==Characters Introduced in Order of Appearance; Character Status==
Bryan Benson,
A police(?) detective and our leading man, a gigasaurus who loves sports and evading responsibility, possibly taxation too.
Chao Feng,
The First Officer (of what?), and a douchedrinker according to Benson.
Lau,
The captain of Patrick's favorite Chinese sports team.
Edmond Laraby,
A missing geneticist, dead or alive off the grid.
Avelina Pereira da Silva,
Science Director; Head of Environmental Research & Development. Got her full name in Chapter 3
Vasquez,
Not to be confused with Vasquez from Aliens; a player in Patrick's favorite sports game.
Lindqvist,
A sports player not even worthy of description by Patrick. Must be a PCJ caricature.
Ther
esa Alexopolous,
A lieutenant, and a Duty Officer (of what?), sidekick to the Chad Bryan Benson.
Bahadur,
Chief Constable of the Chinatown District, on par with Bryan Benson.
Nibiru,
Not a character, but a black hole on the edge of a solar system. Probably the best character, though, if it's anything like Black Hole Sun.
Devorah Feynman,
Curator of the Museum, wants to preserve humanity's culture by locating and securing authentic works of art.
Constable Korolev,
Ther
esa sent him to back-up Benson; a rookie that's greener than grass.

--E1: Chapter 3 opens up with a visit to *the* Command Module (not capitalized in the book, even though it sounds like a very important location in the Ark) and some borderline meandering - the language is inconcrete. The highlighted sentence, however, I felt was in keeping with the sci-fi theme and the environment, and wish Patrick explored this kind of thing more. These kinds of lines, to me, are extremely valuable for the reader's imagination and how they engage with your work. Making sure they get the right message, the right tone, is imperative.

--E2: Detective Bryan Benson is on his way to meet Director da Silva, full name
*Avelina Pereira da Silva* in the Bio-Lab Module (again, not capitalized, even though it reads as "the" module and not "a" module). There's too much prissy meandering here, and all of this could have been shortened, tightened up, made punchier.

--E3: Patrick's obsession with young girls is still on my noticeboard, especially because when young girls are brought up there seems to be a 100% consistent theme of them being harmed in some manner.

--E4: During his internal monologue on the way meet Director da Silva, Benson laments that the "crewman culture" (uncapitalized proper noun AGAIN... and I argue it NEEDS to be, because the Ark's Crew refer to a specific hierarchy above the 'Cattle', who are the viable population to be unloaded onto the fucking colony!!), that is the Ark's official crewmembers, views watching and playing
*Zero Finals* as 'beneath them'. Snooty fuckers! How dare they!

--E5: Benson "touches" the handler with a less-than-friendly slap on the shoulder that's hard enough to send the poor man spinning. The Ark's chief constable, everybody, assaulting the waitstaff of stuck-up rich people. This is like being mad that a Mickey D's drive-thru clerk is having trouble hearing you, becoming unhinged, and "accidentally" pushing a drink back into their hand when they hand it to you to cause a spill. Jackass. I won't be forgetting any time soon that Benson is the kind of guy who doesn't regularly bathe and freshen up, which is
fucking retarded because in Chapter 2, there was an entire point about how Bryan
just managed to get himself an apartment with a stand-up shower, and it was presented in a way to make that sound like a big goddamn deal on this ship.
This entire process could have been avoided if he wasn't such a slob. Damn, man...

--E6: Here's the needful on Avelina: posh, pampered, living in wealth the unwashed masses can only dream of, yada yada. Her quarters are themed around botany: Benson observes a few flora specimens that
*are all a shade of purple or lavender.* Is that a clue!? Oh boy! Otherwise, it's set dressing.
*Oh, and more poop jokes.*

--E7: Avelina's mannerisms clash with her build-up: she appears as an enthusiastic middle-aged woman of striking beauty with a deeper well of patience than most nobility types would possess. Of course, there's some snide interruptions in what should be an interesting meeting with a presumably interesting, powerful, well-connected character.
Also, some mention of
*the Flip* again... and we're still waiting on Patrick to get back from Hooli's all-you-can-eat night to explain what that means. If I've somehow missed it, please tell me. I'm putting this much effort in so that anyone following along can correct me.

--E8: It's halfway through the page, past assault on a waitservant, past poop jokes, past an odd icebreaker and some awkward commentary that we're back on the plot, learning about Tau Ceti G, how its primary star affects the atmosphere and environment, and Avelina's research and experimentation into adapting humanity for the alien ecosystem. Mostly fine,
but something feels lacking.

--E9: Now Benson broaches the topic of Edmond Laraby to Director Avelina and the mood changes. I wasn't halfway into this page before I took issue with this investigative approach. There's a potpourri of minor writing issues that need to be tightened up here (how many fucking constables do you have working for you? Would've been nice to have an estimate!) but they pale in comparison to the tangent that Benson made me want to go on.

Bryan Benson as a character has yet to be given a personality. Nothing I have read so far constitutes an identity for the man. Anyone living in the western anglosphere knows a guy (or dozen) like him and how they behave on the surface: surly, aloof, a little dysgenic... but a personality this does not make. Bryan is so far a surface-level jackass; he hasn't displayed any emotion nor demonstrated he possesses a belief system of any kind.
Final Fantasy X was an excellent story (controversial, I know) and one of the better examples of presenting a character who knows fuck-all and needs things explained to him, and thus the player/reader learns about Spira with (and through) Tidus. Bryan isn't even that. What explanations we get of in-universe terms are doled out encyclopedically. It's dry, it's boring, it's unengaging.
Compare him to Tidus, even! Who and What is Tidus? Tidus is a whiny brat, is inquisitive, a bit sensitive, a little too nosy, loves Blitzball, and one of his unspoken traits shown to the player is that he will unthinkingly throw himself into danger to save anyone he can or do the right thing, to the point he tries to fight off Sinspawn with his bare hands until Auron gives him a sword. He's stupid but headstrong and brave, easygoing and friendly, fiercely loyal and supportive. He had personality. Bryan has yet to show us ANYTHING like that, and most of what I described is what we learn about Tidus in the first few minutes of playing FFX!
I'm not as well-read as I could or should be, but I can be absolutely certain that you fine kiwis reading this thread can reference any number of detective stories where we get SOME idea of our leading guy or gal right away as well as the promise of future revelations. Bryan's just boring, and he's all we have, so the story is boring despite a small streak of consistency. That said, I will rate this book 5 stars if it was later revealed that Bryan just has a fucking hamburger where his brain should be. No spoilers please.

--E10: Back on topic.
*Benson immediately hits Avelina with the detail that she was referring to Edmond in the past tense,* so this is more than likely a clue to the investigation. Whether or not Patrick thinks this is smart remains to be seen - I wouldn't have wasted a good shot like that so early. Her behavior's... probably odd. It's also dumb (especially in THIS setting) to think someone's dead for being missing "over a day". I'm not too good with people IRL as it is so I rely a lot on my own support circles to gauge signals and reactions in these circumstances.
Naturally, this investigation process is derailed once afuckinggain by
*Zero Finals*. I'm pretty sure Blitzball wasn't this intrusive in FFX. But then... but then something extraordinary happens...
"Zero saved him from that life." I highlighted that in purple this time. This is one and only exact moment that
*Zero Finals* should have been mentioned in this chapter! Bryan is receiving Character development!! We learned some history on Bryan!!

--E11: Benson asks Avelina to show him what Edmond was working on. Da Silva explains that Dr. Laraby's research pertains to wheat seedlings, special variants called
*sliders* (but why?) that are a fuckin' marvel of botanical engineering because the original wheat DNA is preserved while they were able to code in a number of extra genetic profiles that allow the plant in question to adapt itself for any environment - a universal crop. Some more interesting revelations include that Tau Ceti G was not the first planned colony, as 'Ceti E and F were targeted but were unfeasible at the time.
Dr. Laraby's graduate dissertation pertained to this work, and only Avelina took him seriously, championing the project. Then we get what at first glance appears to be a random distraction on matters of faith, but I'm holding my judgment on that. Nevertheless, there's some back and forth on how Avelina and her team may be playing God and that Earth's destruction may or may not have been God's influence, but it's shaky and debilitating to read. Not to mention, there has been nothing to suggest this would be even worth mentioning in the first place.

--E12: Just as soon as I had read the previous entry, we get more dry explanations that feel seriously out of place to me. The entire investigation has been paused for nearly a page or two worth of text on religion and if the implausible Nibiru black hole that suddenly appeared is God's doing. We still have no idea what caused Earth to become uninhabitable, what *the End* was, and Nibiru is paradoxically described as only accelerating that process. The wording of this entire sequence also confuses the Hell out of me: is Earth actually gone, in the present? Has it died? Is it dying? I'm operating under the assumption that *the End* already happened and Earth is gone.
I don't care about Nibiru, to be honest. The real stuff in this story is Tau Ceti, the Ark, the tangible concepts. It's crazy to just drop in how this black hole defies all currently held laws of science and
*merely accelerated* the process of Earth dying. Why does this matter at all?
**Where even is the Ark in relation to Nibiru? How close are they to Tau Ceti G in the present?!**

--E13: A semi-important tangent is delivered by Avelina, who then immediately does a (fart) at the end with more poop humor. I'm pretty checked out by this point, though, and I'm glazing hard. I did not miss that the Codes of Conservation were elucidated upon in this, though, but something that important could have been woven together with other topics and much earlier.

--E14: I'm once again foregoing a special mentions because there's another tangled web of this-and-that. Avelina devalues the clue from Chapter 2 about Edmond's apartment being
*too neat and sterile*, and then has nothing to offer on his tastes in art deco, which I find, for some reason, to be incredibly stupid. Almost as stupid as the use of "push off" to mean "leaving" in this context, because it's a
*Zero Finals* term and we simultaneously know too much about
*Zero Finals* and not enough for that to be a unique, intuitive phrase!
The chapter does not end as primly as Patrick thought it did. At least we now know that in two weeks they will arrive at Tau Ceti G and that is when
*the Flip* will occur. Chapter 1 also contained a reference to this "two week" measurement but only told us it was part of
*the Flip* without so much as some subtle direction that it's when they fucking arrive. Instead, it was referred to as a "fundamental shift", which meant jack and shit in that context.