Grrl Power #1459 – Chemical Frenemies?
She likes him because he challenges her. And by “likes,” I mean she hasn’t killed him yet for challenging her. Or for being an arrogant ass.
No, the story about the MIT/CERN kid isn’t Deus’s backstory, but it apparently is a not-uncommon arc for child prodigies who grow up surrounded by a bunch of average brain types, then finally settle into some bleeding edge profession, and learn that they’re in the 50th percentile of the intelligencia 1%.
I think exponential intelligence is genuinely incomprehensible, because individuals or groups at one intelligence level really lack the tools to understand a group that’s, for instance, ten times as smart. Of course, “ten times” is impossible for us to really quantify anyway, because “ten times” what? The word “intelligence” is really poorly defined in absolute terms. I mean, if you’re good at math but can’t remember dates and anniversaries, are you smarter than someone who struggles to add 15 and 7, but has an eidetic memory? Or is the world’s best astrophysicist smarter than the world’s best diplomat? One can figure out what dark energy is, the other can save hundreds of millions of lives by preventing wars. How much does emotional intelligence factor in? Without it, we’d have a world of sociopaths. At a certain point, information throughput becomes a limiting factor. Is a once-in-a-generation genius who secludes himself and occasionally publishes some revolutionary mathematical proof “smarter” than The Machine from Person of Interest (which was a show where a massive supercomputer processed every video and phone call and text message, etc, and alerted the Feds to terrorist plots – which sounds terribly dystopian, but the inventor (the glasses guy from Lost) made it a closed system so the government couldn’t use it to spy. The bulk of the episodes revolved around the fact that it could also detect people plotting non-national level crimes like murder, so the inventor put a backdoor in that would spit out a Person of Interest, and they wouldn’t know if it was the perpetrator or the victim. Anyway, I thought it was an entertaining show.) You’d probably say that The Machine in this case wasn’t intelligent at all, but throughout the series, it demonstrated an ability to learn and had a non-human intelligence that allowed it to stay ahead of the evil government agencies and corporations that wanted to abuse its abilities.
The point is, actual capitol-S Super intelligence is one of those things that are on Archon’s short list of Apocalypse level threats, because it’s very likely that the individual with that ability could out plot, plan, and prepare the entirety of the rest of the human race. If Deus built a suit of armor or a rocket powered paraglider and wore a goblin mask so he could rob banks, no one would give a crap about him on the macro level. Instead, he has the resources of a medium-sized-and-growing country and access to alien technology and probably demonic magic. So he’s being watched by a lot of agencies and interests. Some think he might become an exploitable resource, but they’re dumb. I mean, literally, compared to him, they’re very very dumb. Of course, that’s not to say he’s the only super intelligence on Earth. But most of the known ones are more like Digit. Focused on tangible sciences and engineering, not his broader approach to economics, diplomacy and politics.
Obviously Deus has some broad-spectrum approach to resisting chemical influence in place. After all, he’s the leader of an up-and-coming, expanding nation, and seems to be, on the surface, doing a good job for the people under his administration. And he’s making enemies of every surrounding country and eventually he’s going to start hitting countries that third parties have financial interests in. Third parties like diamond oligopolies, mining consortia, all kinds of larger criminal organizations, and eventually, whole countries. Not to mention the Alari colony ship. They’ve agreed to live under his rule, but what that really means is they do whatever they want within their little fiefdom, which amounts to the area they’ve expanded their ship into, plus some extra land they negotiated with Deus, but outside of that, they’re subject to the laws of Galytn. They would immediately assume authority if something “happened” to him. That’s assuming they could keep Thothogoth from using Galytn as a foothold for his own conquest, or that either of them could stand up to the Supers in Deus’s military.
So Deus has some preventative measures and contingencies in place, they’re just not super overt like most comic book Super Smarts do. You know, an army of Deus-bots, or a metal throne room with Kirby-esque pipes and energy fields full of dots that project force fields that can only be deactivated after he delivers a monologue.
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Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
I said Deus transplanted his brain in the body of a clone of some super, and it’s probably Achilles (for the invulnerability).
The UFO backstory bit of Achilles makes more sense if it is. Deus probably knew of Achilles before invulnerability being fully manifest and Deus needed a sample without being noticed as human, so he built/borrowed a UFO.
How did Deus know? Hire a telepathic species or borrow an alien / magic device. Extra points for testing if he gets telepathic immunity out of his Achilles clone body after that!
Deus’s lack of concern with having an heir makes total sense now….. he can let his brains deal with any problem he surrvives until someone realizes he can be put in a cage or thrown into the sun(hard to “walk it off” due to gravity). Which he won’t while Vale and a few others are around to protect him enough, presumably.
This also explains why he’s very confident he could survive a night with Maxima.
That… would actually make the X in his forehead make sense.
That’s where the brain got inserted.
ok but the question then becomes, how did he manage to open up the invunerable skull for the transplant?
Do superpowers activate after a certain age? If the clone body was young enough then it would still be uh, malleable?
Or removed…
It would be much simpler just to apply a non-reactive coating over his skin prior to her arrival. That might leave him vulnerable to a finger poke in the eye, but by that point things have stopped being playful. And it doesn’t take super-intelligence to realize that Sciona enjoys playing the game just as much as Deus.
Nah, he is from the future or got his information from the future so he was given the means to protect himself from this stuff (like her touch). Although he’s going to have to study it in order to make the vaccine to inocculate himself against her touch so that in the future, he can give it to his past self so he can have been inocculated in the past our present. :)
And as always…
All praise Deus, amen.
One of the better treatments of superintelligence comes from Orion’s Arm, a shared writing experiment/fictional encyclopaedia of a far-future time when practically godlike AI are not common, per se, but known, and physics still rules the day.
So there is a scale of intelligence, the toposophic level, going from S:0.5-0.7 (Deus’ example of a 160 IQ grad) to S:0.7-0.9 (nearbaselines and superbrights) up to S:1 (hyperturing AI and Athenaeids), and then there are the S:2, S:3, all the way up to the real godlike S:6 Archailects.
Under “First Toposophic – Basic Transapients” it explains that S:1 is not only raw processing power, it’s hyper-creativity, processing almost incomprehensible sensor input across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, having the ability to talk at a modosophont level to 15,000 sapients at once, simulate people’s mindstates so well they seem to have telepathy, full body awareness of each cell, run factory complexes through cybernetic connections, split off and run copies of their mind to live full lives in a VR world, craft sculpture from smart-matter…
…all at the same time. And that’s just the abilities we can comprehend. So to go beyond that is incomprehensible, and while an S:2 might seem to be giving you all its attention, they are operating on such a high level that it might make perfect sense to them to decide to remake your entire civilization into a Utopia in the time it takes to order a coffee.
There are people who are not very happy about this, and so an entire culture of Hiders has grown where they stay in the background as far from the reach of Archailects as possible. It’s very possible because as I mentioned, the laws of physics apply and staying dark and cold in the background of space is a very good way to hide, and while there are wormholes, lightspeed and relativity is also in effect.
Just as equally, there are entire civilizations who choose to live under the aegis of the benign Archailects in Utopian abundance as the S:5 and S:6 do whatever they concern themselves with.
On this scale, Deus is probably a 0.8-0.9 superbright, maybe even a transsavant who can “spike” into the first toposophic in certain abilities.
I’m also a big fan of Orion’s Arm, though the descriptions of S1 as being some kind of absolute barrier rather than being post-singularity compared to say S0.6 seems like a big leap to me. More rationally we’d expect an intelligence completely beyond the comprehension of the smartest human alive today to still exceed but be relatively comprehensible to someone 4 times as smart as the smartest human alive today. Which means the singularity levels would always be a sliding scale of incomprehensible only relative to some kind of baseline measurement rather than a “oh you reached level 10 now you unlocked a thousand times more power compared to when you were level 9.90”.
That said I do like that they at least try to engage with the concept of superintelligences and its transformative effects on a society rather than trying to explain it away.
I also do love that we get to see that Deus did indeed have some kind of plan other than hoping for his reflexes to carry him through the day.
The math used is likely some form of log(log(x)), if they want to make the math logically consistent with the writing.
An effect of a mistaken measure of intelligence is an unhealthy approach to language.
Smart people tend to have a wide lexicon.
As such smart talk is complex talk.
As such smart text should be complex.
This’s a mistake.
Communicating something hard in an easy manner is shows of intelligence of a higher level than doing it in hard words.
It requires you to understand your topic head to tails otherwise too many holes will be formed by the impreciseness of simple text.
It requires you to understand communication.
Yet when you hear it, it sounds simple.
The other way around also happens.
One can and does formulate simple things super complex and suddenly they sound smart.
I’ve seen people make both mistakes.
Is he pulling Dr. Doom vs the Purple Man and immune by sheer willpower.
Or he’s pulling a Layla Miller. :)
this was not supposed to be a reply to anyone. I posted this as a regular post. So weird it ended up a reply
“It requires you to understand your topic head to tails otherwise too many holes will be formed by the impreciseness of simple text.
It requires you to understand communication.
Yet when you hear it, it sounds simple.”
–You have just described a physics lecture by Robert Feynman– I was there. It was simple when he led the class through the derivation step by step. It was enlightening. Like all transcendent revelations it faded in the morning light.
I have an IQ of ~180 (or did at the time). Feynman did not have an “IQ”. That scale was no longer relevant.
It sounds like the word Deus wants is “hypervalent”, if he means there are more than 8 electrons in the valence shell. Such molecules do exist. Most involve halogens (fluorine, chlorine, and occasionally iodine), because only halogens are electronegative enough to pull those sorts of shenanigans. A lot of them are, as one might expect, highly reactive, like the infamous chlorine trifluoride (which ignites almost everything, including sand and concrete, on contact, and makes toxic, aerosolized hydrofluoric acid as it burns), though there are exceptions, like sulfur hexafluoride (a nontoxic gas).
It also includes any xenon compounds. Yes you can get xenon to react with things, it just takes the chemical equivalent of a hydraulic-powered crowbar. By which I mean you need pure fluorine gas, and either a very good experimental setup with lots of safety features, or a kludged-together setup and a death-wish. It’s not especially complicated as syntheses go: just combine the elemental gases and apply appropriate amounts of energy.
Now, if it involves anything that electrochemically shouldn’t be able to bond covalently or hypervalently, I would agree with Deus that these molecules shouldn’t exist. Especially anything that gets carbon to be hypervalent. But like a lot of “rules” in chemistry, the octet is more of a suggestion, at least when certain halogens are involved. And if it breaks the rules, there’s probably a word for it already. Always worth checking on that ahead of time.
I actually like the idea of hypervalent carbon for this. Given that it requires Sciona to intentionally exert magical energy, it makes a bit of sense that said energy would be forcing the carbon to form hypervalent molecules and then only let them decay once they’re in the target’s nervous system. That’s “magical mind control” enough for my suspension of disbelief, anyway. :3
Apparently no one else has pointed this out yet (watch someone turn out to have pointed it out between when I loaded the page and when this post goes through), so…
“actual capitol-S Super intelligence” < this is a spelling error.
There are at least two different words, with different meanings, that are spelled 'capital', but a capitol is a city where a central government has its base.
A capitol‑S Super intelligence literally taps into the nation’s geographic center of power. Move it out of D.C./London/Beijing/Etc and it looses its power because the organizational ley‑lines don’t reach the suburbs.
My guess is that Deus is SO smart that he’s actually able to compartmentalize the portions of his brain that are being controlled by someone else and sort them back to the way they should be in real time before it has a chance to spread to the entire thing. Kind of like air gapping a portion of networked computers that are infected with a virus and clearing out the malicious software before they have a chance to infect the rest of the network
That’s actually the main “power” of the MC of a different story, posted on Royal Road. And it has a long title:
Stupid Sexy Cryptids [or How I Became The Emperor of Mankind]
Yes it has a harem theme. It’s also suggestive of Deus’ goals. Yes, he wants to rule the world. For reasons. BUTT! He wants US TO WANT HIM to rule the world. And that’s the real reason behind all the social uplifting.
It is, after all, better to be loved than feared. But if you cannot be loved, then be feared.
Honestly it feels more like he just looked into what her super power was, made an immunity serum, made himself immune to the chemical reaction and is now just toying with her without revealing he made a counter to her power.
Deus’s superpower is being really, really annoying.
Deus is the Kwisatz Haderach
I’ve met more arrogant assholes in IT than the military. Every one of them thinks he’s the shit, but if they were paying attention, they’d understand that compared to John von Neumann we’re all just monkeys in the zoo.
This sort of thing happens in athletics all the time. There’s a book by a guy who entered the NFL. He had always been the number one athlete, first kid picked etc. He wound up being 6’8″ and 285 lbs of muscle.
He walked into the defensive team’s change room and everyone there was 6’10” and 340 lbs.
For the first time in his life, he realized that me wasn’t going to make the team….
One of Herbert’s best little insights is when Paul sees the Sardaukar prisoners collapse emotionally because they’d never been taught how to lose. Their whole identity was built on dominance, so defeat hollowed them out. Paul’s takeaway is that troops who can take a loss, regroup, and come back smarter are better than those who shatter the moment the universe stops cooperating.
Everybody knows people with cross shaped scars are immune to poison.
Being “smart” Deus is prepared.
In more than one way.
I personally think that the chance Deus doesn’t know some magic is very, very small.
It’s the ultimate tool for the super-intelligent, it would explain both his complete lack of fear of supers AND his purported age.
He might well be the most powerful wizard on the planet. he just doesn’t dress in robes and carry a wand.
Now, he also might be remoting a Super’s body as part of that, too.
What makes Deus so dangerous is that I’d almost say he’s beyond Vetinari when it comes to being a practical ‘villain’ . He’s almost 4th wall aware ,so he realises that putting himself into a place where not even Syd and Max can remove him without some other threat coming up for him to be the only person with the brains to deal with it.
i think id want him to answer the question “are you implying you’re ‘thinking’ your brain chemistry into behaving?!”
It can make you immune to it… if you control your atom structure somehow, or the chemical receptors in your body, kinda like…a… super power… dang
I would rather expect that Deus does have an army of millions of bots, just that they’re the really scary kind, nanobots.
The real question is whether he’s immune to acidic chemical reactions.
Funnily enough, acids actually do way less damage than bases, at least just going off what aqueous H+ and OH- do. Strong acids will leave surface burns, but strong bases will turn the fat in your body into soap.
It’s not his body, it’s his ego that’s nigh invulnerable.
I wonder at what point do you get to that Batman level of intellect where you can selectively drive yourself insane to create multiple parallel identities that watch the others for influence then counteract that influence. I remember reading a game called Aberrant where the super intellects basically stalemated each other and that was the only reason nobody had already taken over the planet.
Good analogy at the top, really hit home with me even tho I never got into higher education because of the anxiety of testing. For me the early(‘ish) feeling of being smarter than anyone else was combined with already knowing that wasn’t _actually_ possible, so instead I got this complex where I felt best when I felt like I was the stupid one in the room/group. IE: It would be really frustrating, confusing, and scary (anxiety) to be the one people turned to for wisdom or insight or complex problem solving when I couldn’t explain how I got to a (or the) conclusion. Maybe saying this will help someone…
There’s a saying I heard again recently: “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.” It’s good to try and surround yourself with people you can learn from.
Of course, there’s another saying that was just made up by some brilliant but unnamed person for this comment: “There’s no mindset so healthy that a human being can’t turn it into a complex and/or neuroses.”
I hope the saying doesn’t apply to teachers.
Teachers are not necessarily smarter than all their students, merely more educated and mature.
While there is joy in helping persons of limited potential to achieve their maximum, there can be a special feeling in helping someone who has the potential to surpass you eventually.
From my own experience if you can keep your mind active, drinking or drugs can’t really effect you. I have never had a blackout drunk, nor any of the “fun stuff” has wrecked my memory or choices. Now, hangovers and such are a different story…
Yes yes, I did some stupid crap, but not anything I can blame on being drunk or whatever. Deus just has a hell of a metabolism and is in complete control of himself no matter what. If anything, Sciona just hyped up his mental processes, and gave him the equivalent of a certain blue pill…
Did it not occur to her that he’s likely had enough substance intrusion attempts from poisonings to various other effects that he likely had to come up with a catch all system correction fix early on?
When did Sciona take her bra off?
Deus took it when she wasn’t looking.
I think it goes without saying, if Deus is going to get addicted to Sciona’s funky love fluids, then he’d better get some nice tatas in his face. That’s only fair.
Offpanel in the transition between Deus checking the test tubes (#1458, last panel) and him using the mass spec and watching the results with Sciona (#1459, first panel).
Anyone else notice him noticing her drug laced hand on his shoulder in panel 2?
yeah. and he said “you really did not think that would work did you” she is also double slapping his face with her power and its doing nothing :D
lol Funny as hell.
So I recall an oddly marked horse faced non-human friend of Dabbler’s who at one point told her visiting Earth might be entertaining. No reason. Just, maybe Sciona’s superpower only works on humans…?
Is intelligence his superpower?
I figured out in the third grade that putting Elmer’s Glue on my fingers meant that I didn’t leave fingerprints. (That might not sound impressive but my school didn’t give us access to glue in the first grade.)
Fortunately, I was ethical in my younger years or I would have gone the supervillain route.
Watch his intelligence just be absurdly high but completely explicable via standard human genetics & his actual super ability is something like “immune to everything as long as he’s chasing tail”.
If we take what deus said at face value, does that mean the only person he can’t beat his Maxima?
Deus absolutely has a bunker full of Doombots and another room full of tubes of indeterminate energy- but they’re (almost) literally there just for show.
The energy tube room also can be used as a ballroom or place to host formal dinners (it’s got industrial kitchens attached) and the Doombots can, in an emergency, be activated for civic defense, organization, or natural disaster cleanup.
Makes sense, if he is so intelligent he is the conscious equivalent of lucid dreaming, so super lucid awareness, he could tell what his brain should be doing, when its doing things it shouldn’t, and mentally correct for it by sheer willpower. A self checking and self correcting system over neurological activity.
he just needs a much much bigger dose of touchy
I work very hard to show I am not a sociopath. ( being hyper intelligent is such a burden )
There’s one of two possibilities. Either Deus’ superpower is even more broken then we thought and gives him super mental resistance. Or he’s thought about potential “truth” serums or just being drugged out of his mind and gone under treatment to give his body some form a chemical resistance. It’s technically possible to something like that with poisons and diseases. I mean, it’s also possible it’s both but the super power is doing the heavy lifting here if that’s the case.
i still think he collects “some” power/energy from the people he has coitus with. hence his big book collection. and why he wants to get with Max so much. and his intelligence and every other “stat” is boosted by all the many partners he had.
did it really take me this long to catch on that the main big bad is dues x, and the main heroine is maxima, making the couple literarily the god in the machine?
You haven’t figured out the name of his company yet?
You will hate him even more when you do :P
The term is “deus ex machina,” not “deus ex maxima”.
As things stand, they are my by far preferred supervillain couple in the whole genre. They are so well matched, I could eagerly read/watch a whole series about their banter. Yea, for a very loose definition of ‘villain’ in Deus’ case, but at least it fits the meme that only characters labeled as such are allowed to be effective agents of change in the genre.