[898] This is not our time.

Nice Bicentennial Man reference, Tom.

Nooo. Personally, I've been looking forward to seeing all of Diego's robots walking and talking around again in the Court. I do not want them to die again.

Damn, no questions will get answered. But what could you expect from a certain Mr Siddell ;-)
I was amazed how *old* (as in, old and tired) the original robot looked in today's comic. I wonder if all the things he said influenced the way I see him.

Well played, Frankenbot. If you convince Kat to not reactivate any of the other robots, you'll have gotten away with the perfect murder.

Kat needs to obtain an excellent supply of chill pills.

The robots didn't die when they put themselves into storage the first time, she did not bring that one robot back to "life", and it is not going to "die" now. They were simply asleep. Kat woke that one up. She can put it back to sleep. She could wake one or all of them again, and put them to sleep again, as often as she wished. That's all.

This robot's penchant for drama and hyperbole...

1) "and while you have given me this priceless gift of life"

2) "I hope you do not find me too brazen if I ask you to return it"

...are not reasons for Kat to abandon her reasoning capacity and succumb to ego inflation. Resurrection and murder (or mercy killing) just aren't involved in this one.

@ rainofsteel

I thought the Robot had made this clear, they don't sleep. They are on or they are off; or in its own terms, they are alive or they are dead.


Just because, unlike Humans, they can be brought back to life, doesn't mean he was any less dead (or switched off, if you prefer) for the past two hundred or so years.

Just because this robot has a penchant for strongly excessive drama and hyperbole, doesn't mean it is right.

Human beings cannot, so far anyway, be switched on and off.

If we could be, being "off" would not be referred to as "death" because we could come right back from it.

Does the transporter from Star Trek murder and resurrect it's passengers every time it is used? Does cryogenic suspended animation seen so often in Science Fiction murder and resurrect it's passengers every time a subject goes through it?

Robots in the Court appear to be overly-impressed with humans because they were created by one and so, I think, borrow a little too much from what occurs to humanity (death, where you can't be "woken up", ever) and they mentally transfer it onto themselves, regardless of what is actually happening.

If Kat continues freaking out like this about every little thing that comes along, she'll turn herself into a psychotic wreck.

"No, she's the mayor of Crazy Town!"
-- Sunny Baudelaire, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

Yes, sleep and death are two different things. You can come back from sleep, but you cannot come back from death or it wouldn't be called death.

If Humans invented a machine that could switch them on and off at will then no, it wouldn't be refered to as death.
If the machine then broke while a lot of people were 'off' and no one knew how to fix the machine then those people would, for all intents and purposes, be dead.

Now reverse that, when Diego was alive they probably did refer to it as on/off. When he died, they had no means to repair themselves and switching themselves off was it, the end, dead.
They couldn't know that someone would succeed where they failed and figure out how to switch them back on.

If in 1000 years time someone figures out how to bring me back to life from whatever is left to dig up, it doesn't change the fact I was dead. Really dead.

Yeah, I'll throw in a vote for "Kat is overreacting." Nothing that is salvageable is dead. At worst, its asleep, suspended, hibernating, or in some kind of stasis. We do have those words in our language, and there's a reason we have them. And somebody can't just come along and suddenly say that any one of them are actually death. Well, they can, but at most it's a debatable point of philosophy with no clear answer.

I suppose I'll still wait for this situation to move further, but... this page is really kind of sealing the anvilicious nature of this chapter. Maybe these two will have something sensible to say after they turn Frank off, though.

Look, regardless of what anyone may think of the Robot and his thoughts on life and death I can't see how anyone can say Kat is overreacting.
Kat views the Robots as sentient, you can tell based on how she interacts with them all throughout the comic, Zombiebot says she has brought him back to life. He then asks if she will kill him. A sentient being is asking if a 13 year old girl will euthanize him.

We've had days to mull this over and argue the life/death, on/off, etc. blah blah blah. In the comic Kat's had, what, 10 minutes... half an hour tops?

I think you're all reading way too far into this! That is all.

It wouldn't be the Gunnerkrigg Court forum if we didn't do that.

It wouldn't be an internet discussion board if we didn't do that.

It's a window to his soul.

That's why it's empty.