[2930] "I am OMEGA."

[imaginaryfriend]

Well, damn. Everyone who chose Omega on the poll come see me after school to collect your quatloos.

[lightshade]

This might be the time where I've seen the most people make an accurate prediction for what the next page would say! Amazing!

[imaginaryfriend]

Let the speculation commence on why Omega looks like she(?) did before and does in however she's(?) presenting herself(?) on this page. I thought the Court wasn't down with man-machine gap bridges. Maybe they just didn't want others in the Court to follow this line of research and replicate Omega? And maybe she(?) looked like Zeta because they tweaked Omega with what they learned from Zeta? Well, end of chapter so plenty of time to ponder before the next one.

[jda]

... so, Omega is just another anthropomorphical abstract that decided to look like a teenager...
"No, I understand"

[Eily]

Apr 19, 2024 7:15:17 GMT imaginaryfriend said:

Let the speculation commence on why Omega looks like she(?) did before and does in however she's(?) presenting herself(?) on this page. I thought the Court wasn't down with man-machine gap bridges. Maybe they just didn't want others in the Court to follow this line of research and replicate Omega? And maybe she(?) looked like Zeta because they tweaked Omega with what they learned from Zeta? Well, end of chapter so plenty of time to ponder before the next one.

If there is a human somewhere inside Omega I wonder how willing they were to be involved, or if it is another Jeanne situation, where they bound someone against their will.

[madjack]

"Can you do anything to help?"

"No."

This little exchange might be something to keep in mind now.

[maxptc]

Orphan soul powering Omega theory looking stronger then ever.

[basser]

So I can see a neurosurgery cranial brace behind her head (the threaded rods with wing nuts) and I'm pretty sure the long thing on the left is a high frequency antenna. Possibly the thing inside the ribcage right next to it is a receiver of some sort? I swear I've seen equipment like that but the dials/gears are throwing me off.

The kind of round thing with a nosecone next to the sternum might be an IR or thermal sensor I think, things with conical mirrors tend to be looking for radiation of some sort. Big ole cylinder thing with a nut just above it looks like a pressure sensor.

So overall I think this is possibly a lot of weather station stuff shoved in a person.

[silicondream]

Apr 19, 2024 7:05:29 GMT imaginaryfriend said:

Well, damn. Everyone who chose Omega on the poll come see me after school to collect your quatloos.

"I am Omega, and I was born with incisors for canines.  Everything went downhill from there."

(I know it's just a matter of lighting and human canines aren't very dramatic anyway, unless they're Zimmy's.   It was just my first impression on viewing the page.)

[rafk]

CALLED IT.

[worldsong]

Hello Omega.

[imaginaryfriend]

Apr 19, 2024 7:05:29 GMT imaginaryfriend said:

Well, damn. Everyone who chose Omega on the poll come see me after school to collect your quatloos.

Should go without saying but if today's update is just a reality-distorted image of someone else using Omega to remotely sift through the distortion then awarded cookies and quatloos would have to be redistributed while taking that into account.

[guntherkrieg]

[Heavy Metal Boss Music Begins]

[guntherkrieg]

Apr 19, 2024 8:09:40 GMT basser said:

So I can see a neurosurgery cranial brace behind her head (the threaded rods with wing nuts) and I'm pretty sure the long thing on the left is a high frequency antenna. Possibly the thing inside the ribcage right next to it is a receiver of some sort? I swear I've seen equipment like that but the dials/gears are throwing me off.

The kind of round thing with a nosecone next to the sternum might be an IR or thermal sensor I think, things with conical mirrors tend to be looking for radiation of some sort. Big ole cylinder thing with a nut just above it looks like a pressure sensor.

So overall I think this is possibly a lot of weather station stuff shoved in a person.

What do you reckon? Are they taking weather sensor data and then extrapolating using stat mech to model the rest of reality? Is it just a metaphor for reading chaotic data, which Omega then parses into predictions (prophecies) that the Court can then read (interpret). 

I have a vague feeling that Omega is just the Oracle of Delphi in sci-fi drag. 

Also interesting that we have a weather droid (Skywatcher) and now Omega is (symbolically in the ether, at least) augmented with loads of weather station cyberware. The difference being that Skywatcher purely watches and Omega is, apparently, being used to cement reality into one particular shape by collapsing the macrowaveform into something knowable (a dead system). 

[madjack]

Given we know how deep Tony is with the Omega project... Weather readings?

Edit: And again.

Perhaps its a just large part of the raw input data?

Edit again: Duh moment, not a lot of easier ways to map prediction accuracy than comparing forecasts to the actual weather afterwards.

[anag]

Great art again, print-material!

Is Omega based on human? Just playing WH40K Rogue Trader and I got serious cogitor-vibes. Hrrr

[shadow3]

Iris West: WE are Omega.


#cw

[Corvo]

Annie: Hi. Hm, are your mandible ok?

[Polyhymnia]

Fascinating contrast between Omega, “man’s attempt to become God” (or destroy God—Omega being the end goal of the Court) and Mecha-Kat, who’s rather organically on her way to deification.

www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1049

[torontoregonian]

Hmm that upside-down Jarvik 7 artificial heart-y looking bit sitting above the broken sternum kinda reminds me of this:
www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1606

[morrahadesigns]

So, folks are speculating about why Omega is an NP, but is it really? We're still inside the massive Zimmstortion. Could Omega simply be a sentience that recognized the best way to blend in until the time was right?

That reveal page also has me leaning towards the court having trapped/used a real person to be/power Omega.

[justcurious]

Apr 19, 2024 11:34:48 GMT Polyhymnia said:

Fascinating contrast between Omega, “man’s attempt to become God” (or destroy God—Omega being the end goal of the Court) and Mecha-Kat, who’s rather organically on her way to deification.

www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1049

Yep. While scary Kat looks elegant and Omega looks like the dead.
Strange that Kat looks so terrifying yet her apparent apotheosis is a result of acts of kindness.
Interesting how Omega was so disconcerted by Kat's taking Sam into the Ether without her knowledge. She does not appear to be able to see what happens when someone freezes time. Could this be because she is the Court's attempt at omniscience but they failed because their deterministic models were wrong?

[ctso74]

Apr 19, 2024 8:25:57 GMT silicondream said:

Apr 19, 2024 7:05:29 GMT imaginaryfriend said:

Well, damn. Everyone who chose Omega on the poll come see me after school to collect your quatloos.

"I am Omega, and I was born with incisors for canines.  Everything went downhill from there."

(I know it's just a matter of lighting and human canines aren't very dramatic anyway, unless they're Zimmy's.   It was just my first impression on viewing the page.)

My thoughts as well. Then I thought-
Omega: "Do you see any cavities?"
Annie: "Yes. You have a very large cavity... but you teeth are fine."

[blazingstar]

Cookies, cookies for everyone! She is Omega! Mystery solved!

(and yet I still have SO MANY QUESTIONS)

[basser]

Apr 19, 2024 9:22:12 GMT guntherkrieg said:

Apr 19, 2024 8:09:40 GMT basser said:

So I can see a neurosurgery cranial brace behind her head (the threaded rods with wing nuts) and I'm pretty sure the long thing on the left is a high frequency antenna. Possibly the thing inside the ribcage right next to it is a receiver of some sort? I swear I've seen equipment like that but the dials/gears are throwing me off.

The kind of round thing with a nosecone next to the sternum might be an IR or thermal sensor I think, things with conical mirrors tend to be looking for radiation of some sort. Big ole cylinder thing with a nut just above it looks like a pressure sensor.

So overall I think this is possibly a lot of weather station stuff shoved in a person.

What do you reckon? Are they taking weather sensor data and then extrapolating using stat mech to model the rest of reality? Is it just a metaphor for reading chaotic data, which Omega then parses into predictions (prophecies) that the Court can then read (interpret). 

I have a vague feeling that Omega is just the Oracle of Delphi in sci-fi drag. 

Also interesting that we have a weather droid (Skywatcher) and now Omega is (symbolically in the ether, at least) augmented with loads of weather station cyberware. The difference being that Skywatcher purely watches and Omega is, apparently, being used to cement reality into one particular shape by collapsing the macrowaveform into something knowable (a dead system). 

Yeah I think it's important too that Tony is evidently so important to this project that they dragged him back to the Court. He's a surgeon and this looks like a kid with stuff surgically implanted. And that might kind of explain why he's the one keeping weather sensor spreadsheets instead of some meteorologist, if we assume some of the sensors he's monitoring are, uh, elsewhere.

Also the fact that he can't be himself around Annie when it's been heavily established that this only triggers when he's speaking to more than one person, AND the fact that Zimmy and now Omega both have the same general body design (the way their ears and head and nose shape are drawn, I mean, which always seems intentionally similar) I'm still putting all my eggs in Annie and Zimmy and now Omega all being more or less the same kid.

Introducing the concept of shifting with the twins arc feels relevant to explaining how there's so many of them. And if Omega is indeed some kinda shifted instance of Annie then it makes Tony's "what I did to my own daughter" comment make more sense.

Perhaps they just kept making copies of Annie until they generated a god, and for one of them they got a bit literal with it. And then Annie is the one where they actually succeeded but haven't realized yet.

Also the black haired ones like Zimmy and Omega make me wonder what would happen if you shifted one of these kids as a baby and then separated them from Surma. Perhaps you'd get a kid who constantly sucks in ether in an attempt to fill the void where the fire should be?

[Gemminie]

Mystery New Person just said she's not Zeta. On this page she continues, "I am Omega." Oh, so you're just another Greek letter HOLY F- ... and end of chapter.

And we see another glimpse of a partly organic, partly mechanical device, featuring a skull, some ribs, possibly some organs, and various machine parts. This is likely the same deteriorating organic/technological machine we saw glimpses of early in the chapter. I had thought that this was some kind of reference to what was going on with Robot, especially as some barnacles and feathers featured in those glimpses, but I don't think so now. What is this machine we keep seeing? Is it the true appearance of Omega? I don't think so. Considering that the barnacles and feathers appeared right after MNP (now known to be Omega) said she knew where Robot was, I suspect that what we're seeing is basically how Omega sees the world. Perhaps it's the abstraction that allows Omega to make predictions.

So ... if places and things are being changed instead of people in this distortion, how is Omega looking like a NP? Well, for one thing, places and things are being changed; nothing says that they can't be changed into people. But it's also possible that Omega pretended to be a robot (or an ordinary robot; perhaps Omega looked like a robot normally) and went through Kat's transition process. But that doesn't seem too likely; at the time, all robots other than the Seraphs were involved in the shield. So unless Omega had its CPU removed and placed in one of the boxes, Kat would've noticed a robot that wasn't involved in the shield. That would've been an anomaly.

Or possibly Omega transitioned into a semi-organic body on its own. What if the Court has known how to do what Kat's doing for decades or generations of human lifespans; they just didn't see it as useful or desirable, but Omega predicted that it would be necessary? Well, there are a few possibilities there, but no way to tell. One of the things I love most about GKC is how every question answered raises several more.

It seems clear now that the chapter title, "Devil's Due," has to do with Robot's self-image as the betrayer of his angel and his confession to Annie and Shadow.

[Runningflame]

Apr 19, 2024 11:34:48 GMT Polyhymnia said:

Fascinating contrast between Omega, “man’s attempt to become God” (or destroy God—Omega being the end goal of the Court) and Mecha-Kat, who’s rather organically on her way to deification.

www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1049

Yes, one of my first thoughts was that she looks like a cross between Mecha-Kat and Zimmy on this page. I don't know how sound the logic is, but intuitively it feels like Omega is a human (for all intents and purposes) that the Court has horrifically experimented on to try to create a machine goddess. Meanwhile, Kat is the real deal, arising much more naturally, and while she is potentially scary, she also has the capacity to be a lot healthier.

People have speculated before that Gamma and Zeta were "early prototypes" of Omega. There's got to be some connection, given the title "subject Zeta" and how Omega says "No, I'm not Zeta, I'm Omega" in an "almost right, but you've got the wrong Greek letter" tone. I'm a little muddled by Jones saying (on the page linked above) that Zimmy "is an interesting anomaly that was brought to the Court for research," implying that she existed already in the outside world and the Court discovered her rather than making her what she is. Jones could be lying, of course, or misinformed. We don't have much solid information about Zimmy's origins. The picture gets even blurrier for Gamma, though: not only did she not know Zimmy before they happened to meet in the outside world, but she only speaks Polish despite living in the UK. Doesn't seem to track with an origin as a Court experiment.

Maybe the Court discovered Gamma and Zeta (among others, presumably at least α, β, δ, and ε) in the outside world, did some research on what makes them tick etherically, and then used that research to create Omega? The timeline is another question, since neither Gamma nor Zimmy were born yet (probably) when Tony was already getting instructions with a big Ω on them. But it's possible the project itself, and its name, predate the "acquisition" of human research subjects, and the "earlier Greek letters" naming scheme was backfilled later.

(Random other observation: the fact that Zimmy and Gamma are so closely associated, yet their letters aren't consecutive. Was the Court maybe tracking Gamma for a while, but didn't make contact with her until after she met Zimmy?)

[TBeholder]

Annie has a million of questions too.
But considering that Omega is on the same list as Zeta, simple answers probably are not on the table, nor even in refrigerator.

[guntherkrieg]

Apr 19, 2024 15:48:25 GMT basser said:

Apr 19, 2024 9:22:12 GMT guntherkrieg said:

What do you reckon? Are they taking weather sensor data and then extrapolating using stat mech to model the rest of reality? Is it just a metaphor for reading chaotic data, which Omega then parses into predictions (prophecies) that the Court can then read (interpret). 

I have a vague feeling that Omega is just the Oracle of Delphi in sci-fi drag. 

Also interesting that we have a weather droid (Skywatcher) and now Omega is (symbolically in the ether, at least) augmented with loads of weather station cyberware. The difference being that Skywatcher purely watches and Omega is, apparently, being used to cement reality into one particular shape by collapsing the macrowaveform into something knowable (a dead system). 

Yeah I think it's important too that Tony is evidently so important to this project that they dragged him back to the Court. He's a surgeon and this looks like a kid with stuff surgically implanted. And that might kind of explain why he's the one keeping weather sensor spreadsheets instead of some meteorologist, if we assume some of the sensors he's monitoring are, uh, elsewhere.

Also the fact that he can't be himself around Annie when it's been heavily established that this only triggers when he's speaking to more than one person, AND the fact that Zimmy and now Omega both have the same general body design (the way their ears and head and nose shape are drawn, I mean, which always seems intentionally similar) I'm still putting all my eggs in Annie and Zimmy and now Omega all being more or less the same kid.

Introducing the concept of shifting with the twins arc feels relevant to explaining how there's so many of them. And if Omega is indeed some kinda shifted instance of Annie then it makes Tony's "what I did to my own daughter" comment make more sense.

Perhaps they just kept making copies of Annie until they generated a god, and for one of them they got a bit literal with it. And then Annie is the one where they actually succeeded but haven't realized yet.

Also the black haired ones like Zimmy and Omega make me wonder what would happen if you shifted one of these kids as a baby and then separated them from Surma. Perhaps you'd get a kid who constantly sucks in ether in an attempt to fill the void where the fire should be?

Jesus Christ. If that's not what it turns out to be that'll be a shame as that's a blanking awesome theory. 

[Gemini Jim]

Apr 19, 2024 7:18:15 GMT jda said:

... so, Omega is just another anthropomorphical abstract that decided to look like a teenager...

"Call me Meg! I changed my name to Meg"