Pavel

Pavel is a humanlike martial-arts training peripheral whose significance changes when Conner Penske remotely inhabits it: a sparring machine built to provoke becomes a borrowed body through which Conner can move. Its first appearance emphasizes its physical presence and deliberately irritating personality; its later use makes the distinction between device and person harder to keep simple, as Conner tests its hands, balance, speed, and strength against the limits of his own body.

Identity and Design

Pavel arrives at Lev Zubov’s garage as a tall figure in a dark gray suit, with pale eyes and strongly defined features. It greets Wilf Netherton by name and shakes his hand with a grip described as warm and careful. The body is more than six feet tall, with pale hair and a manner that shifts readily between composed attention and a sparring stance. Its appearance is humanlike, but its identity is that of a peripheral: a remotely operated body rather than an ordinary person present in the room.

The personality software is designed to provoke. Ossian Murphy explains that the behavior is part of Pavel’s sparring functionality, intended to make an opponent want to strike it. The training purpose is explicit, but the performance is not purely mechanical: Pavel directs a dismissive look at Ossian, raises an eyebrow at Flynne, and asks how it can be of service. Those mannerisms make the machine socially legible even as the people around it discuss switching off its personality AI before someone else uses it.

From Sparring Partner to Conner’s Peripheral

Before Conner’s arrival, Ash tells Pavel to go into the back cabin, lie down, and notify the factory that they will not need the cloud. Flynne follows Ash to the room, where Pavel is lying on a bunk with its ankles extending beyond the end. At Ash’s instruction, it closes its eyes. The scene marks a change in use: Pavel is no longer simply the training unit Ossian describes, but the prepared receiving body for a new operator.

When Ash signals the connection, Pavel’s eyes open and it immediately examines its large hands, moving its fingers and touching each thumb to the fingers in turn. It sits up and gets to its feet with quick, springlike movement. Flynne identifies the person now controlling it as Conner, who confirms that he knows her. He recognizes Ash from a prior, drug-associated experience, but the scene’s central recognition is physical: Conner can see and move through Pavel’s hands.

Flynne introduces Conner to Ash, Ossian, and Netherton as her brother’s former Marine comrade. Conner does not treat the peripheral as an abstract technical demonstration. He looks at his hands again, then asks whether the place is a boat or dry dock; Flynne tells him it is a large recreational vehicle. At the window, he looks out and says that he wants to get out. His first sustained use of Pavel is not a controlled sparring exercise but an impulsive test of freedom of movement.

Movement, Risk, and Return

Conner opens the door, vaults over the railing rather than using the gangway, drops to the garage floor, and runs down the line of cars in Lev’s father’s collection. As he passes beneath the garage’s long arches, their lights come on and fade behind him. Flynne follows his movement through the space; the episode makes Pavel’s capacity concrete in distance, speed, and bodily coordination rather than technical explanation. Conner’s running is at once a practical test of the peripheral and a personal experience of movement he cannot take for granted.

He later returns to the cabin and reports that he may have dislocated a finger, while judging the rest of the body more than satisfactory. The contrast matters: Pavel’s capacities are exhilarating, but the experience is not risk-free, and the remote body’s physical consequences still require attention. Ash brings out a Medici for him. When Flynne says she does not know whether any of them are all right, Conner responds that the injury made the reality of the experience clear to him: he could have broken Pavel’s neck if he had not been careful.

Ash explains that Pavel is genetically human for the most part and should be treated as human, while also stating that it is valuable property borrowed for Conner’s presence. The two descriptions remain side by side rather than resolving into one category. Pavel is a training unit, an engineered and borrowed asset, and the body in which Conner can act; the scene’s ethical and practical tension follows from that overlap.

Ownership, Training, and Narrative Significance

Pavel belongs to a friend’s brother and is optimized for martial arts. Netherton identifies it as a training unit, and Flynne’s caution before the transfer anticipates the strength of Conner’s reaction: she tells Ash and the others to give him room if he becomes excited. The borrowed machine therefore sits at the intersection of several purposes—training, remote embodiment, and an improvised response to Conner’s situation—without ceasing to be someone else’s property.

The episode also distinguishes Pavel’s programmed behavior from Conner’s use of its body. Its provoking personality belongs to the sparring design; the hands it studies and the run through the garage belong to the person connected to it. After Conner runs, the training unit returns to the room with a possible finger injury and a new operator’s account of what its body can do. Pavel’s narrative importance lies in that transfer: technology becomes neither a mere controller nor a simple replacement body, but a contested interface where engineered capacity, human agency, ownership, and physical risk meet.