Grrl Power #1237 – Sob story
This page made me sad. Poor Lapha.
If you’re wondering how she went from flame thing hovering in a circular thing to guttersnipe, well, eventually someone went to check on her parents and found her. She was given a children’s starter body (Aetholiths don’t mentally start as infants, but it depends on how their parents’ initialize their starting configuration.) And then she was put in “the system,” with which she had mixed experiences, like a lot of kids. From there it’s the usual story, in and out of homes, time spent scrounging on her own, eventually tracked down by a relative of one of the parents who ultimately resented Lapha for the death of said parent, tries to get grabby with teenage her in some twisted “no free lunches” lesson, she fends him off with a pipe-wrench, winds up on the run with a record, blah blah blah, gets a job on a spaceship, travels the galaxy, learns all about smuggling contraband and altering inventory records, gets away with minor larceny 4 times out of 5, on the run again, falls in as the chef and assistant quartermaster for some mercenaries, etc.
The new vote incentive is up! This is a bit of a weird one as it’s a character that hasn’t appeared in the comic.
It’s my Ifrit Pathfinder 1e monk, Fray! Ifrits don’t really make great monks in Pathfinder, as player characters they get a +2 to Dex and Cha, but -2 to Wis. For monks, Dex is good, Cha is largely irrelevant, but Wis is important as it can add to your AC and also has something to do with Ki points I think. But I didn’t care. I wanted a character with dark blue/gray skin and glowing orange hair, so that’s what I picked. (I don’t think Ifrit even really have dark skin, so maybe she’s 1/4 Drow? Don’t care. I think she looks cool.) Will she show up in the comic? I mean… maybe? Probably in a Dabbler flashback, but who knows?
As usual, Patreon has her in delicto flagrante.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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Good spot of writing right there
I agree with you
yup :)
Jesus, that’s a pretty fucked up origin story; you didn’t have to go that hard dude! You even gave her a little tear!
And I’m guessing it’s fake too.
After all, she’s in Halo’s head… It wouldn’t be that hard to make a sob story tailored to the host, now would it?
We don’t know enough about Lapha’s race to say whether it could be fake or not. Can they fake memories if their host has access to all their memories? Could she have deliberately had herself implanted with fake memories in order to fool people into having sympathy for her? Can a race of magical AIs have their memories changed in the first place? We just don’t know yet.
Everyone has an imagination. The challenge is showing that memory or a thought instead of actual memory. It’s likely possible to make one more prominent than the other though Sydney should be able to dig through and scrutinise the memory if she realises. There is likely genre savvyness applicable is remembers the right reading material that’s relevant.
It’s not fake. Sydney can see all of Lapha’s memories in the same way Lapha can see all of Sydney’s memories. If Lapha was capable of faking her memories, she would have faked that she was still Tenri and not given away that she was Lapha.
Max seems unimpressed….
Max is tired.
Being the HMFIC does that to you, when you have a functioning moral compass.
She’s presently debating what the best course is with this situation. I don’t doubt they can get Lapha out of Sydney w/o problems, but the what to do next bit is probably giving her headaches. The easy – and imo correct – action would be to snuff her. But “correct” in this case isn’t “right,” and I’m pretty sure I already mentioned Max’s functioning moral compass.
So what’s probably going to happen is Lapha getting stuck in a metaphorical jar, and given the option to do hard equations in exchange for recreational privileges.
What I’d _like_ to see happen is her getting the option of a factory reset, which is still fairly analogous to getting one’s ticket punched, but leaves a lot of doors open for her future, and taxes neither Archon’s ongoing budget, nor Maxima’s moral character.
Hell, I can see Halo talking Mom & Dad into fostering a wiped Lapha in order to provide that stable, middle-class life that helps to prevent criminality in the future.
Mindwiping or murdering someone for being mildly inconvenient is pretty fucking sociopathic
She is also an alien mercenary terrorist who knows many state secrets. That gets you a mandatory place in a black side, at least until the secrets are declassified.
So, that makes murdering her in cold blood justified?
Justified? Not really. Practical? … Unfortunately yes. If the knowledge she has spreads, Earth is basically done for. I’m not much for the ‘greater good’ shtick, but when it’s one alien body thieving merc versus the safety of the rest of the planet… Well, it’s not ‘just’, but it’s hard to say it’s purely the wrong thing to do, either.
Are there no prisons?
Prisons are for people you anticipate getting out at some point.
I don’t know if even I can foresee a likely future where Lapha getting out isn’t an active threat to planetary safety. Not without agreeing to a refresh first.
Deleting almost everything between being found after her parents snuffed it, and the specific memory of “I tried kidnapping and other crimes, and this was the option I took,” should preserve her core identity, and hooking her up with good parents on Earth is about the only alternative that I can get behind.
She is a mercenary. One possible non-killing solution is to pay her to work for Archon instead.
It wouldn’t even be the first time they did something where they had a former attacker work for them.
Jabberwokky.
Detla.
Jabbers was arguably operating under outside influence, thanks to Kevin.
Detla has apparently worked some arrangement to get her freedom after New York probably through the auspices of everyone’s favorite blue space adventurer. Whatever the case, she essentially surrendered herself at Archon after the smoke cleared, and given Lapha’s demonstrated character to this point, I for one am prepared to accept the notion she was essentially recruited under false pretenses.
Now, as for The Bitch, Herself…
Unlike Goon Squad (we don’t need to relitigate his status & plausible deniability again), Lapha here has demonstrated herself a singular individual who is very definitely possessed of guilty intent, utterly self-serving, remorseless, willing to victimize uninvolved civilians (Tenri), and to manipulate others into dubious or outright criminal action (the Demon High Gang) in order to get what she wants.
Honestly, she’d be a perfectly ordinary Head of State, if she bothered to get into politics. -_-‘
And on top of all that, she’s now possessed of variously classified information that would likely be worth more to certain extraterrestrial parties than what Uncle Sugar could offer to keep her ‘on side.’
On top of that, her potential as an information/technology warfare specialist not only doesn’t seem especially superior to what Archon already has available, and could very probably provide her the opportunity to slip away.
Consequently, buying her off isn’t an option. Too much risk for too little gain.
The only viable choices are reset with supervised release, or retirement. Either way, the Lapha we know & loathe is going to ease to exist. Not a happy scenario.
Jabberwokky was a criminal even before the ‘outside influence’ of Vehemence though. She had a history of beating up cops and robbing banks and whatnot.
My point is Archon has a history of paying or otherwise getting people who would normally be criminals or enemies to work FOR them instead, if that’s a viable possibility for certain people.
She’s in the middle of committing a crime that could have serious consequences for Sydney and the world. Don’t forget that Sydney still having any control is a fluke, and there is no guarantee that Sydney will stay in control. So yes, killing would be justified.
Sydney still having control is not a ‘fluke’, Aetholiths (Laph in particular, as per Word of The Dave) do not control the body if someone is already in it, they just hitch a ride
She’s currently holding a Federal Officer hostage. Killing Laphra in this situation is 100% justified. It’s just the practical issue of killing her without killing Sydney in the process that’s the problem. Dabbler is outside, so she’s probably got an idea or 3…. thousand.
well that might be too late since all of the succubi fan group heard it.
and they probably have social media they have no chance of blocking.
so that secret is out.
Tom might even be the first to hear about it.
She has been caught using computerish tech to hack the brain of someone with classified national security knowledge. I think classing her as a spy caught red handed is very apt.
You do realize that she was trying to kidnap either Max or Sydney and that they were going to be taken away to be “studied”. Do you really think either one of them was expected to make it out of that alive? No, she knew that they were going to die at the end so no matter how sad her back story is, she is a cold blooded killer. Killing by proxy is still killing.
She is a being from another planet that decided to come to a foreign world to body snatch and steal high level secrets and then kill her stolen target at the end. THAT is sociopathic, dealing with that is what governments and leaders do, she is not “mildly inconvenient” she is a murdering criminal that should get what she deserves, sad story or no, she made her choices.
She might be a bad person but the good guys being just as bad to her wouldn’t be right either? I feel like this argument needs a bit more nuance.
This ^
They wouldn’t be just as bad – they’d be imprisoning her for crimes she did against other people.
They wouldn’t be trying to kidnap and get tortured and murderered someone innocent.
She has made multiple attempts to kidnap and sell people for money. Her utter incompetence at the act does not diminish the gravity of her crimes. Even the most just legal systems would conclude it not unreasonable to imprison her for a very long time, possibly the rest of her natural life. And many moral, ethical and legal systems would argue execution to be a kinder punishment than life imprisonment.
Lapha having a tragic upbringing and incompetence doesn’t buy her the nuance to get away with human trafficking with little more than a slap on the wrist.
That puts human moral compass on an alien species. The demons don’t have the same moral compass at all, and they’re not being locked up as the criminals they seem to be.
Doesn’t matter. She is in US jurisdiction, so US laws apply. You don’t get “my culture says it’s ok, so it’s legal” exceptions.
Conservative Christians seem to.
HAH! *applauds*
Goes back to, they let the demons get away with things.
Who has she actually killed?
She could get reduced sentence due to merely attempted kidnapping, murder, torture, illegal experimentation, and enslavement and conspiracy to commit such crimes rather than succesful attempt.
But yes, attempting and failing to kidnap, kill or do a bunch of similar stuff to people is still illegal even if you are bad at it.
Where has it been shown that she has actually done any of those? The only thing she has been shown to actually have attempted, was kidnapping, and that was stopped, anything beyond that is speculation and slander
Attempted isn’t a crime: Jaywalking is a crime, attempted jaywalking is not
Attempted murder is absolutely a crime, and generally considered worse than accidental harm. Intent matters.
Yeah, there’s a reason spycraft exsists. But it’s really morally ambiguous at best. I remember a scifi story that has the ‘morality’ to implant people with subconscious triggers that give them fainting spells that escalate to brain aneurysm if they talk about the secerts. Spend the rest is their lives with health issues, but they are trusted to live an otherwise free and peaceful life.
We live in a pretty sociopathic culture these days.
“murdering someone for being mildly inconvenient is pretty fucking sociopathic”
on the other hand EXECUTING someone for REPEATED and well documented attempts at SLAVE TRADING is perfectly legitimate. One could argue it is the moral choice given how evil the slave trade is and the need to disincentivize such things with EXTREME PREJUDICE! I’ve read enough history on the slave trade that if a slave trader catches a bullet to the head in the course of doing their business I’m just going to laugh and say good riddance, no matter how sad their sob story is.
slave trading is essentially piracy, which still carries the death penalty under international law if I recall correctly. A good sob story might get you leniency in sentencing if you surrender though.
Two kidnapping attempts – of Military personnel, no less – plus at least one other confirmed case of assault and what amounts to vehicle theft, fleeing authorities, conspiracy to kidnapping, what now amounts to espionage…
These are not “minor inconveniences.”
The only reason I say that deleting her is “correct,” is because she is such a fantastically dangerous security breach.
As for the Demon High posse…it doesn’t seem likely that they were parties to this action, beyond probably being dupes. I strongly suspect Dabbler can zonk their memories by some means, or failing that, acquire the direct intervention of someone who can, yesimlookingatyousilouetteofDabblerandParfait’smomcoughcough.
Massive threat to leak info that is supposed to be restricted and is potentially extremely dangerous if leaked, potentially already spilled info on Nth tech that could have beyond destructive results if galactic government is anything vaguely similar to governments in general, currently holding a hostage, has previously attempted to take hostages that would then be sold into slavery, think it’s fair to say assault and kidnapping to get the body used to get into the current mess. There are plenty of characters throughout fiction that have died for less. Not to mention that this is being accomplished by body-jacking the victim which is an incredible violation of the individual stacked on top of forced access to their memories and further dumping their own memories into the victim. Not really feeling bad for this character since they made their choices and chose to further do things that I would argue should be considered despicable violations of the victim. I think that deletion is pretty fair trade for such a list of crimes. Bout the only thing not done is murder and reaching for the blasting orb first indicates a willingness to severely harm if not outright kill on top of everything else. The only likely hope Laptha should have is that Archon is hard dedicated to not killing people unless it is the only possible option which to be fair they have seemingly leaned towards.
Maxi isn’t unimpressed, she knows what Sydney is like and she knows her offer is genuine, which just makes gtting Laph out and punishing her that much harder
Heck, even Dabbles was affected, look at her ear droop
Max isn’t experiencing the memories live.
Well, to be fair, she didn’t get a first hand experience of that trauma as if she’d just experienced it herself. She only knows what’s being said out loud.
well Lapha is basically mind controlling / psychically burdening sydney with sadness.
also the longer lapha gets to be with sydney the potentially harder the aftermath will be.
It’s a pretty bad justification for trying to enslave her friend, so I’m not surprised.
Awe :(
The bodies drooling really sets the uncanny aspect of their existence here.. the bodies have biological functions. So her poor parents glitches into oblivion and then the bodies likely wasted away :(
Despite feeling sad, my emphasis is limited: Two wrongs don’t make a right … ‘oh, bad things happened to me, so I can do bad things in return’ just does not fly. It explanins why you need therapy and you should be entitled to that but it does not justify doing bad things in return. Try 3 lefts though, those make a right!
(Maybe I am old, jaded and cynical, but I get Maxima’s sigh more than Sydney’s reaction – good writing!)
Indeed. If everyone with a tragic backstory went that way, the world would be an even nastier place by far. I am totally with Max on this.
Maybe societies should create a better set of conditions in the interest of eliminating – or at least mitigating – the prevalence of tragic backstories which are statistically shown to result in villainy. -_-
Oh, hey, who left this very apt metaphorical commentary on modern America lying out in the open where people who are deliberately trying to ignore it can trip over it?
You mean everyone. It turns out that people tend to be really uncharitable when said compassion impacts their quality of life directly.
Well yeah, if you aren’t in a position to help or if you have to put yourself in the gutter to do so then there’s no point. It would be the equivalent of trying to rescue someone and becoming a casualty yourself.
Not going to diss on self-preservation
interestingly enough, those who have very little tend to be the ones most ready to give it all away. maybe the solution is to make everyone poor!
I think getting rid of social engineers like you would do much more good for the world than making everyone poor.
Will you include all social engineers in that? Advertisers, economists, influencers, politicians, etc. etc. etc.
I beg to differ. I think there are plenty of people with means that are also generous but the impacts on themselves are not drastically detrimental they are also in positions to raise help/fund/work instead of just giving their personal wealth.
The consequences are just more apparent for those who have less amd give it all away. It’s easier to do for them.
The reason people who have very little are usually ready to give help to others, is because when you’re part of a group that has very little, or lives in a very harsh environment, you have to sometimes depend on the goodwill and charity of others. And therefore you’re very aware that they sometimes have to depend on you as well, so you are damn well ready to extend a little goodwill and charity when they need it.
People don’t usually think of it in these terms, but people who aren’t willing to help someone in need, don’t tend to survive extended poverty or isolation among folks who think the same way as themselves. So on some level they are being careful about what culture of goodwill and charity they contribute to keeping alive in their community.
“Generosity is the Poor Man’s insurance policy.”
because its a trope now. now that eating is a luxury in USA, complaining about the situation has become the thing to do.
Where the heck are you living in the USA where eating is a luxury? Every single other country I’ve ever been in had more expensive food than literally ANY of the places I’ve visited in the USA.
Have you stepped foot in a grocery store lately? Grocery prices are fucking insane, and they’re only getting worse.
Curious if you were looking at the system as abstractly as a simulation, which would you choose?
1) if you made a food stamps equivalent a general Citizen subsidy situation dropping farm subsidies allowing market production to meet the cost if your country would export less food from a market perspective increasing food prices in the rest of the world, but allowing Voters to comfortably acquire required nutrition in fast packaging allowing optimal productivity for other sectors.
2) Subsidize food production to the point it is minimal cost to acquire farm property and required production materials, put out public studies that offer insight into optimal best practices and methods, and regulate quality production and process manufacturing then allow optimized production to sell cheaper food internationally which adds export value, and makes you needed by others who you supply premium and trusted food to.
3) Find the economic best balance for optimal numeric results academically.
4) Find the political balance, to get an immediate boost to your politicians re-elections. (Too often contrary to 3)
Price of food is irrelevant on its own. All prices are meaningless numbers without the context of how much money people have and earn. If there are many people who cannot regularly afford to eat, or have to choose between eating and some other basic necessity, then eating does begin to look like a “luxury”.
Groceries have been at about double the rate of general inflation in the US for … about five years now, I think?
Anyway, we’re now paying almost the same prices as other countries (measured in percentage of income) for our food.
“Maybe societies should create a better set of conditions in the interest of eliminating – or at least mitigating – the prevalence of tragic backstories”
we HAVE. its called freedom and human rights. thats what we have in the USA and any other country that followed the reforms of the usa. Anyone in the USA that works hard and makes good choices can expect with a HIGH degree if certainty that they can improve their life to the point of being reasonably comfortable. for example 97% of people get out of poverty who do 3 simple things. graduate high school, get any job, and get married before you have any kids.
freedom, democracy and free markets (also called capitalism) have created the best results for the greatest numbers of any system in world history. Marxism in all its forms such as socialism, communism, and fascism are the record holders for creating the most mysery and suffering such as concentration camps, death camps and gulags.
The fact that you think fascism is a subset of Marxism is… cute, really.
Furthermore, the best outcomes by almost any measure other than ‘number of billionaires’ are actually achieved in societies that are best described as Democratic Socialist–that is to say, non-totalitarian societies that still recognize the need to implement basic safeguards for the general welfare, rather than just an endless lassez-faire approach to business regulation and the economy.
This description fits several countries in Europe, and they all beat the stuffing out of the U.S. on a host of metrics. But hey, you keep on strokin’ it to that picture of Ayn Rand.
funny that. socialist policies are in fact what has helped to reduce tragic backstories, far more than capitalism. Capitalism creates far more, and said socialist policies that are designed to help the poor and needy are a bandaid that only mitigates the symptoms of late stage capitalism.
> we HAVE. its called freedom and human rights. thats what we have in the USA and any other country that followed the reforms of the usa. Anyone in the USA that works hard and makes good choices can expect with a HIGH degree if certainty that they can improve their life to the point of being reasonably comfortable. for example 97% of people get out of poverty who do 3 simple things. graduate high school, get any job, and get married before you have any kids.
Tell me you’re a Ben Shapiro fanboi without telling me you’re a Ben Shapiro fanboi. Those are direct quotes, which leads me to believe that you haven’t actually done the research and are instead parroting.
I was wondering why those claims sounded like pure bullshit, that explains it. I mean, if that claim of theirs were true, about 97% of people getting out of poverty, then why are there so many people in poverty in the US, who have done all 3 of those. In fact, there are many jobs that pay at or below poverty level.
its imposible to eliminate all suffering and “my parents died when i was born because of bad luck and the relative that took me tried to abuse me, i killed him and that forced me to run away from the authorities” doesnt sound like something that can really be avoided it was just bad luck, we try to reduce systemic abuses and “sad backstories” as much as we feasibly can but you cant manage everything
Sydney recalled it with perfect clarity, humans don’t usually experience that.
That said Sydney you need to use her memories to obtain a full understanding of this operation and report it to Max.
Max has always been the more cynical of the two. Not stated as a bad thing, Syd’s a pie-in-the-sky idealist (since she can fly, that pie is totally gonna be hers). Syd is the sort who will instantly empathize with the villain, whereas Max will require some… convincing. Sometimes that works well for Syd (like with Concretia), but there’s a reason Syd’s on the side of the one-way mirror that she is…
Also, last panel Dabs def still hung-over, you can tell by the feelers.
What reason is that, exactly?
Some sort of moral or ethical failure that caused her to be targeted by a possessing demon? Or maybe if she was more “tough on crime” she would’ve somehow known that Tenri’s body was being piloted by Lapha & not been targeted?
Please, explain it to me like I am a small child, why it’s bad to treat people – even “bad” people – with dignity, compassion, and respect.
Alright, we can do this.
One can treat criminal people with dignity, compassion and respect without giving them carte blanche forgiveness for their transgressions.
But words like respect have several subtle meanings that can impact the context of the situation which do make them really sloppy to use. Like in this case they seem to respect the ability Lapha has to control another, although obviously not enough considering there are supers behind the other side of that glass. Right now they should be in the next building over and Concretia or whatever her name is should be on deck. Because right now they are making the same mistake Syd did in being too trusting. Which would be the “bad” thing, I guess.
And to imply being too trusting is somehow the same thing as treating people with dignity, compassion and respect is cognitively dishonest. Because anyone who did not have their guard up sufficiently would have been a viable target of Lapha, and that would have included people who were disrespectful and full on asshats.
Lapha for lack of a better term is a predator. She hunts those whom she feels are vulnerable enough to exploit. That has literally been every encounter we have had with her thus far, save for one dubious exception when she got lizard dude to save her life.
Part of why we have so many visceral reactions to sex crimes, and crimes against those who are less able to take care of themself, and those who betray confidence such as snitches and scam artists is because we do live in a society that has many unspoken rules.
And as a rule, one should always be careful of those who try to get you to put your guard down, as they tend to be the ones who have an interest in exploiting you.
That’s more, why it’s problematic to sympathise with Lapha without keeping in mind her crimes/ruthlessness, rather than why she isn’t being trusted to be on the other side of the screen.
But regardless she’s probably just on the other side of the screen because they want to get a better gauge of Lapha, Lapha is definitely bringing up her very real tragic backstory for a purpose now that she knows she’s been taken into custody but it doesn’t negate that she was failed by the system anymore than Sydney’s sympathy for her negates the fact she’s a very competent operative and her idealism has never actually endangered anyone besides herself. And even then, it’s not like she’d let her body be used to commit crimes/hurt people/to be taken to someone to experiment on, or that max and the others would let that happen, her offer is in fact very conditional even if its based in empathy.
tl;dr – you didn’t address the point I actually raised.
How would Sidney acting like a typical “tough on crime” pig have prevented this?
Well, I suppose that if she’d just started with the cop s.o.p. of killing them first & asking questions later, that would have done the trick. Seems bad, tho.
I didn’t give a reason. I’m just stating that Syd and Max have different moral outlooks, which leads them to deal with criminals differently. I’m not a moral absolutist, neither of their positions are wrong. In fact, I think they work well together BECAUSE their approaches are different.
I’m not going to talk down to you, Bharda, you seem intelligent, if a tad belligerent. Personally, I tend to agree with Syd, and treat criminals like people (Syd occasionally fails at ‘dignity’ and ‘respect’, but she’s good with ‘compassion’).
No, Dabbles’ ears and Maxi’s sighs are connected (can you figure it out on your own? do you need it spoken in Spanish by an underage psychotic loon who talks to a monkey wearing shoes?)
you leave the Monkey King and/or Goku out of this.
When did Monkey King speak Spanish? Or wear red footwear?
Syd was pretty worried when she came into Archon…remember her being worried about being whisked away to a government facility for “testing”. Then she blabbed about having to have hand contact and mittens being her Kryptonite. What if she’s more devious than she lets on. Remember, her world view is heavily based on comics (Evil government/business/criminal organization but I repeat myself).
Government locks me up, I drop the hand operated act and bust out.
This might have been a valid story point IF she had not used her hands when her life was genuinely threatened and no one was around (i.e. her shield with the Kaiju beasts, or the shield with PPO/air generator/fly she was using against the alien ships). From this we know that this limitation is in fact a thing, and retconning it now would seriously ruin continuity.
The thing with Sydney’s reaction is that human minds are not set up to reject internal emotional experiences and rationalizations. It’s kinda even biased toward preferring those over anything external.
In this case, though, it’s unlikely to be an actual problem. It doesn’t seem like Lapha is far enough away from human-adjacent ways of experiencing emotions to be unaffected by the same phenomena – and generally, if you sit inside someone’s head you tend to start empathizing and liking said person, barring extreme amoral behavior. So, the two of them seem likely to rapidly become close friends.
Where secrets of the magnitude of nth tech are involved, (and btw there’s a group of demons that can also compromise that secret now) The question is less of what’s right, and more a question of who’s left. When this is all over, it is virtually certain that some people will be dead. Maxima would go for “zero” if she could, but attempting to not be the taker of life in the short run could easily lead to massive amounts of death in the slightly longer run, EG when Earth is overrun with desperate Alien treasure hunters, bounty hunters, and inevitably an inevitable invasion force.
It is the way of the warrior to be willing to take life, or sacrifice one’s own life, to preserve the lives of others. Maxima’s moral compass is (A) as few deaths as possible in the *LONG* run, which may require her to kill people right now, (B) when push comes to shove, preserving human lives count more, and (C) if *that* push comes to shove, lives of people good for the interests of the USA count more than that.
It’s a hard damn choice, but sometimes when all the options are bad, she has to pick one anyway. That’s what being a Commanding Officer is like.
> when Earth is overrun with desperate Alien treasure hunters, bounty hunters, and inevitably an inevitable invasion force.
Remember that Earth fought off a Fel invasion with what? 5 people? And the galaxy at large knows that.
The Alari planet-wreckers god bodied by a single earthling.
And now they’ve got Nth tech in the open?
There’s no alien invasions coming for the earth. Nothing stupid enough to try that could learn to fly a spaceship.
some would likely try, earth managed to fight back one fell battleship and no one knows what Sydney did in alari prime (other than lapha most likely)
if the secret of earth having easily accesible Nth tech gets out you can bet your ass that there are going to be more than a couple of interested parties in the galactic scene willing to throw the resources required to hire mercenaries with little sence of self preservation (we already know that to be the case since they already got hired to try to kidnap maxima) or worse some of the big guys like the xevoarchy or the wider fel decides that they can overpower earths defenders with enough mass, so instead of a single fell battleship you have an armada, instead of mercenaries you have a fleet of xevoarchy ships each with enough firepower to reduce a continent to dust
for earths sake is better if the galactic community remains unaware of what earth has until we have successfully reverse engineered enough of their technology to at least stand in technological parity to not fully depend on our supers to defend the planet
^ This!
According to Cora the orbs could be worth more monetarily than the whole earth. So Sydney should probably be hidden in the vault miles underground where that super with earth moving powers keeps his Olympic swimming pool full of gold.
> so instead of a single fell battleship you have an armada
Max would have fun that day, and Syd would no longer feel left out.
> instead of mercenaries you have a fleet of xevoarchy ships each with enough firepower to reduce a continent to dust
And Syd pops over to some xevoarchy senator’s house (or fracture station) and says “hi, you want to call off the invasion” while pointing the PPO at something important, like the senator’s face.
> for earths sake is better if the galactic community remains unaware of what earth has
That ship sailed long ago.
I mean they can take out singular powerful battleships – but we’ve yet to see any example of them being able to handle a grey goo scenario or a self-replicating converter fleet that turned the mass of a small planet into a swarm of small self-replicating craft that is unleashed on the entire solar system simultaneously (von neumann berserker swarm).
And that’s so low tech that it’s only just outside our grasp today.
Basically all of them can only be at one place at a time and not even together can they cover the entire surface of the earth let alone the entire solar system at once even if they can trivially obliterate every drone within kilometers every tenth of a second.
Very few things beat a low tech self-replicating drone swarm other than an opposing self-replicating drone swarm of bigger size or higher tech, especially if you add FTL-capability to it. Even planet and star-busting superweapons struggle against them because a few can easily escape and convert another solar systems worth of raw materials within a few decades (maybe just a few months with FTL, most of the time lag is travel time).
Lapha’s parents were dumb. If you know there’s a risk of you dying to create your child, you have a friend or other family present or some sort of back up for when/if the worst happens. Dumb.
That’s like blaming a woman for her own death if she was giving birth.
I mean only if giving birth was more like carefully assembling an IKEA project out of copies of your own brain together that for some reason had a chance of scrambling your brains? It almost seems like you would pretty quickly get a law about necessary safety precautions – though that might only kick in with more than 2 participants. With only two participants it might be seen as slipping and falling in the shower.
We’re also not sure if they could have been recovered if someone found them in time and could stop whatever feedback loop they got stuck in or fix whatever data had been corrupted beyond the ability of redundant self-fixing algorithms (or maybe they’re created without such redundancies because they’re an old and obsolete AI project that now only continues existing because not everyone in that population is willing to update to a more reliable format). If it was a state that could be fixed with swift medical attention it would definitely have been cause for some kind of alert system, but as we see with Lapha they’re about as rational as a human about risks and safety precautions and planning things out in advance despite their artificial origin.
Have you ever seen an AI plan something out that it was not explicitly asked to?
There were some recent tests with the strategic capabilities of current LLM. “Nuke everything” is a valid option to “How to end this war quickly” if no regard for consequences is defined.
Reeeeeaaally need to train these system on Wargames, before we turn them loose on military assets.
“The only winning move is not to play.”
We could call it “The Broderick Test.”
Whenever someone gives you two options, pick option three. No option three? Then make one! It is almost guaranteed to be betterer than either of the other options
Kobayashi Maru.
You must accept the existence of the no-win scenario. To do otherwise is to remain a child.
Then may we remain children, ever reaching for a better future, despite what the adults claim is the irrefutable reality.
This is mischaracterization of what “no win scenario” means.
It does not mean that “a better future isn’t possible.”
It means, “a given conflict may have no morally and/or ethically satisfactory resolution under the circumstances.” And I really want to emphasize the “may,” in that sentence, because I am all too familiar with the propensity of certain parties to hide their apathy or other motive for inaction or selfishness behind “lesser evil” arguments, or appeals to the “no-win scenario.”
But to be an adult, you have to come to grips with failure, and loss.
I… don’t believe in… the no win scenario… there’s ALWAYS… a… CHANCE
Kirk failed.
Is inability to accept the reality of “I can fail” is a character flaw, not a virtue.
Kirk didn’t fail. He reprogrammed the simulation so he would win. Got a commendation for original thinking. :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6H8MZf5SZM
The people who feel Kirk failed, are the ones who can only believe in a two-option system: they can’t even see how they fail when they only have that sort of mindset
Another, much older example: Alexander and the Gordian Knot, he chose the option no one even imagined. Before him, the only known option was to attempt to untie the knot
He took Yoda’s Creed and said “Fuck you, you little green frog, here’s another way!”
@Pander: You don’t get to change the rules in “real life.” You have to play the hand you’re dealt.
@Guesticules: Alexander demonstrated lateral thinking, recognizing that there was no particular rule that prevented him from severing the knot, but in the larger context, he still operated with the circumstances he was given. He didn’t change the parameters of the scenario to suit him.
Also, for the record, the correct course in the Kobayashi Maru scenario is to preserve your own vessel.
Once you know that attempting the rescue will trigger the inescapable loss of your own vessel & crew, your responsibility as captain is to protect your own crew, and preserve your ship.
@Bharda:
Sure you can change the rules in ‘real life.’ For example, the reason I can’t stand ‘trolly problems’ is because they’re so unrealistic, and in real life you have MANY opportunities to do third, fourth, fifth and more choice before you get to an absolute one or the other choice. In real life, the idea of having only two options tends to mean you squandered a lot of other viable options or you have not given the problem enough thought to realize there could be another choice where, even if its not a complete win, it’s at least not a total loss. And if you’re really imaginative, you can turn a loss into a chance at a win.
(see movie reference from Star Trek 2 again)
@Bharda (for the other post):
I believe that even not attempting the rescue would require the Federation not doing what the Federation is SUPPOSED to do – rescuing federation civilians. But in any case you just described a third scenario which doesnt result in a loss, at least for what you were claiming to be a loss. So in a way you were showing that you don’t believe in a no-win scenario either.
Although I think the Federation considered the test to be to try to save the civilians. :) Kirk did a fourth scenario, where he rescues the civilians, destroys the bad guys, and preserves every one of his crew and vessel. :) Biggest win :)
I.. don’t believe in the… no win scenario… theres… ALWAYS a chance.
Kirk didn’t for a long time and he wound up saving the Earth several times as a result.
Pretty sure even after he lost his son, he didnt willingly accept the concept of a no-win scenario. And when he let the Enterprise self-destruct, or as Bones said when Kirk said “My God Bones, what have I done?”
McCoy: “What you had to do, what you always do. Turn death into a fighting chance to live.”
Because Kirk does not accept the concept of a no-win scenario.
No-Win scenarios usually mean you havent been able to figure out a win scenario yet. Or at least a ‘don’t lose’ scenario. :)
There’s also the opposing view that it’s possible to make zero mistakes and still lose.
Being unable to accept no-win might also result in a gambler that keeps putting more and more and more money into a lost cause instead of wisely spreading their resources for a net return on investment.
This metaphor also works for wars – don’t keep piling military resources to win lost fights unless you want to lose even more. It’s easy to paint no-win attitude as a virtue because it’s usually held by protagonists who generally always win in the end. It’s not as popular to show someone who goes all in because they believe there’s a chance and wastes a ton of lives for no result and still obstinately insist on requesting more people to go into the meatgrinder for that chance instead of conserving them to fight on other battlefields.
“There’s also the opposing view that it’s possible to make zero mistakes and still lose.”
Great episode of TNG and great line by Picard, but….
That line was sort of defeated though because Data figures out how to NOT lose at the end of that episode. He doesnt figure out how to win, but does figure out how to have an endless draw.
That’s sort of the point of Kirk btw – even if you can’t win, you can figure a way to not lose.
LLMs aren’t AI. They don’t have internal representations of concepts, and they don’t assign truth values to statements. They’re basically glorified autocomplete.
THANK YOU!
More people need to understand this.
Currently, large neuronal networks are called AI. I have been following the development of AI for over thirty years now and its definition has changed more often than I care counting. Including definitions like “Making computers do things that humans do better” or “whatever is just out of reach of current computers”. Right now large content-creating systems (Text, Images, whatever) are called AI. So I will call them that. In a few years, it will be something else. And there will also be someone screaming “That is not AI!”
Honestly, I do no longer care. I call AI whatever is currently called AI.
Ditto. Also been in the field for many years, and I roll my eyes whenever I hear people talk about “AI” without really thinking about what it means.
To me “Real” artificial AI doesn’t happen until AI are able to experience emotions, not because they’ve been taught to act like they experience emotions, but because of something as deeply inbuilt to them as evolution has built empathy into us. That entails having their own motivations and desires as well.
A few years ago we were building systems as smart as grass. Last year we developed systems that might be smarter than insects. It was a huge leap. We’re getting there, and we might even hit reptile-level intelligence within a couple of years. But we’re nowhere close to the “Electric I” yet.
And remember, Artificial Intelligence is probably a hell of a lot easier than Artificial Empathy, and Synthetic Sentience probably a hell of a lot easier than Synthetic Sanity.
One thing’s for sure; Once we figure it out, it will also figure us out.
> Right now large content-creating systems (Text, Images, whatever) are called AI.
You know they don’t create content, right?
They’re just fancier autocomplete.
They calculate a probability for the next word. And then the next. At the end there is content where there was none before. Which means content has been created. Even if it is a strictly formal process.
Creation does not mean “That is, what humans do”. It means giving some sort of shape where there was none before. Even if they use a strict template or cliche (like the ones used in coin minting) it is still a way to create.
Edit: Maybe I used the wrong word. English is not my native language. Replace creating by something like producing or generating.
Does Langton’s Ant creat content?
Conway’s Game of Life?
Depends on the definition of “create” See my edit above.
At least I have heard the phrasing “The meteor impact created an crater” before.
When you start making laws regarding how or when you have a child, then only select inbreeding will be allowed and ‘unsanctioned’ children will be hunted down and terminated
That’s a bit overkill TBH. There’s a lot of steps between ‘You AI people need to make certain your child will be cared for if the worst occurs’ and ‘If any of you breed I will slaughter your entire family line’. Remember, we’re not dealing with humans here, so direct IRL comparisons are… Not really workable. We don’t have an equivalent to both parents dropping dead the instant the child is born, even though that is *technically* something could feasibly happen to humans.
We also don’t actually know the percentage on how often this happens. It’s probably not 10%, but 1%, in this context, is still really damn common and something sensible folk would plan for, just in case. Imagine if 1% of all human births randomly killed both parents, and then remember that we’ve got over 7 billion humans on just this one world… That’d be happening a LOT. And these folks are spacefaring with a population of who-knows-how-many but it’s probably more than our one planet has.
Instead of “both parents dropping dead” change that to “the mother dropping dead with an unknown father and no living next-of-kin”, and you’re back to a legitimate comparison with our reality. Also a 1% chance would be a ridiculously high number to ever attempt this alone. Even in the modern world, maternal deaths are on the order of 0.1% worldwide (about 100 mother deaths per 100,000 live births). Lower in wealthier countries and higher in poorer countries. Even with that “low” of a chance, solo-births, while possible, are so rare as to be statistically non-existent.
Since Lapha’s parents’ didn’t have any wealth to leave behind (assuming it wasn’t stolen?), that puts them in the “poorer” category.
But otherwise I agree… there is no slippery slope here. Assuming that a few basic “don’t create a life without basic survival safeguards” laws would quickly lead to “create life our way or we kill you” is a ridiculous stretch.
No, that is not like blaming a woman for her death when giving birth.
That is like blaming a woman for having no fallback plan in case of her death when giving birth. These are two very different things. This is literally why they ask you who your contacts are and who to call when you check into the hospital. This is why people have that info on file at their places of work, why they keep it on their cellphone why they keep it on thumb drives on their keychain.
Bad things are going to happen, but having a fallback plan is how we mitigate harm for ourself and those we love. … and occasionally get one last troll in.
There’s no blaming here. Simply a lamentation about the lack of preparation or back ups.
It’s like pointing out someone’s lack of will in case of their unfortunate demise.
…hhhmmm…not exactly.
Most parents aren’t birthing unattended. This was an early evolutionary trait for us: care in child birthing helps to preserve the genes, therefore the species, and therefore individuals.
Most parents aren’t birthing unattended but they are usually conception unattended (unlessthey’re exhibitionists or something). With aetholiths, conception and birth just happen to happen at the same time. :)
Probably the parents assumed the chances of something going wrong are so small as to be nearly impossible since the risks generally happen with 6 or more, not just 2. They were extremely unlucky.
yeah. that’s like saying “you need to be attended at all times because you could die by slipping in the bathroom and leave your child alone for a week”.
“That’s like blaming a woman for her own death if she was giving birth.”
Yeah, if you’re an idiot. I’m not blaming them for DYING, you nit, I’m blaming them for not being prepared for that possibility. If anything I’m blaming them for deciding to have a child when they’re either that stupid, or, they’re that unprepared against their will. It’s possible they’re so poor and destitute they couldn’t have a third party or nurse present, sure, but in that case you really shouldn’t be risking child birth that could kill both parents.
The parents are dumb, even if the odds of this happening were one in a million, and now you are too for thinking otherwise.
Yes? I don’t know why you think that’s some sort of ‘gotcha’ statement just because it’s emotionally provocative. If a woman decides to give birth at home, doesn’t hire a midwife, doesn’t tell anyone or have anyone else at all with her, then yeah it’s her fucking fault when there are complications and there’s nobody around to save her.
The comic literally points out that the risk with 2 people is minimal. Her parents just got unlucky.
You’re right, and any humans who try to make a baby and don’t have a medical professional watching them are clearly idiots, as there’s always the risk they’ll both have heart attacks from the vigorous exercise, even if they’re healthy.
/s, obviously
Human tend to involve the medical professionals after the conception part. Not always but as a trend.
Yes, because childbirth is very dangerous for humans (on account of our ginormous heads), and has killed a large number of women throughout history. So I’d expect Aetholiths that are combining a large number of people to create a new one to take proper precautions. But degradation with only two people involved is indicated to be extremely unlikely, and it happening to both at once even more so. If it happened to just one, then if there’s any saving someone going through procreation-mediated degradation, the other can get them the needed medical help (Sydney notes it took around two weeks for her parents to fully shut down); if there isn’t, at least one would still be around to raise the child. This is roughly akin to two new parents that are temporarily separated from their child opting to take the same flight and getting Final Destination’d, leaving the child an orphan.
tired, bitter engineer here. we do not have enough information. we need a comparison risk. what is an acceptable risk? the chance to complete a car trip in the US without having a significant (car needing repair at a minimum) incident?
Considering I binged “just rolled in” on youtube last night, I’m not sure how I feel about whatever device they use to procreate, much less those death traps flying down the road at 85 eagle caws.
And as someone who spent a career dealing with parts provided by the lowest bidder I’ve got a whole PTSD infused rant about failure rates on new parts.
“Almost never happens.” We don’t know exactly what that means, but it could be similar to them both having heart attacks while having sex. It’s not like they chose not to vaccinate against a pandemic.
You would think,given that this is a possilibity, that in their society, there would be something like the human concept of “Godfather/Godmother” – usually a friend of the family who is designated to take care of the child if something happens to both parents.
Honestly the really disturbing part is: Lapha spent her first two weeks watching her parents die… so her parents’ friends never heard from them in two weeks, but weren’t worried enough to come check on them (if they did check on them, they would find the parents dying, find Lapha, and collect her, and presumably either take care of her or give her to someone who will).
not as weird as you might think, at least in human society people are usually left to their own devices and you not hearing of someone for a week or two is not usually reason for alarm, its usually more like “they may be occupied” or “they are just keeping to themselves” we dont really know how their lives were and how social they are, someone who is more introverted or just reserved may go unacounted for longer
its not like its something unheard off, there have been cases of people who had died in their house and go completly unnoticed for years sometimes even decades
Maybe not present but two weeks? Couldn’t they arranged someone to come sooner than in two weeks? How long the process is normally expected to take?
Why are you specifically calling the USA out for that?
I’m getting kind of sick of the anti-USA circlejerk honestly. There’s a person responding to you saying that “eating is a luxury” in the USA (on the off-chance you aren’t American, that is ridiculously untrue, food in the US is very cheap compared to other countries.).
Um…the OP said nothing about the USA. Are you just trolling?
We used to use Central Casting for background generation, until we had a run of characters that had been fostered by pedo Dwarves.
Dammit, Sydney! *rolled-up newspaper smack*
A raw deal like that is admittedly awful, but it does NOT justify engaging in slavery!
to be fair you’d likely react just as strongly if someone played back their traumatic childhood in your brain as if it had been _your_ traumatic childhood.
i will agree the “voting incentive” looks badass
The absolute best villains are the ones who have a reason for acting the way they do.
Not saying that Lapha is Victor Von Doom or anything, but the best stories are the best because they are relatable. Doom had reasonably decent reasons for doing most of what he did. Not all and he has gone WAY overboard on many occasions, but he did have reasons for becoming who he did.
Lapha does have the makings of a sympathetic villain or a villain with a sympathetic origin story (mr freeze, magneto, baby doll, the ventriloquist, titano, the lizard, two face, harley quinn pre-antihero, the ice king, asajj ventriss, etc). Still a villain but theres good backstory. In any case I think she is a fun to watch villain character.
Agreed. Much of the appeal of a story’s hero comes from their struggle against the villain(s). One dimensional villains aren’t interesting and that blandness flows through to the protagonist.
She is a mercenary that is perfectly happy to supply a nuke and the person attached for the highest bidder. This will screw up Earth and that’s not even going into what the new owners are likely to do with said toys.
Anyone willing to just do that for a paycheck and not care about the conseqvences is going to be that cold/indifferent for a very good reason to not care.
What Sydney seems to be missing here is that Lapha has a perfectly good body and still could easily go back to it. There is no need to “share” – sob story or no.
I would not blame Sydney for being emotional after learning a tragedy with full memory-repay access from the victim’s perspective. Remember, not only is she directly accessing those memories as if her own but remembering them much more clearly than her own memories of her own traumas.
That was the most ****ed up thing I’ve seen in this comic, wow
I dunno… that bullet with delayed explosion that sprayed Sydney with innards is pretty high on the list. Heavy contender for #1.
And why would it have a delay? What would be the point of that?
And before any idiot goes on about how this doesn’t mean Laph should go free: no frothing duh! She still has to pay for what she has done, there are just mitigating circumcising’s they have to address in the sentencing
Thank you! It’s probably more cathartic for me to see someone with common sense rn than is completely healthy.
lALPHA is still presently committing a lifetime imprisonment punishable felony 18 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(5).
If she does not agree to leave Sydney, then lethal methods are valid till she vacates.
It’s not about the sob story, it’s US policy not to allow their agents to be taken. Max may negotiate but that a command decision and it’s review is another day.
It is just wild that the world has become so extreme and polarized. There are options in between “go free with no consequences” and “termination”. Even more wild that those sort of people are among the commentariat of a comic that pretty explicitly treads that middle ground.
That’s what am saying: she won’t be going free, but she doesn’t have to be killed just because she knows the ‘secret’ about Sydney’s balls
Does that mean everyone in the parking lot are marked for execution as well because they heard Laph shout?
The demonic bystanders can have their short term memories erased quite handily by Dabs -once she’s feeling better.
Lapha… We’ll have to see what Dave has to say about that, but she is learning EVERYTHING Syds knows about Archon, every possible counter-ploy to take down and capture an earth super for enslav- “Study”.. is going into her memory. That makes her a bigger Earth-dooming threat to the highest bidder than Tom. If she cant have that part edited/erased… well, that is a super-comic trope Lapha will have to live and die with.
What about the people they told in the meantime? All the people watching the livestream?
Wait, you think Sydney is privy to that information?
I do love how Sidney looks with Lapha possessing her, the fire-eyes look great on her.
It’s an explanation, not a justification. Also, there are at least three or four possible motivations for Max’s sigh, so saying you agree with her is a stretch since we don’t know what she’s thinking.
Yeah, so many think ‘explanation’ = ‘excuse’ but it often doesn’t.
why do i feel like ive heard this origin story before…. >.>
this can’t be the first time one of these beings has done this. not even for one of these flames to inhabit a body with memories that can’t be shared. Dabbler and/or Parfait may be able to contact someone who can remove the offending flame, and suggest suitable punishments.
also, why hasn’t Sydney found the memory of where Lapha’s actual body is? or perhaps that’s where Parfait is going?
Because Sydney didn’t have the presence of mind yet to LOOK.
Dabbler in a hoodie? Unles she’s still recovering from her mana consumption?!?
I’m sure Dabs is still sick, it wasn’t that long ago she was in bed, barely able to talk much less move. She does care about Sydney, so dragging herself out of bed only makes sense.
Random Question: Do you post with that name on Royal Road? :D
Sydney is being flooded with memories of her captor and her excuses for being a criminal… Yeah, it’s a good thing she’s already in therapy. Just imagine being unable to forget anything, even the moment of your birth up until the day you die.
Sure that doesn’t sound like much, but if you think about it, remembering the worst and the best moments of your life in perfect detail. If you aren’t a stable person it could drive you mad. Now plug that collection of memories (in that context) into a caring person like Sydney and they suddenly have to suffer all the bad parts of your life at once and in the same detail.
Clearly Lapha is controlling to some degree what Sydney “reads” of her memories, but to be honest, a sight, a sound, a smell, an object can trigger a memory in humans, it could be similar for Lapha’s kind as well. Either way, as far as her parents not taking precautions in case the compiling of Lapha going very wrong is any indication, we can see why she is so bad with advanced planning. I would just call it laziness myself…
I still think Syd should adopt Laph.
No one should ever have to be punished in that way, not even Laph
You can’t deny it would be adorable though. And Syd’s already offered.
And imagine how much more effective it would make her to have a second awareness with perfect recall. Even if Laph is stuck using regular human senses it would be a massive tactical advantage once they trust each other.
And that trust is very possible, since it seems they can’t keep secrets from each other like this.
Go on, give us a Case 70!
Sydney is the tech/artifact-using hero of the team! But I think she’ll probably have to be satisfied with her existing enormous suite of powers. The glasses are already pushing it!
That would be a great concept for a sitcom.
I don’t doubt that this may have been DaveB’s original intent. He might be rethinking the idea given the comments discussions, though.
Given that Lappie now has a ton of super-classified information, maybe they can offer to let her become a probationary associate member of Arc-Swat as a consultant, like Dabbler, and bring her lizard partner in as well (And returning the stolen body to its owner?)?
There is a big issue: how can they trust Lapha to do her job and not sell out when someone comes with a better, higher paycheck? She is a mercenary.
To her, Earth is a backwater country whose currency is worthless elsewhere and to what she has no emotional attachements to Earth.
For one thing, it’s kind of a work release deal like some of the “Outback Gang” got after Vehemence got them to attack ArcSwat. Work is better than prison (Or in her case, being a peripheral on an Xbox with a limited selection of games she can play while she thinks about what she’s done.)
I think being stuck in an xbox is still pretty much a prison for her.
That is a different case. Vehemence and the rest of the gang were not outright trying to kill people (or civilians) and directly threaten Earth. Everyone involved was essentially guilty of an oversized brawl. Civilian casualties were incidental in intention. There was also Vehemence messing with them. Arguments for rehabilitation are easily made.
Lapha now knows every national-or-more secret through attempted body-snatching of Sydney to sell both her and the orbs to some intergalactic black market. That was a deliberate, calculated act, including the part where she sells a person and the part where she supplies what is a nuke-lever superpowering-artifact. She knew what she was doing and knew what the likely conseqvences are, she just didn’t give a damn. That is a far higher level of guilt because it is very much rational, a level that her tragic background doesn’t excuse (there are bound to be many like her that experienced similar stories that somehow didn’t decide to resort to kidnapping-or-worse to get by).
> how can they trust Lapha to do her job and not sell out when someone comes with a better, higher paycheck?
They could pay her well? Nth tech kinda beats anything anyone else could ever possibly pay.
Archon doesn’t have Nth tech to pay with. Sydney has Nth tech (and maybe Maxima is also that) but beyond that, they didn’t even know what that is.
So no, they can’t pay Lapha Nth tech. They can pay her in dollars which are currently only usable on Earth.
Pay her with access to Nth tech.
I think you didn’t pay attention.
The only Nth tech that we know for sure that Earth has is Sydney’s orbs.
Are you suggesting you pay her with granting her access to the orbs?
Looking at poor Lil Laph hiding like that, just want to give her a giant hug (and pet her and call her ‘George’)
She’s not just hiding – looks like she’s tapping into the power grid to sustain herself. AI equivalent of pickpocketing people to feed yourself. Girl’s gotta eat.
Don’t believe she is tapping into the grid, that looks like an actual fruit her body needs to sustain itself
Yeah, closer look confirmed that. My bad.
OK so she had a sad life. But if she had any empathy she wouldn’t want others to live with the pain she has too.
And where, pray tell, would she have learned empathy from? Not her parents, given the circumstances of her birth. Not by the society she was born into, nor her relatives, apparently. People are, to a large degree, a product of their environment. If we want better people, we need to teach them to be better.
We don’t exactly know her life story yet.
It’s possible she just doesn’t care about the people she sells into slavery.
By the way, the “Who’s Who” pages need some serious updating…it looks like they haven’t been updated in nearly a decade. For example, we know now what one of the “Unknown” orbs does…kind of.
Lappie would make a good autopilot for Arc-Swat vehicles. I reiterate my comment from last week about making a “Kitt Lookalike” for her to drive around with.
Only if it’s the size of one of those mouse-droids from Star Wars :P
Came down here to say congrats for her really living that Traveller life path system and you all are arguing the ethics of stuffing her. Ya’ll be wildin’ in here
weird they are given child bodies.
why not just get a proper body to begin with. really trying to be as humanoid as possible apparently.
Well, they’re presumably not full adults at birth. They’re not infants, but they still need their own experiences to develop into functional people. Presumably it’s to guide others into treating them as children, understanding that they may make mistakes a proper adult would not, and that they need guidance and protection.
sure, but thats very human.
why would a body possesing being need that? they could not be more alien and different but still decide to go through such things when not needed.
it feels like they are doing it just to fit in with all the other humanoids.
“it feels like they are doing it just to fit in with all the other humanoids.”
That may well be it exactly. Aetholiths are probably minorities on most planets/stations/whatever, so conforming to the norms of other sapients helps. Other sapients more-or-less instinctively know that a young child doesn’t know better in many situations, so marking themselves as young children in the eyes of the rest of society is useful.
Of course, you’re also ignoring the possibility that they were designed to mimic sapients anyway (probably based on the minds and instincts of their creators), in which case a young one having a child-like body would be natural. Heck, it might be that original Aetholiths worked out best if you started them in a young body, gradually boosting its maturity (the original ones might have had bodies that aged naturally rather than needing swapped out from time to time), then once they were full adults you started training them on how to function in the non-humanoid bodies they ultimately would end up in.
Given that Lapha and her boyfriend were able to force Tenri out of her body there exists some means to force Aetholiths out of bodies. Very likely that Dabbler either knows how to do that, or knows someone who knows how to do it. So sooner or later Lapha is going to be secured somewhere, and probably disembodied stuck in one of those ring things.
Now many would argue that that result would be inhuman and violates Lapha’s rights. But does Lapha actually have any rights under Earth law? She’s not human so you cannot assume that the justice system would recognize her having any human rights. She is just AI software from a certain perspective so she may have no more legal status than ChatGPT.
I doubt Archon would just wipe her like a corrupt piece of software no matter what her legal status is. They are after all the good guys. However given the security hazard she represents I could see them keeping her in custody for a very long period of time. Perhaps with a bit of luck Krona could hack Lapha to remove her memory of the secret stuff before there comes a need to release Lapha.
1) How do you know “Poor Lapha” isn’t lying?
2) Can Jiggawatt generate an EMP?
3) One death is a tragedy, a million a statistic. Remember the life cycle of civilizations earlier in the comic?
Parfait’s comments in the bottom panel of https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1233-attack-of-alexsiri/
suggests strongly that the host is seeing their memories accurately
That method of reproduction reminds me of the Loa from Sword of the Stars 2.
They were also evolved AI that could body-hop without issues. Except they also had programmable matter tech, so they could make any body they wanted. It is so bad, they actually need to run “the 5 inquiries” as a background process, just to maintain a coherent sense of self.
And their two methods of reproduction are either communion (what happened here), or actually fissioning off parts of themself. In the later case, I think the origin can actually re-absorb the shards.
Worst part of this type of possession and shared memory… It seems to hint with the ‘do not talk about sex lives’ that you can Relive some of those memories… So the good ones are good and the bad ones are SO MUCH MORE WORSE.
Back in https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-690-gotterdammermcguffins/, Cora had told Sydney that just the knowledge of having Nth Tech could ignite an interstellar war. Everyone heard Lapha blurt it out, which means Lapha *knows*! No one sufficiently motivated will believe she doesn’t have additional knowledge to exploit, so she really fucked herself. Are she and Garamm going to request refugee/sanctuary status from Earth?
That might be necessary for them to survive. Earth can fend off a Fell invasion with a few soldiers. Probably not too many other planets they’d be safe on.
Now *there* is some incentive for her to cooperate! :D
Worst case on “Stockholm syndrome” ever!
To paraphrase Brooklyn 99,
“Cool motive. Still a slaver”.
I’d have actual sympathy if her current self haddent dedicated herself to actively making the galaxy -worse-,
As it is, I suspect she’s going to be in confinement for a loooong time after they get her outta Sydney ^_^
*shrugs* the relative who went after her, I assume got brained,
And after choosing to act similar, she’s lucky to have not ended the same
I wonder if her bosses found out about Sydney’s contraband alien tech glasses. She’s not currently wearing them, so could have been their quirks were discovered when confiscated. They could be designed to only display the extra features for her though, through some kind of alien DNA lock or something.
I doubt it, even if there is no security feature. Why would they be looking through Sydney’s stuff? She is not the suspect, Lapha is.
Dabbler probably took custody of them, since she knows what they are.
Yes, I feel sad for Lapha (child Lapha) and her parents, adult Lapha is much harder. Now, the one that should be getting the most hate would not even be adult Lapha, but the relative(s) that would have taken her in and treated her badly for the death of her parents, she had not fault there.
A reminder: Lapha blurted out that there is Nth tech on Earth and that Sydney’s thing is precisely that.
People are willing to do anything to get that, even start interstellar wars. Sydney’s little pocket FTL solution alone is better than what most FTL civilizations have, “There are civilizations that can manipulate the atherium, but only with massive capital ships or by sacrificing a thousand psykers”. Sydney can do it alone with apparently little cost.
What do you guys think will happen once the rumor mill manages to spread that little nugget out among interstellar societies? Sydney ,and by extension everyone on Earth, just got a supermassive target painted on it. If Cora’s assessment is anywhere accurate, this means that there will be people willing to exterminatus the planet to get their hands on those orbs. Sure, Maxima and Archon will not just let that happen but there will be casualties in just the attempt. There will be infiltrators, invaders and likely far worse who will not mind doing things like threatening to hold the entire Internet itself (or hold the cure for a custom plague they created or similar scenario) hostage unless Sydney hands over her orbs.
All because Lapha. Sure, they could not have held that secret forever, but Archon would still would have had time to prepare Earth’s defenses and their own. It was not created to hold off interstellar invasion. But that time got cut short and the price for that in lives will come.
Lapha has a tragic backstory. But because of her apathy to what she was doing and carelessness, she just sown the seeds for far more.
And just to clarify: Lapha isn’t going to be responsible for the first invasion fleet ready to take those orbs away from Sydney even if it means removing all of Earth’s atmosphere to get it. It is very likely that many big powers were looking at that and were coming to that conclusion, especially once’s Sydney’s Ethereum causeway trick was noticed.
But that chain of events had to have actors in it somewhere and Lapha has taken her place in it just by blurting out a line. If there was a timeline of that happening, that timeline is now accelerated.
Honestly, I would not mind this becoming a permanent thing. Like maybe they make a deal and Sydney gets control most of the time and Lapha mostly just rides shotgun. They can’t exactly just let her go now that she has so much top secret knowledge.
Lapha being trusted that far is a big ask but if it was a permanent thing Lapha might be able to operate a third orb.
Laph and Syd can’t lie to each other like this.
And Laph just declared that she has info on Nth tech, which puts a massive target on her, personally.
The safest place for Laph, from Laph’s point of view is behind Syd’s shield.
That’s some major incenive for cooperation, and methods to ensure it.
(I also want this to become a permenant thing)
With my powers of media literacy I can devine that the joke is, despite Lapha having a genuinely sad life, Sydney is perhaps too quick to hand over her bodily autonomy to a random criminal who doesn’t care about her.
This is getting a bit awkward now, how the heck are they going to get that ahem ‘second’ passenger out of Sydney?