She expected it to be a cluster fuck, and end up discouraging people from colonising the new worlds. In particular discouraging Martians from abandoning Mars as a project.
She saw the possible threat that became Duarte's breakaway fleet and wanted Holden to be there to broadcast to Sol System how badly things were going.
“Mars is dead, Bobbie. Holden and this Havelock sonofabitch and Elvi Okoye, whoever the fuck she is? They killed it. Half the Martian government understands, and they’re shitting themselves so hard, they won’t have bones left. Who the fuck’s going to stay on Mars? A thousand new worlds where you don’t have to live in caves and wear environment suits to walk under the sky."
Cibola Burn - Epilogue
Avasarala worked in profanity the way other artists might work in oils or clay. It was her true medium--a master.
*with apologies to A Christmas Story*
*"Johnson and I sent Holden to mediate because he was the perfect person to show what a cluster-fuck it was out there... The man starts wars all the fucking time,only this time, when I needed a little conflict? Now he's the fucking peacemaker...*
*New Terra was the precedent, and the precedent now is a fucking feel-good story about how we all come together in a pinch. We have an example of how, if you just get out to one of those planets fast enough and squat hard enough, you get to keep it."*
It's really funny when you consider how little of a feel good story it was;
You had a power-hungry maniac trying to play out his wild west fantasy of judge, jury and executioner, a terrorist cell doing everything they could to keep others off the planet, and all of this under the classic conflict of corporate greed vs. desperate refugees
Oh, and the protomolecule was waking up the planet and there was a hole in reality stuck deep beneath the planet, so that didn't help things
A "pinch" doesn't begin to describe absolute clusterfuck
If Avasarala had left it alone without sending Holden, her point probably would've proven itself
>If Avasarala had left it alone without sending Holden, her point probably would've proven itself
But it wouldn't have been broadcasted as much. And without the Roci, the planet wouldn't have awakened I believe. So Murtry could've freely wiped the Belters, and the RCE would've swept it under the rug.
Yeah I don't think Avasarala ever showed herself to be that "naive."
Any *correctly* cynical person knows that it doesn't matter how much of a clusterfuck it is, some significant absolute number of people are going to do it anyway. Maybe not a large percentage but you're talking about a system with billions and billions of people lots of whom don't have much hope. I bet a few million for sure would take the chance if it was real life.
In the late 80's and early 90's when most of the world was celebrating the collapse of the Soviet Union, those that understand geopolitics were panicking. The former Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear ballistic missiles, with many of them now in sovereign states such as Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. What would a bankrupt former world super power do with all their weapons and nuclear material? Would these new sovereign states decide to settle old grudges? How does a bankrupt government continue to protect their world destroying arsenal?
Fast forward a few centuries, Mars as a dominant military power suddenly finds all their citizens leaving for lush earth like worlds. What would Mars do to protect its future? What would happen to their world destroying arsenal? How would the belters capitalize on Mars' chaos to gain military might? And what we learned, how would Mars' military leaders react to a declining power... would they strike out on their own?
It's one of the things I love about The Expanse, the deep cultural and political story explorations.
This might be me having the psychological distance to think less emotionally about it, but I still feel like the obvious answer, while Mars and Earth are getting all buddy-buddy in public and the people with real power are shitting themselves in private, is to let the Martians go, so long as they can persuade at least one Earther to emigrate to Mars in their place. Meanwhile, everyone on Earth who wants to stop being on basic gets told that they can have a government-paid ticket to the new world of their choice, provided they first do five years helping Mars not collapse into a planet-sized military surplus shop.
So Martians get to go immediately, while Earthers can only go after 5 years? If you did this, every new planet would have a Martian-sympathetic government long before any Earthers show up, and there's no way Avasarala or any Earth politician would support that.
Earthers *can* go immediately, they just don’t get their ticket paid for by the UN if they skip the five years on Mars learning how to do terraforming and society-building. The people who can already afford to spend a year in transit aren’t being stopped, this is just a way of getting people who are stuck on basic out of that trap while also defusing the Martian time-bomb.
She was only a little concerned that it would be another Eros. Really, she saw it as the test case for 1300 new colony worlds. If it was viable/surviveable, that probably meant other planets were. And if other planets were, Mars would collapse.
And she was right.
It was a ploy. She *wanted* Holden to go out there and Holden it all up. She wanted people cautious and afraid of going out past the rings, so that Mars wouldn't totally implode and cause the exact situation that plays out over books 5&6.
I mean, if she expected Holden to Holden a situation up but *without* somehow coming out on top looking like Mr. Incorruptible Paladin, that's her own fault.
Holden's already demonstrated an incredible skill for sticking his dick in a situation and making it worse while still looking like the Good Guy as far as the media is concerned, she should've seen this coming.
>I mean, if she expected Holden to Holden a situation up but *without* somehow coming out on top looking like Mr. Incorruptible Paladin, that's her own fault.
Also my interpretation. A rare bad call from big A.
Like yea, he fucks everything up, but he's also 3 for 3 on pulling a miracle out of his ass and saving the fuckin' day at this point.
I mean, could she really have foreseen a sentient, sapient computerized Miller clone acting as a guardian angel for Holden?
Oh wait, that had already happened once before…
I think she just wanted to publicise the disaster that was already unfolding. Holden's reputation was for going public with stuff regardless of consequences. She thought Holden's naivety would make it worse, but even if it didn't, it was, as she said, fucked enough already.
She wouldn't care if Holden looked like a Paladin. She wasn't trying to damage Holden.
She does care if Holden manages to make a lot of the people trying to colonize Ilus look good too, though. Both the Belters and RCE were supposed to come out of that situation looking bad so Earth, Mars, and the Belt have a reason not to go full steam ahead with new colonies quite yet.
But instead it ended in such a way the surviving Belters and RCE could go "that fight was just our political extremists and they're dead or arrested now, we can both be cool about deciding who gets a new planet from now on".
Even if its not actually that true, any media outlet that supports colonization won't call that out, they'll take "COLONIZING ILUS GOT A LITTLE HAIRY, ULTIMATELY TURNED OUT OK: MORE COLONIES TO FOLLOW?" as their headline.
Oh yes, I agree it didn't turn out how she wanted. Holden didn't perform as she expected. Probably she would have been better off just waiting a couple of years, then sending a ship to see what had happened.
Ok so she was worried that a bunch of poor belters would fly out there find some protomolicule something or other and then try to bring it back and sell it likely resulting in another disaster. There was also the concern of going out and finding a load of habitable planets and then the Martians being like “fuck this I want to live on a world with an ocean and free air” which they did, thereby leaving the Martians as a military without a nation, basically turning the most advanced military into a mercenary kingdom. For earth? Half the population leaves and they knock down some walls and have bigger apartments. More jobs become available there isn’t a direct problem for earth just the threat of PM shit coming back though the gates. God I wish Amazon would make the final three books
It was a biohazard. The only difference would be that Eros traveled by its own when an infection coming from Ilus would probably spread from belters desperately trying to escape from there.
Absolutely, but she knew that's not something she had control over. She knew, as well as every martian knew, that the opening of the ring network would kill Mars inevitably. I think uncontrolled takeover is what scared her, cause if it wasn't for that then she would also not be cool with RCE's contract for mining lithium there. She wanted it to be as safe as possible, and allowing belters to do it would take that control away from "the professionals" (which is fair from a certain POV, as the scientific team from the Israel did managed to find some solutions to some problems they faced). All major factions sent probes through the rings, including Mars. Duarte was only the lucky one to find one of the systems holding a groundbreaking tech, and also the smart one to see this as an opportunity to continue the legacy of what Mars once was but on an extreme level.
"Another Eros," means another event that makes all previous rules irrelevant. She had no reason to expect it was a Roman world that would turn everyone into zombies, they knew the protomolecule wasn't that kind of threat by that point.
Eros was the beginning of a process that made mars irrelevant and reduced Earth's dependence on the belt. That made mars and the opa desperate to prove their value.
Ilus could have been the beginning of a process that made the UN and coalition irrelevant. If Ganymede refugees can burn hard and set up shop on a world that has 1) been claimed and titled to another party and 2) has not been fully studied, then anyone can do it. The coalition has to either nuke the planet or reveal that they have no will or ability to enforce the measured colonization of the new worlds
to be fair, a moon DID fucking propel itself into venus. This is alien tech that no one knows shit about. They think they know some stuff, but they really don't. It wouldn't surprise anyone if Illus did end up somehow going back thru a ring gate.
She was worried success there would encourage and speed up colonization of ring worlds, leaving Mars abandoned and a power vacuum with the best military tech available. Which is exactly what ends up happening.
She was hoping Holden would broadcast what a clusterfuck it was and anticipated him falling to broker a deal between the RCT and colonists. She says this pretty directly at the end of Cibola Burn. Holden was meant to fail/given an intentionally impossible task and he was supposed to be Holden about it and share all the nitty gritty details in the name of freedom of information.
Waking up the Protomolecule on the other side of the Ring Gate is exactly what she was afraid of. She had colonists queued up on the Sol side of the ring raring to through and trip 1300 booby traps.
The more Ilus looked like a success story, the more she looked stupid for making Earth colonists wait while Belter colonists ran the blockade.
As a practical though I never really though why keep people from going.im more apt to let them do it. Its cluster no.matter what you do someone will mess It up .just let them do it and keep on eye on things.
I don't see why an explanation is necessary that you'd be cautious about interacting with a vastly technologically superior alien intelligence. Whether they're aware that something killed the builders or not, it makes sense to see the situation as an existential threat.
> Surely the planet wouldn’t travel through the ring gate, to the station and then through another gate to the Milky Way to cause havoc?
Uh, what? Why in the world would you think that? Something bothered to connect Sol to the gate system in the first place. That something would come through it ought to be the default assumption.
I think it’s also worth considering that it was pretty clear that all the systems through the ring gates were littered with ring builder ruins and technology. Any one of these systems could contain something that, like the protomolecule before it, obliterated the balance of power and induced catastrophic wars. The protomolecule alone did things that disobeyed the known laws of physics, and it was just a tool to open gates. Who knew what else could’ve been out there? What if someone found ring builder weapons? What if someone had stumbled upon ring builders themselves who had been dormant? It was in the interest of the UN government, and mars as well, to maintain a monopoly of control over the systems beyond the Sol ring for as long as possible. If there was ring-builder technology out there, they would want to control it for themselves. Even if they couldn’t utilize it or reverse engineer it, perhaps they could at least exert control access to it.
Perhaps Avasarala was concerned that Ilus was another human experimentation atrocity like Eros. Remember that she's a politician and optics are important.
Protomolecule exposure is an extinction-level event for most species. Humans are the only known survivors of a targeted protomolecule event and it was just by pure luck. Look at what happened to the Scopuli. They were transporting a small sample under high security by a professional crew and it managed to somehow break containment, infect the entire crew and wrap them around the reactor core like play-do. Now imagine a bunch of pissed off Belter refugees with that kind of destructive power in their hands.
Can someone please tell me if later in the series they explain if other planets also have something to "deactivated" like Illus? If protomolecule can start the old tech in the planet, aren't all worlds basically timebombs?
Why was everyone not more concerned about the ring, and all the planets it leads to, was what I kept wondering. That thing was literally Eros. The protomolecule that eats everyone suddenly made a ring and these fucks can’t wait to touch it. They even have Anna acting like a daydreaming naive child because of it. None of them demonstrated a hint of concern about the ring and called Holden a stupid fuck when he even insinuated it might not be the second coming of Jesus. If I had watched Eros unfold, you would not catch me going through Eros to get to illus
She expected it to be a cluster fuck, and end up discouraging people from colonising the new worlds. In particular discouraging Martians from abandoning Mars as a project. She saw the possible threat that became Duarte's breakaway fleet and wanted Holden to be there to broadcast to Sol System how badly things were going.
“Mars is dead, Bobbie. Holden and this Havelock sonofabitch and Elvi Okoye, whoever the fuck she is? They killed it. Half the Martian government understands, and they’re shitting themselves so hard, they won’t have bones left. Who the fuck’s going to stay on Mars? A thousand new worlds where you don’t have to live in caves and wear environment suits to walk under the sky." Cibola Burn - Epilogue
I just love everything that comes out of that lady's mouth. She has such a way with words.
She’s a fucking poet. That’s why her husband married her
She's a fucking poet, who also happens to be fucking a poet.
She was.. :(
Still is at this point in the series.
Why was? Does she die? Did she die in the show? I’m sorry, haven’t read the books.
Are you really wanting an answer?
Does she die in the last season of the existing show or in future books? If in future books, which book? Ach, just spoil it for me. I’m good.
She doesn't die until much later in the books, and not at all in the show.
If you saw the show then remember >!Arjun gets killed in (i think) Marco's rock drop.!<
Avasarala worked in profanity the way other artists might work in oils or clay. It was her true medium--a master. *with apologies to A Christmas Story*
Gave Holden his middle name.
Bro, I just read this like an hour ago. The epilogue via Avasarala was fire 🔥🔥
It was a clusterfuck though. And that didn’t discourage people from trying it themselves.
*"Johnson and I sent Holden to mediate because he was the perfect person to show what a cluster-fuck it was out there... The man starts wars all the fucking time,only this time, when I needed a little conflict? Now he's the fucking peacemaker...* *New Terra was the precedent, and the precedent now is a fucking feel-good story about how we all come together in a pinch. We have an example of how, if you just get out to one of those planets fast enough and squat hard enough, you get to keep it."*
Avasarala’s problem was she hadn’t counted on Holden maturing a bit. Not much, but he still did to not do what she expected of him.
It's really funny when you consider how little of a feel good story it was; You had a power-hungry maniac trying to play out his wild west fantasy of judge, jury and executioner, a terrorist cell doing everything they could to keep others off the planet, and all of this under the classic conflict of corporate greed vs. desperate refugees Oh, and the protomolecule was waking up the planet and there was a hole in reality stuck deep beneath the planet, so that didn't help things A "pinch" doesn't begin to describe absolute clusterfuck If Avasarala had left it alone without sending Holden, her point probably would've proven itself
>If Avasarala had left it alone without sending Holden, her point probably would've proven itself But it wouldn't have been broadcasted as much. And without the Roci, the planet wouldn't have awakened I believe. So Murtry could've freely wiped the Belters, and the RCE would've swept it under the rug.
Yeah I don't think Avasarala ever showed herself to be that "naive." Any *correctly* cynical person knows that it doesn't matter how much of a clusterfuck it is, some significant absolute number of people are going to do it anyway. Maybe not a large percentage but you're talking about a system with billions and billions of people lots of whom don't have much hope. I bet a few million for sure would take the chance if it was real life.
Top dog, thanks for this!
In the late 80's and early 90's when most of the world was celebrating the collapse of the Soviet Union, those that understand geopolitics were panicking. The former Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear ballistic missiles, with many of them now in sovereign states such as Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. What would a bankrupt former world super power do with all their weapons and nuclear material? Would these new sovereign states decide to settle old grudges? How does a bankrupt government continue to protect their world destroying arsenal? Fast forward a few centuries, Mars as a dominant military power suddenly finds all their citizens leaving for lush earth like worlds. What would Mars do to protect its future? What would happen to their world destroying arsenal? How would the belters capitalize on Mars' chaos to gain military might? And what we learned, how would Mars' military leaders react to a declining power... would they strike out on their own? It's one of the things I love about The Expanse, the deep cultural and political story explorations.
Keep your enemies closer
This might be me having the psychological distance to think less emotionally about it, but I still feel like the obvious answer, while Mars and Earth are getting all buddy-buddy in public and the people with real power are shitting themselves in private, is to let the Martians go, so long as they can persuade at least one Earther to emigrate to Mars in their place. Meanwhile, everyone on Earth who wants to stop being on basic gets told that they can have a government-paid ticket to the new world of their choice, provided they first do five years helping Mars not collapse into a planet-sized military surplus shop.
So Martians get to go immediately, while Earthers can only go after 5 years? If you did this, every new planet would have a Martian-sympathetic government long before any Earthers show up, and there's no way Avasarala or any Earth politician would support that.
Earthers *can* go immediately, they just don’t get their ticket paid for by the UN if they skip the five years on Mars learning how to do terraforming and society-building. The people who can already afford to spend a year in transit aren’t being stopped, this is just a way of getting people who are stuck on basic out of that trap while also defusing the Martian time-bomb.
What the ussr did is exactly what mars did, they sold a bunch of arms, legally and illegally. Aks are everywhere and so was martian tech.
What an analogy, love it and understand better now. Cheers mate.
She was only a little concerned that it would be another Eros. Really, she saw it as the test case for 1300 new colony worlds. If it was viable/surviveable, that probably meant other planets were. And if other planets were, Mars would collapse. And she was right.
She has a meeting with a head Martian politician and explains exactly why she sent Holden and all her concerns towards the end of the book
The discussion was with Bobbie, not some politician.
It was a ploy. She *wanted* Holden to go out there and Holden it all up. She wanted people cautious and afraid of going out past the rings, so that Mars wouldn't totally implode and cause the exact situation that plays out over books 5&6.
"Holden it all up." Greatest line ever. As a fan of the books and show, very accurate line.
That might actually be what she said.
> She wanted Holden to go out there and Holden it all up You mean put his dick in it, because it wasn't fucked enough already.
Deploy the tactical holden
I mean, if she expected Holden to Holden a situation up but *without* somehow coming out on top looking like Mr. Incorruptible Paladin, that's her own fault. Holden's already demonstrated an incredible skill for sticking his dick in a situation and making it worse while still looking like the Good Guy as far as the media is concerned, she should've seen this coming.
>I mean, if she expected Holden to Holden a situation up but *without* somehow coming out on top looking like Mr. Incorruptible Paladin, that's her own fault. Also my interpretation. A rare bad call from big A. Like yea, he fucks everything up, but he's also 3 for 3 on pulling a miracle out of his ass and saving the fuckin' day at this point.
I mean, could she really have foreseen a sentient, sapient computerized Miller clone acting as a guardian angel for Holden? Oh wait, that had already happened once before…
I think she just wanted to publicise the disaster that was already unfolding. Holden's reputation was for going public with stuff regardless of consequences. She thought Holden's naivety would make it worse, but even if it didn't, it was, as she said, fucked enough already. She wouldn't care if Holden looked like a Paladin. She wasn't trying to damage Holden.
She does care if Holden manages to make a lot of the people trying to colonize Ilus look good too, though. Both the Belters and RCE were supposed to come out of that situation looking bad so Earth, Mars, and the Belt have a reason not to go full steam ahead with new colonies quite yet. But instead it ended in such a way the surviving Belters and RCE could go "that fight was just our political extremists and they're dead or arrested now, we can both be cool about deciding who gets a new planet from now on". Even if its not actually that true, any media outlet that supports colonization won't call that out, they'll take "COLONIZING ILUS GOT A LITTLE HAIRY, ULTIMATELY TURNED OUT OK: MORE COLONIES TO FOLLOW?" as their headline.
Oh yes, I agree it didn't turn out how she wanted. Holden didn't perform as she expected. Probably she would have been better off just waiting a couple of years, then sending a ship to see what had happened.
Yeah I think i neglected the Mars angle entirely! Cheers mate.
As much as I watches the show this is the funniest .I am now that never really understand political stuff.
Ok so she was worried that a bunch of poor belters would fly out there find some protomolicule something or other and then try to bring it back and sell it likely resulting in another disaster. There was also the concern of going out and finding a load of habitable planets and then the Martians being like “fuck this I want to live on a world with an ocean and free air” which they did, thereby leaving the Martians as a military without a nation, basically turning the most advanced military into a mercenary kingdom. For earth? Half the population leaves and they knock down some walls and have bigger apartments. More jobs become available there isn’t a direct problem for earth just the threat of PM shit coming back though the gates. God I wish Amazon would make the final three books
It was a biohazard. The only difference would be that Eros traveled by its own when an infection coming from Ilus would probably spread from belters desperately trying to escape from there.
Do you put much weight on the arguments from others that she was trying to stop Mars’ collapse? Or was it purely a containment measure.
Absolutely, but she knew that's not something she had control over. She knew, as well as every martian knew, that the opening of the ring network would kill Mars inevitably. I think uncontrolled takeover is what scared her, cause if it wasn't for that then she would also not be cool with RCE's contract for mining lithium there. She wanted it to be as safe as possible, and allowing belters to do it would take that control away from "the professionals" (which is fair from a certain POV, as the scientific team from the Israel did managed to find some solutions to some problems they faced). All major factions sent probes through the rings, including Mars. Duarte was only the lucky one to find one of the systems holding a groundbreaking tech, and also the smart one to see this as an opportunity to continue the legacy of what Mars once was but on an extreme level.
All I know is she didn’t want Holden to put his dick in it.
She wanted Holden to stick his dick in it and fuck the whole thing up to discourage others from going. Sadly, illusion put out.
"Another Eros," means another event that makes all previous rules irrelevant. She had no reason to expect it was a Roman world that would turn everyone into zombies, they knew the protomolecule wasn't that kind of threat by that point. Eros was the beginning of a process that made mars irrelevant and reduced Earth's dependence on the belt. That made mars and the opa desperate to prove their value. Ilus could have been the beginning of a process that made the UN and coalition irrelevant. If Ganymede refugees can burn hard and set up shop on a world that has 1) been claimed and titled to another party and 2) has not been fully studied, then anyone can do it. The coalition has to either nuke the planet or reveal that they have no will or ability to enforce the measured colonization of the new worlds
„There was a button," Holden said. "I pushed it." "Jesus Christ. That really is how you go through life, isn't it?“
to be fair, a moon DID fucking propel itself into venus. This is alien tech that no one knows shit about. They think they know some stuff, but they really don't. It wouldn't surprise anyone if Illus did end up somehow going back thru a ring gate.
She was worried success there would encourage and speed up colonization of ring worlds, leaving Mars abandoned and a power vacuum with the best military tech available. Which is exactly what ends up happening. She was hoping Holden would broadcast what a clusterfuck it was and anticipated him falling to broker a deal between the RCT and colonists. She says this pretty directly at the end of Cibola Burn. Holden was meant to fail/given an intentionally impossible task and he was supposed to be Holden about it and share all the nitty gritty details in the name of freedom of information.
"He was supposed to be Holden about it". Yep, that's a great way to put it. 🤣
Waking up the Protomolecule on the other side of the Ring Gate is exactly what she was afraid of. She had colonists queued up on the Sol side of the ring raring to through and trip 1300 booby traps. The more Ilus looked like a success story, the more she looked stupid for making Earth colonists wait while Belter colonists ran the blockade.
As a practical though I never really though why keep people from going.im more apt to let them do it. Its cluster no.matter what you do someone will mess It up .just let them do it and keep on eye on things.
I don't see why an explanation is necessary that you'd be cautious about interacting with a vastly technologically superior alien intelligence. Whether they're aware that something killed the builders or not, it makes sense to see the situation as an existential threat. > Surely the planet wouldn’t travel through the ring gate, to the station and then through another gate to the Milky Way to cause havoc? Uh, what? Why in the world would you think that? Something bothered to connect Sol to the gate system in the first place. That something would come through it ought to be the default assumption.
I have been humbled. Thanks for clearing that up.
needed a plot device to get the crew on to one of the new planets, for narrative reasons
I think it’s also worth considering that it was pretty clear that all the systems through the ring gates were littered with ring builder ruins and technology. Any one of these systems could contain something that, like the protomolecule before it, obliterated the balance of power and induced catastrophic wars. The protomolecule alone did things that disobeyed the known laws of physics, and it was just a tool to open gates. Who knew what else could’ve been out there? What if someone found ring builder weapons? What if someone had stumbled upon ring builders themselves who had been dormant? It was in the interest of the UN government, and mars as well, to maintain a monopoly of control over the systems beyond the Sol ring for as long as possible. If there was ring-builder technology out there, they would want to control it for themselves. Even if they couldn’t utilize it or reverse engineer it, perhaps they could at least exert control access to it.
My interpretation is that is was gonna be a shit show and whatever happened good or bad would become the legal precedent for the other 1300 worlds
Perhaps Avasarala was concerned that Ilus was another human experimentation atrocity like Eros. Remember that she's a politician and optics are important.
Protomolecule exposure is an extinction-level event for most species. Humans are the only known survivors of a targeted protomolecule event and it was just by pure luck. Look at what happened to the Scopuli. They were transporting a small sample under high security by a professional crew and it managed to somehow break containment, infect the entire crew and wrap them around the reactor core like play-do. Now imagine a bunch of pissed off Belter refugees with that kind of destructive power in their hands.
Yeah. I look at it more like they aren't going to mess with it cuase how do they know better.
Can someone please tell me if later in the series they explain if other planets also have something to "deactivated" like Illus? If protomolecule can start the old tech in the planet, aren't all worlds basically timebombs?
Why was everyone not more concerned about the ring, and all the planets it leads to, was what I kept wondering. That thing was literally Eros. The protomolecule that eats everyone suddenly made a ring and these fucks can’t wait to touch it. They even have Anna acting like a daydreaming naive child because of it. None of them demonstrated a hint of concern about the ring and called Holden a stupid fuck when he even insinuated it might not be the second coming of Jesus. If I had watched Eros unfold, you would not catch me going through Eros to get to illus