There are 3 main characters in O Human Star… The comic is currently focused on Sulla but all three character’s stories are intertwined. When the comic is red, it’s a flashback. When it is blue, it is present day.

I recommend starting from the beginning and reading, but here’s a not so brief recap:

Alistair Sterling (Al) is a brilliant inventor in the field of robotics, and the fruits of his labor are responsible for the way things are currently. He tends to be kind of a loner and seems to hide behind a gruff exterior. He is gay, but seemingly in the closet. In the past, he had been in a relationship with Brendan but made Brendan swear to keep it a secret. They eventually formed a partnership and a business together. Something happened a long time ago, involving a fight between Brendan and Al, and shortly after, Al died. He lives on now as a robot. Nobody is sure who built the robotic Al, but it wasn’t Brendan.

Brendan Pinsky: Al’s longtime partner and lover, and Sulla’s father. He is suspicious of whoever built Al, and is doing detective work to figure it out. What makes things even more suspicious is that Brendan himself tried to bring Al back several times, only to meet with failure, but someone, somewhere has managed to do it. One such attempt to bring Al back was Sulla (note the similarities between Alistair and Sulla’s names…) who he has raised as a daughter. Lucille Santos is a close friend and is also the CEO of her own company. One suspect is a mysterious rival who we have not been given a name or face, but we know Brendan is distrustful of and intimidated by.

Sulla changed her gender at a young age to female, which suggests that her thoughts and feelings are much different than Alistair’s (who seemed to take offense at the idea that he might be secretly female.) She is home-schooled by Brendan, and wants to be with other kids her age. With a little encouragement from Al, she has befriended a quartet of girls from school. She and Titus (or Ty) have hit it off. The quartet does not seem to be aware that Sulla is an android. Sulla has yet to “come out” as an android, which resulted in some ambiguity when she ordered food from the restaurant (she did not specify that she wanted synth food, as regular food is bad for androids, and this may be why she is tearing up so much. It isn’t very clear.) Also, the quartet seems to believe that Al is her dad.

There are probably more details I missed that may become important later.

Oh cripes, I didn’t even notice that. Titus standing right between the two gendered bathrooms… stealth slap-in-the-face-with-symbolism panel.

I was worried about that, yeah (which is why I didn’t think it was actually going to be the broth…)

All the synthetics are based off of AL’s neurone simulator which was developed to sidestep having to understand intelligence before building an A.I. and instead just copy and simulate a working mind. When they tried to record the copy of Al that eventually became Sulla maybe it’s possible that included his sense of taste simply because at the time the system couldn’t filter it out from the rest of his mind.
So you get an intelligent android that knows what taste is but wanders around all day with numb tongue. All Brendan did was make an interface to a chemical sensor in her tongue. Maybe he didn’t even think of it. Maybe she just asked him one day why she couldn’t taste anything?
Makes me wonder if synthetics who’ve sent an arm off to the repair shop have to put up with phantom limb syndrome until it gets back?

I think she’s talking about Brendan. Sulla’s aggreeing on the fact her dad is awesome, not that she’s meeting him at the library. Or at least, that’s how I read it.

I’m not sure if Sulla can taste anything, or not.

I think, in Chapter 2, she makes coffee or tea, with lemons. But, her drinking coffee or tea doesn’t prove that she tastes the coffee.

i think the idea is that she doesn’t really have internal plumbing at all, at least, not that’s equipped for actual food. It may have immediately started leaking into her mechanical bits as soon as she swallowed it, meaning that she may have been putting herself at serious risk by eating it.

Oh boy! That sounds delicious. Sign me up for that, now! Hee hee hee.

: )