👽 Miller Legacy 🛸

I actually don't remember the first time the definition "collectivist society" came up, was it in a chapter or here in the comments? They clearly weren't individualistic, but the way they were collectivistic could need some context.
Toq's situation was actually quite different from a collectivist society where people do things for the good of society purely out of a sense of duty, or where people genuinely cared about averyone else. He and the other ancient sixamians were actually receiving orders from the older sixamians, the ones not sharing a single gene with humans, for all the time. The original sixamians were actually aiming to the survival of their species and so their orders actually went in the direction of helping their society, but Toq and the others were just executors never really learnt how to make decisions for themselves. In other words, they didn't behave a certain way because that was what the local ethics said, but because that was the order to execute at that given time.
Most of the ancient sixamians, like Arizhel, once on Earth kept following the last orders they were given (i.e. look for resources, make it possible for sixamians to live on Earth for the time being), while Toq instead was the first one learning some vague ideas about the earthling lifestyle and ended up drifting away from his peers as he tried more and more to experience the way of living of the locals. Antaan was the real outliner there, somehow he seemed to know enough about the earthlings already before arriving there and managed to find his sweet spot quite quickly.

However, back to Toq, there was a line in a previous draft of the last chapter that I think to have deleted in the posted version to replace it with other details, in which Toq actually complained about his difficulties in understanding free will and the process of making choices by himself. Being told (in words or with telepathy) that he's wrong all the time was not really helpful to him either.
So that he grew up only following orders, he never really learnt to be propositive and to take the initiative before (and he also struggles a lot to openly say "no", actually), and up to now the main choice he took after a significant amount of thinking was the one of moving away from the other ancient sixamians and to find a new job (to us it probably sounds like a relatively easy choice to take, but for him it was quite scary already). He has still quite a lot to sort out on this side, actually.

Before getting to way he didn't return back to Cassy then, there is also probably another point to cover, which is: back on Sixam, the sixamians used to assign tasks to the most capable person to deliver it. So, for him to return back to Cassy would have meant to "volunteer" himself for a task he knew not to be very capable of, while taking a big life-changing decision (which is something he's still learning how to do, even after years), and it would also have been quite scary for him because he's starting to understand many nuances of why Cassy would hate him at this point and he knew that a confrontation with her would have resulted in a situation hard to handle for him. Forgiveness is another human prerogative he still struggles a bit to understand, so he saw the chances to be forgiven as almost negligible.

In conclusion to this disordered essay, is Toq quite messed up? Quite clearly yes, he still has a lot of things to understand, overcome and sort out, he's still a quite troubled person in general, and this reflects in a few (apparent) contradictions in his choices and his behaviour.
Will Cassy decide to keep around her and Sirio such a messy person who still struggles so much to adapt to their way of living? That's a question for another chapter...