‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 341

Kim might have a slight grudge against someone...

33 Comments

Children have to learn their sense of morality, they have to learn empathy and compassion. They have to learn over time how to think in advance of the possible consequences of their actions. I suspect that Kleya did not *realize*, deep down into her very bones, what she was actually doing when things started happening. Now she knows, however. Now she has a clue. And she’s good, deep down inside. She wants to be good. She knows what she did is wrong, and she wants to make things better…even if she doesn’t know how. Even if there may never be a way how.

This is why you can’t try children as adults. (Later teens, perhaps yes; early teens, no.)

I’d say that she most definitely has a grudge.

So Kim was best friends with Kleya’s mum – that’s an interesting nugget of information. Ironically, it seems as though Kleya and Jake share something in common – their motivations.

As for the killing of Kleya’s mum, I’m guessing she may have been logged in at the time, so wasn’t fully aware that her actions were having impacts in the real world.

Unfortunately, the one person who could shed some light on who Deconstruct.me were and what they actually got up to (rather than what they’ve been widely perceived to have got up to) isn’t likely to do so for some time – given the enormity of what she’s alleged to have done, it’s going to be very difficult (if not virtually impossible) to build such a level of trust with someone that she can reveal her true identity.

It also appears everyone is so rigidly stuck to their beliefs they haven’t noticed that Kat seems to be deliberately invoking the memory of Kleya’s mother (favourite colours, favourite route, most frequently used headset)…

Oops… someone wouldn’t be so happy to hear the truth about Kat…

Something is definitely not adding up here. Kleya knows she was responsible for her mom’s death, but killing her on purpose and laughing about it… I don’t see it.

I still don’t know who Deconstruct Me were, or if they even really existed–Kleya and D could do a lot of damage by themselves, especially once they started overriding the controls on armies of mecha. The instigation for her rampage seems to have been her dad being arrested (or seized by the corporation, whichever) after Kleya got the Hakido working. His later denunciation seems to have completely broken her. I wonder if that was also when she found out she’d killed her mother?

Regardless, the more I learn about this world, the more I think Kleya’s plan of being a “hero” by playing the Game is completely misguided. I suppose it’s a strategy for trying to show a different persona to the world, but there are real problems that need her attention, as Sandra can attest.

One of the common shock reactions can be to laugh. It’s perfectly possible someone like Kleya would not have a default reaction of crying. Crying is often considered a form of weakness and remember young Kleya doesn’t show weakness.

I think it could’ve been an Ender’s game situation. She was very much misled to think that her actions were right until they turned out not to be. She was taught to win and think very linearly so I don’t think she knew there were real consequences… That there was gray between winning and losing.

She did the path most fun to her in games and no one ever thinks the gaming NPCs as people when they play those routes. By winning the way she finds fun she lost and that’s probably why she was quiet for two years before trying far too hard to be nice.

Also another factor you didn’t consider is I don’t think Kleya understands what being a hero is even now or she would be offering for stuff she messed up. I think she is being a hero in the game to try to figure it out. Remember how startled she was that one of her actions was nice?

When I once was in a bicycle accident (my helmet probably saved me from brain damage, it was a pretty brutal collision), after I’d come to and the eyewitnesses were taking care of me, I called my dad to come pick me and my bike up. I was laughing shakily all through the phonecall, so that my dad thought I was drunk – laughing is definitely my shock reaction. It could easily be Kleya’s too.

I agree with Athan on why Kat was laughing, She wasn’t laughing at the site of her mother dieing because she was enjoying it or anything of that sort. Rather quite the opposite, I think the shock and horror of the situation and her despair of loosing her mom because of something she did was to much for her to handle and the result was she experienced a heroic BSOD and it likely wasn’t until quite sometime latter when she felt safe enough to top and process what happened and try to put her life back together that she was able to express remorse or sadness for what she had done even though she felt it from the very begging even when she was laughing as she was not in her right mind at that point she couldn’t handle being there it was just to traumatic for her.

Kleya doesn’t care about the world, she doesn’t care about other people and she doesn’t care about making the world a better place. All she cares about is being loved (or at least, not hated) and she’s trying to accomplish that the only way she knows how: by doing the opposite of the things she did before. “Atonement” is not in her vocabulary.

She doesn’t care about the world but I argue she does care about people. She has shown she can care for best friends. Writing a backdoor into a program, like she did for Jake, would be an immense amount of trust for her. But she doesn’t have that connection that she can help people and be liked by helping the world.

I think her atonement, and she is atoning for her mother at least, is trying to do small things at a time. Doing it for her friends and working her way up when she gets a better idea. Kinda like levelling up.

I’m guessing that the actions that got her hated by the whole world were, from her POV at the time, exactly that – trying to help someone. And she, ah, did not receive recognition for that. She strikes me as a kind of person for whom helping people is as natural as breathing, and she’s surprised to have it recognized as nice. For her it’s just “normal”. And she hadn’t had it recognized before. I’m guessing her upbringing – her father – empathized “winning” as the primary virtue, and “being nice” as a way to appeal to people. Actually caring about and helping others just didn’t matter.
So now that she’s trying to atone for what she did, she still doesn’t realize that it’s what matters. She’s trying to be nice, overwhelmingly nice, as nice as she can be. Because that’s what she knows to do.

As for her mom’s death and laughing, I’m guessing Kleya might have been on something like a power rush at the time, too caught up in “winning” to actually get the message that not only she accomplished her objective, but her mother died in the process.

you could be right in addition to my original idea where she was laughing because she was under way to much stress and mentally bsod’ed and so was not in her right mind at the time. it’s also possible that she was working on something and was laughing at the fact she got that working and was so focused on that she completely missed the other facts that any other observers of the event would think are glaringly obvious, and would of totally changed her mood. or perhaps she did see it but it was so horrific to her that her mind just couldn’t process it with everything else going on, so while it may of been right in front of her and she might of been staring right at her mom’s corpse, if her brain was to stressed to even attempt to process what just happened all the way though she would not be able to see it.

I agree just because you win a game that doesn’t make you a hero. A hero is some one who changes the world for the better and helps people out of the kindness of their heart

Seems like Jake is starting to figure out what goes on in Kleya’s head. After all that thinking about it a few pages back, when he was afraid to ask. Maybe he needed some other perspective on it.
Btw, when will we learn her real name? Jake must know it, but I don’t remember him ever mentioning it.

Somehow Jake needs to urgently tell Kleya of the hypothesis that anything related to the cyborg’s parents stirs up the virus. He could tell the whole group this to prevent her flat out ignoring him, but that would risk widespread knowledge about the virus. He could mention Kleya’s real name right now (hint, hint, nudge, nudge; just joking, back to seriousness …) to make the virus flag this conversation, with Jake hoping that it would inform Kleya about the conversation’s contents; but that is a huge risk. I wonder if Dr Grace is going to confront her.

Wow, just wow! I never considered that… If D is the virus and is an AI, then that would mean that D could be two-faced… D could be programmed to be Kleya’s servant/friend that also has another virus-like goal that it is hiding from Kleya.

From what i remember, D is described as nonsentient Ai – meaning, it can behave intelligently, and think, but lacks its own goals. It likely also lacks the perspective to reason the real intentions behind orders it receives from Kleya. In fact, its learned responses may be based on Kleya’s personality from few years ago – thus thehighly effective, but at the same time hardly subtle behaviour. That means, unless she is being very careful, its actions can have many consequences she would find undesirable… assuming she’d ever learn about them. It’s ironic, since D seems to be at the moment the only “person” she trusts completely.
In short, i don’t think D is “two faced”. More an illustration of the saying “be careful what you wish for”.

“There’s not enough words to describe how much I’d kill her myself.” Either this is a typo, or Kimi believes that there are degrees of how much you can kill someone. Saying “There’s not enough words to describe how much I’d LIKE TO kill her myself” would make more sense.

Actually, that’s an internet way of saying the same. “I’d kill her dead” would be another similar phrase, as would be “I’d kill her a lot”. Whether this was the intention, I don’t know, but it didn’t read oddly to me at least.

Yes, but as far as I’ve noticed Kimi has been speaking proper English up until that panel. Lol, I was actually thinking about The Princess Bride when I made that last comment. XD

There are different degrees of dead. Just watch The Princess Bride.

I get the feeling Kleya was an innocent but gifted child who was pushed by her father to make tools he could control? the world with, resulting in D and the Hakido (looks like a matrix style full immersion system) and possibly other nic nacs. still ruff on the order of events, did the father getting grabbed predate the collapse or vice versa, if the father got nabbed first, we could have a kid throwing a tantrum and causing the destruction, or if the destruction hit first, the father or another member of Deconstruct Me could have used her devices to trigger it, if so do you blame the maker for someone else misusing the device. As for Kleya herself she knows she has done something wrong, and i think atonement/fixing the damage is on the agenda, its how that is important, she is avoiding hacking/relying on her programing skills, only using the hackido to interface with the VR system, preventing D from diverting premium goods to her hideyhole putting herself on the same level as the other people, even to the point of earning her virtual money, she could easily hack and not have to pay for anything, as for D, id say there is a permenant link between her and it, she dies, g-d knows what it will do, and she is the only one who can control it, shhe just hasnt gotten around to stopping it interfering or is unaware that it still messes with stuff on certain stimuli

We already know that the general public is willing to eliminate a whole group of makers (programmers/”hackers”) for the misuse of their creation (programs/”the Virus”). I would guess that the dearth of programmers in the world makes it particularly difficult to catch all the side effects and bugs of any given program, so I don’t think Kleya knows the full extent of what D can and does do. She’s beginning to get an idea that it’s much bigger, faster, and more responsive to more stimuli and commands than she had known. Of course, it may be constantly growing, expanding its area of influence, and so becoming even more powerful than its original design had intended.

Am I the only one who really wants Kleya to become evil again??

Again!? She is still evil! World domination dressed differently! I feel you dude!

I dont get it… why does everyone get this idia of kat. looking at her flashbacks, she had nothing to do with the badguys and was compleatly tarafied during that time. if she was laughing she was probly using her cybernetics to compleatly leave the world temporarialy.

Heck, maybe she was playing the Game, but something malfunctioned and she ended up going through the motions in real life?

There was a comment about the current leader of Tenka having usurped the job, and it was through the timely occurance of the end of the world.

Its very comic book villain – but this is a comic, so…. – I wonder if the real villain of the piece is that guy. Deconstruct Me was just a patsy (and may just be a name, and not exist beyond that) and that Kleya’s work was co-opted to fulfill the evil plan. Her own activities may have been engineered – she was manipulated – again to create a convenient bad guy for everyone to blame.

Just a thought.

I think she did do all this on her own free will but she never ment for it to go this far she didn’t know that it was bad to hack because her dad told her it was good and after she hacked into he system she didn’t have any control over what she hacked she probably didn’t tell the robots to go blow up every thing she loved

Depending on how gifted she was and what she was working on (knowingly or otherwise) the apocalypse may have actually been entirely accidental, the effects of her first (and possibly only) serious bug to date. The laugh is easy to explain as it would have occurred during the Ohno second (defined as the length of time between when you realize you made a mistake but can’t stop it because you already pressed the enter key). She laughed because it did something unbelievably bad instead of fixing everything because she had a period instead of a comma. And for the record some things could very well do that, particularly if they were directed to a development/error fixing tool (which could be what D is or was). So she instructs D to stop her from hacking because she is absolutely terrified of the possible consequences of accidentally changing the wrong thing. Deconstruct.me was probably a fairly benign programming/light hacking group she was involved with where shred posted some early code or something. Given the name it probably was involved with learning by reverse engineering existing code. Given the consequences the processes in question were probably the equivalent of internet wide root or machine level code.
These days a disturbing portion of devices run on Java if someone messed up a little piece of core java code that affected the way it processed data something pretty similar would happen now. Next time you update Java on your computer look at the list of stuff that runs on java. There is stuff like home security systems, ATM’s traffic control stuff etc, think of what would happen if all that failed at once. And this is precisely why good programmers are in such high demand.

Hmm I seriously wonder if Kat really did kill her mother and how much it really is that she and other’s think she did assuming of course its not survivor’s guilt of course.

I also wonder how much of she’s accused of is really her fault and how much was really the actions of a certain corporation that now basically controls everything.

Wow such a loyal friend :l. Also the part about about her laughing as she killed her mother ruins my theory unless she was miss informed

We had that flashback already. Jake, and someone – quite possibly Kim – were seeing the events on TV. They weren’t firsthand witnesses to what really happened. And that leaves a lot of room for possible misunderstandings.

Not A Villain Webcomic

Webcomic of a semi- reformed hacker trying to redeem herself in a post- apocalyptic world she may have created.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 341