Giant spider monsters? Yikes! Flying monkey aliens? Holy Wizard of Oz!
Yes. I did had those same thoughts, when I saw them and I thought that the giant spiders were somehow linked to the Archiec. It became clearer that they were native species, when Earth didn't receive one those and it finally locked down the giant, winged monkeys showed up. But that is also the thing, they got a confirmation that there's at least three hundred other civilisations that possibly might look for a salvation one way or another.
To be frank, if I'd apply human nature in there, Katee would be flying between those systems, destroying them one by one, or forcing the aliens to destroy them, effectively creating a barrier between the places. Going back to Earth instead of fixing the long range communication is in my mind a mistake. What good they are going to do on Earth?
I also thought about the Earth sending out the signal and it attracting the unwanted attention. What if, somewhere out there, are powerful allies who can change the course, why would want to stop broadcasting radio signals?
Escaping a black hole by tapping into a mechanical spider’s micro fusion reactor was a stretch. That big, colorful cable feeding power from Sasha to the ship was a hoot.
Indeed it was, even bigger stretch then the mini-fusion reactor. If they found all those alien implants inside the alien skulls, why not collect all of them and backengineer or connect them to the power-grid? Does it need to be a living person to operate the fusion-reactor?
Petra’s nervous system literally bubbling from the back of her neck was a real Alien experience. At least the nerve-creature had the decency to die as it attempted to crawl away, instead of escaping, growing into a powerful monster and killing the crew one-by-one.
When it happened I was convinced that it was the monster, and I was screaming at them to get the flame-thrower and burn the sucker off from the deck. Nobody listened.
William’s development from AI to an independent individual entity as he struggled with human emotions was well done. I didn’t foresee William becoming “mother” to a new AI.
In the book 2 I described an AI model, where the AI clones a version of themselves, and the child becomes the new AI and they almost copied it. So, I cannot be beating the wrong horse if they got it in theirs as well. The whole problem with the cloned AI is that it is rarely the same personality, and even bigger problem is that due to the cloning, whatever "powers" they posses, the child might have inherited them as well. Or put in simply way, they could have inherited the AI passwords for the systems, and that is a problem.
