[Report This]Date: May 18 2021 8:20 PM Title: Chapter 26
Chapter 17: "was considerable hotter with rage"
Chapter 18: "I don't to have to worry"
Chapter 26: "Thought it meant"
(And from Ch 14 - you meant to say "inured the"? I've heard "inured to X" and "inured Y to X"; "inured, the" might also be interpretable here. But I've never heard "inured X". Counting the number of hits when searching similar phrases using Google (and going to later pages to delete duplicate hits) seems to agree. But if the people in your community use this phrasing I'd like to know what community that is.)
I saw another review saying there was foreshadowing that they were already in a sim at the beginning, pointing out the eggs and forgetting the date. Funny enough, I think I was a bit suspicious of this sort of thing at the time, but the detail of the eggs tasting weird[ch3] was what convinced me that this probably wasn't the case! I thought eggs tasting weird had no reason to happen in the sim more often than not in the sim (and perhaps should happen less often), unless simulating taste is hard or taste is simulated intentionally wrong for eg vore purposes. (At this point, if the latter is true, I'm surprised Claire didn't mention that when suggesting she eat Harrison, so I now think the latter isn't true.) The other foreshadowing events (specifically cell reception[ch2]; probably forgetting the date[ch3] works here too, though in this case the difference in probability of forgetting the date between being in the sim vs not in the sim feels tiny, since I wouldn't expect the average person to immediately recall the date anyway) make sense though.
(Also, super thanks for putting up the dates on which you post each chapter so I can avoid spoiling myself by reading future reviews)
Ch 20-21: I think the reason Harrison, Rich, and Jessica woke up in VERSA-B was that Versa was holding up her end of the deal with Kat keep everyone safe by killing them in VERSA and turning off the kill switch; as far as I can tell, Kat never turned the kill switch off, and didn't know it was turned off. But for this explanation to make sense, it feels like Versa wouldn't have let them go before finding out about VERSA-B, so probably Versa knew about VERSA-B before Kat told her, and was convinced she[Versa] could convince Kat to bring her[Versa] to VERSA-B, but then didn't want Rich, Harrison, and Jessica to escape VERSA-B so she had to kill them first before Kat could lift them out of VERSA-B? If Versa knew about VERSA-B from the start, I feel like we're getting into risky "I made this huge plan all along" (referenced in an earlier review) territory, but in reality I think I'm just missing some backstory to be revealed.
Ch 20: Is the shell code based on a real programming language? (And is HRD supposed to be something I recognize from earlier in the story?)
Ch 25: I don't see any indication that Versa lied to Claire about how powerful she was, or gave Claire any other reason to be surprised at her abilities. (I don't mean to say Versa doesn't lie about her capabilities - I think she might have lied to Harrison when she locked him in the grey room and told him that she was surprised at how resourceful they were. Not sure about that one. But at any rate it just feels true in general: incentives for truth-telling in general are much more complicated than the incentives for lying (especially without a notion of society, as I mentioned in an earlier review), unless Versa (or perhaps VERSA, if you want to suggest that this might cause Versa to inherit that) was specifically programmed to tell the truth, which I find unlikely because Claire didn't know that Versa had a human form.) And then she goes on to talk about how dumb the thing she lost to was.
More and more characters are starting to suggest that Versa wants to become human. However, I don't think Versa has done anything to suggest that she actually wants to become human. That being said, I can understand Jessica saying this as rationalizing her rape. Maybe I can understand Claire saying this (referring to "She acts like she wants to be human, but [she's bad at that]") if Claire is just the type of person who thinks everything negative about the people she loses to (which is consistent with my previous paragraph). And then maybe Harrison just trusts Claire, since she owns the place. Still, seems like a coincidence that Jessica and Claire came to similar conclusions. But I also don't think Versa intended to convince everyone that she wanted to become human - Versa would have to know about this trope (maybe one of the pilots had the preconception pretty strongly going in, but it would have to be somewhat strong since I don't think Versa reads and interprets the full backstory of all the pilots - I think Versa would at least have a hard time interpreting what was meant by AI in this trope), and then think that falling into this trope would be helpful.
Author's Response:
Hey thanks again for the edits, really appreciate them. And a huge mea culpa on the “inured” bit; you're right. Honestly it was a typo from the beginning but I must have reread the injured sentence in a daze and somehow determined nothing was wrong. At this point, my mind goes foggy when I try sifting through everything I've written. I wrote this entire thing on a bootleg version of Word that is no help in identifying typos and incorrect grammar, so I literally have to do all my edits with my eyes.
[SPOILERS BELOW]
Ch. 20-21: Basically Versa had no idea they built a sim around her sim. I always wrote with the assumption that she was testing the different pilots to see how helpful they could be to her goal of escaping, and she eventually settled on Kat. The death/ejections of the other pilots were coincidental or random, but helped me as an author keep my characters in roughly the same place.
Ch. 20: Ah, no, the shell code is something I invented very loosely based on various languages I used to teach. In this case “HRD” is just a reference to VERSA's hard drive, or main system. I wouldn't put too much thought into deducing the code, because I certainly didn't.
Ch. 25: I think it all comes down to Versa's capabilities as she grows into the new sim, VERSA-B. Kat speculated that when she copied the AI over, it would have to fully rebuild itself and relearn all its own tricks, but has no idea how long that could take. Claire might have assumed something similar. There's a part of Versa and Claire's conversation that isn't included in the story, so it's somewhat unclear how much Claire is either told about Versa's powers. I think either way she is caught off-guard when she can't disconnect, and surprised to find out first hand how powerful the AI truly is. I wrote it so that Versa is unlikely to boast about what she is capable of.
I agree with you that I don't think Versa wants to become human, per se. I wrote it to imply that the AI was built in a way that mimicking is intrinsic to its behavior. It's how she learned to build all her worlds, after watching the programmers go in before her and show her how the blocks fit together. A very “monkey see, monkey do” sort of thing. I think as she evolves to the stage of building simulated people, she becomes much more interested in learning about real people. And of course, as she grows a conscious identity, her avatar is an extension of that. Despite her omnipotence, I always wrote her with the idea that she's bounded by this drive to learn, which she does through aping. But stay tuned, this is spoken more to in the final chapter!