I Know You're Listening
I Know You're Listening
[Caption above the two panels of the comic:] Now and then, I announce "I know you're listening" to empty rooms.
[Cueball is sitting in an armchair, reading. He murmurs something unreadable.]
[A second Cueball-like surveillance man with headphones, seems to have gotten up from his office chair so fast that is has fallen over and lies behind him. He is now standing in front of a large computer terminal with two screens, he can hear Cueball's mumble as it is shown as coming from one of the screens. The surveillance man is leaning back away from the terminal while holding a hand to his headphones.]
[Caption below the panels:] If I'm wrong, no one knows. And if I'm right, maybe I just freaked the hell out of some secret organization.

Cueball occasionally says "I know you're listening" aloud in empty rooms. The idea is, that if nobody is listening he doesn't lose anything, but if somebody is listening he gains by freaking them out. In this case another Cueball-like surveillance man does get quite the shock.
As mentioned in the title text, this is similar to Pascal's Wager . Blaise Pascal was a French philosopher and mathematician who discussed the issue of the possibility that God actually does exist or not. According to Pascal, a rational person should live as though (a Christian) God exists, because he would lose negligible things if this turns out not to be true, but would gain immensely if it is true, by going to heaven in the afterlife. As Pascal himself recognized, this is not a proof of any god's existence, Christian or otherwise, but rather an inexorable choice made by every human being. Cueball makes a similar choice here, though hardly for such a moral reason.
[Caption above the two panels of the comic:] Now and then, I announce "I know you're listening" to empty rooms.
[Cueball is sitting in an armchair, reading. He murmurs something unreadable.]
[A second Cueball-like surveillance man with headphones, seems to have gotten up from his office chair so fast that is has fallen over and lies behind him. He is now standing in front of a large computer terminal with two screens, he can hear Cueball's mumble as it is shown as coming from one of the screens. The surveillance man is leaning back away from the terminal while holding a hand to his headphones.]
[Caption below the panels:] If I'm wrong, no one knows. And if I'm right, maybe I just freaked the hell out of some secret organization.
