Author notes

141 - Job Opening

El Cid

on Jan. 14, 2017

Another bit of totally-not-Star Wars-related raunchiness, this time just because.

REFERENCES

Nefertiti and Hatshepsut were both prominent female figures from ancient Egypt, Nefertiti a queen (wife of Akhenaten) and Hatshepsut the second historically confirmed female pharaoh, after Sobekneferu.

RANDOM EGYPT FACTOID

Did you know King Tut was mummified with an erect penis? Standing tall for over 3300 years, that has to be the longest held erection in history.





A small query, regarding a possible worldbuilding-related plot hole:

QUESTION
As far as we can tell, these people live in a world where basically everybody has the ability to browse the internet (the “metaverse”) and read and send messages, just using the bionic implants in their brains. So, wasn't Jetta taking a huge risk not killing Meech right away? Couldn't he be recording everything he sees, or silently alerting the police right now as they speak? Seems kinda reckless for a supposed veteran space scoundrel.

ANSWER
Yes, that's true I guess, and it also sort of isn't. I try to stay away from putting nuts-and-boltsy stuff in the comic whenever possible (some of you may remember my horrendous attempts at technobabble early in the comic… lesson learned!). But I'd say, in a general sense, yes the “bad guys” in this situation would have to worry about being cyber-snooped, but at the same time they'd probably have all kinds of devices for jamming people's implants so a potential victim couldn't record them or alert the police. Also, they'd probably have a way of detecting that you're transmitting a signal; even with today's technology, we can pick up on Earth something as weak as a cell phone signal being sent from Pluto. It's sort of an arms race, I guess. The bad guys are always trying to find ways to beat the latest technology, or turn it to their advantage.

In a more specific sense, in this particular instance, no, there's no risk of Meech getting a signal out. It was mentioned much earlier in the comic that the area they're in is a Designated Confidentiality Zone. I'm not entirely sure what that means (the little warning blurb tells Jetta that “sensory recording and state vector backup processes” are prohibited), but I take it to mean that a lot of the cyber-snooping stuff in use in the general public is disabled here, because the residents pay a premium to maintain their privacy. Meech could use the house's local network to contact the authorities but, as we already saw, Jetta has already disabled that. So they're not in any danger.

And if reading any of that was headache inducing, well now you know why I leave that stuff out of the comic!