With no way for her to her control their progress, the NANs seemed to be choosing randomly where to work on her and when. She had to endure sudden, overwhelming pain, nausea, lost strength and just as sudden blackouts. Though all the episodes were brief, they were unnerving, an ongoing weakness Althea did not want to display to the Makani men. She could not be ready to offer them her agenda until she had a semblance of control over herself.
Given what you’ve read and what I’ve been expounding on here in the commentary you can see I don’t look upon Althea as living in a simplistically portrayed reality where once a problem is identified it is cleverly and ultimate solved in a clean and enduring manner (sort of a mock-real as it were). This is another way I measure this storyline as more of post-modern SF tale.
Back to the narrative…
Problem: she needs resources to feed her internal nanometric networks. That means food and that means to get whatever is available.
Such as it is, while she has survived, she has a long way to go for a full recovery (at least from her near transhuman existence), literally – light years – really. And also, to her horror, she no longer has the direct and advanced control over her internal tech she is used to.
You could say what she’s suffered, what is to her, the equivalent of a stroke. But, hey, disability is all perspective, isn’t’ it? As you should be able to tell by now, Althea likes to be in control.
But she is still human, and that colors her reactions. She isn’t happy about the speed or actions of her healing tech, any more than we would about ours, that is supposed to work in a way we understand, and can control, but for some reason won’t.
She forced herself to look back up, to gaze back into the pain radiating from his dark amber eyes.
Accept it. Reflect it. Use it.
“So much was lost,” she told him, voice low with sincere grief, regret. “More than you can imagine.”
She waited for a moment, then tried a smile to offer him hope.
“But… yes,” she added, brighter. “The Legion Consortia survives… still.”
What also adds to Althea’s stress level is she feels the need to put up a front to the men, because she knows she needs them, and she wants them to believe she is what they need her to be.
To be fair, that’s a bit of a projection on her part. Kyso and Traejan have seen her a lot worse, and she knows it. How she’s behaving is, really, more about her than them.
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Start listening to the audiobook from Chapter 1
Start reading the novel from Chapter 1
Start listening to the audio version of the author’s commentary from the Intro