[2941] "I saw you, too, Charles."

[imaginaryfriend]

So Calgon's real name is Charles.

...I wonder if this sort of romance is even possible these days after the internet was invented.

[lisanela]

I think knowing the ending really colors my opinion on their relationship and Charles, but I think he genuinely had good intentions (and she must know too since she knows everything). Maybe she was kept alive by machines or transformed/transferred into one because he couldn't bear to see her die? Kinda the opposite of a Diego character.

[philman]

Anyone else getting Jones vibes with the weird generational relationships and one person knowing the other their entire life thing?

[bicarbonat]

This reminds me a little of Arthur and Juliette's situation. One's considered a tool of the Court, the other an employee, both bound to return results... Except we definitely know Arthur and Juliette's feelings are genuine, and they're on equal causal footing.

For the theologically/mythologically familiar, this application of Omega's ability brings up an interesting point about the emotional life of precogs and how primed it is for sacrifice and loneliness: Even as you meet the strangers who will become closest to you, you see them scattering or betraying you in the future, dying, etc. The emotional stress would be unavoidable.

Does Omega have spots outside of her notice? Or has she serenely digested the entire span of her relationship with Charles, happy, sad, and bad?

[arcuna]

So far I'm willing to believe Charles had good intentions all along. My guess is he was also very much against what was done to Jeanne.

[arf]

May 15, 2024 8:15:00 GMT arcuna said:

So far I'm willing to believe Charles had good intentions all along. My guess is he was also very much against what was done to Jeanne.

Doubtless, although I think this playback is from some time after Jeanne, so Charles would not have known.
... but would Omega!?

[TBeholder]

May 15, 2024 7:16:19 GMT lisanela said:

I think he genuinely had good intentions (and she must know too since she knows everything).

She does not “know everything”. Check the previous pages. She describes what observably happened, not intentions and other intangibles.

May 15, 2024 7:20:08 GMT bicarbonat said:

For the theologically/mythologically familiar, this application of Omega's ability brings up an interesting point about the emotional life of precogs and how primed it is for sacrifice and loneliness

Her case is (noisy) omniscience.
For the highs and lows of specifically precognition, see Paul “Muad Dib” Atreides.

May 15, 2024 8:15:00 GMT arcuna said:

So far I'm willing to believe Charles had good intentions all along. My guess is he was also very much against what was done to Jeanne.

Is there any reason to assume he lived in the same time, rather than was born long after that incident?

[silicondream]

Come to think of it, maybe they're his bones in the Omega device. Maybe the Court preserved her spirit through her bond with a lost lover, as they did with Jeanne.

May 15, 2024 7:17:46 GMT philman said:

Anyone else getting Jones vibes with the weird generational relationships and one person knowing the other their entire life thing?

Well, it wouldn't be Gunnerkrigg Court without weird semi-romantic, semi-familial tension and age difference shenanigans.

[guntherkrieg]

May 15, 2024 7:06:53 GMT imaginaryfriend said:

...I wonder if this sort of romance is even possible these days after the internet was invented.

Sorry, what? 

[pyradonis]

I'm not really sure what to think about this. Feels a bit like Miss Omega is an involuntary stalker.

Interesting how her ability parallels with Coyote. Coyote can know everything. Miss Omega can see everything, at least everything that is not influenced by the Etherium (and draw conclusions), but she is overwhelmed by it. Coyote isn't, but he is born from the Ether and swims in it, and can just as easily decide not to know something. So far it seems like Miss Omega cannot decide not to see something. Well, it's not clear what the shielding devices do that Charles installed. Do they act as dampeners for the flow of information? They don't seem to really hinder it. Do they enable her to to focus better? Do they just weaken some side effects of the information flood?

And, Charles, huh? Seems very much unrelated to previous characters. Definitely not a Founder. Most likely born after the time of the Founders.

Another thought, Miss Omega can see the past, but can she also see the future? Or is that what the "Omega Device" will do one day? Take the information she provides and extrapolate? It would give meaning to the whole "Knowledge of Everything" chapter. And again we'd end up with the science-and-machines-loving Court people having cheated in their greatest creations by using Etheric means at their cores.

[lisanela]

May 15, 2024 10:02:13 GMT TBeholder said:

May 15, 2024 7:16:19 GMT lisanela said:

I think he genuinely had good intentions (and she must know too since she knows everything).

She does not “know everything”. Check the previous pages. She describes what observably happened, not intentions and other intangibles.

I was talking about Charles's personnality in particular and assuming that since she could see his entire life in its every detail she must have a pretty confident positive opinion of him. Predict the future by using the past etc etc..

[storyteller]

May 15, 2024 7:16:19 GMT lisanela said:

I think knowing the ending really colors my opinion on their relationship and Charles, but I think he genuinely had good intentions (and she must know too since she knows everything). Maybe she was kept alive by machines or transformed/transferred into one because he couldn't bear to see her die? Kinda the opposite of a Diego character.

I was thinking it being a problem of the age gap - ie, she outlived him and then the Court happened.

[arcuna]

I agree that Jeanne's death/imprisonment probably happened (much) later than the Omega flashbacks we're seeing now. My point was more that for some reason I have a suspicion that the people in those flashbacks are both the same guy (Charles) and that he maintained his moral stance throughout his career.

[morrahadesigns]

May 15, 2024 12:47:14 GMT arcuna said:

I agree that Jeanne's death/imprisonment probably happened (much) later than the Omega flashbacks we're seeing now. My point was more that for some reason I have a suspicion that the people in those flashbacks are both the same guy (Charles) and that he maintained his moral stance throughout his career.

Just going off visual cues I would have thought Jeanne's murder happened before this. This looks like the Victorian era, Jeanne's story looked earlier than that. (Don't know enough about history to cite the specific time frame, sorry.)

[blahzor]

May 15, 2024 7:17:46 GMT philman said:

Anyone else getting Jones vibes with the weird generational relationships and one person knowing the other their entire life thing?

this is way more one sided in the power dynamic, Jones knows things no one could possibly know about the planet

Omega knows everything about everything that will and has happened

[bicarbonat]

May 15, 2024 10:02:13 GMT TBeholder said:

May 15, 2024 7:20:08 GMT bicarbonat said:

For the theologically/mythologically familiar, this application of Omega's ability brings up an interesting point about the emotional life of precogs and how primed it is for sacrifice and loneliness

Her case is (noisy) omniscience.
For the highs and lows of specifically precognition, see Paul “Muad Dib” Atreides.

All omniscience involves precognition, but not all precognition involves omniscience.
I use the category because omniscience is a rather smaller group, and the loneliness that attends 'knowing ahead' is a much larger and varied group. There's a lot of country between Melisandre, Paul Atreides, Eren Yeager, Irene Adler, and, say, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, but they're all precogs. 👁️

[Per]

May 15, 2024 7:20:08 GMT bicarbonat said:

For the theologically/mythologically familiar, this application of Omega's ability brings up an interesting point about the emotional life of precogs and how primed it is for sacrifice and loneliness: Even as you meet the strangers who will become closest to you, you see them scattering or betraying you in the future, dying, etc. The emotional stress would be unavoidable.

Why, though? If she's going to do things just because it's what's supposedly preordained, why couldn't she have any sort of thoughts and feelings about that for the exact same reason? That makes it seem like her actions and feelings run on two different tracks of causality.

[bicarbonat]

May 15, 2024 14:27:23 GMT Per said:

May 15, 2024 7:20:08 GMT bicarbonat said:

For the theologically/mythologically familiar, this application of Omega's ability brings up an interesting point about the emotional life of precogs and how primed it is for sacrifice and loneliness: Even as you meet the strangers who will become closest to you, you see them scattering or betraying you in the future, dying, etc. The emotional stress would be unavoidable.

Why, though? If she's going to do things just because it's what's supposedly preordained, why couldn't she have any sort of thoughts and feelings about that for the exact same reason? That makes it seem like her actions and feelings run on two different tracks of causality.

Are you asking why I think emotional stress is unavoidable for people who know how their emotional lives are going to go? (I'm genuinely asking.) I never said she couldn't, wouldn't, or shouldn't have "any thoughts or feelings about that".

[ctso74]

Omniscience may not be that much of a buzzkill, if you have a good sense of living in the moment. When Sol novas, Earth will be swallowed or blown into rubble. For all the "importance" of Caesar, Einstein, Alexander, Marx, or anyone, what will they end up changing in the long run? Make a pebble explode a little to the right? Make some more interstellar dust drift to the left?

But a friendly pat on the back during hard times, or a warm cup when you need to talk, is sublime to most people. If Omega can see her future, she may be choosing to seize the joy in her now.

[imaginaryfriend]

May 15, 2024 10:30:40 GMT guntherkrieg said:

May 15, 2024 7:06:53 GMT imaginaryfriend said:

...I wonder if this sort of romance is even possible these days after the internet was invented.

Sorry, what? 

Clear your browser history all you want. Omega still knows.

[Per]

May 15, 2024 14:31:58 GMT bicarbonat said:

May 15, 2024 14:27:23 GMT Per said:

Why, though? If she's going to do things just because it's what's supposedly preordained, why couldn't she have any sort of thoughts and feelings about that for the exact same reason? That makes it seem like her actions and feelings run on two different tracks of causality.

Are you asking why I think emotional stress is unavoidable for people who know how their emotional lives are going to go? (I'm genuinely asking.) I never said she couldn't, wouldn't, or shouldn't have "any thoughts or feelings about that".

I guess I'm asking why the assumption is that normal expectations apply for internal states when they don't for external ones.

A common treatment of precogs in fiction (not specifically something you said) goes something like: "An ordinary person wouldn't step under a falling flowerpot knowing it would hit them, but Sue does, for you see she is a precog and already knows that's what's going to happen. But Sue is going to be bummed out about it every step of the way, because who wouldn't!" Causality somehow works one way but is cut off by voodoo magics in another.

[knowit]

You know, just reading through this thread, it occurs to me that a lot of people have been under a strong supposition that what happened to Omega was done to her against her will, but I don't think there's been any actual evidence towards that other then "Well it looks pretty spooky". Maybe she wants to become an immortal information machine for whatever reason. People have certainly wanted stranger

[bicarbonat]

May 15, 2024 15:22:39 GMT Per said:

May 15, 2024 14:31:58 GMT bicarbonat said:

Are you asking why I think emotional stress is unavoidable for people who know how their emotional lives are going to go? (I'm genuinely asking.) I never said she couldn't, wouldn't, or shouldn't have "any thoughts or feelings about that".

I guess I'm asking why the assumption is that normal expectations apply for internal states when they don't for external ones.

Not sure what internal and external states you mean, but here's my assumption.

It isn't unusual to feel for the ones you love (including yourself). The fact that she appears to take happiness and unpleasantness with equanimity does not mean that she doesn't feel the full force of both due to the explicit nature of her ability. The distinction is that she alone has more time to feel these things because she knows about them well before they "land".

That's all I'm saying.

[Gemminie]

After saying that his work has helped her so much, Omega tells the scientist, whose name appears to be Charles, that she's seen him too, at various points during his life, and anticipated that he would come find her. It appears she's fallen in love with him, she tells him wearily but happily in a hybrid panel with three flashback-within-flashback frames as he responds by merely saying her name. He wonders how she could have seen him in his youth when that was before her birth, but she only says that the information is there; she only needs to "avail [herself] of it." And an end-of-flashback bracket indicates the end of this scene in Omega's backstory.

So her ability is to obtain information about events, past and present, and it appears that Knowledge of Everything is available to her. The chapter is probably only getting started, but we haven't seen any indication of her predicting the future yet. Since we're looking at this from a future time, we know that the Court will want to use her ability to predict the future, and that it can in fact do so in the present day.

But how does it do this? Does it have her spirit bound to the technologically-augmented remains of her body? Does she count as a trapped soul? Is her Ether at risk from those who would misuse it? Is the memory of her fading, along with the power of the Ether? Has the Court forgotten that Omega was once a person due to this, now thinking of her as a mere prediction machine? If so, what a beautifully-constructed tragedy; I don't know whether this is Charles' intent, but I suspect not. I suspect that, since he's older than she is, she will outlive him, and others will be put in charge of her project, others without his scruples or emotional connection to her. And, since their understanding of the Ether isn't as complete as the Arbiter's, they don't know that their memory of her will degrade after she dies and they'll forget she was a person.

My other thought was that they would create an Omega Device named after her that was capable of doing what she does without using the Ether, but I'm thinking that's unlikely now. I'm thinking that's what they think they already have, having forgotten that Omega was once a person, and when they try to take their device to the new world with them, they're in for an unpleasant surprise.

[lisanela]

May 15, 2024 15:32:20 GMT knowit said:

You know, just reading through this thread, it occurs to me that a lot of people have been under a strong supposition that what happened to Omega was done to her against her will, but I don't think there's been any actual evidence towards that other then "Well it looks pretty spooky". Maybe she wants to become an immortal information machine for whatever reason. People have certainly wanted stranger

That's a good point! I assumed it was against her will because she seemed so happy to move and look around in the distortion, but maybe she thought being a super computer was better than being in pain all the time (hopefully she wasn't in agony as a robot-skeleton chimera...).

[tibert]

In case the end of chapter will reveal Omega was telling her story to the gang while we were reading it:

At this point of Omega's narration, Kat is in full fangirl mode.

Later, she may be like this.

[fia]

I'm thinking today also about the Omega/Kat parallels: Kat has achieved deification and unreal 'etheric' ability (including control over her assigned dead) primarily through vast scientific knowledge, experimentation, and modeling.

Omega was born with near-omniscience and a similarity to a certain kind of receptive device. (I say "near" for the same reasons others have pointed out above, which is, for all we know what she reports on are observables only – unclear about whether the perceives intentions or inner states generally also, and whether the information she has access to is physical or nonphysical in general, whether it is a specific kind of physical information, etc. We also don't know the relationship between her omniscience and future-predicting abilities. Here, she says "information was already there," which *might* suggest a block-time universe where the future is fixed, but it *could* suggest just something on which anything determinate enough or likely enough is knowable, but it leaves open indeterminate events, or events unknowable with the information accessible in the present. It could also suggest that she, too, needs to build a predictive model, but just that she has such rich starting information that her predictive model is way likelier to predict accurately than a typical human one).

Both ended up, if the previous illustration serves, *becoming* integrated with a device or other technology. Kat did it willingly (and willfully), so that her consciousness extended beyond herself and into many other objects. Omega - maybe also willingly?? But perhaps in a kind of reverse, where her connection to technology might allow her to switch into or switch out of connection with everything. Or maybe it never did that, and she's stuck with the original "pathology".
Most abilities can be removed once acquired with enough knowledge and skill. Could Kat's be? Could Omega's be? Or are these godlike etheric abilities something you're just stuck with once you get them?

[crater]

May 15, 2024 7:06:53 GMT imaginaryfriend said:

So Calgon's real name is Charles.

...I wonder if this sort of romance is even possible these days after the internet was invented.

I'm pretty sure this is what Tom is getting at. Omega is basically just looking at someones Etherbook. She even spoke through a bird "twitter". Her interface with reality might be creepy >>>but at the end of the day are we any different than her?<<<

[Sky Schemer]

May 15, 2024 15:06:36 GMT imaginaryfriend said:

May 15, 2024 10:30:40 GMT guntherkrieg said:

Sorry, what? 

Clear your browser history all you want. Omega still knows.

She is the real story behind Incognito Mode.

[novia]

Not like us.