Comic Discussion > ALICE GROVE
Alice Grove MCDLT - November 2016
jheartney:
It's entirely possible that Pate's objective is access to Ardent. Imagine you were a local bigwig, and had an instant-upgrade magic wand. Your military would be unstoppable, and you could create an assembly line of advanced gadgets for sale or for your own use. (OTOH Pate already has Bad News, who is pretty unstoppable too, albeit less flexible.)
The question then would be how Pate learned about Ardent. Maybe he has a com line to the Praeses. Or maybe he got wind of the water-pump upgrade incident. So many questions.
brasca:
Mr. Bad News is a one many army, but he can't be everywhere. If Mr. Pate wants to extend his control then he'll need an army that can deal with low level problems and then his Death Star on two legs to take care of the big problems.
As for how Pate knows all this maybe he's been in communication with the Praeses or maybe he has a network of informants. I imagine he's had an observer in Alice's village for some time just because she's an anomaly with knowledge of the past, but it wasn't until the space dwellers arrived that there was anything significant to report. If so Pate never paid her a visit with his companion to get information out of her which seems odd considering his goals.
Tova:
I wonder whether 'the blink' really did occur in an instant, or whether there was simply a period of time during the war so traumatic that Alice has blocked all of the events that occurred out of her mind to the point that, from her subjective viewpoint, the events occurred 'in an instant'. We only have her word that there was a blink at all, so it seems possible.
My other theory is that Pate was one of the AI designers and Mr Bad News is an AI.
Sorry if these thoughts have surfaced before, I only semi-follow this thread.
Is it cold in here?:
If Mr. Pate is a baseline then a sufficiently motivated or sufficiently unethical opponent could seize him as a hostage. If, hypothetically, such a person were around.
If Loomis is only capable of counterattacks, why did Alice want to abandon their entire mission as soon as she saw him?
retrosteve:
--- Quote from: Is it cold in here? on 08 Nov 2016, 00:44 ---If Mr. Pate is a baseline then a sufficiently motivated or sufficiently unethical opponent could seize him as a hostage. If, hypothetically, such a person were around.
If Loomis is only capable of counterattacks, why did Alice want to abandon their entire mission as soon as she saw him?
--- End quote ---
"Only capable of counterattacks" presumes that he has no agency, which is unlikely. His sadistic grin could only come from a thinking being. Could Asimov's Three Laws have somehow been imposed upon a thinking being? It cannot happen.
"Has standing orders from his employer, for now, to counterattack only" would make far more sense. What's easier to imagine: mind control, or employment?
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