A Mad Tea-Party 255
Chapter: > Part Six
I promised I wouldn’t miss any more updates of this comic until it’s done, and I meant it. 😉
Character motivation is very important to a story. More than once I’ve found a well-developed character steering a story of mine in a direction I never intended. Zeus, here, is caught in the original plan I had for the Vourasq War nine years ago. He’s trying to play out a Japanese sci-fi anime in which, despite great loss and devastation, the two sides in a great clash of civilizations find they have hope of resolving their differences and finding peace after all.
Althea, on the other hand, seems to be playing out a very different movie indeed.
Zeus’ idea, of course, is the most plausible. Althea acted strategically, but it wouldn’t solve the inevitable problem. Zeus is thinking long-term, something I find admirable. He needs to be in charge!
Not necessarily. The brain-bot already reported a shift in the Vourasq program priorities that provides reasonable doubt that the Vourasq defenders would bother returning to this sector of space. Assuming a logical (vengeance is not logical by any estimation) response to the lost BB, the other BBs would most likely assume the best means of fulfilling their (updated) mission would be to avoid the problem space.
Since the brain-bots have been known to show vengeance over fallen comrades, it would be quite possible they’d return some time to settle the score; unless popular opinion changes once again.
I’m going to have to leave this one as a mystery! I don’t know what the other brain-bots do after this, if indeed they do anything. Nothing happens along these lines by the time this story ends, but that’s all I know.
I have a technicality…the Brain-bot was not acting out of vengeance, since that would suggest that the sub-bots were separate entities. The instantaneous death of the sub-bots (even anthills take some time to die out after the queen dies) suggest that they were merely extensions of the central brain-bot, much like fingers or hands.
Maybe. In which case, only one entity has actually died, though it might still be understandable why it was upset- losing fingers might not be fun.
This assumes, of course, that the characters’ perception of what’s happened, and our understanding of their perception, are accurate.
That was sort of my point. The brain-Bot didn’t act out of vengeance, but out of response to an immediate threat to its “body”.