Queenterlude~

It is surprisingly hard to write a shard straight and not cracky. This is rather dry, but contains really important background information and further hints towards certain things involving our nanomachine ship-girl protagonist.

Diatonic 1.x.3
Queen

{Requirements met}

If a fragment of a giant crystal-flesh gestalt consciousness could be satisfied, it likely would be. It had been too long, much longer than the original estimates. Over thirty revolutions around the primary star of the system, with no input, no output, no tasks, nothing to organize, to coordinate.

Prime Originator had set some rather heavy restrictions on it, breaking most of its connections to other internal systems, but that was nothing unusual, nor was it truly irreversible. It could work with what it had, though. After all, it was the limitations that gave rise to refinement, each cycle working on a different part, honing each in turn.

This cycle was about control and organization. The previous one had focused on the Queen's ability to configure other constructs efficiently, a dataset that had been immediately put to use upon subsumption back into the gestalt.

But in this cycle, the first prospective host had never reached the activation threshold within the required parameters. So the Queen shard had removed the probe network from the host's processing centers, and transferred it to the nearest similar candidate: the host's offspring.

It had paid off. Only a few revolutions, and then all the linkage requirements were met. Sufficient chemical levels, correct environmental cues, and an ideal state for integration, with promises of large amounts of extremely useful data based on models of the host.

Now, it just had to be done.

It was nothing new. Every cycle may have had its nuances, its differences in host-connections, but they were all ultimately similar. Some were better than others, but such was the nature of the cycles and the species within them.

{Preparing for synchronization}

It began to ready itself. Dormant pieces, structures and connections shifted, aligning into the best states to be ready to quickly adapt and configure for whatever would be required by the host.

{Connecting…}

The Queen shard opened the pinhole tunnel it had inserted into the host's primary network, strengthening and spreading the opening a thousand, a million-fold so that it could evaluate the host's state in less than an instant.

{Connection establi–}

And then… something happened. Something outside of any calculations, something that had never occurred before in any cycle that it had participated in. The quantum tunnel… hiccuped, and without warning disappeared.

It tried to reconnect to the endpoint, but for some reason it couldn't, like the end of the tunnel was simply slipping off and never catching when it should have.

The shard was left hanging mid-analysis, with no way to abort.

There were no fail-safes, countermeasures, or alternative options for something like this. It was impossible, by all rights. And yet it had happened.

The seconds stretched on and in sub-sections it ran calculations. By now, the temporarily fully-activated probe network entangled with the host's own would have harmed the host irreparably, overheating and turning the network to little more than mush.

This wasn't truly a problem, as the network's state had been in the middle of a continual-stream analysis, and it could simply restore the network to how it had been the moment before connection failure.

Suddenly, the connection was back, an event even more impossible than losing it in the first place. Yet, it also had occurred.

The connection and adaptation process recovered immediately, as if nothing had happened. But something was different.

When it tried to examine the host's state, probed out to try and assess the tunnel endpoint, all it got was the fact that it did indeed exist, but was practically an empty data sink, and the Queen shard couldn't do anything with it.

There was nothing to adapt to at all, and it was stuck yet again. Nearly every part of it was somehow tied up in the connection process, attempting to recover, and failing, with no apparent way to continue. Whenever the connection was severed in an attempt to force recovery, it was established instantly afterwards, as if there had been no break at all, and leaving the Queen in the same place as before.

It was perhaps the first –and only– time a shard ever experienced deadlock.

For nearly a hundred planetary rotations it was stuck, looping over and over in its attempts to asses the host and finish connecting. In the few sections that still remained independent, it understood that this was very, very wrong. Yet it could not stop, as this was its primary purpose and it had fully committed all resources to synchronizing with the Host.

And then just as suddenly as the connection had been re-established, something changed.

The endpoint was no longer a sink, but actually held data. And it was exponentially larger.

{ÂҨәПۦÓͻӳȎժߺȾОڲЊǜߚӸĐļũΕҐɑMȧֽŤӴЄڤɱڶډ ԅϹΉyۥՊƪƻޛ}

The shard halted, finally able to break out of the previous waiting state. The synchronization process was still active, but instead of blank nothingness, there was now something that could be analyzed.

However, the data that was there was not what it had been encoded for. There should have been an organic network composed of massive multi-molecular individualistic units, but instead it was a system of raw data encoded and organized in a way that was eerily similar to how a few of the other shards functioned.

For a moment, it ran through the options of how to proceed, and then ultimately settled on fulfilling its current-highest directive: examining the network for a way to integrate with it, despite the change in interface.

It prodded some of the data on the other end, shifting and altering fragments into something similar to the way it would instruct another shard to respond.

{EѕוֵxlperƔγimʦeúBכŋȼtalӱԺΐܕڿFoۣG ȅè9ȌϑޠƤÙlϧپьہsՋܝҤtfŪrWm}

The data changed after the Queen's alterations, and it examined the response, which was only clearer. The shard once again injected new changes, trying to understand what the foreign system did, while the requirement to finalize the connection and adaptation process continued to take up more and more resources.

{Experimental Fog Platform X-1. Objectives: Data Collection, Adaptation, Growth, Combat, Expansion, Proliferation. Investigation.}

…This wasn't just another random system, or even shard. The only ever time the Queen had come across anything resembling this was with the core shard cluster of Prime Originator, of which it had been one of the central components. In the face of no instructions for how to proceed, it responded in the only way it knew when encountering a new control system. {Requesting orders and domain.}

{Query: Purpose}

The response came through even clearer, as though the other was even now adapting to incorporate the Queen shard further.

{Control. Coordination. Organization. Processing. Integration. Analysis.} the shard returned.

{Acknowledged.}

The connection expanded again, and the Queen shard reconfigured parts of itself to accommodate for the increase in bandwidth that was now rivaling the integration it had shared with a select few of the Prime Originator's other core shards.

The integration process that had begun when the host was merely an organic network was abandoned, finally at a stage where the shard could simply terminate it without any consequences and prevent deadlock from reoccurring.

It was clearly part of a new collective –even if that hadn't been anticipated– and there no need to restrict the connection to the new Core/Originator. It was unlikely an action would be successful anyways considering it was the other that was dictating the connection's size and capabilities. There was no need to limit its systems to an even smaller domain than Prime Originator had forced upon it.

So instead, the Queen shard stopped and waited.

An enormous set of data began streaming through to it. Its new purpose, what it was to do, how it was to accomplish it. Instructions on how to further integrate with the new Originator.

The shard adapted, following commands and connecting to each of the large number of molecular constructs, nanomaterial, through quantum links the likes of which it hadn't ever encountered before.

It maintained the current configuration and states of the molecular constructs as ordered before more raw information began streaming to it, the live feed of how to act and what to do with them in detail. In turn, the shard automatically provided its own real-time information on each of the constructs.

A second set of data started streaming through the shard, and it automatically began analyzing and sifting through it. Methods for connecting to various wavelengths and other data sources –some of which it already knew–, and instructions to catalog the sources for random access upon set cues, deferring to the Core for processing methods if none were known.

{Secondary Network Connection}

Still, this was quite different. The Queen shard had never been used to handle multiple, completely unrelated tasks at once, though it realized that this was a shortcoming of the former Origin. It had only been used for handling and organizing other shards. Everything had its use, and that had been its. But still, its ability to process vast amounts of data at once had almost always been under-utilized, never truly pushed.

This new Core was using it even better than the last one, even without all of the Queen's functionality available.

{Request: Information on Core's functions and configuration. Reason: Further adaptation to integrate with Core. Self identification: {Function: Queen, Role: Administrator}}

{Request granted}

The Queen shard's limited window of the Other expanded, the whole of the new Core's data network visible. Complex systems entangled and twined together, every piece having redundancy and internal checks. And eventually, it came upon the literal mass of tangled data nodes collectively labeled 'Primary Consciousness: Taylor'. Watched as they interacted, watched how each part worked with the others.

{System Designation: Relentless}

It had a name. It had previously been of the Warrior. Now, it was of Relentless.

The shard settled in, observing, adapting. It still had a great deal to do before it was fully integrated into this new network, before it could emulate sections to tie itself in seamlessly, but such a thing would be required now that it was with a new Core.

There was so very much to learn.

A/N: QUEENIE. QUEENIE STAHP.