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"Her Matrix"
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Her Matrix
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Her Matrix

by Paul Taylor on December 8, 2010 at 12:00 am
Story: Wapsi-Archive
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Discussion (93) ¬

  1. geekoncall
    December 8, 2010, 12:01 am | # | Reply

    Pop Psychology???

  2. geekoncall
    December 8, 2010, 12:02 am | # | Reply

    Back to Warehouse 13

    • Jim
      December 8, 2010, 1:39 am | # | Reply

      I can’t wait for the next season .

  3. Fairportfan
    December 8, 2010, 12:02 am | # | Reply

    “Okay – now that I caused you so much pain you fell down, I’ll gallantly help you stand back up…”

    • eschmenk
      December 8, 2010, 10:09 am | # | Reply

      I was hoping she would do that yesterday.

      • Julie
        December 8, 2010, 6:35 pm | #

        Not enough room in one page for all of that and a helping hand up. 😛

  4. BigBadRichard
    December 8, 2010, 12:31 am | # | Reply

    If alcohol can affect Jin then some meds will too. She can even take a fifty ton dose and not die so it should work.

    • Fairportfan
      December 8, 2010, 12:51 am | # | Reply

      Perhaps, for the GGs, alcohol is like cold – it only affects them if they expect it to.

      • StJason
        December 8, 2010, 1:09 am | #

        In that case, the meds should work too, because she wants it too.

        …so would an exorcism, dancing with snakes (ha!) and a lucky rabbits foot (double ha!)

      • Fairportfan
        December 8, 2010, 2:32 am | #

        I said “expect it to”, not “want it to”.

        And if it were that way, and she believed that ordinary meds can’t help…

      • the Fansheep
        December 8, 2010, 4:48 am | #

        well … how would some of the risk work on them? .. Like deep depression some med curse?

      • txmystic
        December 8, 2010, 11:16 am | #

        IIRC, to activate a golem you need to give it an order composed of specific letters (in the case of the golem girls, this would be the glyph language)…so to produce drunkenness, was Tepoz actually supplying them with alcohol or the glyph language equivalent of “drunk” or “mead”?

      • eschmenk
        December 8, 2010, 11:38 am | #

        It seemed to happen automatically. Tepoz imagined them as drunk college girls when he summoned them. Perhaps that’s enough to change the writing on their clay bodies. I think it’s more likely that, as the god of alchohol, he has some special power to make them (or anyone else) drunk without having to change the writing. He apparently sobered up Jin in the Cerberus Club just by saying “You’re sober” and that seemed to work on Monica, as well.

      • Artemisia
        December 8, 2010, 6:27 pm | #

        just type in “Lots of dried frog pills” should work on her if it works on hex…
        lol Pratchett is amazing

      • Jabberwonky
        December 8, 2010, 9:09 pm | #

        Tepoz had been given stewardship of the girls, maybe that gave him the power to rewrite their ‘code’.

    • Jayessell
      December 8, 2010, 5:26 am | # | Reply

      With no chemical cause to her mental illness, it would be treated with therapy?

    • Eirik
      December 8, 2010, 12:09 pm | # | Reply

      Perhaps the drunkenness was all placebo effect?

      • bmonk
        December 8, 2010, 4:59 pm | #

        The first placebo they tried had no effect, so they put her on a stronger one.

  5. Opus the Poet
    December 8, 2010, 1:00 am | # | Reply

    Was that Paul being political? Or just creating a believable character for Shelly?

    • jwhouk
      December 8, 2010, 5:07 am | # | Reply

      Being from Minnesota, I’d say “yes”.

      • Deuce
        December 8, 2010, 6:47 am | #

        I thought a Minnesotan might have gone with Governors rather then Presidents.

      • Jabberwonky
        December 8, 2010, 7:04 am | #

        Wouldn’t his tenure on ‘Cospiracy Theory’ make him prime for the Wapsi Universe?

      • Artemisia
        December 8, 2010, 6:31 pm | #

        Shoot! That says presidencies I thought it said Precedencies and was a general statement that most of humanity has no brain to start with.

    • Aaron
      March 27, 2017, 10:10 am | # | Reply

      Imagine coming across this comic after the 2016 election…

  6. NOTDilbert
    December 8, 2010, 1:14 am | # | Reply

    Ooooh, will someone get to go Matrix diving? Black sunglasses all around!

    • jwhouk
      December 8, 2010, 5:08 am | # | Reply

      But they won’t all fit in the back seat of a subcompact Toyota!

      • Pol
        December 8, 2010, 10:29 pm | #

        Don’t have to, just stick ’em all in Bud, she can sit in the passenger seat 😛

      • kramegame
        December 9, 2010, 1:06 am | #

        Bud: redefining the definition of clown car

  7. Joe Minotaur
    December 8, 2010, 1:17 am | # | Reply

    …and we’re back to Jin and her problems!

  8. Jim
    December 8, 2010, 1:42 am | # | Reply

    Bringing Tina up to speed .

  9. The Old Wolf
    December 8, 2010, 5:51 am | # | Reply

    No physical brain? So they really are just clay, through and through? Really detailed clay…

    • Jabberwonky
      December 8, 2010, 7:00 am | # | Reply

      Hollow clay…Bud has shown, mulitple times she has a ‘hatch’ she can open and store stuff inside of her.

      • eschmenk
        December 8, 2010, 2:17 pm | #

        I think the human form is magical and the hatch was magical, too. I think their real clay form was shown here: http://wapsisquare.com/comic/everybitasdangerous/

    • eschmenk
      December 8, 2010, 10:09 am | # | Reply

      Go back to the early archives and look at Tepoz when Monica unpacked him from a crate. They were made by combing clay and ash from their bodies. The human form is magical.

      • eschmenk
        December 8, 2010, 10:21 am | #

        Actually, a brush would probably have worked better. 🙄

        They were made by combining clay with ash from their burned bodies. (I may as well restate it while am at it.)

      • W.
        December 8, 2010, 11:37 am | #

        We knew what you meant. Darn keyboard gremlins. I want to add, burned alive bodies. ‘Cause that makes for extra horror…and creepiness.

      • Fairportfan
        December 8, 2010, 1:51 pm | #

        Jin was already dead, as i recall, having committed suicide to keep the bad Guys from carrying out their full plan.

      • eschmenk
        December 8, 2010, 3:09 pm | #

        Would that make it any less creepy? I’m not sure if Monica ever decided if Jin committed suicide, anyway. Bud told Monica that Jin gave up on November 15th, 2005. Jin doesn’t look alive, but she’s didn’t fall over, either. Monica said she thought Jin committed suicide on November 29. On December 1, Tina replied that it was important to find out. But on Jan 27, 2006, Monica decided that simply not escaping when she could would have been enough. She summarized things on March 26, but it’s still not clear. Jin might have even burned herself alive and done both at the same time.

        BTW, does it count as suicide if she allowed the priests to burn her alive, given that she could have stopped them at any time.

      • Artemisia
        December 8, 2010, 6:39 pm | #

        Burning dead bodies is just cremation, that’s not creepy, as for the mixing with clay to form a golem that would be cool, but only if you could skip the whole prep bit with the starving and ahem…

      • Julie
        December 8, 2010, 7:04 pm | #

        @eschmenk – I don’t think that Monica’s line of thought from the late Jan. 2006 comics suggests that “not escaping” was enough. She said “She didn’t give up. She could have gotten out of that pit…it was a token sacrifce,” in the comic you reference, and then on the 30th she said Jin sacrificed herself.

        It sounds to me more like Monica decided that Jin’s suicide wasn’t giving up, but purposeful. The March 16, 2006 summary reinforced that IMO (“You sacrificed yourself before they gained control over you”). It sounded to me like Jin killed herself before her emotions were molded into what the priests wanted in their chimera.

        That especially is driven home when in the same comic Jin says “They thought I had abandoned them. They thought I’d given up!” That just references Bud’s original telling of the tale (Nov 15, 2005 – which showed a Jin who looks to have died by slicing her wrists).

      • W.
        December 8, 2010, 8:15 pm | #

        @Artemisia If you don’t think regular cremation can’t be creepy, you need to read The Cremation Of Sam McGee by Robert Service

      • eschmenk
        December 8, 2010, 9:26 pm | #

        @Julie: I agree that “sacrificing herself” sounds like suicide, but would allowing yourself to be killed when you could have easily prevented it count? The other thing is that Maya had herself burned alive as if that were necessary to make a golem out of her. Would a dead body work? Could you bring clay to life, retaining the dead person’s knowledge and abilities, if you started out that way? Somehow the person’s mind seems to be transferred to the golem, but I wouldn’t think that a person would normally have a mind after death. BTW, notice how Monica says that Maya turned herself into a monster, even though the priests were the ones who actually did it. She often speaks imprecisely, like the other characters.

        I think the reason the priests couldn’t control the chimera was because they didn’t control Jin in the first place. They never broke her — she just made them think they did by pretending to give up. To, me, it seems like that would be all that would be necessary.

        Also, sorry about writing the one date wrong; it should have been March 16, not 26.

        @Artemisia: I was still thinking that Brandi and Bud were burned alive, at least.

      • Pol
        December 8, 2010, 10:51 pm | #

        Huh…
        @ eschmenk: I don’t think allowing someone to kill you would really be suicide, the priests would have still lit the fire that killed her, ergo murdering her. Jin’d probably have to light the initial fire herself for burning to death to be suicide. Also, taking into consideration all the rest of the weird stuff that Maya and the priests got away with in the name of science you could probably apply a bit of basic voodoo; hair and teeth etc. aren’t alive but can theoretically be used to control a person’s physical body and spirit, ashes would just be the rendered down body, containing the spirit of said person until it was released. Bud said about the Jaguar Temple that someone needed to know that the person had died before they could be contacted.
        @ SoWhyMe: The Aztecs made him the god of alcohol, at some point he DID say “I’m no more a god than you are” (or something along those lines)

      • Julie
        December 9, 2010, 8:35 am | #

        @W. – GAH! I read that as a kid, and it scared the crap out of me. Of course, it didn’t help that the book that story was in had illustrations, and the one for Sam Magee was a close-up of a creepy smiling face surrounded by flames…

        @Pol – I think eschmenk doesn’t view Jin’s death as suicide. I do. 🙂

        @eschmenk – Hmmm…I didn’t think about May’s transformation explanation. That does put an interesting wrinkle in it, but still…how do you reconcile Bud’s memory of a Jin that looks dead pre-burning?

        I know that Monica and many other characters speak inaccurately all the time, but supposedly that was memory we were seeing that had been invoked by the glyph command…which you’d think would involve more honesty than a simple question where someone can blather on however they want.

      • eschmenk
        December 9, 2010, 11:01 am | #

        @Julie: I’m not sure if that shows Jin being dead or just looking very bad. Is the black area underneath her blood or is it something for effect, like what Paul did with the shadows?

        BTW, Bud did speak honestly, but inaccurately. She says right there that Jin gave up.

      • Jabberwonky
        December 8, 2010, 11:39 am | #

        I had forgotten that Tepoz arrived as a statue. Does that mean he is a golem too? Hmm…

      • Paul Taylor
        December 8, 2010, 11:59 am | #

        That explanation starts here: http://wapsisquare.com/comic/littlecaretaker/

      • SoWhyMe
        December 8, 2010, 6:10 pm | #

        Ok, so Tepoz is a clay golem made by May (possibly from animals). But, how did he become the god of alcohol?

      • Julie
        December 8, 2010, 7:29 pm | #

        @SoWhyMe – Creative networking?

      • Jabberwonky
        December 8, 2010, 9:21 pm | #

        And, you know, I just read that sequence again in the books, recently. (Mind like a steel trap, I tells ya…)

    • kingklash
      December 8, 2010, 11:33 am | # | Reply

      Kinda like why Batman wanted to put Plastic Man into the top ranks of the JLA. His unique structure (different from pretty much all other stretchy heroes) means he can’t be affected by the usual mind control techniques.

  10. Xavienne
    December 8, 2010, 6:17 am | # | Reply

    LOL@ the presidencies line. Nice. 🙂

    • Julie
      December 8, 2010, 7:53 am | # | Reply

      Agreed. 🙂

  11. Jabberwonky
    December 8, 2010, 7:06 am | # | Reply

    Does this mean Bud will accompany Monica and ‘Manda to Ireland? *crosses fingers*

    • SoWhyMe
      December 8, 2010, 6:11 pm | # | Reply

      Well, I think Bud may be the means to get them there.

  12. ziggy78eog
    December 8, 2010, 8:04 am | # | Reply

    Where do you think you’re going to, Muscle Head? You’re part of this as well, whether you like it or not!

  13. Dane
    December 8, 2010, 8:28 am | # | Reply

    Recommended reading: The President’s Brain is Missing, by John Scalzi, a hysterical short story about, well, what it sounds like. http://www.tor.com/stories/2010/07/the-presidents-brain-is-missing

    • Julie
      December 9, 2010, 8:59 am | # | Reply

      Oooo…I like that story. 🙂

  14. vexgodglove
    December 8, 2010, 9:20 am | # | Reply

    So then she was crazy before this all began. It wasn’t the millenia of reliving history over and over that drove her nuts.

    • Eee
      December 8, 2010, 9:59 am | # | Reply

      Possibly two different things. Jin was apparently schophrenzic in her youth; somehow, when Maya built the Calendar Machine, she managed to connect it to Jin and it provided a prop that kept her sane. The stress of all those thousands of years trying to fix things either was aggravating her condition to the point she was losing it even with the CM’s help, or she was going nuts in new ways. Now the stress is gone, but the Machine is gone, too, and her old problems are coming back…

    • eschmenk
      December 8, 2010, 10:03 am | # | Reply

      Right. Read starting here. Bud also explained part of it when she was talking with Jin in the Mall.

      Basically, the calendar machine was supposed to help Jin, and it worked pretty well, but it wasn’t perfect and the looping and stress caused problems anyway. Now she doesn’t have the calendar machine helping her at all.

  15. eschmenk
    December 8, 2010, 9:53 am | # | Reply

    What the hell is going on with Shelly? She was raring to go earlier. Now she’s “Good luck with that,” as if she has no intention of doing anything.

  16. txmystic
    December 8, 2010, 10:13 am | # | Reply

    Awesome line, Shelley…rimshot anyone?

    It’ll be interesting to see how a celtic grave marker fits in with what Jin was up to while she was still alive. And does this mean we’ll get more backstory about her and Mayahuel’s lives?

  17. txmystic
    December 8, 2010, 10:34 am | # | Reply

    Bud just mentioned a psychological issue trapped in her matrix. Does Tina 2.0 remember that Tina 1.0 was a psychiatrist, or was that part of the memory loss when she passed? She mentioned a book with shorthand in it awhile back (reference needed)…

  18. eschmenk
    December 8, 2010, 11:26 am | # | Reply

    Tina 2.0 doesn’t remember anything about Tina 1.0. Someone could have told her, though. Jin told Monica that Tina 1.0 was a psychiatrist and hinted that Monica should look at her diary on March 29th, 2010.

    Your reference: http://wapsisquare.com/comic/writteningibberish/

    • eschmenk
      December 8, 2010, 11:27 am | # | Reply

      That was meant to be a reply to txmystic’s post immediately above.

  19. eschmenk
    December 8, 2010, 12:35 pm | # | Reply

    Why is Tina asking a question that she should have already known the answer to? Monica and Jin already told her that Jin appeared to have schizophrenia. Jin had just told Monica that it started when she was alive, so presumably she would have told Tina as well. Tina understands that Jin is a golem and knows how she was made. I don’t think there was anything that Bud said that Tina didn’t already know.

    Hopefully tomorrow Tina will say, ‘I knew that,” and will ask more specifically what she really wanted to know. I’d like to know why Monica thinks something was smuggled out of Lantis that would help Jin and why she would think Celtic cross tombstones and Yggdrasil might have something to do with that.

  20. SoWhyMe
    December 8, 2010, 6:36 pm | # | Reply

    All this concern for Jin seems misplaced to me. If the GGGs have some sort of a programmed matrix instead of a brain, that would mean they are little more than than machines. They act like the girls they were, but they really aren’t. The have no soul or spirit, just the data from their brains. The girls are long dead so what’s the point of all this care what happens to them? A robot will, eventually, be made to seem human to the extent actual humans will care about it as if it were. It can even be made to emulate a specific dead person, but it won’t BE that person. In the final analysis, it is nothing more than a fancy talking popup toaster. All this stuff about helping Jin is useless. Jin is gone and this shell is not her. Just some “thing” that seems like her. Better to just put them back in storage and figure out a way to destroy them while in that state, ending their threat.

    • Artemisia
      December 8, 2010, 6:56 pm | # | Reply

      Cold! Cold and heartless.
      While Jin may be a threat now she was the one who made it possible to save the world. I do not know for certain but i suspect that she has a soul i think they all have souls and that is what allowed them to be separated and maintain their original forms.
      in any case if you believe Genesis then we are all golems.
      ~clay figures animated by breath of life, or the word of god, living under the tree of life (aka the Torah) in eden.

      • eschmenk
        December 8, 2010, 8:25 pm | #

        Or if you look at it from a strictly scientific point of view, we are biological machines.

      • Pol
        December 8, 2010, 10:57 pm | #

        the second I read that Dr.Who popped into mind: “What is life? A quirk of biology… a way of keeping meat fresh” (referencing ‘nanobots’ bringing a dead child back to life)

      • W.
        December 8, 2010, 8:31 pm | #

        Well said.

      • SoWhyMe
        December 8, 2010, 10:04 pm | #

        Ok, I’ll give you thay were instrumental and needed in that, and may be for something more in the future, so it may be wise to keep them around and fix Jin, but not for their being the original girls somehow locked inside the shell. They are dead and gone. The souls left when they died. They are outta here.

        And I don’t believe the Genesis myth of us being made from dirt and some god breathing life into us unless you want to say it is a metaphore of evolution with life springing from the elements of the earth, and evolving. In that sense, we are created from dirt. Dirt in the ocean, anyway. Heck we never really left the ocean We brought with us in our blood (literally). Quite a trick.

    • Julie
      December 8, 2010, 7:28 pm | # | Reply

      I think there’s something more to it than the GGs being machines. They just don’t really know how it worked. (I’m thinking of this comic.)

      • W.
        December 8, 2010, 8:33 pm | #

        I agree.

      • SoWhyMe
        December 8, 2010, 9:54 pm | #

        Yes, she says she is “in” there, but would she actually know any different? You can tell the difference between yourself and an exact machine copy of you, but can it? It would think it IS you, and no one else could tell the difference just by looking and interacting with the both of you, but the original you would know it is the original. The copy would just think it is the original. If you die, you are gone. What’s left behind is something that could replace you and no one would know, but it would not, in fact, be you. In the same way Jin can think she is the original Jin “inside,” but that does not mean she really is.

    • Jabberwonky
      December 8, 2010, 9:30 pm | # | Reply

      I don’t think the golems have ‘souls’. I think those would have gone to thier afterlives at the time of their deaths. The use of the ashes of their former selves gives them a very sophisticated, and by our standards ‘magical’ recordings of their thought processes. This gives them an AI status and the ability to make decisions beyond what they may have been programmed for. Making them very human in their actions, and should be treated as thinking, feeling beings.

      IMHO

      • SoWhyMe
        December 8, 2010, 9:48 pm | #

        Doesn’t matter. They are still not the original girls. A machine acting human does not make it human or even alive.

      • Fairportfan
        December 8, 2010, 9:53 pm | #

        Consider Doctor McCoy’s feelings about the transporter – unlike some forms of postulated matter transmission (more properly “Matter transposition”) that work by folding space or some sort of handwavium, the “Star Trek” transporters are specifically stated to disassemble you, and recreate you out there, thataway, from where you started.

        McCoy sometimes worried (at least in some of the books, which are considered canon) whether what came out the other end was actually the same person – or just a very clever duplicate that had the same memories.

        From the outside, he reasoned, that appears to make no difference (an extreme form of the Turing Test, essentially), since no one would be able in any way to prove that it wasn’t exactly the same person.

        And from the inside, it would make no difference, since the duplicate would think exactly like the original person, have the same memories, and believe themself to be the original person…

        But the person who stepped into the transporter would “die” there.

        Unless the “soul” – whatever that is, if it exists – automatically re-attached itself to the body after the transmission…

        Let’s just say that that thought might make me a tad nervous about stepping into a matter transmitter.

      • SoWhyMe
        December 8, 2010, 10:18 pm | #

        I recall hearing of a story in which it was found that the very first time you transported, you left your soul behind. Not Star Trek, some other SF story.

        Youtube has an interesting cartoon on this:
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxucpPq6Lc

    • Jabberwonky
      December 8, 2010, 9:32 pm | # | Reply

      Not being human is no excuse for being treated inhumanely.

      (It’s hard to articulate without caffine)

      • SoWhyMe
        December 8, 2010, 9:41 pm | #

        Of course, IF you’re talking about something alive. Is it inhumane to toss out your old computer?

      • Fairportfan
        December 8, 2010, 9:57 pm | #

        If my computer gave all the objective signs of being a thinking feeling being … quite possibly.

        So far as i’m concerned, if an apparently-living being passes the Turing Test (as the GGs certainly do), then that is a human being.

        I’m not sure i believe in “souls” – but i sure believe in judging the world by what i can perceive and discover.

        For all i know, you (or anyone else here – including me) could actually be a Very Clever AI experiment being tested. That doesn’t change the way i react to what you (or anyone else here) says or does.

      • SoWhyMe
        December 8, 2010, 10:27 pm | #

        A computer can be programmed to give all the objective signs. That does not make it so. The Turing test is not infallible.

      • Fairportfan
        December 9, 2010, 12:34 am | #

        A distinction that makes no difference is no difference.

      • Julie
        December 9, 2010, 9:06 am | #

        That reminded me of the movie AI. Not the greatest movie ever, but when an AI was created that reacted with emotion and behaved as a human, the real humans wanted to protect it because they believed it was human.

        In the end, our belief of something can trump actuality. That’s probably the real root to “mind over matter.”

    • Tessa
      December 8, 2010, 9:33 pm | # | Reply

      Technially, the brain is just a network of cells that make us us. If the matrix is emplanted exactly to hold the same information, there’s not much to distinguish it from the original in terms of funtionality.

      • SoWhyMe
        December 8, 2010, 9:45 pm | #

        Yes, but that does not make a person. For example, if you transferred every bit of information from your brain to a computer and it then acted just like you, would it really BE you? No, just a souless copy. If you died afterwards, you would not “wake up” in the computer. You would still be dead and the computer just something that seems as if it is you.

      • Fairportfan
        December 8, 2010, 10:00 pm | #

        First prove that there is a soul and/or that you, or i, or Pablo, have one.

        Then we can discuss whether that computer duplicate is a “soulless machine”.

        It’s an electronic computer.

        Your brain is an organic computer, with an incredible holographic memory system.

        That “soul” you’re on about quite possibly doesn’t even exist.

      • SoWhyMe
        December 8, 2010, 10:23 pm | #

        I am speaking in regards to the story line. In it there is a soul involved as a distinct entity. There being one in reality is not the issue.

      • Fairportfan
        December 9, 2010, 12:35 am | #

        Mind pointing out where souls were mentioned as such?

      • W.
        December 8, 2010, 10:49 pm | #

        If you turn your computer off then back on, is it the same computer? If you get to a save point in a game and quit and come back later, are you playing the same game? This is my great great great grandfather’s ax. It has had two heads and six handles, but it is his ax, or is it?

      • Tessa
        December 9, 2010, 12:07 am | #

        Well, given the example you gave, no it wouldn’t be ME, I’m me. It would be another individual that happened to have my memories, everything that happened after that would distinguish us (i’m sure it being in a computer would be a big distinguishing factor in our futures). I don’t personally believe in a soul, but even if it did, how would you know if it didn’t? If it interacts in a way that is conscious, it might have a soul. In terms of the story, if the Living Jin is dead, the later version of Jin is still alive and just as conscious as the new one. I don’t think it was ever said she didn’t have a soul, and even if she doesn’t, she’s obviously conscious and has feelings, so I don’t see why they shouldn’t care about her.

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