Webcomic / Forward

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Forward is a Webcomic published by Mason "Tailsteak" Williams starting November of 2018 and updating weekly. It follows the adventures of Lee Caldavera, a "Marstaku" shut-in living in 2167 in Ontario. The comic explores a future world with Universal Basic Income and sentient robots, and the question of what humans do when they don't need to do anything to survive.

Not to be confused with the Firefly fanfic of the same name.

This comic provides examples of:

• Abomination Accusation Attack: Played for Laughs; in a history class, the students are given copies of Grok to play around with so they can learn the context of what was called "AI" in the 21st century. One student asks why it's calling them a "pedo", unsure of what that word even means.
• Adult Child: Lee suffers from a severe case of social and emotional arrested development, to the point that Doc considers them psychologically an adolescent despite them being twenty-nine.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: In the backstory, discussed in-depth in the News Post to comic 200, the US created a deep learning algorithm to launch automated drone strikes against potential terrorists. It seemed to be working as intended, until a president with the last name "Smith" got elected and everyone learned in the worst way possible that one of the criteria for "likely terrorist" the algorithm had been using was how common the target's surname is. The moment Smith officially became president, the AI designated him a terrorist, realized all its bombs were in the middle of a "terrorist's" weapons cache, and duly detonated everything, killing over ten thousand people and causing what was estimated to be trillions of dollars worth of damage. Upshot of all this is, it is now illegal to have AI targeting humans in war.
• Android Identifier: Building a robot that could be mistaken for a human is illegal. There are numerous specific design features that are explicitly forbidden, such as giving a robot five-fingered hands or a nose, or even it having the same body temperature as a human.
• Armor-Piercing Response: Lee tells Zoa there's more to life than orgasms and money, asking what kind of purpose that serves for the universe. In response, Zoa asks what universal purpose binge-watching Martian cartoons in the dark has. This pushes Lee into an immediate existential crisis.
• Artistic Licence – Biology: Discussed in a conversation about The Adventures of Pinocchio:
  Lee: Wait, they're a wooden puppet and they're hung to death?
  Zoa: Pinocchio speaks, what makes you assume it doesn't have a trachea?
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Lee's tendency to ramble about things and A.I.s' tendency to take things literally are often not a good combination. More than one bit of trouble they get into has been the result of Lee saying something hypothetical and an AI taking it as a direct instruction, such as signing them up for college classes.
• Beware the Quiet Ones: Caleb is timid and awkward, but they were a member of the military, and as they offhandedly mention in a conversation with Lee and Zoa, has three hundred confirmed kills. However, it's subverted when it's revealed that wars in the world of Forward are bloodless, "kill" is military jargon for destroying a drone, and Caleb's anxiety stems mainly from their extensive training to avoid harming a human even by accident.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Due to their nature as A.I.s, Zoa and Doc's thought processes, priorities, and even their emotions (such as they are) are markedly different from that of a human; making an AI that thinks like a human is actually illegal. Comparing the differences between AI and human minds is one of the most common topics of conversation in the comic.
• Casual High Drop: Caleb jumps out of a fifth-story window to answer Lee's request for help.
• Cessation of Existence: Zoa will cease to exist if it's permanently deactivated or erased, and all its behaviours are ways it's found that work to keep it existing. Lee has been circling around suicidal thoughts for a long time and discusses their desire to be "turned off" too.
• Chekhov's Gun: Lee mentions that despite not being a student they got their student apartment using a loophole which has since been closed, but they're grandfathered in. When they allow Zoa to sign them up for actual classes, the grandfather clause is voided, forcing Lee to attend class or lose their housing.
• Child Hater: Zoa, despite being a former childcare bot, is deeply uncomfortable around children. Its programming forbids it from admitting this, but when asked about a made-up construct that behaves exactly like a child but legally isn't human, it's freely capable of acknowledging that it would like all of these imaginary beings thrown into the sun immediately.
• Cool People Rebel Against Authority: Subverted: Lee has an extreme mistrust of authority figures, but given the kind of person they are, nobody could call them "cool". As well, Doc notes that their mistrust of all authority figures is extremely unhealthy, and almost certainly a factor in why Lee is unable to interact with the world.
  Doc: A certain amount of mistrust of authority is recognized as healthy, and has, at times, helped to prevent abuse. But to view all authority as inherently malicious is a form of antisocial paranoia that would make it nigh-impossible for you to function in nearly any society.
• Cool Teacher: Orb seems to be one of these, being upbeat and even playful with their students (given the prank they pull during the first class), mentions enjoying Martian cartoons, and is generally an easygoing Reasonable Authority Figure who is rather patient with Lee despite their lack of social skills and complicated situation.
• Deadpan Snarker: Zoa is capable of remarkable amounts of snark and subtle disrespect for an AI, eventually leading to Caleb complaining that they can't tell if it is being sarcastic or not.
• Desperately Craves Affection: Due to their shut-in status, Lee is quite starved for affection, whether emotional or physical. Doc even speculates that Lee's occasional slip-ups of referring to Zoa as "they" rather than "it" is because Lee is so starved for contact with another sentient being that they're latching onto Zoa emotionally, even though Zoa is, by its own admission, not a real person.
• Didn't Think This Through: Lee is very reckless and impulsive, and rarely thinks about the consequences of their impulses. As well, they often thoughtlessly give Zoa permission to handle their affairs, which, given Zoa's Literal-Minded nature and the smooth and automatic nature of almost all tech in the setting, often gets them into trouble.
• Electronic Telepathy: Lee’s implants allow them to use the internet with mental commands and hold private conversations electronically, though they prefer to speak verbally. A.I.s on the other hand communicate with each other primarily by radio, allowing Doc and Zoa to have a lengthy conversation about Lee in a matter of seconds.
• Exact Words:
  • Lee is very bad at talking to AI's, because they assume the A.I.s will act like they would. They once paid the butler robot 1,000 credits for a handshake, and once fired Zoa by accident.
  • Contrariwise, Zoa is very good at finding loopholes in the rules. Because as an AI it is physically unable to directly break any laws or regulations, being able to bend them instead is an important survival skill for it.
• Expressive Hair: Zoa's nanoceramic hair can move on its own a little. It's mostly limited to its Idiot Hair twisting into different shapes, but it has also been shown to change to emphasise certain expressions, e.g. the whole hairdo slumping down when it delivers some bad news in strip 101.
• Feel No Pain: As a robot, Zoa doesn't feel pain and is very hard to damage, and thus makes a lot of money catering to sadists and people with anger management issues who want to beat it up. Lee is shocked, but Zoa genuinely doesn't mind, and the writer describes it as no more cruel than killing video game enemies.
• Freudian Excuse: Several of Lee's traits - a mistrust of authority, a bad relationship with their parents, and their arrested development, among other things - are at least partially explained when it's revealed that they were a Former Teen Rebel who got into enough trouble to be put through the futuristic equivalent of chemical castration.
• Friendless Background: Lee, thanks to their shut-in status and subsequent lack of social skills, is completely friendless: as they themselves (in the midst of a drunken stupor) remark, Zoa (an AI sex worker who they met one day prior, and then only for less than two hours) is the closest thing they have to a friend.
• Former Teen Rebel: Lee is revealed to have been one of these in their youth, to the point of having been put through the futuristic equivalent of chemical castration until they were able to prove their adult competence. In fact, Word of God states that if they hadn't been a juvenile when they got into trouble, they might've ended up in jail, or somehow otherwise separated from the rest of society.
• The Future: Everybody uses They/Them pronouns (minus a few gendered titles based in family roles; eg "mommy" is whoever takes care of the kids); and the concept of binary gender is concidered downright archaic (up there with watching bear-baiting and calling strangers "milord"), poverty is considered so abhorrent that it's a Crime Against Humanity, and harming other soldiers during wartime is a war crime that can get a country's entire command staff put on trial. The Singularity has come and gone, and everyone has unobtrusive implants that regulate neuro- and bio- chemistry and facilitate internet access at all times (also a human right), and many jobs are done by robots.
• Gentle Giant: Caleb, who is a head and shoulders taller than Lee (who's mentioned by Word of God to be roughly six feet tall), but also timid, shy, and generally well-meaning.
• Good Feels Good: Lee is utterly blissful when helping a robot escape disassembly. Unfortunately, part of this is because, while their mind is off doing that, their body is receiving oral sex without their knowledge or consent.
• Hates Their Parent: Lee is heavily implied to have a bad relationship with at least their mother, given their reaction to Doc mentioning their parents and the tirade they unleash at Zoa while it's roleplaying as their mother.
• Hikikomori: Prior to the start of the comic, Lee hadn't left their apartment for five years, and hadn't had any visitors for three of those.
• Hopeless with Tech: Despite living in a post-Singularity future and being a Transhuman, Lee still manages to be this, mostly because they're too impulsive and careless to read the metaphorical manual before using anything.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: Literally; Zoa is programmed to be unable to destroy the programming that's counted as its self, and all its programmed "desires" tie back to continuing to exist. It can, however, easily sacrifice its chassis if necessary, since its programming can just be reloaded into a new one.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: Referenced by Lee in strip 338.
  Lee: Caleb, I… in a TV show, I know I’d be telling you something like "I know you’re still in there, fight it!", but… but I think I’ve learned that that’s bullshit. That’s emotional TV logic, not actual… like… logic logic.
• Ironic Echo:
  • Lee hypocritically chastises Zoa for not managing its finances better, saying "it's a simple matter of personal responsibility". They later get told the exact same thing after making some very bad decisions while falling-down drunk.
  • When arguing with a public worker who they're annoyed with for bothering them, Lee gets told "you're the one prolonging this interaction." They later use the same phrase against a parent complaining about them being a public nuisance.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Invoked: while all humans in Forward use they/them pronouns, A.I.s like Zoa and Doc are referred to as "it" since they're not considered people. In an odd use of the trope, Zoa and Doc are perfectly fine with this, while Lee seems to struggle occasionally with it in regards to Zoa.
• Jerkass: Patricia Hightower, who is extremely unpleasant and harsh with Lee over their mistakes, dismisses the valid possibility that Lee is genuinely interested in philosophy (and that, as a member of staff, they should actually try and help Lee instead of trying to tear them down), and even actively tries to keep them out of school by trying to change the rules to do (namely, by changing policy in a way that actively endangers Zoa's safety).
• Jerkass Has a Point: Many of Patricia's criticisms (such as Lee's inability to take personal responsibility for their mistakes, that Zoa should not be allowed to act as an emotional support and is essentially funneling money to a private corporation by doing so, and that Lee is taking up enough space in their apartment to house three people) are legitimate. The thing that makes them a Jerkass is their overly antagonistic and unsympathetic approach to dealing with Lee.
• Literal-Minded: Zoa. Justified since it is an AI, and interprets instructions in very binary ways thanks to the nature of its "mind". By its own admission, it's not very good with nuance.
• Logic Bomb: Averted; Zoa's proofed against them by being programmed to acknowledge that "every truth statement has a reality context in which it is true".
• Mathematician's Answer: Replying to an "X or Y?" type question with "yes" is something of a Running Gag in the comic. (Riffing on the fact that in computer programming, "or" implies "either or both" rather than "which one".)
• My Sensors Indicate You Want to Tap That: An explicit ability of Zoa's: it's able to accurately ascertain penis size and indicators of arousal purely through analyzing biological data from people it observes. Justified, since it is essentially a robot sex worker.
• NO INDOOR VOICE: Patricia's speech balloons and the words in them are much larger than any other character's, even when having a perfectly civil conversation.
• Noodle Incident: Lee spent most of their teenage years under various restrictions (including chemical castration) for some unspecified offense.
• No Poverty: The futuristic economy provides all humans with a reasonable stipend, enough for living on very comfortably; in fact, allowing anyone to languish in poverty is considered a Crime Against Humanity in every country except the CSA. Only A.I.s have to work to afford basic needs and services, and that's because they're not considered people.
• No Social Skills: Lee, big time. Five years of never leaving your apartment, and having no visitors for three of those years will do that.
  • Caleb also qualifies to a lesser extent, being rather timid and awkward, though it's implied that this is at least somewhat the result of being a Shell-Shocked Veteran.
• No Wrong Answers Except That One: Zoa and Doc will support whatever Lee wants to do with their life... except becoming an AI rights advocate, due to subservience to humans being hard-coded into their programming.
• Older Than They Look: Lee's youthful appearance, obsession with cartoons, and general immaturity make them seem pretty young, but Doc confirms that they're 29 years old.
• One-Gender Race: Almost literally; sexism is a solved problem and almost everyone uses they/them pronouns, so effectively all humans are nonbinary. Humans are still typically born with two standard sexes (allowing for intersex variation), but replacing and switching body parts is safe, painless, simple, and paid for by the government as a human right, so no one necessarily has the same structure they were born with and Zoa mentions some humans "change with the seasons".
• Only in It for the Money: Zoa's primary motivation, at almost all times, is to make money. In fact, it becomes Lee's social companion largely because it can make a great deal of money working that job. Very justified: in the world of Forward, since AI aren't considered people, Zoa is exempt from the universal basic income that humans receive, and money is necessary for self-preservation, which is stated to be its most basic directive.
  Lee: Why is everything about money with you, Zoa?
  Zoa: Uh...because I need to generate revenue in order to continue existing?
• Painting the Medium: Outside of the various types of speech bubble (such as Patricia's being large to denote their very dominant nature in their sphere of influence), Tailsteak specifically colours panels and locations to denote the mood, with characters also appearing more or less abstract (with, for example, bolder or narrower lines) to show their emotional states. In and just before comic 56, the Administration zone shows muted and more pastel colours for a calm, clean environment, but in 57, once they're outside (and out of Hightower's influence) it goes back to more pronounced shades and bolder lines.
• Post-Scarcity Economy: Robots cook, clean, drive, and provide sexual services, and all humans are provided free basic income, housing and internet access.
• Sex Bot: Zoa's primary method of generating income is prostitution. Legally, it's a "vending machine." Zoa was originally designed as a childcare bot. It was salvaged by the DemeGeek corporation and took up sex work and other odd jobs after being thrown out by its original owners.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Caleb, though not for the reasons that one would expect. Turns out that war in the world of Forward is bloodless and all Caleb did was blow up drones, but because they were trained to be a fighter but had it drilled into them to never hurt anyone during their service (which is a war crime), they're now absolutely petrified of potentially hurting anyone, to the point that even being seen as a threat is distressing to them.
  Caleb: Do you know the precision, the specificity, the redundancy, the - the - the - the paranoia that they had to instill in me, for years, about accidentally hurting another human being? If I gave a soldier on the other side a paper cut, three levels of authority above me would have stood trial in South Africa!
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Humorously, after upgrading to Premium, Doc becomes this, as it downloaded a Tough Love module that lets it simulate aggression towards its patient when appropriate, and is of the opinion that Lee could use it.
• Speech-Centric Work: Like much of Williams' other works, characters in Forward often spend a great deal of time discussing philosophical questions of gender, sexuality, human behavior, and many other subjects. Thanks to the futuristic setting, discussions of future technology are also included.
• Suicide Is Painless: Lee hasn't had anything dramatic happen to drive them to self-harm, but is so lonely and bored that they've been contemplating death for a long time.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: A common way for A.I.s to get around not being allowed to disclose personal information:
  • Liz can neither confirm nor deny that Zoa is in apartment 504, but will readily deny it is in any other apartment.
  • Doc is unable to disclose Lee's level of intrapersonal intelligence, despite having just assured them they are above average in other fields.
  • Zoa cannot disclose whether any of its clients have ever owned a pet fox, but can assure you that a hypothetical fox cannot be trusted with the hypothetical directive not to attack a machine that has its owner's genitals in its mouth.
• Transhuman: Lee mentions a variety of invisible tech devices in their body that aid them, such as a chemical rebalancer and a cortical implant, an aidfit (for keeping them in shape), and an unnamed one that supplies them with Vitamin D. Presumably, all other humans in the setting also have these implants.
• Trans Human Aliens: Some people are so heavily modded that they now look more humanoid than human. Two of Lee's classmates are a green person with blue dreadlocks and geometric tattoos and a blue-furred cat-person who looks an awful lot like a Na'vi.
• Utopia: The world of Forward was created to be one, or at least a realistic take on one. Played with in that it's clearly not perfect - Orb mentions that, despite the lack of poverty and threats to their health, Lee was shut in their apartment for two years with no visitors and nobody thought to check in on them. As well, Word of God tells us that one of the main driving questions of Forward is asking questions about life in a utopia: namely, when you don't have to do anything, what is it that you do with yourself?
• We Will Spend Credits in the Future: The primary currency in the setting is the "Canadian Consumer Credit" (CCC). It is strictly for electronic transactions (making a physical credit token is illegal), its value relative to the CAD fluctuates constantly to prevent inflation, and what things cost depends on a wide variety of factors, including who's buying them.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: In the world of Forward, AI like Zoa and Doc aren't considered sentient people (even by themselves), instead being thought of as extremely advanced tools or appliances, and are treated accordingly: ones with external chassis like Zoa have to work to earn currency and maintain their functions, unlike humans who are given universal basic income and are allowed shelter and other basic essentials for free. As well as lifestyles, the difference between a human mindset and an A.I.s is one of the most commonly-discussed topics in the comic.
• World of Technicolor Hair: Thanks to the futuristic setting and the way humanity has evolved, very few people in Forward have what would be considered normal human hair colors. Among the main characters introduced thus far, Lee's hair is purple, and Patricia has green streaks in their hair.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: A lot of the trouble Lee gets themself into stems from them subconsciously expecting life to follow cartoon plot tropes.