'Not A Villain' Webcomic - TENka calms everyone down. The hacker needs to be caught.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 110

It's too bad no one's watching Kleya's reaction...

Random info: Though the Germany City didn't survive the Ending, the remains of it still give some protection and most of its ex-citizens (now considered as Outsiders) continue to survive there.

And for the vote incentive, the fight against the blobs continues!

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Thanks to everyone who reads my comic! I really appreciate it!!

39 Comments

I for one am not surprised that the official anti-hacking system was created by Kleya. (Although I do wonder if she put in any backdoors when she made it)

I thought that it was Kat’s personal system, which Beard was taking credit for. But you make sense, IF Kleya used to work for TENka. Which is possible, and would explain a lot.

Definitely made my day slightly better, esp that vote incentive lol. If my credit card hadn’t been stolen I’d definitely buy one of those shirts. Though, I think I missed something on one of them…
Yay Comic!

PHEW! So they didn’t get Kleya… That’s good to know. ^^ At least we know who the hacker is now. So that means… KLEYA IS SAFE!! XD XD XD

… For now anyway. :\

Maybe I missed something, but I’m pretty sure it hasn’t been explained yet.

How exactly did the world end?

It hasn’t been explained yet. Apparently it was horrific enough to cause massive instability in the planet. And apparently, either hackers were part of the cause of it (which I highly doubt) or because the world has become extremely dependant on hardware/software, they’ve gained a lot of power and some have used it in very nefarious actions. That in turn has caused a witch hunt and general population anti-hackerism.

I think the ‘he could take over a city’ comment is most enlightening in that regard. While likely at least partially a case of exaggeration in the face of fear, it likely points to how automated and reliant on technology a city is.

The following is a guesswork:

Humankind continues polluting for another 30-40 years. We find a few more oil deposits to keep our dependence on fossil fuels sated, or we convert to liquid coal (which is even worse) or nuclear (which would be better if we could count on nothing ever going wrong). Maybe something even more damaging to the environment that we haven’t even found yet.

It starts to become clear that we’re going to destroy our own atmosphere, so we create massive life-support systems (maybe even dome cities) for all the major population centers, along with making smaller ones available for people to have for their own home.

Continue for 10-20 years, at this point, the world has already “ended” in that people are afraid to go outside because the atmosphere is so terrible. Still, most of the human population has ready access to clean air. The “citizen/outsider” division probably began at this point.

Now some disgruntled Outsiders (“Deconstruct Me”?) decide that they want to make the rest of the world feel their pain. They create a computer virus to take over the self-calibrating life support systems used in cities and change their behavior.

Billions of people die. Eventually, people manage to purge the computer virus from at least some of the cities, and rebuild the system so that it can’t happen again.

Germany City, mentioned in this page, probably still has the virus active – hence: “The atmosphere is still fluctuating.” Aside from a messed-up computerized life support system, I can’t think of anything that would cause the atmosphere to “fluctuate.”

Whatever happened (“The Ending”), the blobs on the previous page were speculating about solar flares and earthquakes, and I’m not seeing either of those as being related to fossil fuel use. (Or hacking.) A solar flare could easily damage the atmosphere, which might then fluctuate for some time, and might also cause earthquakes (if substantial parts of the crust were melted, a lot of fault lines would become very unstable). There was apparently enough advance warning to build the Cities (or they were built for other reasons, e.g. your fossil fuel hypothesis), and not all Cities survived The Ending, e.g. Germany City. However, one doesn’t need to be in a City to survive– other survivors might be in smaller underground pressurized shelters or something.

But if “Deconstruct Me” really exists, and isn’t just a bogeyman created by TENka, they might have tried to take over Germany City, and the City may have been damaged in the resulting fight. Or they might be a group who didn’t evacuate Germany City when it was damaged in The Ending, and they might have disobeyed TENka in doing so.

Yay! Now TENka says that it was THEIR anti-hacking system.
Ahhh I want to hurt them sooo badly 😀
Kleya, add some money to your account, make biiiig explosion or sth 😀

exciting~ ?(´?`)?(´??)?(`?´)?

The vote incentive makes me snicker.

It’s also quite nice to know what D is. This also means that Kleya has worked with TENka in the past.

This Deconstruct Me group also sounds like they’ll be a handful for Kleya sooner or later.

Well, she didn’t necessarily work with them. It’s possible they stole it from her in some other way.

I do agree about the hacker group though. Also possible that they’ve already been a handful for her in the past.

Plain as Danni may look, I find it hard to think that she’d manage to lose a popular vote to Superbug there.

For the first time in reading this, I ‘m confused – who is superbug? Does he mean that bandit is a hacker? Is it kleya or the tenka guy saying “my system”? The layout of the comic means I don’t follow what’s happening. I thought danni was fighting bandit with kleya? Or was she in a different trial?

-Superbug is (presumably) Danni’s opponent.

-Kleya is THINKING ‘My system’. See how the bubble changes?

-Danni was in a different battle, as evidenced by the fact that they were on different sides of the brackets and each fight is 1v1.

Back in page 104, it shows that Danni is up against “SuperBug” and Kleya is against Bandit. Each fight is just 1-on-1.

The Bandit is not the hacker. Superbug is a completely different person who first appeared now (though his name was first shown in 104).

That was Kleya saying “my system”. Apparently, “D” is TENka’s anti-hacking system that Kleya either programmed, took over, or taught (since it is an AI).

If you see the rectangles with rounded corners that means it is Kleya’s internal thoughts. That might help in determining who is saying what.

I had assumed that D is Kleya’s personal system and has nothing to do with TENka, but TENka is taking credit for what happened.

It says on D’s character page entry that he operates with Kleya behind the scenes and interacts with her quite a bit. That makes me more inclined to believe he’s a personal system she designed that TENka is ripping off the credit for.

The fact that the cities are named after countries seems like a pretty interesting bit of info… Perhaps before the Ending entire cities were the size of countries? Or perhaps AFTER the ending cities that were still habitable were just that rare?

Interesting. So Kleya designed TENka’s anti-hacking system? I KNEW there was a reason TENka was out for her head on a platter! She would know the system back and forth if she made it- she’s a threat to them, and if she were to sell the information on how to beat it to someone it could very well destroy TENka and L,i.F.e. Obviously they can’t risk letting her walk around free. My guess is TENka tried to put her on ice so she faked her death to get away. It would explain why “she was supposed to be dead” as the Bandit said earlier and why they want to find her to make sure.

Wild guesswork there, but this is just my take on it. I’m probably wrong, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Somehow, TENka still doesn’t strike me as quite “evil” enough to want to kill one of their best engineers just because she knows how their system works. Someone has to to keep the system up-to-date, which means that someone in the company has to know how it works in order to keep it relevant – otherwise, cyberterrorist groups would just learn its weaknesses and work around them. Killing off your best employees is a waste of human resources.

I think Kleya is probably responsible for her own situation. She probably “went rogue” and started making a lot of trouble without TENka doing anything directly to her. I suppose it’s possible that they tried to ~fire~ her, thinking that now that they had D, they didn’t need her – but the smarter thing to do would have been to promote her and put her on another project (and fire someone else if you’re that desperate for money).

My guess: We know that Kleya was in The Game before. At the time, she was probably doing off-hours while working at TENka. She probably was losing her numbers and was about to get kicked out – and she went rogue to avoid “losing” The Game. Saisuke is probably involved somewhere, here (he’s on the character page, after all) but it’s impossible to tell how, so far.

There is the possibility that Kleya never worked for TENka. She could have worked for a rival corporation that was bought by TENka for the technology and fired all the personnel (happens today). “D” would have been something she built there that was carried over to TENka. She might have gone a little rouge with her firing and performed some “evil” hacks on TENka which makes them want to find her.

And I bet that there’s code in the TENka system that no one has touched since Kleya inserted it. On very large code projects, there’s pieces that no one wants to touch because it is critically important and no one knows how it works. It is possible that when she left TENka or when they no longer liked each other, she left backdoors in their system and hid it well enough that they haven’t found all of them. It’s probably how “Hero Smiley” works. It probably hooks into TENka’s logging system (such as D) and removes all traces of her attempts.

Kleya might have worked for TENka, and might have disagreed with their policies in a major way. They seem to want to exert a lot of control over everyone, and I have the feeling she would object to that. I doubt very much that TENka tried to kill her, but they would have tried to keep her contained and controlled, and she wouldn’t react well to that, either. She probably hacked to escape from TENka’s physical custody and to hide her online identity.

But wherever she is, she doesn’t seem to be worried about air and food. She says no City would take her, so presumably she’s not hiding out in one, probably not even Germany City. She’s got a pretty good shelter set up, though, wherever she is.

I wonder if all the Cities are physically near each other? Otherwise, why would anyone have to decide which one to go to? They’d go to the nearest one, right?

Interesting that the hack would also attack Kleya. Was it because they are partners (linked accounts?) or was it attacking her because she was activating her special? Also an interesting reaction about the hacker. Kill him? While I agree that cyber-crime should be punishable, the punishment should fit the crime. What is a hacker capable of that they would garner murderous hatred (or is life so under valued now that the first reaction to any crime is to demand their death?)? They could kill life-support in certain areas if the system is on an open network (not smart design). Identity theft must have become more grievous of a crime than it is now, with greater consequences for the victims and of course there is always hacking and taking possession of avatars.
One more thing, I had originally thought that to be an ‘Outsider’ meant to be living off-planet, but to reveal that just being outside of a ‘city’ on the planet makes you an outsider is very telling about the current condition of the planet, given previous information on ‘outsider’ living condtions.

The hacker never did anything to Kleya. Only thing that happened was that Kleya knew her partner was being attacked, likely because she knows way more about the game world than a person is supposed to know (like viewing stats from her last fight with bandit isn’t normal).

As for killing a hacker, there have been many indications that hackers are a -serious- threat. Think about how much technology we have now, then add a century or so, and consider what it could do. My guess is that hackers (particularly this ‘deconstruct me’ group) in the past have caused some major catastrophe. While perhaps not the Ending that was just mentioned, likely something of great significance.

Also, the city/outsider thing has been mentioned several times before.

Page 107, Kleya states “Huh? Someone’s hacking? Attacking me?” Further more, if she wasn’t being attacked, why did she get an alert of the attempt? There was nothing to indicate she was actively keeping an eye on Danni’s fight until the hacking attempt caught her attention and she went looking for its source.
As for this hacker group, all we have so far is tenka’s word they exist (I think I saw that logo in their “hacker’s will be prosecuted” signsm I could be mistaken.). What they are in reality is unknown. They could be a myth, created by tenka as scapegoats to produce fear and obedience in their customers and they don’t actually exist. They might be hackers employed by tenka in order to produce an aura of fear and to cause disturbances that tenka can ‘save’ and ‘protect’ their consumers, making themselves out to be the valiant heroes. And of course, they could be an actual hacker group (like anonymous) but their intentions, goals and methods are still completly unknown.
The city/outsider thing was mentioned, but very little information about their conditions, environments and locations has been revealed. With this small bit of information on this page, we can divine so much more about the world constructed than we could before.

Someone was hacking her special that she gave to Danni. She probably has common code that she puts in all her specials to alert her about hack attempts. So, when Superbug attacked Danni’s special, the special sent out the alerts and Kleya heard them and first thought it was an attack on her until she figured out where it was coming from. Superbug was just an unlucky hacker that attacked a special that had too many alerts in it to trigger D.

I could see us getting to the point where a hacker could commit a crime that is worthy of the death penalty or imprisonment for life.

Just look at what happened with the Stuxnet virus. It looks to be specifically targeted towards machines that enrich uranium. It modified the machines so that instead of enriching uranium, they failed.

Now, think of how dams, airplanes, boats, nuclear reactors, etc are all controlled by computers. Most of them are not connected to the outside network, but many times you’ll have an employee who messes up and brings in a USB drive or a laptop from home. A hacker could build a virus that attempts to infiltrate those locations and then wrack havoc. Opening the flood gates of a large damn would cause serious harm and quite a few deaths.

Now, imagine that happening just once. With the amount of media coverage, it wouldn’t be long till anyone who calls himself/herself a hacker would be disparaged. Look at what happened to Muslims in the US after 9/11. And if you are living in a world that has massive instabilities and all your news is coming from a corporation that hates hackers (because of the damage they can do to it), you’ve got a situation ripe for exaggeration of hackers abilities.

I can imagine quite a bit. I can imagine the entire world being destroyed because someone forgot a semi-colon in their code (C++ was always nitpicky like that). There is a saying “To err is human, but to really screw up you need a computer”. They don’t even need a hacker related incident; all they need is an incident they can blame on hackers. Humans are prone to making the wildest jumps in thought and logic from the tiniest scraps of information.

Not semi-colon mistakes. The compiler catches that way to easily. Maybe a = vs == mistake would be more liable to destroy the world 🙂

And I do agree that all they need is the media to blame it on a hacker and you’ll probably have this same scenario.

Ohh~~!! The suspense!!!!!

The female pronoun from the crowd “Kill her!” is interesting. I guess whatever Kleya did before was extreme enough to change the popular conception of “Hacker” to be a female.

It seems both groups were right about D. I was sure it was her AI, because it looked like she was pointing when she said “Let D handle it,” but others thought it was TENka’s. I suppose its “avatar” looked too good to be Kleya’s work. 😛

Whoever it was that suggested several pages ago that Kleya probably was previously a member of TENka and since quit has just been confirmed.

There’s also cries of ‘get him’. So i doubt it.

I have to agree, and was going to point that out if no-one else already had (as it has).

Like another reply states, there were also cries of “Get Him”…but even so, in OUR world (in almost any culture), once a crime has been commited, the vast, vast majority of people assume masculine. When you ask someone to picture a thief, a bank robber, a con man or a car thief, the first thing nearly everybody would think of is a male of some description.

So…either this is an intentional setting development by the author (in which female figures in sinister or suspect positions are becoming as frequent – if not MORE frequent – than males, so much so that overthrows millenia of assuming males as being natural villains)…

Or…it’s an unintentional use of wording, subconsciously written in simply because Kleya is female.

Or…it’s simply an unusual person/user in said frame who suspects women of any and all wrongdoings.

lol, Superbug. Reminds me of one of those bug catchers from pokemon for some reason. XD

I may not like hackers but I don’t think they should be killed. They must really be hated in this world.

I just want to say I love the vote incentives. Love them to death. The way you have an ongoing storyline in them is like I am reading two almost entirely different comics with the same art!

I am lazy about clicking to vote on comics. Wallpapers and such don’t do much or me. But you have hit the way to get me to click, because if I don’t, I miss the story!

I love this comic. Both of it!

Ha ha. Yeah, the blobs have taken on their own little story. I think it’s hilarious and I’m so glad to hear that others think the same! lol.

Thanks for commenting and letting me know. And thanks for reading and voting! I really appreciate it!

[…] story follows Kleya, a reformed hacker (the worst of criminals) who wants nothing more than to be seen as a hero, despite her sour […]

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 110