‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 620

Jane may or may not really dislike TENka.

26 Comments

Kill the programmers, kill the robots, kill ALL the robots, kill the med bots, repair bots, construction bots. Kill TENKA, kill the Game, kill hackers! When will people realize that “kill it” does not solve problems!

Whatever you say about TENKA – at least they seem to have an actual plan to SAVE the word instead of just killing. For that matter, as much as they dislike Kat’s “real” identity – every side of that plan seems to involve her living and willing help. Um… maybe her unwilling help if required.

Jake has been very cagey about his plan – but he seems more worried about colateral damage then her literal life. Perhaps a practal concern for her mental health as well.

TENka has its problems. They are pretty much deceiving Dude’s city with that whole “send them a programmer” thing. They have enough internal politics to burn everything down a dozen times over. Their leadership consists almost entirely of various forms of imminent tyrant. Bandit clearly stated that the outside world have legitimate reasons to doubt TENka’s motives…

Breaking TENka may well be a bad thing, but they are far from an ideal solution to the world’s problems. They actually look to be pretty terrible as far as leadership goes. They are about the only place with a decent supply of technical staff and their city is still a mess, meanwhile Dude’s city is falling apart and their people are still holding its society together. If they can kill TENka as an entity without killing its staff then it may well be best for everyone, the programmers there might them move somewhere where they don’t have to constantly watch their backs and aren’t being diverted to someone or other’s power-play. True, that is wishful thinking, a city that genocided your kind is not going to feel like a safe environ, and most everyone is stupid enough for politics, but one can dream, and most people in Not a Villain have very little aside from dreams remaining to them.

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2015-01-06
“Its a big world, and the “save” function wasnt well thought out.”

Next panel: “No, if everything goes boom, only *I* win. Also if you call me ‘Kitty’ one more time, I will make you regret it!”

Was that a reference in panel 5?

@panel 6: I think Jane may not count Tenka as being a part of “everyone”.

I think panel five’s text is a reference to “Miss Mary Mack”, what with repeating the last word thrice.

Kitty Kat
All dressed in black
With neural links
All down her back
She told her mother
To be well hid
And watched the systems
Jump the grid

Nice! 🙂

I see, that makes sense, thanks!

Oho, Jane’s not a total fool. She knows that TENka means to rule. But Kat has also seen the fate that down the chaos path does wait.

Just having some fun. I do hypothesize that Kat has a better idea than Jane or Sandra of what would happen if TENka’s authority were undermined without an alternative leadership being presented. She’s mentioned before that even though she can remotely hack things to fix them, she’s stopped doing it because the result is that the people would just break them cause they knew they hadn’t been the ones that fixed it. The problem with a breakdown of legitimacy in a world where survival depends on complex machines is that there is nobody you trust to program the machines.

In a book I read once a group gets to a machine that can literally reshape the universe. And everyone ends up pointing guns at each other… And eventually shooting at the only being that actually knows how to use the machine.

How can you trust someone in a situation like that?
Even if they are well intentioned – what if they simply mess up? What you have may be bad but…

I think Jane may not be considering the fact Tenka wants to *survive*, not only rule, and to rule, it wants others to survive, too.
She… oversimplifies.

Chu is right. Thus far Tenka hasn’t done much to save anyone; they’re just profiting from the game while people are trapped and starving and dying. Jane is a lot smarter than others believed, but she’s missing half the picture. Even if she succeeds, what happens during the vacuum when Tenka is gone? What happens to the half of society that is thriving under Tenka’s leadership?

Yes, those in the outlands who are focusing on The Game are doing so at their own peril by not getting out and actively improving their situation. But that’s not really much different from today, with people who watch television and spend hours on their computer rather than learning real life skills or trying to improve their lot in life. What might we accomplish if not for the drug of electronic entertainment?

Then again, it keeps people like Jane off the streets…

“Profiting” from the Game. Right. And no one has done the math on how exactly THAT many Outsiders are making a living as entertainers? Pretty sure most (if not all) of that is coming from AI bots with bank accounts. The cities don’t like citizens taking that “entertainment” fund because they know it is really charity.

Plus – TENKA itself is on much shakier ground then people realize. Even if they are the only place actually exporting food at all.

It’s not that the Cities don’t like people taking the entertainment funds cause it’s charity, it’s because they need people to work outside of L.i.F.e. and the Game, such as by working the fields (farms, whatever they are) and doing maintenance to make up for the lack of functioning bots/mechs.

Probably all the Cities ship at least some food, but they probably can’t buy food, because that would undermine the very real need for self-sufficiency in case deliveries are shut off.

Well, except for TENka. TENka doesn’t win if you kill TENka.

I wonder what exactly she meant when she said that they were killing her children.

I also wonder why Jane isn’t nicer to Kat. She should know by now that people like Danni and Mina are able to get on her good side, so why not be more like this:
“Sorry for acting like a crazed murderer, but we needed Danni’s popularity to go up. Acting like a bunch of loose cannons in the Game while still defeating Aza’s group got us a LOT of popularity, but let’s be cool outside of the Game, ok? Here, this is a photo of what my family and me really look like. If we can ever recover from The Ending you’re free to visit us and I’ll make you some tea and biscuits.”

So, yeah, if I were in a similar situation I’d be quite cheesy and upfront with my motives and the story would be terrible. 🙂 Melodramatic at best. But at least I wouldn’t say “Kitty” to the one I’m asking for help. Seriously, is that woman currently being controlled by her children and one of them is in puberty or something? ¬_¬

I think Jane is actually trying… to get herself to do that. When you’re too jaded, to set in your ways, it is quite hard to act in a new way even if you want to.

I still think Jane is being played by Mina’s mom, but even if not, I think it’s someone a lot like her. Someone whose kids are in immediate peril, and TENka is doing nothing to help them. Sandra seems to be generally supportive, but doesn’t have the resources to help dig out Jane’s family and get them to safety.

I mention this because in addition to playing the part of Jane-as-psycho, I think the player is only borderline sane at this point. Mae is not in a good way. I know how I feel when my own kids are in trouble. If I were Mae’s mom, I’d be getting pretty frantic and short-tempered by now, too.

“Kill TENka” doesn’t have to mean “kill the TENka employees.”

Also, they’re talking on Sandra’s server, and Sandra probably doesn’t know all of Jane’s “reality” details, either, so I think Jane is still being cautious about staying somewhat in character. There is no truly private way for her to have a conversation with anyone.

Except that Molly doesn’t have the technical skills to hide that from Kat, and if she’s really as unstable as Jane pretends to be, she doesn’t have the emotional skills to hide a Kido from Mae.

Yes, the Kido requirement is the main argument against Mrs. Lilly being Jane. But we now know the family is buried in rubble, and some areas are reachable only by squirming through small spaces Mae couldn’t manage or be moved through by others. There may be a Kido unit the parents have found that they can’t get Mae to. I could see them deciding to hide that fact from the kids. I could also imagine that situation tearing up what little stability Mrs. Lilly has left. 🙁

I’m still PRETTY sure the cataclysm or whatever was actually TENka’s fault (or at least the trigger)

Well, and the difficulty with treating TENka as a monolithic entity comes up. After all, before the Ending started Kat and her family, along with Jake, were all part of TENka together. I suspect that none of them was actually the president of TENka or even particularly high in the decision-making loop. While the president (or whoever) and Kat’s dad both had a similar tattoo, the resemblance kinda ends there.

I think that the president was doing something, then realized that Kat’s cybernetic interface would allow her to dig it out, and thus chose to eliminate her…and failed. So instead he resorted to demonizing her, and largely succeeded.

Isn’t (or wasn’t) Kleya’s dad the president of TENka?

It’s not clear. There was a character in Reality who has the same tattoo as her dad did, but it’s not confirmed that it was her Dad (they don’t really look the same other than the tattoo) and it’s not confirmed it was the President of TENka, though in context it seems to be someone fairly important.

Kat’s dad apparently was taken from the family by force and on that occasion told Kat’s mom to protect her. This is not suggestive of being in a position of power, but possibly there were national authorities or rival transnationals involved in that.

Well, of course The Game gets updated.
On the positive side, it provides entertainment for people in a world where other forms of entertainment are difficult or impossible to produce on a large scale.
On the negative side, it keeps people from focusing on the possibly nefarious schemes f those in or seeking to gain power.
In the neutral middle ground, it keeps the common folk from stirring up trouble while people try to do other things that need doing.
Clearly, Jane only sees the negative.

…and ff in left field, it’s entirely possible that they can’t update anything The Virus interferes with, and that’s basically everything but the game. Nobody outside of the underwater bubble really knows about The Virus, I think? Except Kleya, obviously.

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 620