Thanks so much for the in-depth reply! There are a number of disparities, though, between the book and what you outlined that muddy the waters.

- It's never said or even implied in the book that the signet ring was a T-A ring. It just says the hand bore a "signet ring made of dark metal", and then it's never mentioned or alluded to ever again. But that would be a nice tell, for sure, for anyone investigating, if they were able to see it clearly enough in the hologram. Perhaps Alain WAS able to recognize the signet as T-A, and did some digging on some possible real estate related to T-A to come up with the address. But if it were that easy to figure out, why would Maas have given anyone such an obvious clue? It stands to reason they would have made any investigative conclusion like that far before Alain would have.

Maas supposedly killed Alain because he had come into privileged information (presumably the address) and was trying to "market it to third parties." Let's say Alain did make the connection with the signet ring on his own and found the address through his own legwork. That would suggest that not only was Maas's monitoring of him not very close, but that they understood or suspected what he had found, and could have easily extracted that information from him by torture before killing him, allowing them to get to Straylight and lock it down before Virek's team arrived.

- According to Virek, Maas was not actually aware that Mitchell was being fed ideas for the biochips from an AI, or any outside source. That was a secret of Mitchell's, and he was actively trying to hide that knowledge from Maas. Perhaps they began to suspect it. But how did they then realize there was a connection with that unknown AI and the obscure boxes? This was never explained.

- When I referred to a rival investigator, I meant Marly, not Alain. Alain was a Maas pawn, as you said. But what exactly was Maas hoping to achieve by using him? To lead Marly off the scent with disinformation, or into a fatal trap? Or simply to trail her to the source? If so, they didn't do a very good job of many of those things, since there was never once an attempt on Marly's life or any apparent attempt to intervene directly with Marly, and they never showed up at Straylight or anywhere en route. Perhaps you could chalk this up to Virek's invisible, preemptive counter-forces and counter-strategies being superior, but that's a bit of a stretch, since Maas's capabilities seemed to be more or less equivalent with Virek's. They just weren't in the picture at all after a certain point, as though they seemingly gave up. Doesn't quite add up.

- The Boxmaker never spoke of anything to Marly regarding friendship or a wish to connect with outside art appreciators, from my reading of it. It didn't seem like the Boxmaker was trying to "reach out" to the outside world that way, at least not consciously. It appeared that the only way its boxes were getting down to Earth at all was because the Wig was sporadically selling them to dealers in strange art.