Skin Horse

By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
Color by Pancha Diaz
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2021-02-20
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2021-02-20

by shaenon on February 20, 2021 at 12:01 am
Chapter: Off to the Fair
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Discussion (32) ¬

  1. Alphaghoul
    February 20, 2021, 12:15 am | # | Reply

    Uh oh, I hope this is just a red herring and they didn’t do anything to the server.

    • D. Walker
      February 20, 2021, 2:16 am | # | Reply

      We literally just saw them pick up Baron, set him back down, and walk away without touching the server. They’re morons, remember – not smart enough to identify the server for what it was, much less tamper with it.

      Anywho, Baron went comatose when he first jacked in. Whatever is wrong with him now started happening before the goons ever even showed up – no tampering needed.

      • D. Walker
        February 20, 2021, 2:28 am | # | Reply

        Scratch that – they didn’t even touch baron, they just looked at him, then left.

      • BMunro
        February 20, 2021, 3:09 am | # | Reply

        Isn’t that normal when he’s jacked in to the server? Neither Lee or Sweetheart seemed bothered when he initially went quiet and immobile.

  2. Moe Lane
    February 20, 2021, 12:35 am | # | Reply

    Always interesting to see Tip turn on the “Oh, hey, I’m a combat Army officer and CIA-trained investigator” part of his brain.

    • D. Walker
      February 20, 2021, 2:27 am | # | Reply

      Kind of feels like plot contrivance to me – both in terms of him having the skills, and in terms of how they’re being put to use here.

      He’s looking at paved asphalt, what the hell “signs of a struggle” is he supposed to be noticing? Go stand in a parking lot at night, do fifteen jumping jacks, then have a friend come over and look at the ground and tell you want they notice. I don’t care if they’re a soldier or CIA – they aren’t going to notice anything, because there won’t be anything of any value to notice.

      Nothing happened to create any marks – there was no “struggle”, Sweetheart and Virginia both just fell over where they stood. At the very least, they’d need to have skidded a rubber soled shoe against the ground hard enough to leave a mark, or lost a button, or something more than just stand on and then fall down on a parking lot surface. (Maaayyybe if the asphalt is particularly dusty or sandy or something, they could have disturbed some dirt? But if that’s the case, establish that detail.)

      • David B Huber
        February 20, 2021, 4:41 am | # | Reply

        Possibilities include Sweetheart blowing coat when tazed and (sadly) Dr. Lee being hit hard enough to cut her scalp and leave a few drops of blood on the pavement.

        Dr. Lee also stated the weapon used on Sweetheart was a cartridge tazer (contrary to appearances in the previous strip) so the Anasigma goon may have discarded the spent cartridge.

        • David B Huber
          February 20, 2021, 5:04 am | # | Reply

          I can’t blame autocorrect for my misspelling of “Taser”. 😉

          Nor was I aware it’s an acronym for “Tom A. Swift Electric Rifle”!

          • Judas Jurgen
            February 20, 2021, 6:05 am | #

            Yeah, it’s literally named after a sci-fi weapon. Life imitates art, I suppose.

      • NoTime
        February 20, 2021, 10:42 pm | # | Reply

        Granted the device looks and is used like a cattle prod in the image but it is explicitly stated to be a cartridge taser. Anasigma goons just don’t seem like people who would clean up after themselves so you have taser wires, probes and probably a discarded cartridge as well. Pulling the probes would cause bleeding as they are barbed.
        As David mentioned it would be surprising if a blow like that didn’t split Virginia’s scalp. Scalp wounds bleed profusely so the the blood spot would most likely be several inches across. Not to mention possible broken bits of plastic form the taser.

      • wykstrad
        February 21, 2021, 4:01 pm | # | Reply

        Also, beyond possible physical details mentioned by other commenters, the van doors left swinging open with no sign of two team members is a worrying detail.

  3. efogoto
    February 20, 2021, 1:51 am | # | Reply

    Maybe unjack him? Or is it dejack? disjack?

    • David Simon
      February 20, 2021, 2:05 am | # | Reply

      Jack out? Jack down? Jack off… er, wait, definitely not that last one.

    • D. Walker
      February 20, 2021, 2:14 am | # | Reply

      “Jack him out”, to be technical, or just “disconnect / unplug him”.

      That said, I’m not exactly sure what the consequences of that would be. A meat brain risks dumpshock, but I’m not sure what happens with a full on android – possibly a crash necessitating a reboot, risk of corruption and lost data. (And this all assumes semi-standard cyberpunk theory – none of which may exactly apply in the Narboniverse, which might work according to its own rules.)

      • BMunro
        February 20, 2021, 3:03 am | # | Reply

        Might leave him trapped in the simulation.

        • D. Walker
          February 20, 2021, 1:37 pm | # | Reply

          I mean, if he’s literally just a program that can run on any hardware, and his actual “self” migrated fully onto the server, which took over all his operations and became his new “body”, sure.

          But if his operations are being controlled by his body, and he is merely “reaching” into the server, severing the connection could either shunt him back out of the server (which could be unpleasant) or his operations could be terminated along with the connection – but at that point, he can likely be rebooted from his last known good boot, and just lose a bit of time / memory / data.

          • David B Huber
            February 20, 2021, 3:22 pm | #

            An excellent point, D. Walker. Given Aimee’s greeting of “Welcome to your forever home.” the server must have processing resources to support full migration.

            But what if the implication of “forever home” is a one-way trip? So Mistycorn would be constrained to telepresence if he wanted to remain useful to Aimee in meatspace.

    • David B Huber
      February 20, 2021, 4:49 am | # | Reply

      If Nick collects himself he could probably jack in to Aimee’s World wirelessly himself to ask Baron if he recorded events automatically.

    • Robert Nowall
      February 20, 2021, 11:35 am | # | Reply

      How do you feel about “unplug?”

  4. Robert Nowall
    February 20, 2021, 7:06 am | # | Reply

    You can read signs of a struggle on an asphalt parking lot?

  5. Shadowmehr
    February 20, 2021, 9:20 am | # | Reply

    Nick is in panic mode. Which probably means his osprey half is making a ninety degree turn straight to Vegas so he can use the sensor arrays to look for Ginny. Thereby confusing whatever radar tech was actually tracking him up to this point.

  6. phredd
    February 20, 2021, 10:15 am | # | Reply

    Huh. So for some commenters the bar of believability is somewhere between:
    Tip has a sexual “mojo” that allows him to teleport/time-skip himself & others around the globe.
    And…
    Tip can detect signs of struggle in a parking lot.

    Interesting…

    • awgiedawgie
      February 20, 2021, 12:29 pm | # | Reply

      I find it more interesting that Tip sees signs of a struggle where there was no struggle.

      • D. Walker
        February 20, 2021, 1:47 pm | # | Reply

        Precisely. It’d be sort of like if Tip mojo’d to a place that doesn’t even exist.

        Suspension of disbelief is less about the actual possibility of something, and far more about how much sense it makes and whether it is internally consistent. We can accept impossible things that don’t play by the rules of physics, but we immediately reject those things when they begin to break their -own- rules.

        A classic example of both aspects is Superman’s weakness to kryptonite. People can accept that being in the presence of a particular kind of space stone weakens Superman, even though that’s pretty bizarre and arbitrary, but they get annoyed when the effects of exposure to kryptonite are inconsistent – sometimes it renders him totally powerless, other times it just sort of is uncomfortable to be around but he can still ultimately fight and defeat Lex Luthor wearing full armor made out of it.

      • Zero
        February 20, 2021, 2:41 pm | # | Reply

        How do you know that? Bad guys have cleared out all of Vegas. There’s probably signs of a lot of struggles about.

        • efogoto
          February 20, 2021, 6:47 pm | # | Reply

          Or, in the manner of Bullshot Crummond, “A broken twig! The sign of a scuffle.”

        • awgiedawgie
          February 20, 2021, 10:36 pm | # | Reply

          Touché. There may indeed have been struggles here. Just none of them involving our intrepid travelers.

      • David B Huber
        February 20, 2021, 8:22 pm | # | Reply

        Tip retains latent werewolf potential as well as the inoculation of Unity’s nanites which cured him. Who’s to say he only “saw” signs of a struggle?

    • Robert Nowall
      February 20, 2021, 2:40 pm | # | Reply

      It’s the reality blindness plague. We have to point out the implausibility of it all even if we see it.

  7. Doug Relyea
    February 20, 2021, 1:11 pm | # | Reply

    Looks like Bobby Bill Naughtwright and Carwomen DeSoto will lift the curse that has plagued AnaSigma boots on the ground since they became conficted with Skin Horse.

  8. NoTime
    February 20, 2021, 11:05 pm | # | Reply

    Started reading this on GoComics about the middle of a Dreadful Future. I found it interesting. Was going to do an archive dive but found a reference to Narbonic in a comment. So I read Narbonic, Lil Mell then back to SkinHorse. Amazing how much having the background changed perspective on the segment of SkinHorse I had previously read.
    Hitting real time is a bit of a shock to the system.
    Kudos to Shaenon and Jeff.

    • fractalwolf
      February 21, 2021, 2:14 am | # | Reply

      I had no idea Skin Horse was on GoComics. Thanks for mentioning it, so I can add it to my follows!

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