Datachasers
is a Webcomic hosted on ComicFury.
Datachasers is set in the distant future, in a world still recovering from an apocalypse. In it, humans and androids live side-by-side and face the hazards of their dangerous environment. Though set far into our future, it reflects our past and our present, dealing with the politics and cultures of different people, along with touching on the very fundamentals of humanity.
Updates: Monday, Wednesday, Friday. There is also a completed prequel called Luna Star (link).
Datachasers contains examples of:
- After the End: Centuries of war have destroyed civilization.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Subverted. The AIS of New Rome doesn't welcome visitors, but isn't actively malevolent or evil.
- Ancient Astronauts: The Epiphytes dropped by back in ancient Greek times, and were mistaken for nature spirits.
- Applied Phlebotinum: All over the place. Nanomachines are a bit of a favorite.
- Artifact Title: The story has nothing to do with data or the chasing thereof.
- Artificial Limbs: Integrating artificial parts into living bodies is almost commonplace.
- Black Market Produce: New Troy, being more than a bit of a nanny state with strict regulations on the sale, possession, and use of substances that the twenty-first century would consider commonplace, has a thriving underground economy in contraband like salt and alcohol.
- Body Backup Drive: There's a couple of sequences wherein the awareness of an android is installed in a new body—once as an upgrade, and twice as a restore after an accident wrecks the originals.
- Brain/Computer Interface: "Data jacks" are not uncommon among humans. Androids have it even easier.
- Cat Girl: Dusty and Kat are genetically engineered cat-people.
- Cyber Space: The "Infonet" can be accessed via a sort of holographic interface.
- Deus est Machina: The city-states are run by massive Artificial Intelligence Systems that most definitely have their own personalities, motivations, and goals. Fortunately, they're benevolent towards humanity.
- Electronic Eyes: Androids have them in a whole rainbow of colors.
- Glowing Mechanical Eyes: Although the glow doesn't play too great a part... until it's not there any more, or turns red.
- Gratuitous Latin: New Rome (which is even called Nova Roma by its inhabitants) uses a corrupted version of Latin as the local language. The creators have noted that saying it's "Future Latin" lets them be as accurate or (more often) inaccurate as they like in writing dialogue in that language.
- Faceless Goons: Most of the Nova Roman guards and "Gutter" wasteland bandits.
- Fan Disservice: One segment, commonly called "Mockingbird", is uncomfortably abundant in this. It starts with the police searching for Minx, a female android who's stuck in an unpleasant arrangement; even as Minx's situation deteriorates, the cops find evidence that something very,
very, very bad has been going on. - Fanservice: Done more tastefully than one might expect in a work with so many pretty female characters.
- Gendercide: The "Oblivion Virus" bio-weapon wiped out about half the infectees, while 90% of the survivors were left infertile, and the ones who could still bear children had a low incidence of live male births. Heavy use of medical technology such as artificial wombs and genetic manipulation staved off extinction long enough for the population to stabilize, but females still outnumber males by a fair margin.
- Green-Skinned Space Babe: Justified and lampshaded in the case of the plant-based Epiphytes, who have the equivalent of chlorophyll in their skin and can consciously shape their appearance to be aesthetically appealing to humans instead of scary.
- Grew Beyond Their Programming: The older Artificial Intelligence Systems, originally intended to provide assistance for human operators, have evolved well beyond their early purpose—to the point where it was the AI systems that stopped the wars wracking the globe by simply refusing to help humans kill each other any more.
- Heterosexual Life-Partners: Ada and Teedee are close, but not that close.
- Higher-Tech Species: The Epiphytes hold this role.
- High-Tech Hexagons: A not-infrequent motif.
- No New Fashions in the Future: Sharing closet space with Space Clothes.
- Older Than They Look: Anti-aging treatments are in use among the human population, while androids look as old or young as they wish, and the one Epiphyte we've seen has been around a lot longer than her appearance suggests.
- Organ Theft: Unsurprisingly, a prominent part of the Gutters' modus operandi.
- In the first draft of the story, Lynn Taylor nearly lost her eggs (and potentially her ovaries as well) due to a faulty Auto Doc. A real doctor showed up and turned it off.
- Psychic Powers: "Sensitives" exist in the human population, but the Epiphytes are a great deal better at it.
- Ridiculously Human Robots: Arguably, most of the androids are more human in their behavior than some of the humans.
- Robosexual: Android/human relations are quite advanced, so to speak.
- Robot Girl: The androids who aren't Ridiculously Human from the start fall into this definition.
- Screens Are Cameras: Frequently.
- Sir Swears-a-Lot: Several characters could qualify, but Tokyo Rose and Teedee lead the pack. Their Swear Jar is probably in seven digits.
- Supervisor Timmson of the NTPD shows up for a total of 11 panels, and spends three of those panels laying down a profanity-spiced ass-chewing on an erring officer.
- Supervisor Timmson of the NTPD shows up for a total of 11 panels, and spends three of those panels laying down a profanity-spiced
- Slave Collar: Slaves in New Rome wear them. Dusty keeps wearing hers even after she's freed.
- "Inhibitor devices", which impose passive or active physical control on an android, are often shown as being built into collars.
- Speech Bubbles: To be expected, given the format, but there's a bit of playing about with tricks like using color-coded bubbles for specific androids.
