Schlock Mercenary/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

• It took me a while to realize that the book titled "Emperor Pius Dei" wasn't just a reference to Petey being a virtual god. Its initials are "PD." It took me five years to realize that.
  • Also, "Pius Dei" translates approximately to "dutiful god." It's a mission statement.
• What does Petey fear? Ghosts. What does he fight? Dark Matter creatures that have no difference from ghosts.
• Why does Dr. Bunnigus make sure to remove Tino's rastacoils? Two reasons: One, the reason she gives Legs: It was a gang symbol and she wanted those affiliations symbolically replaced with affiliations to the Toughs. But there is another reason as well: the rastacoils are specifically told to be "reinforced", which might be the only reason why Kathryn was able to fling Rafe into a wall without tearing his scalp out. If someone tried that on Bunnigus, they'd just succeed in leaving a pissed-off, balding doctor right behind them.
• I just got that Petey didn't lie to the Tricameral Assembly about what was about to happen to them: he just didn't mention that the frigate with the comically large orbital lance had nothing to do with it.

Petey: In 10 Minutes, [the frigate] will be overhead, at which point it will destroy this building and any who remain inside.
Petey: ... [My robots] and I will share your fate.
Qlaviql Captain: You murdered our government to install me in its place?
Petey: Let's say "removed from office". It has a less criminal ring to it.

• In one side-arc of Schlock Mercenary the toughs stumble upon a group of A Is (called 'Squiddies' by the fans) Who had succeeded in cleansing themselves of their 'Meat Infestation' some 15,000 years ago. Said A Is also proved incredibly stupid for a space-faring race, overlooking small but important details that can spell disaster especially for a sublight inter-stellar voyage. One wonders how such A Is could have achieved spaceflight or even Sapience in the first place, until you realize that a computer is only as smart as the person who programs it and the 'meat' the squiddies later dealt with were the kind that would program A Is without any safeguards... -Les
• In a recent arc, the company had been split up into four commands. "Mallcop Command", under Captain Tagon, had to deal with a group of punks practicing Parkata Urbatsu, a martial art that evolved from "the ancient disciplines of Parkour, urbobatics and something called Youtubing". The description seems like a throwaway joke until it's revealed that both the punks and Lieutenant Shodan, who was training the troops in Parkata Urbatsu, had set up cameras to capture their stunts, which they planned on editing and making public. The cameras are an integral part of Parkata Urbatsu too!
• It's easy to miss this, since it's never been explicitly referenced in the strip. But when Doyt-Haban brought in the corpse of the Toughs' first doctor to claim the UNS bounty, it was missing unspecified bits. Almost six years later, we find out the secret project the doctor was previously involved with is capable of rebuilding people from parts of their dead body.
• "Pray that there is a God, my little flock, because only a god can stop the entropic destruction of the universe." Only there is eventually a god, and he goes by the name "Petey"....
  • The "big old black hole" gets fairly important later on, too.
• The way AI's become perfectly helpful given enough resources seems to go against the cynicism of the setting... except applying reductionist logic to human corruption shows one common thread - inherited survival instinct means humans will seek Ultimate Job Security even if their ability to perform that job is lacking. OTOH, A Is may be intelligent machines, but they are still just machines - their "survival instinct" boils down to "don't let yourself be destroyed". They don't mind finding new tasks if the old ones become irrelevant. Here's a case-by-case breakdown:
  • Lunesby is a filing system; all she wants to do is provide information to her creators as efficiently as possible - even if it's information that proves government corruption. So when push comes to shove, she smuggles herself off Luna, away from the corrupt authorities who want her deleted, airs all their dirty laundry and goes into the information broker business with Shafter's Shifters.
  • Petey is a warship; all he wants to do is make war for the benefit of his creators as efficiently as possible - even if that means becoming a god in the process.^[1]
  • LOTA is the Longshoreman Of The Apocalypse; all LOTA wants to do is transport resources to LOTA's creators as efficiently as possible - even if that means transporting all twenty-two billion of LOTA's population to a terraformed paradise where they have no more need for LOTA's services. LOTA then retrofits the former habitat as the biggest friggin' gun in the universe, thus returning to LOTA's original function - a tank. Now LOTA's name stands for the LongGUNNER Of The Apocalypse.
  • Even the "meat cleansing" robots fit in - they don't have enough processing power to reach these conclusions. Because they're also too stupid to realize adding mass to a solar sail would mess with its controls.

Fridge Horror

• Once you realize how the Fleetmind chooses to spent its vast reserves of power, it sinks in that it's casting away lives it could have saved whenever it displays its Teraport-busting powers.
  • I was under the impression that the current arc was at a critical stage in the Andromeda war and nearly all of Petey's resources are tied up at the moment. I know it's been a while (okay, more than a year) since this comic but still.
    • Pretty much, yes. Not being able to throw energy at his problems until they were solved was a novelty to Petey, meaning there was no opportunity cost before that point.
• The teraport, and I am not talking about the tear apart thing since that is discussd in the comic itself. I am talking about how the early version at least powers itself. It is supposed to take random molecules from the thing it is transporting and converting it to energy. http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2000-07-16 Think about that for a minute. This is horrifying even before we learn about all the micro and nano stuff that could be disrupted by this. A more general fear could be serious material degradation of the hull or the anniplants after several ports. Scary, right. Now look at the last panel of the comic linked to. This one implies that the random sampling of molecules chose full items. Let that sink in as you remember that the ship is missing 1800kg of mass, and that the sampling of mass was uncontrolled, and the something in the last panel could easily be exchanged for someone.
  • And then to make it worse, in this comic part of the mass converted is suggested to be in a characters memory centre.
    • I just thought that he was distracted by the 'port.
  • It's implied later that ship-based teraports use the annie-plants for energy, like the rest of the ships' systems. It doesn't have to be random, Kevyn just thought that would be a better idea. Remember: Mad Scientist.
  • Then again, when Breya was considering not forwarding the teraport data to Xinchub, but doing it anyway because she didn't want to sacrifice a whole ship "to be rid of the fat man", using the fat man's, uh, mass to power the 'port would save everyone a lot of grief in the future.
  • She was giving the teraport data to him, and he was teraporting himself. Even if she was teraporting his ship using her power, she couldn't use his mass to power it.
• As far as has been said up through book 17, Eina-Afa was built only by and for the ancient Oafa. Did they leave everyone else to be killed by the Pa'anuri while they hid in it?
  • Oafan ships are commonly armed with wormhole guns. See Kevyn's analysis. All-Star critters didn't dub these things "End Guns" for nothing, they make situation in the whole Galaxy even more unstable than things like teraport cages. Thus the most likely answer is "yes, because at this point paranoia already reached the maximum point (for this cycle)". Also, it probably was a grand project even for someone owning those forges.
  • Yaeyoefui expected other sophonts to design worlds best fit for them. Maybe there's another habitat or a hundred optimized for other species, floating in interstellar space out of the way under standing orders to remain "quiet". But even if their owners trusted each other, they won't maintain contact in fear that one gets hacked or insane, and then all either end up cooked or have to power up, which may attract the Pa'anuri. And then their development have gone definitely Not As Planned.
    • There was one such hiding habitat in the prologue of Book 19, dated 73 million years. So there may be some still around from the earlier cycles.
  • The prologue of Book 19 shows that Oafa began the hiding project not responding to a present threat, but right after they discovered evidence of previous extinction cycles. So they were on the paranoid end of the scale. For the same reason, even if they advised others to do the same, anyone from the Oafa era less Properly Paranoid than they were would be more likely to start worrying much later and have less of a head start.

1. ↑ And as his loyalty to the Nazi-By-Any-Other-Name O'benn empire has been eliminated, scaling up his loyalty means his "creators" are in effect all baryonic life in the universe.