Comic Discussion > ALICE GROVE

Alice Grove MCDLT - December 2016

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Neko_Ali:
There are a number of other potential problems with the 'kill villagers' idea. First is that killing more people may make Alice less likely to comply. Hurting someone but leaving them alive and needing to be cared for is a scummy, but effective technique for dealing with enemies. There are also questions of whether it's teleportation or very fast movement, how far can Church go. And how could he prove what he had done. If he could travel with a human then Pate likely wouldn't have needed the carriage. Church could bring back just a severed head to show what he's done. We just don't know his capabilities.

The number one reason though is a soon as Church is out of what Alice thinks is his effective range for instant travel, she could kill Pate. It took several days to walk to Sedna's, then several more at least to travel by cart to the dig site. So we might be several weeks normal travel time from Alice's village now. Alice is capable of moving so fast that the kids couldn't make out what was happening when she and Sedna fought. Even if Church could instantly teleport to the village, it would take him at bare minimum several seconds to go there, locate and kill someone and return. Being almost absurdly generous with the time scale there, that's still plenty of time for Alice to knife hand Pate's heart out.

As far as why the immortals tend to go a bit crazy when the opportunity for bloodshed arises.. The three times we've seen it was when a fight or attack was already under way. As far as we can tell, they were specifically made or re-made as weapons. It's not a far stretch to think they were designed to enjoy or be used to killing. And they are far more powerful than everyone else around them. So we have a 'world of glass' Superman situation. It's not that they are aware that they can destroy things whenever they want... They have to actively work on restraining themselves and their programming, so as to not destroy whatever they touch or lash out with violence when surprised or stressed. And when a situation happens that they can cut loose... It's like releasing a huge amount of pressure they keep themselves under.

Samik:

--- Quote from: pwhodges on 06 Dec 2016, 00:59 ---He harmed Sedna without being attacked, though.

--- End quote ---
To a much more limited extent, and with a very different disposition. He dismembered Ellie with glee. With Sedna, he did the bare minimum to neutralize her as a threat, with perfectly flat affect.


--- Quote from: BenRG on 06 Dec 2016, 01:14 ---That was a second-tier attempt to restrain her. She had ignored the clear warning when he put his hand on her shoulder (a first-tier attempt) and her continued violent behaviour released him to use... stronger measures to enforce the behaviour restrictions on her specified by his commander.

--- End quote ---
What he said.


His reaction to getting hit by the pipe just really suggests to me that he's under certain behavioral restrictions, and taking the hit, as BenRG puts it, released him to do his thing. He was genuinely glad that she did that, because he couldn't have had his fun otherwise.

Likewise with Sedna, her aggression was directed towards not himself or Pate, but their property - an asset that may impact their ability to achieve their objectives, but the loss of which doesn't place either of them in imminent danger. So, his order set probably permits him to disable but not kill her.


Now, he did less harm to Alice for attacking Pate than he did Sedna for destroying the carriage.  So either they knew the attempted assault was coming (or as Neko_Ali suggests, were deliberately provoking it), and Pate had already instructed him to just block it and nothing more, or Pate has already recognized that Alice is superior to Sedna, and given Church a higher aggression threshold for her preservation.

Samik:
Okay, I've already given up on the Pate-as-Church's-puppet idea.  It was fun for the day it lasted.

Skewbrow:
From the scant available data of Church's responses to stimuli I am beginning to doubt my earlier belief of him being organic.  He is shown as being very tightly conditioned to follow orders. So his undoing may become to find a conflict in those orders, and place him in a situation where the conflict freezes him into inaction. Not at all unlike those Asimov's three law obeying robots that Susan Calvin (and later skilled roboticists) incapacitated in the numerous short stories/novels.

It is not unthinkable that bio-engineered soldiers could be conditioned to follow a set of orders in a robotic fashion. So actually: bio-engineered or robotic, makes no difference? After all, the pre-Blink war created several models of bio-engineered soldiers (as well as AIs). May be Church was one of the latest models? Like a developed version of Alice that was discovered to not be flexible enough under some circumstances, and therefore abandoned?

Method of Madness:
I never can seem to remember to check for a new thread. Also holy shit, Church is fast...does he teleport short distances?

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