[2940] Such detail in your divination

[novia]

In this comic Omega reminds me of Odin, who, although he had ravens instead of crows, was also able to see all events in the world.

[Igniz]

Omega, the All-seeing, the All-Mother.

[guntherkrieg]

Her eyebags/eyeshadow are/is getting more and more Zimmy-like.

Could be a common effect of people jacked constantly into the Ether. Remember Annie had similar eyes after her first trip to Zimmingham. As did Jack...

Or she could be a direct ancestor for the Zims.

[foresterr]

Damn, I think Zims relationship to Omega must be something really non-obvious. "The Court has no device, you've already found me".

I just got a bright idea that Zims situation is more parallel to Annie's than we ever expected, but kind of in an inverted way. She might be in fact Omega's direct descendant, and (potentially) has the full extent of her powers. However: Omega is more or less omniscient (current complications notwithstanding), but not omnipotent. If you know everything that is, everything that was, and everything that is going to happen, but you are not really able to influence it in any way (because you already know in advance everything that you are going to do and it's unchangeable), you have effectively no free will. Triggering that power in you would effectively kill whatever normal personality you had before, and make you a continuation of the original Omega.

So, Zims while still being her own person would have Opinions about that process and try to fight (might be related to the horrible thing that she did), and Kat using Omega to kill her... well, you know what that would be. And maybe it already happened.

[pyradonis]

I know, the chapter is not over and all... but I really hope that after a whole earlier chapter ("Knowledge of Everything") about how a perfect prediction device would work, it doesn't turn out that a Court scientist just randomly found a girl who could see everything thanks to random Etheric Phlebotinum and who happened to be called Omega.

I would have said, maybe meeting Miss Omega was what inspired the Court scientists to build the Omega Device, maybe they deliberately tried to duplicate her brain or something, but the previous chapter makes it look more like her body has been hooked up to some goddess-forsaken machinery until today like the Emperor of Mankind¹. For a while I also thought that the purely artificial cruise ship CPU appeared as a whale skeleton in a Zimmy-brand distortion, but Omega actually does not seem to appear as what was seen on the final page, but as a regular NP instead. So it looks a lot like the bones and machinery are what she actually looks like outside the distortion.

¹Warhammer 40k

[foresterr]

May 13, 2024 10:42:34 GMT pyradonis said:

So it looks a lot like the bones and machinery are what she actually looks like outside the distortion.

Agreed that the chapter transition is set up in a way very suggestive of this. That of course contradicts my theory, but either way, it's going to be interesting.

[yellowb]

Of course, Omega does not need to be any relation to Zimmy. People are just assuming that she is - which I admit is understandable. But it ain't necessarily so.

[guntherkrieg]

May 13, 2024 10:11:15 GMT foresterr said:

Damn, I think Zims relationship to Omega must be something really non-obvious. "The Court has no device, you've already found me".

I just got a bright idea that Zims situation is more parallel to Annie's than we ever expected, but kind of in an inverted way. She might be in fact Omega's direct descendant, and (potentially) has the full extent of her powers. However: Omega is more or less omniscient (current complications notwithstanding), but not omnipotent. If you know everything that is, everything that was, and everything that is going to happen, but you are not really able to influence it in any way (because you already know in advance everything that you are going to do and it's unchangeable), you have effectively no free will. Triggering that power in you would effectively kill whatever normal personality you had before, and make you a continuation of the original Omega.

So, Zims while still being her own person would have Opinions about that process and try to fight (might be related to the horrible thing that she did), and Kat using Omega to kill her... well, you know what that would be. And maybe it already happened.

Really good point, re: what is your personality if you know everything that happens to you? You essentially become something non-human. Like the aliens from Arrival. Or Slaughter House 5. 

===

Remember as well that Zimmy's intro features a lot of jumping around (perspective-wise) in time to various dates. We assume it's the reader bouncing back and forth in time but it could very well be Zimmy's own perception.

I'm sure there was a chapter in which Zimms is confused about whether something's happened yet or not. 

[guntherkrieg]

Question: is Omega unable to die (or be allowed to die...) and thus the image of machines and bones interfaced together is her... having rotted away but still alive? Still predicting?

[Sky Schemer]

"Your work has helped me so much.

"By the way, an author you follow has released a new book. If you would like to learn more, I can add it to your wish list. Do you want me to do that?"

[Hatredman]

Read this page and the next 24 (you'll like it, garanteed):

killsixbilliondemons.com/comic/breaker-of-infinities-4-123/

In them we have a girl that's in fact dead but still alive and who is all-knowing of the past, present and future. Also, she has a device (or is she the device itself?). At one point she says:
I
DO
NOT
EXIST.

I found it amusing.

[Gemminie]

After the girl's demonstration, the scientist ushers the observers out of her room, urging that they let her rest. Then, turning to her, he confirms for us that she is called Omega ("Miss Omega," specifically) and calls her demonstration "frightening." She hopes it won't cause trouble for him, but he thinks it will convince them that her abilities really exist, calling what she just did "divination."

She replies that it's just information and that she is subjected to a constant flood of it at all times; the man's work has helped her a great deal (perhaps by giving her more control over this ability).

It's official; this girl is named Omega (though whether she was named that by her parents, by herself, by this scientist, or by someone else is unclear). These scenes are probably taking place between 1.5 and 2 centuries ago, so under ordinary circumstances (which these are certainly not) she should be long dead. So ... what is the "Omega Device?"

• A device by means of which the Court has bound Omega's spirit to the remains of her body and communicates with her
• A device created to replace Omega by making the same sorts of predictions she made
• Something else?

Regardless, Omega apparently is standing before Annie in NP form in the present day. Has her spirit, which the Court hasn't allowed to rest, inhabited an NP body (used or unused) in order to experience being alive again? You know, if she wanted to be taken into the Ether, there's a psychopomp right here who can do that, probably wrecking all kinds of Court plans in the process.

[fia]

I haven't been commenting as often but I just wanted to say, damn, Tom, how do you keep surprising me / us!!!
Been reading this comic since like 2007 or something and the commitment to these long long game revelations is nuts.

Wondering lots of things. First, if maybe Omega herself is the one wanting to leave the etheric earth-place..? Living an omniscient nightmare for a century and a half and turned into a human machine soup, I would probably want to run away too.

Second, if all these Omega prediction missions Tony was on are just ways to calibrate the technology the Court has with the brainwaves (or whatnot) emitted by Ms. Omega herself.

Third, wondering if Tony knows Ms. Omega or the mysterious doctor man here himself. If he has lived his whole life at the Court, and has never spoken about his own parents, maybe he has some relation to the monocle guy? Great-grandson perhaps? I too would be an awkward tightass if everything I ever did or went was known and knowable to my parents or guardians. When Tony confessed to Don about the hand surgery / Surma / Annie / being gone for 3 years thing, he mentioned that he suspected the Court always actually knew exactly where he was and made a decision about what moment to "reel him" back in. They essentially guilt-tripped him with his own daughter's messy situation, but no earlier than 3 years into his running away.
It somehow seems so much more evil knowing they knew where Tony was because of this long-term human experiment. But if the flashbacks so far are accurate now, maybe Omega consented throughout, or at least initially, due to the amount of pain she was in.
And if Omega is that close to Court leadership, her secret is so closely guarded (like Eglamore alluded to), maybe her "evil" perspective isn't meant to be that, maybe it's a distortion of a lot of well-meaning people in pain solving problems they have in ways that inconvenience or hurt others.

I also wonder if Omega understands herself as separate from other people. Zimmy forgets who she is sometimes. Wouldn't it be just as likely for Omega?

EDIT: oh gosh, and I just realized. So many of Annie's acquaintances die in a plot-relevant way partly to end up being taken into the ether by her. Usually (Jeanne, Mort, the fire kid) it's an act of mercy. What if ... Annie ends up taking Omega to the ether at some point???

EDIT2: Do Omega and Jones know each other? Like, did they ever hang out? I wonder what they look like to each other.

Anyway. Lots of thoughts.

[drmemory]

Huh. I really was thinking the girl wouldn't be Omega, as such. Does this mean that the present-day Omega is a life-extended girl from the Victorian era? Or what? Her powers seem like pretty standard ether stuff - basically she knows things because she can see them from the ether. Talking through animals is a new twist but not that different from things we've seen before. Still, I was thinking Omega started as a computer, since that's how it's always been presented, but maybe that's too simplistic.

Omega is a really odd name for a human girl... maybe it's a code name, like Zimmy vs. Zeta. A couple guesses: Octavia, Odette, Olivia, Ophelia, Opal, Odessa.

Questions:

Is the current Omega the same entity as the girl Omega we just met? The answer may not be yes/no.

Are we watching Zimmy's great-great-...-grandparents here? I'm almost getting a Donald/Anja vibe here.

Does anyone in the modern Court Inner Circle know the details of these events? Who are the Inner Circle, anyway?

[Fen]

May 13, 2024 21:44:05 GMT drmemory said:

Omega is a really odd name for a human girl... maybe it's a code name, like Zimmy vs. Zeta. A couple guesses: Octavia, Odette, Olivia, Ophelia, Opal, Odessa.

"Megan" fits quite nicely 😛

[maxptc]

Omega is or is powered by an orphan soul sure, but it may be a reversed new people situation, the orphan just crammed into a computer.

[exquisitecorpus]

Hey, maybe this observation amounts to nothing, but Omega in the distortion is often drawn with a philtrum (that vertical line from her nose to her mouth) at certain angles. The girl in this flashback is too. Zimmy is not—I've gone back and checked her appearances in recent chapters. Maybe I missed something. Feel free to contradict. But could potentially be a distinguishing feature Tom deliberately left in? He rarely gives his characters visible philtrums—the only other character I've really seen with a philtrum in his latest art style is Loup-as-Jerrek.

My gut feeling says there might be a strong etheric connection between Omega and Zimmy, and ancestor/descendant is an attractive theory, but I'm more doubtful than certain they're exact clones or split.

[blahzor]

Uh oh

The rings around the neck
Having way to much detail information
She will never be allowed to die and and will soon be page 2930

[Nnelg]

Huh... So I just realized, at their cores Omega and Zeta are just "hypersensitives". Both of them have information overload, and Omega had it worse before the Court helped her manage it somehow.

...I was about to say that maybe Gamma is also a sensitive, just less "hyper" than Zeta, and that maybe she helps Zeta by diverting some of the flow of information. But then I realized that has implications for how the Court helped Omega.

I'm not going to say that Zimmy is there specifically as a scapegoat, but perhaps the Foley house is? Having so many ether-sensitives in the school may divert the flow too, like Annie does.

Hm... One wrinkle in my logic is why the etherless rain doesn't help Zimmy, when under this flow theory the Ether is the problem?

Oh! Maybe it's related to psychopomps. They take ghosts to the Ether so that all the information of their lives getd folded back in. What if Zeta and Omega are collecting information from the living world? And if they don't dissapate that into the Ether, it overwhelms them?

In that case, Gamma would be more like a sink into the Ether, which would explain why she doesn't seem to have any other supernatural properties. And Annie is a bit of a sink too, because she's a part-time psychopomp.

So the way the Court is helping Omega would probably be... The Ether ocean? Is that basically just one giant "heat sink" for Omega?

...if so, the Court expending it to leave the world would be very, very bad for her.

[Gemini Jim]

I don't have anything serious to add at this point. So, I'll add this:


Bonus page: The crow pops out of "Meg's" mouth, or from some hidden spot where it's been lip-syncing/ ventriloquising her words throughout the whole demonstration.

[TBeholder]

But evidently “divination” is okay for a mind not so closed. It’s totally not a matter of taste. ;]

[Hatredman]

May 14, 2024 7:40:32 GMT exquisitecorpus said:

Hey, maybe this observation amounts to nothing, but Omega in the distortion is often drawn with a philtrum (that vertical line from her nose to her mouth) at certain angles. The girl in this flashback is too. Zimmy is not—I've gone back and checked her appearances in recent chapters.

Also, Zimmy's nose is very different.

[Hatredman]

May 14, 2024 20:59:20 GMT Gemini Jim said:

Bonus page: The crow pops out of "Meg's" mouth, or from some hidden spot where it's been lip-syncing/ ventriloquising her words throughout the whole demonstration.

Like this?

[Hatredman]

May 14, 2024 14:31:50 GMT Nnelg said:

In that case, Gamma would be more like a sink into the Ether, which would explain why she doesn't seem to have any other supernatural properties. And Annie is a bit of a sink too, because she's a part-time psychopomp.

So Gamma is a pomp candidate too?

[pyradonis]

May 14, 2024 14:31:50 GMT Nnelg said:

In that case, Gamma would be more like a sink into the Ether, which would explain why she doesn't seem to have any other supernatural properties. And Annie is a bit of a sink too, because she's a part-time psychopomp.

I'm not finding the page right now, but am sure that somewhere Jones literally said Gamma acted as a heat sink for Zimmy's overload.

[OGRuddawg]

May 15, 2024 10:21:00 GMT pyradonis said:

May 14, 2024 14:31:50 GMT Nnelg said:

In that case, Gamma would be more like a sink into the Ether, which would explain why she doesn't seem to have any other supernatural properties. And Annie is a bit of a sink too, because she's a part-time psychopomp.

I'm not finding the page right now, but am sure that somewhere Jones literally said Gamma acted as a heat sink for Zimmy's overload.

www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=723

In the Spring Heeled, pt. 2 chapter

[Nnelg]

May 15, 2024 16:14:14 GMT OGRuddawg said:

May 15, 2024 10:21:00 GMT pyradonis said:

I'm not finding the page right now, but am sure that somewhere Jones literally said Gamma acted as a heat sink for Zimmy's overload.

www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=723

In the Spring Heeled, pt. 2 chapter

...the next page reminded me that Zimmy hates being watched or surveilled. Hm...