Christmas in the Far Out There Universe – page 24
Far Out There: the webcomic where major characters have parents who are never seen beyond communication devices!
I was going to tease some other stuff about Ichabod’s parents and girlfriends… but it’s 5:30am, Christmas Eve, and I haven’t wrapped a single present yet. Gotta go!
(Historical Notes: I was in such a hurry to finish this update that I accidentally wrote “girlfriends” plural when Ichabod very much absolutely only has one girlfriend.)
It’s easy to forget that Ichabod has parents. Well, more that he has parents that are likely still alive, as all human characters theoretically have had parents at some point, but still.
Yeah, I try to keep Ichabod’s pre-Nitpicking past really hazy and vague, so I can throw in whatever random reference I feel like. That does have the unfortunate side-effect of making things like his family really difficult to show.
Remember, it’s the ultra-distant future. It’s highly likely there are some humans who never had parents, at least in any sense meaningful to us. Manufacture an artificial cell, assemble a DNA code from a library of parts, and incubate it in the ever-popular Mad Scientst’s Giant Vat and you’ve got yourself a perfectly good parentless human. In fact, unless proven otherwise, I’m assuming that’s how Stilez got created. and possibly Tax also. It fits in with the maybe-canonical-and-maybe-not-canonical vote incentive that depicted the dozens of proto-Stilezes in cryostorage. You program your artificial DNA code, run the program in the Vat to produce a Stilez, fix the bugs, and re-run again for the next Stilez, and repeat. I think they may have let the beta version escape, though, there’s still a few bugs.
That wouldn’t be all that common, though. Too expensive for too little payoff. Anyone who does it is likely trying to make Soldiers (probably Super Soldiers, which is what I suspect is the explanation for Stilez, she broke free and trashed the place that made her to the point where they need a literal generation before they can attempt to start again, if they even survived the reason why they were trying to make super soldiers), or trying to make themselves children without the dangers of childbirth, in which case they have parents.
True, but Mad Scientists often do things that are expensive with little or no payoff for reasons not discernible to the more sane. And the FOT universe seems to have a surplus of Mad Scientists.
It’s actually kind of surprising that there aren’t even more Stilez-like dangerous creations roaming loose. Or maybe there are and we just haven’t heard of them. The Universe is (supposedly) a big place. Ichabod did introduce her waaaaay back on page 71 as “one of the single most dangerous humanoid creatures alive today” which implies that there are at least some number of others on a par with her.
Yeah, but creating a person is a big responsibility. You have to care for them, teach them how to speak, how to clean up after themselves and how to use the toilet, eugh. And that’s ignoring all the human interaction it requires. There’s a reason why Avatar was only created with a set reason before being kicked out an airlock, and why, despite there being thousands of robots at the Mad Scientist Convention, there were only a few Zombies. Honestly, it’s just easier to make a doomsday device and either use it, set it in a corner to forget about and accidentally activate months/years later, or make anything else that could be half-completed before either being worked into an even grander invention, or activating prematurely and requiring the crafter to move out of their home for a period of time until everything get’s fixed for them.
Please note, most of this post is spoken as if on behalf of an imaginary Mad Scientist who’s opinions match what was said. It may not match what Blitz considers cannon, but could be used as an excuse to have minimal non-humans despite the high Mad Scientist Count in the Far Out There Universe.
Meh, I figure you just dump the extra babies into some underground bunker (everybody’s got tons of those all over the place, right?) and toss a few discount Nannybots in there with them to raise them, maybe hire some shady organization to monitor the thing to make sure it keeps running and not ask any questions, and in a decade or two they come out programmed for whatever sinister mission you might have had in mind. Pretty low maintenance, really. Just don’t forget about them entirely, or who knows where they might end up!
*regarding Avatar, my impression was that they “obtained” an existing regular 10-ish year old kid, presumably off of Space-Craigslist or wherever, and retrofitted her with the invulnerability/megamemory package, rather than creating her from scratch. Way more convenient, and faster, than building from scratch.
There is a REASON why Trigger was given to others to raise, Ed8, even given his shady mission and the Nannybots, and that cost money, something many Mad Scientists don’t have to spend on anything beyond their creations and experiments. Hell, the average Mad Scientist probably doesn’t have more than a single lair, and if they have a spare underground bunker, why would they waste it on using the space to raise some kid they made as an experiment and have no real use for?
And I have the same impression about Avatar’s Source Body (though they may not have been 10-ish, as their body was basically rebuilt from scratch, and the invulnerability/ immortality/ deep space survival/ megamemory packages may have required compression of her existing body, which would explain why her only set of invulnerable clothes is significantly too large for her. Then again, she WAS rebuilt by Mad Scientists, they could have just bought/made the clothes big enough to fit anyone they had a chance of catching, and gave it to whoever arrived, regardless of their real size).
The thing is, that actually reinforces my argument. Even the group of Mad Scientists who decided to create an indestructible super-memory storage designed to know everything, ever, didn’t bother to start from scratch to make the best one they could, they just stole a kid and modified them to fit their desires. You really think that no one there would have ever had the thought to make someone from scratch, just because they could? It’s just too slow, too expensive, and too annoying for the average FOT Mad Scientist to bother with for any reason beyond “my partner wanted kids, and I am not going to be upsetting them under ANY circumstances”.
Whoa, boy, that’s a wall of text (for comments on this site) right there. Time to do some editing to make it more manageable to read.
Oh, there are SO many things I can’t say one way or the other for fear of spoilers…