Skin Horse

By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
Color by Pancha Diaz
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2012-05-28
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2012-05-28

by shaenon on May 28, 2012 at 12:01 am
Chapter: Choose
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Discussion (19) ¬

  1. John Campbell
    February 8, 2013, 8:12 pm | # | Reply

    I think TVtropes calls this Fridge Horror: The realization that, though Jonah gets to respawn, Nera doesn’t, combined with Sergio’s explanation that this is not conventional time travel, but skipping sideways across alternate universes. So when they die, Jonah’s consciousness survives and moves on to sitting in the auditorium in another universe, and he ends up being a sort of gestalt of all the Jonahs from all the universes he passed through to get to the end.

    But that doesn’t help Nera. Her consciousness doesn’t get shuffled into the next universe over when they die. There’s another Nera in the next universe Jonah visits, but this Nera, and every other one of the dozens, maybe hundreds, of Neras in all of the universes along the way, until the very last one, is a dead girl walking.

    • MisterTeatime
      March 29, 2013, 8:24 pm | # | Reply

      I thought he wasn’t moving through alternate universes, just observing a ton of them in preparation for the eventual perfect run which actually happens.
      You’re right, though. Yours is way darker.

      • Darael Draconis
        November 29, 2016, 7:12 pm | # | Reply

        Not really. Thine is exactly as dark; those universes still exist and all those Neras are still dead or soon-to-be-so, whether or not *our* Jonah’s actually been in them.

      • Dementron
        December 16, 2016, 1:39 am | # | Reply

        He can’t just be observing alternate universes, because he’s altering what happens with his outside knowledge.

  2. Timelost
    February 15, 2013, 3:54 pm | # | Reply

    Well, on the bright side Nera hasn’t died EVERY time, maybe she somehow makes it out of the building in a few of those where Jonah dies horribly on his own.

    • MisterTeatime
      March 29, 2013, 8:25 pm | # | Reply

      Yeah, she’s pretty competent on her own- remember who got them in here? Once she doesn’t have to worry about Jonah she should be fine.

      • Windy Wanderings
        May 21, 2014, 4:41 pm | # | Reply

        Yes, but she also just saw her freind die and she’s in A-Sig. I don’t think any alternate Nera gets a happy ending.

        • Mike
          March 16, 2018, 5:21 pm | # | Reply

          She probably gets forcibly recruited in a few of those.

          • awgiedawgie
            March 16, 2018, 7:59 pm | #

            Though you have to admit that’s still not a happy ending. Then again, she might finally find out what “extirpation” really involves.

  3. Takashoru
    March 10, 2013, 1:43 pm | # | Reply

    The real Fridge Horror is that every possible configuration of moves in the game known as reality is played out assuming the existence of this sort of parallel dimension.

    Loads of stuff is worse than what they’re going through.

    Umpteen billion universes of almost impossible suffering. These guys get off lightly.

    • SotiCoto
      August 20, 2014, 11:27 am | # | Reply

      On the upside, the “universes of almost impossible suffering” … by which you mean Universes that are identical but for a few negligible differences on one irrelevant blue planet third from the native star somewhere on the outer edge of just another spiral galaxy… are a miniscule minority next to the Universes where life never existed to suffer in the first place.

      Don’t try to think about it though. The human brain hasn’t sufficient RAM to process numbers anywhere near that scale. Even numbers orders of magnitude SMALLER can only be processed by reducing the units of data to featureless quanta.

      • Dementron
        December 16, 2016, 1:41 am | # | Reply

        And somehow, for you, the complete absence of life is an *upside*.

  4. Delta Echo
    September 7, 2014, 7:08 am | # | Reply

    On the flip-downside, if virtually every bit of sci-fi ever has taught us everything, it’s that the universal constant across all alternate universes is Earth and the hairless apes upon it.

    • Darkstarr
      April 19, 2016, 11:54 pm | # | Reply

      That’s what happens when you live in sector ZZ9-plural Z alpha. And not every universe has an Earth; some were blown up by the Vogons to make way for a hyperspace bypass.

      • Darael Draconis
        November 29, 2016, 7:14 pm | # | Reply

        All but one of them, actually. Kind of a big SLaTfatF plot point, that: the one that we see there is explicitly the only one.

        • Sailorleo
          February 20, 2017, 12:07 am | # | Reply

          Except that’s not actually the case either, as Mostly Harmless deals with another of the surviving Earths and the supposed final destruction of the probability of Earth’s existence (but that isn’t quite as accurate as it seems either, as there is still one more book after that).

    • Kanta
      June 19, 2016, 11:40 am | # | Reply

      That’s not really relevant because Jonah is only going through the universes created by changes in his own actions, not ones with different start conditions or anything like that.

  5. Malicron
    April 4, 2016, 10:04 pm | # | Reply

    Ah, the time travel device is going to destroy the universe; I see Sergio’s time machine works on the same principals as Helen and Dave’s. Time travel in this universe kind of sucks.

    • Dementron
      December 16, 2016, 1:42 am | # | Reply

      Well, multiverse.

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