18 KiB
[RT] Glimwarden, Chapter 8
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Author: u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow*
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Score: 33
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Created: 2016-07-08T13:07:45
Post:
Comments:
u/ZeroNihilist [+4] (2 hours later)
The Schism was first sighted by Merry in chapter 4, within her normal hunting range. This was a few hours (at most) before the failure of the lantern, given that Philip intercepted Sander and Merry as they returned and the failure occurred while they were eating.
Assuming that the Schism and the sabotage aren't coincidences, I see a few possible explanations:
##1. The saboteur lured the Schism within range of the town to coincide with the failure of the lantern.
Problems:
- The failure timing seems to be unpredictable to the engineers, which means that either our saboteur is an expert on Light's Hollow's lanterns (able to estimate to within a few hours) or it was luck that it appeared when it did.
##2. The Schism had foreknowledge of the failure of the lantern.
Problems:
- If Darklings are precogs, humanity is fucked.
- It is conceivable that signs of failure in the lantern are detectable from its emission signature (especially to Darklings, which it affects materially), meaning that it's just prediction and not actual future knowledge.
- If Schisms always have this ability, why have they never before appeared in Light's Hollow? *Or have they? Melanie may have read of such a thing.
##3. The Schism had been positioned near the town ahead of time, and attacked when the lantern failed.
Problems:
- Merry found the Schism easily after very little search time due to the huge impact of its movement. How was it not found beforehand, except sheer bad luck?
##4. The Schism was brought into range and the sabotage was set up to coincide with its arrival.
Problems:
- If the sabotage was intended to take effect very swiftly (or at a specific time), how was this not apparent to the engineers?
##5. The multiple-part sabotage is a red herring. Only one thing made the lantern fail, which may use a mechanism unknown to the engineers (perhaps something involving a specific bind).
Problems:
- The engineers should know of this failure mode, at least if they truly do understand how their lantern actually works.
Of these, I tend towards 4. It seems like it would take a long time to bring a Schism close, and the only way to be sure the lantern failed at a specific time would be to make it happen. That means either the plan was short-term (e.g. 5 things each intended to take 1-10 hours to fail, so failing early on average) or the actual failure was triggered by a separate action after the initial sabotage.
Two final observations:
- Healer's lantern (the one that failed) is noted as the closest to Sander way back in chapter one, presumably the closest to his house. That's pretty much the only significant mention in the story of that lantern before the failure. Healer's lantern could be the closest to Gossom and/or Langust, or Sander's initial excursion could have provoked it somehow, or some other reason.
- Philip observed that the Darklings seemed to rank him as an unimportant target due to his lack of bind. If somebody was able to conceal the bind (as hypothesised at the inquest), that may make them "invisible" to Darklings. Such a person could hunt the wilds and amass a truly absurd quantity of bind.
u/waylandertheslayer [+12] (4 hours later)
Philip observed that the Darklings seemed to rank him as an unimportant target due to his lack of bind. If somebody was able to conceal the bind (as hypothesised at the inquest), that may make them "invisible" to Darklings. Such a person could hunt the wilds and amass a truly absurd quantity of bind.
I think Philip was only invisible to the Darklings because there were many people with the bind around him. Sander went into the wilds without any bind, and was still attacked, at the very start. It would still be a slight advantage to be able to hide your bind in the wild, but while it's hidden you also can't use any of its advantages and are basically a vanilla human.
u/scaevolus [+7] (13 hours later)
Philip could also be mistaken. Maybe his sociopathy means he's an emotional blank, and the monsters are attracted to human emotions?
u/waylandertheslayer [+1] (20 hours later)
Maybe they're attracted to emotions, but that seems like it would require quite a lot of complicated machinery (since it's a rational story, I assume Alexander Wales wouldn't have human emotions be a fundamental force - maybe they'd target via pheromones, which would be similar to looking for emotions?) and it's more likely that they do target those with the bind.
u/ZeroNihilist [+2] (a day later)
I should probably have stressed the word "may" there.
My current hypothesis is that all humans have the bind to an extent, and that the Darklings (being made of the stuff) can sense it where normal Glimwardens can't. They naturally tend to attack the strongest source nearby. Perhaps the goal is to "free" the hearts from the humans/lanterns so they can reenter the environment and coalesce as Darklings. Who knows.
It seems a little convenient, otherwise, that humans are able to internalise the hearts by eating them, though the counterpoint there is that any world where they couldn't would pretty quickly result in humanity being destroyed.
My guess is not without its own problems of course. For one, if suppressing the bind does limit the expression of its powers as Seaborn says, my hypothesis would imply that "cloaking" would have to stop some normal human functions as well.
As an unrelated point, somebody who was able to outright control the Darklings would be able to destroy settlements very easily. Instead of throwing powerful creatures at a failing lantern (which is a solid strategy, of course), starve the city of hearts. They can't simply stop the lanterns and restart them when necessary (there's a setup time at the very least), so they will have to either be incredibly vigilant with human scouting or waste their limited supply of hearts.
When they run out, you bring in your enormous Darkling army.
The fact that this hasn't happened could be considered evidence that the saboteur cannot directly control the Darklings but is just manipulating them (e.g. laying a "scent trail" of bind between Schism-land and the town, or just playing bait).
u/whywhisperwhy [+2] (5 hours later)
Just to add to the big picture of conspiracy theories-
A young engineer by the name of Kelso Kelly had come before the council and told them ... mundane means existed to kill the darklings.... some kind of rotary gun, which the council had given him provisional funding to build, despite the protestations of the chief glimwarden.
Similarly, there's already one lantern with the ability to remove hava and each town presumably has at least one travelling lantern... Despite protestations, it seems like a perfectly obvious emergency measure to have prepared.
The former sounds like a faction is deliberately suppressing technology in order to keep the Glimwardens powerful. The latter could possibly be an oversight, but there have been so many of these mentioned that you have to wonder.
u/Nevereatcars [+1] The Greatest Is Behind (8 hours later)
Damn, we could use list-making skills like those in Marked for Death
u/waylandertheslayer [+3] (4 hours later)
Time to ramble and theorycraft.
Let's assume that the outcome was intentional, and see who benefits. The engineers as a whole are slightly worse off. The glimwardens as a whole are much worse off. However, individuals within each group might have benefited. Probably not the glimwardens, since they risked death, but if one of the engineers at the lantern was the one who sabotaged it so that he could easily reactivate it at any time, he would stay quite safe. An engineer could easily have been a patsy or collaborator to someone else's scheme, if they were reimbursed well enough or the other guy had a strong hold over them.
Colsum probably benefits a bit. He wants to get a glimwarden under his control, and if there are more spots available as well as fewer auxiliaries who might enter, he's in a better spot. I don't know if he's cold enough to kill off some of the town's defense force just to slightly improve his own position, but if he really needs a glimwarden for an as-yet-unrevealed reason (e.g. he's dying and needs someone to get him hearts in order to live, or he's planning to take over the town and needs information from the glimwardens) he might be behind the lantern failure.
Colsum also has the means to intimidate, manipulate and blackmail an engineer if he needs to. He has a lot of economic might, and probably has at least one engineer indebted to him or otherwise reliant on him (maybe he's paying for food/medicine for a family member, or is holding a hostage).
We don't know enough about Colsum to assign even a 50% chance that it was him, but he's definitely a solid possibility (>10% I'd say). The various council members get <1% since there's no apparent motive. It's more likely that one of them was somehow involved, but against their will or without knowing the plan until after they'd done their part. Probably 70% to 80% that it was someone we haven't been introduced to yet, and >50% chance that it's connected to Langust.
There is also almost certainly more than one person involved. There was probably at least one person marshaling or otherwise guiding the Schism, and at least one person interfering with the lantern. It's also probably linked to the other recent lantern failure that led to a town's complete destruction.
"The lantern went out,” said Legal. [...] “It happened at two in the morning and wasn’t noticed right away. Their alarm system hadn’t been tested in a long time and failed for some reason, but they never managed to investigate that because all their engineers were woken up and put to work getting the lantern shining again. The darklings had killed a few dozen people before the town started to wake up."
and
"[...] the problem with the main lantern appeared to be intractable."
That sounds a lot like sabotage. I assume that this was a hostile test of the lantern system in Light's Hollow, and that more attacks are planned. It's harder to destroy a town with seven lanterns than one lantern so the next strike will probably aim to hit several lanterns at once (or maybe the sabotage that already happened was inflicted on several lanterns, and it's just luck that one went before the others did?)
There are too many possible motives for damaging a lantern to narrow down the saboteur, since it could be anything from intended destruction of Light's Hollow to a political move where someone tries to put pressure on the chief engineer only to have their plan go horribly wrong.
One other thing: the only person who's said there was sabotage is the chief engineer, who has incentive to lie about her group messing up and getting lots of people killed, and who's getting information from other people who have incentive to lie about their failures. While she's probably telling the truth, some details (e.g. number of parts that were damaged) might be wrong.
u/None [+3] (7 hours later)
I think your portrayal of Philip as sociopath is a bit heavy-handed. He's constantly thinking about how different he is, about his lack of real concern for others, etc.
u/alexanderwales [+6] Time flies like an arrow (17 hours later)
Thanks for the feedback (as always - I find your advice insightful if sometimes hard to do anything about).
My conceptualization of Philip is sort of ... how I'd imagine a gay man in Syria to feel? You'd spend a lot of your time thinking about your sexual orientation, about the orientation of other people, about how you need to act in order to fool other people into thinking that you're straight, about what shibboleths you might be missing because you're not actually straight, about the consequences of being found out, about who might know or suspect ... I feel like your thoughts would circle back to it fairly frequently until it became a central pillar of your mental life.
I'll revisit this chapter once I'm feeling better to either tone it down or try to get that across more succinctly. It's one of those things that I played with quite a bit while I was writing.
u/None [+2] (a day later)
Thanks!
I understand that approach, I'm just not convinced that real life sociopaths are that self aware and focused on it. I havent read too many (if any) books by sociopaths in the first person though, so who knows..
u/CouteauBleu [+2] We are the Empire. (a day later)
We don't actually have an official description for Philip's, um, main characteristic. For all we know, he could be suffering from "Previously unknown genetic defect that only strikes one child in ten billions during a full moon if the baby is born at the same time a darkling dies".
And I still don't think he qualifies as a sociopath anyway. He's shown way to much planning ability and some ethical thinking that would be impossible for a sociopath.
u/Vermora [+3] (21 hours later)
Of all the Glimwarden and Shadows of the Limelight chapters, this was the most enjoyable chapter for me to read. I'm really like how Philip is being portrayed, and the writing style of Glimwarden in general.
u/CouteauBleu [+2] We are the Empire. (a day later)
One thing I really like about Philip and his chapters is how they keep bait-and-switching you with cynicism. Chapter 7 implied that lanterns failures kept happening and nobody ever reacted to them seriously.
This chapter tells us that reactions did happen, like designing an experimental lantern in the safety of the city center, conscripting the auxiliary (without which the outbreak might have lead to the lantern's destruction), and designing new weapons.
I see a lot of people saying that Glimwarden is a dark story, but I disagree. Limelight felt like a dark story, because things kept getting worse and the protagonist fought pointless bloody battles alongside delusional murderhobos. Glimwarden, even with its deaths and its dangerous world, is about people, trying to do better, and that's enough for this story to feel uplifting to me. The same (sort of) applies to The Metropolitan Man.
u/CouteauBleu [+1] We are the Empire. (24 minutes later)
Well, that was fast! The only way this week can get even better now is if notes published another Legacy chapter. :D
EDIT: Holy crap, that did happen! \o/
u/waylandertheslayer [+1] (7 hours later)
I recognise the name 'notes', but it's been quite a while since I read anything by them. Could you link me to their work? Googling for any combination of 'author rational notes' mostly brings up author's notes for HPMOR, and 'rational notes legacy' gets me a bunch of software specs.
u/CouteauBleu [+1] We are the Empire. (8 hours later)
The writer of 'Cenotaph', basically the most popular Worm fanfic there is. It has two sequels, 'Wake' and 'Legacy'.
u/waylandertheslayer [+2] (8 hours later)
I remember now, yeah. I read Cenotaph over a year ago, and never really got around to reading the rest of the Memorials series. Cenotaph was considered almost canon levels of good, iirc.
u/Aretii [+1] Cultist of Cthugha (3 hours later)
I see /u/alexanderwales was tired of the "is Philip a sociopath" debate and decided to settle the question.
u/whywhisperwhy [+2] (5 hours later)
Which is a huge part of what makes him an interesting character to me- because while he does seem ever-focused on his own self-interest, much of his attitudes/efforts are also very beneficial to the community as a whole.
u/CouteauBleu [+2] We are the Empire. (7 hours later)
I'm still pretty sure Philip does not qualify for a psycopath diagnosis. He has the muted emotions, but not the inability to form long term plans.
EDIT: aeschenkarnos proposed a schizoid personality disorder diagnosis, which I think fits very well from what we've seen so far.
u/None [+1] (14 hours later)
I am friendly (as friendly as you can be..) with someone with that disorder and I don't think it matches. Philip isn't awkward, generally. He has a couple of glitches but he's generally smooth.
u/TotesMessenger [+1] (4 hours later)
I'm a bot, bleep, bloop. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:
- [/r/glimwarden] Glimwarden Discussion Link: Chapter 8
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u/MonstrousBird [+1] (7 hours later)
Probaby wild theory, but could the Darklings themselves be responsible for the sabotage, perhaps specifically the Schism? Obviously they couldn't come into the tower to sabotage the lantern personally, but perhaps they could either control human agents or have some psychic/bind like powers of their own that could damage the structure of the lantern. It would explain why two towns were attacked, and why the Schism 'knew' to be there at the right time. And it would of course be to the darkling's advantage to stop getting their hearts cut out...
u/SimonSim211 [+1] (a day later)
So any predictions on how many chapters until Sander develops a strobing (I am assuming that continues light is like continues heat, thus less effective than the same quantity of energy in bursts) version of the lantern that weights about as much as a person and then turns himself into a long range airborne/shock trooper (teleport the lantern in, in the confusion kill a few, pick up the harts, teleport out, refuel the "lantern")?