The security spell is still there, it just, uh, soaked into the drywall.

“Shkran lak” is “thank you” in Arabic. At least according to google translate. Arabic is the first language Dabbler learned/copied/cheated when she got to Earth. She also picked up Kurdish, Turkish, and Neo-Aramaic before learning English. Maxima speaks passable Arabic. Her vocabulary doesn’t quite cover discussing an advanced medical condition or talking someone through rebuilding a motor, but can have reasonable non-technical discussions about most topics. The closest she gets to technical topics involve tactics, like discussing the need to post lookouts with a village elder or compliment that elder’s wife’s dolma or falafel. And yes, getting in good with the elder’s wife definitely counts as tactics.

Dabbler has more or less made this point before in the comic, and while this is a flashback, it’s not even the first time she’s made this no-super-tech-for-you argument to Maxima, even though their relationship is still quite new. Dabbler doesn’t subscribe to any sort of Prime Directive. Her hesitancy is two-fold. One is just as stated on this page. There is a line in cybernetics that once crossed, can lead to amazing and horrible things. In a way, we’ve started to dip our toes into that pool… or, the line… the surface of that pool is a line when viewed in cross section from the side. Yeah. My dad had a cochlear implant. That is a piece of hardware that directly stimulates nerves. Not nerves in the brain, but in the ear, bypassing the broke stuff. But it’s a step. Or a toe-dip. That tech is nearly 40 years old? I mean, commercially. We’ve also started messing with direct brain implants – at this point, mostly for paralyzed people, but the things we learn from that won’t be confined to those in need, especially if there’s money to be made from widescale commoditization.

But here’s the thing I think will hang up broad adoption of cyberware entertainment/utility. Would you trust Facebook or Twitter or Playstation/Sony or literally any company to install hardware into your brain? Any publicly traded company is afflicted with institutionalized enshitification. I mean, think about even a minor example, like how Helldivers 2 required a Sony Online Account, making it so players in 118 countries couldn’t access/play the game. But some dickhead MBA thought it’d be more useful to force people into some sort of mandatory mailing list/pseudo social network than it would be to sell however many more millions of copies that move excluded them from. Yeah, the community rallied, Sony caved. Fine, whatever. But that’s just one super minor example – do you trust Slappy the Idiot MBA when you have shit wired to your brain? Think about how many data breaches Sony has had over the years.

I would say that no one would allow a megacorp to wire stuff to their nervous system, but humans are just so stupid. Even those of us without ADD have incredibly short memory spans it seems, and are easily distracted by anything that jangles a shiny key-ring in front of us.

The other reason that Dabbler doesn’t want to hand us unheretofore invented technologies is simply because she thinks it’s important for a race to have its own heroes. If some alien came down during the 1400’s and handed us a textbook with the laws of thermodynamics and a bunch of other goodies in it, would we know the name Newton or Einstein or Curie or Darwin or Hawking? Or would it all be Gorglo, Who Sold Unto Us His Used Science Textbooks so He Could Score Some Space Kush? Humans would think less of ourselves if someone held our hand while we walked up the big-boy steps, and Dabbler won’t take that away from us.

The counter argument to this approach is that while there are some really important scientific, engineering and invention-ing milestones, I think there’s a relatively narrow window for those things to happen. Sure, we all know Edison (stole the idea from the actual engineers who) invented the lightbulb, and Jack Kilby and a few others invented the integrated circuit and I’m sure you can name quite a few other notable people, I feel like there’s a point at which inventions are a function of corporations or universities with deep funding or research grants. Like, you can google “who invented the accelerometer” but at some point, projects are the results of dozens of people and the white-papers that came before, and it gets really muddy to point credit an individual with some creation. Like, when was the last time you heard about an inventor? I don’t mean the guy who zip-tied kitchen knives to a weed whacker in an attempt to make an improved weed wacker, but really just invented a way to more efficiently cut off his own feet. Back in my day (shakes fist at cloud) inventors were something you occasionally heard about. Now it seems if you’re an inventor, you probably spend most of your professional life inventing one tiny sliver of a smartphone along hundreds of others and no one will ever know your name. I mean, I guess your family would know your name. Hopefully. I was talking about national renown.

Well, that’s kind of a downer. Anyway, please enjoy the above comic page of enjoyableness!

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The new vote incentive is up!

Dabbler went somewhere tropical, in a very small bikini. As you might guess, it doesn’t stay on for long, which of course, you can see over at Patreon. Also she has an incident with “lotion,” and there’s a bonus comic page as well.

 

 

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Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.