Chapter 1, Page 30

Reminder, all old incentives are going up on the Facebook at the beginning of the new month~ in case you missed any. I’ll have a special incentive up on the 1st as well, since the 1st is a good day to do that kinda thing. Thanks for reading.

41 Comments

  • pretty flacko

    Deeper than the Deep Web?

  • ubin

    Reveals!

  • Lew

    condensation, u-huh…

    • Lennier

      And he just stubbed his toe. And has some Mars Dust in his eyes.

  • Unclever title

    Gen 1 Levi is pretty chill.

    • shingworks
      • Glenn-o-matic

        (snort. gag. sprayed coffee) !x!

      • Hansontoons

        Chortle, snerk, choke on adult beverage…

  • DukeBG

    And that’s when Bex realizes she’s in the middle of nowhere with a mentally unstable psychopath, but doesn’t want to believe that at first. Well, okay, she doesn’t know enough about his mental instability yet. This can get scary.
    A very powerful moment.

    • Asterai

      Not a psychopath. Unstable, sure, psychopath, nope.

      And he might play it off as a joke in the next line… which, yanno, doesn’t help much with the whole unstable perception.

      • DukeBG

        Heh, well, okay, maybe not psychopath. But somewhere in the murderer cathegory. “I hid the body well. They won’t find it.”

        • Kittenears

          murder would require sentience. I’m not sure AI qualifies.

        • Asterai

          Hmm. Maybe. We aren’t clear on how sentient the AI are. Or why he… hid the… body.

          There are killings of humans that don’t count as murder, and reasons you might hide a body that wasn’t your kill.

          • Asterai

            But, adding to that. Psychopaths wouldn’t be crying over their victims.

          • DukeBG

            I am exaggerating, of course.

          • Ryan Schneider

            Well, technically, he is a thief who feels in his bones that the LEVI is his rightful property. Hiding it is functionaly pointless, like dragging a boat to the middle of a desert to spite the repo man who would sell it to another sailor, but now it’s useless. LEVI is his Precious, and if he can’t pilot it, no one can. I suppose that makes him a manic obsessive with increasing paranoid tendencies. Paranoids are still capable of selfless emotions, like compassion and empathy, (unlike a psychopath), but are unable to keep them a priority in the front of his mind when perceived threats manifest. For example, if he ends up killing her, I guarantee he will feel immediate remorse as he recalls her family when he calms down. A psychopath, at best, would be indifferent to her as a person, at worst, well, I’d rather not go into that.

  • Enrique262

    Aw shit it’s happening!

  • I drove the Chevy to the Levi but the Levi don’t fly…

    • shingworks

      SIGH

      (I laughed)

  • …uh ohhh

  • AIs, huh? So the one that Bex’s kids got, is that just a toy or does it have some personality in it?

    • shingworks

      Maybe it’d be like some kid’s version of Siri or something, haha. Too much AI would be kinda sad for the toy once it gets lost on a roof or smashed into someone’s window by accident… oh no I’m sad thinking about it haha

      • Lennier

        “The AIs were staging a rebellion, so we SSHd into their Cloud and dialed them back to just above stupid.”

      • Ryan Schneider

        “Science can only be one of two things: it can be a tool, or a toy” G.K. Chesterton.

        Did you see the “Animatrix” shorts, “The New Renaissance” parts 1 and 2? It drives home the importance of not creating disposable intelligence. Planned Obsolescence and wasteful consumerism must NOT be applied to truly sapient machines, yet between bad habits and the machines being very gradually developed, we might not even notice that we have done it until it is too late. A sapient mind is not a tool, but either a slave or a work partner, not a toy, but either an unwilling jester or a playmate. If we are to play god we must be responsible ‘gods’, and if we can’t be, then we need to draw a line in the sand of technological progress and say NO FURTHER.

  • Daniel

    Whoah. Cool reveal.

  • Kat

    I find it especially touching that LEVi called him by a nickname. Is it smart enough to come up with things like that on its own?

    • shingworks

      No, they’re just buddies :] So they call each other by nickname.

  • This is getting creepy.
    Love it!

  • bel

    Aww, robot bud.

    Out of curiosity, is LEVi pronounced ‘lev-ee’ ‘lev-eye’ or ‘lee-vye’? I’ve been pronouncing it ‘lee-vye’ and it occurs to me that that might not actually be correct. If it’s ‘levitating imager’ is ‘lev-eye’ the correct one?

    • shingworks

      It’s pronounced the same as the word “levee,” which rhymes with “heavy.”

      • Hansontoons

        He ain’t LEVi, he’s my brother…

        • Sheridan

          Oh my god…

  • Kittenears

    oh my gawshhhhhhhh I’m not sure if I’m heartbroken or very, very worried.

  • Glenn-o-matic

    There’s got to be a Damned Good Reason for hiding a Perfectly Good LEVi.

  • Absle

    I was confused why losing a flying camera was such an emotional thing up until now. Obviously it was expensive, so I knew it was a big deal, but I didn’t realize it had an AI. So he lost a friend, which makes more sense.

    • shingworks

      It’s a lot more than a camera as well, it’s a pretty extensive (and expensive) tool for mapping, analyzing and utilizing the chemistry/ geology of extreme areas. I decided to cut the technical details of what it does but you can still get an idea in the glossary, where I went through the trouble of defining all the words I ended up cutting from the script, haha. But yeah he’s also a cute buddy :3

    • Ryan Schneider

      I was convinced for a while that there had to be a missing PERSON named Levi, (who perhaps named his invention after himself, for fun); I just couldn’t grasp how Mike would be so distraught (and in trouble) over a probe, but NOW I’m getting it.

  • Spav

    SHF repeaters? Like little deploy-able signal transmitters that can be dropped every once in a while to relay the feed back to the central station?

    • shingworks

      Exactly~ expounded upon in the recent vote incentive

  • Flancy

    Hmmm… In an earlier page, Goto says “LEVi’s dissapearance.”

  • Katie

    Damn. Re-reading and that last panel is just. A+

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