And there's the third of our main trio, making his appearance.
Meanwhile in the bottom panel, the patchwork character to the right is a Level 3 AI (average human level) -- abandoned AIs are even further down the totem pole than rats.
In the first draft, a much larger, more dangerous version of that AI would have been a leader in early group battle between two groups of scavengers for the medical pod...but that didn't flow well and would have unnecessarily introduced too many minor (if that) characters early on.