Grrl Power #1406 – Peeping super entity
Ooh, Harem’s got a secret…
This guy, let’s just call him Nthaniel for now, probably could be running some sort of “know what every quark in my vicinity is up to” field, but, maybe he’s bored with however many ages of never being surprised by anything. He’s got access to really incredibly comprehensively sophisticated advanced predictive algorithms running on whatever the next six steps past quantum computing is, being powered by the total captured energy of a violet dwarf, which is a kind of star I think I just made up that’s really good at outputting energy used for computations. And he has senses that are like a million tricorders scanning everything in… let’s say in one A.U. So it’s hard to surprise him usually. But apparently the branch of Causal Naturalism reality is taking is one of the less likely outcomes.
One of the cooler things I read about in Systema Delenda Est (though I’m not sure of the actual origins of the concept) was Summer Civilizations. Basically, you simulate a civilization in a ridiculously powerful computer, run that civilization forward at ten-thousand times normal speed, then you steal all their patents and weapon designs and cool ideas for the real world. (Or is it the real world!?) And I guess if they come up with any pithy philosophy or good, uh… movie ideas or quilting pattern or whatever, you could steal those too. Anyway, I mention it because if you have your own matrioshka brain, you could probably run a few dozen of those and crib some of the good stuff from them, including their own predictions about any number of events.
I spent a little time trying to write “I’m an advanced being therefore the concept of “I” is too simplistic to encompass my personal pronoun needs,” but really, in the end, that seemed sesquipedalian. I wasn’t going to write “This unit” or “Entity Alpha” or whatever, and a personal pronoun really only needs to be “I” or “we” if they’re some kind of group consciousness. Having multi threaded thought processes to the point that some might begin personality divergence may be a case for some sort of hybrid personal pronouns, but in the end, I just went with “I,” because if I used anything else, I’d really need to make room on the page to explain what “Vo,” or “Glim,” or “Schvarvelshooshisticoli,” meant, unless I wanted you guys thinking it was his name.
Ooh, look! A new vote incentive! And it’s updated with color!
Well, in progress, obviously. I have another one that’s actually a bit further along, but everyone was all, “Sydney Kobold vote incentive!” So I switched to this one. Plus the other one was a multi-character picture so it will actually take me longer to finish. I hope to have an update for this one each week, so stay tuned. There is a slightly higher res version on Patreon.
By the way, this gunmetal blue-ish background and teal pencils are how I draw the comic. I set it up this way so I don’t have to spend all day staring into a bright white blank page.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
It’s been a while since it was first mentioned, but have we seen the sixth Harem yet?
Where was it first mentioned?
I don’t think it was explicitly mentioned in the comic, but in the comments I’ve seen theories that Harem could’ve stashed an undocumented spare body somewhere as a back up in case something happens to her five known bodies.
It has been mentioned in comic how Harem didn’t instant get access to five bodies when her powers awakened, but that the number increased over time. The sixth one here could be one that was only recently formed.
Or one she just never told anyone about.
I know she was probably lying to old X-face when she told him she liked playing his double agent to show up the stuffed shirts at Archon, but I don’t quite trust her. Most of her actions seem to be driven by her addiction to sensation. Keeping a secret body could be her exit strategy in case she decides she’s done with Archon and needs to start over somewhere else.
It could be distance or perspectives but one of them looks smaller and maybe younger. I can’t remember exactly theorem first split, maybe 12 or 14, but I think she might have a copy she keeps permanently “devorped” so it doesn’t age.
Effectively a backup for getting old.
Or possibly that’s the one she hasn’t quite managed to manifest yet. On the theory that she started by being able to manifest two, then three etc.
That one is sleeping, that’s why they are in that position
Two are sleeping, yes, but the given relative orientation also suggests one is laying down on her stomach, the other smaller one is floating that way, not just laying on her side.
One could be crawling into a vent…I’m just saying….
I took that one to be spying. Looking down from above a la ducting etc
Fetal position, arms tucked with hands over the head, knees up, neck bent to place chin as close to the chest as possible, this is a classic trauma position. The position is also found when people are in a non paralytic coma. Also, measuring the torso, from butt to shoulder, the one in a fetal position, to the one laying down, is around fifteen percent shorter, considering that you get a clear butt to shoulder measurement from both. I would say that the one in a fetal position is indeed a younger version of Harem. I would guess she is aware of the sixth version of herself, but if that is a non materialized spare, that would throw everyone hunting her, if she suddenly dropped six to eight years of age, being smaller and less developed physically,when appearing somewhere with only one body.
No matter how much she has experienced, she’s still only 19!!
There’s a chart on p491 where Harem describes her total life experience.
The fact that one of the Harems Nthaniel sees is smaller and in a fetal position suggests a “potential” Harem (i.e. she’s on the verge of manifesting a sixth body).
Good memory. With that info, we can take it further. That chart shows her getting new bodies at 8, 9, 11, and about 14. Differences of 1 year, 2, and about 3. She also says she’s 19. If the pattern continues linearly, we should have expected her to have an extra dupe around age 18, and expecting number 7 around age 23.
Maybe it’s not a function of time at all, but rather her experience. Maybe she’s so obsessed with new experience because that is what causes new Harems to develop. If that’s the case, space adventure may turbo charge her development.
I still think, given her nature, she’ll leave a Harem out in space. I just doesn’t seem to make sense that she’d ground herself back to Earth once she was untethered.
If it’s not 1,2,3,4,5 years in between but more Fibonacci-like with 1,2,3,5,8 in between we’d expect to see a sixth body at age 19 and a seventh at age 27.
“we’d expect to see a sixth body at age 19”
So, any time now…
The sixth body was first discovered in #651 – and Maxima and Dabbler both know about it.
*blinks; re-reads the page in question* Oooh. So when most of us thought she was saying there were 6 of her instead of five due to the time jump, it was actually seven instead of six, which she really couldn’t handle due to how her brains are wired as a whole. She wasn’t just gushing about the time travel being cool, she was also excited that she’s going to have a sixth body soon.
I see absolutely no indication on that page that there are 6 of her absent time shenanigans. There were too many of her because there was a sixth body coexisting alongside the others while the group was forward in time.
No, that was temporal distortion by venturing into the future. There were suddenly double her normal amount because it was a voyage though time and space instead of just space.
The scan just showed supers from Earth. Maxima shows up diffrent because she got her powers from the geode.
Took me a few seconds to figure it out.
Pretty sure it’s looking only at all the quantumly-entangled copies of Harem. The surprise is that there are 6 of them, and we only officially know of 5. Copies are made by simply not dematerializing one copy when she “teleports”, creating two. She keeps the total number down because she can’t process all the input from too many.
Is the smaller one in a fetal position an “unborn” copy? Is it one she created, then immediately “stored” in “devorp” because she couldn’t handle the extra input (yet)? Is it a spare “life insurance” copy kept hidden away in case of a simultaneous attack on the others?
With the appearance of a glowy Max I doubt we’ll find out soon and this will be a hanging plotline to be resolved at some point in the future.
The blue sparkles, yes. Pickle meant the exploding rainbow that is Maxima in the last panel.
It could also be an echo from her little time travel incident.
So those outlines are harem? I’ll ask the obvious question, why are there six of them? Is one stuck in a stasis tube? The fetal position one.
And i guess he was startled by Maxima?
My guess is Harem has a backup body she’s not telling *anyone* about.
Same way Halo isn’t telling anyone she can teleport. Except Harem might not have told Max. (I expect Deus will know, because he’s annoying like that. The interesting question is does Deus know where her 6th body is)
The sixth one might not be materialized at the moment. (It appears to be naked, like the one taking a shower.) We know that she gradually gained the ability to manifest more bodies over time and that if she stores one, the rest of her bodies get proportionally stronger. She might be keeping it in reserve as a surprise, or because being 18% stronger is currently more useful than a sixth pair of hands. Or maybe she just hasn’t decided what fashion statement to make with it yet.
Oh, nice to see another fan of Inadvisably Compelled! (I really liked IC’s “Paranoid Mage” series, too, if you haven’t read it.)
I know it shouldn’t surprise me as much as it does, but it always tickles me when I see a creator I like enjoys another creator I’m fond of.
Yeah, I’ve recommended Paranoid Mage and SDE here on the page. Inadvisably’s anti-authoritarianism fetish speaks to me. I also really liked Blue Core, but it’s a different flavor than the other ones.
I think the only time there were six Harems is when one of them went to the Alari homeworld and into the future in the same trip. She must have appeared on the Alari homeworld while all five of her usual bodies were on Earth.
We’re canonically past that point. Halo got back to earth from that juml forward point. We simply skipped the intervening months
Those are 6 Harem bodies!
Also Nthaniel’s reaction to Maxima is one of the most informative things we have about the origin of her powers.
Beyond the sixth harem….
Its me or the colors on Maxima are exactly the same that in Sidney’s orbs? Similar origin/technology?
I was just going to ask the same thing. I originally 5hought it was Sydney he was looking g at because of the colours. It wasn’t until I saw her in the background I looked closer and saw it was max.
I was thinking that it’s just coincidence- afterall how many different primary/secondary colors can you depict something as without getting into weird outliers like teal or mauve. But on second though, they are very similar in all the exact shade and combination. Could definitely indicate a shared source or history. Like, maybe Maxima is hosting some sort of non-physical/parasitic entity, and the orbs are it’s physical body/manifestation, but they got separated when it crash-landed on earth.
No real evidence for that yet, I think, just pure speculation.
The geode must be Nth level nano-tech or something
Possibly… sufficiently advanced to transform Max into what she is now without killing her…
Whatever it was, it’s enough to give Nthaniel the heebie-jeebies… Which… should not be a normal occurrence for him…
Might wanna dial up the senses just a smidgeon, Nthaniel.
I know it takes some of the surprise out of life, but in this case, surprises could be a really bad thing.
“I should have noticed that concurrent to arrival” suggests that Nthaniel misjudged that.
I was thinking the same thing about the light radiating from the center, and it being her main, original body. I think the reason it’s smaller is that it’s farther in the background, the lights appear to be radiating out and towards the viewer.
there’s a central point to the blue shading, it reaching outward, and the center of that shading is in a fetal position. How much you wanna bet the “6th” Harem is actually her original self, not split up, with all the strength and etc. of the five she has split into?
What if the original body is comatose or trapped in an endless nightmare because those five ‘copies’ have gone off to do their own things, monopolizing the brain’s “runtime”?
She’s in a foetal position, inferring she’s asleep and sleeping naturally rather than in a coma or unconscious, as she’d probably be lying on her back in a bed linked to monitoring equipment.
Although she could be floating in a tank, her foetal position infers she’s laid down on her side.
I would argue that it’s the LEAST natural of all the different positions that Harem is show to be in, especially in comparison to the one lying down right above it.
So guessing that it’s the “original” or maybe the control-center or whatever is good. But I also think it could be effectively hibernating somewhere, and we have no idea what sort of alternative powers she might gain if she un-teleported all 5 of her copies.
And it’s smaller. What if she keeps her original body demataterialised so it doesn’t age? Like all the other body’s are disposable or something?
That first panel really humanises Nthaniel a lot. Makes him feel less like an unknowable alien consciousness and just… a very knowledgeable and intelligent person.
One who maybe just realised that (s)he/they need(s) to readjust the old work/life-balance.
The last panel also humanizes him as well, catching a glimpse of Max in all her glory and having a panicked reaction to what he sees.
“catching a glimpse of Max in all her glory”
Dabbler will be SO jealous…
Sydney was able to surprise them and make them laugh.
Harem presents something they might not have seen before.
Maxima startled them.
That last bit is most likely the most interesting one. Could whatever bonded with Maxima be of something even surpassing the Nth? Or from an (unknown) rival of similar level? Or is it the combination of a super (or specific one with Maxima’s ability) with the thing from the meteorite that created something new and startling?
But can N^thaniel build a Matrioshka Brain powerful enough to simulate multiple Matrioshka Brains and steal the output of their simulations too?
Guys, speaking of Matrioshka brains, I found the first in-comic mention of one on page #506, exactly 900 pages ago.
So, new running theory?
The Rock that leaked, had a tiny pocket of Nth tech in it, and produced Maxima?
It was a geode. The running fan theory with the Orbs is they crashed to the earth millennia ago. They could have been riding on the asteroid whose impact killed off the dinosaurs, or it wasn’t an asteroid at all but an Nth ship that crashed and only the Orbs survived, or something similar.
Back to the Max’s geode, one possibility is that the geode that “created” super-Max was created as a result of the Orb crash. So yeah, possibly a pocket of Nth tech.
Are Maxima’s colours the same set as Sydney’s orbs?
Not exactly. Maxima has all the orb colors, plus black swirls on the arms.
So far as I can tell, the actual name of Summer Civilization as a specific term for fast-time digital civilizations is mine. The idea has been hazily around for a long time, though.
William Gibson of Neuromancer fame came up with an interesting variant of Summer Civilizations in his novel “The Peripheral”. It involved creating a quantum link to a point in the past, and then another timeline would branch off from that point, and you could use the quantum link to communicate with (and manipulate) the branch timeline (which was called a stub).
For those of us not up to date, are you the actual author of the Systema Delenda Est trilogy, which I very much enjoyed reading?
Mildly concerned about the Harem in the fetal position.
My God! She’s full of stars.
Maxima: Taste the rainbow! BE the rainbow!
Yes, thinking those coloured fonts are the orbs talking with him.
If not already said before, can we have a word of Dave on the matter?
I think the colored fonts are still him talking, the colors/multiple words are used to represent how he’s using single words that cover all the concepts mentionned in a precise way. I don’t think the colored words represent different orbs talking, because last page those words were asking questions, and those make more sense as coming from Nthaniel rather than being aimed at him.
Also, in last’s page’s commentary Dave said:
> I will say this though, those word bubble stacks he’s speaking, with two or three different colored words per bubble, he’s actually saying a single word that encompasses all those concepts. “How/When/Why” is a specific comprehensive interrogative, and his language has other words that mean “Who/What/How” or “Which/How Much/Whom.” You get the idea. It makes for a thick dictionary, but he’s the kind of guy who appreciates that sort of lexical precision.
So it’s definitively him speaking those colored words. Not the orbs.
So…he’s an AI?
No, no. Nthaniel is actually intelligent, not a misnamed search engine.
Buggy search engine. One of the requirements for a search engine is that it only provides you with real results.
Artificial Intelligence, after being “just a few years more” since the 1960s, did in fact arrive.
Artificial Sanity may be, um, more difficult. We’ll get back to you on that……
The idea of simulating an accelerated civilization and taking their technology was first set forth in Theodor Sturgeon’s 1941 short story “Microcosmic God.” Great story — one can find it in the *Science Fiction Hall of Fame* short story collection.
Another early incarnation of the concept was Simulacron-3 , 1964.
Although that one used the concept for *shudder* marketing */shudder* purposes.
And did the Turtles Allll the Way Down thing. And a sadistic operator, like in Tron.
Typo: Quandry -> Quandary
It’s notable that Nth-aniel is shocked by the power in Maxima, but it’s not that surprising; we kinda knew something’s up with her.
Hm, I wonder if maybe Maxima has an extraterrestrial power origin AND regular human superpowers on top of that. It would explain how she’s so overpowered…
Umm, we know Maxi had an extraterrestrial power origin: she accidentally cracked open a space egg and ingested the liquid filling
In the comments to Maxima’s superhero origin, it is stated she was already a super, but a “late bloomer”. The symbiote in the geode hitched itself to her wagon and boosted her superpower potential as part of the other mutations it foisted on her. And unless I misremember, the geode was from space. So… yeah, pretty much.
Nthaniel? you mean that guy in Hell Difficulty that best friends with a corgi, and presently hangs out in the beyond lately in the Tutorial.
That Nthaniel Gwyn?
For someone who’s usually so serious, Max is literally very colourful. Also, I still maintain that all of Halo’s bodies we’ve seen so far, none is the original. I think the hidden Halo is her original body.
Oh, interesting… It looks like Harem may have another body on the works… Last time when she showed her graph of how old she was (waaaaay back in Sciona’s hideout), it looked like they spawned within a pattern. I think this is the next one.
Also, maybe Max is inhabited by more than one symbiote? Definitely looks like it at least.
Also also, thank the stars Krona is not here, I don’t think N^thaniel would be all that happy with their project having a backdoor.
The Orbs are from Nthaniel’s place? He knows what the 7th Orb does!
Sanity check:
The outlines in panel 5 are Harems. Of which, we see one more than is known.
And the multi-colored swirl outline with a suggestion of eyes is Maxima.
Right?
Maybe? I’m just a little confused about what’s going on here, aside from that Nthanial is scanning the situation and coming up with some kind of surprising result.
the middle harem seems to be the original lying in a fetal position and everything is projecting out to the others.
all of the lines/stars move from her to the others.
Wait… That’s Max in the technicolor dream coat… But it also kind of matches the orbs colors.. does this mean what happened to her in the past is linked to something similar to what the orbs are?
On the pronouns and language issues mentioned in the recent descriptions, I’m always a fan of a bullet point and a comment stating the language has been translated as best as possible for the readers’ comprehension.
If you really wanted a slightly stilted alternative to the first person pronoun “I”, you could go with third-person-ish “self”. But I think I agree with your reasoning that is unnecessary.
Honestly you could have just not used a pronoun at all (or just rarely). “Hmm. Should have noticed that.”/”too much work”/etc.
It’s moderately common to see a leading personal pronoun get dropped in casual speech for several languages, including english.
“Character almost never uses pronouns” seems like a fairly simple challenge for someone with your writing talent, and you could even pick a specific color for sentences/thoughts/concepts that are self-referential.
dude, you always crave a shrimp po-boy!!!!!
Are the last and next-to-last frames swapped because of non-consecutive Time?
Nah, he was commenting on Harem’s weird timespace links, then got startled by Maxima’s Day-glow aura.
Maxima has a cool swirly aura. She’s too cool for this guy’s school.
I think I’m fascinated with the coloring and the connection to the multi-dimensional beings understanding of what is happening.
For all that the reason he came to observe was because of the activation of the Orbs, Sydney herself is greyed out as he focuses on other beings there, marking her as understood and not the current focus.
Harem is the colors of space and stars, marking her ability to be there, and not be there, at the same time. As if she encompasses all the environments she herself has experienced.
When he finally notices Maxima, the swirling rainbow color scheme echoes Syd’s Orbs, but within her skin instead of being manipulatable by hand and decision, he seems particularly surprised. Does this mean that her own powers are Nth-generated as well, just genetically?
I need to go back and see if the origin of powered beings is mentioned anywhere, and if it’s possible that Maxima is just a small percentage of the Nth species, or if she might’ve been exposed to their energy and her genetic code translated it to abilities for her.
I think Sydney is greyed out because she isn’t intrinsically superpowed.
well
Maxima head is covered in a “tin hat foil” and all around her body
“I” is pretty decent as a personal pronoun. I have an identity disorder and usually use “I” or “me” unless I am currently referring to more than one of us. Even if it didn’t get confusing for people, we has other meanings that you lose in communication of you give up “I”
Is it just me or does he look a LOT like Kaiju #9?
It’s you.
We’ve known Harem had more bodies since she got back from the start of Sidney’s intergalactic venture – episode 651. She wasn’t discombobulated because of the distance from the rest of her, it was because “there were too many of me.”
mumble mumble fingers and mind mumble. Page, not episode.
You could use “this one” in place of “I”, I’ve seen that a few times.
Is it just me, or does Nthaniel kind of look like a highly evolved Beaker from the Muppets?