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Something that occurs to me upon re-reading—Spartacus Hughes is essentially repeating the same experiment here as he did with the Bonsai Planet: shattering a society down to its foundtions, following it through its descent into barbarism and violence, then watching to see how it regroups. The only difference is a difference of scale—100,000 humans as opposed to 2 billion I-Life.
Hughes implies it in his speech to Slade this issue—"All I needed was an enclosed space and enough time to finally run this experiment through to its conclusion." The Libertania is at least the second version of this experiemnt, and the one that has proceeded the farthest before it was shut down by The Hand.
So the I-Life, and the bioship Sharon Jones (who's been skulking around the background of the last couple of issues) will ultimately prove important, I wager, since the fate of Ned Slade and The Hand seem to be tied in to the fate of Spartacus Hughes and his experiment.
Don't know why this wasn't obvious to me before, but I totally missed it. In his previous incarnation, Spartacus just seemed like a mercenary to me: I assumed it was Simon-the-world's-richest-pervert's money he was after, when in fact it was the knowledge to be gleaned from the brutaliation of the Bonsai Planet itself—Simon's depredations were just a means to a end...
Need to re-read the whole series thus far, this weekend. |
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