She seems to be of a similar weight to well, an organic human her age. The concern with weight was that having a human pilot and life support systems massively increase weight and without that even 80 kg robots could fly on like 20 kg of fuel.

I think it’s fair to discuss whether our robo-Al is the same person as bio-Al, but even if we want to consider them different people, that doesn’t change the fact that there are clues in the text that hint at Al being trans and closeted. I didn’t personally pick up on them my first reading, but others here in the comments section over the past few pages have made some compelling arguments and when rereading the early chapters that struck me as the most likely explanation for what was going on with Al. Even if there aredifferences between bio-Al and robo-Al, I doubt being trans originated with Sulla.

I suppose it is possible you are right, but I think that the symbolism with the ballerina was always supposed to be hinting at it, along with Al’s interest in Brendan, but not accepting things in quite the same way Brendan did, which at the time, I took to be internalized homophobia, but now, it may be because Al was not a gay man like Brendan is, but a trans woman, even if Al hadn’t quite figured that out just yet.

My previous comment got flagged for moderation because I added links, but it seems this is the same one Al was building back in the day and the one Brendan hooked up to record Al’s memory patterns.

See: Chapter 3 p10 and Chapter 5 p25. Edit: Also Chapter 5 p36-37.

Edit: Apologies for making a double post, Blue.

Clearly, the best explanation is that despite being bio-human sized, she’s actually ultralightweight and therefore the amount of thrust needed to levitate her wouldn’t disturb the papers on the ground :p

If Sulla used some of her own data to repair the damaged copy of Al, then the present copy of Al would be cross pollinated so to speak with Sulla’s own individual personality characteristics, thus the original Al might not have been proto-transsexual(???) but that element was introduced/retconned into his personality by Sulla.

All in all, The Al in the robot body is NOT the original Al, think about even the divergent differences of a biological identical twin. This is the painful truth of such a technological resurrection, you are getting a passible reproduction, but no reproduction is the same as the original that has been lost. The robot Al would also have no way to really tell how much of what he remembers is from the biological original or from Sulla’s filling in the blanks except perhaps from possible gross inconsistencies which may or may not be noticed since they are both so closely similar on a psychological level.