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Post by blazingstar on Oct 27, 2021 19:54:24 GMT
Tiny hints have been dropped on us about the "Omega Device" through the series, and I'm happy to finally get another one. I couldn't find a thread just for theorizing about it, so perhaps it's a good time to make one. What IS the Omega Device? Here are all the mentions of it: Page 1547: "They had me out there researching their blasted Omega Device." Page 1689: "You only see parts of the court that it wants you to see...and Tony's in deeper than most." Page 1877: Tony's " EYES ONLY" envelope with the omega and court symbols on it Page 2395: Loup senses "Omega" Page 2396: Zimmy senses "Omega" Page 2430: "Some kinda machine." Page 2538. "Omega said..." Today's page. I'd like to accumulate our theories about what the Omega Device is here (the more serious ideas from the Wildspec thread are also welcome). I personally think it's a very, very, very old machine that has predicted both Annie's birth and the need to build an etheric power concentration station. And now, one that has, for some reason, predicted the need to drain Coyote's powers, and steal it for themselves. Even though this would technially be manipulating magic, the Court prefers to do it in ways they can study and understand, and not through other magic-powered computers that can't be fully explained. But to what ends will the Court use this power? Why was Annie's existence so necessary? Is Aata running the whole show, and if not, who? What do you all think? Thanks to imaginaryfriend for providing the comprehensive archival word index to the entire comic, which saved me a LOT of time in compiling this. If there are any more references missing from this list, mention it and I'll edit this post! |
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Post by imaginaryfriend on Oct 28, 2021 1:08:14 GMT
Thanks to imaginaryfriend for providing the comprehensive archival word index to the entire comic, which saved me a LOT of time in compiling this. If there are any more references missing from this list, mention it and I'll edit this post! made the index, which I periodically use to make myself appear smarter than I actually am. I just made a link to it. Be aware that it is not all-inclusive for text. For example the instance where Jenny and Antimony are talking about magic doesn't appear in a general search for the word "magic" that I ran recently. |
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Post by Druplesnubb on Oct 28, 2021 8:35:12 GMT
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Post by bedinsis on Oct 28, 2021 16:35:58 GMT
Why stop there, when you can just quote it in its entirety? It IS relevant for this thread. |
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Post by Druplesnubb on Oct 28, 2021 17:46:27 GMT
Sure, why not
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Post by mturtle7 on Oct 30, 2021 19:52:19 GMT
One thing we know (thanks to Shell) is that it's some kind of predictive/computational device, which was consulted for information while the Shadow Men were planning to steal Coyote's power. The three questions foremost in my mind right now are probably: a) What's the range of things it can predict/compute? b) What is is made out of, and how? c) Why is it being kept so secret?
The clues we've been getting that relate to these questions are...pretty weird, to say the least! Tony's Brazil trip certainly seems like it was testing out the predictive capabilities of Omega, or perhaps an early prototype of Omega...so what the hell is the common element between stealing Coyote's powers, and two Brazilian slugs mating? Then there's the way Tony talks about "researching the Device and Surma's pregnancy"...that sentence alone has bugged me for years. Mainly, I'm trying to decide if he was testing it, by having it predict stuff about Surma's pregnancy and then verifying that information, or if he was researching the underlying mechanisms it relies on. Loup doesn't really give us much information, besides the fact that it is inside the Court, and can be (only) partially sensed by godlike beings from a distance. And then finally, there's Zimmy...in spite of her vagueness, she's definitely been the most helpful one in identifying what Omega is. It's like a machine, but not a machine...so maybe Tony & the Court have been stretching the definition of "device' a little beyond its common usage. It's a "way of looking into the unseen world"...in other words, it does the same thing that Annie does all the time (what she calls, "looking into the ether"), but is still clearly different from Annie's (very simple) method somehow. And finally, it has "something to do with me and Gamma"...personally, I think that means it was created based off of the research the Court did into Zimmy's powers, and so maybe it operates similarly to her (and Coyote and Renard, by extension)?
My current working theory (that I came up with literally while typing that last paragraph) is that Omega is the Court's attempt at making the world's first artificial etheric being - a "god", some might call it, although others might prefer "spirit" or maybe even "fable". The key thing here is that usually, beings like that are created by just waiting for them to emerge from the Ether, but the Court is cheating by just extracting ambient Ether and shoving into one place until it looks kinda like a substantial Thing they can interact with. Isolated from the vast human mythos that usually shapes it, this ether starting interacting with the only thing it could: it's own creators' desire for knowledge. Hence, one of the first things it did was depict a random place at a random time, but specifically enough that Tony was sent out to watch for anything unusual there. Except, that random noise was all they could get from it, at first. They needed something more...so they started researching how concentrated ether can be stored in human bodies. Surma's fire happened to be a good model, since pretty much the only thing preventing it from being pure ether is its association with that one, singular, element. More than a decade later, when they found Zimmy, she turned out to be an even better model, the only flaw being all that pesky mental stress her etheric process accumulates. So thanks to Tony's research (and maybe others), they learned how to pour their sterilized ether into a living human child, and thanks to Zimmy, learned how to get ether-infused people to attune to the ether. The ideas for how to do this have been in the works for a long time, but only just after Loup's attack did the project finally manage to accelerate all the way to a working "prototype" - i.e. a human child with magic powers that are divorced from human mythos and relating only to the pursuit of knowledge...
...and that child is Becky Ground.*
*ok FINE maybe that last part isn't as serious as the rest of my theory**
**or is it???
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Post by Druplesnubb on Oct 30, 2021 21:10:14 GMT
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Post by DonDueed on Oct 30, 2021 23:42:37 GMT
... Then there's the way Tony talks about "researching the Device and Surma's pregnancy"...that sentence alone has bugged me for years. Funny, I always read that as two separate areas of research: his work (researching Omega), and his personal quest (searching for a way to keep Surma alive after Annie's birth).
Couldn't be that simple, I suppose.
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Post by warrl on Oct 31, 2021 4:33:42 GMT
a) What's the range of things it can predict/compute? I suspect that the answer to that question is humongously different in physical space than in etheric space... ... and the Court missed this detail. |
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Post by drmemory on Nov 1, 2021 4:02:25 GMT
I've been posting theories about Omega in the other threads. Good job making one to put all Omega info in one place! I've got one for robot mysteries as well, that's been around for a while and sees some traffic... which might be relevant since I'm pretty convinced that Omega is robot-adjacent. Most likely a computer mind, like the modern robots have, but not necessarily attached to a robot body.
We know of three computers powered in part by or at least able to use energy from the ether.
1. Anja's computer, of which Donald is a sub-user 2. Kat's computer 3. Omega?
I can't prove Omega belongs on that list but the evidence is mounting! Also, no contradictory evidence that I've noticed.
There are other somewhat similar entities too, in all kinds of form factors, ranging from ship-sized to a small insect weather station. Obviously, I'm talking about the old robots, the new robots they created, and Kat's androids. I was seriously thinking of adding all this to my questions about robots threads but really, it probably belongs with the other Omega speculation. The later-generation robots have computers too. For example.
We know that Diego's robots used the ether, not just for power but in order to move at all. We know that those robots created the later robots, as their successors and children. We know that Kat created the new robots (which I really think are androids) based on her own tech and stuff she learned from Diego's tech. So I think we pretty much have to assume the androids are linked to the ether as well, even though they are also clearly linked to tech.
So what's the obvious thing to do as soon as you have more than one computer? Network them! Duh. I wonder which of these computers and other electronic minds are networked in some way? Pretty sure that all of Kat's new androids are all networked to her computer to some extent. But has Omega reached out to talk to Kat's computer and Anja's computer? What about the robot's computers in the robot-only center? For that matter, what about the other robots?
And of course, we've seen a mecha-goddess around, who seems to be linked to things remotely. A couple of places we've seen this: here and here. In the past I've suggested she is linked to all of her androids but have gotten more negative pushback than not. Oh well. I'm going to go a bit further today and suggest she may well be linked to ALL of the robots and any computers having any ethereal connections at all. I mean, if Tom isn't trying to show us off-screen connections there, I can't imagine what he is trying to show us. I still think there is some chance she also has a supervisory connection to her androids, but don't really know for sure...
Also, I think it's possible that the Ether Station, which is explicitly called that, either is part of Omega or is linked to it. If Omega is indeed self-aware, it's probably linked to a lot of the other computers and other electronic minds, too.
Based on the shadow man plots to steal Coyote's power, I fear Omega may want all the power. This would be bad, not just for Coyote, but for the world, as that power is necessary to keep the world spinning. Also, to keep the other ether-based entities alive!
The court may think they are in chart of the program (interesting name now that we are starting to see how entrenched computers are everywhere), but I suspect it may not really be the case any longer, if it ever was. Omega drives events from behind the scenes to a large extent, I bet.
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Post by blazingstar on Nov 16, 2021 4:03:47 GMT
There's this page too, in which Zimmy can actually see the alternate paths Kat was set to go down. Was Kat's destiny part of Omega's calculations, too? Hmmm. |
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Post by mturtle7 on Nov 17, 2021 1:20:06 GMT
Whoops, looks like I'm a bit late in responding to this, but whatever.
I mean, that line is pretty darn ambiguous by nature, and I made it clear in my post this was just my personal interpretation. I thought Zimmy meant she was actually sensing some abstract affinity with Omega, especially since her very next line is "...and that guy in the forest [i.e. Loup] noticed it too." Plus, if you look at the previous page, whatever she knows about Omega has made her specifically afraid that the Court will come after her and Gamma...although that could just be good ol' Zimmy paranoia talking. I honestly hadn't even thought about the fact that the Court's ether draining has triggered her powers in the past! That's a very good point though, it absolutely seems connected.
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Post by blahzor on Nov 17, 2021 13:52:10 GMT
Whoops, looks like I'm a bit late in responding to this, but whatever.
I mean, that line is pretty darn ambiguous by nature, and I made it clear in my post this was just my personal interpretation. I thought Zimmy meant she was actually sensing some abstract affinity with Omega, especially since her very next line is "...and that guy in the forest [i.e. Loup] noticed it too." Plus, if you look at the previous page, whatever she knows about Omega has made her specifically afraid that the Court will come after her and Gamma...although that could just be good ol' Zimmy paranoia talking. I honestly hadn't even thought about the fact that the Court's ether draining has triggered her powers in the past! That's a very good point though, it absolutely seems connected. as in the Court uses Zimmy to power the Omega device but b/c of how chaotic her power is it doesn't last. so when they are running their simulations she's also seeing them its basically the show Devs kinda sorta |
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Post by vanzetti on Nov 17, 2021 18:57:37 GMT
Omega is GlaDOS.
"There's no sense crying over every mistake, you just keep on trying till you run out of cake".
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Post by pyradonis on Nov 18, 2021 11:57:03 GMT
Thanks to the thread titles and their current order, right now each time I look into the "Discussion" forum, I read: "What is the Omega Device?" - "A huge source of Ether"
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