HOW DARE YOU MAKE ME FEEL MY OWN FEELINGS

And those thoughts were still, “You are the boy. I love you the most.” And then they stopped.

OH MY GOD THAT’S WHY HE WANTS TO TIME TRAVEL

yeah.. but taht dog was probably happier than anythign ever….
assuming it wasn’t hit by a car or something..
in which case its last thoughts were probably “ow” and “I’m glad you’re here.”

People tell themselves a lot of stories about death. We invent ways to believe that it’s not the end, ways to imagine that it’s not coming for us, ways to plan and prepare as if the things that happen afterward will still matter to us when there’s no “us” to matter to anymore.
If the ‘dialogue’ we see here is the level on which Skip thinks all the time, Skip probably doesn’t worry about what’s going to happen when he’s gone. He doesn’t think about whether his life matters in some greater sense, or whether things will be different in the future because he was here. If he knew he was dying, he would probably think back on the things he did and didn’t do and judge his life based simply on that- did I do what I wanted with the time that I had? I spent my life. Am I happy with what I got for it?

Patrick says a lot of awful things in issue 5, but I’ve never counted the last panel of this page among them. In context, talking specifically about murder and other violations of self-determination, it’s certainly bleak and disturbing. But the basic sentiment is that a life is a resource, and the Civil War example points out instead that each of us gets to decide how to spend ours. Those soldiers didn’t choose “my life” or “my death”, not really- they couldn’t have opted out of death, only rescheduled their appointments. They chose between “spend my life to get another few decades of personal happiness” or “spend my life to try and change the way things are in this country”. I think that’s a beautiful perspective.
A lot of people worry about whether they’re doing something “worthwhile” with their life- whether it’s going to “matter” when they’re gone, whether they’ll be remembered, whether they’ve improved things for the people who come after them. And those may be valid concerns, but they don’t determine the value of an individual life. Their life doesn’t belong to the people who come after them! It’s theirs. At the end, the only person who gets to decide whether it was “worth it” is them.
Maybe that’s something Patrick learned from Skip.

Assuming what you mean is “if this is one of the five ‘active’ Patricks, does that mean he’s only in one place at a time, and there are memories Alison could’ve landed in that would’ve just been memories and not contained anyone capable of reacting to her”…

Anima’s warning wasn’t “don’t go to that place, it’s dangerous!”- it was “you don’t know where you’re going!”.
This is a mindscape- it only has the geometric properties that people define it to have. This particular area is suffused with irrational Component and (we infer) largely avoided by the locals; it may be even more intuitive to navigate, and behave less like a space with linear dimensions.
Alison jumped into it without knowing the first thing about what it was or where she might end up- all she was thinking was “I want to find Gurwara”. And she’s very aware that everything she believes about Gurwara, right down to his name and face, is unverifiable and may be a complete fabrication.
How extraordinary is it, really, that she found someone else instead?

Sure, this scene looks sweet and innocent *now*, but I can imagine it getting a lot darker. We all know what happens in books with a boy, a dog, and a Newbery Medal on the cover.

first lets ask a question. are we seeing what anyone standing next to Alison would see? or is this what Alison herself sees? we are in a realm of fairly pure thought, Gurwara may be how Alison recognizes whatever that is, it could be the natural entropy of memory, or the specific effects of his concussion, drugs, or whatever.

Indeed, something else! He was also looking quite sneaky.

But, I suppose the level of concern depends upon whether Gurwara is part of The Conspiracy and what his intentions are.

To play devil’s advocate, perhaps his intentions aren’t altogether bad, and he’s trying to carefully upkeep Patrick’s mind until he can handle dealing with The Conspiracy?

It seems that there are many possibilities given that Gurwara is appearing after Partick being close to a breakthrough in time travel quite some time ago.

At the very least Gurwara seems to have disturbed the web of information Patrick was building. How serious that is depends on whether he’s taken a memory factoid, or a deduction, Deductions can be rebuilt, memories…we don’t know. The holographic memory model argues for non-localised storage, but we aren’t working at that level of abstraction, we’re working in an abstraction where memories have a physical existence. RAID might keep info over multiple discs, but a hacker can still get in and do a secure delete on every copy of the file. Redundancy doesn’t exist if something can still affect every copy. So we have to assume he may well be altering memories, which isn’t good.

Which incidentally leads on to… we’re in Patrick’s brain, directly accessing
memories, and there is a whole web of information about the conspiracy,
which rather blows away the theories he was making it all up.

Getting back to Gurwara, we still don’t know how he fits into this. He played head games with Alison, but the lesson he taught was one she needed teaching. Doing it by messing with her proper professor’s head was clearly unethical, but the lesson itself was about the ethics of control and coercion, and the revelation of what he did actually reinforced that. Gurwara working to a do-the-least-harm scenario is still possible.

I don’t think we can call him an agent of the conspiracy at this point, it’s at least as likely, if not more so, that he represents a third, unknown faction. But whatever he’s doing, his aims don’t seem entirely congruent with Alison and Patrick’s. (For creepy thoughts, his presence in Patrick’s brain likely means he’s nearby, which also means he’s in the vicinity of Alison’s unconscious body. Admittedly, my money’s on Feral keeping Al safe. In a fair fight)

While we’re on the subject, someone should probably tell Patrick he’s running his brain on an unsecure server. And yell at him until he changes his admin password to something that’s not ALISON.