Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking too. Remember how the “ghost” was talking quite casually to Scarlet about how the gang doing the ghost recording actually needed to ask questions to get an answer from a ghost?
I suspect that may have been Dustin, in his timeline, talking to his timeline’s Scarlet about the recording that his friends were in the process of making. Our timeline’s Scarlet heard that part of the conversation when it leaked between worlds, and the recorder picked it up as well.
A while ago, the gang was trying to detect electromagnetic signatures of ghosts in the club room, and were trying to use a digital voice recorder to capture the voices of ghosts. They succeeded in recording what was probably Dustin’s voice (creeping out Scarlet pretty badly as she had thought she was actually talking with Timmy at the time).
From what Dustin is now saying, it sounds as if his version of Daylla was doing some follow-up on some similar research, and died (possibly as a result).
That’s if we can trust what he’s saying, of course.
Actually, now that you mention it: remember yesterday’s strip, Daylla said “T-Timothy?!” to this Dustin character. It sounds like this Dustin and Timothy have nearly identical voices.
Like I said yesterday, mixing realities. Somehow Daylla crossed over from her [Dustin-] world to his [Dustin+] world. If they were in [Dustin-], one or more of the others would have found them in the search. How? Stay tuned…
Yup. This is a bit like Laumer’s Imperium stories, in which “probability storms” could cause people to drift spontaneously between similar (but not identical) parallel worlds. Can’t find that book you just set down? That’s why… you set it down in that world over there, and drifted into the world where you never actually bought it.
Another author who had a similar theme was H. Beam Piper. Lord Kalvan of Othwhen and related stories. I have The Complete Paratime. Unfortunately, it is no longer available as new nor as an eBook.
Yeah, this is now screaming ‘Alternate timelines’, and it could be a HUGE callback to the original comic plotline – the mayan engine.
Every bit of this weirdness could tie all the way back to the golem girls and that frakkin’ machine; no one really understood everything about how it worked, after all.
Everyone thought it recycled the CURRENT world in an endless loop until they finally killed it.
Suppose the engine was linked across a huge number of timelines all across the universe, only trapping SOME people into a specific time and place by jumping between worlds that were many years out of sync?
It’s possible that specific people were tied to and attuned to the engine and were somehow aware of the ‘recycling’ effect the machine caused for them. But to the people left on those other supposedly ‘destroyed’ worlds, time just marched on.
Maybe it wasn’t recycling a single timeline at all.
Maybe when the engine ended the ‘current’ world on a certain date, that world actually continued onward, but SOME people’s souls or consciousness, minds, whatever – everyone whose mind was linked to the engine were actually just all pulled out of that world and over to a NEW, similar timeline that was at an earlier, specific time period to start again?
Energy/effort-wise, this effect would be so much easier to understand.
Even though it’s dead now, the world engine may have left all sorts of artifacts and damage to the fabric of time and space…’ghosts’ that are just people walking into the thin places where the engine had been connected to that world, tears left behind between the worlds.
The Laumer books were originally published by Ace back in the 1960s, after appearing in a magazine first. Baen ‘rediscovered’ Laumer’s books in the early 2000’s. They’ve done this with other authors, as well.
Other examples of this sort of thing in fiction:
* Job: A Comedy of Errors, R. A. Heinlein – A man finds himself dislodged from his own timeline and begins randomly jumping from one to another. Along the way, he falls in love, meets an incarnation of the Devil, and is present at the Biblical Apocalypse.
* “For a Foggy Night”, Short Story by Larry Niven – A man becomes afraid to travel during thick fog at night, as he explains that it is possible that the “light clouds” around lampposts we are seeing is not light being refracted, but a probability cloud – where the light is brightest is where it is most likely to be for us, but there is no guarantee that we will arrive at that version of reality. He then reveals that he was told this theory on a similarly foggy night by someone who claims to have gotten lost between realities in this manner.
No one else seems to have mentioned this, so I guess I’ll say it. Look closely at these last two pages. Doesn’t Dustin look an awful lot like a genderswapped Digit?
At the risk of sounding insane, I can personally attest that it’s a freaky experience. It wasn’t like what’s shown above, but it happened once back in 2009. I worked at the college cafeteria at the time and when a noisy cafeteria suddenly goes quiet when you’re in the back kitchen and you go to look for everyone and wander around a suddenly empty (of people) student union building for 15 minutes before seeing someone reverse fade into existence about 20 ft down the hall from you is pretty fucking freaky.
I’m thinking ghosts may be (in this universe) people from other realities who can slip into this one only if their version of themselves died. Meaning Scarlet could be heard there as she had died at some point.
Dustin might even be an alternate-universe Timothy. Possibly his/their parents narrowed down the choices to those two names, and the results of a coin toss spawned both branches.
I can just see him, looking out towards the horizon as the sun rises and his readers come on line for the day, as he happily proclaims
“I love the smell of frying brains in the morning! Lets me know I’m alive!”
It’s been too long, really, since he hit us with a plot twist like this… the strip has had a lengthy period of fairly linear character development for a while now. Darned good to see he can still blindside us with something that’s quite unexpected (and will turn it to have been well-set-up, I expect)
…huh???????????
This is some timey-whimey nonsense going on, isn’t it?
Dustin just saw the truth, and it kicked him right in the ectoplasm
This is really starting to look like like the ghost is screwing with her. The question still remains how did she get to here. WHEN is here?
Either that, or intersecting parallel worlds.
How much can other worlds intersect with this one? Doesn’t the Vimana network prevenr that sort of thing?
Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking too. Remember how the “ghost” was talking quite casually to Scarlet about how the gang doing the ghost recording actually needed to ask questions to get an answer from a ghost?
I suspect that may have been Dustin, in his timeline, talking to his timeline’s Scarlet about the recording that his friends were in the process of making. Our timeline’s Scarlet heard that part of the conversation when it leaked between worlds, and the recorder picked it up as well.
Ghost recordings?
A while ago, the gang was trying to detect electromagnetic signatures of ghosts in the club room, and were trying to use a digital voice recorder to capture the voices of ghosts. They succeeded in recording what was probably Dustin’s voice (creeping out Scarlet pretty badly as she had thought she was actually talking with Timmy at the time).
From what Dustin is now saying, it sounds as if his version of Daylla was doing some follow-up on some similar research, and died (possibly as a result).
That’s if we can trust what he’s saying, of course.
Actually, now that you mention it: remember yesterday’s strip, Daylla said “T-Timothy?!” to this Dustin character. It sounds like this Dustin and Timothy have nearly identical voices.
And look similar, Day noted how Dustin was ‘too tall’ to be Timmeh
Yeah, this is a “_When_ the Frack?”, vs a ‘WTF?’ scenario…
Like I said yesterday, mixing realities. Somehow Daylla crossed over from her [Dustin-] world to his [Dustin+] world. If they were in [Dustin-], one or more of the others would have found them in the search. How? Stay tuned…
That would make sense, maybe the “ghost” was just a fragile point in between realities, and two separate timelines are able to interact here.
Yup. This is a bit like Laumer’s Imperium stories, in which “probability storms” could cause people to drift spontaneously between similar (but not identical) parallel worlds. Can’t find that book you just set down? That’s why… you set it down in that world over there, and drifted into the world where you never actually bought it.
Worlds of the Imperium and the sequels. I met Laumer at a Rivercon shortly before he died. Baen has an omnibus of all three books as a single volume:
http://www.baen.com/imperium.html
Another author who had a similar theme was H. Beam Piper. Lord Kalvan of Othwhen and related stories. I have The Complete Paratime. Unfortunately, it is no longer available as new nor as an eBook.
Yeah, this is now screaming ‘Alternate timelines’, and it could be a HUGE callback to the original comic plotline – the mayan engine.
Every bit of this weirdness could tie all the way back to the golem girls and that frakkin’ machine; no one really understood everything about how it worked, after all.
Everyone thought it recycled the CURRENT world in an endless loop until they finally killed it.
Suppose the engine was linked across a huge number of timelines all across the universe, only trapping SOME people into a specific time and place by jumping between worlds that were many years out of sync?
It’s possible that specific people were tied to and attuned to the engine and were somehow aware of the ‘recycling’ effect the machine caused for them. But to the people left on those other supposedly ‘destroyed’ worlds, time just marched on.
Maybe it wasn’t recycling a single timeline at all.
Maybe when the engine ended the ‘current’ world on a certain date, that world actually continued onward, but SOME people’s souls or consciousness, minds, whatever – everyone whose mind was linked to the engine were actually just all pulled out of that world and over to a NEW, similar timeline that was at an earlier, specific time period to start again?
Energy/effort-wise, this effect would be so much easier to understand.
Even though it’s dead now, the world engine may have left all sorts of artifacts and damage to the fabric of time and space…’ghosts’ that are just people walking into the thin places where the engine had been connected to that world, tears left behind between the worlds.
Oh, no… Laumer. I read his books from Baen so many years ago, but they just stick in your brain! Auauauawwwghhghgh!!
The Laumer books were originally published by Ace back in the 1960s, after appearing in a magazine first. Baen ‘rediscovered’ Laumer’s books in the early 2000’s. They’ve done this with other authors, as well.
Other examples of this sort of thing in fiction:
* Job: A Comedy of Errors, R. A. Heinlein – A man finds himself dislodged from his own timeline and begins randomly jumping from one to another. Along the way, he falls in love, meets an incarnation of the Devil, and is present at the Biblical Apocalypse.
* “For a Foggy Night”, Short Story by Larry Niven – A man becomes afraid to travel during thick fog at night, as he explains that it is possible that the “light clouds” around lampposts we are seeing is not light being refracted, but a probability cloud – where the light is brightest is where it is most likely to be for us, but there is no guarantee that we will arrive at that version of reality. He then reveals that he was told this theory on a similarly foggy night by someone who claims to have gotten lost between realities in this manner.
No one else seems to have mentioned this, so I guess I’ll say it. Look closely at these last two pages. Doesn’t Dustin look an awful lot like a genderswapped Digit?
Nope, grown-up Timmeh
I am very confused right now
She’s slipped into a “space between spaces” and is loosely able to interact with an alternate reality.
At the risk of sounding insane, I can personally attest that it’s a freaky experience. It wasn’t like what’s shown above, but it happened once back in 2009. I worked at the college cafeteria at the time and when a noisy cafeteria suddenly goes quiet when you’re in the back kitchen and you go to look for everyone and wander around a suddenly empty (of people) student union building for 15 minutes before seeing someone reverse fade into existence about 20 ft down the hall from you is pretty fucking freaky.
But you are back on your meds now, right?
Har har.
The only meds I have to take are for my allergies. The only mental disorders I have are neurological (ADD & Aspergers).
I’m thinking ghosts may be (in this universe) people from other realities who can slip into this one only if their version of themselves died. Meaning Scarlet could be heard there as she had died at some point.
I think we’re supposed to remember this whole thing involves the Akashic Records somehow.
There is something fishy and intransparent in this, mostly.
Check out 10/6/2017, I believe that is ghost Dustin that Scarlet mistook for Timothy.
Dustin might even be an alternate-universe Timothy. Possibly his/their parents narrowed down the choices to those two names, and the results of a coin toss spawned both branches.
Dustin is ‘too tall’ to be Timmeh though
Perhaps and elder sibling that dies young?
I had suggested such when we first met that ghost.
I’ve given this some thought and it hasn’t helped.
Boy, this is a mystery. Hang in there with your shoulder, dude, we’re eager to find out what happens.
I suspect Paul-sama is having a lot of fun tormenting us with this storyline.
I can just see him, looking out towards the horizon as the sun rises and his readers come on line for the day, as he happily proclaims
“I love the smell of frying brains in the morning! Lets me know I’m alive!”
It’s been too long, really, since he hit us with a plot twist like this… the strip has had a lengthy period of fairly linear character development for a while now. Darned good to see he can still blindside us with something that’s quite unexpected (and will turn it to have been well-set-up, I expect)
Realization finally hit home has it? (and HOW in the hell did Daylla die anyhoo???)
Accident is my guess . . . maybe stepped off a curb in front of a bus because she was running late.
Oh, hah, this is another ghost story. Funny.
I think Dustin and Timothy are twins, and only ONE of them survived into the age in which they’d begin having memories of each other 🤔