When the fastest woman ever built is dragged outside of reality by her ex-boyfriend, she’s got to pull herself together across four parallel worlds before a hive-mind can take over the planet.
“That rarest and most refreshing of things: a science–fiction story that feels like it comes from the future. It’s marvelous, in the true sense of the word!”
-Phil Foglio
“A robot lady is dragged outside of reality by her ex-boyfriend. Deliriously confusing and addictive… it’s kind of wonderful.”
– Peter Watts“Seriously folks, if you haven’t looked at Decrypting Rita yet you really ought to. Very post-singularity, much upload, wow.”
– Charlie Stross
First off, a big thank you to the author @anthracite, for giving me permission to post her work. Marked as OC as it’s her original content.
This is one of those works that breaks the traditional boundaries of the medium its presented in. The art style is vivid, and integral to the interweaving narrative as the protagonist moves through multiple realities. For such an ambitious work, it’s remarkably tightly written, with a subtly and depth lacking in traditional comic work. Trauth’s styling is unique - combining art-deco, surrealism, and pop-art with intensely strong linework and dynamic framing with the compositional skill of Lichenstein. This is not your average comic - this is a unique piece of art and an excellent story.
@anthracite Part 2/2
I never heard his voice again. Many other spirits would come through the years, and speak to and sometimes through me as my misadventures accumulated, but never him. It was only when one of those spirits led me to the remains of a murder victim (true story for another time), and I accepted the reality of what I was experiencing, did I consider my experience with the dragon to be something “real”.
Was he a higher power? He was higher than me, that’s for certain, but not a god (met a couple of those later). He was not moral - in fact tactically obsessive to the point of cruelty and intolerance at times - he had a lizardlike view of the world that could be exceptionally cold. He was connected to me in a way that other random spirits aren’t, almost as if I were a child or echo of his soul and he was responsible for and affected by my actions.
Willya look at that… I’ve never told that story. Guess the old imagination engine is workin’ as intended… I feel like I completely digressed here, but that was my very long-winded way of saying I both agree with and have experienced what you describe.
When I try to visualize all of it, it appears as a hall of fractal mirrors and prisms - with souls as the lights - their dance casting millions of reflections that wash over and through each other, a waltz of a galaxy of spirits, each reflection a reality bouncing back our own light at us. In this space the question becomes not what am I, but what am I not?
And the answer that comes back is nothing. The unbeing. The void. Which is what some Buddhists would say is we also are - the being and the unbeing all the same bean, but my particular spark can’t yet make the jump that far. Maybe I’m too young a soul to walk that road yet… or maybe, like I suspect, they’re too scared to take a side against that nothing - no one believes you can truly end entropy… except for maybe my dumb dragonfly ass… ;)
damn, that’s a heck of a story. My own experiences with this sort of thing are much smaller. If there’s any kind of spirit-dragon contact going on behind me deciding to Be A Dragon, I suspect mine is rather younger than yours was.
I just spent more time than I would like to on managing to see all these replies, I had to manually cut and paste links into the search bar on the pawb.social Lemmy to get them to show up, because kbin demands I log in to see the main post, and trying to read all of that in a little column in the Mastodon interface is kind of awkward. I might say more later.