It's probably worthwhile to listen to what Laridia actually is saying, without bringing assumptions (so far as we can). For example, in the previous strip, Laridia talked about Cupressaceae bringing Ardent & Co. "into its network." I assumed this meant allowing them physically into the areas where people live. But apparently that's not what she meant: instead of physical habitats, the praeses are gateways to different realities. She'd told us this, but it was easy to ignore the words and assume something else.
BenRG supposes that we're talking about a matrix-style situation, with a computer-simulated reality operating inside a non-computer reality. But that's not what Laridia is describing. She specifically says that the reality of our characters is exactly the same as those hosted by the praeses. Also, she seemed to actively consider the idea of bringing the whole party into the hosted reality. Thes isn't really possible if the hosted reality is a matrix and the outer reality isn't. At best you could clone the external characters and run their copies in the matrix-reality. I guess you could imagine knocking out the "real" characters and connecting them to an avatar in the simulated reality, but I don't see any of the stuff you'd need for that, and in any case it contradicts Laridia's claim that both realities are of the same type.
Assuming we take Laridia seriously, then I see two possibilities:
1. That both the internal hosted realities as well as the external reality (Earth with giant tree-beings orbiting) are simulations. This would suggest the Blink consisted of all of Earth's population being recreated in a giant simulated reality, with some of the Earth parameters changed. If this were true, then the ruined Earth might still exist outside the simulations. Perhaps Ardent was transferred from praeses to simulated Earth by agents on the non-simulated Earth running a hack on the simulation systems. Further, his abilities are an augmentation to his program that the praeses can't deal with.
2. (More likely.) That when Laridia talks about the hosted realities being identical to the external reality, she's not kidding. Perhaps the hosted realities are in fact real in the same way both old and post-Blink Earth are real. (How this work technically I have no idea.) You could imagine a multiverse, with praeses mediating between universes.
Note that Laridia refers to Ardent's "discontinuity." We'd imagined that Ardent's magic touch was the result of nanomachines doing an on-the-fly rebuilding of tech. But what if that's not what was happening? What if Ardent's ability is to actually change reality itself? Rather than having nanomachines turn a toy into a bird, what if the bird was brought into existence through a reality shift? This would tie into the notion of the Blink, which was an apparent reality shift on a global scale. And it would be properly referred to as a "discontinuity." The praeses would be quite right to not allow it to operate inside their hosted realities.
If this second possibility is what's happening, then we have the question of where Ardent's new reality-shifting ability came from. Is it related to the Blink? (probably). It could be what warped Ardent to Earth, and allowed his sister to follow. And of course it'd be interesting to see if Alice could have really killed Ardent, if he's that powerful.
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Topic: Alice Grove MCDLT - THE END...? (Read 258230 times)