[2662] It is ultimately your choice.

[madjack]

So no pressure or anything.

[caber]

I like how casually the speaker essentially states, "we were in fact putting the kids into potential danger to test things out. But hey, it all worked out okay!"

[madjack]

This answers one question about just why all the stuff on the cruise was being treated as no big deal. I think it raises another though, on what the Seraphs had to do with it, were they running the experiment or did they (more likely, I think) hijack it along with the ship?

Also if memory serves, the only person who had a bad time before the robot drama kicked off was Zimmy, and we don't know if she was sick because of the nature of the ocean or was just seasick. Gamma, Annie, Paz, Rey etc were just fine.

Perhaps the Court saw the results of that year's cruise as a data anomaly or something.

[TBeholder]

Because it’s not like Jenny just had a fun exciting adventure.
So does this mean Zimmy is involved this time, or they did not even bother to check the results that time?
Anyway, considering how ridiculously pear-shaped this voyage went, any confidence in the resulting “design” seems to be badly misplaced.

[philman]

I wondered if the Love Boat was going to be mentioned as the last time we saw the sea. But having it as a test on the schoolchildren is a bit much!

[speedwell]

I call bovine metabolic waste product. Both on the assertion of an "Ether-free world" (I suspect the Court elites simply wish to reserve Etheric control to themselves and find the current atmosphere too messy) and on the promise of a choice. In fact I am going to go so far as to say the Court itself is being manipulated by "trickster" entities.

[imaginaryfriend]

If this new totally real world really is devoid of ether then travelling to it using etheric science would be a one-way trip. Not sure how they'd even communicate if something went wrong and they needed support or another evac but that's not a good selling point so I guess they'll bring that up later if at all.

[justcurious]

What gives them the idea that this new world will remain free of the Ether one humans start living and dying there? I get the impression that the Ether is a creation of living beings. If so does the Court know this?

[yellowb]

Aug 12, 2022 8:08:14 GMT speedwell said:

I call bovine metabolic waste product. Both on the assertion of an "Ether-free world" (I suspect the Court elites simply wish to reserve Etheric control to themselves and find the current atmosphere too messy) and on the promise of a choice. In fact I am going to go so far as to say the Court itself is being manipulated by "trickster" entities.

"Yes, yes, exciting, is it not?" did strike me as something Coyote would say.

[madjack]

Aug 12, 2022 7:21:59 GMT caber said:

I like how casually the speaker essentially states, "we were in fact putting the kids into potential danger to test things out. But hey, it all worked out okay!"

"At Gunnerkrigg, we do all our science from scratch. No hand holding."

[Geekette]

Belief makes real in the Ether though, and can make things real retroactively. If channeled correctly and enough people believe (in the right way, and Kat's "The ROTD is just a guy in a mask with an old TV" certainly seems like it could be in the right track), then it is. Even if such a planet didn't exist before, even if it had plenty of ether connection before, now it doesn't and never did -

You know, in exactly the same way that Coyote became the skeleton of a bird by a lake and forgot he'd ever been anything different until he decided to stop.

[aline]

Aug 12, 2022 7:21:59 GMT caber said:

I like how casually the speaker essentially states, "we were in fact putting the kids into potential danger to test things out. But hey, it all worked out okay!"

"We needed human test subjects, so we sent the kids alone with a robot crew."
I mean. There wasn't a single adult on that ship. No doctors or even the shadow of an authority figure to monitor in case something went wrong. Not ONE.

Cool cool cool.

[aline]

Aug 12, 2022 8:44:05 GMT justcurious said:

What gives them the idea that this new world will remain free of the Ether one humans start living and dying there? I get the impression that the Ether is a creation of living beings. If so does the Court know this?

I think that's one reason they selected their batch of people so very carefully. Maybe they know or they assume that people without any affinity to the ether don't create or feed it either. And they either know or assume that the offsprings of such people wouldn't either.

So I guess we're adding eugenics to the core beliefs of this new magic-free utopia.

[Isildur]

Aug 12, 2022 7:30:23 GMT madjack said:

This answers one question about just why all the stuff on the cruise was being treated as no big deal. I think it raises another though, on what the Seraphs had to do with it, were they running the experiment or did they (more likely, I think) hijack it along with the ship?

Also if memory serves, the only person who had a bad time before the robot drama kicked off was Zimmy, and we don't know if she was sick because of the nature of the ocean or was just seasick. Gamma, Annie, Paz, Rey etc were just fine.

Perhaps the Court saw the results of that year's cruise as a data anomaly or something.

Perhaps they did not get as far out to sea as they were supposed to, due to the ship and seraphs hijacking the cruise for their own ends.

Zimmy is especially sensitive to being cut off from the ether, but for the others, feeling ill effects might have required going further.

[arf]

Aug 12, 2022 8:44:05 GMT justcurious said:

What gives them the idea that this new world will remain free of the Ether one humans start living and dying there? I get the impression that the Ether is a creation of living beings. If so does the Court know this?

"For those of you who choose to go, we have another treat: to escape the ether entirely, you must undergo a cybernetic body transfer."

[mordekai]

They are making a really shitty sales pitch... I mean... they are basically saying "we have developed amazing etheric starfaring tech that allows to colonize other inhabitable planets, but we are going to dump it and go back to regular, normal tech; also, we are leaving the planet and all the rest of Humanity and all the interesting things you love and go live in a far away extra-terrestial colony populated by a few hundreds or thousands of people and ruled by us as absolute tyrants, with no chance of return back home if you have regrets... exciting, isn't it?"

So what do they offer in exchange for their freedom, for the chance of developing successful careers on Earth (I doubt they are inviting useless people), for all the entertainment created on Earth, for all the things they could still discover and enjoy and learn on Earth...?

New, exciting reality-warping, starfaring etheric technology? Nope, they are eschewing that.

A new, post-scarcity sci-fi society? I dunno... the stuff from the court seem to be kinda magical, being made of a substance that is neither earth nor wood... can they grow and manipulate it without etheric tech? And all their technology seem to be built and maintained by robots, which they will leave behind... If they have a way to create some amazing post-scarcity high-tech sci-fi society without robots or etheric tech or the Bismouth Seed, they should prove it now... in fact, they should have proved it long before triggering the exodus...

The opportunity of making all the experiments they wish without restriction? I dunno... most inhabitants of the Court don't look like mad scientists, and even in Kat's case, the Court seems to be the only factor restricting her work... If she were outside the court, her innovations in the field of robotics would make her the most famous person in the world... not to mention that renouncing etheric tech AND robot labor would mean that she would lose an immense amount of power...

Getting rid of the Ether? Do the Ether really bother most people outside of the Court? These people could just shrug and say "well, the Ether didn't bother me when I lived in New Jersey/Paris/Madrid/Berlin/Vienna/Los Angeles/Brasilia/Tokyo/Kyiv/Rome/Beijing/Sydney/Cairo/Pretoria/Buenos Aires/Bogotá/Chicago/New York/London...etc., if I want to avoid it, I could just go back to the outside world...".

I dunno, I hope Mr. Nommo Apkallu will explicitly show some tempting bait, because otherwise, they are really bad at their job...

[imaginaryfriend]

To be fair, I think the Love Boat cruise was screening and not experimenting on underage subjects without their knowledge or anyone's informed consent. If something unexpected happened during that screening, however, they probably would have been very interested.

Would anyone care to speculate on what would happen if Zeta was sent to this planet..? The place being ether-free or having very low etheric pressure I'd think Zimmingham would bust out and cover a radically large area of the place, maybe permanently. So over time what would that evolve into, after Zeta is gone one way or another? A planet of intelligent whitelegs that revere a departed mother-goddess?

Another thing: The impression is being given that these people are going to this new planet to do research. The individual giving the speech appears to be from a tradition of etheric technology so shouldn't be a native of this allegedly ether-free planet, or at minimum not one from a species that evolved there (and in fact may be a being of the etherium who is interested in guiding humans on a path of knowledge and reason). The planet is depicted on the previous page as being blue and green with white clouds which suggests a biosphere and atmosphere, but this is only a representation. It might be much less hospitable. Who is going to be doing the mundane manual labor to support this research endeavor? Are there ether-free natives? Are they importing semi- and unskilled labor as the Court probably used in the past? Or maybe they're going with robot labor. They'd be less advanced then Diego's tech but could conceivably get the job done in the short term, but these settlers would need spouses (or whatever) eventually. That suggests to me that they'll import some regular muggles for labor, which makes me wonder about the terms that would happen under. On the other hand, if they want to keep human-produced ether from contaminating their ether-less paradise, they'll have to keep the population to an absolute minimum. That would mean robots, and importing new researchers as the old ones die out. But maybe they don't adhere to the same model that Anja used when explaining ether and therefore don't believe normie humans in general have the capacity to contaminate it... which I figure would make this colony doomed from the start to be another beautiful failure...

[aline]

Aug 12, 2022 11:16:50 GMT imaginaryfriend said:

To be fair, I think the Love Boat cruise was screening and not experimenting on underage subjects without their knowledge or anyone's informed consent. If something unexpected happened during that screening, however, they probably would have been very interested.

The exact quote is "We admit, this was to test the effect of the star ocean on the human body". 

That doesn't sound like screening. That sounds like shoving a bunch of kids on a ship to see if anything interesting happens to their body. Even if they weren't the first humans to try the ride it's definitely in the "experimenting on children" category.
Also so far the Court has done whatever they wanted without giving a single f*** to either knowledge or consent, such as with the intense surveillance everbody seems to be subjected to (to a degree that would put most police states to shame).  

Even worse, they admit that the ocean was designed to be unpleasant for ether atuned people and they still put Zimmy on that ship, presumably to check exactly how ill she'd be. 

[pyradonis]

And once again the observation is obvious: Everyone depicted at the location besides Kat is obviously an adult. And the entity also speaks to the crowd as if they are all adults ("the cruise you took when you were children" is only, what, two years ago for Kat?). What's up with that? Why were the teens shown saying that some of them got invitations, and now each page carefully makes sure to show there are no other teens beside Kat?

Aug 12, 2022 9:30:27 GMT aline said:

Aug 12, 2022 7:21:59 GMT caber said:

I like how casually the speaker essentially states, "we were in fact putting the kids into potential danger to test things out. But hey, it all worked out okay!"

"We needed human test subjects, so we sent the kids alone with a robot crew."
I mean. There wasn't a single adult on that ship. No doctors or even the shadow of an authority figure to monitor in case something went wrong. Not ONE.

Cool cool cool.

Ah, but there was an adult with them... just in the water and not on the ship... who apparently didn't even realize what was happening until Paz jumped into the water to tell her... and then did nothing useful besides smashing a glass roof... while people were under it.

Aug 12, 2022 11:16:50 GMT imaginaryfriend said:

I'd think Zimmingham would bust out and cover a radically large area of the place, maybe permanently. So over time what would that evolve into, after Zeta is gone one way or another? A planet of intelligent whitelegs that revere a departed mother-goddess?

Sounds like pure space horror. I like it.

[todd]

I think it's a point in the Court's favor that they're not compelling people to make the voyage - although it's probably based, not on moral considerations but on pragmatic ones ("Conscripts or people who see themselves as kidnapped won't do as good a job as people who willingly came").

[Polyhymnia]

So the big question for me about the cruise is this…that ended in the robotic ship demanding an etheric-created organic body, no? And it almost received one, thanks to Kat. That seems like a red flag (again with the “how is Kat not associated with the ether” and another vote for “the ether is being-generated and I think the robots can even end up there thanks to creator Kat.” ) I mean, look at these pages. That’s not someone cut off from the ether, even if she doesn’t have ordinary fire-type or talking-to-animals superpowers: www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1410
www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1443

Also? That picture of Zimmy looking upset specifically comes from a panel about her being seasick, not having an etheric freak out . Idk, I guess I’m having a hard time accepting this being’s explanation as the truth. Unless it was to check if the students could take the etheric distortion, and frankly, nothing happened there that hadn’t been experienced in zimmingham.

Though this panel suggests that Jack had some advance knowledge about what was going to happen: www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1394

The ship reacted to the etheric ocean freak-out and capitalized on it by demanding a body, The humans all seemed more or less fine to weather it, Zimmy excluded. I wonder how much the court actually knows about what happened? Because the ship’s actions and the Seraph’s actions were originally taken (by me, at least) to be coordinated, but now it seems like that was just coincidence and there may have even been three factions: the court, that wanted to test student bodies’ reactions, the seraphs, who took advantage of the storm to test their creator’s abilities maybe, and the ship, which took advantage of the ether to demand a body: www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1400
Here’s a glimpse of what I think travelling the star ocean looks like? That bright light? But it’s interrupted by Reynard crashing onto the ship. (I just assumed all of the light was a part of Zimmingham originally, but now I’m wondering if it was a destination, and given the whole “going into the light” thing with death and Tony’s own experience with that sort of thing, I can’t help but think the court is being bamboozled).
www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1419

Also, how are they monitoring strain? Those ingested nanobots? I think what the court actually concluded from the test was not “human bodies survive it” but “etheric people can fight back and end our experiment, so we should leave them behind,” though I don’t think it was the result they were fishing for.

One wonders if the testing part of it was just the seraph robots de-ethering people because none of the students seemed to actually struggle with the ether apart from Zimmy.

Actually, here’s my new theory: the seraphs have been lying to the court, and the court has assumed robots are robots and not androids, as may be more appropriate. The Seraphs have taken pains to ensure Kat can go to the strange new world, but also made sure she has developed her ether and technological capabilities and have hidden her from the court. They originally wanted to accelerate her research via ether because they assumed it would be the only way they could join humans in organicness, but after her banishing and after successfully creating New People, they see that the ether is no longer necessary for her to create bodies. So…no conclusion I guess.
But I do think that maybe the court just straight-up doesn’t Kat’s etheric status and the Seraphs are why. (Because one really does wonder what the court wants to do wihh to their race of slave-droids…)

[imaginaryfriend]

Aug 12, 2022 11:44:04 GMT aline said:

Aug 12, 2022 11:16:50 GMT imaginaryfriend said:

To be fair, I think the Love Boat cruise was screening and not experimenting on underage subjects without their knowledge or anyone's informed consent. If something unexpected happened during that screening, however, they probably would have been very interested.

The exact quote is "We admit, this was to test the effect of the star ocean on the human body". 

That doesn't sound like screening. That sounds like shoving a bunch of kids on a ship to see if anything interesting happens to their body. Even if they weren't the first humans to try the ride it's definitely in the "experimenting on children" category.
Also so far the Court has done whatever they wanted without giving a single f*** to either knowledge or consent, such as with the intense surveillance everbody seems to be subjected to (to a degree that would put most police states to shame).  

Even worse, they admit that the ocean was designed to be unpleasant for ether atuned people and they still put Zimmy on that ship, presumably to check exactly how ill she'd be. 

Testing is part of but doesn't equal experimentation. People get medically tested all the time in routine ways. If something unexpected happens it has anecdotal value but isn't experimental. A future study that does have experimental value can be planned from anecdotal evidence but that's it. That said, the Court was ethically in the wrong if they tested people without their knowledge and consent, particularly children, and they seem to be admitting to doing so.

Not sure they knew Zeta was on board. They were hiding, but then they're always hiding. She and Gamma might have stowed away or maybe they just insisted on going and were allowed to do so because it was expected to be only unpleasant and Zeta hasn't done much to endear herself to the Court personnel.

[Polyhymnia]

Aug 12, 2022 11:59:08 GMT pyradonis said:

And once again the observation is obvious: Everyone depicted at the location besides Kat is obviously an adult. And the entity also speaks to the crowd as if they are all adults ("the cruise you took when you were children" is only, what, two years ago for Kat?). What's up with that? Why were the teens shown saying that some of them got invitations, and now each page carefully makes sure to show there are no other teens beside Kat?

Aug 12, 2022 9:30:27 GMT aline said:

"We needed human test subjects, so we sent the kids alone with a robot crew."
I mean. There wasn't a single adult on that ship. No doctors or even the shadow of an authority figure to monitor in case something went wrong. Not ONE.

Cool cool cool.

Ah, but there was an adult with them... just in the water and not on the ship... who apparently didn't even realize what was happening until Paz jumped into the water to tell her... and then did nothing useful besides smashing a glass roof... while people were under it.

Aug 12, 2022 11:16:50 GMT imaginaryfriend said:

I'd think Zimmingham would bust out and cover a radically large area of the place, maybe permanently. So over time what would that evolve into, after Zeta is gone one way or another? A planet of intelligent whitelegs that revere a departed mother-goddess?

Sounds like pure space horror. I like it.

Perhaps this “when you were children” comment suggests that even though each person feels like they are among a crowd listening to a single speaker, the being speaking to them is actually speaking to each of them, individually, through their mind, and people are receiving different, tailor-made messages.

[fia]

Oh gosh. What if the mysterious speaker is an AI or robot? Perhaps one that had experience with time travel or knew of its possibilities?

Would explain a lot, honestly. Robots, even Kat's New People, aren't connected to the ether.

[Gemminie]

The first thing the mysterious speaker confirms on this page is that the "Torn Sea" cruise was designed to test the effects of the "star ocean" on the human body. ("What ocean is this?") So they were testing on children, then? Of course, it's not stated whether they had previously tested on adults or not. I also note that the speaker says "when you were children," implying that everyone currently being addressed was on that cruise. Does this mean that everyone present is/was a student from the same year in school as Kat, Janet, Winsbury, Annie (at that time), etc.? Perhaps they're inviting in waves.

The speaker goes on to say that those particularly connected with the Ether found the voyage difficult, and Kat has a flashback to Zimmy and her discomfort aboard ship, which we had all just assumed was seasickness. But Annie, for example, didn't experience any such distress just from being on the star ocean. Also, wasn't there a spot of bother about some robots taking over the ship and trying to use it to coerce Kat into making a body for the ship itself, with the seraph robots hijacking some Ether siphon devices? That wouldn't exactly have been a forgettable experience. Was that part of the plan? Are they glossing over it? Or do they really not know about that?

We see a somewhat wider view including the jetty, the people standing on it, and the boxlike structure on its edge back there, and a shimmery indistinct blur where the speaker is standing. They tell the assembled students that the new world will be completely devoid of Ether – does this mean that they're assuming that by now, all the students will have learned what the Ether is? Is this a subject covered in classes? It wasn't covered in any classes that we were allowed to see, and in fact Annie only learned about the Ether from sources fairly far removed from the Court, such as Coyote, Renard, and Muut. I suppose Anja is with the Court, but she wasn't teaching a class at the time. Jones is only sort of with the Court.

Anyone with any connection to the Ether, even the slightest, hasn't been invited. Mundanes only, I'm afraid. But even among the mundanes, it's not mandatory. Since Annie's talking to Kat, I assume Kat declined the invitation. Now, we don't know whether the Court told them to pack a suitcase and bring their toothbrushes to the meeting, but it does really look like the speaker intends to take people with them now. No chance to say goodbye to your family and friends whom you won't be seeing again, no advance warning. If anyone goes with them on what I'm assuming is a one-way trip with this short notice, I'd be surprised – it would have to be people with no connections to the world they're leaving, or perhaps their other friends/family are already on the other side. Are there even communications between Earth and Courtworld?

[Gemminie]

Aug 12, 2022 8:44:05 GMT justcurious said:

What gives them the idea that this new world will remain free of the Ether one humans start living and dying there? I get the impression that the Ether is a creation of living beings. If so does the Court know this?

Hmm, well, that would require the psychopomps to take them into the Ether after they die. But without Ether how will the psychopomps get there?

The existing psychopomps, that is. Perhaps without them, the spirits of each person who dies will just hang around as ghosts until several generations later someone spontaneously figures out how to do spirit guiding, and voila, you've got an Ether. Or perhaps they've got a plan for that – for example, "the Omega Device will tell us when anyone's going to die, so before they do we'll ship 'em back to Earth to die there."

[ctso74]

Aug 12, 2022 11:59:08 GMT pyradonis said:

And once again the observation is obvious: Everyone depicted at the location besides Kat is obviously an adult. And the entity also speaks to the crowd as if they are all adults ("the cruise you took when you were children" is only, what, two years ago for Kat?). What's up with that?

Maybe, everyone went on a cruise at some point in the curriculum. Or the "entity" is speaking individually to everyone, and this message is just the one Kat heard.

I'm starting to wonder if this forum's use of the word Ether, and the Court's use of the term Ether are the same thing. What if we're using it as a more umbrella term, while the Court means something more specific? From our POV, it could be a case of "this Ether is good but that Ether is bad", but to the Court's POV they're talking about two different things.

[Eily]

Aug 12, 2022 11:13:45 GMT mordekai said:

They are making a really shitty sales pitch... I mean... they are basically saying "we have developed amazing etheric starfaring tech that allows to colonize other inhabitable planets, but we are going to dump it and go back to regular, normal tech; also, we are leaving the planet and all the rest of Humanity and all the interesting things you love and go live in a far away extra-terrestial colony populated by a few hundreds or thousands of people and ruled by us as absolute tyrants, with no chance of return back home if you have regrets... exciting, isn't it?"

That might explain why Janet didn't come.

[bicarbonat]

"Where the heck is everybody going" is a question that Tom has wrapped in delicious implications and obfuscations. We have several groups that really need to be kept distinct re: the Courts plan –

Etheric vs Non-etheric (NE)
Adult vs Non-Adult (NA)

I wonder about the size of the NE cross-section. Gotta assume reproduction is going to come into play if they're starting over on a new planet, right?

But what if they're planning on just living forever? Death is the stuff of the horrid ether and its monstrous psychopomps. The ether with all its supposed knowledge, never helped with that – it wants, needs people to die. Science will put a stop to all of that.

And they need stable people who don't have rap sheets of closely-surveilled but un-confronted after-school etheric dalliances.

And we've seen flashforwards of Margo, who seems to be NE, as an adult ('course, we assume she's on Earth).

Basically I'm:
1) wondering how "needed" the NENA are
2) convinced that this initiative's leaders intend to live as techno-gods. Wonder if they know there's already a real one.

[Gemminie]

Aug 12, 2022 11:16:50 GMT imaginaryfriend said:

Who is going to be doing the mundane manual labor to support this research endeavor? ... That would mean robots ...

Well, the Court has already proven itself able to create robot CPUs that produce laborers with no personality. All they need to have in addition to that are functional robot bodies, and they've got their robot labor. (I've got nothing to add to your other points; they may well be headed for failure.)