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Artificial Incident
Happy New Year! Hope you are all doing well and thank you for all your support!
18 Comments
That’s a good point here.
Also akemashite omedetou gozainya !
So it is looking like time differences are far more complex than thought earlier or a potential meguffin.
I go with this — “wibbly wobbly timey-wimey stuff” at that.
Ahhh, so THAT’S why Kaylin is seemingly less and less like Kevin as time goes on. The bio that Kevin filled out for his character is overwriting his personality. But since Callum didn’t fill out a bio, he’s just himself.
Which, adds a whole slew of other questions if true. Such as, if they really are the players trapped in game as their characters, then why is Kaylin’s bio overwriting Kevin in the first place? I feel it has to be more that just a simple “Oh, because she has a bio and no one else trapped bothered to write one.” There’s plot there in that question. It’s just a matter of WHAT Sage decides that plot happens to be.
I’ve actually already answered this- and its kinda shown in the comic but left vague enough for people to realize it on their own- Kaylin has over 250 years of lifetime experience. All the blanks left by her bio were filled in. She said herself she remembers her adopted human parents, the elves she joined after they passed on, and the thieves guild she joined, all of this was just simple “At the age of 230 I left the elven conclave and joined up with a thieves guild in a human city” and that turned into people, places, jobs, failures, successes- all of it memories she now has.
Yeah don’t know why but I got SOMA vibes just now
So the way to keep Kevin mind is to delete Kaylin’s biography that or change Kaylin’s name in the biography to Kevin’s
I was going with the machine copying the data of the mind at that time and the original keeps doing their thing
i was getting the exact same vibes
I smell Cover up!
Are they still receiving the new because other wise how does she know it’s not in the news
As she said, he’s been trapped in here for over 52 days in the real world, she’s only been trapped for 3 real life days. Which means Kevin was out in the world where news and information spreads fast, and it had been 49 days since this kid is believed to have gone into a coma while playing a game. Or died, they dont really know yet. It just kinda sucks to assume their brains have been copied or some AI has taken control of their bodies or they died. So they assume they are probably still alive in the real world. After all, even with their advanced tech putting whole human brains into a computer system is a massive undertaking requiring a ton of power and resources, and there’s at least 18 people known to be trapped so far? Possibly a lot more.
A really plausible explanation would be that they are just got copied. The NPC-s look to be human level intelligences too, so the capacity of the system seems to allow many human level intelligences to exist. This means that in the real world they might be still alive or dead, but the original game simulation was still running after each disappearence. The players just got lagged off. This might be a bug, the sideeffect of the process or the IRL gamer dieing while in game.
Another case could be that the IRL player just got kicked off the server and could still log back later to the original simulation. This would allow later arrivals to have seen people who are trapped here in the original game after they got moved here. A sync error connection drop and logging back in asap was a pretty common occurence in the early 2000-s with quite a lot of mmofpsrpgs. Of course a wasd and mouse controlled game was nowhere near to direct neural control, but the initial fade out effect was common, due to the old network and server systems of that time not fully up to the task of an open, changable world based mmoprg with fps controls and viewpoint and hundreds of users per server node (=in game location). If the PC-s trapped here had more information, they could check what happened with the IRL players. But for a large player base game service with multiple games, one or two in game IRL player deaths, coma or something similar would not be big news and if the glitch only copied part of them, then it wouldn’t be discovered at all, unless two PC-s meet who disappeared at different times and knew each other IRL. In our world, quite a lot of people died while logged into asian mmo-s in the past (mostly in Korea) and not many of these cases reached the news.
The time difference could be established if the order of disappearences and reapperences are the same and the time difference between them is kept consistent and linear with the IRL timeline. This could be caused either by the current simulation running in parallel with the IRL timeline or the system playing back archived logs at a constant rate. The latter would mean the IRL time could be anything.
Also one more thing: The fact that some information were added and some got overwritten suggests that their consciousness might be running on the same hardware as the NPC-s – but with PC access rights – with all that this would imply.
So unless more information is uncovered by a later arriving PC who actually knows another earlier arriving PC and knows what happened IRL after the first one disappeared from the original game, there is no way to determine anything.
But while that may be a plausible plotline, we are glossing over the 300 year jump, no Adventurers during that time, and why the environment changed if it is still running on the same game client. Not to mention, Kaylin heard her watchers logging off. Lag or dual login could explain hearing/seeing the chat, but not the environment change.
Is this a separate server, where there are not suppose to be any players? What could cause even a fragment of the mind to be copied, or the NPC’s AI to be improved to almost lifelike quality?
How did a player (Mike) from a separate game (Star Parade) get here? Mike and his 16 contacts estimate the time difference to be 14 to 1, but his group didn’t seem to have a time jump. Mike never said where he was in the order of 17 coming in, just that he thinks his body hasn’t had water in 4 days. But if any of his contacts came into the game before him, they might have been without nourishment for longer, yet he never said any of them assumed they shouldn’t or couldn’t still be alive. What will happen to Mike? His body should be almost beyond its limit as he enters his fifth day without water or food.
Sorry for question basting, but it really is what grabs my excitement about this comic. Some writers have become so formulaic that you can almost tell the end of the series before you finish chapter one, but Sage doesn’t hand us answers without some more questions. I just wish the MC’s and side characters weren’t so frickin OP. Still love it though.
I’ve been pretty careful with the OP-ness. Kaylin is extremely powerful- but shes by no means the top of the food chain in the world, far from it. Most of the humans met so far are just sooooo weak, and there’s a reason for it! Kaylin wasnt joking about not being able to take on the 3 monsters that showed up though. Her strongest ability is her ability to talk her way out of things- but it doesn’t work on everything. It’s very much to play on the “OPness” of Charisma in games. It’s hard to predict how a person could take advantage of charisma. It’s fine when it’s Fallout or Outer Worlds because it’s all scripted, but in a game like Dungeons and Dragons it can go out of control fast if there aren’t proper checks put in place. It all comes down to the GM/DM deciding if something is too far, but how does a computer system know what is too far for a skill that is hard to define? If it’s all a numbers game it can be broken with high stats and bonuses. As Kaylin has shown, if you use a plausible excuse or mix truth with a lie- the results say it all. Thankfully though some creatures are just looking for a fight, and some people just cant be reasoned with!
Mike doesnt have contact with his friends in space while on the planet, and hes been trapped on the planet for almost a month now- so he thinks its possible some of his friends in space could have died by now if they never got any help in the real world- if their theory is even true. Mike never said there was a time jump- but he did say the universe changed around him.
I have answers for everything- but i need the time to reveal it all XD
“Kid goes into coma playing VR game” made the news for a bit, probably…but then the new WoW expansion came out. People lost interest fast, and then the news was hit with “thousands go catatonic playing desktop game.”