Comic Archive

Setting: Heidi, Max and Zhang are looking at the partially disassembled machines.
Max: Pretty standard components from the usual manufacturers, and then we have these utterly weird parts with only numbers that yield no search results.
Heidi: Those parts are mind-boggling. They seem alien, way ahead of the state-of-the-art. I can't wait to experiment with them.

Zhang: Maybe we should focus on the standard parts after all. I notice these bridge ICs come from 2 consecutive batch numbers across both machines.
Max: That would imply that whoever built these things, was ordering parts right when a new batch had been started. That might get us somewhere.

Heidi: We're in luck, I happen to know someone who works for PMD. She might be able to track down customers who ordered around the time when the new batch started.
Zhang: Won't that violate GDPR and such?
Heidi: Shooting people in the face to me seems a much worse violation than GDPR.

Setting: Alana is walking in a corridor with Heidi.
Alana: So, what about those fancy machines, have they revealed any secrets yet?
Heidi: None so far. We do have a lead, but it may take some time.
Alana: How about the hardware itself, what are these things capable of?

Heidi: We don't know yet, and there is no information to be found online. However, some of the units resemble something I've seen in a paper about quantum entanglement, only then shrunk to a nearly impossibly small form factor.

Alana: Well, I know on what you will be spending your next Friday Freewheeling slots. Heidi, just one more thing…
Heidi: Yes, Alana?
Alana: Please turn down the volume on that electronic watchdog, it almost managed to drive me crazy.

Steve: What was this rumpus recently with OIB-A271 barking for more than an hour?
Heidi: A diversion to fool Alana into believing he's just a regular Oiba.
Steve: If that would be normal behavior, the product line would never have survived beyond its first generation…

Steve: So, these are the mysterious machines. What's so special about them?
Heidi: I'm trying to probe some of the unusual components. The results are… interesting.
Steve: How so?

Heidi: For instance, the part I'm currently testing in this machine… well, the best way I can put it, is that it exhibits mind-reading capabilities.
Steve: In the past I would have called bullshit on this. However, since the Deletium adventure, my general sense of disbelief has gone seriously out of whack…

Max: We're the last ones to leave the office. Will you activate the alarm?
Zhang: With pleasure.

Zhang pushes buttons on the alarm panel.
SFX: Beep bip beep
Alarm panel: Countdown started.
Zhang: “The bomb has been planted.”

Zhang and Max exit through the front door.
Zhang: You take the point.
SFX: Beep… beep… beep… beep beep beepbeepbeebeep (ever shorter delays between each beep)

SFX: Beeeeep.
Zhang: “The bomb has been defused. Counter-terrorists win.”
Max: Dude, you have been playing way too much Counter-Strike…