Annotated 9-22
Writing deliberate nonsense can be harder than it sounds! I had to try at least three times before I got something that my subconscious wasn’t trying to make sound like something else.
John changed the level of damage here from his initial pencils to justify HR’s relatively calm reaction, and Phil adjusted the price of HR’s damage assessment once we got the final art. Even so and even in 2011, the idea that this huge mainframe was a less costly repair than a frikkin’ LAPTOP does not hold up under close examination, and that’s on me. The main point here is that at this point in the story, HR is not an easily rattled fellow. This will change.
“Get you out” as HR’s stated goal is somewhat misleading, of course. At this stage, it would be useful to him to decouple the Five, but he’d only save them if he could do so while furthering his own goals.
Oh, I was under the impression it was just like. The cost of replacing the monitor & the wires connected to the set of 4 monitors on that panel.
It probably IS, but even so. You can swap out one laptop for another in an hour at Best Buy, but those monitors are embedded into the wall by a specialist. Not impossible for someone like HR to do it himself, but I sure couldn’t.
(Kinda wish we’d done a scene where HR and Carol threw tarps over the tubes so that some hardware guy could come down there and fix that thing without having to get Ferris’d.)
I give HR more credit. Crazed megalomaniac that he is; he is still a smart man and a planner. He did not build a completely impractical wall of monitors and servers that requires demolition to replace components just so it would be pretty. Electronics break and there should be a simple way to access and replace components, even if it isn’t apparent in the drawing. For the display I am thinking an adjustable mount so you can pull it out of the wall and tilt it, and access all the wires and connectors if need be. Alternatively, each component could be built with some kind of release mechanism so components could simply slide in and out of the wall, but that would probably make the montior/tv pricier. There could be an access panel on the other side of the wall.
Also even though there are likely mechanisms to auto back-up data on machines at Hurricane, HR probably doesn’t want to have his secret project connected to the company’s network. Therefore, losing a laptop means losing data, which is virtually always a bigger deal than losing equipment that can be replaced with money.
Heh. It’s like the batcave. I’ve always wondered how Bruce got that elaborate set-up he has down there; from computers, to landing pads, to a full-scale animatronic t-rex. How does he get all that stuff down there with out there being a whole lot of questions?
At least with HR & Carol, I can come up with a couple plausible scenarios that explains how they got all that stuff down there.
I figured last time HR lost a laptop which had useful information on it. The info wasn’t archived anywhere offsite for obvious reasons. So he was lamenting more the cost of the losing the information rather than the fiscal cost.
I never understood that last sentence or what it was trying to accomplish. Kinda unnecessary.
We know his goal from prior panels, but that line fleshes out his pursuit of that goal in a number of ways- gives us some sense of how long he’s tried, how hard, and how much trying can cost him. (Not that any of the above is some extraordinary amount)
So if HR doesn’t care about saving them at this point, what is stopping him from decanting the tubes and pulling the plugs? Is magic literally keeping him from touching the tubes?
My guess is pride. He put them in so surely he could get them out and any claim otherwise is clearly wrong. Or something like that
When the five in the tubes die, it doesn’t negatively affect the five in Arkerra.
And that’s assuming there are living bodies in the tubes right now, rather than them being already brain-dead and just kept around for show by H.R.–and possibly so that he can pull his “look, this is who you really are, now stop clinging to this game identity” trick near the end.
Hmmm… Could be a bit of a show for Carol. After all, she certainly thought they were still alive, right up to the very end.
Simple. He’s still thinking he’s going to make both an entry and an exit at some point himself. As such he wants the “exit” part to be, you know, workable and non-fatal.
I went back and reread T’s last line again. Appears he’s saying HR *cannot* decouple the 5, that they’re an inconvenience, and that if he COULD get them out in a way that ‘saved’ them he would only take that option if it furthered his own goals. (You know, as opposed to hindering them because they immediatey go to the media and/or police)
When he killed that employee, was the hacksaw something he had in the basement already? Was it in case the five needed disposing?
Seeing this page I have to wonder if how things ended was his plan all along or is there a slow steady decent into madness and megalomania?He seems to think the game universe is just that and not actually real and confused why he cant disconnect them from it.Perhaps the HR we had at the end is a mere shadow of this one in terms of sanity and morality.In any case lines were crossed and maybe he dug himself in too deep and just kept going.
HR’s been hard to parse/interpret, even when I did a complete reread. He absolutely changes (keep an eye on that tie), but it gets tricky to say what he was before and which parts are different.
He’s not a sociopath at this stage, he still has a conscience and a regular-down-to-earth part of him that goes ‘what in the world am I doing?’ We’ll see both these parts rise to the forefront later, before they disappear.
I suspect his primary driving motivation at this point in the story (and throughout his time leading Hurricane) is a Jurassic Park kind of deal- he’s trying to create something amazing and unprecedented, he’s been focused on whether he could instead of whether he should, and he’s now incredibly invested in making it happen (which makes him willing to cross moral lines rather than give it up).
The stuff he gets up to in the later sections may have been a conscious goal all along, but if so I think it’s currently still more an abstract/hypothetical idea to him- “think of the amazing things you could do!”. He’s not seeking godhood, he’s seeking to achieve things with arcanometrics and godhood’s one of the later items on that list.