I would suspect that she was just stealing the core rather than actually sending it back in time, but the whole "Hybrids you are always here" thing seems to corroborate that part of the story.
If we did fight her to stop her from whatever her plan is would we actually be able to fix the disappearance thing without her?

She's going to try and use it to travel to other timelines again. Bet you anything you like.

>>593208
Of course she is. Tell her to spill the beans, or else you'll have your CAI hack into hers and find out directly. Also, what do her cards do exactly? What is she capable of?

Hey, maybe she can find out while hacking the Elder Machine what it did to the ship. We would kindof like to avoid the death of our new friends.

>What have I told you about humorously undercutting me?
That you don't want us to. But we both know Polo's ever-present prankster is still ticking away in some corner of your mind and appreciates it.

So... since you're of two minds, we'll take the tiebreaker and pick the funnier option.

>Rokolo's 'particular expertise'
What was that again? Cloning? Not sure how that relates to extradimensional machine space-god horrors...

>sisters
Out of curiosity, does any of that needling actually hit home? I mean, I assume she's not lying about the empathy. And there's no part of you hive / family wasn't important to you. And there's really no one closer related to you than an alternate version of yourself.

Granted she's a terribly behaved little monster, but your whole thing is about redeeming people from monsters, aren't you? How's she any different than the other people and species you've reached out to?

>She’s hiding something from me.
She can do that, too, can't she? The whole clone-dart training. Fine control of silence.

Problem is, you can't. So she's going to know you know in a moment.

Which means you might as well cut through the bullshit and just ask / demand "What."

>>593237
>Rokolo's 'particular expertise'
>>What was that again?

Rokolo is highly promiscuous.

>>593237
>Problem is, you can't. So she's going to know you know in a moment.
Wrong. She can use empathic silence, but it is illegal by Supreme Court order.

>>593291
You misunderstood to what I was referring to. Yes, Polokoa can silence her empathy- but she doesn't have fine control. It's all or nothing. She can't choose to silence individual thoughts. She never had a clone dart battle, so she never picked up that particular trick.

>>593208
>She’s hiding something from me.
Thank you again, High Queen Obvious! In other news, grass is green, birds fly, and you both have tiny voices in your head that want to fondle your tits.

Jokes aside, in all likelihood, she wants something from the elder machine. Her plan is (essentially) to trap it in a stable time loop, but she also said that its parts would grow back over time. Meaning she can probably take something small and/or study it without messing up that loop.

But we [b]can't[b] deal with that right now. The Elder Machine wants you two to brawl. So you need to work together at least until it goes away. At that point we'll probably have to call in back-up - you're in no shape to fight your clone.

Polokoa 2014/09/23(Tue)18:22 No. 595506 ID: c4fa14
File 141152175529.png - (202.66KB , 600x600 , chewout1.png )

>Of course she is.
>Jokes aside, in all likelihood, she wants something from the elder machine.
>She's going to try and use it to travel to other timelines again.
>you might as well cut through the bullshit

“Rokolo! Are you trying to find out how to travel between dimensions again!?”

“Of course I am! I need to get back home eventually, don’t I? What did you think we’d do?”

“I was going to call the Time Police and ask them to take you back! You think I’d give you pass to go back to screwing up other timelines again!?”

“Come on! The Time Cops are dicks, they don’t have the right to lock me in my own dimension based on their stupid laws. “Contaminating the multiverse with the influences of a parasitic energy being”, rrgfh! First, it is entirely symbiotic, and second, nulla poena sine lege certa, damn it!”

“Their rules aren’t my problem and you know it!”

>If we did fight her to stop her from whatever her plan is would we actually be able to fix the disappearance thing without her?

Unless you’ve figured out whatever weird code the Elder Machine’s systems are based on, and how to use it, then probably not. Rokolo said she studied, and had access to studies of, these things before now. We haven’t.

>Out of curiosity, does any of that needling actually hit home?

Rrrrrrrgh. I can’t deny the empathic connection. And I can’t say it would be inaccurate to think of us as sisters. But it’s weird and horrible! She’s horrible!

>Granted she's a terribly behaved little monster, but your whole thing is about redeeming people from monsters, aren't you?
>The Elder Machine wants you two to brawl. So you need to work together at least until it goes away.

… Fine. Okay. You’re right. I don’t want to fight her. I’ll listen to her, and try to talk her down from her… plans.

“Right, yes. Ok. I… interfered with the timelines I visited. I left some mess behind…”

“Mess!? People died!!”

“It’s not my fault! I wanted to just get what I was after and move on! If they had just been helpful, when I asked them, then I could have made things a lot smoother! Any secondary trouble that came from the aftermath of me having to do things the hard way, because they didn’t listen to someone who has an important job to do, is their fault!”

“Their fault!? For not listening!?”

Polokoa 2014/09/23(Tue)18:23 No. 595508 ID: c4fa14
File 141152180161.png - (200.76KB , 600x600 , chewout2.png )

>What was [Rokolo's 'particular expertise’] again?

“Oh, hello Polo and-or Rokoa! You don’t know me, but I’m partly an alternate version of you from another dimension, and I would like to ask you for a favour! If you would be so kind, could you possibly allow me-“

Polokoa 2014/09/23(Tue)18:23 No. 595510 ID: c4fa14
File 141152183460.png - (226.39KB , 600x600 , chewout3.png )

“- to subject you to a horrifically torturous and invasive surgery, in which I will extract chunks of your brain, then render it down and inject it into myself so that the robots who live inside me can help me integrate it into my own mind, thereby allowing me to gain all of your personal memories and skills!!”

“How could they refuse!?”

“Look, I’ve improved the extraction procedure a lot.”

Polokoa 2014/09/23(Tue)18:25 No. 595512 ID: c4fa14
File 141152190003.png - (104.23KB , 600x600 , chewout4.png )

“It’s only a little torturous now.”

“Anyway, yes, ok, when you put it that way, it sounds a little crazy, but not if you know the whole story! If they knew all the facts, they’d have worked with me. I know because I know all the facts and I’m working with me, and I am them! Partly. They’d know the price is worth the result!”

“The result. The end justifies the means. As ever.”

“It does!”

Ugh. I have half a suspicion already, but I suppose now is when I ask her what this all-consuming goal actually is.

>>595512
Wait, she needs chunks of their brains? Um, why doesn't she just cut off an arm and use that? Decentralized brains, you know... That's not that bad an experience for a Neumono soldier.

Don't get too focused on the argument, now. You can't let yourself get ambushed. Get her to tell you what's going on while you keep an eye out. Also, ask her why she didn't just tell the alternate Polos and Rokoas about her big plan so that they could in fact make an informed decision and agree to the procedure like she expects them to.

For a species with so much empathy you two are sure crappy at understanding each other.

Put yourself in her shoes for a second. One or two tiny changes in your life and you would be her instead. Maybe her methods are a bit over the top but don't pretend you would not do something similar if you thought it was worth it.

So at least try to listen to her before judging her life. Its sad that the two loneliest sisters in the world can not at least try to be friends.

What do those cards of hers do last time anyways? Can't remember. Must have quarantined the data or it selectively corrupted itself.

>But it’s weird and horrible! She’s horrible!
Welcome to family. That's how it works. You fuzzballs kind of luck out, most the time, since hive-structure allows a lot of cheating around that.

>Fine. Okay. You’re right. I don’t want to fight her. I’ll listen to her
...and your resignation to try is immediately followed by her saying something provocative. >>595528 Is right. For all your empathy and supposed similarities, you two sure are crappy at picking up on the other at all.

Even though you both thought "I don't want to fight her" at practically the same time, you're still fighting. Sheesh.

>>595510
Wait. Um, shit. ...is she the reason you ended up as you? Ripped the two of you apart, and the salikai and science hivers stitched what was left together?

>Wait, she needs chunks of their brains? Um, why doesn't she just cut off an arm and use that? Decentralized brains, you know.
Presumably the surgery is because she wants specific bits of brain. If you just take an arm, you're getting a random sampling of what happens to be stored in that portion of the drive. No guarantee you get access to all of what you want, even with redundant storage.

>I have half a suspicion already, but I suppose now is when I ask her what this all-consuming goal actually is
Might as well. No need to waste your time bleeding out when we could get to the point.

>>595519
She needs as much brain matter as possible so she can get their entire skillsets. EX: Take Rokoa's arm and you might get the needle trick, but you won't get the century+ of combat experience.

>>595512
If you ACTUALLY believed that you would've TOLD them the whole story. You didn't. So... f$#@ you, quasi-sistah.

On a side note, i noticed that in addition to the obvious difference in Rokolo's expression and the mental image Polokoa gets that Rokolo doesn't, Polokoa has slightly more blood leaking out of her face in the Rokolo thread than her own. It's a nice touch.

Polokoa 2014/10/28(Tue)22:01 No. 599688 ID: 2b5958
File 141455891781.png - (146.46KB , 600x600 , timeloopholes1.png )

>So at least try to listen to her before judging her life.
>Get her to tell you what's going on
>Might as well. No need to waste your time bleeding out when we could get to the point.
>For all your empathy and supposed similarities, you two sure are crappy at picking up on the other at all.

If she wasn’t so similar to me I wouldn’t be getting so agitated. Believe me, I’m trying.

“Alright, I’ll explain. I’m going to tone myself down and be real for a moment, all right? It’s not something I do for just anyone. What I ultimately want is… how do I get this understood…?”

This had better be good.

“I’ll try from the beginning. After I’d… settled, enough to be functional, obviously the first thing I did was deal with my salikai. That left me with a lot on my hands, their facilities, the CAIs, the science hive, a pack of Rokoa clones, a leftover scraping of Rokoa’s former hive, and… eh, a big pile of things, technology and research and resources, I don’t need to list everything. But there I was, brain fresh and sparkling, CAIs and neumono nerds jabbering on about all this science, and I had a hard time getting any of it. I was smart, but I had none of the education, so the first thing I decided was that I needed to fix that. Of course, that was going to be a huge waste of time, so I figured out a way around it.”

“I told off some Rokoa clones to each spend a few years studying a different field with the science hive. Of course, they hated it, but I made sure they knew I was in charge. I spent that time building myself up more, pulled a few heists, doesn’t matter. What does matter is, at the end of that first round, I used the neural extraction and integration techniques that had helped create me to copy their knowledge to myself. Of course, they were Rokoas, so it took twelve years to give them about eight years of education, but there were ten of them. By copying their memories to myself, I gained eighty years of education in just twelve! So of course I did it again, with more Rokoas, but in the meantime I went ahead and got started looking into all this technology I’d acquired. I’m going to skip over a few years, but what I got to, eventually, was messing around with warp technology. What I was specifically trying to get to was a kind of site-to-site teleporter. I did eventually manage it, but in the process I ended up… not exactly teleporting things to my own dimension, one hundred percent of the time.”

“Obviously, when something that interesting happens by accident, you look for how to do it deliberately. That was how I started looking into other dimensions; it wasn’t long before we were able to aim better, and look specifically into other timelines. There were all sorts of useful things you could find out that way, you know? Everything secret or hidden in the world had to have gotten outed in some other version of events. So I kept looking. So… I kept seeing other ways things went… ways things could have gone, and…”

I think we’re getting somewhere.

“And what made my timeline different. And why. And…”

“And?”

Polokoa 2014/10/28(Tue)22:04 No. 599690 ID: 2b5958
File 141455906096.png - (156.47KB , 600x600 , timeloopholes2.png )

“… this isn’t important either. Bad explanation, the history doesn’t matter. You need to hear what it is I’m going to do. And what I’m going to do is good! The best!!”

Oh for… She felt actually vulnerable for a moment, there.

Polokoa 2014/10/28(Tue)22:04 No. 599691 ID: 2b5958
File 141455909293.png - (202.19KB , 600x600 , timeloopholes3.png )

If I want to persuade her to give this up, I need to know what it is motivating her, personally. There was something important there, but she skipped over. Like she was afraid to think about it.

>[Some kind of trauma, experienced at the point of exposure to the magnitude of the multiverse? Sounds familiar.]
>[The Time Police told us. Potentiality Shock, they called it.]
>[When you see what you’re really capable of. Or could have been capable of.]

Not a problem I ever had, but I remember.

“It’s a little complicated to explain - right, do you know how just a minute ago, you said you couldn’t change history, only take part in a self-fulfilling time loop, or create a new timeline if you do manage to change something, leaving the original in place? And I said yes, that’s true for inhabitants of linear timespace? That’s all generally true! But that’s the simple version, like when you tell kids ‘oh rainbows are from sunlight off raindrops the same way as prisms”. Like most science, the real thing is more complicated and detailed, and I need to explain it because it’s the key to the whole plan! You see, it’s not changing history that causes the timeline to split - it’s the paradox!”

“By going back in time and changing the past, you alter the circumstances that caused you to go back in time in the first place, generally because you no longer have a reason to want to go back in time. Therefore, you can’t have gone back and changed history, which means you didn’t, which means there isn’t anything stopping you, so you do, so there is, so you didn’t, so you do, but you don’t! It creates an unmanageable contradiction, and the only way the universe can accommodate it is by shunting the problem into another timeline! That way, there’s space for the new events, while the original events remain in place, just elsewhere. It’s actually fascinating, it’s not predestined or anything. The timeline temporarily exists in a sort of state of superposition, so if you end up being stable it settles and becomes normal, but if you do change things the timeline rupture actually extends all the way back to when you arrived in the past, retroactively!”

“So, the reason why a being outside linear spacetime can manipulate history without causing that is, they can perceive and interact with multiple points along the timeline at once! They change the past, and adjust later events at the same time, so that the chain of events still makes sense.”

Polokoa 2014/10/28(Tue)22:05 No. 599692 ID: 2b5958
File 141455913517.png - (204.08KB , 900x600 , timeloopholes4.png )

“The consequence of that is, you can change history! So long as the chain of events is still cohesive, so long as everything looks the same up until the point where you went back in time in the first place, then there’s no paradox and no new timeline gets split off to make sure things make sense, because they do already!”

“If someone is killed, and you wanted to change history to bring them back to life… you can! You just need to be clever! If you could make an empty clone body of them, make it look exactly the same, maybe create some simple bio AI to pilot the body a little, have that die in their place, and take them back to the future with you without leaving anything for anyone to notice… then it works! Because you tricked yourself into thinking they died, you still decided to go back in time and save them, so you do! So they’re alive!!”

“That’s what I’m going to do!!”

Polokoa 2014/10/28(Tue)22:06 No. 599693 ID: 2b5958
File 141455916503.png - (93.95KB , 600x600 , timeloopholes5.png )

“I’ll bring them back. No - make it so that they never died at all! All of them. Polo, and Rokoa, they both chose to be fighters, took the responsibility… and they failed. But they won’t have failed, they never did fail, so long as I succeed! All I have to do is go back, fake all the evidence and bring them all back to the future with me before it goes wrong!!”

“And I don’t have to stop there. Polo never really lost anyone before then, but Rokoa… I can go further back. I can do the same thing, it’ll be far easier, dealing with primitives, people lost on hunting trips, washed down rivers, buried, eaten… every member of her hive, every cousin, every sibling, every friend or lover, every child… everyone she was supposed to look after but couldn’t… It’ll have just been an illusion. I can make it so that it was just a con!!”

What… Her empathy is going crazy!

“And then… Polokoa, I’ll do it for you, too, I’ll help you do the same! And my CAI, and yours! And more! We can keep on going, timeline to timeline, history to alternate history, with every possible instance of ourselves, one at a time, forever, we can do it! Resources aren’t an issue, we can always take more from some timeline where they haven’t been tapped yet! And time!! We’ll never run out of time, we have time machines - and immortality, agelessness at least, it’s piss easy!! Fuck, Rokoa could have been immortal by just replacing her body parts from younger neumono!!”

Polokoa 2014/10/28(Tue)22:06 No. 599694 ID: 2b5958
File 141455920992.png - (692.31KB , 1200x600 , timeloopholes6.png )

“Polokoa… my time-split sister… That’s the plan. That’s what we came up with, me and my CAI, that’s what’s driven us in everything, the whole single purpose of my life ever since I realized…!”

“… We can save everyone!!”

Polokoa 2014/10/28(Tue)22:07 No. 599695 ID: 2b5958
File 141455924114.png - (99.71KB , 600x600 , timeloopholes7.png )

“We can fix- nnh!”

Polokoa 2014/10/28(Tue)22:07 No. 599696 ID: 2b5958
File 141455926821.png - (110.06KB , 600x600 , timeloopholes8.png )

“… hnnh.”

… And now it’s not.

Polokoa 2014/10/28(Tue)22:08 No. 599697 ID: 2b5958
File 141455929778.png - (111.88KB , 600x600 , timeloopholes9.png )

“… it’ll be difficult. Logistics. Cloning. Stealth. Precision above all, in the time travel, the timing, the execution. The deception. It needs to be perfect. So I need to be perfect. That’s why I started traveling, taking knowledge and experience from other versions of us. Because I need all fields mastered, every bit of potential fulfilled. I won’t take any risk that there’s something, anything I don’t know, that’ll make it all fall apart.”

…?

“I don’t want to make people suffer; not them especially. But it doesn’t matter how much trouble I cause. Once I’ve fixed everything in my timeline, I’ll be free, and I’ll have the time and the power to pay back any karmic tab you could ever put my name to.”

That was… a lot to take in.

Okay, take a few minutes to realize what you're REALLY doing here.

Don't get me wrong, it's a great plan. According to some of the history from alternate timelines that I've looked at, people HAVE been doing this. One guy was able to switch a robot with his insane body-double in a geothermal nuclear cannon incident. Two girls saved themselves and their parents and lived to tell the tale for a hundred thousand years. Almost everyone in the local multiverse who has lost someone has wanted, even for a few nanoseconds of thought processes, to bring them back from the dead, and sometimes, yes, they do come back, even without time travel!

But after you're done with death, what the HELL are you going to do with your life?

Power corrupts. The thing is, corruption is a necessary part of life. Some part of us needs to die in order for us to change or evolve. The part of you that was weak needs to die if it gets in your way. The team member needs to let their selfishness die a little to work in a group. But say you kill your own mortality, and any sense of loss or grief that you've ever had.

You would likely go insane from the boredom.

It wouldn't even have to be boredom: if it ever gets easy to resurrect the dead, you would just as soon start killing people because you would know that you could just bring them back later. You would have power over life and death like a goddess, but without consequence, without pain or suffering, there would be nothing that could hold you back from thinking "You can do anything you want - good or evil". You might hold out against the temptation for BILLIONS of years - but then? One little voice in your mind telling you to be free and have fun ragdolling that one moron, and nothing would stop you from believing that it was right. And since you have infinite time, all it would take to corrupt you is... said infinite time.

I am NOT saying you shouldn't try to save your friends and your sister. I am not even saying that you should not become a tyrannical overlord, with eternal dominion over the universe. I'm saying that you should put LIMITS on yourself to stay sane. And if you ever break those limits, find more. If you are level 9,000,000, get a level 10,000,000 hobby. Discover the fourth dimension. Solve the mysteries of an alternate universe in under a month. Make friends with other "ascended" beings.

But PLEASE listen to your health bar and realize that if you can do everything forever, you will likely do something unforgivably evil one day - unforgivable by YOURSELF. And it will change you forever.

P.S. Is this thing on?

Well we just got a flicker of our counterpart over her empathy. Looks like she has regrets about the choices she made. Looks like that regret and Alison's drive to save everyone in the old simulation have sort of combined forces.

That and all the brain eating she has been doing probably has dozens of tiny splinter personalities that have set up shop upstairs.

While her plan is solid I do not think he is doing it for the right reasons. She is trying to save everyone because she hurts inside. It's never a good idea to make any major decisions while you are still grieving. Tends to color everything you do and jumble up a otherwise decent plan.

Honestly if a alternate future me jumped through a portal and saved me from dying and then invited me to live in a city full of us I would not turn them down.

>>599697
Over halfway dead, Polokoa.

...ask her if she's ever tested her hypothesis. It would be fairly simple to test it by altering low-key events in other timelines. Also, ask her what she found out she lost to give her such motivation in the first place. What alternate history is she working towards? She still wears that biosuit, like you... It's one where she didn't kill Rokoa, right? She will still have done so. Eliminating the consequences of her actions will not eliminate the actions themselves. Does she think her Rokoa will just forgive her for murdering her, and so many of her clones? What about AFTER she fixes all her mistakes? What about the mistakes she'll make in the future? Will she try to fix those too? If so, when does it stop? What about other peoples' mistakes? The suffering of others? Why do only Rokoa and Polo get their loved ones back? There is just so much suffering, so much tragic death, some of it necessary death. The best anyone can do is to reduce it. To teach, to guide people towards harmony. If she actually plans to try to reverse every tragic death that has ever happened, will tragedy become meaningless? There are consequences for bringing back the dead.

Also um, I think you just witnessed the negative side effects of injecting yourself repeatedly with brain serum. She's got multiple rokoas and polos inside herself. That brings up a serious issue, here. If she saves her Rokoa, who will she have injected herself with to create the hybrid she is? That would be a problem with you too. She can't bring back your Rokoa and Polo, can she? They are part of you now. If she made their deaths false in the past, no matter if it was done in secret, then your origin is a paradox, and it'll split off a second timeline.

I'd like to advise some caution here as well. She has invested a massive amount of effort into this, and a large amount of suffering of others as well. If you convince her it was all for nothing, she is going to freak the fuck out.

>>599704
Don't convince her it was all for nothing, right? Got it.

It isn't for nothing if she can put all that extra brain power to applied use.

Ask her if she can do some good NOW. With all that intelligence, she should be able to design some inventions that can better the people around her, planets that she can govern, sisters she can live with. Tell her that she needs to EARN her right to murder for the greater good, to risk time paradoxes for the power of true resurrection; to play goddess, you either play the part or you get slain.

I don't know if this is a morally justifiable code of ethics in your universe, but it's something that she is likely to accept. Use it - a skewed, three-dimensional moral compass is right tw-erm... some of the time. ish.

Are there supposed to be little purple things in the goo? That's new.

>Save everyone, bring everyone back to life
Isn't that kind of problematic on the scale she's talking about? Functionally, she's talking about removing death. And having everyone who's ever lived alive at the same time. We're talking massive overpopulation issues. Where do you get the space and resources for that? How is it sustainable when all of everybody ever starts having kids?

I suppose she is talking about tapping dead universes for resources. That might be sustainable, but it would depend on what the rate of life successfully arising is. But I mean, at some point absurdly asymptotic population growth is going to break even that.

...to say nothing about the crazy moral issues of creating universes without consequences. Playing god, deciding how people's lives, how time goes.

>If I want to persuade her to give this up, I need to know what it is motivating her, personally. There was something important there, but she skipped over.
Agreed. No appeal to logic will dissuade her. Any argument needs to be on an emotional level, and we don't have the critical information we need to make that work, yet.

>I won’t take any risk that there’s something, anything I don’t know, that’ll make it all fall apart.
Potential problem. What if there's something, but virtue of knowing it, that causes you to fail? If information that's fundamentally incompatible with what she wants to do exists, her current plan guarantees she'll encounter and absorb it.

>>599694
And I don't know if you could see that, but we got flashes of her CAI. They're definitely tied into this. Overlapping motivations. A perversion or variation on our own impulse to try and save everyone when trapped in the looping hell simulation, piled onto her own issues.

Taking info-war precautions, here. There's no evidence that was a hack attempt, but we're going to treat it as one, just in case. Scanning, trying to see if they did anything or embedded any information in that signal.

>what do
So... bad thought. This decision has some weight, right? So doesn't that mean, even if you say no and stop her from getting this tech, there's going to be a splintered timeline where you say yes and she gets the tech to jump universes again? Which means, either way, there's a Polokoa who can move between universes again.

In which case, it would be nice if the reality hoping maniac was on our good side. One you actually have the option of talking to, and won't just have to put down.

Tell her that that is a lot to think about. Her plan sounds at least halfway insane, but you're not going to write something like that off prematurely, or when you're distracted by bleeding to death. You won't stop her from copying the data she needs now, if she agrees not to use the tech to bug out on you or force the issue. If she's not going to run out of time, she can afford to let you have some to think about this.

In the meantime, let's focus on the immediate problem. ...and make it clear you expect her not to run up some horrible karmic tab while she's here.

After the latest Homestuck update I've gotten really fed up with well-intentioned extremists always being wrong and the universe bending over backward to smack them down for no reason.

So you know what? I say go for it. A perfect world with no tragedy or suffering? That's what everyone wants, especially, I think, Polokoa. Isn't a utopia what she's been working towards with her reforms? Rokolo can do her one better with a retroactive utopia.

The only issue I really see is that Rokolo seems to be pretty unstable and nutty, which will of course ensure things go haywire. But that's where Polokoa comes in. She's quite possibly the sanest and most stable individual we've seen so far. A team-up between the two would be a repeat of what makes Polokoa such an effective leader on an even greater scale; Rokoa's determination, willpower and proactiveness kept on a leash and directed towards useful purposes through Polo's pragmatism. With Rokolo's brains and Polokoa's wisdom, we could really do this.

Also? If she gets on board with this, she has input; she can steer Rokolo away from bad choices and ensure things don't collapse spectacularly. If she doesn't...

>>599730
>So... bad thought. This decision has some weight, right? So doesn't that mean, even if you say no and stop her from getting this tech, there's going to be a splintered timeline where you say yes and she gets the tech to jump universes again? Which means, either way, there's a Polokoa who can move between universes again.

...she's going to go ahead with this anyway. Even if Polokoa kills her in this timeline (which I think is really the only thing that's going to stop her at this point), there will be another one that succeeded in her place; we won't have solved anything. Regardless of moral opinions, this is the most practical choice.

However, Rokolo DOES seem pretty unstable and irrational about this. We'll need a bit more info. Try to get a better understanding of her motivations and whatever emotion she's trying to cover up or avoid. Be gentle, though. Lure her out with emotional appeals, and entice her to lay her heart bare. Unfortunately, though, we may not have the time for that...

>Fuck, Rokoa could have been immortal by just replacing her body parts from younger neumono!!”
... She mentions Rokoa's potential immortality, but not Polo's. That's... no, probably nothing.

>Plan to become basically the Doctor and/or a time goddess

...
Okay, much like with Radde, I admire this plan for it's audacity, ambition and the fact that if it succeeds, everything gets better.

I am beginning to doubt Rokolo's intelligence, genre-savvyness and general sanity, however.

Rokolo, you're proving here today why being a being of non-linear space-time (don't lie, that's basically what you'll be when you accomplish this plan of yours) isn't necessarily going to get you what you want. You can't guarantee that you'll be able to fix everything, especially since you'll HAVE these non-linear beings to deal with. You took out half of a corpse on a fluke after someone else threw everything they had at it. Look at Polokoa, she's practically one foot in the grave (no offense, mistress).

You'll have the old gods AND the time police gunning for your head at that point. And if they could lock your dimension off, they're going to have something that can prevent this plan eventually.

Just... stew on those things for a while. We can't pretend the idea isn't... intriguing, and worth thinking about.

But we're also bleeding everywhere and people are probably dieing maybe. Not the best environment for thinking about time travel shenanigans.

>>599694
I think this is an art error. Polokoa's left eye is red, not pink. Fixing it would ruin the deep and symbolic contrast thing going on though, so it might be better to leave this as-is.

>>599778
You'll have the old gods AND the time police gunning for your head at that point. And if they could lock your dimension off, they're going to have something that can prevent this plan eventually.

Only the old gods, I suspect. Founding an organization that calls itself the time police, and having them go around hassling your younger self and preventing anyone else from messing with your plan, would be easy enough.

>>599893
Just because you can establish a stable time loop doesn't mean everything you encounter is going to be a stable loop. Rokolo would need to be put in a position to found the original time cops, and iirc they also existed outside of time like the Elder Machines here. So they don't need a cause.

And if it were possible, then the time police would never have locked Rokolo in her own universe in the first place, or helped Polokoa when she foiled Rokolo's plans that one time. Like Rokolo said, it set her back by a factor of cube (not sure how to actually phrase this, but whatever).

>>599778
>But we're also bleeding everywhere and people are probably dieing maybe.

Yeah, what's the status on this? Rokolo said she could fix it, has she? Or does Polokoa need to do something as well? If it's something she needs the super-mode for she should probably do that now while she still has time.

Polokoa 2014/11/09(Sun)14:56 No. 600997 ID: 94501b
File 141557376256.png - (90.49KB , 600x600 , discussionwrokolo1.png )

>Well we just got a flicker of our counterpart over her empathy
>we got flashes of her CAI
>Taking info-war precautions

>[Yeah, that was kinda weird. Don’t know what happened there, that didn’t come through any of our normal ports or sensors.]
>[It wasn’t any sort of communication we equipped ourselves to receive.]
>[I wonder! You guys remember about quantum entanglement, right?]
>[When a pair or group of particles is linked so that their quantum states can only be described as a single unified system. What happens to one happens to all of them without regard for physical distance, sort of. Yes?]
>[Yeah. Well, it’s not the same thing here, if it’s a thing at all, but I wonder, we’re alternate timeline versions of each other. We have to be sharing at least some of the same molecules, right? So maybe something similar is happening. Parts of our systems are resonating with each other.]
>[So, what, we’re experienced a kind of cross-dimensional twin telepathy?]
>[Maybe! Just with the most significant and oft-recurring feelings or thought patterns.]
>[Or maybe we just had so strong an ‘oh I get it’ moment that we hallucinated a bit.]
>[Oh, like when Lolo uncovered that two-headed priapod cult!]
>[I told you to never remind me of that.]

>This decision has some weight, right? So doesn't that mean, even if you say no and stop her from getting this tech, there's going to be a splintered timeline where you say yes and she gets the tech to jump universes again?
>there will be another one that succeeded in her place

>[Woah, don’t go thinking like that, guys. You can’t tell yourself nothing matters because everything happens or doesn’t happen somewhere! It’s bad for you.]
>[Dastrica wouldn’t be happy.]
>[Besides, it might not be true! Dr. Chamani, over at BC3 University, put out a paper two years ago theorizing that it’s not possible to instigate natural timeline mitosis while you’re outside your home timeline. So Rokolo’s personal timeline can’t divide so long as she’s here!]
>[Not that that theory’s been at all proven.]
>[And Chamani made kind of a couple of leaps in her reasoning.]
>[Ok, so it’s not super certain. But how about the Elder Machine, then?]
>[Oh, right! Rokolo said the Elder Machine only exists in this timeline!]
>[And it’s an escaped prisoner. It wouldn’t have been imprisoned at all if that just meant another version of it would still be free. There must be something about it that prevents its timeline from dividing, or maybe that process doesn’t apply to it at all!]
>[Which means that, so long as we’re in direct contact with it, our timelines can’t split either.]
>[Which means that until it’s gone, and who knows for how long after until the effect wears off, everything we do is the one and only thing that gets done!]
>[Our choices matter!]
>[Hooray!…?]
>[Is that good?]

>...ask her if she's ever tested her hypothesis.

“Have you tested-“

“Ugh! Of course I’ve tested it. What do you take me for?”

>A perfect world with no tragedy or suffering?
>Functionally, she's talking about removing death.

“I’m just trying to make sure I understand you. Saving everyone is going to cause some problems, don’t you think?”

“Why would- fuck. I didn’t mean…! Argh, maybe I did for a moment. I get… carried away, sometimes. But I don’t really intend to save literally everyone, you crazy… rrrgh. Should have known you’d interpret it that way.”

Polokoa 2014/11/09(Sun)14:56 No. 600998 ID: 94501b
File 141557381539.png - (103.94KB , 600x600 , discussionwrokolo2.png )

“I’m not like you, not some… ridiculous prophesied demigod Queen, selected to rule the species by the divine right of quantum inevitability, someone who’s going to sit on top of whole planets and glare down like they’re everyone’s preschool teacher. When I said I could save everyone, I meant save everyone I’m responsible for. That we’re responsible for. Our hives, Polokoa. Everyone that I - that Polo or Rokoa should have been able to save from dying in the first place. I want to fix our mistakes. I’m not going to bring people back from anything that couldn’t have been prevented in the first place, I’m not that fucking immature, and I’m not stupid enough to directly interfere with my own creation. And if anyone else wants to save their own people, then they can invent time travel and figure out how to fucking fix it themselves! Because real people, and listen to me because I know this will be hard for you to get, real and reasonable people focus on taking care of their own shit, sister. Do you understand now?”

>[Polokoa]’s quite possibly the sanest and most stable individual we’ve seen so far.

Stable, maybe. I am not sane.

>Also um, I think you just witnessed the negative side effects of injecting yourself repeatedly with brain serum. She's got multiple rokoas and polos inside herself.

“I’m… concerned. Your empathy just now seemed-“

“I am aware, it is a minor side effect. I’ve absorbed the memories of hundreds of our counterparts, and only seven or eight are so… persistent. It’s statistically negligible, and the echoes fade away, over time. They’re easy to handle, normally, but you’re riling them up. Making them want things they can’t have. Fuck, ‘they’ don’t even really exist! It’s just parts of my mind being a bit delusional. That’s a-.”

Polokoa 2014/11/09(Sun)14:59 No. 601001 ID: 94501b
File 141557395564.png - (132.62KB , 600x600 , discussionwrokolo3.png )

“Shut UP Polo you’re an aerospace engineer you don’t know SHIT about neurobiology OR psychiatry!!”

Make that very concerned. It would be nice if Dastrica was here.

>moral issues
>Power corrupts.

Good points. Especially when I remember, from what the Time Police told me, that in her own dimension Rokolo is effectively a cross between a mad scientist, a military dictator and an organized crime boss. And a sexual predator.

>Any argument needs to be on an emotional level

>[Guys, I think we’re getting close to the moment where a decision needs to be made. If Polokoa wants to stand any chance of physically subduing Rokolo so we can deal with her later in better surroundings, we need to make the attempt soon.]
>[Rokolo probably isn’t going to respond to normal reasoning. She’s clearly at least a little nuts (not even counting this ‘echoes’ thing), so what we’d have to do is figure out exactly how and why she’s nuts, and then use it against her.]
>[We have some clues on why Rokolo does what she does already. If we follow this path we could get a few more, and then maybe we could convince her to back down… but betting that we will do all that is a risk!]
>[She already demonstrated that she didn’t hold a grudge against you once already, so fighting doesn’t mean giving up on convincing her of anything ever.]
>[The longer we wait, though, the worse a chance with a fight we’ll have.]

She’s upset with herself over her loss of control, and stress seems to make her more honest. If I asked her for her personal motivations in the right way, she might answer out of sheer exasperation.

>>601001
Why do you want her to back down? If she does what she wants to do, won't this sibling rivalry finally end? You could help her. Don't you think her hive deserves to be saved? The Elder Machine wanted the both of you to fight. Defy it.

That said, it'd still be cool to knock her down a peg through emotional manipulation. How about this: "What if those who died deserved to die? What if bringing them back causes nothing but suffering for those around them?"

>timeline can't split because the elder machine only exits in this timeline
But we already sent it back. The elder machine only exists in a small segment of this timeline. Now that we're past that, it should be free to splinter at will.

>You can’t tell yourself nothing matters because everything happens or doesn’t happen somewhere! It’s bad for you.
Normally, the other consequences don't matter, since you don't interact with each other. But when the consequence is whether or not people (or a person) starts traveling between realities, it gets messy right quick.

>just save everyone we're 'responsible' for
That... changes the problem significantly. On the one hand, it makes this project a whole lot more feasible. On the other hand, it might make it less moral. It goes from a grand design (of questionable insanity) to something personal and selfish. As tempting as it is, does anyone really deserve to fix their own family, their own life, at the cost this would take to implement? With the risks involved?

>It’s statistically negligible
Nothing that's possible is statistically negligible over the set of all possible realities. Since your plan hinges on hitting them all, you're guaranteed to hit those low-probability cases. This problem will get worse over time, not better.

Nevermind the fact that you're already somewhat splintered yourself. She really think if she stuck you into her brain you wouldn't be just as noisy, if not more?

>what say
Ask her what she's responsible for. Ask her what she did, what mistake she made, that's she's willing to do absolutely everything to undo. You'd have to be a blind, deaf, unemphatic idiot not to see it tearing her up, even now.

She wants to talk about taking responsibility? That's what your whole damn egotistical space empire she so disproves of is about. Forcing everyone to stop acting like children and take responsibility for their actions. I couldn't fix my shit, but I could damn well make sure everyone else did.

>>601010
You know, I don't know if it's something that we should bring up at this exact moment, but her plan is self-contradictory.

In an unaltered history, the time traveler goes back in time to alter an event: the only way to ensure that no alternate universe splits off where this event still takes place is for the altered event to still superficially appear to the pre-travel time traveler to have been the same. In other words, the pre-travel traveler cannot know the exact nature of events: if the truth of what happened is known, changing events is impossible.

Thus, gathering knowledge to leave nothing up to luck is self-defeating: the more you know about the mechanics of previous events the more difficult your job becomes since your goal in the end is to con yourself. As soon as your travel back the "difficulty" of this con is set and scaled with the knowledge you had at the time of traveling; the only meaningful learning that can be achieved is AFTER you travel back in time (as knowledge gained then can be used 'against' your pre-time-travel self to con them into traveling back int he first place).

And of course, once you're in the past (before an event happens) you can't learn about the event you intend to change until it happens, at which point it's too late to change it.

So either you learn everything you can and make your own job of changing the past nigh-impossible or you leave gaps in your own knowledge deliberately to take advantage of and risk leaving things up to chance.

>>601039
Um, there's a fundamental flaw in your argument. You're not supposed to con yourself in the present, you're supposed to con yourself in the distant past. The event is back then, you know. The more you know about eyewitness accounts of the event, the more easily you can see points in time where nobody was looking. The pre-time-travel self you speak of does not know if the exchange happened or not, no matter how much knowledge is gained about the circumstances of the event in preparation for the trip.

Think of it as a Schrodinger's Cat. With cloning, time travel, teleportation and organic AIs, it can be considered very difficult to confirm if someone died for real without checking for those exact things. So, the target is both alive and dead, and you only know for certain when the time traveler returns from the trip.

Oh good, she set up limits for herself. Now, focus on her inability to recognize the fact that she is murdering people.

Something has caused her to lose trust in people, but not fragments of their psyche. An army of Polos or Rokoas would be a great brain trust to solve the equations needed for perfect time resurrection. A hive mind of chopped up brains? Not so much.

Figure out what caused her to lose trust in other people. If you can convince her that eating minds is destroying her chances of saving ANYONE, you might be able to chip off some of her psyche.

>>601051
>You're not supposed to con yourself in the present, you're supposed to con yourself in the distant past.

Except you DO have to con yourself in the present (the present being the you that is motivated to travel back in time to fix the past). That's why you have to make events line up: you have to be motivated to travel back in time in the FIRST place or else you create a paradox and split timelines. You have to con yourself from the point where you first witnessed the accident all the way up until the point where you decide to time travel. Conning your "ancient self" might provide the greatest motivation, but should your past/present self discover hints of your future self's con before deciding to time travel themselves, they could radically change their actions and never time travel at all, and thus end up preserving the original timeline via paradox.

For example; say you replace someone that died with a clone or something; what happens if your con is good enough to hid traces of your involvements; but your past self, in researching how you're going to go back in time and fix things, discovers that the person they thought died was just a clone? They're rational, and they don't know their own future self's involvement, so they're forced to investigate further where you never did, and from there chaos theory takes over. The only time you might get lucky is if your past self just assumes that they already time traveled and that anything weird is just something they're going to have to manipulate to happen: but such an assumption isn't necessarily rational (and the logical conclusion of such an assumption is that one has to manipulate the entirety of history behind the scenes "just in case" you're not witnessing the "original" version of events but instead a "semi-corrected" version of events that the original-timeline version of you set up to set things right so that you end up creating a stable loop rather than a branching paradox like your assumed time-traveling self attempted to do).

>>601001
you can get her to calm down easily, just pet her on the head and scratch her behind the ears. If it ever becomes necessary.

Ask for numbers. How many people, exactly, is she trying to save? Make it sound like you're starting to be persuaded, doing some ethical calculus, 'harm justified by prevention of greater harm.' Obsessive research means she's probably got a memorized list, and might end up blurting out, or at least empathically projecting, the reasons for each one as she names them.

I still don't really see why her plan is a bad thing, other than the brain-nomming (which Polokoa might be able to get her to stop doing if she provides her with a better alternative, like having actual people skills). If this destabilizes the multiverse and draws the attention of the Time Police then obviously she shouldn't do it, but we've seen no evidence for that - they seem to object to people hopping between timelines, no word on changing their own. And again, Polokoa has input if she agrees to help - including demands, such as Rokolo stopping her mad antics once she's accomplished the supposed end to justify the means. Maybe she can get Dastrika to untangle her psyche, too.

>DO SOMETHING ALREADY
"Subdue" her? As in nonlethally? I thought you couldn't do that to neumono. Polokoa dealt with her before so she could do that again and drag her back to Dastrika for therapy, I suppose. Epic boss fight and non-lethal KO incoming?

>what say
Ahh, social skills, my one weakness! Her patience is clearly exhausted, so something direct like "Who are you responsible for?" might work...but it also might just maker her angrier and blow Polokoa off. I suppose we don't have time for subtle, though.

Going back to her moment of vulnerability, she acted weird when she got to the part about "how things could have gone". Could be potentiality explosion like the CAI theorizes, but it could be something more specific. Did she see a utopian timeline where important people didn't die and Rokoa and Polo got to live happily ever after? (...Polo Quest's timeline?) Maybe be direct about that. Though the question is how to phrase it... "What did you see?" probably won't cut it.

...how about a compromise? She can make a list of things to learn then travel back in time to tell herself to study one of those things and to then travel back in time again to study the next thing on the list. Then use the brain-leeching technique on HERSELF to learn all that shit her alternate past selves learned. Her alternate selves will do that too, so the timelines will merge again since each Rokolo winds up with the same collection of knowledge.

>>603716
That would likely cause a time paradox. Telling her past self directly to study a different thing than what she did in the original time would likely cause a parallel universe to form, one where she went back in time and one where she didn't.

Does she HAVE to keep killing and lobotomizing her alternate selves to absorb their memories? Why hasn't she developed a mind-copier yet? It wouldn't have to be perfect - those partial brains certainly aren't.

>>603722
>That would likely cause a time paradox. Telling her past self directly to study a different thing than what she did in the original time would likely cause a parallel universe to form, one where she went back in time and one where she didn't
Well yeah, but that would mean she's travelling to alternate universes to absorb memories from herself, who knows of her own ultimate goal and would put up with the memory extraction procedure by her own admission.

I think there's a more efficient way to go about this.
Time travel, unless I'm badly misunderstanding the mechanics, allows for infinite computational power, as no matter how long it takes to run a program, you get the results instantly. Even if the program runs longer than the universe, you can send what progress you've made back however many times it takes to complete it.
Infinite computation allows for a number of cool things; most relevant here is the ability to simulate a universe in perfect detail; and not just a single universe, but ALL POSSIBLE universes, because infinite computing power makes infinite tasks trivial.
A perfect simulation of a person is the same thing as that person; if you have two copies of a computer document, deleting one does not mean the document ceases to exist. Thus, saving someone in a simulation is the same as saving them outside of a simulation, and much easier; saving someone outside requires fucking around with clones and robot doubles, while saving someone within a simulation is just a matter of point and click. (Once you've gotten the programming groundwork done, obviously.)
What's more, this makes saving absolutely everyone plausible, since it requires no extra logistics beyond the time machine and computer itself, and any manpower obstacles can be solved by giving selected individuals within the simulation admin powers, or simply copy-pasting yourself a few vigintillion times.

>>609820
Eh...the clone isn't actually the person, though. The original body still died. Unless you can confirm that perfectly replicating someone's brain resurrects them, there's still the issue of people being unsaved.

She is clearly onto SOMETHING, or she would've imploded in some kind of horrible time paradox event or something by now. The only question here is how much she is getting right and how much is just her being nuts.
>>603722
Good question! Why hasn't she?

>>609993
Well, the way I see it is that minds are sort of like books. If you have two copies of a book, and you destroy one, the book continues to exist. In order for a book to actually be destroyed, you would need to hunt down and destroy every copy of that book. The important thing about a mind is its information content, the thoughts it thinks. The specific physical substrate those thoughts are being thought with is of secondary importance.

Polokoa 2015/01/27(Tue)03:18 No. 622447 ID: 7bc1b7
File 142235751343.png - (119.75KB , 600x600 , motivationsupdate0.png )

>But we already sent it back.

>[Um, no we haven’t. We’re standing in it right now.]

>A perfect simulation of a person is the same thing as that person
>Well, the way I see it is that minds are sort of like books. If you have two copies of a book, and you destroy one, the book continues to exist.

You’re an AI. How would you feel about a perfect copy being made of you, and then you being killed while leaving them to go on? I’ve had enough experience with clones and alternate universes to know it doesn’t work like that. From the perspective of the universe, maybe, but not for the one who gets to die. As for Rokolo, I’m getting the feeling that bringing the dead back isn’t even her real ultimate goal, emotionally speaking. If she just wanted to meet them again she would visit them in another timeline.

>Does she HAVE to keep killing and lobotomizing her alternate selves to absorb their memories? Why hasn't she developed a mind-copier yet?

You’d have to ask her. But, she doesn’t exactly kill the alternates herself in any case: she just leaves them in a state where they can’t function to the best of their ability. My problem is how many times she’s done that at the wrong time for them, so that they end up getting themselves killed or not being able to save others.

She seems to be cooling down, but her empathy still feels strange. Sort of-

Polokoa 2015/01/27(Tue)03:19 No. 622448 ID: 7bc1b7
File 142235755240.png - (96.55KB , 600x600 , motivationsupdate1.png )

Hold on. Her mood shifted.

Polokoa 2015/01/27(Tue)03:21 No. 622450 ID: 7bc1b7
File 142235771324.png - (226.73KB , 600x600 , motivationsupdate2.png )

“Right, forget my issues. It doesn’t matter! I’ve got everything I need. How about we continue this conversation up above? You’d better be more persuasive than you have been, because you just missed your chance to pull the plug.”

Hm.

“Have I? You’re not at home, Rokolo. Unless you’ve got a set of warp drives and a pack of fusion reactors in your pockets, you’re still not going anywhere.”

“This is the asteroid! There are crashed ships all over. I can put something together.”

“By yourself? With every authority in this version of the galaxy after you?”

Polokoa 2015/01/27(Tue)03:22 No. 622451 ID: 7bc1b7
File 142235775594.png - (194.64KB , 600x600 , motivationsupdate3.png )

>Polokoa has input if she agrees to help - including demands, such as Rokolo stopping her mad antics once she's accomplished the supposed end to justify the means. Maybe she can get Dastrica to untangle her psyche, too.
>You could help her.

“Maybe you could pull it off, but without my help it’s not likely. You don’t have your clones, you don’t have your secret labs, and you’re not on a full-size planet too dangerous to be fully charted. I don’t get along perfectly with the authorities in the rest of the galaxy, but you won’t get along with them either if I tell them about you, and I wouldn’t even need to. You think my dimension is ridiculous and unrealistic? Well, it is. I have ninjas.”

I’m starting to wish I’d brought some of them with me.

“But we don’t have to do that. At least, that’s what I’d like to say. What I would like, if I could, is to actually offer you my help.”

“… Yeah?”

“I can get you resources you could never have in your own dimension. You can pick assistants from across the galaxy, multiple CAIs, experimental military technology, test ranges, all of it. You don’t even need to stop visiting other timelines: I’ll go with you and help you convince those Polos and Rokoas to lend you their memories. But first of all, there’d be conditions.”

“Of course there would.”

“You have to have patience. If you’re after a version of Polo that’s trying to stop a city being blown up, we wait before waylaying her. We try to convince her, and if she’s not going to say yes, we move on. There’ll be some other version of her with the same skills who’ll say yes, somewhere. You’re the one who just said time wasn’t a factor, weren’t you? But here’s where we start running into problems, because I’ll be the one saying whether we move on or not. That applies to the whole project. You can run it, but I’m in charge, and if I say you stop doing something, you stop. I say what ideas become reality. And to help those ideas be good ones, my next condition would be that you visit a therapist and-“

“You want to send me to the couch!?”

“The same one I go to. She’s good. But-”

“Hold on. Dastrica? Your version of Dastrica is a psychiatrist!? Ha ha! That actually makes sense.”

“What’s yours d- no, I don’t want to know. I want to go to your dimension as well, and start fixing it up, but look, those conditions aren’t the problem! I’m sure they’re going to be issues, especially expecting you to let go control of anything, but the real proble-“

Polokoa 2015/01/27(Tue)03:23 No. 622452 ID: 7bc1b7
File 142235780995.png - (221.77KB , 600x600 , motivationsupdate4.png )

“… Nnnnnh.”

“Wh- Hey! What’s wrong? What could make you whine?”

>[Holy shit, Polokoa! You’re running out of spare brains!]
>[Are you ok!?]

“Ewin? Olishiz, awaspar bra… Aurke? Ghrh.”

>[… What?]
>[Shit. Alright, I know you don’t like it, but we’re going to use your neural bypasses. It’ll patch you up and cut the load, we shouldn’t get another random spike like that.]

Polokoa 2015/01/27(Tue)03:24 No. 622453 ID: 7bc1b7
File 142235785951.png - (181.89KB , 600x600 , motivationsupdate5.png )

“Let me take… You’re even worse off than you look!”

“… I’m fine.”

“Fuck you’re fine, sister, you just developed receptive aphasia right in front of me. Do you know how bad a neumono has to be for those kind of symptoms to manifest? We’re getting you to the surface so you can shut your suit off.”

“No! Bypasses. I can last a while longer, now. Long enough. I can’t go yet.”

Polokoa 2015/01/27(Tue)03:25 No. 622454 ID: 7bc1b7
File 142235791872.png - (185.23KB , 600x600 , motivationsupdate6.png )

“While the elder machine’s here, the timeline won’t split. So if I make my decision now, it sticks! And I can’t make that decision until I know whether or not I can trust you!”

“… Excuse me?”

Polokoa 2015/01/27(Tue)03:25 No. 622455 ID: 7bc1b7
File 142235795673.png - (200.58KB , 600x600 , motivationsupdate7.png )

>Her patience is clearly exhausted, so something direct like "Who are you responsible for?" might work...
>Ask her what she's responsible for. Ask her what she did, what mistake she made, that's she's willing to do absolutely everything to undo.

“That’s the real problem! I know you won’t keep your word if you really think you need to break it, Rokolo. So the only way I can trust you is if I can predict what you’ll do, and I can’t! Everything you’ve been telling me, you want it, they’re real reasons, but they’re not the real reason. There’s something else, something you want to avoid, something more important than everything else! That’s what I need to know, so just tell me honestly why you need to do all this!”

Polokoa 2015/01/27(Tue)03:26 No. 622456 ID: 7bc1b7
File 142235801867.png - (119.13KB , 600x600 , motivationsupdate8.png )

“Alright, you want to know? One: It’s awesome.”

“Rokolo.”

“Two: I actually want to see everyone again, what a surprise!”

“Rokolo!”

“Three-“

“Rokolo!”

Polokoa 2015/01/27(Tue)03:27 No. 622457 ID: 7bc1b7
File 142235804846.png - (108.58KB , 600x600 , motivationsupdate9.png )

“Because it was my fault!! Are you happy!? You couldn’t figure that out on your own!? They died and I was made to take revenge for it, Polo pretended it was something else but that’s what it was, stupid idiot pointless revenge! Then I looked into the fucking time vortex like an idiot and I find out none of it had to happen and it’s all because Rokoa had to taunt Polo and Polo decided to shoot her and leave her for dead!! So I couldn’t pretend that there hadn’t been anything I could have done, that it couldn’t have happened any other way or that I did my best because I didn’t! Or Polo didn’t - Rokoa, or… I… Whatever!! I’m them!!”

“Do you know what it feels like to think you’re responsible for your own hive’s death!? Do you!? It’s the worst fucking pain you can’t even imagine and this plan is the only reason I got out, because now they’re all actually alive and I just have to collect them and I’ll be free! That’s why it needs be perfect! If I mess around even a little, if I don’t do absolutely everything that I could possibly ever do to make it happen then I’m playing with their lives and if it doesn’t work that means I’ll have killed them again! And I won’t!! Do you understand!? I refuse, absolutely, unequivocally, to allow even the tiniest fractional chance that I will ever have to feel like any member of my hives - of my family, died because of me, not ever ever ever again!!! That’s it, all right!? Now you know!”

“So what are you going to do about it!?”

So... Cuddle time?

I think she needs a hug.

>You’re an AI. How would you feel about a perfect copy being made of you, and then you being killed while leaving them to go on?
I suppose once you've cut and pasted a few times the perspective on forking gets a little skewed.

>Rokolo's acting / empath-ing like she sees worse injuries than our sensors are picking up
Wait. The difference is superficial, but Rokolo's seeing worse injuries than we are. Is that her emotional state affecting her perceptions, or is there something trying to sanitize our medical feeds? Polokoa, please tell me you didn't have something installed so you could redline without us being able to tell just how close you got the edge.

>So what are you going to do about it!?
Hug her. And then we're going to cut the power to your super suit, leaving you to collapse under your own injuries before you can kill yourself. And leaving your crazy sister with a helpless family member she needs to save.

I think you should make absolutely sure this won't backfire. Ask her to swear on her family that she will cooperate with you.

>>622457
... huh.

Alright then.

I don't think we're going to be persuading her to stop. You're gonna have to convince her to let you supervise.

That seems like a very reasonable motivation, and she seems genuinely invested to the point she might level out once she succeeds. Help her. She didn't have any strong, immediate objections to the conditions so it seems like this could work.

Smack her, then hug her, then tell her that if she fucks it up, you'll hunt her across the multiverse.

That should have her properly confused!

Polokoa 2015/03/23(Mon)01:03 No. 630428 ID: 6a263e
File 142709783440.png - (111.23KB , 600x600 , polokoaschoices1.png )

>So... Cuddle time?
>I think she needs a hug.
>Hug her
>Smack her, then hug her

Well… no, she doesn’t want a hug. I think she’s sensitive about seeming weak, now, after saying all that.

>Is that her emotional state affecting her perceptions, or is there something trying to sanitize our medical feeds?

>I’m afraid a lot of our sense of surface damage and flesh wounds is still based on data from Polokoa’s biological senses.
>We have heartbeat and body temperature and neurotransmitter monitors and all that, we can reliably tell if and where she’s injured, but when it comes to how much pain she’s feeling… well, she’s just gotten so good at ignoring it, you know? It’s hard to distinguish from her normal background damage.

>I don't think we're going to be persuading her to stop. You're gonna have to convince her to let you supervise.

I’m not sure I can even do that. I’m sensing some resentment.

She doesn’t seem to think my offer is any better than her original plan was. Not worse, either, but I don’t think that’s good enough for her. The pathological obsession with saving her family is one thing, and clearly the overwhelming first thing, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have other issues. She’s used to being in control; she probably had to spend a huge amount of effort to get that control, in the first place. The idea of giving it up is difficult for her. Which means I have to use force, after all.

Polokoa 2015/03/23(Mon)01:06 No. 630429 ID: 6a263e
File 142709796380.png - (211.92KB , 600x600 , polokoaschoices2.png )

If you could hack into her suit, defeat your counterpart and take control, then you could retrieve the information she just got off the elder machine and delete it from their system.

The first option for doing that would be for me to just jump her so you can get stuck in right away. While you do that, I’ll grab her and get us both out of here. You’re having to divert a lot of effort to keeping me going, I know, but you’ve been prepared for a contest like this. It would half be like the battles you had to deal with when you were created, and half digging through her mind while you follow her neural connections. It should be an even match.

>[Oh man, one of those dream metaphor mind journeys again?]
>[Those are always so weird and confusing! You never know what you’re supposed to be doing.]
>[Come on guys, it won’t be that bad. We’ll be meeting our own challenges, after all. Sort of.]

The second option would be to knock her around a bit so that her CAI has to deal with her injuries the way you’re doing mine. That’ll reclaim your advantage and then some, so you should be able to do your hacking with no problem. I’m in bad shape, but my suit is still fully charged, so she shouldn’t be a problem for me.

I really don’t want to have to fight her at all. If only I had something else to add, some extra persuasion that would overcome her pride, then…

>then we're going to cut the power to your super suit, leaving you to collapse under your own injuries before you can kill yourself. And leaving your crazy sister with a helpless family member she needs to save.

… That’s a third option. But I’d need to actually disable your aid, so that she would really have no choice but to bring me straight to my people herself. If you’re willing, and if you think it’s the best option… I’ll do it.

The time for talking is over. Tell me your decision.

Look at her. She's probably thinking the same thing you are. Makes sense, given how you're LITERALLY cut from the same cloning sources... whatever.

Figure out which choice will deal the least damage to the Elder Machine. It's possible that you can shut down your implant's extranet functions (increasing your defense against hacks), and knock her out while she's busy trying to dominate you.

What if you're both broken? Maybe you two need help, but from an insane psychiatrist who works on stabilizing minds rather than deprogramming them...

>>630429
1, because the elder machine wants a direct confrontation, and I do not want to give it the satisfaction. Also maybe you could figure out what makes her tick so that you can get her to let go of her pride, at least enough to get the ball rolling.

That third option sounds like just giving up. I mean, if we lose the fight via either method, isn't that what would happen?

You know the best way to know if a deal is decent is if you would take it yourself. Would you let her meddle in your affairs because she did not trust you?

So before anything else tell her this.

"You know what Rokolo I am being unreasonable. I am constantly surrounded by people who want me running there lives that when a equal comes along I stupidly treat them like one of my subjects."

"Here is a new deal for you if you will take it. I will help you with your project. Even if all that means is helping you get out of here and then waving goodbye as you head back to your dimension."

"I might dislike some of your methods but its not my job to judge you. So if you want my help you can have it. And if you do not I will help you leave. Maybe just stay a week so we can have send off party first."

"Just remember that if not for a bit of random luck today you would still be stuck in your dimension with no access to any other. I know you don't trust me and want to do this alone but is your pride worth the risk? If you keep going the way you have been you might get trapped by the time police again and never be able to finish your plan."


See if that gets to her and if not I would say cut life support and force her to bring us home. I know its not the best option but she is at full power while you are half dead already. All she has to do is draw out the fight by a minute and we would have to spend all our power just keeping you alive.

Also fighting here would just play into the elder gods plan. Trying to save everyone can only go so far. We have a responsibility to our people here. Trying to save random alternate dimension versions from getting molested by Rokolo is outside our jurisdiction.

...

If we purposefully disable you, that leaves Rokolo alone to do what she wills. Even if she does return you to your people, she's not going to stick around. We want her to stick around.

And I don't relish the idea of a CAI v CAI battle. It's possible they'll hit a vulnerable system that could kill you or something.

We might be able to talk them down - frankly a fellow CAI would be easier to deal with than either of you nitwits.

... No offense, mistress.

If we must fight, then you'll need to reach medical as soon as possible.

>some extra persuasion
You have a somewhat galactic empire, that might be worth it? You could offer your military/scientific resources to-

... wait, how do we know that the ship will come back from that time bubble thing?! We can't guarantee you'll have medical anywhere near you to access!

>It’s hard to distinguish from her normal background damage.
...I'm going to assume what we're picking up secondhand from Rokolo's empathy is more accurate, then, and start rounding up the damage estimates accordingly.

>If you could hack into her suit, defeat your counterpart and take control, then you could retrieve the information she just got off the elder machine and delete it from their system.
Let's be brutally honest here. Our counterpart is likely to be as competent as we are. A hacking fight between us would be a slugfest, decided by pure chance, and/or luck of which universe we managed to invent slightly better next-gen bio-computer / not-actually jetalium systems to host us. The element of surprise wouldn't even matter, because no matter which of you moves first, no matter how fast your reflexes are, that's still slow compared to processor cycles. The 'defending' CAI will not be surprised.

If you set us on each other the much more likely outcome, rather than a hacking victory for either side, is our two collectives meeting some kind of accord or compromise without either of you two getting to butt heads or veto as we do it. We'd go over your argumentative little bunny heads.

Additionally, in the unlikely event we don't bypass you two and reach our own compromise, and it comes to a strait hack fight, I give our alternates better odds. Rokolo's been on a relentless quest for improvement and resources. And they may have real-world experience fighting other alternate CAIs in their raids on other realities.

>what do
I still like option 3. We emotionally blackmail her- put her in a situation where she has no choice but to stick to her principles and try to save a family member. Force her to act, maybe force an epiphany.

Option 3. No amount of eleventh-hour violence, physical or computational, will change what kind of a person Rokolo is. Meanwhile, the sooner we shut down the CEP, the more time all those neumono on the surface will have to recover from it's effects and brace themselves for whatever seismic nonsense the elder machine's exit causes.

>>630803
Ooh. That's a good point. Keeping the suit on at this point means we're making the call to continue to keep all the neumono on this rock disabled- unable to evacuate, protect themselves, or participate in disaster relief.

That only makes sense if we're classifying Rokolo as a bigger threat to their safety than... everything else. And while she has the potential to be, I don't think she actually is, right now.

>>630948
Actually, it goes even further than that: the more damage Polokoa suffers right now, the longer it'll take her to fully recover, so the more strategic-scale messes there will need to be cleaned up during and after that recovery, Rokolo-related or otherwise.

Anybody remember that time Baron Wulfenbach got wounded at the Battle of Passholdt, and Castle Heterodyne woke up before he was out of the hospital? Or when the Jade Prison broke and the Scarlet Empress disappeared? Hypercompetent autocrat incapacitated + galaxy full of opportunistic weirdos + new disruptive threat => utter chaos.

Let's take the route which keeps that to a minimum.

I vote option 3. It feels like the most interesting and narratively satisfying ending, assuming Rokolo does cooperate.

No more talking! Take a third option!

ATTENTION: It turns out that figuring out what the suggesters are suggesting is harder than the author thought it would, for reasons that are his own fault. So he, that is I, am doing a poll to clear it up.

You can get the link (and discuss my failings) in the general Asteroid discussion thread: >>/questdis/90821

Polokoa 2015/06/11(Thu)21:58 No. 647936 ID: 1a7a01
File 143408513690.png - (167.54KB , 600x600 , hackstart1.png )

>We might be able to talk them down - frankly a fellow CAI would be easier to deal with than either of you nitwits.
>If you set us on each other the much more likely outcome, rather than a hacking victory for either side, is our two collectives meeting some kind of accord or compromise without either of you two getting to butt heads or veto as we do it.

… It isn’t what I think we should do. Too much trust in your alternate selves. Too dangerous, too risky. My gut tells me to be firm, to contain her, and fix all this… wrongness. I have to make it right.

But I always feel that, that I have to make everything right, all the time. The beating of my hearts is less constant than that feeling. I know it’s not natural, that I’m not right in my head. In my heart. Sometimes I have to struggle with myself, just to remember that.

That’s one reason I have you.

I trust you.

… I can’t hide my thoughts from her while I’m keeping the empathy generator active.

Polokoa 2015/06/11(Thu)21:59 No. 647937 ID: 1a7a01
File 143408518231.png - (171.37KB , 600x600 , hackstart2.png )

So I’ll fix that.

“… Hey. What are you-?”

Polokoa 2015/06/11(Thu)22:00 No. 647938 ID: 1a7a01
File 143408523924.png - (125.10KB , 600x600 , hackstart3.png )

Do what you think is best.

“Don’t turn off your suit here!! We have to get out!”

Polokoa 2015/06/11(Thu)22:01 No. 647939 ID: 1a7a01
File 143408527316.png - (113.76KB , 600x550 , hackstart4.png )

“I’m… pretty sure you were planning… to disable me, anyway.”

“I was going to steal your suit power, you idiot! Or get you to get us out first!”

“Just… use your dumb cards.”

“Urgh. Fine, since I have your permission. I hope you like being put in a coma, sister.”

“I’ve had practice. But… we’ll see.”

Good luck.

Polokoa 2015/06/11(Thu)22:01 No. 647940 ID: 1a7a01
File 143408531123.png - (84.29KB , 600x500 , hackstart5.png )

Network connection established! HARDWARE ERROR: bandwidth limitations detected. It is highly recommended that only one or two representatives be selected from the CAI ROSTER to coordinate efforts. While waiting, perhaps you’d like to select an AI lobby backdrop theme?

>>647940
Lobby theme... How about Knights of the Round Table?

>>647940
Transfer whatever spare dregs we can to the other suit before it goes entirely without killing Polokoa.

>lobby theme
TNG's observation lounge. That's where you do diplomacy and first contact and make plans for important missions in space, right?

>representatives
Alison and Arbiter?

mii plaza snoop mashup.

>>647977
Oh god. I just imagined a mii plaza where everyone is that one dancing snoop gif, and found it hilarious. Smoke weed e'rry day, bitches.

Maybe a nice picnic setting would make things cozy and pleasant. Put everyone at ease.

Board room would send an 'all about business' message instead.

>>647940
How about something resembling the set of a daytime TV talk show, perfect for when the crazy gets out.

Lets go for a MST3K theater so we can all sit in the front row and make jokes on the memories we pull up. What better way to bond than to have us all laugh at our partners embarrassing memories?

The War Room from Dr Strangelove.

CAI 2015/06/17(Wed)02:03 No. 649030 ID: 7450ea
File 143453180250.png - (107.68KB , 600x500 , PolokoaReps.png )

In hopes that diplomacy and appeal to better nature are the best paths to take, ALISON and ARBITER are selected as Polokoa’s CAI representatives.

The network lobby theme is set to KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE.

CAI 2015/06/17(Wed)02:04 No. 649031 ID: 7450ea
File 143453185359.gif - (79.14KB , 900x600 , knightslobbyP.gif )

>[Having chosen to join forces, the CAIs will now share in all actions and knowledge until their hosts are disconnected again. Thus, the adventure continues in the Rokolo Quest thread, with >>649028]