Decrypting Rita by Margaret Trauth (Egypt Urnash) - Comic - 2015
Decrypting Rita by Margaret Trauth (Egypt Urnash) - Comic - 2015
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.
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I should really add the Stross and Watts quotes to the front page of the site one of these days. Thanks for the kind words!
(and fwiw my style on that is firmly grounded in 1950s post-cubist cartooning - animation design like Maurice Noble and Mary Blair, album covers by Jim Flora, etc. "Mid-century Modern" is what this vibe has been named in recent decades; you'll find a lot of it in the work of pretty much any GenX animator, especially once digital tools made it super easy to work without outlines.)
My pleasure - and I really mean that. On personal note, your work is inspiring me on both a creative and intellectual level. It brings validation to personal experiences between separate consensual realities, and the struggle to unite them into a coherent narrative of the individual that encompasses all facets of the multiple realities they experience. Your work immediately grabbed me as this is a concept I've been turning over in my mind for years.
In fact, I even struggle to find the language to describe the phenomena, even though all of us move through "real" reality, dreams, the semi-reality of the internet and video games, imagination, novels, movies, and all of the places in-between - becoming a different role, a different character in each space, and often a different person to each new mind we meet.
Which one is the real person? Or are they all real and just too big to fit into our concept of what we consider a person?
Oh, and Mid-Century Modern - of course! I totally blanked on the term when posting - thanks!
Mysticism gives us concepts to answer these questions with such as "higher self" or "HGA" or "oversoul" or even "god", and which one you use can raise all kinds of questions.
More mundanely the language of furry is useful for the day-to-day role shifting. My adminsona on dragon.style is deliberately not my usual dragonsona, Gracious Anthracite is designed as someone more patient and serene than my usual dragonsona, and having her icon there next to whatever I'm typing here reminds me of that. My significant other and I have "hatesonas", who are a grumpy married couple along the lines of The Lockhorns; performing them to each other is a good way to say "I am moderately annoyed with something you are doing but I would much rather turn it into a joke and have a play-fight about it, at worst".
And then there are the people who use the language of multiple personalities and describe themselves as "systems". Personally I tend to see that as a warning flag after a few too many experiences with people excusing bad behavior as something done by an "alter", if you have the villain from a popular video game living in your head as a "fictkin soulbond" then it's your responsibility to keep them under control.
Magically, shit also gets interesting when you invite things distinctly outside of anything you would normally think of as part of yourself to *be* *you*. Calling up Osoronnophiris, The Bornless One and requesting something of them is a very different vibe from vehemently *declaring* yourself to be Heart Girt With A Serpent, the one whose Mouth is Aflame, the one who Begets and Destroys, the Bornless One who exists outside of and shapes all time and space, and then *proclaiming* that a thing is so. I dabble in this. I should do it more seriously sometime.
@anthracite Your comment got me going, so this part 1/2 - you inspired me to blow through my writers block and the kbin comment character count. Gotta thank you for that before posting.
So I've been thinking all night about what you wrote above, especially because one of the reasons I first followed your profile was because I knew (or was, depending on how you view it) a dragon at one point, and caught the same flavor of energy signature from your profile as I remember from him - a sense of kindred.
He was not a creation of mine, he first made himself known through a ouijia board session my friends and I had set up as joke whilst teens. Scared the hell out of us with his accuracy, gave us a name, declared himself a dragon and said he lived in me. I kinda brushed it off at the time, chalked it up to me liking dragons as a kid and didn't think anything much of it until about a year and a half later.
I was with two of my friends, M and N, both who were heavy drinkers (I'm a lightweight), and both who were far stronger than I (I'm built like a bird). We were small town boys stuck out in the back hills of California, freaks and geeks the three of us, so our Saturday night was a bonfire on a hilltop with a bottle of jack. None of us had good home lives, but M probably had it near the worst of all, and as we were walking down the two-lane highway back home, a line of cars started rushing down the hill towards us, and M jumped out into the freeway in front of them.
"C'mon motherfuckers! Kill me! C'mon!"
N was closet to him, but M was a full head taller and batted him away like a fly, screaming at the cars to kill him. There was no way they could stop - they were going about 50 on 20 degree incline.
Something roared in my ears. Time slowed down and I felt heat ripple through my muscles. In three strides I was at M's side, picked him up by his throat, all 200lbs of him (dude was pure muscle - he benched 290), and tossed him like a ragdoll over the embankment, out of the way of the traffic and into a tangle of blackberries.
I weighed maybe 150 at the time. Even with adrenaline in the mix, it was physically impossible for me to do what I had just done. It was 15 feet from where M had been standing to the edge of the road, and he had flown through the air, clearing the edge without touching the ground.
We managed to pull M out of the blackberries and N cussed him out the whole way home. I was trying to keep the sound of chanting out of my head, and kept running my hand up and down my arm because in the darkness it didn't feel like skin.
It felt like scales.
During my twenties, the dragon would return at points, although never quite so dramatically until the very end. Usually as a voice, biting, incisive, demanding I take certain paths and berating me when I didn't. There would be times when talking in a group, when I'd feel him take control of the oratory, saying things beyond my years, and often leaving me (and the listeners) wondering where the words had come from. We'd get in long internal arguments that would leave me exhausted - he was the neurotic overbearing uncle I never had. I came accept him as part of my personality - he was often enough in my thoughts I assumed him to be simply a neurosis given veracity by coincidence. Even when he would manifest physical effects in the world - a gust of wind blown by a psychic wingflap, the ability to run incredibly fast when needed despite my asthma, the odd capacity to reach out those wings and calm a room - I assumed it was a perceptual flaw of my own mind... even when others would observe and remark on the weirdness of it. I didn't want to believe it was an actual being that had a separate reality from my consciousness.
Until one night, in the depths of Los Angeles, he died.
I had holed up in hotel room with my girl at the time with enough ecstasy to ride out the weekend in erotic bliss. There were no hallucinogens involved, but almost immediately I entered into a state of complete detachment from reality. In the vision I was at a funeral - or more accurately, a dying ritual, for the now very old dragon. I was to witness his passing. They were entombing him as he slowly died at the center of a grand library built like the Colosseum, all made of marble. He had been a teacher to the young and this was to be his legacy. He looked out at me from that world into my eyes with the disappointment of a mentor denied, but a sense that he had done all he could, and I was as good as I was going to get. Then he closed his eyes, and he was gone, and I was back in the hotel with my girlfriend puking her guts out in the toilet.
@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... ;)