It’s not stated explicitly in any one strip, but a series of clues made it fairly obvious to me after rereading books 1-4 several times. They didn’t have the AI tech for a fully artificial mind after the war but they did before?The robots in the rich houses have the similarities to the later APEX slaves. We hear about how brutally debt slaves are treated so how are actual criminals treated? Things like that helped me figure it out.
Human Brain slaves were common before the war, too, made from executed condemned prisoners, installed in the most advanced “androids” used by the super rich. Apex has been a manifestly evil Fascist technarchy for decades before the Grex phenomena began.
Leftoids comparing Trump to the Commie fanatics in Johnstown is a level of doublethink that even Orwell couldn’t have imagined in his nightmares. You filling kids like Crooks’s head with your insane hate is going to trigger a civil war. But this is the world Obama created when he destroyed the Bluedog plank of the DNC. You lost your sanity with them.
At the very least, as lunatic as the Apex leadership has become, they ought to remain just sane enough to want to understand how these boats could have possibly survived the war intact.
Peafowl are opportunistic hunters in the wild, eating prey as big as squirrels, but are also prey themselves to upper mid sized cats and the biggest eagles. This necessarily requires excellent eyesight. Now exaggerate that via anthropomorphic size, and he could probably see the moon landing location if the moon wasn’t moving so fast.
A LOT of the rank& file Topsiders are the sons, daughters, nieces and nephews of Apex executives with enough clout to nepotistically prioritize saving THEM over many otherwise much more meritocraticly qualified potential members, more COMPETENT members. My realizing this helped explain their eclectic mix of accomplishments & failures.
It helps that most of them are half their original mass, or less.