If anyone survives, a statue of Arianna Acanthia WILL be erected. She quite literally gave her all. Hell, there could be one put up in New TROY to honor her sacrifice! If anyone survives to order it done at least.
I'm not convinced the dying is done here! The EVIL duo still has the knife and like to twist it to make it hurt MORE! :-p
I hate to have to AGREE with Sheela, but if all they lose is Arianna, Kali and Democlus to remove Douchimus they are way ahead. It will be a Pyrrhic Victory if most of the New Troy team (along with most of Nova Roma) die. The world will STILL be a better place without Douchimus polluting it, but the cost will have been too high (for me).
I'm wonderin' if Ada carries some human and android repair nanobots in her medkit? I'm curious what that tuning fork thingie in Ada's hand does and is it casting a green glow on Acanthas face or are those shadows?
Where's Doc McCoy and his Tricorder when you need them?
Uh ohhh. I just had a thought. What is TeeDee's and Ada's equipment going to do once they start to scan Dolly, who they were told is a one of a kind prototype Android and almost everything they have says she is human?
I think they'll cross that bridge when they get to it. Dolly can tell then that she can repair herself and they should leave it at that. But I doubt they will be too shocked and unable to accept it.
Considering who they're dealing with, and how they got where they did, it really shouldn't be cause for disbelief. Android frames have been under development for a while, and it's not unreasonable that an advance would come from the Taylors, or that their Guardian would get first crack.
Besides, Dolly's body us so human in nature, it can utilize most things that can repair human bodies. They should have no issue with her.
Sure, the bone repairs might not be as strong, as a specifick repair kits for her special bones, but I reckon they'll last long enough for her to get back to New Troy.
Well, to be fair to Teedee, the people she triages are normally very distracted at the time, so she's never really polished her bedside manner. Mincing words isn't a helpful habit in those circumstances.
Though, having been present while it was played several times recently for a child's school paper, I believe the line is:
He is not just merely dead, he's really most sinceeeeerely dead.
"She" in the original, of course, but the "merely" dead got a lot of laughs from my kids, so I'm fairly sure that's right. Also, it rhymes better with "sincerely".
I'm not usually that guy, but apparently, I had one in my system today and needed to get it out. Sorry.
Yeah. We will probably get a week's worth of touring the wastes outside of Nova Roma. Nothing apparently happening then suddenly the city vanishing in a wall of smoke and fire. Nova Roma launching all its weapons at all the other city states, before destroying itself. :-7
I can see the 1st chapter now (Steve the Murderturd the early years) runs in to two androids from new troy one tries to befriend him so he chases her up a tree before being driven off by her partner thus his epic tail continues in the wastes
I'm rereading this for like the 20th time, and TeeDee's actions and wording in panels 5 and 6 don't seem to me like she is being Captain Obvious or uncaring.
In panel 5 I get the feeling she's approaching Arianna like she is still alive and she is trying to be upbeat for her patient to try to help the patient keep their own hopes up. Then she is like "SH*T that blade" Then she pauses for a second to check her scanner for brain activity and states "She's Gone".
When Dolly yells DAMN IT, it takes a second or two for TeeDee to respond with Sorry.
I think TeeDee just doesn't know what else to say or do right then.
She knows that the blue haired chick is the Taylor Guardian, and Dolly is showing a LOT of emotion in her damn it.
TeeDee doesn't know what to say to someone like Dolly who is a LEGENDARY Figure to S&R.
What can she really say. That is DOL-E224 aka Dolly sitting on the ground not even 12 feet away from her, and Dolly is upset that Arianna didn't survive.
And TeeDee just doesn't know what to say. Although she is probably trying to figure out #1 just who this person is that Dolly is upset about her death, and #2 she might be trying to keep from nerding out that THIS IS DOL-E224!!!
Kali: subject to a check for a black box or emergency save port, Dead. And as a suicide it would be disrespecting her decision to use the black box or emergency save port.
Arianna: Might possibly have been saveable ten seconds ago, but... Nope. Dead.
Acantha: Hurt more recently and less badly than Arianna; could be alive and/or saveable.
Dolly: Injured pretty badly but life isn't in immediate danger.
Lynn: Minor bruising. Her status as mission objective allows somebody somewhere to breathe a small sigh of relief at least until they discover what Decimus did - after which brown trousers will be required.
Theoretically, Kali (or any Cassian -- or any android) could just be restored from the last backup copy of themselves that they made before embarking on a hazardous mission. However the ethics of that have yet to be outlined in the DataChasers universe. The implication is that it can't possibly be that easy, but I don't recall any explanation about why it wouldn't be.
It might be _really_ interesting to restore a pre-Libertatem copy of Kali, post-self-destruct and see how she reacts to being told of the denoument in the tunnel. Not quite sure how that would play out ...
From the rush we saw making saves of TeeDee and Ada, android brains require power to properly operate. (I'm confused as to why they don't have an internal save-to-disk function, but they evidently do not.) If they were able to go to a zero-power state, then only TeeDee's backup would've been a high priority - as she was on fire - and Ada's could've been done at leisure.
Sentience requires a LOT of processing power. And while the Q drive will "Store" their memory, there is no guarantee that it will store their sentience, everything that makes TeeDee, TeeDee or Ada, Ada.
Remember that after their reloads, TeeDee was freaked out about the possibility that her "sister" wouldn't be herself anymore and she would have to fulfill her "Promise", we don't explicitly know what that promise is, but from the fact that TeeDee was holding her weapon at the time we can make some educated guesses.
Also my understanding is that something like regular backups and flash ports are NOT part of the Cassian design. They actually might have been designed to make such back ups extremely hard to make to prevent a Cassian from even thinking about disobeying, knowing that they could be reloaded into a different body, possibly one without an inhibitor.
And from the reboot pages it was clarified that and android sentience needs to be in backup or standby mode to take a proper flash. Being awake and aware may be like having an actual death as the "Sentience" can't be copied while it is active. And since taking that type of backup actually destroys the Synth brain in the process, you can see why many androids would have that fear.
Did the drive get ALL of what makes them "Alive" or was there some part left in the old brain just as it fried?
And TeeDee was worried that Ada had purchased a power extender back up, and Dr Demark made herself aware that Ada HAD put in a back up power supply, which is why she went after TeeDee's back up FIRST, as TeeDee's synth brain couldn't take those temperatures for very long before losing coherence, and she would "Die".
From what I recall from previous discussions, New Rome androids don't have backups or the ability to be backed up -- after all, from New Rome's point of view, they're only androids.
Well, we're solidly in the 'science fiction' realm here, so speculation is ... chancy at best. I will, however, do my best to make a fool of myself.
@Mark_L_A, the impression I got was that the backup process was very reliable when the android had time to safely enter backup mode and wasn't dealing with compromised or degrading hardware. There's also no indication they couldn't go to standby, backup, then go active again -- so there's no disincentive on that score to making backups except the cost of power and storage. My impression was that TeeDee's concern stemmed from the extreme circumstances of Ada's YELLOW backup, not the flash process in general. But I could easily be wrong.
And, for both @Mark_L_A and @HiFranc, I doubt the Cassians are a "Nova Roma" design. Remember that Tokyo Rose helped build Aeneas. Blueprints travel well and the Cassians were around before Nove Roma was ruled by a xenophobic mechanophobe. It seems very likely to me that the Cassian design was bought from experts in the field who were paid back when the city rulers wanted androids as part of the government's resources. It's always easier to adapt an existing standard design than to come up with a new one from scratch -- not just for the hardware itself, but for all the manufacturing, test, and support hardware and software required.
I suppose it's possible that someone _before_ the Age of Hostility decided to completely reinvent the wheel for the Cassians and didn't include access ports, but that seems unlikely. And I find it COMPLETELY implausible that, after the Age of Hostility began, Nova Roma would devote the resources necessary to a major research initiative in new and cutting edge android design, given their attitudes towards androids as expressed.
So, I am assuming Cassians have flash backup capability, but it seems a reasonable assumption to me. They may have been prevented from using it since, hey, why would Decimus just stop at making 50,000 bad decisions, when he can make 50,001? ^_^ Or it's possible that androids are just as creeped out by backup proliferation as some of us would be by frivolous human cloning, so they decline to exercise the capability. <shrug> I just don't know enough about the issues and personalities to know why they don't do it -- just that they apparently don't do it.
But I bet they do it on Lost In Translation! ^_^. Think about how easy that would make the "Evil Twin" process. I wonder if that show has any regular android characters on it? And, if so, I wonder if they are played by androids?
Take modern day servers, we can easily backup their files, and fata on harddrives and such.
But making a rolling backup of the STATE of the server, is much more complicated, without getting data errors.
You might think it's as simple as dumping the RAM into a file, but alas, there's also the data in the processors that is currently being worked at, and data currently being transported in the databus, that may be directly used in one of the process states, and without which, the process state makes no sense, and can in fact corrupt other data.
It's a pretty complicated process to make a full backup of a running server.
And by the same token, it would be similarly complicated to backup a running synth AI.
As for wether or not the Cassians have a backup port, I dunno, it is after all pretty easy to just remove the physical port.
Cassians do have "flash ports". Kali triggered her self-destruct, however, which includes a circuit overload that would have blown out the port.
(And no, before someone gets all literal, the self-destruct is NOT triggered by speaking the words, and no Cassian or other android can be "tricked" into slagging themselves. The only reason she said it out loud was to hit Decimus between the eyes with the fact that yes, she was willing to commit suicide if it meant killing him, too.)
@Gilrandir The Q drive is a Flash dump of the Android AI, it's down and dirty quick as you can to save their "Life" and "Sentience" It is not a controlled backup in a stable setting. It is basically emergency battlefield meatball surgery.
Get it done quick enough to save them before their sythnbrain shuts down.
A standard back up could probably be done over night while an android is recharging or "sleeping".
The Q drive basically rips everything in just a minute or two, which is what causes the synth brain to degrade during the process.
Thing of the crowbar shorting two 10kkv buss bars. Power will flow until the crowbar vaporizes.
The Q drive is a LAST Resort, when you just don't have enough time to do a proper slow job of it.
Hence why TeeDee was worried, not just because of the yellow flash, but because of the nature of a Q drive flash itself.
TeeDee has probably had her sentience transferred at least twice, once into the Type 0 body and then into her previous type 3A body. Her emergency Q drive flash and reload into a type 3F coupled with how badly she had been damaged with the amount of "Pain" she felt at the time of transfer, had to terrify her for her sister Ada's chance.
As Rose has said the Cassian's do have flash ports, whether or not they have NT Style Q drives however is debatable.
They may have something similar or they may not have anything like it. All the Cassian's may have is a standard back up on a regular basis and not a way to actually "Save" the "Sentience"
Well, I have no information about the reliability of the backup process to either a Q-Drive, or to any other off-line medium besides what we have seen in the comic. I'll point out, however, that you don't need to depend on the riskiness of a Q-Drive if you're in a high-risk profession. You just back up to off-line storage the night before a new mission, and then preserve that until the next time you make a backup. So whether Nova Roma has Q-Drives specifically (and I'm sure Mr. Black could get them several at a reasonable price if they were willing to pay) is irrelevant -- the question becomes "Do they have off-line storage?"
But no distinction has been made between an android 'backup' and a 'sentience save'. The implication has been that, if you flash the android, you preserve the sentience for download to a new chassis at some future time. So, if Kali ever had a backup made, and that data was preserved, she could (in theory) be re-downloaded, which is the only point I was making. Ada and TeeDee's backup experience that we saw was (I hope) specifically atypical and sub-optimal. Of course it is significant to them, but (in my opinion) it isn't really relevant to the Kali question.
This is really the same issue as the Star Trek Transporter Dilemma, except for androids only (or humans who have gone for the mecha upgrade). There are several possible story 'solutions' to it, but I'm trying not to interject my own opinions here, rather than find out how the creatrices choose to address the issue in DataChasers.
If Tokyo Rose thawed herself out (and proved viable), but the Tokyo Rose A.I.S. remained coherent based on its active image, could TR(organic) use Machine Empathy to mind control TR(mecha)? Or, would TR(mecha), realizing the danger, be able to put countermeasures in place? ^_^
Thank you. I've had time to take some medication for my head and aching back, so some thoughts.
Fortunately Freefall has already answered a few of the points you raised.
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff400/fv00380.htm
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff400/fv00381.htm
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff400/fv00382.htm
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff400/fv00383.htm
I don't think that the "Sentience" of an android could consist of just a "Backup".
There is an undefinable essence, that a mere back up won't have. The backup is just that a backup, a copy. It is the actual electrical impulses through the synth brain as a whole which creates "Sentience".
You have the Mona Lisa on the wall of the Louvre and you take a picture of it with your camera.
Is that picture in your camera now the Mona Lisa?
My understanding of the Q-drive is that it is taking the mona lisa out of it's frame, crumpling it up and packing it into a small container, then later taking it out and putting it into a new frame. There is some damage from the original removal and crumpling it up, but with proper care, that can be repaired.
Freefall (great strip, BTW, in my opinion) doesn't answer the questions ... it just asks them. Unless you're asserting that TeeDee perished in the fire and copy-of-TeeDee is now living a new and fulfilling life as a member of New Troy S&R ...?
Now the Mona Lisa example ... let's have fun with that:
Consider that the Mona Lisa is biological. If the Mona Lisa gets captured by a sufficiently high-resolution scanner, is that the equivalent of getting the mecha upgrade? And, once it's gone for the mecha upgrade, if we make numerous, perfect digital copies of the file, can any one of them be said to be different from all the others. Or, no matter how good the resolution is, does the original 'die' when the canvas is destroyed, and the mecha are nothing but imitations? Do people looking at the copies somehow feel less moved and inspired than when they look upon the original canvas? Is that the fault of the canvas, or the people? ^_^
Then consider something that started out as a digital creation, for example an original finished page of DataChasers. What are the implications as we create and destroy various versions of that? There is no Mona Lisa-equivalent about which we can say "This is the original". Does that make it superior to 'organic' works? Inferior?
It's easy to assert that there is an intangible, indefinable spark that uniquely is associated with a particular identity -- but then what happens to the spark when the android is flashed? Is it resident in the chassis, the drive, or both? All are possible, but each has very different implications.
My understanding is that a backup without a synth brain is just data. Also, my understanding is that data cannot be copied unless the android is in backup mode or non-functional. Once in backup mode, they can't go back to consciousness in that body.
In the Mona Lisa example - a digital camera could never replace it because:
Paint is a three dimensional material. Something is lost when translated into two dimensions.
The pigments in the painting have unique properties with respect to the way light interacts with it.
Even things you don't consciously notice, eg the smell of the piece influences the way we perceive an object.
You can argue that no digital copy can ever be good enough to qualify as the original, but that implies that there shouldn't ever be anyone who can get a mecha-upgrade -- but Tokyo Rose would probably argue differently. ^_^ (@Tokyo Rose is mum on the subject.) We seem to be assuming that, in DataChasers you _can_ make a good enough copy of an individual that it truly is indistinguishable from the original consciousness.
Also, do we know that an android can't go Active after entering Standby? I must have missed that. That is one solution to the Transporter Dilemma: destructive copying. The very act of making the copy destroys the original, meaning that there can be no such thing as a backup of a sparked individual and a given spark is always present in exactly and only one place at any given time.
Oh, wait. Aeneas. Hmmmm, Maybe consciousness can be backed up in the DataChasers universe.
We all have needs, @Tokyo Rose. If only there was some store of archived images and narratives you could consult that would contain graphic and explicit depictions of recommended solutions for having those needs met -- purely in the sense of scholarly research into the needs of the moment, of course. ^_^
Lets not forget that we do have one sentience transfer in the comic that was not via flash sticks - It was when Dolly went from her old body, to her new body.
This is a simple postulation on my part but does anyone else when they are reading the text balloons use the length of the tab as a measure of time when the words are being spoken?
Instead of an ellipse the tab being elongated is taken as a sort of pause before the words are spoken.
In panel 5 and 6 as TeeDee is talking, I thought she spoke like this
"Let's See what you ... Whoa. ... ... Sh*t that blade went right through the lungs, didn't it ... She's Gone... (DAMN IT - Dolly) ... Sorry.
That is how I'm reading this. Not TeeDee being flippant about it, but she really doesn't know what to say, and she knows that this girl, Arianna, is important to Dolly at least, now that they are there to help take care of Lynn.
If anyone survives, a statue of Arianna Acanthia WILL be erected. She quite literally gave her all. Hell, there could be one put up in New TROY to honor her sacrifice! If anyone survives to order it done at least.
I'm not convinced the dying is done here! The EVIL duo still has the knife and like to twist it to make it hurt MORE! :-p
This cost a lot regardless. Let's hope the cost wasn't as high as it might be...
Please?
Still, it is an unfortunate fly in the ointment.
Where's Doc McCoy and his Tricorder when you need them?
"Do you think you can save her, Bones?"
"I'm a doctor, Jim, not a miracle worker."
"He's Dead, Jim!"
"He's Dying, Jim!"
or "It'll kill him, Jim!"
I'll take my chances with Ada and Teedee, thank you!
{edit, after Centcomm's reply}
We saw one in Queen of Cups.
Sure, the bone repairs might not be as strong, as a specifick repair kits for her special bones, but I reckon they'll last long enough for her to get back to New Troy.
(How many here remember Mercurochrome?)
Good, Ada, get Acantha back!!!
@alt text: yeah, but TeeDee is not bad either...
PS: I am glad, Friday is not 1st April ...
(I am desperately fighting the urge to make a comment involving Decimus pining for the fjords.)
Though, having been present while it was played several times recently for a child's school paper, I believe the line is:
He is not just merely dead, he's really most sinceeeeerely dead.
"She" in the original, of course, but the "merely" dead got a lot of laughs from my kids, so I'm fairly sure that's right. Also, it rhymes better with "sincerely".
I'm not usually that guy, but apparently, I had one in my system today and needed to get it out. Sorry.
I'll even throw nerfballs at the TV when family guy makes fun of the Tin Man!
(Actually, I was going to refer to Acantha as only 'mostly dead'.)
lol
In panel 5 I get the feeling she's approaching Arianna like she is still alive and she is trying to be upbeat for her patient to try to help the patient keep their own hopes up. Then she is like "SH*T that blade" Then she pauses for a second to check her scanner for brain activity and states "She's Gone".
When Dolly yells DAMN IT, it takes a second or two for TeeDee to respond with Sorry.
I think TeeDee just doesn't know what else to say or do right then.
She knows that the blue haired chick is the Taylor Guardian, and Dolly is showing a LOT of emotion in her damn it.
TeeDee doesn't know what to say to someone like Dolly who is a LEGENDARY Figure to S&R.
What can she really say. That is DOL-E224 aka Dolly sitting on the ground not even 12 feet away from her, and Dolly is upset that Arianna didn't survive.
And TeeDee just doesn't know what to say. Although she is probably trying to figure out #1 just who this person is that Dolly is upset about her death, and #2 she might be trying to keep from nerding out that THIS IS DOL-E224!!!
Or the Terminator...
Decimus: Dead! No-joke, No-soap, end-of-the-rope Dead.
Kali: subject to a check for a black box or emergency save port, Dead. And as a suicide it would be disrespecting her decision to use the black box or emergency save port.
Arianna: Might possibly have been saveable ten seconds ago, but... Nope. Dead.
Acantha: Hurt more recently and less badly than Arianna; could be alive and/or saveable.
Dolly: Injured pretty badly but life isn't in immediate danger.
Lynn: Minor bruising. Her status as mission objective allows somebody somewhere to breathe a small sigh of relief at least until they discover what Decimus did - after which brown trousers will be required.
It might be _really_ interesting to restore a pre-Libertatem copy of Kali, post-self-destruct and see how she reacts to being told of the denoument in the tunnel. Not quite sure how that would play out ...
I think it would give most people at least a pause.
Remember that after their reloads, TeeDee was freaked out about the possibility that her "sister" wouldn't be herself anymore and she would have to fulfill her "Promise", we don't explicitly know what that promise is, but from the fact that TeeDee was holding her weapon at the time we can make some educated guesses.
Also my understanding is that something like regular backups and flash ports are NOT part of the Cassian design. They actually might have been designed to make such back ups extremely hard to make to prevent a Cassian from even thinking about disobeying, knowing that they could be reloaded into a different body, possibly one without an inhibitor.
And from the reboot pages it was clarified that and android sentience needs to be in backup or standby mode to take a proper flash. Being awake and aware may be like having an actual death as the "Sentience" can't be copied while it is active. And since taking that type of backup actually destroys the Synth brain in the process, you can see why many androids would have that fear.
Did the drive get ALL of what makes them "Alive" or was there some part left in the old brain just as it fried?
And TeeDee was worried that Ada had purchased a power extender back up, and Dr Demark made herself aware that Ada HAD put in a back up power supply, which is why she went after TeeDee's back up FIRST, as TeeDee's synth brain couldn't take those temperatures for very long before losing coherence, and she would "Die".
@Mark_L_A, the impression I got was that the backup process was very reliable when the android had time to safely enter backup mode and wasn't dealing with compromised or degrading hardware. There's also no indication they couldn't go to standby, backup, then go active again -- so there's no disincentive on that score to making backups except the cost of power and storage. My impression was that TeeDee's concern stemmed from the extreme circumstances of Ada's YELLOW backup, not the flash process in general. But I could easily be wrong.
And, for both @Mark_L_A and @HiFranc, I doubt the Cassians are a "Nova Roma" design. Remember that Tokyo Rose helped build Aeneas. Blueprints travel well and the Cassians were around before Nove Roma was ruled by a xenophobic mechanophobe. It seems very likely to me that the Cassian design was bought from experts in the field who were paid back when the city rulers wanted androids as part of the government's resources. It's always easier to adapt an existing standard design than to come up with a new one from scratch -- not just for the hardware itself, but for all the manufacturing, test, and support hardware and software required.
I suppose it's possible that someone _before_ the Age of Hostility decided to completely reinvent the wheel for the Cassians and didn't include access ports, but that seems unlikely. And I find it COMPLETELY implausible that, after the Age of Hostility began, Nova Roma would devote the resources necessary to a major research initiative in new and cutting edge android design, given their attitudes towards androids as expressed.
So, I am assuming Cassians have flash backup capability, but it seems a reasonable assumption to me. They may have been prevented from using it since, hey, why would Decimus just stop at making 50,000 bad decisions, when he can make 50,001? ^_^ Or it's possible that androids are just as creeped out by backup proliferation as some of us would be by frivolous human cloning, so they decline to exercise the capability. <shrug> I just don't know enough about the issues and personalities to know why they don't do it -- just that they apparently don't do it.
But I bet they do it on Lost In Translation! ^_^. Think about how easy that would make the "Evil Twin" process. I wonder if that show has any regular android characters on it? And, if so, I wonder if they are played by androids?
Take modern day servers, we can easily backup their files, and fata on harddrives and such.
But making a rolling backup of the STATE of the server, is much more complicated, without getting data errors.
You might think it's as simple as dumping the RAM into a file, but alas, there's also the data in the processors that is currently being worked at, and data currently being transported in the databus, that may be directly used in one of the process states, and without which, the process state makes no sense, and can in fact corrupt other data.
It's a pretty complicated process to make a full backup of a running server.
And by the same token, it would be similarly complicated to backup a running synth AI.
As for wether or not the Cassians have a backup port, I dunno, it is after all pretty easy to just remove the physical port.
(And no, before someone gets all literal, the self-destruct is NOT triggered by speaking the words, and no Cassian or other android can be "tricked" into slagging themselves. The only reason she said it out loud was to hit Decimus between the eyes with the fact that yes, she was willing to commit suicide if it meant killing him, too.)
Get it done quick enough to save them before their sythnbrain shuts down.
A standard back up could probably be done over night while an android is recharging or "sleeping".
The Q drive basically rips everything in just a minute or two, which is what causes the synth brain to degrade during the process.
Thing of the crowbar shorting two 10kkv buss bars. Power will flow until the crowbar vaporizes.
The Q drive is a LAST Resort, when you just don't have enough time to do a proper slow job of it.
Hence why TeeDee was worried, not just because of the yellow flash, but because of the nature of a Q drive flash itself.
TeeDee has probably had her sentience transferred at least twice, once into the Type 0 body and then into her previous type 3A body. Her emergency Q drive flash and reload into a type 3F coupled with how badly she had been damaged with the amount of "Pain" she felt at the time of transfer, had to terrify her for her sister Ada's chance.
As Rose has said the Cassian's do have flash ports, whether or not they have NT Style Q drives however is debatable.
They may have something similar or they may not have anything like it. All the Cassian's may have is a standard back up on a regular basis and not a way to actually "Save" the "Sentience"
But no distinction has been made between an android 'backup' and a 'sentience save'. The implication has been that, if you flash the android, you preserve the sentience for download to a new chassis at some future time. So, if Kali ever had a backup made, and that data was preserved, she could (in theory) be re-downloaded, which is the only point I was making. Ada and TeeDee's backup experience that we saw was (I hope) specifically atypical and sub-optimal. Of course it is significant to them, but (in my opinion) it isn't really relevant to the Kali question.
This is really the same issue as the Star Trek Transporter Dilemma, except for androids only (or humans who have gone for the mecha upgrade). There are several possible story 'solutions' to it, but I'm trying not to interject my own opinions here, rather than find out how the creatrices choose to address the issue in DataChasers.
If Tokyo Rose thawed herself out (and proved viable), but the Tokyo Rose A.I.S. remained coherent based on its active image, could TR(organic) use Machine Empathy to mind control TR(mecha)? Or, would TR(mecha), realizing the danger, be able to put countermeasures in place? ^_^
To make amends, I offer this bit of poetical whimsy (in the form of a limerick):
The integral of z-squared dz,
From one to the cube-root of three,
Times the cosine
Of three Pi over nine
Is the log of the cube-root of e.
Fortunately Freefall has already answered a few of the points you raised.
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff400/fv00380.htm
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff400/fv00381.htm
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff400/fv00382.htm
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff400/fv00383.htm
I don't think that the "Sentience" of an android could consist of just a "Backup".
There is an undefinable essence, that a mere back up won't have. The backup is just that a backup, a copy. It is the actual electrical impulses through the synth brain as a whole which creates "Sentience".
You have the Mona Lisa on the wall of the Louvre and you take a picture of it with your camera.
Is that picture in your camera now the Mona Lisa?
My understanding of the Q-drive is that it is taking the mona lisa out of it's frame, crumpling it up and packing it into a small container, then later taking it out and putting it into a new frame. There is some damage from the original removal and crumpling it up, but with proper care, that can be repaired.
As for TRAI and TR. I'm not TOUCHING that one.
I want all of my appendages intact.
Now the Mona Lisa example ... let's have fun with that:
Consider that the Mona Lisa is biological. If the Mona Lisa gets captured by a sufficiently high-resolution scanner, is that the equivalent of getting the mecha upgrade? And, once it's gone for the mecha upgrade, if we make numerous, perfect digital copies of the file, can any one of them be said to be different from all the others. Or, no matter how good the resolution is, does the original 'die' when the canvas is destroyed, and the mecha are nothing but imitations? Do people looking at the copies somehow feel less moved and inspired than when they look upon the original canvas? Is that the fault of the canvas, or the people? ^_^
Then consider something that started out as a digital creation, for example an original finished page of DataChasers. What are the implications as we create and destroy various versions of that? There is no Mona Lisa-equivalent about which we can say "This is the original". Does that make it superior to 'organic' works? Inferior?
It's easy to assert that there is an intangible, indefinable spark that uniquely is associated with a particular identity -- but then what happens to the spark when the android is flashed? Is it resident in the chassis, the drive, or both? All are possible, but each has very different implications.
Let me get some sleep and give this some more thought.
In the Mona Lisa example - a digital camera could never replace it because:
Paint is a three dimensional material. Something is lost when translated into two dimensions.
The pigments in the painting have unique properties with respect to the way light interacts with it.
Even things you don't consciously notice, eg the smell of the piece influences the way we perceive an object.
Also, do we know that an android can't go Active after entering Standby? I must have missed that. That is one solution to the Transporter Dilemma: destructive copying. The very act of making the copy destroys the original, meaning that there can be no such thing as a backup of a sparked individual and a given spark is always present in exactly and only one place at any given time.
Oh, wait. Aeneas. Hmmmm, Maybe consciousness can be backed up in the DataChasers universe.
Had a hexahedronical ball;
The cube of its weight,
Plus his pecker, times eight,
Is his phone number; give him a call.
Small (DAZ) world, isn't it. :)
Instead of an ellipse the tab being elongated is taken as a sort of pause before the words are spoken.
In panel 5 and 6 as TeeDee is talking, I thought she spoke like this
"Let's See what you ... Whoa. ... ... Sh*t that blade went right through the lungs, didn't it ... She's Gone... (DAMN IT - Dolly) ... Sorry.
That is how I'm reading this. Not TeeDee being flippant about it, but she really doesn't know what to say, and she knows that this girl, Arianna, is important to Dolly at least, now that they are there to help take care of Lynn.