Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

WCDT 21-25 January 2019 (3921-3925)

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jwhouk:
New week, new poll!

Is it cold in here?:
It doesn't seem likely to me that Arrogant Architeuthis has emerged from the depths to say Get Well Soon to one of the many accident victims who must a priori exist in the world.

Oh my. What's interesting about Roko?

She was trying to develop informants at the fight club to bring down the "big fish" above Corpse Witch. Eminence Grise won't care about normal organized crime, but what if there's a massive conspiracy that enslaves other robots? One that has corrupted law enforcement, as Corpse Witch claimed?

Roko can do things that Spookybot cannot conveniently do, like find activities in the physical world that don't create COMINT trails.

She's motivated to do so and frustrated that she (thinks she) failed with Bubbles. She has relevant skills.

Does Spookybot have Operatives, secret agents with credentials that get them in anywhere? Would Roko take the job, to accomplish what the powers of a police officer did not?

BenRG:
Being me, I suspect that SpookyBot is collecting favours from certain Synthetics that have caught their attention. The ultimate goal is unknown but, as some may have seen last week, I wonder if they're setting their pieces on their side of a game board of some kind.

OldGoat:

--- Quote from: Is it cold in here? on 20 Jan 2019, 08:40 ---
Roko can do things that Spookybot cannot conveniently do, like find activities in the physical world that don't create COMINT trails.

She's motivated to do so and frustrated that she (thinks she) failed with Bubbles. She has relevant skills.

Does Spookybot have Operatives, secret agents with credentials that get them in anywhere? Would Roko take the job, to accomplish what the powers of a police officer did not?

--- End quote ---
Hmmm....

Spookybot seems to be made for COMINT - they manage to not be able to help but overhear quite a bit, certainly casual conversations between AIs.  There must be a data link between Station's avatar projector and his host servers on SS-E-CE* - so that's vulnerable to intercept.  I don't think encryption is much of an issue for SB to deal with.  Perhaps they do need some help eavesdropping on meaties.

Roko won't willingly work with/for Spookybot, but the latter is fully capable of manipulating pretty much anyone we've met in the cast in unwittingly helping carry out their designs.  While I do not like SB, I do admire subtlety, and they have that to spare when they want to use it.

*Space Station Ellicott-Chatham Enterprises

oddtail:
Went with the last option in the poll, because that's the closest it got to "who cares?". I think a super-powerful entity as a character in a work of fiction has a huge potential for making much of what happens meaningless. Either everything can be resolved super-tidy (in a good or bad way) with little effort or drama, or there are arbitrary reason why it doesn't. Either outcome has its huge pitfalls to step around.

I'm not saying amazingly powerful characters can't be a thing. But I don't see how they apply to QC. You could have a character that's just too apathetic to do much (like Dr Manhattan). But that's honestly super-depressing, and works best for deconstructions and very cynical works of fiction. You can scale everything up (like Superman stories), but QC is charming in large part because it's slice-of-life, so almost by definition low-importance, local, low-stakes-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things-stuff. Y'know, normal people problems, just with robots.

You can explore the nature of power and humanity and go all philosophical, but I'm not convinced that works as a side theme of a story.

And as someone pointed out, Spookybot is not dissimilar to Q, but - again, as I think someone mentioned - Q tends to get his comeuppance at least some of the time. He highlights how much potential humanity really does have in the end, which enhances the usual characters in the show and works with ST's themes very well. Spookybot has not given me that vibe, at least not yet.

When I think about what Spookybot might want, I can't think of a single answer that would engage me more than the more mundane goings-on in QC tend to. I don't wanna be a hater, but I have yet to think of a reason Spookybot might work for me. There's plenty of places this character might go, but all that I can think of (the ones I listed and perhaps a few more) just clash with the comic's usual shenanigans. I think I might happily read a Spookybot-centred story *apart* from QC, in the right circumstances. But for QC specifically, I'm afraid it'll steer away from what made it charming for me in the first place.

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