Why are the Zurks weak to the Defluxor and sunlight? The Defluxor is most likely UV rays which the sun also contains, and the Zurks are basically evolved bacteria. Many pathogens are easily killed by ultraviolet light, and the Zurks are no exception.
The Sentinels and their facility can easily capture and lock down robots, but aren't suited for doing the same to a cat since they're not used to seeing or even capturing cats. As such, the cat could escape its cage rather easily, disable the security systems, and even trick the Sentinels into getting locked up. The last one is quite notable proof that the jail isn't cat-proof, since the cat can freely move through the gaps in the door gate even when it's closed while the Sentinels themselves can't.
Moreover, the fact that they had cat-sized cages at their disposal implies that the Sentinels may have learned about the existence of Zurks, and were prepared to catch and contain some of them for study in the event the creatures ever got close to Midtown. Which probably would've worked fine, because Zurks are stupid and would only lunge against the bars in the direction toward potential prey - i.e. towards the cell door - never back and forth to set the cage swinging.
Speaking of the Sentinels, the ones in the Neco facility seem oddly disinterested in the boxes which the cat hides in, even if they only just chased the intruding feline until it "disappeared" into one. This may not be because they're bad at their job, but because they're specifically tasked not to damage Neco property, and the boxes in question have the company's logo printed all over them. Once the cat is inside such a box, it registers as "Neco property" to their programming.
Being a cat, this game justifies the protagonist being a Heroic Mime, and nobody bats an eye at it going most anywhere it wants. It is also justifying the cat being Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer instead of quickly trying to open the sky and saving everyone. They are a cat, after all.
The Companions routinely refer to the extinct humans as their "ancestors", not their "makers". This seems far less incongruous once the cat meets Seamus, as this encounter establishes that Companions have parent-child relationships among themselves. Presumably new Companions are constructed rather than born, but the intended parent or parents probably have a role in designing, assembling, programming, or at least commissioning the child's construction. If that's their notion of "becoming a parent", then by their definitions, the humans who commissioned, designed, assembled and programmed their distant predecessors were every bit as much a part of their "lineage" as their Companion antecedents.
The company responsible for waste disposal and, inadvertently, for the Zurks' creation is called "Neco". This name is a portmanteau of "neko" - Japanese for "cat" - and "necro": a prefix meaning "death". Perfect title for the source of Stray's opposition.
Why, given their ruthlessness toward other Companions and their ready recourse to lethal force, didn't the Sentinels simply execute the cat, B-12, and Clementine immediately upon their capture? Probably because B-12 had digitized Neco's atomic battery, giving the little drone a bargaining chip: kill his friends, and he'd erase the battery from storage, crippling Neco's operations.
In a situation broadly reminiscent of the Real Life Cordyceps fungus and its fictitious portrayal in The Last of Us, bacteria similar to the ones that became the zurk really do exist and are being evaluated for the same application: waste disposal. Now there's a vanishingly small chance that they might actually evolve into a macroscopic predatory lifeform, but it wouldn't be the first time mankind lost control of a species they were tampering with, and if something that can eat literally anything, including the stuff all our technology is made of, gets out of hand, things could get really, really ugly.
The Zurks used to be a waste-disposal bacteria Gone Horribly Right. Who's to say that the bacteria that evolved into the Zurks aren't gone? Even if they're not infectious, as waste-disposal bacteria they aren't too picky about what they can consume and grow on. The Zurks might be covered in the stuff, and if this is the case, it means our cat may be doomed if a Zurk latched onto them even once, or if they have even touched anything Zurk...
The ending where the roof is opened to allow sunlight in, thus killing the zurks,would be a purely awesome moment... But the more shadowy corners of the Slums/Dead City and the nightmarish Zurk nest in the sewers AREN'T exposed to sunlight, meaning that the zurk infestation is still a huge threat.
And now the Zurks have access to the Outside too. Sure, sunlight can kill them ... but what's to stop them spreading beyond City 99's boundaries at night?
Then again, Doc is back home, and now that he has proof his Defluxor weapon works against Zurks, he can produce more so travelers will be well-equipped.
Also, the shadowy areas close enough to the streets can be cleaned by luring most of the Zurks out and using mirrors to burn the rest. Or even simple glass sheets in place of mirrors, since ordinary glass isn't transparent to UV rays. The Sewers, however, would require a dedicated and well-equipped raid.
From the look of things, the segments of roof that retract at the end slide down into the wall. Which seems like a logical bit of engineering ... but it begs the question of whether Stray and B-12 just inadvertently squashed or hopelessly trapped Stray's family, who were living in a large gap between wall layers, of exactly the sort needed to house those withdrawing roof segments!
There's no way Stray's family would be slow enough to be caught by the roof.
The Rooftops is one of the most zurk-infested areas in the game, being almost covered in Meat Moss. It's dangerously close in proximity to the significantly safer Slums; you get to the level through the rooftops of the Slums and exit the level by riding down a bucket. If you hadn't opened the city roof and killed off the surface-dwelling zurks, who knows how much longer it would've been before the infested area started spreading to the Slums?
This isn't just a problem for the Slums. The Zurk are nearly on Antvillage's doorstep, and from there it's a short trip into Mid-Town. The Slums and Antvillage at least understand the threat they're facing; the robots in Mid-Town are completely unaware and the Sentinels likely lack the ability to adapt to such a threat. It's possible the entire city would have been overrun in just a few years time.
The cat family consists of four juveniles, no longer kittens but not yet mature adults. Their affectionate interactions and the orange fur shared by three of them implies they're littermates. What happened to their mother...? MC's fall might not be the first tragedy they've suffered.
The main Control Room is under lockdown with only humans allowed to enter. So why does it look like the room has been regularly cleaned by the nearby Helpers who are not allowed to enter?
The doors are sealed. Nothing's been able to get in, nothing's been able to get out. Dust is mostly human skin cells, so with no humans for millions of years, it's been left untouched.
Also, while no Companions are present, integrating an automated system to vacuum up dust particles and maintain low humidity into the Control Room would make sense. Those mechanisms were intended to last as long as it took for Earth's surface environment to recover, after all.
When B-12 puts its harness on the stray, it mentions that it was specifically designed for small quadrupeds like them, which raises the question: what the hell was the thing's original purpose? Why would the humans of old want their cats and dogs to carry harness-based drones around? Was it a military/police application, sort of an Animal Eye Spy kind of thing? Or just a toy fad like today's camera drones? No answer is given either way.
The way I see it, it's just regular harness that can be used to store things, not necessarily drones. It's just happened that they have technology to digitize things, so it's practically a Bag of Holding. Maybe it is a common technology that they even decide to make one for cats/dogs as well.
In the Slums where fuel would have been hard to come by, a small pack animal might have been a better investment than trying to keep a car going.
Having a tiny drone piggyback on your cat or small dog might also be a handy way to let it explore the city freely, with little risk of it getting lost, stolen or hurt. If it wanders too far, the drone would be tasked to dangle a treat in front of it to lead it home; if a threat appears, it could call for help or herd the pet away from danger.
How do you make clothes out of cable? It is probably possible using some kind of machine, but the grandma doesn't seem to have any. She is KNITTING.
The same way you knit a poncho with yarn, by creating interconnected loops of the cables that combine into a single mesh. The result would probably be more like a slightly flexible shell than cloth, but that wouldn't be as thematic.
What bothers me is that it looked exactly like cloth and functionally warm, but I guess it's Acceptable Breaks from Reality.
Another robot describes Elliot as a hypochondriac, suggesting his shivering is largely psychosomatic. As such, it wouldn't matter if the poncho didn't actually make him warmer, as long as he thought it would.
Knitting with cable might actually involve a very fine and flexible cable and they didn't say what the "cable" is made of (note that some yarns are made out of something called "acrylic") and the subject of shivering robots, well, there's a theory and some evidence that suggests that B12 wasn't the only who one uploaded themselves into a robot, except B12 actually remembers what it's like being human but the other ones forgot about it.
It's a heating element shaped like a poncho.
B-12 helpfully explains the origins of the Zurks. That being said, the step from macroscopic bacteria, to the formation of Meat Moss, to the sudden appearance of giant eyeballs in the walls isn't explained. Particularly noticeable when B-12 starts observing the giant eyeball in the sewers with such fascination that he almost disregards the cat in trouble until it's too late, yet offers no such explanation of what could have caused that. And, after the Sewers level, you never encounter them again, building up the Zurks and their sort of evolution as a major threat only to discard it about 2/3 of the way through the game with little closure as to where any of the new stuff came from.
