'Not A Villain' Webcomic - Kleya remembers...

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 304

This is actually a double-page spread, but these Reality pages are killing me, so I'm cutting it in half. I was hoping to have improved enough to be faster at Reality shading but apparently that's not the case. I lost my lovely 2 week buffer, too. Sigh...

Only one more to go, though. I'm saved!

51 Comments

Ooh, we got an extra adjective – *flying* cyborg.

So this pretty much confirms that Kleya is indeed responsible, in whole or in part, for killing a lot of people.

How long should we give her to reflect before demanding that she go back into LIFE and deal with more stress? 😛

It’s hard to say how much of this is new information, though. We saw her flying in the last reality sequence, but most people chalked it up to something slightly more mundane than cybernetics. The Bandit also confirmed that she was the DM leader, but he and Dr. Grace had gone back and forth on the issue so many times with certainty that he couldn’t be trusted.

No, it just confirms that her group is responsible, and that she feels directly responsible for the consequences. I had a discussion on this with a couple of others on pg 301.

True. All that this confirms is that the group she headed did in fact do something very wrong. Which we kinda knew already. Just cause she was the leader means beans. A leader can be an active force or a figure head. Can even go between the two. We don’t know the politics yet so how can we judge how involved she was in this?

My guess? “Hey, I found this neat trick to break into any system, like those robot control systems.”

Then the hacker followers played with a few too many vital systems, because they could.

Explore, play, learn, but when the bots go on a rampage, power shutrs off for vital systems, and the air’s ruined, it went a bit too far.

Does it confirm anything, though? All it says is the world believes she is responsible, which we already knew. It is terrifying how easy it would be to set someone up or create false information and use that. And with her personality, I can see Dad having laid a trap for her, causing her to start everything by looking at something, or even by trying to stop such an event. She could have been used all along, with Dad causing her to kill Mom, and everything else that happened due to something he set up, traps he laid, ideas he planted.

Of course, the world is rarely so black and white. I believe she had something to do with it, but not that she intentionally brought the world crashing down. I think DM started something out of sheer curiosity, and someone else finished it, using them as the scapegoat for it all.

This is the anti-cartoon. Where a gifted little kid almost destroys the world rather than save it.

I was going to say its an anti-anime, but really, 20% of anime is a creepy little kid turning people into chunky salsa.

Wow, ok, I am not an artist so I had no idea how much work these pages are, but if you lost a 2-week-buffer over three pages they must be really intense. I bet it hurts everytime you place speech-bubbles on them. 🙂 I think you should sell the bubble-free versions, e.g. along with the book or something.

And in regards to yesterday, presupposing the statements are true, Kleya is -indeed- a transhumanist dealie.

Also, awesome I described something well for once in my life, thanks for the comments guys. I’m sorry I stole so much of Oscar’s response opportunity, it’s such an awesome thing to discuss though.

I wonder how much of that little news reel was made up, and how much of it was encouraged by her daddy as a testing dealie.

‘Flying Cyborg Girl that destroys the world’ is, in fact, what I want to be.

i don’t know if it does confirm… it sounds more like she was just linked to the hackers. She may have not been directly responsible.

I dunno about the blame here. The “We’ve decoded stuff that proves these people did this” sounds rather fishy.

“Genuinely fishy” or “trope/laws of story fishy”, though? Remember, in fiction characters will routinely decrypt things with merely a supercomputer, whereas in real life your average encryption key would take all the computers currently in existance decades to work through collectively.

Or did you mean fishy in that you don’t think the stuff they’ve decoded actually proves what they say it does?

I doubt they’ve decoded anything to be honest. Given hints through the comic so far, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a cover-up of some kind, where Kleya discovered something, tried to stop it with help from some friends, and “accidentally set it off”, or at least that’s what the real crooks want people to believe.

Either that, or she was messing with something and made a mistake that got through any and all safety measures and destroyed civilization. Which honestly doesn’t sound as likely, but still. 😉

Good catch! Could be a kind of set up.

“Flying cyborg girl” – this is really a little strange!

But she has eyes! First time we see them in the flashbacks, I think.

“Flying cyborg girl”

Yeah…that’s an interesting piece of dialogue.

For two reasons:

1.) Obviously, the “flying” adjective.

2.) We still don’t know Kleya’s real name, IIRC. She had her thought process earlier on on “Delete Kleya’s Smith. Start over.”, but everyone else presumably should know her name in Reality, scapegoat or not.

I wonder if later on, someone will (Possibly Jane and/or Sandra) will refer to her by it in some recruitment part.

Or even further, Aneeka could *easily* drop a bunch of red-herrings with any name. You never know – perhaps Kleya’s had siblings/stepsiblings/cousins/etc., and her father or someone mentions their names.

Maybe we already have been given that name…perhaps her real name is Nanea?

She hasn’t got eyelids, though…

I’m ashamed to be the one to point it out, seeing how the art improved since the beginning and how long it takes to draw reality. But to my defense, I do believe my criticism is constructive.

I love that your static actually cuts words out. Annoying because we still don’t know everything but so much better than kzzt- silly kzzt fake kzzt static.

I still do wonder if she was just named their leader by the propagandists, or if the hackers in general were held as scapegoats, or if she really was behind the terrorist attacks, because I really can’t believe she’d do that last one. Hack into systems, yes, find out their secrets, yes, but intentionally cause damage and destroy? Unless the exoskeleton interface did something to her brain, I have trouble believing it.

And what will you do, when they come to take away your internet?

…I honestly can’t think of what you mean by that comment. And I tried.

I don’t know, I’m not ready to believe Kleya’s the one responsible yet. Probably because she is so certain she is.

*hugs Aneeka* You can do eet! 😀

Did she just throw something at the screen? It looks broken, and her pose suggests motion.

Also, that looks suspiciously like Dad in the image– tattooed arm and all.

I think I see a bit of the interface peeking out from the nape of her neck, but I don’t see it on her hand. Is she wearing it in this scene? The rest of the background is a bit difficult to make out.

As for the transhumanism argument, yeah, maybe. I’m still waiting to hear what the flying cyborg girl and her alleged hacker minions actually did. Kleya, as we know, is still pretty confused about “heroic” actions vs. “villainous” actions. I’m not sure being a flying cyborg girl is what freaked people out or got her into trouble.

It seems to me that Kleya at this point was treating Reality like an extension of the Game… flying around showing off, taunting that no one could catch or stop her, things like that. Taking over the jumbo screen at a football game, perhaps. Causing ATMs to spit out money so she can buy whatever she wants, possibly.

The thing that worries me is Jake’s memory of her saying “everything goes boom.” If she wanted to see explosions in real life, she’d be able to cause them pretty easily. Even if she was getting away with outrageous behavior before, that would cross the line and her former adoring public would start calling for her head. And once the troops are sent out to try to rein her in, I can see her slipping over to the “dark side,” justifying her actions as self-defense.

Even so, I have a hard time seeing Kleya as the leader of a group, even a group of hackers. She seems more like a solo act to me. I suspect Dad may have used her “minions” as an excuse to mobilize more forces than he would have gotten away with, normally, to make his own bid for power.

I really, really hope she didn’t hack the earth’s geomagnetic field. 🙁

“but I don’t see it on her hand”

D’oh! I can’t believe I forgot that detail! When I get the next page finished, I’ll go back and fix that. Thanks for catching that!

I suspect she was made the scapegoat. The company that controls LIFE did the real damage and her hacking was a failed attempt to stop them and by blaming her and the other “hackers” they could discredit them and prevent the truth from being learned. Even more she may believe that her hacking was responsible assuming she made a mistake in her efforts to stop the disaster, rather than it being planned. One of the pieces of evidence is Bandit referring earlier to her killing her mother. The person shown here would NOT have done that. At least that is my 2 cents.

Unless of course she created something like a sentient AI with the sole purpose of taking out anyone who displeased her. Too many people in line? POW POW POW. Some jerk bumps you walking on the sidewalk? ZAP. Mom decides to ground you? CURTAINS.

There IS a flashback when she is starting to hack that shows her mother saying “What have you done?!” so it was probably unintentional or she thought she was helping her mom.

When you eventually finish rest of the double-page spread, you should come back and insert it as 304b. That way, you can keep going with the story without having to worry about it too much 🙂

So. ‘Flying cyborg girl’, huh? Does this have something to do with the magnetic chaos&destruction that brought about The End Of The World (As We Know It)?

And what does Dad have to do with it? Though with the simple-minded approach, this could well explain why she ripped him out of that picture.

The more we read about Kleya, the more I wonder the extent to which she (and hackers in general) been scapegoated for the destructive events that rocked the world. They may have been at least partially responsible for the chaos and carnage, and Kleya had ultimate confidence in her abilities and a ruthless determination to succeed; but knowingly killing a significant proportion of the population for real (including her mother)?

I’m not convinced. Besides which, TENka seem to have a considerable amount of power, being responsible for LiFe – the primary social experience for survivors – and probably have a significant impact in politics. *If* such a big computer-related company was up to no good, then hackers would be the most likely people to discover what they were doing. So what better way to ensure you’re never investigated than by creating policies that ensure hackers either refrain from doing so or are hunted down and killed by vigilante groups?

Kleya’s got a long way to go toward achieving mutual respect among her gaming group, but if/when that point eventually comes, their diversity could help them stay undetected while they pursue various avenues of investigation – especially if at least part of Jane’s persona is an act…

So, she alone has that spinal rig? I thought it would be something TENKA made for all their top programmers.

She built it, and it appears she never shared how she got it to work, or they were never able to replicate it.

I just started reading this comic the other day. I wish I had discovered it sooner because I’m in love with the story. I really want to draw some fan art now.

World ending Hacks of choice? Spontaneous skittle touch for some, random laser eye blasts for others.

I just realized that hacking the world’s geomagnetic field is what lets her fly. It doesn’t necessarily mean that she damaged it.

Pshhh! Hehehehehe. No no, manipulating magetic fields are possible but such fields are not computers. They cannot be hacked. But anything that would cause a disruption in them to this degree that a human could make would be immense. There would be no uncertainty of who did it because it would be found rather quickly.

I cannot guess how Kleya’s cyborg frame makes her levitate exactly, but its fair to assume it somehow causes a same polarity field around her so that the earth’s field just pushes her up. But it could use some other means. Any case, there are completely scientific explanations for how to achieve what Kleya does.

he means that “hacked the earth’s magnetic field” was mentioned in the comic previously

Hmm. Sort of appropriate that I caught the Robocop remake this week then. That IS one of the core flaws with cybernetic transhumanism. Depending on the degree of bonding, it’s entirely possible to have actions taken against your conscious will, while simultaneously your brain convinces itself that it was totally your own decision.

Re: Levitation.

I suppose if you could somehow put 2 magnets with their like poles facing inwards, and step between them, with some way to keep them facing each other(or otherwise maintaining the same distance), you could. Beyond that, stuff like moving… Beyond my high school level knowledge of physics.

As a physics major I would like to chime in on the floating using the magnetic field debate. 1st, you can NEVER put two magnets opposite each other and have them stay. It just doesn’t work. In theory, yes, if everything is static then you can, but in reality nothing is static. Even if Kleya did manage to make a static system to hover in, she would be unable to move without falling.
I do not think that Kleya used the geomagnetic field to stay up. The average refrigerator magnet has a strength of ~100gauss. The earth’s magnetic field is .25-.65 gauss. I can push two refrigerator magnets together, they are not strong enough to levitate an infant (even assuming that’s how magnets work which it isn’t). The earth’s magnetic poles are WAY too weak to even consider supporting a human.
The magnetic fields probably changed on their own. Magnetic fields change poles. It is called Geomagnetic Reversal. It does not appear to have a set schedule for reversing, and we don’t yet understand all of the underlying reasons why or how it reverses. It will reverse in the future and I am guessing that this story is set just after that eventuality.
I think that the ending happened either during or just before DeconstructMe started hacking/being blamed for hacking.

I don’t know enough about manipulating electromagnetic fields to argue with your second point. It is entirely reasonable that the earth’s magnetic field is not strong enough for such levitation. However, speaking as a programmer and roboticist, your first point is incomplete (it answers the letter but not the spirit of the question). It is true that with purely two magnets levitation would not work stably, but if you add in external forces it would be possible, such as when you put two circular magnets with central holes on a dowel. The dowel prevents the magnets from leaving their opposing alignments, and the magnet on top floats. If we assume controllable electromagnets, we can use multiple electromagnets operating under fast closed-loop feedback stabilization to keep the the user/payload upright. This is how the Segway (another inherently unstable system), manages to keep upright.

Also, her not being in space (and just being able to fly) makes more sense for how D would be able to redirect food shipments to her.

another thing not to look over would be some form of quantum locking.

With regards to what dragonspeaker said(which I’ll assume was directed at my post), I was thinking more along the lines of like giant, ceiling/floor-occupying magnets. Sort of like this:

===Magnet HERE===
you+magnets
===Magnet HERE===

So the magnets would be embedded in the ceiling/floor, just far enough apart that they wouldn’t rip the room apart, but close enough that anyone wearing an outfit with the poles facing outwards(We’ll assume for simplicity that all magnets are disc(squared discs for the room, and all poles for repulsion are N)

So you have your suit of disc magnets, with N facing outwards, and the room likewise has the N poles pointing inwards. Essentially, you should now be in a close to 0 G environment. You’d still feel the Earth’s pull on your blood vessels/skin pressure nerves and the like, but as long as you remain between the walls of said room, you would bob in equilibrium(and possibly able to “swim” to different sides, but that might require wall magnets as well).

Re: Earth’s magnetic flip-flop.

My understanding is that Earth has a solid iron core, within a sea of molten iron. Think of it like a gyroscope, in the sense that the iron core is free to roll in any direction within the molten iron. Like a marble within an oil suspension within one of those hamster balls. Through a combination of fluid mechanics, and the Sun(and the Milky Way’s core black hole), the “marble” can be in any orientation relative to the hamster ball. However, because the Sun and Milky Way are so far away, their effects on the “marble” are less pronounced, so it shifts only ever so slightly, which is usually correctable by the “oil”(liquid iron) pushing back against it. Every once in a while, there’s just enough change in the greater galactic scale, that the “marble” rolls out of alignment, causing the planet’s magnetic field to flip-flop.

Alternative: The liquid mantle’s heat+fluidity somehow shifts/alters the magnetic field.

I find it amusing that the right hand sidebar ad is now trying to sell me super-strong rare earth magnets… So I can be like Kleya? 😉

I don’t know how Kleya’s cyber suit lets her levitate, but I doubt being suspended between magnets has much to do with it. I don’t think she’d have earned the nickname “flying cyborg girl” if she had to be in the middle of a magnetic room to levitate.

I’ve never thought it likely that she had anything to do with the shift of the magnetic poles, though I suppose if there was some kind of scientific project to study/alter the Earth’s core and she hacked into it, that could have happened. Maybe she hacked CERN and caused the LHC to spit out a bunch of quantum black holes and they somehow altered the core… But again, this doesn’t seem plausible.

Mostly I don’t think she had anything to do with the shifting poles or a super volcano because she wasn’t angsting enough about it in the main Reality part of the story. I don’t think D was responsible for lots of deaths for the same reason. She gets panicky at the thought of “him” finding her, and freaks out when she thinks about her mom. By contrast, she’s pretty calm when she asks D what’s happening with the poles and volcanoes.

But she also had a screen up with the Deconstruct Me logo on it, back in Reality. Since she didn’t seem to be communicating through that interface, I wonder if DM is really just another program, not a hacker group at all? People see the logo and think there’s this army of hackers out there, when really it’s just her… as I wrote earlier, I just can’t see her as the leader of a group. She’s too antisocial.

Naw, we were just discussing possible ways to levitate. My ulterior motive is somehow persuading Mattel to release a working hoverboard by next year(cf. Back to the Future).

A lot of the things that happened couldn’t be caused by standard hacking. The only way to force a supervolcano to erupt would be to ram a nuke into it and hope you breach the magma chamber, and it has enough pressure to actually erupt.

This indicates that either everything bad happened at once by chance, or these people have tech we can only dream of, and it was used… poorly.

I don’t get why people keep “splicing” the hacking with the ending, when there’s a clear timeline already set:
First, the hacking occurred, probably causing damage to civilization
Then, the hacker hunts began, in which people hunted down anyone who was a programmer
And then, the end of the world came, with volcanoes erupting, and ice pole melting, etc.

What we do know about damage done by the hacking is Shanghai. More specifically, that it was attacked by a robot army. We also know a robot tore down the hospital where Keyla’s mom was staying. And we were told that she “turned an army around, using only her mind”. Presumably, a robot army.

So, it’s more likely that the hacking was mostly a case of robots and/or army systems being hacked. Having a flying super-Kido made it easy for her to hack robots, but it’s likely that she couldn’t fully control all of them. Given that she blames herself for her mother’s death, it was probably accidental. She may have simply wanted to retrieve her, but the hospital collapsed. Or it could just as likely be that she was never truly in control, but rather D was. Or it could have been any of the other hackers, or even her father.

Either way, the cataclysm that followed isn’t necessarily even directly or indirectly caused by the hacking. These could just as easily be two completely separate incidents.

Hey there! Could you please remove the adds for mobile phones which forces the user to visit the app store? As long as this add is here, ive got to turn adblock on for your page :/ this add wont let me go back to your page after it popped up 🙁

Aargh…that annoying ad keeps popping up. It seems to target people mainly from Europe, so I can’t ever get it to come up for me. I’ll see if I can find it though. Can you grab a screenshot of it? Or the url that it sends you to?

http://ads.gltrkk.com/sw/51103/CD30666/CD13939___c914b7b3f540cfa345e3a3a7d0d5b0dc___e2c4w2c484v2t2

this is the link. I made a screenshot on my mobilephone. The popup is called lovelink.us … and the message translates like “there is an error with your appstore, please download xy”

One of the reoccurring themes with Kleya is that she gets tunnel vision, and gets so focused on the goal in front of her that she ignores the consequences and side-effects. Very mad-scientist mindset. In the Game, she was so focused on her own actions that she didn’t really stop to think that allowing Jane into the group was a bad idea. I have a feeling that Kleya’s responsibility or lack thereof for what happened to the real world is related… she got so wrapped up in something, accomplishing a goal, that it didn’t occur to her the kind of disasters she might have set in motion. It also fits into her win at all costs mindset. It also fits into her rather naive view of heroism… many geniuses are socially awkward, not really being able to relate to the people around them.

So at the moment, it seems to be that Kleya has set a task for herself that requires a much different mindset than she is accustomed to and hasn’t really learned that lesson yet. Heroism is at least in part stepping back and looking at the big picture and seeing how one action could affect things around it. Basically, keeping in mind that every decision has a ripple effect, and that something that seems good here and now can cause damage in the long run.

There’s nothing she could have done to offset or upset the Earth’s polarity. That’s like asking an ant (nearly microscopic insect) to single-handedly turn Mount Everest upside down within what had to be a matter of days or weeks. Not gonna happen. However…if some of those hacked robots set off bombs on weak earthquake faultlines, those in theory could have triggered a series of earthquakes that could have led to a re-eruption by supervolcanos (Yosemite and Yellowstone Park are capable of literally blanketing a dozen states in up to 10 FEET (3 meters) of ashfall downwind to the east). That in turn could have set off a whole bunch of chain reactions, including possibly altering the flow of the mantle magma enough to alter the outer and inner core’s spins at just the wrong moment, flipping the polarity of the core (which is not solid, but is rather presumed to be colloidal, somewhere between the two, like the way butter is a “solid” when it’s still malleable like a liquid).

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 304