Comic for Friday, June 14th, 2019
There are handful of things I want to say about this page, but most of them I probably shouldn’t.
Obviously this is running pretty late, and even so, was very rushed, which I suspect shows. There is a few reasons for that. I won’t have any time to work on it tomorrow, so pushing it a day wouldn’t work, and my work made my to work things. Technically they cannot force me to go social events, but as it was the last day the India people were here I was guilt tripped into it. This left me with not a lot of time to finish this page; particularly as I had made a dubious decision to resketch it half way through. Originally I had paneled in the normal half page layout, but I realized I wouldn’t be happy with that for this page, so I repaneled it, which delayed it a bit. The actual page was the same, but I wanted to tweak the presentation a bit.
Panel 6 is somewhat… stylized. There is a reason for that, and not just because I was in a hurry when drawing it. I think there is a… likely obvious reason, and a less obvious reason, but both will probably be known soon. I feel I shouldn’t say more than that though.
Anyway, it is late and I have to be up early, so I will leave this here.
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I only just now noticed you can barely make out the air-stair through the “body” of the Consul. And I do mean barely. That outfit is almost a match for the gunmetal grey of the steps.
So, I guess she gets to be “Dead” for awhile. She might want to become alive again before it causes a constitutional crisis, however, or triggers some sort of recall.
Just noticed it too. Good eye.
The trick is for her to be dead just long enough for the people who’ve been waiting for this moment to play their hands. That’s not just the IDS, but some of the families as well.
….dang, thank comments for getting me to notice that was Peter doing that, but the smirk makes it borderline eerie…(it did seem weird that she came out so easily, and died so easily, and….the reaction we get is “Oh well, she’s dead, guess we all have to just go home now.” Actually, looking at it again, I’m not even sure she talks like the actual Consul does…..)
That said, with the Consul “dead”, does that mean nobody has reason to shoot at them if they fly away anymore?
This comic is always the bright spot of my daily comic crawl. Great art style, great story. I try to not think too far ahead anymore because if I think of 4 or 5 different ways the plot could go, PastUtopia drops a hand grenade in the middle of them… AND without making it seem like some sort of deus ex machina “because plot” hack. It’s just really well written. I look forward to reading the full book (series?) after the comic finishes to see what further insights and threads were in play the whole time.
You can actually see Peter standing behind the landing gear in panel 7. And, in fact, you can see him standing behind the landing gear in panel 5 of the last page as well.
Just noticed that and thought it was a cool background detail, as the panel 5 of the last page sort of foreshadowed this a little a bit now that I think about it. Why would Peter be lurking there? Of course, even I didn’t actually notice what that was until panel 8 of this page made me realize Peter was standing in front of a landing gear, and I looked more closely at panel 7, and looked even more closely at the last page.
holy s##t, I did not catch this one.
This is why I love this comic. There is so much subtlety in the art. everything has a purpose.
Well played! I didn’t think of that option: of course Peter wants to cause whatever plans the rogue families have to occur… it’s the best way to flush them out!
If we assume for a moment the consul actually *ahem* “survives” somehow, then causing such a chain of events should only consolidate her power, right?
We’re all to busy thinking about the “here and now”. Peter is playing for whole cake!!
This is what makes this comic good.
Most of us guessed that the Consul was not actually on the dropship, but in retrospect it seems obvious Peter would use his well established ability to project an image of someone to make people think she was (I imagine some people even guessed that far). But then there is the cherry on top twist that Peter even gets his fake Consul killed, which means the IDS will leak that she is dead, saving him the trouble and making them look bad (as he said they would) when it turns out she is alive, all well removing the threat of the IDS killing her for awhile, as they think she is already dead.
I thought he was leading them into a trap against Camilla and co., but Peter’s idea of a trap is more sophisticated than that by a mile. Why fight when you can just make your enemy lose while they think they are winning?
Peter would probably find two birds with one stone a waste of stones. He wants the whole flock with that stone.
Three or four stones, and use them to weigh down the corners of a good-sized net.
I can see that the ‘Consul’ is ‘dead’. But who was the shooter?
Peter.
It’s a hard light projection. If one of the people in the IDS shot at it, the bullet would just go through or bounce off, depending on how hard the projection is. To draw blood, a bit more is needed…
That having been said, there’s no evidence that there wasn’t *another* shooter. We know from the second hard light projection event that hard light projections can make sound, or at least can be made to appear to make sound. But there’s also an appearance of reacting to environmental stimulus, however weak that evidence is. So it’s possible that Peter just set it up to respond to the sound of somebody shooting. It didn’t matter if the actual bullet hit or not.
But he probably also had a failsafe; if nobody shot within a given time frame, he’d have it make a bang and “dead `Consul`”.
With any luck, this will result in a short period of time in which people refer to her by name, so I can correct my character database.
“…But there’s also an appearance of reacting to environmental stimulus…”
The projection of the Consul was shot, or at least seemed to be shot. And it was realistic enough to convince David as well as the rest of his military entourage, and probably more than a few of Arron’s men.
But how did Peter do it? Two ideas come to mind: (1) Peter briefed the Consul on his plan and, knowing what to expect, on cue she would fall down as if in reaction to being shot. The convincing blood spatter could be from a blood squib on a remote control, like Hollywood uses. Peter might have even had this staged from the back of an aircraft (or door and stairway) located elsewhere. (2) Peter may have had M.Y.M. run this as a hard light computer simulated projection, complete with blood spatter and reaction to being shot.
The answer is almost certainly (2). Peter has used this technique before to thwart attempts on his life. And we know that M.Y.M. is insanely powerful, being able to crunch nigh impossible problems and even capable of manipulating reality.
BTW: Even today, we have technology that is frighteningly close to this. Have you seen the latest in “telepresence” technology? China is already using a news anchor that is computer generated, but is astonishingly real. And there exists technology to edit and manipulate video to an incredible degree, yet available to the public. It’s so convincing that it’s near impossible to tell the difference. One example had Former President Obama saying something that he never said, complete with perfect lip sync. And we have the technology to perfectly duplicate voice.
This is scary because, these days, photo, audio and video evidence is all rapidly becoming meaningless. How can such be trusted when it’s possible to make such convincing fakes? And that’s just what is public knowledge. Now imagine versions of this software, several generations more advanced, running on government supercomputers for God-knows what reasons.
Trust? Try hashing the live video, at very near the time it is taken, and feeding the hash into a blockchain.
That will ensure that the video was not produced at a later time. How to prove the video wasn’t produced at an earlier time, I don’t know.
Yes I do.
Hash it against a number which wasn’t available until the very time of the recording. Something from Random.Org, for instance. The hash would have to effect the video, in some way, however.
Do both, and at the very least you can say the video was produced in the narrow window between when the random number was published and the blockchain was updated.
Proving someone didn’t “pre-record” the event, and then “wash” it with the random value, I don’t know.
Maybe I’ll figure out something tomorrow.
Okay. Old school here. Hash* the video against itself, so that alterations are apparent. Bury a cleartext of the hash, to that point, in the VBI, periodically, to prove the video was done as a single pass, and, within the content of the video, do a “shout out” to something that wasn’t available until just before the video was shot, (reading the first 30 hex characters, derived from a Random.Org true-random saved sample should do it.)
Oh, and then sign it cryptographically, using the subjects key, to prove it wasn’t an impersonator or real-time deep-fake.
…Of course, if you want people to ASSUME it might possibly have been a deep fake…
* By hash, I mean make the video itself a stand-alone blockchain, so you can’t edit an earlier part of the film without scrambling later parts of the same film.
Since I’m no expert, I have to ask: How many cell phone cameras, recording devices, built-in laptop microphones and cameras, digital cameras and digital camcorders rely on hardware security protocols such as you describe? Are you trying to say that all such modern devices encode such hidden information in all the audio, photo and video files they record or transmit? And it’s done on a hardware level in a way that can’t be interfered with or faked, even by the best experts in the world?
If it was so easy to spot a fake with methods such as you describe, then why has there been so much increasing doubt about the validity of certain digital evidence in recent years?
Also, even if very recent digital devices have such security measures to prove date, time and authenticity, what about recordings on devices that are several or many years old?
I think the kind of scenario where the security measures you are suggesting would be useful is where a video feed or video file on a verified and trusted source gets intercepted or changed by hackers. In particular, this could be useful in cases where the time and/or date of said event is known and well established. Yes, modifying an official video source, such as a recorded interview of a world leader, might reveal itself as fake with such security measures.
However, the kind of scenario I was think about would be where experts with the right tools decide to create fake an audio and/or video recording – such as a government, political group or terrarists – and try to pass it off as genuine. In particular, if there were no other credible witnesses to the time and date other than the perpetrators, then I don’t see how an encoded time/date stamp is going to help much, especially if the perpetrators really know what they are doing. With enough funding and motivation…
Just consider the increasingly bad reputation CNN has for fake news. Consider how much worse that’s gotten in just the last few months. They’re having to let go a lot of employees because they’re hemorrhaging viewers and their ratings have tanked, even laying off an entire division.
Yes, a lot of CNN’s reputation problem has to do with blatant political bias and repeatedly claiming things that are later proven, undeniably, to be false. And a lot of it is stuff taken out of context or staged. For example: I’m reminded of an interview with a “random passerby” who people later identified as a CNN cameraman or employee. But I’ve heard of at least one or two cases where CNN literally staged a fake story on a green-screen stage, claiming to be a “live” report somewhere overseas (war correspondence).
Now, consider how trust in politicians and official news sources these days is so low. And combine that lack of trust with how we are on the cusp of a new age where computer-generated avatars are becoming so fantastically realistic that they could fool the average person and, one day, even digital manipulation experts.
No. I’m not saying that.
I’m saying that’s what we need, at a minimum.
The real problem is, people are easily led. A good story, even once disproven, has legs that outpace the uninteresting or unwelcome truth.
I’m saying, if you wanted an immutable record, these things, at a minimum, would need to be done to create a record that couldn’t be altered after the fact.
Most of this is a digital equivalent of holding up a copy of today’s newspaper, followed by sending a copy to a trusted third party (everyone mining bitcoins, in this case), and signed with your personal, practically impossible to counterfeit, seal, but changed so that if someone photoshops in a different newspaper, suddenly the video is garbled from that point forward. It doesn’t prevent people from painting a hated rival into the background shot of a Klan rally.
The reason I called it “old school” is it’s a set of steps based on what we could have done a century ago, updated so it still holds up now. As far as I know, no camera or video security system does this now.
And if people want to believe that (A.) Trumps hairpiece is an undercover brain slug from somewhere in Andromeda, or that (B.) Obama was a Estonian mole and sleeper agent, given extensive cosmetic surgery to look like our then future president, and the real Obama died in college, they will, no matter what the facts say or evidence points to.
Let’s try this question again:
If any of the solders saw Peter, why didn’t they mention him? Why didn’t they try to arrest him? Or shoot him? Even if it wasn’t Peter who shot the Consul, why isn’t anyone reacting to an armed murderer? So pretty sure nobody saw the shooter.
Because the ‘bang’ is small, it makes more sense that the Consul was killed by sniper fire. But then why is nobody ducking or returning fire?
Both sides wanted the Consul alive (we think), but neither side is retaliating against the assassin.
So: who or what is the shooter?
David was rather transparently lying. You can see David look off to where he knows there is a sniper, waiting for it shoot her. That is why he doesn’t reply to her when “she” starts talking.
I am pretty sure Arron also knows what it is happening. He is trying to tell David that he is walking into a trap without actually saying that. He mostly just looks resigned and annoyed. He goes to “check” on the Consul to prevent anyone from realizing that it is not actually a dead body. He may also activate Ellipses, as shown by the soldier’s confusion, but that is just speculation.
David probably no intention of shooting Arron I would guess, as if he does that, Arron’s soldiers are definitely not going to let him leave without a fight. As someone else pointed out, the soldiers don’t speak Malsan, as you can see when he tries to address the consul here, so probably do not know Peter’s plan, as he alluded to what he was going to do in Malsan.
When Peter said he was going to make the IDS look bad, he wasn’t kidding around. Peter really does not do things in half steps.
Arron seems to either have been told or guessed what is going on, but the soldier does not seem to have been (or is a better actor).
Save consul, sacrifice consul, consul not indebted, IDS looks bad. Today’s life lesson: if you want to have your cake and eat it, bake a second cake.
Unfortunately, there’s a flaw with making the IDS (in general) look bad: assuming the consul shows up after the fact, alive and free (and if that isn’t the objective, why bother with the illusion), Arron’s faction was successful at their objective and has at least done the consul a favor, even if they’re not 100% responsible for her safety. There is absolutely nothing wrong with permitting a holographic decoy to be shot.
While there may be reduced legal ramifications, the political ramifications of holograms and people being shot are similar. Rational people understand that consequences of an action means less than what is revealed about the incentives of the people making the action. The Biana clan of the IDS just revealed that it was willing to kill the consul, making other important actors, such as other elements in Central, and other countries in Palindra, (perhaps Orin, which seems to be closely allied with the IDS), more afraid and suspicious of what else Biana and crew are willing to do.
Perhaps the heaviest ramification being the attempt to assassinate the Consul WITHOUT success…?
It would have been fine to fire the HVW, except that it failed and the people who would have been dead instead KNOW.
Once again, the assassination would have been fine, had it worked. Instead Malsa and the Consul can see more clearly than ever where allegiances lie.
Oh, whoever shot the decoy certainly looks bad, but we don’t even know who that is at the moment (there’s no way the IDS comes out of this looking *good*, but so far what Peter has done doesn’t actually seem all that relevant).
I really doubt we have seen the end of Peter’s plan here yet. I reckon this is just set up for whatever he plans to do next.
I am guessing the “shot” as well as the now “dead” Consul were preprogrammed in, so aren’t really evidence the IDS would assassinate her (they probably would, but this isn’t evidence)
Presumably also if it gets the attacking force to back down and leave, it has done its job.
It just sunk in with me: That soldier doesn’t speak much Malsan, so he might not have understood what Peter was telling Arron about his plan (“to have [his] cake and eat it”, plus whatever more detail between scenes).
These are Arron’s military pals, not IDS agents. There’s no reason to expect any of them to speak much Malsan, let alone Peter explanation mode Malsan. Arron and Peter could conspire, right before their noses, to keep them out of the loop. Convenient for controlling the narrative. 🙂
In those last panels, is that a Re-animated KARDUS? Maybe Illa should be taught to be through by Kally after all.
I’d say it is unlikely. Kardus’ head was mostly intact from what we could see, which was Rovak’s criticism of Ila’s dismantling job, if I recall correctly. Plus not sure he could have gotten here that fast.
We know that pretty much all mages are blond, red eyed, and arrogant though, so I think it is fair to say MYM might be willing to classify him as “a Kardus”.
Well, at least pretty much all Orish warmages. Those qualifiers suggest the possibility of others with the title of mage who do not fit that general appearance. That doesn’t quite look like *the* Kardus; the face is a bit off. But *a* Kardus? Certainly plausible.
I suspect they’ll be safe to take off soon.
Perhaps a demonically reanimated Kardus?
Or perhaps part of being an Orish warmage is demonic “enhancement”?
Makes you wonder if red eyes are reflective of something with warmages?
Right, I mean warmages are blond and red eyed, sorry. Obviously not all mages are (Tyler, Kally, etc).
This Orish war-mage seems to mastered the art of patching critical battle damage with edios construct. That probably puts him midway between Kardus and Rovak on the size of the colony of roaches scale of un-kill-ability.
Also Orish war-mages seem to show a lot of variability in skills and toughness suggesting that they are not assembly line clones.
Is that Peter smirking?
Yep, a fake of some kind. Impressive.
Yup. The item he is holding is almost certainly the third hard-light-projector he got from Tyler as payment for the gate-detector. Or the first one if Naomi gave it back to him.
This also basically proves they are autocasters, not just fancy projectors, which would be the first time we have technically seen Peter use an autocaster, but it stands reason he can.
I think the first time we didn’t see him use an autocaster was when asked Miko to prepare a spell for him to locate (or ping) F8.
The only other thing I recall we’ve seen him do without Mium was that projection & explosion in the back alley. (“I wonder who that was, anyway.” PACT? Arpon? The rogue families? No matter, really …)
Somehow, I’m feeling like that’s going to come back to haunt him at some point. Such as, maybe on page 1437, we’ll find out who that person was, and it’ll turn out to be somebody who he actually really did want to talk to. Like, the representative of a mole in the rogue families, or someone from Anola, Kevi, EsIn, Firin, or Katan Providence who wanted to make a deal with him that he’d have found helpful.
Can see the stairs through the consul’s supposed body in panel 7.
🙂 Nice touch.
I’m betting not at appreciable range, though; which is kind of the idea…
3rd panel.
What do you want to talk about _it_?
I’m guessing the _it_ is superfluous, but your plotting is so full there could be a reason.
Thanks for the comic, it’s been awesome. Ben reading here for many years now.
You’re right, that’s just an extra word I think. I was really tired when I posted this.
Always glad to hear from readers, and always appreciate the grammar help and comments 🙂