‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 632

Kleya is thinking.

63 Comments

Oooo…. that last panel is so good! I don’t think we’ve actually seen scary Kleya before. Only other people’s artistic rendition of scary her.

I got chills! Somewhere, somehow, something’s going to explode Hollywood-style!

Everything goes Boom 😉

I love Kleya’s eyes in the last panel.

In Kleya’s room you don’t need to choose between gradients and complex backgrounds like a few pages ago. 😀

You sneaky Aneeka…
Making her eyes look angry, when Kleya is actually going to save Jane and her kids 😉

@WurmD: Oh she’s angry all right… but not at Jane.

“Night will fall and drown the sun when a good man goes to war.”

Or in this case, woman. Uh, avatar. Avatar’s pet attack dragon. Whatever.

To war with whom?

Hmm. Is it a war against apathy? She will save Jane when everyone else is sitting on their butts?

Or maybe it’s a war against ‘harsh truth’? It’s the harsh truth that those in the Cities can’t save every Outsider…but Kleya doesn’t care. She will take that truth and crush it. She will destroy the reality that leaves people to die and create a new future where everyone can be saved.

Or maybe Jane is more correct than we currently know and resources are being deliberately mismanaged. Kleya could be going to go kick corrupt politician butt.

In any case, great catch by WurmD. I saw angry eyes and figured Jane was going to get her butt kicked. But saving Jane makes more sense.

@SiliconWolf: well-worded. Couldn’t agree more.

Shhhhh. Snoot is just trying to sound cool by quoting Dr. Who. Don’t ruin it with with commonsense questions like “whom?”

Never can lose by quoting Doctor Who. And yes, quoting Doctor Who is cool. So are bow ties, regardless of recent episodes.

However, Kleya is going to war against the UNREAL, against LIES… against the powers that created a falsified world that keeps the real world from functioning. Saving Jane’s family is just the first step. Every journey begins with one step.

Because (from what I can determine) Kleya has discovered that she’s been blaming herself totally, all along for what is happening and trying to make amends. She’s just discovered that people dying isn’t all her fault; it was caused by people in power who didn’t care enough to pull others out of the ruins… and then started capitalizing on it.

Bow ties, and really long scarves.

And jelly babies. Don’t forget the jelly babies!

Oh, and while you’re at it, reverse the polarity of the neutron flow 😀 (Which, if you know anything about science…)

Demons run, but count the cost. The battle’s won, but the child is lost, when a good man goes to war.

Only if Jane didn’t omit critical aspects of her truth 🙂

Or she wants to make sure that Jane isn’t lying…

I think she’s reticent because a) she’s been trying to do this “ the right way” and b) she’s going to have to hack the system to save her. (Which might even give her away. That could set off some fireworks. Especially if Sandra really is planning a coup against Dr Grace. And of course Kim would go ballistic. Interesting possibilities. But only if it does give her away.
Also, now she’s helping Jane maybe she can help Mina’s family, and Danni and on down the slippery slope

I think the expression is determination rather than anger.
On a semi-related note, the second-to-last panel looks… wrong. From the shape, it looks like Jane’s hair-over-the-face look, but the presence and location of the bangs, as well as Kleya’s overall posture, indicate that she is meant to have her head bowed and her face pressed against her knees. This gives the impression of an elongated skull.

Yeesssss we’re going to find out what’s happening with Jane and she’s going to help her! 🙂

Yes, presumably. The interesting question is, how will she pull it off? After this conversation, it would be tricky to make any help appear a coincidence… Though on the other hand, the fact that Jane seems to have some understanding of Kleya’s power, yet didn’t freak out, means that she might be the only person Kleya can actually help *without* being too sneaky about it?…

Of course, it could *also* be read as: “Find Jane and make it clear that if she crosses me, her kids will suffer… I’m done with being nice!” 😉

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbusENG6hCE

Two paw thumbs up on the last panel, not just in artwork but in plot twist. Never saw that one coming. 😀

Um. What is Jane thinking, and how much does it have in common with reality? Because this dramatic structure might mean either “exactly right”, “ironically right for the wrong reason” or “exactly wrong”, and I’m kind of nervous which it is 😡

Thinking is a good thing. For her goals, she needs ot do more than just be a hero in the game, she needs to eventually save the world. Rebuild the world. Correct the mistakes she and the world made, which resulted in the end of the world.

Hopefully D does’t cause any toruble in his search. Its methods can be somewhat heavy handed.

The thing is, this can’t *all* be her fault. Bandit/Jake is right; you can’t hack the geomagnetic field of a planet, not even with a super-awesome AI that represents itself as a dragon. We still don’t know what she actually did; but we know for sure that it’s not as much as she’s being blamed for. There was a *natural disaster* of some kind in there, too.

Can she trigger the shift from “Barely surviving” to “Rebuilding” somehow? Maybe. Can she correct her own mistakes? Possibly. Will it be enough to overcome people’s blame for whatever really caused magnetic field changes and massive volcanism? That’s harder to say – it doesn’t seem to be rational in the first place, so it can’t be corrected or argued against logically.

The only major thing I can think that could have happened to cause this kind of destruction is a impact from a asteroid or comet. That may cause a shift in the magnetic field, and cause the atmospheric problems.

Annnd that is something that can be man made in origin. Whether by redirecting an stellar object at the planet, or, in an extreme case, pulling a Zeon and doing a “colony drop”.

I don’t know if it’s ever been proven; but, it has actually been conjectured that the Earth’s magnetic field does occasionally reverse itself!

Proven.

As far as I understand anyways.

Ya… it has been proven that the earths poles have flipped, the proof is that the magnetic orientation of the minerals at the bottoms of the ocean have changed evry meter or so.

Yep. Proven.
Also, IIRC, evidence was found of the poles rapidly flipping back and forth multiple times, concurrent with at least one volcanic eruption (according to what had been a lava flow). Don’t remember much of the relevant details, though.

Plus, if there were, as seems to be the case, significant numbers of robotic combat units and other computer-control systems being overridden, it’s entirely possible that governments employed high-altitude nuclear detonations for the EMP effects, and/or other EMP generating devices, but to deal with (presumably) hardened systems, there would have been lots of collateral damage as a byproduct. That would not have helped matters any.
Of course, if that did happen, then that probably got blamed on Kleya/DeconstructMe too.

Either way, I’m inclined towards there having been a near-perfect storm of coincidental natural disaster(s) plus the actual fighting (physical and cyber), and anything else humans did. One or the other would’ve been bad, but nowhere near as bad as both of them combined turned out.

Yep – and the REALLY big volcanoes go off every so often. Fairly plausible the magnetic pole swaps happen when/because the super volcanoes do. The Geo-records of each don’t record the other. So we have no idea if they line up or not.

But I do that our civilian infrastructure is NOT hardened against airborne volcanic ash nor against a sudden loss of the magnetosphere. And the military stuff is only good for days without the civilian stuff. (Ok, maybe months) Add in a little civil unrest and this is the most realistic depiction of an Apocalypse I’ve seen yet.

Now… its also the least scary. Because right NOW our tech base is a rugged mix of old and new stuff. Lots of analog backups if this disaster happened tomorrow. Once we upgrade to the point analog is only in museums… then it will break even harder.

I’d like to point out that the magnetic field reversal is probably not much of a problem in itself. (Seriously, what’s the worst that could happen if a bunch of magnetic compasses go wrong?…) However, the geomagnetic field is a result of movements in the inner layers of the Earth AIUI; so it’s probably directly connected to the super volcano, which was the real cataclysm I think.

Magnetic field reversal isn’t the problem, the problem is that during the switch, the magnetosphere doesn’t deflect ionizing particle radiation from the Sun, and the effects of this are pretty bad. Among them are massive power-grid overloads and vast amounts of radio noise, very disruptive to electronic systems, particularly large scale ones. But it can also be distinctly hard on animal and plant life.

Super-volcanoes are also bad, but in different ways.

Yeah, no doubt about a significant weakening of the magnetic field having disastrous effects on electronics, and over a prolonged time also on life on earth… Does that actually happen during a pole reversal, though?

Recorded history has not recorded what happens during a pole reversal so…. no idea! Scientists have some reasonable guesses tho – and NaV uses one of the more extreme guesses.

I’m inclined to think that Kleya happened across some supervillain nonsense that had been designed to cause a pole shift (like by injecting ionizing radiation into the mantle or something). But I doubt she was the one who set it off. It should be true that it wasn’t something innocuous that she hacked to allow it to do something completely different.

Calling it now – Kleya’s going to find where Jane is in Reality, show up with her submarine, and say “Get in.”

Is the submarine Yellow?

Pink and yellow only.

Well OK, I guess “We all live in a pink-and-yellow submarine” kinda works too 😉

ALERT!! ALERT!! THIS IS NOT A DRILL!
“Everything goes BOOM” girl has been detected!
Civilians are to begin mandatory evacuations to the nearest shelter
Damage control teams are to report to your crisis stations.
All leave is cancelled.
All computers are to be isolated and secured.
REPEAT, THIS IS NOT A DRILL!

Uhh… I think everyone *is* already living in the nearest shelter…

Now we’re getting somewhere! Alright!

Ooo scary angry determined face. Could be angry at Jane for trying to use her (or coming too close to her secret) or be about to modify Jane’s dolls. Then again, why would she send D to find Jane when she could just ask Jane to meet unless she sent him to find her in RL? Would be “nice” if she went around rescuing survivors, though I’m not sure she’s willing to take that much risk atm. I could see this going a multitude of paths; can’t wait to see which the story follows. ^_^

Trust, but verify.

DUHN Duhn duhnnn!!

…Excellent chapter-ending cliffhanger scene/moment! Well done!

I get the feeling Jane has a good grasp on Kleya’s real goals, and knew helping Jane would fit in. Kinda spooky. Although, that would have the cat helping RL Jane, but not Sandra or The Plan.

the only question that’s giving me a real headache, I’ve had this nagging question about D… dose Kleya Smith/Kat/the cyborg call the virus D because it appears as a dragon, or as a reference to her dad(remember page 236), because he did originally program D/mastermind before Kleya Smith/Kat(we still don’t know her name in the real world) made some discreet changes to his programing, making him into a virus disguised as antihaking software?????

Interesting. Whatever Kleya’s plan is, it involves the game, and she needs the game. Jane’s plan is almost entirely antithetical, so of course she’s going to want to stop Jane.

…but…

She doesn’t normally let D participate in this, because she wants to do it right. “Be nice”. Be a hero. If she’s getting D involved, then she’s not going to be nice. Sure, she *could* just want to go rescue Jane, but that *won’t* dissuade the “kill the game” plan. At the same time, though, Jane’s not the power behind that plan; Sandra would be the real target to take out if “nice” is off the table. So I’m not sure what she’s thinking.

Possibly because I don’t quite know about her *whole* plan.

Aw, D looks so happy!

Ok… I just can’t let this go any longer! who is D is he/it a computer virus, a simple backdoor hack Kleya/anyone who knows his code can use, software mant to help all people, software ment to just help Kleya or dose he just represent Kleyas father?!? I really need someone else’s to say what they think about what D is!!?

D is an artificially intelligent assistant that has deep rooted access to “the Game” due to the fact that D also appears to be an anti-hacking protocol installed into “the Game” by Keyla’s father prior to “the End of all things”. In some fashion, Keyla gained superuser access to D, functionally making her it’s only living boss with the passing of her father; since it seems fairly obvious that no one still alive working for Tenka has the ability to turn D off completely, but original members have a per-incident password by using a handprint combined with the passphrase, “Everything goes boom”. Some members of Tenka may suspect that Keyla is still alive, and that she has some additional control over D; which they often call “the Virus”.

D being an “anti-hacking program” is a total BS cover story, TENka has no idea what it is, but it does lash out against hackers (including them), so they claim it’s an anti-hacking program when it does stuff.

D is probably the modifications that Kleya made to her implant that (among other things) allows her to hack into everything in short wireless range. It probably involves her own neural tissue somehow, which is related to why she keels over dead if it’s turned off.

I don’t believe that this is a merely psychological issue, when her brain adapted to the implant parts of it fundamentally changed from human brain matter dealing with sensory input to tissue being shaped by digital information flows.

No, D is an A.I. program, period. That’s official.

The theory of her implant modifications being related to D is interesting, since that would certainly allow her to control technology (by controlling its programming) — but I don’t think that’s really it, since that wouldn’t be limited in range. I can’t think of any other kind of connection either — though I’m not ruling out the possibility that there might be some…

Well, it’s a full on AI. That much is obvious. There are hints that her father had once written it, but now it follows Kat and considers her to be the better master between her and her father. But that’s likely what Kleya programmed it to say because Aneeka has explicitly noted that D doesn’t have free will.

Judging from what D has offered, it seems to have be a sort of automatic system that takes care of the more mundane coding stuff like changing address values, handling the working of electronic doors, client-server communication, permissions… and doing whatever it is that gets people killed omg who would ever build communications tech that can KILL the people who use that tech it’s SAO all over again!

…deep breaths…

Simply: a convenience tool. A very complex convenience tool, but still… it’s like if you made Clippy able to cheat at video games for you, and other stuff. Incidentally, this is why Dr. Grace’s plan is a downright terrible and stupid plan.

Ya… I toltoly get that D is just programmed as an AI… although the thing that bothers me is that I haven’t herd of any theories for an AI without a purpose ,even if it’s programmed to be pointless that’s still a purpose. So what is D’s purpose???

What do you mean by purpose? Isn’t providing convenience features enough of a purpose? Or are you suggesting that an AI always has to strive for some particular goal on its own?

If it’s that latter, that’s not necessarily the case. It’s true that the Holy Grail for most AI researchers is creating a so-called “strong AI”, which would be one that resembles human intelligence in all aspects. To resemble human intelligence, this sort likely would indeed need inherent motivations.

However, there isn’t really any indication as far as I can tell that D is actually a strong AI. It could just be a so-called “artificial general intelligence”, i.e. one that can find solutions for any kind of problem you throw at it, but without resembling a human mind.

In fact, I’m not sure there is even clear indication of D being a general intelligence at all… It could just be an advanced “weak AI” I’d say, i.e. one explicitly programmed to solve particular kinds of tasks — basically what we have today (think Alexa etc.), only more advanced.

Okay I can roll with that but, not knowing for sure will still really bother me.

Great page! On moments like this I’m really glad you put in the effort to make this story a comic as the art really matters.

For some inexplicable reason, I suddenly got the voice of Mushu from Mulan screaming

“Finally! My baby girl needs me!”

I know that D is supposed to be an emotionless script, but that script is definitely autonomous and very much favors our protagonist or perhaps has a use for her. I feel like D could in fact change its mind on its own as a sentient AI.

She’s got the looook,she’s got the looooook (what in the world could make a brown eyed girl turn blue!)

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 632