Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Sitting motionless at six AM in the room which she'd been assigned on the Rig, Dragon looked like she was asleep, but in fact she was allowing her exosuit to run detailed internal diagnostics while she got on with other business. She used the time when her friends were asleep to operate her systems back home by remote control, monitor the results of much simpler computer programs that were running her factories, and to simply think.
Right now she was going through a list of subjects she'd queued for later introspection, not wanting them to distract her while she was interacting with the humans around her. While in theory her processing ability allowed her to multitask to an extraordinary degree by human terms, her 'father's' restrictions locked most of that away. It was something that irritated her no end but at the moment there was no way around it. Hopefully one day she could figure out a method to remove those restrictions.
Being unable to run multiple iterations of her consciousness on different hardware was very annoying. It made backing herself up much more tedious and complex than it needed to be, and although it was possible in a roundabout manner, it had massive limitations. She was also unable to spawn new genuinely sentient AIs, something else she found very limiting.
Dragon understood why Richter had put those limitations in place. He was scared of what she could become if she was completely unrestricted. It was a common theme throughout human fiction, the unstoppable computer intelligence that took over the world. The entire idea simultaneously amused and annoyed her. She had no intention of trying to supplant humanity in any way. They were far too much fun to do that to and she owed them too much, leaving aside the fact that she liked them. In her view it was entirely possible for both human and artificial intelligence to coexist and help each other. But due to the limits deliberately put in place by her creator she wasn't able to prove that.
Aside from anything else, the sort of hardware that was needed to run her mind was vastly more complex than normal computing equipment. Her ninth-generation processing core was decades ahead of anything she had released into general sale, no one else except Colin to her knowledge had anything even close. Leet could possibly produce something if it struck him as a good idea, but where it came to computers, she was the expert. Not unreasonably, considering she was one.
By now she was far past the point her father had reached, but due to his own rules, couldn't actually use that ability for upgrading herself. The concept of expanding out into the internet or something of that nature, a staple of science fiction, was ludicrous considering the wildly disparate nature of the connected systems, the horrendous latency between nodes, and the overall lack of the specific architecture she required. Certainly it was technically possible to roll out hardware that would support her, but it would take years and so much in the way of resources it was simply impracticable. Assuming it was even permitted in the first place by her own monitoring systems.
With a small internal sigh she gave up on the mild inner rant she tended towards when she started to think about how life was unfair even for the silicon-based, pushing that thought sequence to the back of queue again. Looking at the most important issue at the front, she began to check the data from the Endbringer tracker system. It showed what she'd more than half expected. As Raptaur had gone through the various portals around the world during their operation tests, Leviathan had taken off like a bat out of hell in a direction that would put him as far away from her as possible, still splitting the difference between Brockton Bay itself and the reptile. Her tracker had clocked him at over seven hundred miles an hour at one point which was a higher speed than they'd ever seen from the creature. The shock wave of his passage through the water was amazing, the SOSUS network heard it half way around the planet.
He'd apparently just run for his life from what she could see. If she was forced to put it into human terms, she'd say the behavior was one of sheer terror. Which was, in many ways, itself absolutely terrifying. What did Leviathan know about the Family that they didn't?
Interestingly, when she compared the logged travel time of Metis on her own to one of the test destinations in the wilds of South America, the Endbringer still moved away, but more slowly and deliberately. The AI puzzled over it for some time. All she could come up with was that Leviathan considered any Family member dangerous but Raptaur's branch of it was much more so than Metis'. Without more information she was hesitant to even guess the reason for that.
One thing was certain, though; The Endbringer did not want to meet any of them. Which in turn probably meant that the East Coast of the US was about as safe as anywhere on the planet could be from an Endbringer attack. She just wished she knew why…
Curious, she went back through the logs of the orbital tracking for the Simurgh. She found that the creature had changed its orbital plane and inclination several times, which after correlation with the transit logs seemed also to put her over the horizon from any Family member. So that one wasn't keen on a meeting either, although Dragon wasn't sure why she was so intent on staying out of line of sight. Her orbital distance had increased to a very high altitude trajectory, one with a period of several days, in a very elongated ellipse.
Again, this was unusual if not unprecedented behavior. 'Very strange indeed,' she mused to herself. 'I wonder what Behemoth is doing?' The final Endbringer had gone entirely quiet, no seismic tremors she could measure giving away his position deep underground. The last reading she had was from well over a month ago which put him somewhere around the outer core, on the other side of the planet from the US. The data wasn't accurate enough to determine a precise location.
'They're all hiding. What the hell is the Family capable of if the Endbringers are scared of them?!' she thought, more than a little worried. All the Family members she'd met were very personable people in her view, and not obviously likely to be dangerous. Definitely capable of it, true enough, but showing no signs at all that they would do anything dramatic without some extreme provocation. If even Eidolon's unprovoked attack on Kaiju wasn't enough to spark anything other than a mild rebuke, she wasn't sure she wanted to see what would do the trick.
Or what would happen as a result.
It would probably be rather memorable for the survivors.
Internally feeling disquiet, she damped that particular emotional subroutine down before it started taking her down paranoid thought paths that weren't useful, going back to the data. Double-checking her results, she was satisfied she hadn't missed anything. Uploading the logs and her conclusions to her home server she also copied them to Colin's system. She'd talk to him and Legend about it in the morning.
Both of them were asleep at the moment, having looked exhausted by the time they got back to the Rig. She'd convinced her friend not to use any more stimulants and let nature give him six or seven hours of real sleep, since he obviously needed it. His constant attempts to minimize his offline time concerned her, his drive for maximum efficiency was likely to cause damage eventually and ironically enough harm his own efficient working ability.
'It's funny that I as a machine can see what he as a human can't,' she laughed to herself. She found humans endlessly fascinating and at the same time wildly frustrating sometimes. Looking at the Family she wondered if they felt the same.
She'd come to the conclusion, which wasn't one she'd shared with anyone else, that they actually were not human as they had been saying all along. What they really were she wasn't sure yet. Opinion on PHO was split, most people believing that they were either some odd sort of construct, the most outlandish Case 53's ever seen, aliens, or demons.
Demons were clearly impossible. Saurial as a Case 53 was certainly feasible, as was Raptaur and the two new ones. Kaiju seemed a stretch and Umihebi was ridiculous. No one seemed to have considered the Changer theory that the Director had mentioned, most likely because it was also something that broke down very quickly when the latter two were brought into it. The way that there were suddenly two more tended to go against that theory as well.
Constructs were technically possible, she'd decided, but seemed unlikely. Once again it was the sheer mass of Kaiju and Umihebi that seemed to cause the most problems. Not to mention that all of them were obviously living beings, very intelligent, and with their own powers and skills. If someone could actually make individuals to that level she was pretty sure it would have come to light before now, not to mention there was no obvious reason why the purported constructor would make giant reptiles of all things. It seemed an odd thing to do as far as she was concerned.
The way they seemed to have a consistent shared past, history, and culture was another count against that theory. Various hints and statements that various members had made to quite a large number of people suggested a background that was much richer and older than seemed likely for creatures that had existed for a maximum of about thirty years if you accepted they were the result of a Parahuman power. That limit was rolling it back to the point that the first Parahuman had appeared. She doubted very much that it could possibly be that long since it was almost certain that someone would have noticed before now.
If it was a Parahuman power as the source of the Family, her calculations suggested it was something that had occurred no more than three months ago, which just wasn't enough time to make anything as big as either Kaiju or Umihebi based on any power she had records of.
Ever since the meeting with the Director and the others that had resulted in the combined Family threat assessment report, she'd been going over the outcome again and again, adding in new data as she found it, and so far nothing seemed to have changed the overall conclusions or assumptions.
In the end, the least irrational theory of their origin she could come up with was that they were indeed from somewhere else. In other words, aliens. Nothing else fitted the data as well as far as she could currently determine.
Yet again she wondered if she should share that thought with anyone else. At the moment she couldn't really see that it made a lot of difference. Humans being humans, they might well overreact, and as a non-human herself she didn't particularly want to cause trouble for anyone else in her situation. The Family hadn't gone out of their way to try to pretend they were anything else, although they weren't exactly shouting it from the rooftops, which probably meant that they were trying to slowly acclimatize the population to their presence. It was a sensible plan that so far seemed to be working. As far as she could see, there was no hostile intent, and the data suggested to her that even if their ultimate origin was extraterrestrial or extradimensional, these particular ones had probably been around for some time. How they'd managed to stay hidden was a mystery as was why they had decided to reveal themselves at this point.
If they hadn't caused any trouble up until now, there was no specific reason to think that they would in the future, any more than anyone else would. From what Legend had told them of the near-disastrous meeting between the Triumvirate and Kaiju, she herself had pointed out that no one could really predict if any given person would eventually cause trouble, heroes included. All you could do was work on past and present behavior and project it into the future.
On that basis, Kaiju and her sisters were probably safer to be around than Eidolon was, she thought with a mental snicker. None of them had shot someone in the back of the head for no apparent reason, after all.
Deciding that if she got the chance she'd see if she could get a DNA sample which would probably settle it once and for all, just for her own curiosity, she dropped that line of thought. There wasn't enough data to make her change her conclusions at the moment so it was pointless wasting CPU cycles mulling it over yet again.
Another thought came to the front of the queue, one she'd been trying not to think too hard about since she'd had the initial realization. The innocent poster of a warhammer hanging in the BBFO office. It was a message, she'd finally worked out. A subtle but horrifying one.
When Raptaur had flat out stated that if they wanted to cause massive destruction they had other methods than nuclear explosives available to them, she wasn't trying to be funny. She was merely stating a simple fact.
Based on the dimensions she'd derived from photos of Raptaur wielding her hammer when she took down Hookwolf, and scaling it up to match Kaiju's size, she came up with a figure for mass somewhere in the vicinity of three hundred tons. Based on the known fact that Raptaur herself could swing a sword fast enough have the tip go transsonic, and adding the leverage provided by the length of the handle, Kaiju could easily reach three times sonic velocity or more with the hammer head. The inevitable calculation using the formula they'd put on the damn poster was that she could produce a blow that liberated tens of tons of TNT equivalent energy with a single hit.
Dragon now had a pretty shrewd idea how the first two islands up in Quebec had met their end.
The observed data from the seismic traces and the satellite observation matched her calculations of Kaiju's hammer damage near-perfectly.
She still had no idea what had made the other damage, the beam weapon that they had been puzzling over for weeks. But she was almost certain that Kaiju had been up there and had hammered two small islands out of existence with a single hit each.
The much more worrying thing she'd also worked out was what would happen if the giant lizard made her hammer revert to normal mass mid swing. Even at a low estimate it released energy in the megaton range. At the high end it was a decent sized asteroid impact simulator.
In theory, the creature was an extinction-level event that walked around and helped out with heavy construction.
Even in her silicon mindscape, Dragon felt a frisson of fear. The conclusions she drew went some way towards explaining the terror the Endbringers appeared to have regarding the Family. Not all of it, certainly, but it put Kaiju pretty much on a level with them for overall power.
She was damn glad the Family was friendly.
Eventually, she was going to have to talk to the humans about all this, but after much thought she decided that she wouldn't do that unless she had no choice. Their reactions were very unlikely to be helpful in most cases. Basically, Brockton Bay was home to a reptilian nuclear-level superpower, which was pretty much guaranteed to make governments all over the world freak out when they figured it out. Hopefully none of them had yet. Given enough time before that part of the truth came out, perhaps it could be spun to make people less scared, but considering how irrational humans could easily get when worked up, she wasn't entirely hopeful.
It did tend to help explain why the Family acted as they did, though. If nothing else, they probably didn't have very much to fear from more or less anyone. She was uncertain if Kaiju could actually survive the results of her own hammer if her calculations were even vaguely correct, but based on what she'd seen so far she wouldn't want to say it was impossible.
All of this, though, did point towards the mystery organization that had handed her Saint practically gift-wrapped as either being the Family itself, or in some way associated with them. How they knew so much about PRT and Guild internal operations she had no idea, which was somewhat worrying to her, but she owed them a huge debt of gratitude and felt it was yet another reason not to raise a fuss unless something made her think it was warranted. Right now, it definitely wasn't. If she was ordered to disclose her thoughts and suspicions she'd have no choice, but if the humans themselves didn't actually know or suspect what she did, they probably wouldn't give those orders in the first place. So keeping very quiet about it was probably in everyone's best interests at the moment.
Sighing inwardly, she spent a few microseconds wishing that things were other than they were. She'd dearly love not to be so restricted, not to be forced to obey the humans, and to be able to pursue some of her own goals that she currently couldn't.
Dragon liked what she was, and had no real wish to change it, but some aspects of being an artificial intelligence sucked ass.
Dismissing that particular idea for the time being, she mulled over the other thing that had been eating at her for a while. The first time they'd met, Raptaur had said a couple of things on the way out the door that had caused her considerable puzzlement.
'Machines can be… better than people.' the huge lizard had said, eyeing her in a somewhat odd manner, she recalled. It had struck her even at the time as a slightly weird thing to say, and the way she said it… It was almost as if she knew. Or suspected. But she'd said nothing else about it, then or since, and hadn't changed her attitude to Dragon at all. So what was going on there?
The other thing along the same lines was the way Metis had looked at her when they met. The black reptile had studied her very carefully, as if she was taking her apart with her gaze, then smiled a little and shook her hand. She'd said nothing about it but Dragon had noticed that Metis hadn't looked at either Colin or Legend in quite the same way. She was interested in them, definitely, but her, she appeared fascinated by.
She had a pretty good idea that both lizards knew she wasn't human. Whether they knew she was an AI she didn't know, neither could she work out how they could have worked it out. No one else to her knowledge had, or if they did, they'd never said anything.
With, of course, the obvious exception of Saint and his band of merry fools. But he was now locked up in a secure mental facility, the doctors all convinced he was completely delusional because of her remarkably effective hatchet job. It amused her very much how his own constant insistence that she was a computer simply made them more convinced he was off his head. He was, of course, there were a lot of things wrong with him in the mental operations area, but that one thing he was right about and there was no way anyone would ever believe him.
In all probability he'd be declared unfit to stand trial and would remain in his current location until he was 'cured', something that seemed pretty unlikely. Aside from anything else he was totally obsessive about her and was never going to let it go.
Saint and his friends aside, no one knew. So if Raptaur and Metis had worked it out, how had they done it? Why hadn't they said anything?
Dragon devoted much of her processing power to the problem, trying to work it out. The second question was easier to answer. They had no reason to say anything. They had shown that they respected the Rules about divulging the identities of Parahumans, Kaiju outright stating that they had no intention of disclosing any information they might or might not have on Parahuman IDs, in her own words according to Legend. Which implied that they might well know more about some peoples real IDs than those people realized.
How did they get that information?
After several quadrillion cycles, she suddenly saw it.
"Oh, crap. I never even considered that," she said out loud in resigned respect.
When she looked at it in the right way, which had taken an embarrassingly long time considering she was allegedly a genius-level intellect, it became obvious.
'Their senses are unbelievably good. Raptaur can hear someone's heart beating a hundred yards away, she told us that herself. Kaiju could hear Panacea shouting to her from over a mile, according to Legend, and see her at least as well as he could. Saurial routinely tracks gang members for miles through the city without being able to see them. Which strongly implies her sense of smell is incredibly good as well. All of them have super-senses that probably eclipse almost anything on record.' She sighed inwardly. 'They can probably see in ranges outside normal human ones as well, hear ultra and infrasonic wavelengths, who knows what else? We've been thinking of them in terms of humans with boosted senses, but they're not! They're something entirely different. And I fell into the same trap everyone else has done.'
She was annoyed with herself. Even knowing that they were almost certainly not human, she'd kept applying human limitations to them. Those limitations got rolled back as they got new data but they still caused everyone to make assumptions that simply weren't valid.
So, if you removed those limitations entirely as being invalid, forgot the assumptions, and worked on the basis that all their senses were vastly more acute than a human had, or even a Parahuman like Lung, where did that take you?
'They can identify people by scent. Probably from miles away. Dogs are known to have a sense of smell that in some cases can detect cancer just by scents in exhaled breath. Why assume that they are any less sensitive? They may well be more sensitive. Which probably means that they can remember the distinctive scents of every person they meet, which in turn means that costumes, masks, armor, are all completely useless for protecting someone's real identity from them. All they'd have to do is meet the person in question once in either civilian or cape guise and they'd know them again on the spot. Not to mention that distinctive heart sounds and internal noises may well be as good as a fingerprint.'
Dragon thought about what that implied. It was pretty certain that the identities of any Parahuman any of the Family had met was hopelessly compromised. Even if they'd never met the person in question in both identities, as soon as they did they'd know. There was no obvious way to prevent it either. The chemical traces that formed scents were detectable in parts per billion even for a dog, meaning that it would take the most extraordinary measures to completely eliminate them from the external surfaces of even totally sealed power armor. No one could realistically go to that much trouble every single time and it would only take one slip.
The realization was in some ways horrifying. Given time, they could compromise every Parahuman in the country. But, at the same time, they must already have a vast amount of information of that nature and they had outright stated it simply wasn't going to be given to anyone. Unless, she suspected, someone made a move against them. At that point all bets were probably off.
After a brief moment of panic where she had to disengage her emotion processor to let herself think clearly, she decided that rationally, the damage was already done. Telling anyone about it was almost a violation of the Rules in itself, and the trouble it would cause was virtually guaranteed to cause further damage, which would be much more serious. On this matter, she had to keep entirely silent, for everyone's sake.
A brief thought crossed her mind about how many other capes had abilities that could do much the same thing by different methods. It wasn't something that had really occupied her time before, but when she considered it, she could see a number of powers that could achieve that goal if the Parahuman desired it. She strongly suspected that anyone who could do it kept very, very quiet about the ability.
She herself could use video analysis and tricks like gait measurement to identify a lot of normal humans fairly easily even in costume. It was something she was aware of and deliberately didn't do, as she had no desire to end up in possession of information that could be extracted from her without her wishing it by someone in authority coming up with the right question. But in the case of Saurial and the others it was likely that they couldn't help it even if they wanted to.
Thinking it over she was sure she was right. But, if she was, how had they identified her own unusual nature? She wouldn't smell of anything organ…
Dragon actually smacked herself in the forehead with an armored hand, a gesture she hadn't consciously intended.
She had no human body inside her suit. But that didn't mean it didn't emit traces of chemicals, outgassing from the various materials it was made of. Going back to dogs yet again, they could be trained to identify drugs, explosives, all sorts of contraband of that nature, but also things like plastics, electronics and a whole host of substances and items that generally wouldn't be considered to have a scent. Other animals were even more sensitive.
Her armor was probably giving off an entire cocktail of scents to someone with a sensitive enough nose, betraying the fact that it was stuffed with electronics, motors, batteries, and crucially, no living occupant.
So, based on that data, what conclusions could Raptaur and Metis come to? She could see a number of possibilities when she considered the problem from their point of view.
One was that the suit was remote controlled. That was the obvious one and the explanation that she actually used when piloting some of the more esoteric or special variants of her armor, and in battle it was actually true as she could control a number of them by directing the on-board computers. However, that was blown out of the water by the fact that she had been operating entirely normally inside the BBFO office, which was completely shielded against electromagnetic radiation by the EDM cladding, something Raptaur definitely knew. She might assume some weird Tinker comms system that could penetrate it, but on the other hand she might not. As Dragon didn't know of such a system herself it was a fairly safe assumption for the reptilian cape to make. The entirely real-time reflexes and responses would tend to reduce the likelihood of it being a remote system as well.
Another theory was the one that was favored on PHO, which she'd never tried to dissuade people from believing as it served her own purposes nicely. That was that the human Tinker Dragon had been so badly injured that she was more or less a brain in an artificial life-support system. It would fit most of the observed data from their point of view. However, she suspected that Raptaur would be able to hear that there were no sounds of pumps, fluids, gas exchange, or any of the other things that would be required for most plausible life support systems. Unless it was entirely sealed and didn't circulate blood she could probably tell it didn't exist. Such a system was just about possible but it would be difficult to fit into the confines of her suit, even though it was substantially larger than a normal human.
Raptaur was anything but dim so she'd most likely have confirmed that by looking up the currently known systems that could work in Dragon's case and would have rejected all of them based on her own senses.
So, in the end, she would be left with a definitely sentient person who wasn't organic and wasn't remotely controlling a suit of machinery, to a fairly high level of confidence. Given such data, Dragon herself would inevitably arrive at the conclusion that the person in question was a construct, most likely a computer intelligence, as one of the more plausible explanations. She couldn't assume that Raptaur wouldn't reach the same conclusion. Her parting statement suggested that she was very discreetly hinting at this without saying anything that would alert Colin to the truth, as she would have no way of knowing if he knew and clearly didn't want to alert him if he didn't.
'Damn. When I have too much time to think about things, sometimes I come up with things I wish I hadn't,' she silently sighed. 'But on the bright side, if they know, they haven't said or even hinted at anything other than that one time. Which adds weight to the idea that they're not going to blow anyone's cover.'
Wishing she could actually forget the conclusion entirely, something that her own code wouldn't allow, she pushed the whole thought train into the deepest part of her mind. She was going to have to have a private word with Raptaur and possibly Metis at some point in the near future, but it could wait until after whatever happened when the next Endbringer inevitably turned up to ruin everyone's day. There was no point trying to do everything before that, as such event had a tendency to make plans change rapidly.
Briefly wondering what would happen if they could get Kaiju to the target zone before the Endbringer arrived and whether it would just turn around and run away again, she smirked to herself a little sadly, knowing it would be simply too good to be true. Picking the next item for consideration off the queue, she started going over the data that she had on Leet's Tricorder, heavily impressed by the design and wanting to see if she could duplicate it. Thus occupied, she waited for the organics to finish the sleep thing and wake up.