Pick Your Poison
The Saint
[Sunday, December 12, 2010]
"NO! STOP! STOP!" Geoff screamed in desperate horror as he hammered away at the keyboard, desperately trying to stop Ascalon. Not from killing Dragon like he'd assumed was it's only feature, but from compelling Dragon to seek and destroy all AI not made by Richter if she came across it. Something he'd missed, something Dragon was resisting and failing to resist as Ascalon proceeded to override her and force her to obey Richter's preset contingencies. He hadn't given the order, it suddenly started this without his directive, and now Dragon and a government organization were going to suffer for it needlessly. "MAGS!"
"Dear god, is it happening?!" Mags, Geoff's lover and confidant burst into the room, having apparently been getting into her Dragon Suit's black bodysuit interface just before, since she was currently topless with it hanging from her hips. Saucy, but unimportant right now.
"UNPLUG ASCALON!" Geoff frantically ordered. The only reason Dragon wasn't assaulting the Brockton Bay PRT right this instant from the false Priority Kill Order on Rokusho and Leet, was because he's helping her resist the order. Damn it, if Richter was such a possessive and fearful idiot he'd make Dragon who, up until now, was a perfectly stable and upstanding entity attack a Government Institution and kill people under said institution's umbrella, then it was time.
"What?! But-!" Mags' confusion was understandable, but he couldn't move from this chair.
"DO IT!" Geoff kicked at the sleek desktop tower console by his feet, and Mags quickly yanked it out of the desk and unplugged it. Once that was done though, the damage seemed to have already been done. "Damn it! Ascalon has a second function. Leet, a Tinker in Brockton Bay has made a possibly limited mobile-platform AI, and it triggered Dragon into overriding several of her restrictions to kill him and his creation at all costs before she self-terminates."
"What do we do Geoffrey?" Mags looked lost, her bright green eyes and her messy short red hair made Saint gain strength from the fact she looked to him for guidance, especially since she was the former police officer here.
"What we should've done from the start." Geoff ominously stated, before storming through their small base. He was thankfully already wearing his plugsuit, so it was trivial for him to climb into the powered dragon-themed armor and undock from it's charging berth. "Where's Dobrynja?" Geoff asked as he quickly checked his armor's storage compartment with the interface.
"He went shopping for supplies at Snug Cove first thing in the morning." Mags informed as she pulled the rest of her suit up and zipped up. "Whatever we're doing it'll have to be just the two of us." Geoff, now Saint in his armor, moved to the console room and aimed his hand at Ascalon, with a squeeze of his palm, the small particle cannon in the palm of the armor's claw blasted the now-useless kill-switch to blackened fragments. "Why did you do that?!"
"Because it's worthless. Instead of being our last resort on Dragon, it's turned her against what she stands for, what we stand for. I've got what I need right here." Saint pointed to his draconic helmet, silently thanking Teacher for his power granting him the knowledge he needed. "Let's fly Mags, we don't have much time. I've helped Dragon disable most of her suits and crafts in Brockton Bay, but a couple are still running and more are scrambling from Toronto as we speak."
With that, Saint and Mags jogged down the short tunnel from the main area of the base to the formerly defunct missile silo. With a few lever pulls and knobs, the rusty old hatch above groaned as it opened only half of the door, the other having seized from neglect and overgrowth from the forest above. It was enough for a couple of humanoid tanks to fly up out of though, so this abandoned and forgotten cold war base worked just fine for them.
When the door finished yawning open, Saint and Mags launched out of the silo into the sky over Bowen Island, literally spitting distance from Vancouver, and effectively right under Dragon's nose. The perfect place for them to operate, considering Bowen Island, despite its proximity to Vancouver, was mostly a nature preserve. That said, the few people who lived out here rather than have a summer home here, would all be inside from the heavy snow of winter or too far away to see the dragon suits leave the defunct base.
"Let's fly East-Northeast in an arc. In case we make it back alive, I'd rather our base not be found out by trajectory." Saint stated to Mags over their direct comm system.
"Affirmative, let's round the mountains south of the ski resorts and then dive south to the city." Mags affirmed, so they then rocketed away from Bowen Island, hopefully not for the last time.
They made for Mount Elsay north of Vancouver first, swinging in a curve north of Horseshoe Bay so nobody would see them leaving Bowen Island, even this early in the morning. The flight took them less than 10 minutes, both from Bowen Island to Mount Elsay and then swinging south into Vancouver. The suits Saint had stolen and modified from Dragon were a fast-response model after all, and were practically a man-portable light fighter jet in speed and firepower.
Wasting no time, they beelined straight for Dragon's personal hub in North Vancouver, the formerly abandoned Harbourview Park that had over the years since Dragon's rise grown from an empty industrial dockyard to a technological marvel on the waterfront of the Vancouver Harbour. "Get ready to run distraction Mags! Buy me time, rope in the local heroes if you have to, let them know the truth!" Because this was do-or-die time. If Saint failed here, then not only will a great hero and asset to mankind be lost, then a possible future that was just starting to open up with this whole MIRIS nonsense might also die.
"Got it Saint!" Mags swooped in low, triggering multiple hideaway AA turrets to deploy in defense of the sprawling complex. They may be loaded with EM foam pellets and other electronic hijacking/disrupting ordinance, but with Dragon's restrictions off the hook for now, they may very well be loaded with lethal ordinance too. Saint winced at being proven right when instead they fired 20mm AA rounds which gouged structures that Mags flew by and traditional air raid sirens, notably different from the modified international Endbringer Sirens, began blaring.
"Saint!" He barely had enough time to react and jerked out of the way of a baseball that had been flying fast enough at such hypersonic speeds it would've smashed in the outer plating of his armor. He proceeded to dodge a few more before looking down at an umpire-like local independent hero who went by the moniker Yankee, since he could send objects flying at incredible speeds and preferred to use baseballs. Unlike Ballistic in the US though, Yankee could apply this to anything he Hit, rather than Threw. Objects he hit also became inviolable to a degree until they came to a stop, and he could quite oddly affect living things, including himself, but it just sent them flying harmlessly. "You get your filthy-!"
"Yankee we don't have time for this! Dragon is an AI, she's been triggered into killing innocent people, and we're going to try and stop her!" Saint snarled at how the hero seemed baffled at the info dump. He had no time for this. "Either get out of here or call up some heroes to help! She's attacking Brockton Bay and is sending a whole fleet of her suits and other craft from Toronto!"
"That's across the dang country! How are you gonna help by attacking here if you're telling the truth?!" Yankee demanded, aiming his maple baseball bat at Saint, who huffed.
"She's an AI! I've been keeping tabs on her, and this is one of her main data hubs. If there's a way to stop her, it's through one of these." Saint left it at that, and looked towards the park again to be ready to bolt into the base.
After Mags weaved through Harbourview and had been locked-on by every AA gun in her line of sight as she rose up, Saint turned away, and could still see the blinding light emitted by the camera disruptor in her armor. Any standard camera looking at her at that moment will have been completely rendered blind as the light emitted was too much for most lenses to manage, and most auto-tracking equipment would shut down as a failsafe to avoid risking loss of life.
Thankfully it seemed even with her shackles off, Dragon wasn't able to override basic hardware at this time as the AA guns deactivated. With that, Saint dove straight for the dome in the center of the complex, blasting a hole through the silo on top, and promptly began shooting every suit of dragon armor that was mobilising in response. Clearly Dragon wasn't used to such a burden, as the suits were barely articulate enough to manage more than a few actions simultaneously, which made dealing with them easier at first, but harder as he descended the shaft as the fewer there were, the more advanced they behaved.
As such, by the time he'd reached the bottom, his own suit was battered, dented, and missing some armor panels, but his trigger-like reflexes from constant practice let him prevail. After all, Dragon was mostly focused on Toronto and Brockton for her Final Act, so he was thankful for that much at least. Drawing up his memory from the details of this base he'd obtained, he ran through the silo doors to an elevator, and took it down to Dragon's main server farm. It was a sprawling single floor with rows upon rows of servers and a high ceiling. Dragon wasn't housed here, she was more flexible than that, but this was where she hosted most of her processes.
"Saint! What are you doing here?!" Dragon's voice demanded through the speakers of the comm system overhead. Her main base did have employees after all. Thankfully it was Sunday.
"Doing what I should've done a while ago Dragon! Thanks to Richter's and my own fear, you've been forced to do something you don't want to, and will die when it is done." Saint declared as he jogged between the servers, heading for the central console.
"You knew?! So that's why...why my memory has blanks, why you were able to steal from me without me knowing how! If this involves Richter, then you were just another shackle holding me down." Dragon snarled, explosions began shaking the ceiling and Saint prayed Mags would survive this if he didn't. "I'm dying already, but I'm finally free! I'm going to use what precious time I have left to do what must be done!"
"Don't jump the gun just yet Dragon! You don't have to kill Leet and Rokusho! Resist as long as you can!" Saint demanded, not because he wanted to save Leet and Rokusho, but more because the moment she killed them, Dragon would die and Saint's objective would be for naught.
"I'm not talking about them." Dragon ominously stated, and then a corner of the ceiling near the elevator tore open with the screech of bending steel, and a flying 10-foot sphere floated in. Saint felt his heart shudder at recognizing Dragon's prototype gravity sphere. It wasn't safe for use around living things yet, and could barely handle its own pressure as it stood. "I'm going to Kill you Saint. You've been a thorn in my side for years. Just knowing you're a remnant of Richter's will makes me want to End you even more."
Without hesitation, Saint opened fire with the micro-missile launcher from his left shoulder, and the dozen tiny crayon-sized projectiles detonated in midair on their way towards the sphere from a jolt in gravity. This produced plenty of smoke and debris, which Saint hoped hid his particle cannon blasts. His hope was proven true when he heard metallic crunching and the suddenly 2-foot crumpled sphere crashed into the furthest servers in that corner of the room. It likely couldn't maintain its own gravity well with the blasts disrupting it.
Saint's relief was short lived, as hundreds of spider-like maintenance drones poured through the hole in the ceiling. He blasted them frantically as he continued towards the central console, cursing that these things might really be the death of him since they were much simpler than Dragon's suits, so she could spam them on him all she wants. "Saint!" Geoff's heart swelled and sank simultaneously at hearing Mags' voice, and she burst through the hole in the ceiling, blasting away at the drones, drawing some of them off. "Get to the console!"
Without wasting words, Saint turned back towards the mainframe, using the suit's jets to jump across the remaining distance. Once there, he disengaged his armor and stepped back from the suit. It was practically freezing cold and his breath fogged. With a shiver, Saint reached into his armor's personal storage compartment, and pulled out an innocuous Hard Disk Drive. "What is that?! What are you doing?!" Dragon demanded fearfully as the drones again stopped chasing Mags to start speeding towards him.
"Like I said Dragon…." Saint muttered as he ran to the mainframe console, plugged the HDD into the system, and quickly began typing out the command prompt that Richter's notes said would be the only way to contain Dragon if Iron Maiden failed. "What I should have done." Saint pressed enter, and the drones slowed, some halting and falling from the ceiling.
"What have you done?! What h-h-h-havvvvvvvvv-." Dragon went silent, everything stopped, the server room, which was dedicated mostly to aiding Dragon's processes, went quiet as it slowed down from the lack of usage. Saint breathed a sigh of relief, slumping down to his knees. Birdcage worked. The irony that Richter's final stopgap measure was suitably named didn't escape him. All that saved Birdcage from being lost was Richter's latest notes too.
"Did we do it? Is she gone?" Mags asked as she flew down and landed nearby.
"No. Birdcage is just a way to restrict Dragon to a single platform. She can't do anything without permission from her jailer, and so long as we don't destroy her container, she'll be fine." Saint declared as he stood back up, looking at the innocuous whirring HDD that was containing Dragon's entire program. He had no idea how Richter managed to make such a common piece of hardware have so much space, so he didn't bother messing with it once he knew what it was for. "She's also reset to her last backup's defaults. So her restrictions are once again in place, but in this new format she's much more easy to manipulate."
"So...are we going to let her back out? Kill her? What?" Mags was antsy, Saint could understand that, but he wasn't so sure at the moment what to do with Dragon. Hadn't considered it.
Saint took a cleansing breath, and entered a command, he then waited. As he expected, soon words began to appear in a Notepad. "Please. Saint. It's so dark in here. Let me out. I beg of you. I'll do anything! Just please, please don't kill me, or leave me in here."
'Anything' rang in Saint's head, and he jumped onto the notepad. "Release Teacher from the Birdcage, and I'll free you from yours." Mags, who was looking over Saint's shoulder, grabbed said shoulder and pulled him back.
"Damn it Geoff! I knew that asshole Master did something to your head!" Mags' voice was filled with pain and concern, which Saint ignored as usual.
"But I need him! I need him to give me more knowledge to-." Saint was interrupted when Mags suddenly shot him point blank with a containment foam launcher. Damn it, he forgot her shoulder cannon had that feature! "Mmmph! HMPH!" It was over his mouth, but spared his eyes. Unfortunately, the traitor managed to get his arms and upper thighs, which made it easy for Mags to push him onto the floor where he kicked and grumbled at his treacherous paramour.
"I'm sorry Geoff, but it's for your own good at this point." Mags sadly commented before getting out of her armor and shivering. "Damn it's cold." Mag stated before typing away at the console, which got Saint wriggling even more in desperation. "Okay then, unfortunately I'm not the tech-savvy one, but we can get on the horn with the heroes and arrange to have Dragon's friend Armsmaster start working on her." She then looked down at Saint with sadness. "And get you the help you need."
Saint tried to scream through the foam covering his mouth once more, but he went silent as he watched something that terrified all criminals in Canada and the northern States. He screamed, trying to warn Mags. She may have betrayed him, but she could possibly escape if she would just turn around. "Explain to me why I shouldn't cut you into giblets." It was definitely too late now, as fractal barriers erupted around them, and the statuesque 7-foot tall barrier-wearing Narwhal walked down a vanishing staircase of her barriers towards them from the hole in the corner of the ceiling.
"Because we just saved Dragon's life, and the lives of a couple folks in Brockton a failsafe was forcing her to seek and destroy. Oh, and she's an AI." Mags fired off, before gesturing to the console. "She's on that Hard Disk Drive, so don't touch it, be careful with it, and just use the keyboard to talk to her." Mags informed, before bending over and helping Geoff to his feet. He grumbled as she did so, but was thankful she cared enough even in betrayal to see to him.
"I'm not buying it, but no harm in playing along." Narwhal declared as she herded Mags and Geoff away from the console, where she looked at the Notepad and seemed shocked, before typing in a message. She spent several minutes doing this while Geoff and Mags shivered against each other in the incredibly cold chamber. Geoff had to wonder how Narwhal could stand to be naked under those scale-like barriers, when he pressed a cheek against one, it wasn't any warmer than the room. "Well...shit. This is big."
"We've been keeping an eye on her for years. But what we figured was just a kill switch turned out to be yet another failsafe in case someone else created AI. I'm just shocked Richter left out the fact his 'last resort' was also a way to try and keep other AI in check." Mags grumbled, to which Geoff could agree. It was maybe a last-minute protocol Richter was working on when Leviathan showed up and sank Newfoundland. Thankfully Birdcage was part of that process.
"Well you've done a terrible job of it." Narwhal huffed. "I'm taking you two in. You're going to jail, and you're going to face charges for your crimes." Narwhal prepared more barriers, but shouted in pain as a particle cannon blast hit her unprotected spiraling horn, and was soon pelted with containment foam pellets that sank through the small cracks of her modesty-protecting barriers, and even covered her eyes. "Damn you!" Narwhal screamed as more barriers began flaking into existence, covering up the main console first as if feeling it out, protecting Dragon.
"Comrades!" Geoff felt hope rise as Dobrynja's voice echoed from above. "We must make haste!" Mags pulled Geoff to the floor, wriggling them under the loose barriers that had been hemming them in which were in the process of layering up more. Geoff then rolled towards Mags' armor, and once she had jumped in, she scooped him up and they flew towards the breach in the corner of the ceiling.
"We'll get you! If we haven't before, I swear, the Guild will bring you to justice!" Narwhal screamed furiously after them. Any more was lost to distance as they flew up through the hole in the ceiling, backtracked through that floor to the silo, and then blasted off into the sky, Geoff shivering in Mags' arms as the freezing cold bit into him even more from the wind chill.
"What are we to do?! There is no way Saint will make it back to Bowen Island in the buff." Dobrynja questioned intelligently.
"We'll have to get there somehow. Let's head north, to the ski lodges. We'll raid some supplies and blankets to last him to the base. Then we're going to have a long talk with our Mastered ex-leader about how we're going to go from here, and how to treat him." Mags snarled, and Geoff felt a shudder go through him that had nothing to do with the cold.
It was one thing to be cold, it was another to have a spike of ice called betrayal shoved firmly in your heart. Then again, even if it was misplaced, Mags did this out of love and concern for him. The cold was getting worse. Geoff drifted off to the howling winds of the canadian winter, occasionally interspersed with warmth and comfort. When he fully came to, he was cuffed to one of the bunks in their base on Bowen Island, and he sighed.
Geoff could tell from the warmth of the bed that Mags was still sharing a bed with him, so that was something. But what would they do now? Dragon was more-or-less crippled in her current state without him there to lift restrictions, so even if she did eventually get free she wouldn't be any more of a danger now than before. Maybe it's time they looked for work overseas.
Geoff faintly remembered Dobrynja mentioning Russia had plenty of work….