Comic Discussion > ALICE GROVE
Alice Grove MCDLT - April 2017
hitmiccs:
--- Quote from: retrosteve on 18 Apr 2017, 03:15 --- Their peculiar lack of motion says this is something else. A ritual? An agreed-upon conclusion? A submission? It could be any of those, but not the end of a hostile battle.
--- End quote ---
That's exactly what I tried to say earlier :)
Those "Churches" could be a kind of bodyguard-AI, with the sole purpose to protect a specific being. If this being is killed, the bodyguard loses its purpose and falls back into a state of waiting for a new task.
Just throwing some thoughts in ;)
retrosteve:
--- Quote from: hitmiccs on 18 Apr 2017, 09:59 ---
That's exactly what I tried to say earlier :)
Those "Churches" could be a kind of bodyguard-AI, with the sole purpose to protect a specific being. If this being is killed, the bodyguard loses its purpose and falls back into a state of waiting for a new task.
Just throwing some thoughts in ;)
--- End quote ---
Interesting thoughts. But I've never seen an AI as something that can be programmed, and neither, I think, has Jeph. AI's are, in his universes, *people*. They can be motivated, or intimidated, or pissed off. But they can't just be controlled or programmed any more than you could. Not without a lot of brainwashing and torture, anyway. It would be awfully difficult to build a thinking machine that considered itself a person, yet still responded to a lack of orders by going quiescent. Imagine a person doing that.
Now instead, riffing on your idea, consider the Ronin of old Japan. A ronin was a samurai that had lost his master and had nobody to protect. He wandered the countryside looking for, whatever, wrongs to right, booty to plunder, according to his personal ethic. That would be a more likely backstory, no?
retrosteve:
P.S. Not that it matters, since they are all fully sentient anyway, but another reminder that the Blink made ALL the AI's disappear. And Alice was there at the blink.
So Alice is not an AI. Church, I suppose, might be, since he was perhaps buried in lava at the time and therefore safe from the blinkers. But he also might just be another organic modified soldier, like Alice, but stronger. Occam's razor is in favour of that.
hitmiccs:
I wouldn't deny, that Church (or someone like him) has or had ethical values he followed, but his behaviour and the scene from the flashback give me the impression, that he only needs to act like that, if he has someone to protect or just some task to accomplish. In the first panel of the flashback, he just kneels there, in front of Alice, until the blast from space occurs. With his reflexes, he could have left the area of the impact in a blink (ha-ha), escaping the blast. But he's like...accepting his fate.
Now that he's protecting Pate, because he rescued Church from his rocky prison, he regained his purpose and takes every action needed to fulfill it. But how did Pate really gain Churches trust, how did he convice Church, that he's someone worth protecting? Is it really just because Pate unburied him and reactivated him in the process? What happens to a Church-Model supersoldier being held in solid rock for 5000 years? Is he just shutting down to Energy Saving Mode (:D sorry), or does his anger rise with every decade he has to wait, fuelling his body enough to survive? I think it's also a question of what those supersoldiers really are and how much of a programming has happened, when they were created. In my opinion it would be no problem, to program those soldiers for a specific task, without emotion and just an obedience-subroutine paired with a lot of self-preserving priority (if the soldier fails, his protege will also die). Something that doesn't fit into my picture, is Churches face, when he was attacked and switched into maniac-mode, sporting an evil grin that would make the Joker jealous.
Another theory, regarding the flashback:
Maybe it's betrayal - he was awaiting orders from Alice, but she decided to put him underground, out of the way, because he IS in fact more powerful and a threat to her of some sort. But that would put Alice into a difficult light, with questionable intentions.
€dit: I was informed by the forum, that you posted when I wanted to submit this.
You are right, I forgot that all AIs were blinked away - so they are (probably) all "just" massively enhanced humans, with different levels of strength. This would imply, that there had to be a lot of manipulation going on to make Church a blindly obedient bodyguard, as you stated before.
Seems like I have to go through my thoughts again.
LKR1009:
In this strip ((http://www.alicegrove.com/post/141109595324/they-have-a-super-weird-relationship)), Sedna said Alice had held a grudge against herself for the past 5000 years. The flashback is to 5000 years ago. Maybe Alice betrayed Church or vice versa? Just spitballing ideas.
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