An Avatar Christmas – page 22
Okay, this one didn’t come together the way I’d hoped at all, and trying to explain the thought process is NOT going to be easy. If you’ve listened to the various Character Soundtracks I’ve posted on Patreon, you’ll know that The Kid’s music of choice is a weird mix of Ambient and Jazz, sort of like a detective story set in a fairytale. It always give me a mental image of a sort of Film Noir cityscape, except the buildings are way more ornate and old-fashioned, like old Greek and Roman ruins but with fire escapes and power lines all over them. I figure that’s what… wherever The Kid comes from looks like. The problem, obviously, is that’s exactly the kind of architecture I’m NOT good at drawing… thus my attempt at realizing this mental image not only didn’t turn out how I wanted, but it ALSO greatly drifted away from the planned page layout in the process, to the point that most of the web of fire escapes I’d spent so much time on just got covered up by the characters. Oh well. That’s what first tries are for, right?
And speaking of soundtracks on Patreon, the last of the Christmas playlists is now up! If I’ve timed this properly, there should ALSO be a sort of index page either already up or set to go up later today, which should make it a lot easier to browse through all this content. And what’s more, that’s still TECHNICALLY not all the Far Out There stuff going up this month! …though it is the last of the free stuff. Hey, I gotta give SOME kind of exclusive content to the paying customers, right? So keep an eye out for that!
This is one of the universe’s inverseverse. Specifically, it’s a colour inverseverse, where everything about the universe is relatively the same, but the colours are inversed. There’s also a whole bunch of surprisingly useful and oddly niche characteristics to the local physics that do affect the main universe in ways that can only be abused by some unusual individual’s like The Kid.
In short, this is the Inverseverse, and is one of the ways/reasons that ESP, more commonly known as Psychic Powers and more correctly known as Extra Sensory Perception Abilities, actually works.
Avatar, as to the reason why you don’t know about it is simply because it doesn’t count as a part of the universe due to a technicality, so the Mad Scientists who put all of the universe’s knowledge into you didn’t include it. Also, they were upset that they couldn’t directly observe any of the Inverseverse’s, and they each tends to break one major rule of physics in a way that crosses across universes, so including them would have been… problematic. Thus they just decided to snub their entire existance by ignoring them.
*totally writes down the word “Inverseverse” for future use*
While we say colloquially that she knows “everything”, of course that’s not really true. Obviously, for one, she was denied any knowledge of her own origin, nor any other knowledge that might lead to that knowledge. Aside from that, she would know everything that was public knowledge on the Spacenet at the time hundreds (?) of years ago she was programmed, plus every secret knowledge at that time ’cause the Mads hacked all those encypted government databases and so forth. Fast forward to when the Cap’n picks her up, she downloads any new publicly available knowledge, but would not have access to most secret knowledge. (Her computer brain probably has a constant direct link and crawls the web 24/7 for new info like a far more adorable and far less creepy/malevolent version of Google.) In any case, she would not have any secret knowledge not electronically recorded. For example, someone somewhere knows what happned to Princess Rheiko, but she wouldn’t know it. Though she would know EVERY conspiracty theory avout it on the ‘net. Unfortunately.
The Inverseverse may have been discovered (or created) in secret some time after her own creation, and the small Cabal of “Technomage-like” folks who have access to it do not record anything electronically. so completely unknown to her. (alternate, the Inverseverse not being part of the universe, the Mads who were part of the Cabal and knew about it simply decided it was not knowledge of the universe that needed to be preserved by her, as Darius proposed. Or partially both. Mads love exposing others secrets but are rather protective of their own. ie Kittens)
In any case: The important point here being that the Mads programmed her with an unquenchable thirst for new knowledge, so that she could preserve it all after the universe goes kaput, so showing her this is pretty much THE MOST AWESOME PRESNT SHE COULD EVER GET! An entire additional new universe of stuff to know, even if it is a small pocket universe or something like that. The answer to the question of what do you get for Christmas for the girl who knows everything and needs nothing: A New Entire Universe! Merry Christmas, Avatar! 😀
(Ichabod probably called in a favor because he filled in for the Kid on an assignment or something – it’s not like the Cabal would allow the Inverseverse to be revealed to just anyone on whim.)
There is a bit of a mistake with this ramble. Namely, Avatar was never intended to know EVERYTHING in the universe, but instead ALL INFORMATION in the universe. Basically, she doesn’t need to know absolutely everything, she just needs to know all mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, history (specifically, general, political, interesting facts and disasters), accounting, engineering… basically all the knowledge and principals that would be useful in designing a universe from scratch after this universe is destroyed, and everything relevant to how people actually live.
Specific details which can’t possibly be relevant in a new universe, such as who Avatar was before she was transformed, the names of specific musicians and artists who’s minor political actions might have been seen as important a couple hundred years after their death but is considered irrelevant 10,000 years after, and so forth. Leonardo a Vinci, for example, wouldn’t be included, because he honestly had no real lasting impact and is only known because of the art world’s fascination with the Mona Lisa. That’s completely irrelevant to a new universe, so wouldn’t be something Avatar needed to learn before being blasted out into space. Though it’s possible that she learnt about it after being picked up by Cap’n Crosby.
TL’DR: Avatar was never given all knowledge, instead only receiving the “important knowledge for the new universe”, as determined by the Mad Scientists who kicked her into outer space, and anything else she knows is from her own study after being picked up by the Cap’n.
Hmmm…I think the spam filter swallowed up my long rambling response 🙁
Whoops! Sorry about that!