Killing Space
Aug01
on 2018-08-01
at 23:36
Chapter: (A)Wash
Characters: Ace, Akane Ryoshi, Denali, Gina "Mama" Gibs, Jaz, Luna, Magenta, na-Nilina, Navigator, Pilot, Science Officer, Sky, Steward Ashe, Walton, Wildstar
Location: OIS Gene Rodenberry
Yep. It’s Ace’s fault.
↓ Transcript
Gina
Of course generating a micro-singularity destroyed the Old Ones’ Particle Accelerator. Ordinarily, a singularity that small would quickly, let's say “evaporate” for want of a better word. But it lasted long enough to consume the planet.
Ace
MOM! You really destroyed a planet full of people? What about all the children and civilians?
Gina
They didn’t have civilians. Every single Saurian, from the lowest ranked drudge to their ruling committee, was committed to conquest and destruction. And Earth was next.
Walton
And no children, or women, either. They cloned their cells in huge batches of slurry, then used something like fabbers to assemble grown Saurians, and some kind of interface to generate a basic personality. It was all dependant on an ancient supercomputer. They came out of the tanks fully formed and ready to serve.
Fortunately they had so few tanks, and it was all ancient technology. They had no way to make more. And only the one main controller. So it was all on their homeworld.
Gina
And since they kept trackers on their slaves and prisoners, our Orion friends were able to beam every one of them to safety.
We really had no choice. And it was our only chance. They were literally massing forces to attack our planet. They would have exterminated humanity, or made us food animals. Their favorite being children and young women, like little Ju Yi.
Ace
Ju Yi?! The guy trying to carry her off was a Lizardman?
Gina
Yep. And you killed him with your bare hands. No one else has ever done that. But you did start an interstellar war.
Of course generating a micro-singularity destroyed the Old Ones’ Particle Accelerator. Ordinarily, a singularity that small would quickly, let's say “evaporate” for want of a better word. But it lasted long enough to consume the planet.
Ace
MOM! You really destroyed a planet full of people? What about all the children and civilians?
Gina
They didn’t have civilians. Every single Saurian, from the lowest ranked drudge to their ruling committee, was committed to conquest and destruction. And Earth was next.
Walton
And no children, or women, either. They cloned their cells in huge batches of slurry, then used something like fabbers to assemble grown Saurians, and some kind of interface to generate a basic personality. It was all dependant on an ancient supercomputer. They came out of the tanks fully formed and ready to serve.
Fortunately they had so few tanks, and it was all ancient technology. They had no way to make more. And only the one main controller. So it was all on their homeworld.
Gina
And since they kept trackers on their slaves and prisoners, our Orion friends were able to beam every one of them to safety.
We really had no choice. And it was our only chance. They were literally massing forces to attack our planet. They would have exterminated humanity, or made us food animals. Their favorite being children and young women, like little Ju Yi.
Ace
Ju Yi?! The guy trying to carry her off was a Lizardman?
Gina
Yep. And you killed him with your bare hands. No one else has ever done that. But you did start an interstellar war.
Ace started it, but his mom ended it. Don’t mess with the family.
It’s *always* Ace’s fault.
Wow. Talk about bringing something back from the past. I had to think hard to remember that sequence in the comic.
Don’t forget that for all the longevity of the comic, the action takes place over a very few years (five? six?) starting when Ace was 18. It might seem longer due to the flashbacks to when Ace was a kid, or Ace In Space when he was 15. I love that about TMI. 🙂
It helps to do a periodic archive dive and reread the whole story rapidly once in a while to keep track of some details. Also gets me through periods where I’m caugbt up on all my webcomics and have too much free time on my hands.
Yup, on something like my fourth or fifth archive binge over the course of the last week, does help refresh the memory and make the current stuff even better
Seriously? How many lizard people would little Ju Yi feed? Sure, tender, but not enough to go around. Or was she just for him?
It wouldn’t be just Ju Yi. A lot of kids go missing each year, roughly 800,000 in the United States alone. Granted that’s only a “reported number” and most of those are found or return on their own but how many are not reported and are never found? Now many disappear, forever, around the world, each year?
That number is absurd fiction. It’s also doubled from the last time I heard it.
Generally it’s propaganda from the anti-sex-work lobbyists trying to get more brutal and oppressively laws passed to harass and destroy the lives of sex workers, but since sending armed thugs in uniform to beat up and rob single moms and kidnap their children isn’t great publicity (even if that’s exactly what’s being done) it has to be reframed as “rescuing” “victims” from “human trafficking.” The fictitious “children being abducted every year” number is part of how they drum up support for these programs, and the excuse they use when the reality of what they actually do unintentionally gets in front of a camera, or an actual sex worker makes an inconvenient social media post that wasn’t shadowbanned into invisibility quickly enough.
Tracing back the references and numbers to their origins, we find a single authentic report, that over a 4 year period, 4 children were abducted and held hostage in the entirety of the USA. Do you know how many that suggest are really being abducted and held hostage?
Four. Just those four that could actually be confirmed. Even the one missing the longest was found within two weeks. Some cop commenting on it (not a social scientist or analyst or anyone that actually knew what they were talking about) was quoted in a news story saying “There might be 100,000 other children missing we don’t even know about yet” (so, you know, please keep giving us money to expand our police departments, give us military-grade equipment, and surrender any and all illusions of privacy). That pulled-from-the-ass number jumped to 400,000 as other prohibitionists manipulated people with speeches, and now you’re up to 800,000, the population of a large US city, not only missing at one time, but disappearing every year? Try to imagine the logistics of that? There aren’t enough basements on the continent! To move them around to evade notice would require FLEETS of transport trucks, each stacked to the roof with children like firewood, filling all four lanes of a highway, in an endless train of them driving by from dawn until dusk, preventing all other traffic for the entire day… and yet, somehow, nobody has noticed that 800,000 children are missing? Maybe they’ve all been killed? Somewhere there’s a landfill itself the size of a large town, with bodies of 800,000 children (every year, no less) just piled up in literal mountains… and no one ever notices that either?
They’re fictional. They don’t exist.
As paranoid and suspicious and “guilty-until-proven-innocent-and-often-not-even-then” as our modern western culture is, do you imagine it’s EASY to kidnap and hide a hostage child?
That study with 4 kids was finished a couple decades ago now. The child safety paranoia is even more extreme these days. Much more recently, I read a news story where two siblings under 10 didn’t arrive at school, so the school called the police and reported them missing. They broke the door down of their family house, and found the kids in their pajamas playing video games. They’d unplugged their mother’s alarm clock so they could skip school and play games.
It wasn’t even 10am when the police raided their house like it was a SWAT-team drug raid. Back in the 90s, I showed up at school after taking an unannounced sick day, reported myself to the office, and was told no one had bothered marking me absent, and if I’d just kept my mouth shut, the absence wouldn’t even have been counted. Times have changed quite a lot.
Almost without a single exception, Amber Alerts that go out for missing children are a custody disagreement between parents. Strangers don’t kidnap children; they don’t know who your kids are or give a damn about them either way (except on TV and in movies, because the fear of that happening, however unrealistically, is deeply engaging to the audience).
Here’s non-fiction: virtually every human… every mammal on the planet has the primal, herd-animal instinct to protect a child in distress. The belief that there are “strangers” everywhere trying to hurt your children is absurd, and teaching kids not to talk to strangers will keep them from seeking help if they ever really DO need it.
Statistically, the people MOST likely to hurt children are their own parents, by far. Of children who actually have been abused, they were 161 times more likely to have been hurt by immediate family or very close acquaintance, than any “stranger”. They are also twice as likely to be abused by a woman than a man. So, in the final count, all fantasies aside, who’s the greatest potential threat to your children in their lives?
The one they call “Mom”.
As I recall, he was standard size for a human and she was much larger than a Thanksgiving Turkey, so the math is pretty easy to work out. Young tend to be more tender meat (which is why you see much more lamb than mutton) and children are demonstrably easier to carry off alive than an adult, so it makes sense.
You’ve given this a lot of thought… Should we be worried?
Nah, both hunting and raising human children would be far more work than I’d care to put into a meal. Especially when there are many animals easier to raise for food. Understanding predators behavior is a step in defending against them. I can put lots of energy towards protecting human children. So you really only need to be worried about me if you are a threat, like if you’re a lizardman in disguise. 😀
Not sure I like that Ace is resolved of the burden of taking a human life like that, even such a piece of human trash. It informed his character. Though I suppose at the time he had no way of knowing, and was still perfectly willing and able to kill someone.
But that’s just personal opinion. Just because I don’t like something, doesn’t mean it’s objectively bad.
If you remove the ‘human’ part of it, it doesn’t really change anything
Ace wasn’t loosing any sleep over having killed the kidnapper when he thought it was a human. He isn’t proud of the action either. He identified the threat and neutralized it, he lives with it the same way as snipers, soldiers, police officers, and executioners live with taking lives. He gave the being an opportunity to flee without harm and received threats against his family and friends instead. The only option to protect them all was to kill that individual. Not an ideal solution, but not one Ace needs to agonize over. It was as much the lizardman’s fault as anyone’s.