Page 65. Time to wrap up lunch.
I will be taking off next Monday’s update to visit some family and table at two conventions. First one is Artist Alley Comics Fest in Portland, OR on August 2 – map info here! The second is Autoptic in my hometown of Minneapolis, MN on August 8 and 9. Come see me if you’re a local!
OHS will return August 10!
Ahhhhh! What a twist! A gross, unforseen twist of events for poor Sulla, and Titus seems a little attached to the idea of Sulla’s dad. Still cool.
Knew it! Ahhhhhhh!!!
Interesting how Sulla is calling Al her dad. Wondering if she’s really starting to regard it as the truth and how she regards Brendan. In a sense they are both fathers—one by nature (or a human replicating of it) and one by nurture.
I think she’s talking about Brendan. Sulla’s aggreeing on the fact her dad is awesome, not that she’s meeting him at the library. Or at least, that’s how I read it.
… Wait, so that’s. that’s broth spilling over?
Looks like it. It’s possible her systems took the liquid and tried to process it as tears / moisture, but it simply couldn’t handle the condiments inside, and so… this happened.
That’s….quite some interesting internal piping
Interesting that she has a sense of taste. Why would she be equipped with that, if she only ever eats those cracker things?
Maybe it’s not so much taste as an ability to analyze the composition?
All the synthetics are based off of AL’s neurone simulator which was developed to sidestep having to understand intelligence before building an A.I. and instead just copy and simulate a working mind. When they tried to record the copy of Al that eventually became Sulla maybe it’s possible that included his sense of taste simply because at the time the system couldn’t filter it out from the rest of his mind.
So you get an intelligent android that knows what taste is but wanders around all day with numb tongue. All Brendan did was make an interface to a chemical sensor in her tongue. Maybe he didn’t even think of it. Maybe she just asked him one day why she couldn’t taste anything?
Makes me wonder if synthetics who’ve sent an arm off to the repair shop have to put up with phantom limb syndrome until it gets back?
i think the idea is that she doesn’t really have internal plumbing at all, at least, not that’s equipped for actual food. It may have immediately started leaking into her mechanical bits as soon as she swallowed it, meaning that she may have been putting herself at serious risk by eating it.
I’m not sure if Sulla can taste anything, or not.
I think, in Chapter 2, she makes coffee or tea, with lemons. But, her drinking coffee or tea doesn’t prove that she tastes the coffee.
I was worried about that, yeah (which is why I didn’t think it was actually going to be the broth…)
Titus “I can come in if you need me to” who is avoiding entering gendered public restrooms unless it’s REALLY IMPORTANT (I know that feel).
And yup, called it on the broth tears.
Yep. And the feeling of locking yourself away, crying, after trying to pretend to be something else for somebody you won’t let yourself admit you’re falling in love with. Know that feel too.
lots of feelings for this couple…
Oh cripes, I didn’t even notice that. Titus standing right between the two gendered bathrooms… stealth slap-in-the-face-with-symbolism panel.
It seems synthetic digestion technology still has a way to go. Until now, I was under the assumption that synthetics excrete stuff they don’t need through the usual exit. (Al asking, “Do robots crap?” and Sulla saying, “Not if you eat fructose.”) I didn’t think it would come unprocessed out of other orifices like this. And I wonder if Brendan is going to be upset that Sulla tried human food – maybe there are other side-effects even she doesn’t know about, considering she herself didn’t seem to anticipate broth coming out of her tear ducts.
Not to be vulgar, but:
Maybe it’s a [When I laugh, my milk shoots out of my nose]-type of problem.
Maybe, when AI(s) laugh, + eat, at the same time, their soup/food might shoot out of their eyelids.
Bleah. (…And now, back to the kid-friendly part of our program.) :D
For lack of a trendy way of saying this: I like this awkward sequence in Sulla’s day! It makes her a more of an empathetic person, in this story.
@superdaisy.
Oh boy! That sounds delicious. Sign me up for that, now! Hee hee hee.
: )
I know this is late in the story but is this story It’s own story or is it a part of something else? It’s just that everybody seems to know a lot more about this story than me.
There are 3 main characters in O Human Star… The comic is currently focused on Sulla but all three character’s stories are intertwined. When the comic is red, it’s a flashback. When it is blue, it is present day.
I recommend starting from the beginning and reading, but here’s a not so brief recap:
Alistair Sterling (Al) is a brilliant inventor in the field of robotics, and the fruits of his labor are responsible for the way things are currently. He tends to be kind of a loner and seems to hide behind a gruff exterior. He is gay, but seemingly in the closet. In the past, he had been in a relationship with Brendan but made Brendan swear to keep it a secret. They eventually formed a partnership and a business together. Something happened a long time ago, involving a fight between Brendan and Al, and shortly after, Al died. He lives on now as a robot. Nobody is sure who built the robotic Al, but it wasn’t Brendan.
Brendan Pinsky: Al’s longtime partner and lover, and Sulla’s father. He is suspicious of whoever built Al, and is doing detective work to figure it out. What makes things even more suspicious is that Brendan himself tried to bring Al back several times, only to meet with failure, but someone, somewhere has managed to do it. One such attempt to bring Al back was Sulla (note the similarities between Alistair and Sulla’s names…) who he has raised as a daughter. Lucille Santos is a close friend and is also the CEO of her own company. One suspect is a mysterious rival who we have not been given a name or face, but we know Brendan is distrustful of and intimidated by.
Sulla changed her gender at a young age to female, which suggests that her thoughts and feelings are much different than Alistair’s (who seemed to take offense at the idea that he might be secretly female.) She is home-schooled by Brendan, and wants to be with other kids her age. With a little encouragement from Al, she has befriended a quartet of girls from school. She and Titus (or Ty) have hit it off. The quartet does not seem to be aware that Sulla is an android. Sulla has yet to “come out” as an android, which resulted in some ambiguity when she ordered food from the restaurant (she did not specify that she wanted synth food, as regular food is bad for androids, and this may be why she is tearing up so much. It isn’t very clear.) Also, the quartet seems to believe that Al is her dad.
There are probably more details I missed that may become important later.
Even though this is old, I am rereading it again and thought I would toss out my two cents. I think she associates the taste to broth – which is salty, when in actuality, it is tears.