9/4/17 UPDATE: O Human Star is taking a brief hiatus while I finish some projects with tight deadlines. Apologies for the lack of advance notice, but stuff piled up and I decided it would be better for the next few pages if I took a little extra time on them. I plan to resume updates on Monday the 11th – thanks for your patience!
Page 44. Study project.
One more reminder: I will be traveling to Boise, Idaho to be a exhibitors at Library Comic Con from August 26 – 27. I’ll have OHS Volumes 1 and 2, and a minicomic version of an OHS side story I drew for an anthology last year. Come say hi!
Hey, just thought I’d let you know that this page isn’t showing up on the front/home page of the site. I only saw it today because I was reading through the archives and it showed up when I hit next. You can’t get here from the front page, you have to go into the archives and go from page 43 to 44 that way.
Really love this comic, by the way!
Gimmel again, looking thoughtful, always present, silent, helpful. So helpful. So, so, so helpful………….
Is Gimel… reading? Goodness!
(Now I’m wondering – since this seems to confirm Sulla can absorb and retain information with much greater ease than her human peers, how would synthetic folks integrate into a school system designed for humans? Maybe they’d just study on their own separately and socialize another time?)
Ahhh… This brings me warm fuzzies as a homeschooling parent.
Its a bit sad realizing Sulla was the one who brought up flying when flying is the thing that gives her away as a synthetic later. Also I’ve been wondering for a while, but it seems like Brendan just called her Buddy back then?
Wow! Good catch. I hope she is going to be okay when we catch back up to her in the future. In a sense, her “coming out” could be a wonderful thing for the synthetic community and the humans who become synthetic (like Al—I bet he’s not the only one).
Bren calling her Buddy is probably a term of endearment. I call my kiddo lots of things other than her name.
I get the feeling that she had a different name back in the day (maybe a play on ‘Alastair’?) but that the author is eager to avoid handing anyone opportunities to deadname a trans character. (For various reasons, I don’t read Questionable Content anymore, but it reminds me of how Jeph Jacques refused to say one way or the other whether Claire had had bottom surgery. Nice to see authors being awesome about trans issues even around fictional trans people. Especially since characters can’t consent.)
This scene warms my homeschooling parent heart. :) It seems Brendan is what we’d call an “unschooler” or a “child-led” homeschooler. I love how he lets her lead her own projects/education, but also sets boundaries and still teaches her at the same time while learning with her. It’s a big part of why I love homeschooling my child and why we homeschool to begin with. She’s several grades ahead for her age in math and reading, but still very much a little girl.
Yes, but he probably has no option. He is raising a boy that doesn’t exist under the law and probably can’t fully pass for human yet (let’s remember he’s still developing “Buddy’s” limbs and body parts), and the fact this boy is not human is probably unknown to everyone yet. He didn’t reveal this even to Lucille AFAIK.
It would be very interesting to see how Buddy/Sulla’s existence is finally revealed to the world (or was it what happened last time we saw her?), but I imagine that Brendan is also growing his company producing advanced robots that would change people’s perception (and laws) related ro synthetic intelligence in the meantime.
I always thought Sulla was ashamed to be revealed as a robot in front of her friends that thought she was human because of the mere desire to fit, but that the existence of synthetic humans was already known in the open world, including their legal implications (given robots are referred as having rights in the the future). I’m rethinking it now.
Reading this, I have this twist idea where Sulla is the one who put Alastair together.
That’s one of the big theories going around—or another AI may be responsible.
Potential spoiler –
I suspect Al did it himself or somehow Lucille was involved. It felt like the scene with Brendan seeing the simulation of Al’s face (with Lucille behaving like she had no idea it was there) was foreshadowing. If Lucille truly wasn’t responsible for that simulation, the individual who responsible for Al’s AI rebirth probably was.
I am reminded in the old 1970s novel “The Adolescence of P1”, where a self-aware program explains to its creator that it now “reads everything”, and means all computer-typeset text.
The adolescence of P1 is one of my old favorite books. Not sure, but there may have been a low budget (crappy) movie version of that years ago…
Met you in Boise today, Blue. I just binge-read your story, and I loved it! Looking forward to more, thank you!
Awww, so heartwarming and adorable watching Sulla.
“The best articles about that explosion!” I love Sulla so… much…
Binging through to here, I’m now wondering if Gimel is the one behind bringing AL back. =o