Comic 1112 - Talk to Mom's red
Posted on 30th Oct 2018, 2:39 AM
in Hope
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Author Notes:
You stick around to talk to Mom's red.
You ask the giant mouth on the wall how it travels through space.
"Are you inquiring about propulsion? It's not particularly complex. Well--it wasn't when the pilot had access to infinite mass. Action, reaction--material expelled with enough force will push one forward. In space, it takes surprisingly little to move, though reaching a speed I would consider efficient--or even escaping this planet's gravity, and breaking past the atmosphere--that requires a great deal of force. I imagine as I am now, my mass would diminish substantially reaching anywhere of note. Now that you've begun to tap into your own red in earnest, however... you do not have such things to concern yourself with. You can expel as much material as you desire, with as much force as you prefer."
...When the mouth says expel material, does it mean--
Fuse, having caught at least part of the conversation, fills in what you were thinking. "Like, blood rockets? You just shoot blood at some crazy velocity? Because that's... kinda cool, not gonna lie."
"It doesn't need to be blood, necessarily," the mouth clarifies. "Various gases can serve similar purpose."
Fuse gives the faintest hint of a sigh. "I'm glad everybody already went to bed, we'd spend the next ten minutes on that comment."
What about air?
"Air?" The enormous mouth doesn't actually move, but you could swear it smiles wider regardless. "Why do you require it? Energy for your human shape? Fuel, to construct new cells? To drive your primitive immune system? You can force your heart to pump its blood. You can will new cells into existence. You can command neurons to fire. You are reaching now the point where you should understand--oxygen, for you, is merely convenient. Breathing is a habit."
Well... your friends need oxygen still. You can't really control their bodies like you can your own, and if for... whatever reason you decide to make a meat ship, you need to be able to take other people.
"...I see," the mouth replies. It pauses, though you're not sure if it's thinking, or just giving you the chance to. Mom's red continues. "That is a dilemma. I have never needed to consider it."
You ask Mom's red if there's any tricks you haven't thought of--things your mom did that you haven't. Shooting blood out of a portal like a rocket blast is already new ground for you, surely there's others.
"For your mother, manipulation of the body was not merely a stack of tricks," the mouth replies. "It was nature. It was habit. She contorted the physical as easily as you take breaths. I struggle to think of anything in specific you haven't achieved yet, in terms of what she was capable of... but I may simply be absented minded regarding her feats, having taken them for granted. She could do it all so... casually."
You ask why humans get a little crazy when they're in the red.
"The human mind fights to comprehend the experience," responds the mouth. "Actual infinity. That concept alone is an impressive one to grasp for those that have known only limits their entire existence. Time, space, weight... these are ideas adjacent to the red, achievable and tangible within it, but not necessary components. They are foreign imports, dirty tracks left by careless boots as one walks through the door--they are not native to it. Moments can be eternity. Eternity can be moments. It can be subjective and vary on a whim. Imagine: watching in minutes as another lives through years. Manipulating time and space in the red requires... hm. This tongue, your language lacks sufficient words for it. I can only recommend practice. Experience."
So, wait--if you can mess with time, does that mean you can travel backw--
"I advise strongly against it," the mouth interjects... and very quickly. "I advise against even considering it too heavily. There are no hard rules against it in the red. Here, on this plane? It is a very different matter. There are... obstacles, to emerging from the red backwards from when you entered it. There are... forces. Things you do not want to draw even a glance from."
You ask if portals can be opened from inside of the red, to places that don't currently have your blood on the outside.
"You can open a doorway to where blood will be, but is not yet," the mouth replies. "I advise strongly against it."
You ask if blood HAS to be in some kind of container, or if that's just some personal limit you have.
"What is a container?," the mouth asks. "What does it mean to be inside? It is a real limit, a tangible 'rule' as much as such a thing can exist." This time, you're positive the mouth smiles wider. "Your mother did have a fondness for bending rules."
Lastly, you go to ask your own red about manifestation--does... she WANT to be manifested?
"Oh, yeah," Fuse remarks, looking up from the computer screen. "That's still happening."
"I don't like it any better than you do," Red sort of huffs. "This should be getting better by now."
You hear Tesla stifle a giggle. Up until this point, they've been quietly whispering to each other--however, this seems to have gotten their attention. Faraday waves. ...At Red. "Hello! I'm Faraday."
She gives Tesla a small nudge. Tesla takes a moment to work up her courage. "M-my name's... Tesla. Y... you have the same kind of flower I do."
There's a very long pause all throughout the room.
"I have... no explanation for that," Red finally remarks.
"Okay, yeah--that's weird," agrees Fuse. "You girls can see her?"
Tesla and Faraday nod with varying enthusiasm.
"You are splitting your electrical signals," Mom's red states. "It is... very faint, but definite. I suspect conventional humans are ill equipped to perceive it."
"...But ghosts totally can," Fuse adds, shrugging his shoulders. "Alright."
"What do you mean, splitting the signals?," Red asks.
The mouth does not reply.
"Big Red did say it was faint," Fuse finally replies. "Maybe that means he can't hear you. He just... knows you're here."
"Why are we splitting signals?!," Red asks more vehemently, this time to no one in particular.
It... probably has something to do with your adventure as a ghost, and having your imprint reinforced or... whatever all that did.
"Or Red having to take over as your brain for a while," Fuse suggests. "She was kind of stuck in your body for... a long-ish time. Maybe you're starting to dedicate... synapses to her. Or something."
"So what, I'm turning into a ghost?," Red protests.
"I dunno," Fuse shrugs. "Look, I'm not Dr. Finch. I'm just spitballing here. Wait--" Fuse looks up at the giant mouth on the wall. "You said you can detect her, faintly--can you like, feel ghosts? Do you know how helpful that would have been if you'd mentioned that sooner?"
The mouth could see you when you were astral projecting, if you recall correctly. Mom's red, at the time, said you were 'difficult to spot' but strong enough to be sensed.
"I do not discern differences in electricity very astutely," the mouth replies. "I'm familiar with Mine's presence by now, moreso now that I've witnessed it free of the body. Her journey about the room as independent electricity, a few days ago, was... a learning experience. I have a keener eye for her energy now."
"You don't have proper eyes, though?," Faraday remarks.
"I'm supposed to be a psychological aspect," Red states. "Not a ghost!"
"It's not so bad," Faraday replies. "I rather like it."
Also, Big Red has given us a lot of food for thought. Perhaps we need to meditate upon the nature of containers. What *is* a container, really? What if we *imagine* a container around something? If we visualize it hard enough, doesn't it exist in some sense of the word? Or if not, the vent back in the hospital was a container despite being made of multiple pieces... what if *air* could be a container despite being made of many molecules?
We got infinite blood tho.
...Have her other aspects become imprints as well? Maybe we could manifest Child-Mine to hang out with the girls (and see if Edison might be caught off-guard enough to reach her), or have group self-hugs at will, or let Fuse take a look at Visor-Mine to show him what a bad influence he is on us.
Maybe we can try talking to Science-Mine, just to see if it works.
When a liquid enters a container, it finds the edges toward gravity, but does not expand to fill all the available space (particularly upward). Thus, a container controls how far down a liquid can go, and how far it can expand laterally. If a container is tall enough, or wide enough, the liquid is insufficient to escape without an outside force disturbing the container. If a container has a lid, the liquid has an even harder time escaping.
Gases expand to fill all available space. That's why you can't force them to stay in an open container, only a sealed one. But gaseous dynamics are not really the issue here.
The blood's closest comparison is liquid. So I would say that the only components necessary are: a) a barrier toward gravity, b) sufficient width, c) sufficient height. B and C we can sum up as "the container must have enough physical space" or "must be composed of enough physical space." This covers the vent issue. However, I'm stumped as to the applications involving gravity.
No idea if Mine could wrap her head around the concept to use it despite that.
If she can abstractly perceive, or incorrectly believe that the atmosphere is a container, then that'd work. That's been eluded to in previous pages.
Tesla, Edison, and Faraday are all ghosts of the same person, and yet are very different people nonetheless. Is this because of their different experiences as ghosts, or because they come from different parts of their original mind?
And, again, ghosts don't *have* to form after their originator's death, it's just most commonly that way.
Does Red to be a ghost? She's not "supposed" to be one, debatably. But does she *want* to be one?
On a separate note we should ask if giving information to a version of you that traveled through the red in the past is possible, and if so how dangerous it is.
Hey Red if you're an aspect of our personality why are you freaking out about this when we're perfectly calm?
Of course, it could be that Red is a lot more herself than she thinks, and she just doesn't realize it yet.
Well, let's put it this way. Most of us don't know and can't, what that energy is. Those of us who get close to knowing can only describe it as an attribute. A variable. Like your height, or the brightness of a bulb. But of what? Nothing. Down on that scale, attributes are of themselves; everything is numbers. What does it mean for the strings of energy to vibrate? Same problem. Vibration is a characteristic of the strings, in as much as your heart is beating, your lungs are respirating, and your tongue is in a particular position in your mouth at this moment. They are strings, made of energy, and they vibrate. That is all.
So why does anything in the universe act the way it does? Well, put simply, because it does. The slightly more enigmatic answer is "Chaos." The closest thing to a god in my life.
My reasoning was we could give Mini-Mine to Red by way of externalising it into Mini-Mine's body.
Now this seems to be even easier.
Just have Red possess the body in the same way Ghost-Mine got back into her body when astralprojecting.
It would sure be nice to let them "Live" again after all they have been through...
Feel free to tell me whether I missed the potential of this.
Yes, it is clever to communicate with dead-drops within the Red, as that avoids the danger of -opening- a blood portal into the past or future...
But how much does such an information transfer count towards generating an attention-grabbing causality violation?
The Error Room seems to imply that atemporal information transfer is permissible under atemporal conditions, and the Tradesmen and Library have both displayed that their own future-sight capabilities are acceptable under the current universal paradigms, but the power of the Red is under -much- more scrutiny by the Forces Above who govern time-space, due to the currently ongoing, officially sanctioned, divine betting pool oriented around Mine's factual status as the propagator of the next First Womb universal recycling.
Actually scratch all that, there is a much bigger problem that will hit us first: every reply Mine could get at the in-red dead-drop could come from the -wrong- future self! The Red is true infinite, and possesses chronicity only as a psychic byproduct of life itself, which means the communication range is also infinite, across all timelines!
ow can Mine control for this infinite noise-to-signal ratio to identify useful communications?!
Though we should be able to slow or accelerate time forwards without penalty.
...is that Morgenstern has a unique talent for taking cool, weird, or already scary things, and making them blood-curdlingly, pants-shittingly, god-awfully more terrifying than they ever were before.
Finch has an experiment it will take months to complete Mine opens a portal to said area of the red and sends Finch inside a second later Finch comes out and say he finished his experiment technically Finch didn't time travel
or to say this plainly the Red could act as a Room of Spirit and Time(Hyperbolic Time Chamber) if conditions were met, couldn't it?
Then get a long enough rope, loop it around the driveshaft of a generator, lower one end until it comes from the ceiling, tie both ends together, then drop the rope. Bam, figure-8 of rope generating electricity.
A raindrop falls at about 20 meters per second, so the loop is at least 50 meters (2.5 seconds) which is a non-trivial vertical distance.
This has it's most relevant application in the issue of Knox - if this is possible his situation goes from 'screwed' to 'maybe possible'... though it is effectively reviving a dead person - not sure on the moral implications.
He did seem to be MacLand's favorite, so he may have been privy to even more of the depraved stuff than Caius got the opportunity to 'enjoy', but I believe the point still stands.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth
Reaction mass is easy too. Build a "tiny" winged thruster golem, change the mass to use gravitational forces and accelleration efficiently. Blood portal when it gets there. At lest for Mine that works well. Having the fuel in a separate set of physical rules instead of boosted along helps greatly. Realize most of a rocket is made up of fuel on the launchpad, which is expended quickly.
Why is "infinity" psycologically crushing? Look at the sky, moreso at night. Create a finite space that connects to a finite space and a finite space. In effect shield travellers from the raw red.
... Don't put your pinky finger in there, I know what you're trying to do. It always ends in blood.
1) Gathering information from other time periods and using it to base our actions on is *still modifying the timeline via time travel,* even if it's not doing it directly.
2) Given the whole quantum mechanics "observing something changes it" thing, it's entirely possible that merely *looking* through time would constitute time meddling even if we instantly forgot whatever we saw-- the mere act of observation would change things.
3) If Big Red says that even *thinking* about timeline meddling is dangerous, that means we should be really, REALLY cautious.
4) Once the Hounds of Tindalos start pursuing you, they never stop.
That said, a Hyperbolic Time Chamber in the red *might* be a feasible pursuit. I think it's at least safe to ask Big Red about that one, because it involves compression/expansion of time but not alteration of the order of events.
Anything that involves actually interacting with events that already have happened or will happen but haven't yet, even if the interaction is just observation, is where we might get the attention of angry time gods.
We should give Chell a call.
Must be careful not to contact GLaDOS instead.
I really want to know what comes out
If so maybe do the ghost ritual and stick your ghost head through the bunker c door to see what on the other side but that may be dangerous because the tradesmen said both your body and ghost would be vulnerable during the ritual and if he'll is really on the other side of that door you don't really want to stick your head through it as a ghost
Seems like a LOT healthier version of what Thale does. He has multiple bodies at the same time, but they're all so synced they remove any signs of personality (including his own). Mine's first one here, is more like a budding of personality because she has too much energy and not enough physical presence going on to express it all.