u/wehavealwayslived

I feel like maybe there’s more to this book than meets the eye? But I don’t know. So here’s some theories, mostly just for fun.

• I’ve seen others saying this one— from about halfway through I was absolutely convinced that the narrator was Justice of Alibis. But there was no big reveal and at the end I began to doubt myself! I still think it potentially could be the case
• One of the most tantalising loose ends by the end of the book (for me) was the ancillaries the governor mentions early on — the ones who are in society blending in as humans! Did we meet or see any of them? Were any of the characters plausibly ancillaries?
• Getting a little spicier, could there have been any who didn’t know they were ancillaries? Could that be JoA’s solution to the governor’s assertion that one can “always tell” an ancillary?
• Does JoA have a collection of humans? Either as ancillaries or just as “interests”? Do they relate to the objects in the cave? 
• I really began to wonder if JoA had some kind of link to Keemat, — the strange obscuring focus on their past, the “do not question me” vision (I wondered if this was the ship talking to them without revealing its connection to them!). What if JoA planted Keemat in the Temporal Location years ago?
• If the objects in the cave represent JoA’s collection of humans, do they eat the onion because they are ‘consuming’ Keemat via sainthood?
• Leckie is playing with genre here, and I think many threads were deliberately left hanging — I’m not quite sure why. Perhaps If JoA is narrator, it explains why these threads are left? Because it has split off into multiple instances that are not unified so it doesn’t know all the endings? Or because it simply doesn’t care about the same things we do? It attends to its collection of people and ignores the rest?
• Maybe none of it is that deep lol, but I have a real “what the heck just happened” feeling. Maybe it’s just not a very complete book, but I feel like Leckie is more intentional than that. 
• Tell me your theories if you have any!