Is currently building an interstellar empire. He hasn't figured out how to get home yet.Quote:
Originally Posted by halfeye
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Is currently building an interstellar empire. He hasn't figured out how to get home yet.Quote:
Originally Posted by halfeye
Yeah.. horrible goverments with no regard to human rights. Cant see what that has to do with anything though.Quote:
Plus, governments make people who cross lines disappear all the time. Usually into some form of prison. The French even have a phrase for it. Pour encourager les autres, roughly translated as 'so others get the right idea'.
Not quite. This is A) civilians. and B) Something that has not been outlawed.Quote:
What the MoP is doing is analogous to the cat and mouse games that often occur in the real world. Governments know the other side has spies. They will let them operate and try to keep an eye on them. They only react if they catch them going too far. The same sort of thing happens with hackers in a lot of cases.
I'm kinda assuming that the entity Collette discovered is in fact the MoP, what with her observation that its focus is shifting being immediately followed by her father scolding her.
On the way he deals withpeopleSparks that learn too much about his secrets, well he has to do something.
Making very clear that poking certain aspects of his city will lead to... unfortunate consequences is most likely slightly more effective than telling them not to.
Besides, he is still a Spark.
Somewhat over the top reactions are to be expected.
More importantly, Tarvek, Gil and the Clank-guy kinda prove you can avoid the consequences if you are clever and quick enough.
So I guess it is more like natural selection for mad scientists than a punishment.:smallamused:
While the building has disappeared, that does not mean everyone inside is dead. They could be beneath the streets, surrounded by police clanks, and being led off to have their brains cleaned.
Which is more tyrannical - not allowing anyone into Paris who can understand how the place works, or eliminating (various ways) those who understand too much?
Colette has explicitly discovered more than one entity. The second, omnipresent one is the MoP. The first one may be Beausoleil.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kantaki
Is kastle Heterodyne still in there somewhere?Quote:
Originally Posted by Lethologica
He completely removed himself from the Paris systems when the MoP demanded that. However, the last thing we knew is that he was driving one of the child catchers, so he may have been back in, but only in a very limited sense. Alternatively, he removed the child catcher from the systems, in which case he wouldn't be. Further, even if he didn't remove the child catcher from the systems, although Colette possibly could have noticed him, unless he went a lot further than that since then, I doubt she would have.Quote:
Originally Posted by halfeye
A) Hackers and spies can't be civilians?Quote:
Originally Posted by lord_khaine
B) Why would you say it's not outlawed? The disappearances made it seem pretty outlawed to me. :smallamused: Even if a rule is enforced situationally or sporadically, it still exists.
They can, and sometimes are, but the laws are different, the Geneva conventions don't apply to civilians firing on troops, they can be in much more trouble than foreign troops would be.Quote:
Originally Posted by eschmenk
Laws are published, if it's a secret rule, it's not a law.Quote:
B) Why would you say it's not outlawed? The disappearances made it seem pretty outlawed to me. :smallamused: Even if a rule is enforced situationally or sporadically, it still exists.
I suspect that he doesn't disappear people who are simply studying things. What he does is disappear people who try to actively take control. This is probably why he was so insistent that Agatha remove the Castle from the city as soon as possible. His city is, in many ways, a lot like Mechanicsburg, though without an actual AI controlling it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shining Wrath
Ah, it's nice to see father-daughter bonding moments. "Yesssss ....".
I am looking forward to observing.
I think I'm seeing more and more hints that Lucrezia may have infiltrated the Paris systems, probably with Beausoleil's help. I'm still not sure yet, though. Or could it be another one of the muses (or muse of time), possibly built in to the systems by the MoP?
My guess would be that Colette saw both Beausoleil and the Castlebot, rather than Lucrezia.Quote:
Originally Posted by eschmenk
That would make sense. Although the MoP cut Colette off rather abruptly. I wonder if there's another, permanent entity in the Paris network and he doesn't want to discuss that with her now.Quote:
Originally Posted by geoduck
Quote:
Originally Posted by eee
Alternatively, he thinks he knows what's going on with Paris' systems (himself + Colette, Beausoleil, maybe a bit of the Castle) but there's something else potent and insidious lurking (Lucrezia) that he is dismissing too casually, and we're about to see The Master get pwnd.
I hope not though, I rather want to see him face his old peer, the Storm King and see how that plays out. And if he needs to fall for reasons of plot, I'd rather see it be his own age and over-extending himself be what does him in than some sneaky trick.
Yeah, I got the "dismissing things too casually" vibe, myself. But it also could be a hint that there are other things in there that haven't been introduced yet. Or maybe it's just the castlebot. :smallconfused:
One reason I wouldn't be surprised if Lucrezia is in the Paris systems: Beausoleil bragged about how much more he was learning from Lucrezia than he had learned from the MoP. Lucrezia wouldn't be teaching Beausoleil if she wasn't expecting something in return. Would she be satisfied with Beausoleil doing minor things like tricking the systems into not responding to the Giesters or would Lucrezia want to understand and use the MoP's systems herself? In the later case, it would help if Beausoleil told her what he knew and helped her get started. OTOH, since the clank Lucrezia didn't seem to be sparky (based on Gil's observations that the Queen of the Dawn needed other sparks to invent the new wasp engine) maybe she wouldn't be able to do anything much with the MoP's systems anyway. :smallconfused:
One interesting thought: What if Lucrezia (or Beausoleil) managed to copy Lucrezia out of the clank that she's in now (or somewhere else) and into the Paris systems? What would she be able to do then? Would there be enough juice in the systems for her to regain her sparkiness?
To be honest, though, I think I might preferit if this were all Zola's doing. Granted, I don't know how Zola could control the Giesters and other revenants herself and Beausoleil said that he met others (plural) who knew Van Rijn's secrets, so it's probably unlikely, but it would add an interesting twist to the plot.
SpoilerMaster Voltaire is large and in charge. He has a serious amount of power to have Martellus panic like that.
Tweedle and the MoP have history, it would appear.
Large indeed. That shot of him standing next to Collette really drove in how big the suit he wears is compared to a 'regular person'. It certainly can't hurt his intimidation factor to be a walking colossus.
Well, Paris is THE place for the rich and powerful to send their kids to get an education. I assume Tweedle studied there like everybody else did. Given that Tweedle is just as much of a schemer as the rest of his family and profoundly stupid on top of that, it makes sense that he would be constantly running afoul of the MoP whenever his latest scheme went belly up.Quote:
Originally Posted by eee
I assumed Tweedle studied there, too, but I wouldn't go so far as to call him "profoundly stupid." It's just that he's not as exceptionally intelligent as people like Seffie, or Gil, or Tarvek, or the MoP. Of course, whenever his schemes required exceptional intelligence to pull them off, he was still going to have problems. :smallsmile:Quote:
Originally Posted by Rodin
One thing about Tweedle that has always impressed me is how quickly he recovers from his mistakes. I'm particularly impressed with his willingness to accept his mistakes and learn from them. That actually shows a quite a bit of wisdom. Granted, not making the mistakes in the first place would be even better. :smallbiggrin:
I'm hoping the next page or two is REALLY impressive. For the Master of Paris to give that "Oh AM I? Observe!" line and then just drop a clank or two is terribly anticlimactic. :smallbiggrin:
With regards to the entities, I'm pretty sure the "huge, entwined, omnipresent" entity is the Master of Paris himself, given that he starts focusing on Colette the moment she mentions the entity's focus is moving.
The other may indeed be Drusus Beausoleil, who I'm starting to suspect may actually BE the city at this point. Firstly, his name ("Beautiful Sun") matches nicely with Paris's nickname of the "City of Lights." Secondly, he's clearly connected to the city: this comic has the Paris-linked Castle seize control of Beausoleil's clank body, and we haven't seen anything have the ability to remotely control a clank that it isn't networked to in some fashion. He's also obsessed with mechanical life, which seems to indicate that he isn't (or wasn't?) human in any fashion. Finally, he claims to be linked to a bunch of parts of the city, which the "spread out across vast areas of unimportant subsystems" the first entity has matches perfectly.
So I have to wonder...is he a work of Van Rijn? Because if he is the "parasitic intelligence" and the "mathematical chimera without physical constraints" we've heard about, he's operating at a level which clearly boggles Tarvek, and which seems to surpass even powerful artificial intelligence like the Castle and the Beast. And Lucrezia was not, I believe, noted for her work with artificial thought, but Van Rijn seems to have been rather talented in that regard (see the Muses).
Also, side note...thoughts on Beausoleil being a Spark? We've seen from Agatha's little clanks that a machine CAN have a sort of Spark, and Beausoleil did mention making improvements on his clank bodies. That sounds very Sparky, but more and more I'm starting to think he's entirely artificial, which raises all sorts of questions...
I've never got that impression. To my mind, Beausoleil actually has an old-fashioned organic human body somewhere, but he lives his life through his clank bodies--kind of exactly what the Master of Paris is doing, in fact, but on a much smaller scale (controlling only a few clanks with his body rather than an entire city). It would be throwing a massive curve-ball into the mix at this stage to have clank Sparks that weren't created by Agatha, because that's kind of supposed to be something special that only she can do.Quote:
Originally Posted by Djinn_in_Tonic
He said that he was inside the city's systems. Assuming he meant that literally, that would be hard for an organic person to do. Also he seemed especially interested in being able to transfer life back to flesh again. (Notice that Kaja chose to write only "back again" in bold text in the first panel.) That could easily be a hint that he's trapped in a mechanical body.Quote:
Originally Posted by factotum
BTW, I'm not so sure that he is a spark. We've never seen him use the sparky speech bubbles. (Well, except for when he quacked, but I don't think that counts.) I think if he had been a spark, he would have been in the madness place on the page I linked to, but he didn't seem to go there. That could just be a limitation of the clank bodies, but I'm not so sure. The other thing is that he seems to be happy calling someone else, "Master." That's not a particularly sparky trait.
I see no reason to assume it's meant literally, people use that expression figuratively in the real world quite commonly with regard to having penetrated security, and computer security in particular.Quote:
Originally Posted by eschmenk
As that social spark back in Mechanicsburg pointed out, sparks have no trouble subordinating themselves to someone else when that "someone else" is indisputably superior. In Mechanicsburg, there is no question that the Heterodyne is in charge. In Paris, Voltaire rules everyone. Lucrezia/The Other is so infamously powerful that I'd expect lesser sparks to quite readily accept her as their boss, provided they're willing to go along with her goals.Quote:
Originally Posted by eschmenk
Yes, but how much fun is that? :smalltongue: Isn't the idea of a ghost in the machine a lot more interesting? Isn't that the sort of thing the Foglios would go with?Quote:
Originally Posted by Douglas
At least in the case of the castle, the MoP didn't want it disconnected from the Paris systems; the MoP wanted it extracted. Given that doing so without damaging anything would take a good deal longer than otherwise, it sounded to me as if the castle really needed to extricate itself. I'm visualizing some sort of a distributed AI with parts of it inside the various Paris systems that needed to be removed almost as if they were tangible things. And why not? This is fantasy. It doesn't need to imitate the real world all that closely.
Recently we had the MoP approaching Colette. Colette apparently could apparently observe the focus of the MoP move toward her by observing changes within the Paris systems at the same time the MoP's tangible body moved toward her. That to me indicates there is some sort of a duality involving the MoP's not entirely organic body and some sort of intellect inside the Paris systems. He's somehow in both places, I think. Colette called it "integrat[ing] with the city." Likewise, I suspect that Beausoleil is at least partially inside the systems and is the (or one of) the "someone else" Colette also spoke of.
BTW, not that I think RW hacking is all that relevant, but even in that case, hackers often don't just snoop. They often leave software behind to monitor things and collect data (passwords and such); in those cases you can say that the hackers' software is literally in the system, even if the hackers aren't. Now what if the hackers use AI techniques to write their software? And what if the hacker is an AI and it networks tightly with the AI bits it inserted in the system? My point is that you don't have to go very far into the realm of fantasy to get to something close to what I'm thinking.
True, but Agatha had to assert her dominance first. Klaus had many sparks under him, but he generally had to capture them first and he probably had to remind them who's boss occasionally. I don't think they generally go looking for someone to boss them around, but I get the vibe that Beausoleil would hunt around for a good boss.Quote:
Originally Posted by Douglas
I do agree that none of this is definitive wrt Beausoleil. No one has to read it this way.
Going back to Monday... anyone else get the impression that Colette was on the verge of breaking through, only to get interrupted by the Master's arrival?
Now that you come to mention it, yes, it does seem that way. Then again, when Agatha nearly broke through her speech bubbles morphed into madness-place ones, which Colette's didn't on Monday. Then again again, Agatha was a special case on account of the locket, so maybe that's not always how it works.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hurkyl
Agatha wasn't on the verge of breaking through there, though. She broke through at the age of six or something, the locket was suppressing her existing Sparkiness.
Ya, breakthroughs for sparks have been implied to be something extremely dramatic. A sudden burst of intelligence and downright madness that leads to massive creation. It was said that many sparks have gotten killed by the creations they made when they broke through. Collette just being really smart and figuring something out does not sound like a breakthrough...
though i would not be surprised if Collette DOES experience a breakthrough by the end of this arc
Spoiler: New comicLooks like Martellus knows who the Queen of the Dawn is, then. Which raises certain questions seeing as how this was almost certainly not authorised by Grandmama and he hasn't really had a lot of time to scheme independently since coming out of the timeskip.