Annotated 15-22
I’d forgotten most of the details of this scene, and reading it again, I had to chuckle at the sprightly optimism behind the line “Sometimes these things just work out.” The concept of the “happy little accident” was certainly a consolation to Phil and me as we developed the series.
And geez, was this around the time that Phil swayed me from a 30-chapter model to a 36-chapter model? I think so. Probably. As I recall, he kept pushing more chapters as we reached what would’ve been the halfway mark, and 15 is half of 30.
In other words, HR is definitely channeling a lot of what Phil and I had in common as writers. We were working to keep HR’s struggles relatable, and I see from the old comments that there were still a lot of sensible readers who thought he was a benign agent. So mission accomplished, I guess!
Let me be not-the-first to tell you, I am glad the impact of this series on you guys was less severe than its impact on your gestalt insert, and I don’t mean the “shot by an underling” bit.
Still, it was obviously quite traumatic, in the non-literal sense of “open wounds”.
Hope you’ll all heal up in time, with not-too-many scars.
I think HR succumbed to the standard temptation of power. Initially dipping into the occult to make a great video game to entertain and… enthrall. He knew he was risking the 5, they’re his guinea pigs, his test subjects, canaries in the mine. He sends them ahead, he learns things, and that he could, with a few changes, have made a way to be a god in a world of his own making… if he could only undo this one mistake and remove these five from his way.
By the time you start seeing a path to becoming a god, you’ve… stopped being the good guy. And when you’re sacrificing people for being in your way… Ohhhh, that’s what happened with Carol! She was having the same struggle, but without any lovecraftian sanity loss or delusions of grandeur. And she rejected her god… :o Oooh! New layers I’d missed before. :D
It must be hot as heck in that server room.
Dunno… I guess if comatose jar-people, unwashed suits and takeout-trash are your thing, I guess?
Generally server rooms are kept at least a little cool to help the electronics
Doubt it. Server rooms, especially for big businesses that can afford it, have AC units & exhaust vents built into the server room. It’s probably around 80 degrees Fahrenheit in there.
And as a bonus, if memory serves HR’s server room is in the basement. If so, this will help keep things cool since heat rises.
I’ve commented before that it’s tricky to ascertain what HR’s true motives were when this all began. My best guess, IIRC, was that he cared about the project- that his ambition was to do a big thing that successfully used arcanometrics. A Jurassic Park scenario, he cared about seeing if he COULD do it because it would open the door for all these exciting comfortably-theoretical possibilities.
To run with the analogy: by the time of his first story appearance he’s running the dinosaur theme park and behind closed doors obsessing over problems with the control collars and not telling anyone about his plans to found a dictatorship with a personal dinosaur army.
So did Phil shoot T at the end or the other way around?
Or maybe John shot them both.
This isekai goes deep.
Todd Howard- I mean HR: “It just works”
I definitely would’ve said I considered HR a benign enough agent. For a while, he comes across as a man broken by the fact that his mistakes have essentially rendered five innocent people comatose, stripping them away from their families, all while only beginning to dimly understand the truth about what he’s really tapped into.
Of course, he ends up going in a different direction later on…