Today’s page features a Patreon “executive supporter” cameo from Tom H. C. in the form of a Council historian (and also bloodbag.) He’s not in the Who’s Who cause no one says his name, but that’s remedied on the next page.

I’m not 100% sure how assault actually works. Obviously there’s such a thing as consensual assault, or else some aspects of BDSM would be considerably more problematic. I think it probably comes down almost entirely to one party pressing charges against another, but I also imagine there are cases where the state can prosecute someone if there’s patterns of abuse and/or if someone seems to be intimidated into not pressing charges, or is deemed incapable of understanding what assault is, like a young child. In any case Sydney is currently about as informed on the topic as I am, and that’s beside the point of this page. Tom and the vamplings obviously have an arrangement here. Sydney also doesn’t know whether or not Archon has any jurisdiction here. Obviously if a werebear starts rampaging the streets and shrugging off bullets, they’d be on it, and Arianna would be spinning it as “Bear Man” or whatever, but something like this which doesn’t directly affect a member of the public, she has no idea about jurisdiction, but you can bet the Council probably has some form of internal security.

I nearly went off on a tangent in panel two with Crimson’s response to the robot question, but it crowded the panel and wasn’t satisfactory. The jist of it was that there are in fact a few robots here and there, but technically they’re considered aliens, because they’re non-terrestrial intelligence. Here on Earth we still haven’t cracked the whole A.I. thing (unless Google isn’t telling us something) not to mention the ambulatory hardware platform, at least one that looks even remotely human, and/or has more than 15 minutes of battery power. Of course A.A.I.s (Alien A.I.s) still need to be incredibly careful while on Earth because of the “paradigm shifting the technology level of the planet if they get run over by a truck and wind up on the wrong operating table and someone realizes that their patient has a quantum memory synchronizer where their left lung should be” thing.

It occurs to that as far as an AI goes, one might be satisfied touring a planet virtually, either seeing through the another aliens Google Glass or GoPro equivalent or by infiltrating traffic and cell phone cameras, since they’d be viewing the world through their eyeball cameras if they went themselves. I suppose it would depend on the nature of the AI though. Data was hardware dependent. His positronic brain evolved and formed new neural connections as he lived and learned. It’s arguable he couldn’t be downloaded into, for instance, the Enterprises main computer if his body was destroyed. (Honestly though I’m a little surprised that didn’t happen in one episode, internal consistency be damned – and yes I know he basically took over the Enterprise once via some holodeck link into the computer, but in that he was co-opting the ship’s processing power, not transferring his consciousness.)

Mass Effect 2’s Legion would be perfectly fine downloading into another hardware platform. They flat out said his intelligence as well as all the other Geths’ was cloud based, or at least distributed among them all. They’d probably be fine with virtual tourism. Even if they wanted their own autonomous platform to move about in, they could just send down one unit and a million of them could log in to poke about on Earth. (Depending on network capacity I guess) Obviously there’d need to be some sort of coordinating oversight regarding the motor controls or else the thing would move like “Twitch plays Zelda.”

Edit: Fixed a grammar error, and added the mini comic, since people have pointed out that the girls are engaged in Battery and not Assault.

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Double res version will be posted over at Patreon as soon as I get up. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like :)

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Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.