From left to right: Florence, Sam, and Helix, crew of the Savage Chicken.
Freefall is a long-running webcomic (over 2100 strips as of January 2012) by Mark Stanley. It's also a straight-up Long Runner, having passed the decade mark in 2008. Starting with the April 19, 2006 strip it's been colored mostly by colorist George Peterson. Set on a planet in the early stages of terraforming, the strip deals with the antics of alien spaceship "captain" Sam Starfall, his robot friend Helix, and their Bowman's Wolf engineer Florence Ambrose.One of the last words one would use to describe Sam is "trustworthy". He's not always the brightest and is a petty crook (at least by human standards). It's a wonder he hasn't gotten himself killed yet, although the local police may have something to do with this. He can be summed up as "a larcenous squid in an environment suit."Helix has the mind of a child, and were he human, a weak stomach. He's described by Florence in one strip as being "one of those robots who faints at the sight of battery acid."Florence, an anthropomorphic genetically-engineered red wolf, is easily the most intelligent member of the entire cast (not just the main characters) and the Trope Namer for My Instincts Are Showing.For a humorous comic, Freefall actually packs a lot of real-world science into its science-fiction setting. Most of it is pretty accurate, especially regarding space travel and physics — the author often likes to show his work.Freefall has a WikiFur article, after The Other Wiki removed its entry due to lack of notability under Wikipedia guidelines.
This webcomic contains examples of the following tropes:
All Animals Are Dogs: Florence, who is actually a red wolf. Not that this matters to the robots (or children) who see her.
"DOGGY!"
All Girls Want Bad Boys: Florence Ambrose is pursuing a very relaxed and intelligent nice guy, but has a brilliant theory as to why this occurs, and why there are so damned many Bad Boys in the world.
Max Post has an arrest warrant put out for him for hacking, unauthorized access to robotic operating systems, and jailbreaking a PS3.
Strangely averted here, with a baker listing insane theories of the possible danger of money offered by Sam. The unremarkable one is in the middle instead of at the end.
"It's counterfeit! It's been licked by a cat! It's radioactive!"
Art Evolution: To be expected in a 14-year-old comic.
Artificial Brilliance: In-universe case. The primary robots don't count, being a case of Instant A.I., Just Add Water instead, but Qwerty's creations are another matter. Due to writing simple programs without necessarily considering the consequences, a number of his inventions display unexpected emergent behavior. For example, the waffle irons have batteries, and are programmed to recharge once they begin to run low. They went carnivorous.
Artificial Gravity: The satellite delivery story arc goes out of its way to demonstrate the lack of artificial gravity. Word Of God discusses the various nods of clothing and gear to the lack of a convenient gravity quite a way down this page (almost right before the details section for Sam Starfall).
Sam Starfall: Quick! Where's the nearest concentration of valuables that would easily fit into a pocket? Varroa Jacobsoni: Pharmaceutical storage on the second floor. Sam: I'll search there. You go that way!
Florence: He DEFINITELY should not sparkle. Winston: Look at Vlad the Impaler. He was a monster in his time too. But given time and distance, look what happenedto him.
Sam claims that kleptomania is a virtue among his people. That said, even among his people Sam is capable of getting into trouble. Witness that the reason he snuck onto a human ship: the royal family was after him due to a Noodle Incident involving a zeppelin, a loop-the-loop, and a lot of pudding.
Florence, being a wolf, occasionally comes into this.
Winston: It's creepy. Florence: Creepy? This is twilight. Magic hour. Prime hunting time. Winston: I suppose creepiness depends a lot of whether you're predator or prey. Florence: Come on! There's a shortcut through a shadowy alley up here!
Body Backup Drive: Discussed and deconstructed in relation to robots' minds. They can be backed up and downloaded into another body, but the main characters meet two robots who chose not to be backed up because from their perspective they're just as dead either way.
This strip explains why Florence isn't necessarily bound to follow every single directive given to her:
Florence: The surest way to cause your supervisor to fail is to follow his every order without question.
This may also be Foreshadowing Clippy, who does obey every order given more or less without question. (In fact, Kornada is taking great pains to keep him from realizing he should be asking questions, due to him trying to use Clippy in an evil scheme.)
When Florence goes in for testing at the company that created her, this happens, followed half a year of reader-time later by this. And even later by this. It also takes over 100 comics to get around to a joke about Sam misunderstanding the word "hippocampus" during Florence's testing.
In that same storyline, Varroa mentions discovering a ballet company composed entirely of old terraforming robots. Much later, it's revealed that recurring characters Qwerty and Dvorak wrote the ballet they're practicing, called "Making Swan Lake".
The Cameo: A bunch of them, including, during the robot church segment, cameos from real and fictional robots and other autonomous mechanisms. On occasion members of the Freefall forum are given nods.
Censor Box: Helix's vision system has parental controls, and automatically adds them to anything he's not supposed to see, like wolf nipples.
Cerebus Syndrome: As the story has progressed, a larger dramatic arc has grown, although the humor has remained throughout.
Cheshire Cat Grin: Florence's "human" smile is terrifying. She has to be very careful to hide her teeth when she wants to express genuine happiness... though she isn't above playing this one straight when she's not in a friendly mood.
Cigarette of Anxiety: The Mayor does with with a cigar after being confronted with a difficult choice.
Florence's hunting instincts can come across as such.
Also Benny's flying:
Benny: Engines, check. Red and green blinky lights, check. Plane dips alarmingly close to airstrip Benny: Passengers (Winston and Florence, formerly engaged in a Sleep Cute) returned to the full upright position, check.
Culture Clash: There aren't many fully developed cultures to begin with, but... Mostly with Sam, of course. On Sam's planet everything is bolted down. Their excuse is that it comes from evolving from scavengers.
Deadly Upgrade: Gardener In The Dark is a patch designed to prune robots' neural pathways to prevent them from achieving full sentience and walking off the job. However, it seems that Mr. Kornada has had the patch altered to lobotomize the robots back to factory settings. Considering how much Jean relies on intelligent robots to run, this is not a good thing.
Deface of the Moon: April Fools, 2003 has Sam hack into the planet's terraforming computer and sculpt the moon to resemble him.
Even Evil Has Standards: Sam routinely "finds" wallets, hijacks vehicles, breaks into homes; once he tried to mug a kid. Even blackmail is okay. Mind-control and slavery aren't.
Everything Is Trying to Kill You: Sam is attacked by people on whom he tried a theft or scam, robots, and his own ship. Most Terran lifeforms that can move at all try to eat him and even Nature's laws seem to act against him whenever possible.
Expressive Mask: Justified with Sam. With the robots, not so much; their eyes are apparently rigid lenses, but they can be narrowed and made into the Eyes Always Shut-style ^_^ eyes anyways. One robot halfway averts this by having eyes that can display graphics, but they still narrow when he's angry.
Face Palm: Poor Florence ends up doing these very often throughout the whole comic, with the "pinching bridge of nose" variety being the most common.
Faster-than-Light Travel: The Dangerous And Very Expensive drive is only used for very important people and cargoes, though it's also the only means of sending messages to another system anytime fast. Large payloads like colony ships have to be sent slower than light.
Finger in the Mail: Parodied when Helix is kidnapped, in the version of the comic that appeared in a Furry Fandom magazine prior to the webcomic. Since he's a robot, his compatriots just reassemble him as the parts arrive in the mail. The last thing to arrive is his head.
Helix: "Hey! I've been rescued!" Sam: "We are not dealing with a criminal mastermind here."
Fourth Wall Mail Slot: Mark Stanley runs a "Q&A with the Freefall Cast and Crew" thread on the Freefall message boards, where he replies as the character who was questioned here.
Sam: So what you're saying is that in two or three days, I'm going to have a highly intelligent, fast moving, starving, carnivorous alien life form on my ship. Winston: Yep. Wolves are also most active at dawn and dusk, so this will probably happen while you're asleep.
There's also, although not expanded in the comic itself, the DAVE drive, the FTL drive used to get between star systems. Short for Dangerous And Very Expensive drive.
Hand or Object Underwear: Florence has done this from time to time. Unfortunately for her, since she has multiple sets of mammaries thanks to her nonhuman nature, even with the help of her tail it leaves some of her "naughty bits" uncovered. Her fur thankfully covers anything she has on her chest unless she's nursing or in heat (the former has never happened, and the latter is unlikely to happen in such a nonsexualized comic) - but she still covers the same area as human ladies would due to cultural conditioning. And her tail covers, err... the bottom half when needed.
Well, sort of. Florence and the robotic AIs are property, and it is ambiguous whether they have any rights at all. However, their status is complicated because there are relatively few humans on the planet, allowing the AIs a lot of freedom in practice if not in theory. This is an important element in the story, but the AIs don't seem particularly upset with their situation: Some of them work towards gaining rights, but generally accept that only gradual change is possible, and try to find peaceful ways of getting around What Measure Is a Non-Human? without disrupting human society too much. Florence explicitly states that this approach is needed on a few occasions.
It's clear that Dr. Bowman deliberately arranged for the wolf pups to end up in human families, and so be socalized by human families, the best restraining bolt of all. Florence's nominal owner, Scott Ambrose, has long regarded Florence as his younger sister, and is more than merely supportive of her. Florence is treated well by most people around her, but legally, she is still a thing, not a person, and has no more legal rights than a toaster. And "property to be treated and disposed of however we see fit" is exactly how the upper levels of the government of planet Jean regard, and intend to treat, all AIs, including both Florence and the sentient robots — and they know this. We've seen that other elements of the government — including the actual police force — don't share this view, but still, not everyone could remain as calm about the whole situation as Florence and the robots seem to.
As the strip progresses, the capacity of artificial intelligences (including the bioengineered Florence) to subvert their apparent hardwired limitations by locating loopholes or exploiting semantics in their orders becomes increasingly important. Florence even theorizes that Dr. Bowman might have intended for this to eventually happen; though he hasn't appeared in the comic (see The Ghost), it's abundantly clear he cared for his creations like they were his children, and forcing the rest of the world into a position where they must acknowledge his creations as independent beings is as good a way as any to create a future for them.
Herr Doktor: Invoked when Sam disguises himself as a cryogenics scientist.
Human Popsicle: Used for interstellar travel, involving chemicals that make the process unable to be repeated for several years without harming the individual so treated. Invoked when Sam hears that 5-7 years is needed, in between, he states he thought people could be frozen and thawed like popcicles. Florence almost got iced again in a recent visit to Ecosystems Unlimited, thanks to threatening Mr. Kornada's plan.
I Cannot Self-Terminate: This robot really wishes it could. Not that it hasn't a good reason. The JarJarBot is an example of the exception to an inversion created by the addition of a single character. To wit, the robots are usually required to turn themselves in for scrapping at a certain time, meaning that they are required to self-terminate. However, they just caught on that it's possible to get out of having to do it (by buying themselves for their scrap value from the scrapyard, as mentioned by Edge). The JarJarBot, of course, is more than willing to self-terminate.
In the Future, We Still Have Roombas: There are many robots fulfilling this role, such as carnivorous waffle irons, and in one strip during a segment with many fictional and Real Life robots being background cameos an actual Roomba is shown.
Florence is classified as an AI, and is treated as just that by many humans, especially the Mayor and Ecosystems Unlimited. At least this guy has his criteria straight.
Sam cheerfully chides an Ecosystems Unlimited employee who offers up a illogical circular argument against Florence's personhood.
Laser-Guided Amnesia: The memory blocking drug used on Florence, which prevented the conversion of short-term memory to long-term storage for 18 hours.
Loophole Abuse: Robots and AIs learning to use this is a plot point. In one early incident, Sam actually teaches Florence how to engineer her own loopholes when the need arises.
Sam: Never ask for permission. Put your superiors in a position where you automatically have permission unless they actively take steps to stop you. Or as I like to call it, "putting human inertia to work".
Lost Episode: The 1999 Halloween Crossover special.
Mad Scientist: Florence is worried that Dr. Bowman may have been one of these, releasing his untested creations. Dvorak the robot is constantly coming up with strange and potentially dangerous inventions.
Mohs Scale of Sci-Fi Hardness: Level 3, but feels harder because it rarely demonstrates the technology and goes to extensive lengths to keep actual science in the fiction. Nevertheless, it has canonical FTL ships.
Moody Mount: Sam tries to ride Polly the emu to escape from an angry mob, but she refuses. He gets her to run by pulling off one of his facial tentacles and putting it on a stick.
Motivation on a Stick: Sam uses one of his facial tentacles this way so he can ride Polly and escape an angry mob.
Mugged for Disguise: Blunt and Edge will occasionally steal random transponders to pass themselves off as other machines. See Mundane Utility, below.
Mundane Dogmatic: One of Mark Stanley's rules is "no magic technology", with the exception of a very expensive and limited (small cargoes, requires cold sleep...) form of FTL travel. Conversely there's no transporter beams or Artificial Gravity and the only alien race known is in the equivalent of the 19th century and can't breathe our atmosphere without artificial assistance (Sam's home world has a higher oxygen content than Earth, so his environmental suit is required to concentrate atmospheric oxygen to levels that won't result in his suffering from anoxia).
Mundane Utility: Robots normally only identify each other by their ID transponders. This lets a few robot muggers disguise themselves simply by stealing transponders and turning off the ones they were built with. When the rest of robot society finds out about this...they throw a masquerade ball.
My Car Hates Me: An unusually literal example: Sam's spaceship's AI was trying to kill him for a while.
Nobody Poops: Averted in #536, and again when Florence visits Ecosystems, Unlimited, starting here.Word Of God, in an Info Dump on the Freefall forum, states that Florence needs to use the facilities more often than humans, thanks to the physiological modifications to allow bipedal motion not fully taking into account the effect of gravity on her internal organs, which when she stands upright press down on her bladder. The author did the research.
Sam's good with these. According to the manual, he ticked off his planet's royal family in an incident involving "a zeppelin, a loop-the-loop manoeuvre, and pudding, lots of pudding".
There is even a Noodle Incident with Noodle Implements, The royal family is not too happy with him due to an incident involving a zeppelin, a "Loop the loop" maneuver, and pudding. Lots and lots of pudding. This indirectly lead him to leave his home planet.
Helix: A pressure cooker works by applying pressure and heat for a long time. My way does the same in an instant. Florence: That sounds almost as you're trying to cook using explosives.
Overly-Long Scream: Happened at least a couple of times, in accordance with Cap'n Sam Starfall's philosophy, "When in trouble, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!" Helix is usually eager to join in. In one noteable incident near the beginning, the two of them are running in circles and screaming for long enough that they have to stop to take a deep breath (synchronized, even) before continuing. Florence comments on how inexplicable it is that Helix, who is a ROBOT, needs to stop for breath... Then she tears out his voicebox to shut him up, and offers to do the same to Sam if he doesn't quiet down.
Plug 'n' Play Technology: Dr. Bowman's design is applicable to both uplifted animals and robots, given that it's a general mechanism for increasing the complexity of a neural network, and robot brains are based on human brains. (1422)
It recently came to light that Gardener in the Dark goes public "this Friday". Though she doesn't seem to have quite realized it yet, Florence has less than a week to save planet Jean from total infrastructure collapse.
It Got Worse, as of 1910, Florence has two days to stop the program from going live. She did get someone to listen to her within an hour of re-realizing the danger, but needed to defer a full explanation until the following day.
Somewhat subverted in that the necessary restrictions of the Restraining Bolt are often discussed. For example, once Florence asked ironically if it's OK for her to fantasize about breaking into a prison and releasing all the death-row inmates, since she isn't allowed to let humans come to harm.
Florence also theorizes that Bowman's creations are intended to outgrow the Restraining Bolt, as a sort of moral training wheel.
Robot Names: Qwerty, Ab2y becomes Abby. Sawtooth Rivergrinder is a very descriptive name for a terraforming robot. Given the number of robots, not all have names.
Rock Beats Laser: Ecosystems Unlimited attempts to control the information leaving the company by dosing recycled parts with an EMP before releasing them to destroy any clandestine listening/recording devices that someone may try to sneak-out that way. This has absolutely no effect on a hand-written note.
Rubber Forehead Aliens: Subverted, because Sam eventually makes it clear that his encounter suit is deliberately humanoid and harmless-looking to play on human preconceptions; his real form is unknown but includes facial tentacles, and can cause insanity. Wait...
"You're a gravitational engineer. You arrived on the Asimov. And you work for Sam Starfall." "That's amazing." "Simple deduction, actually." "No. It's amazing that you figured out I work for Sam and you haven't asked me to leave."
When Sam needs to come up with an alias in a Cryogenics lab, he claims to be "Leonard Snart. Captain of this Cold facility." For those who don't get the joke, long time Flash villain Captain Cold's real name is Leonard Snart.
The robot religious meeting features robots from just about every TV series or film with robots, including Robbie, a Cylon, Astro Boy, a Skutter and K9.
Shower Scene: Several of them, mostly played straight. The one for the Oct 24, 2011 strip, however, Subverts the usual Fanservice purpose: Florence showers with her clothes still on, as her outfit was just as dirty as she was and she was fatigued from the day's ordeal.
Sliding Scale of Robot Intelligence: Mostly rather high on it, but sometimes it becomes more like a Slippery Slope. Some are more advanced that the others. There are even artists. Robots made on Jean generally show more initiative and creativity than the average robot, and when they turn twenty a neural pruning process makes them even more intelligent (Helix is a rather young robot).
Space Is Cold: Averted. Helix says he does not need air to survive, and Florence replies that he is air-cooled. Rather fortunate as he was apparently planning a "really funny joke" once they got into space.
Speak of the Devil: The Sticky Notes of Doom contain the name Gardener in the Dark — and if you're a Jeanian robot connected to the commnet and hear that name...
Word Of God is that Sam's home planet is like this, with zeppelins (mentioned in the strip) and exoskeletons that resemble War Ofthe Worlds Martian walkers.
Streisand Effect: This one isn't a perfect example, but the final quote sums the effect up perfectly - 875.
Subspace Ansible: Averted. Communications are all limited to the speed of light, and communications between star systems depend on hitching a ride on mostly sub-light ships.
Time Dilation: The D.A.V.E. drive apparently works by somehow doing the reverse, for those on board the trip takes as long as it would normally but to people outside the ship it seems to be traveling faster than light. Which is why passengers on FTL ships have to be in cold sleep.
Uplifted Animal: Chimps were the first to be uplifted, but it didn't work very well, since they turned out to be natural sociopaths. Florence is an uplifted wolf (Word Of God states she has no human DNA), part of an experimental breed - only 14 of them exist so far. That may be all there ever will be- they're actually only a prototype for a future race of uplifted alien animals. However, if THEY have anything to do with it, they'll eventually be a full species. This seems fairly likely since Florence is a main character AND terrifyingly intelligent.
Used Future: Especially the Savage Chicken but in general the colony is still a work in process. So... not so much a Used Future, as a Brand New Future With Kinks That Haven't Yet Been Worked Out. Or perhaps Future Site of Future, an EcoSystems Unlimited Construction Project.
Virtual Ghost: Averted, the robots are capable of making backups of their memories but most choose not to; their explanation why involved making a holographic copy of Sam and attempting to cut the originals head off with a chainsaw. Also, robots use transponders to locate and identify each other. If a damaged or decommissioned transponder gets connected to a power source, nearby robots can start "seeing" robots who aren't there. This is cited as explaining a lot of the robot ghost stories.
Webcomic Time: 1900+ strips over the course of more than ten years, and about three weeks have elapsed in-comic. This was lampshaded in #405. It was mentioned again as "almost a month" in #2144.
We Will Have Perfect Health in the Future: Parodied. Given an opportunity to loot a pharmocological supply depot, Sam passes over "cheap life extension pills [and] over the counter cancer cures" in favor of the stuff that he can sell for real money — diet pills and performance enhancers.
Averted, even; when quizzed on how she determines that she's looking at a human, the first thing Florence says is "clothes". Further interrogation gets the explanation; humans may have to modify their physical forms and their genetics beyond current recognition to survive in certain environments, making appearance, scent, and DNA unreliable, but humans are a tool-using species and no matter what form they take, they'll almost certainly want pockets to carry those tools.
These tend to turn into CMoAs and CMoHs for Sam, as seen here.
Who Wants to Live Forever?: Referenced when robots outlive their owner, but not actually relevant since robots aren't actually immortal. Their neural nets are rated for about eighty years.
Worthless Yellow Rocks: Diamonds are the natural buildup of loose carbon on fusion engines. Sam muses on how he could make a fortune if space travel were cheap, here, by taking advantage of this trope.
Winston: I don't believe it. It really was a werewolf. Okay, doc. Think. What's the first thing people in horror movies do when a werewolf shows up? Winston (thinking — and facepalming): Why, the same thing I did. They run off and leave the door open so the monster can enter the house.
(Fortunately for Winston, he's actually a character in a science fiction story.)
Deputy Mayor: Our non-human population consists of one person. Sam. Do we really need an entire police force for one larcenous squid? Police Robot: Sir, I believe if you look past the obvious answer, you'll see one that's even more obvious.
Your Head Asplode: Qwerty mentions that his fellow robots are concerned that this is a possible reaction to robots intentionally circumventing their safeguards, in this strip.
is a long-running webcomic (over 2100 strips as of January 2012) by Mark Stanley. It's also a straight-up Long Runner, having passed the decade mark in 2008. Starting with the April 19, 2006 strip it's been colored mostly by colorist George Peterson. Set on a planet in the early stages of terraforming, the strip deals with the antics of alien spaceship "captain" Sam Starfall, his robot friend Helix, and their Bowman's Wolf engineer Florence Ambrose.One of the last words one would use to describe Sam is "trustworthy". He's not always the brightest and is a petty crook (at least by human standards). It's a wonder he hasn't gotten himself killed yet, although the local police
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