannveig fight it out a bit, with Rannveig ultimately attaching a bomb to Van's back, right in that spot that's hard to reach. You'd think humanity would have evolved arms that could rotate a little more at some point. One of the telepathic ice dragons appears and swallows them both, whisking them away from the AI controlling the world they encountered last issue. The dragon is actually controlled by what's left of Van's friend Eight, who was not a highly intelligent monkey, but a symbiotic thing that had been attached to the monkey.
They head to a spot where the AI's been gathering all the information on everything about the planet, intending to destroy it and revive her son. It's not there, but a bunch of angry clones of her son are, and she kills them. But the AI's already located the little alien she'd successfully grown at the start of the series. Van wanted to use it to get off world, the AI intends to turn it into another database. Neither of them gets what they want, but the infant alien does provide another alternative.
I went back to reread the first three issues, and that did help certain things make more sense. I don't grasp how the alien can be an escape craft, or a memory bank, or have blood that can help remake the world. Chalk that up to it being a weird alien, I guess. I think the Eric she encounters at the site of the uplink is her real husband, not simply a copy, but I'm not positive of that.
I don't think I understand Van as a character. She seems constantly set on moving forward. The past is something to be strip-mined for useful parts (like when she seeks out her mother), but otherwise unimportant. The AI's offer to give her a true version of her son doesn't slow her down in the slightest. I guess I'm not sure why she's so deadset on moving forward. She wants off the planet, but why? Just because it's a frozen mess, a dead end world in its current state? Because it holds a lot of painful memories?
She says Rannveig wants to use the AI's stored knowledge of everyone to set things back to how they were, to restore what she's lost. Van says she can't think of anything worse. So has she just decided it's too painful to try and retrieve what she lost once, or is that that she feels setting things back won't actually make them any better? Van admits she doesn't care about this world, but also thinks she's going to save it. Which aren't mutually exclusive, I guess it's a matter of who she's saving it for, and I don't know the answer to that.
No comments:
Post a Comment