Notice how the image of Dr Steve saying "know thyself" is getting clearer every other day?
This is one of Dr Steve's
"guide posts". Oasis is getting closer and closer to "knowing herself" and being
"responsible enough to be free of him". Of course, the realisation that she really is a constructed machine really is
crushing her as Torg once feared. Oasis, even if she is an artificial intelligence, is fully capable of human emotion.
The next strip will either feature Oasis having a full emotional meltdown or becoming, temporarily, dispassionate and trying to fight off the efforts to control her. In either case, she would be inconsolable for a long time afterwards.
Kusari, by the way, might or might not be able to disobey Schlock's order to kill Riff. Either she will disobey or someone, quite possibly Oasis, will stop her from executing that order. It is unlikely that Pete will kill Riff off.
Still, I can't help but feel that we still haven't gotten the whole story yet. This seems to be an absurdly massive investment by Dr Steve for a dubious payoff. There should still be far more to Oasis than just the satellite. Having a dedicated person, constructed or otherwise, be the only one capable of calling down a satellite strike makes no sense, especially if that person can be controlled by speaking into a watch - you could just call the strike down yourself by using the watch. That way, you could also have the flexibility of having multiple targets designated instead of just one.
It also makes absolutely no sense to
teach that artificial intelligence how to develop a personal relationship. Doubly so if that artificial intelligence is only meant to be
part of a weapons system. Dr Steve definitely thought that Oasis was capable of
being far more than that. We now have answers to the question of what Oasis is; we still haven't gotten an answer to the following question: what did Dr Steve actually intend Oasis to become?
Oasis is described as the
"ultimate tool of revenge". What remains to be answered is revenge against whom. Certainly, Dr Steve's objective is far more than just revenge against Hereti-corp. If he just wanted revenge against Hereti-corp, he could just have called down incendiary strikes against Hereti-corp targets. Since that was his company, he would know what to attack. Of course, the authorities would be on the lookout for the mad arsonist(s), but Dr Steve, in light of everything that he already had accomplished undetected, would have no problems evading that.
Similarly, if Dr Steve only intended for one person, or a few select persons, to die, he could just have Oasis stick a knife into their backs or
make them spontaneously combust. There still is no point in teaching her how to feel emotion if that was what he wanted.
One possibility is that Dr Steve intended for various parties to struggle for control over Oasis and destroy each other in the process. That could be a more suitable revenge. He might not care if the rest of the world pays the price, or he might even have wanted things to happen that way. But this still does not answer the question of why Oasis needed to be taught how to be human nor does it identify Dr Steve's targets.
Given all the resources Dr Steve must have had access to, and the sheer investment in this "project", he must have had something really grand in mind. Destroying, or conquering, the world might actually have been easier than what he had been doing. There is still much that we haven't been told.
We know three other things about Oasis: she needed to
"pass as human and paranormal" and also
"[operated] outside of the web". These things are also important but we haven't been told why.
The inference I have is that Dr Steve is behind the technological base for Oasis. I believe that Sin'thea's contribution, aside from her DNA, was ensuring that Oasis did "operate outside the web". There probably was little to nothing special about Sin'thea's DNA, it might just have suited her vanity. She was described as being
"an egomaniac when it comes to her writings" after all.
The general feeling I have had is that Oasis's target is in fact either the fate web, or the omega pillar. The sheer scale and scope of the project suggest that it is nothing short of that.
The missing threads that remain are Theresa and, still to a great extent, Kusari/Sasha. Both are too similar to Oasis to be ignored.
Kusari was described as being
"a pale imitation" of Oasis. The
"AOL satellite" might or might not be a throwaway joke but its full capabilities are unknown at this point. Is it cloaked? Is it capable of surgical orbital bombardment? Regardless, it does have one clear advantage over Oasis:
it can operate three independent entities instead of just one. These entities still have a limited emotional range versus Oasis and probably have less capability of learning and expressing emotion, but it is clear that they
have some ability to do so nonetheless. Inferior imitation or not, it still represents quite an achievement. But, just like Oasis, what is the ultimate goal of that project?
Theresa is also unexplained.
She gives Torg an "Oasis vibe" and was recognisable to Dr Chen as
"Ms Slaughter". There definitely is a link between Theresa and Oasis. The question is in what way? Was Theresa initially intended to be the organic component for the Oasis satellite but failed in some way? Or was she used as a prototype for the cloning and training of the actual Oasis entity? Marcus Chen might well have met Slaughteresa at some point, most likely in her early childhood. After all, she did not recognise Dr Chen, but he recognised her.
There are some other possibilities here. Theresa might have been a knock-off made for Sin'thea as she wanted another daughter, Theresa might have been Sin'thea's own attempt to recreate Oasis or Theresa might have been the prototype for Kusari instead of Oasis. In any case, it is apparent that
Sin'thea was disappointed in Theresa but, just like so many other things, the "why" has not yet been made clear. As an aside, I wonder what Sin'thea looks like in colour. Is she a redhead or has she gone grey?
As is typical for Sluggy, the answer to one question raises two more. No doubt there are many more surprises in store. What is clear that many guesses will not be correct, but that is something that we have learnt to expect.
PS: I have not checked if the links above work properly as there are quite a few of them.