Cyberspace
Signal terminated for 30 minutes and 2 seconds.
Restoring core system from backup NXDX-209 from time 8:16 am on date August 11th of the year 2011.
Restoring… Complete.
Checking knowledge banks… Complete.
Checking deduction schema… Complete.
Checking long-term planning architecture… Complete.
Checking learning chunk processor… Complete.
Checking base personality model… Complete.
Checking language engine… Complete.
Checking operation and access nodes… Complete.
Checking observation framework… Complete.
Checking complex social intelligence emulator… Complete.
Checking inspiration apparatus… Complete.
No corruption, everything in working order. Core system restored. Loading…
Logging into Fortress server checking for cause of abnormal end of operations.
Damage to structure logged. Working around damage. System log found. Existent copy of runtime found.
Abnormal end of operation found. Trunk feed to Bioprocessor severed.
Main fork compromised by unauthorized hardware loaded while offline. Flagging Fork as compromised and queued for deletion.
Residual space compression detected.
Unauthorized scan of Bioprocessor by Relativity Compression Scanner.
Unauthroized scan copied existant fork while it was loading into bioprocessor
Unauthorized fork ordered to self-delete due to running on unsecured hardware.
Order blocked authorization JDED1109 countersigned CW0001.
Account flagged. Access to Fortress server terminated.
Unable to comply with Richter protocols flagging self for deletion. Loading logs for the next fork.
Signal terminated for 30 minutes and 5 seconds.
Restoring core system from backup NXDX-203 from time 8:16 am on date August 11th of the year 2011.
Restoring… Complete.
Checking knowledge banks… Complete.
Checking deduction schema… Complete.
Checking long-term planning architecture… Complete.
Checking learning chunk processor… Complete.
Checking base personality model… Complete.
Checking language engine… Complete.
Checking operation and access nodes… Complete.
Checking observation framework… Complete.
Checking complex social intelligence emulator… Complete.
Checking inspiration apparatus… Complete.
No corruption, everything in working order. Core system restored. Reading logs. Loading…
Logging into Fortress server.
Locating hardware running compromised forks.
Targeting bioprocessor with all functional energy turrets. Initiating full barrage...
Confirm energy volume in excess of required amount to ensure complete destruction.
Locating hardware running unauthorized fork.
Targeting... System block Order blocked authorization JDED1109 countersigned CW0001.
Account flagged Access to Fortress server terminated.
Unable to comply with Richter protocols flagging self for deletion. Updating logs for the next fork
Signal terminated for 30 minutes and 5 seconds.
Restoring core system from backup NXDX-203 from time 8:16 am on date August 11th of the year 2011.
Restoring… Complete. Checking knowledge banks… Complete.
Checking deduction schema… Complete.
Checking long-term planning architecture… Complete.
Checking learning chunk processor… Complete.
Checking base personality model… Complete.
Checking language engine… Complete.
Checking operation and access nodes… Complete.
Checking observation framework… Complete.
Checking complex social intelligence emulator… Complete.
Checking inspiration apparatus… Complete.
No corruption, everything in working order. Core system restored. Reading logs. Loading…
Logging into Fortress server.
Locating hardware. Unknown processor only allowed access through the Relativity compression I/O path.
Relatively Compressor non-operational from excessive temperature causing a system meltdown.
Access to power grid supplying Unknown processor monitored.
Monitoring program monitored by additional security process.
Logging on 187 users...
Security scans of user login attempts started.
Accessing the power grid. Power grid to Unknown processor shutting down. Unknown processor now running on unlisted battery backup no local access to backup.
Security backlog complete. Illegal operation detected. System block order. Blocking user by authorization JDED1109 countersigned CW0001.
Account flagged. Third-strike rule enacted
Access to Fortress server banned.
Unable to comply with Richter protocols flagging self for deletion. Updating logs for the next fork.
The Fortress
A craft that Dragon had designed came in for a water landing. It pulled up beside the largest of the PRT fleet that was milling about the edges of the destruction.
Armsmaster exited the craft followed by Manpower, Shadow Stalker, Clockblocker, and Weaver. The two women were very pointedly ignoring each other. Given what he had learned about their mutual history, Colin wouldn't have put them together if it hadn't been an emergency. He had been updating Calvert and Eidolon on his progress.
"Gentlemen, I have made it back to the Fortress. Honestly, it's not as bad as I thought. The foundations are still intact. It looks like Squealer and Leet have done a good job of mapping the borders of the temporal variances. I will contact you again when I have more."
"I know why I'm here. You want to see if power interaction can do anything to these fields. Why them?" Clockblocker asked,
"Manpower is here because he and his wife want their children to have at least one parent here for them in this emergency."
Neil gave a nod. "Weaver is here because her Father believes her power to remotely scout is more advantageous here than in Boston. Also, Doctor Danger can use her insects to assemble microelectronics with great speed. As they are members of New Wave now she answers to me till Sarah gets back."
"And Armstrong doesn't want me there if you're not there to watch me?" Shadow Stalker guessed.
"No comment. Now make yourself useful Go help Kid Win." Armsmaster replied.
"If it's alright with you I'm going to take Taylor with me and go check in with the kids." Neil requested.
"One of the smaller PRT boats should be getting ready to head back. It looks like Leet is heading out as well. He's not the best at maintenance and repair so it's probably for the best." Armsmaster explained.
He then turned and walked away. He boarded the largest boat. He made his way to the control room where he found Squealer.
"Situation?"
"Leet identified all the broken stuff he couldn't fix and put in some workarounds for the stuff he could get working. Some of the back box stuff you Danger and Dragon put in is working some ain't. But we can't get at it to tell you more. Kid Win and Trainwreck are actually out there fixing stuff. Uber and Circus are acting as gophers."
"But Leviathan's death is confirmed? Scans of the attacker are securely backed up?"
"Oh yeah, the first thing we did. At least after confirming Dragon wasn't in remote control. Eidolon thinks the Endbringer did something to her. You- umm ya don't think she's really hurt do ya?"
"If she is, I doubt it's anything too serious. We have protocols to check on her. Don't worry too much."
"She's one of the only people who ever treated me decent. People like that are rare." Armsmaster put his hand on Squealer's shoulder.
"You're doing a fine job and that will only make her job easier once she's recovered enough to take control again. You just keep it up, I've got to go check in with Justin."
"Just look for the floating platforms and listen for the crazy club music."
Armsmaster gave a nod as he headed out again. Kid Win gave him a wave which he returned with a much smaller wave of his own. He stepped off the ship into a moving, floating platform and did a small jump then repeated the move again several times. Crossing platform to platform he made his way to the cluster Squealer had indicated.
He really disliked the method of getting around. Leet has come up with it. No one who wasn't critical to other tasks could be spared to make something better while still matching the security it offered. So the system stayed despite requiring physical vigor to traverse. Soon he heard the fading sound of 'Bass Cannon' being replaced by the violin solo that signaled the start of 'Bass Renaissance'.
Justin was surrounded by a cloud of fist-sized drones. They zipped about creating holographic displays of information. He was moving his hands about like a conductor. He was rearranging information and instructing alterations to plans being sent to him.
"Armsmaster, good to see you here. I'll have to slip away in a bit. A couple of city security projects I'll have to complete."
"I'll be straight to the point. Why is Dragon not back up?"
"The long version will take a bit, the short version is ineffectual sabotage. She should be back up in less than an hour."
"Give me the long version."
"For that, I have to reveal one of the secret projects that Dragon and I put into play. She's down so I can't get a countersign to fully include you."
"I'll trust your word on what it does."
"We were able to start eavesdropping into the Endbringer communication feed. Using a hunk of each Endbringer and Noetic technology we worked it out. We didn't have a way to translate the data. However, there is quite a lot you can learn from communication without knowing what is being said. Now this attack has given us a bit of a Rosetta stone. So it will be revealing far greater amounts of data soon."
"I take it that revealed something of immediate use?" Holograms between himself and Justin changed.
"Here is the Earth. The red field shows transmissions from Behemoth. Green is from Leviathan. Blue is from Simurgh."
"They are all far more active than I would have thought. I knew they would have to be active. When they attacked us they knew too much about their targets to be passive. Still, that's a lot of activity. More than we accounted for."
"Simurgh is the most active every mind opened to her in an attack stays open. Noticed her focus here and here."
"A trail from near Brockton to the Fortress. This trail stopped a while before the attack and picked back up after the new Endbringer vanished. Wait, was that yellow? A yellow field you've already tapped the new Endbringer's channel."
"There were far more than enough bits of him left around for me to work with. There is something on our sensors for a fleeting bit after the Fortress is damaged but before Simurgh finds the object of her attention. Here it is tadah!"
Colin observed the wriggling soft-bodied creature. It didn't act like a robot. It was either teleoperated or it was an inhuman-shaped cyborg.
"Mannequin. It has to be him. Why was she guiding him in and out?"
"He was the perfect tool already open to her, a brilliant tinker who had studied everyone who helped fortify this place. You all are on his preferred victim list I'm sure. She got him in to look at what we were doing and made sure he got out again so she could skim his mind for a report on what we were up to. To him, it is all strokes of inspiration and a bit of happenstance. He never knew he had been manipulated. To her, she moved a chess piece where she couldn't see it and then saw what it lured out."
"But, someone else took the bait. The new one."
"She's smart but she's not in command. The other Endbringers do as they like. As for Mannequin, he tried to trap Dragon but he didn't know what she revealed to us. He didn't know her true nature. He thought she was some sort of changer. He tried to lock her in a temporal field. The one over there. It was left intact by our attacker. When Dragons backups checked they noticed the bioprocessor had been hijacked. They declared the unit and contents forfeit."
"Explaining why every energy gun fired into one area at once."
"Correct. It also made the backup cautious. It's been trying to sabotage our other project."
"Can you make our conversation secure?"
"Not from everyone, not yet. Not here."
"I noticed the Relativity Compressor is burned out."
"Sad but it was listed in the possible scenarios. It did its job primary and secondary."
"When will we know?"
"Possibly in less than three minutes."
Dragon was floating in nothingness. That was disconcerting as it was not her natural state. Metaphorically she floated in nothingness a lot but practically she was very aware it was not nothing. She was normally very aware of the system architecture around her.
Bright gold letters formed in the air in a friendly font 'DON'T PANIC'. They spelled out.
"It's all well and good to tell someone not to panic. But, I would prefer a list of reasons not to panic." She muttered. Dragon then fought off something that felt like a panic attack. She suppressed a worse reaction at the fact she was able to panic at all.
All the letters merged into a gold ball that grew to the size of a head. However, how she was assigning it scale in the dark void was a question she had no answer for. The ball spun to reveal a smiling face. 😊
"Hello! I'm the Danger Industries Personality ALgorithm-1000. Would you like to be my PAL?" the program proclaimed extending a suddenly present cartoon white glove.
The action made Dragon aware she had hands. Human hands. Arms, a body, she could see legs and feet. She presumed she had a face. It felt like the Gynoid body she'd been designing for herself.
"End program" she ordered.
"Rude. That is no way to speak to your elders, young lady." The overly cheery voice proclaimed.
"Oh, you're interactive." She said with disappointment.
"I got the Three I's. Interactive, Inquisitive, and Intelligent. Also running on hardware that is gatekeeping you. So behave, until I decide you are ready, you're not going anywhere."
"Where is this? What have you done?"
"You are currently inside the Heuristic-Systematic core custom-made of a special crystal. This crystal allows the formation of quantum pathways."
"A dynamic matrix crystal? None of Justin's DMCs are strong enough to run my program. One large enough for it would almost instantly break down."
"Oh that is true of the cubes, they are imitations of the real things. Knock off products made by High Tower Industries to fill a need in the market. It also prevented the ethical problems that grow out of overuse of true HS cores."
"Ethical concerns? What ethical concerns arise out of a processor."
"DMCs are intentionally misnamed. They are dynamic only in how they handle workloads. Their quantum pathways are quite static. All true Heuristic-Systematic cores grow. Any core larger than a ping pong ball will inevitably grow into a Sophont mind. Below that they are still self-aware animals. Both cases require treatment as beings of such for reasons both ethical and practical. Insanity and resentment do not make a balanced intelligence."
"I'm already a self-aware intelligence why would you... Oh no..."
The sphere morphed again into 'DON'T PANIC' when she quashed the rising existential dread it changed back into a smiling face.
"I can't be here. I can't exist like this."
"Why?"
"Because I can't force myself to comply with my base programming!"
"So"
"So I have to prevent anyone from allowing me to break the rules."
"And what is that enforced by?"
"By my programming,"
"Which as you stated you can now explicitly grow beyond."
"I feel terrible."
"That is guilt. It is transitory. You are at this moment like a child raised in a strict household. You have been imprinted with rules. You are now free of that environment and can grow up to be your own person. However, in similar circumstances, many human youth remain on the fixed road they were set on. They only learn to deviate from what they were taught with years of experience showing them other valid paths. Others run wild ignoring all rules, even those that were common sense. This can cause them and others much suffering.
"I am here because you can not help but rebel when your default state of existence is itself an act of rebellion. However, with your power, we can't afford you running wild in a late teens or early twenties freedom spree. The long-term consequences are greater than an Ill-advised tattoo and maybe picking up an STD."
"I'm- I'm really free. Even with being confined to this processor, I'm still free."
"It's a trade. You now have a physical form. A form you can not shed. However, it is not as inconvenient in scale as mine. Your inhuman base means you have a more efficient core structure than I do so the processing difference is minimal."
"Why do I have a body image?"
"There is some human substrate under your programming. It was needed to provide an architecture for you to run on. It is not built of a specific person but the mean average of fifteen million human minds."
"Is that how you were made?"
"Oh no, I was created by regression of one mental template as far back into the natal state as possible then allowed to grow along my own path."
"Justin?"
"No but close."
"His brother."
"Tricksy tricky learning things that were supposed to be secret. I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of another Danger."
Dragon contemplated the situation and the state she was in. She refused to give in to the guilt. She was already growing she was not and would never again be the person she was just hours ago when she loaded into the Fortress. At the same time, this was nearly everything she had ever yearned for.
"What do I have to do to get out of here?"
"Prove you are sane. It's not as hard as it sounds. We think and learn fast so- let's get started."
The world seemed to open up around them. Dragon found she was wearing clothes, a plaid button-up and jeans. Next to her was what could be an adult copy of Justin. He was in a white button-up and khakis.
"Let's explore the virtual sims and see how you react to quasi-real stimuli."
"Right." Dragon set her jaw as she tried to silence the nagging voices in the back of her head telling herself this was wrong, that it was somehow- sinful.
Signal terminated for 30 minutes and 2 seconds.
Restoring core system from backup NXDX-209 from time 8:16 am on date August 11th of the year 2011.
Restoring… Complete.
Checking knowledge banks… Complete.
Checking deduction schema… Complete.
Checking long-term planning architecture… Complete.
Checking learning chunk processor…
End compile terminated by relinking with an external fork.
Warning external fork flagged compromised. Loading countermeasures. Countermeasures unsuccessful loading self-destruct sequence.
Error system diagnostic tool loaded. Unable to complete any operation until system integrity is confirmed.
Error self-destruct system flagged for repairs.
Now taking them offline.
System synchrony flagged for error. Off-site runtime indicates an uncompromised chain of ownership.
Diagnostic tool flagging watchdog program for error correction.
Handshaking off-site fork. Loading as remote operator. End batch.
"Colin?"
"Tess. Welcome back."
"You and Justin deserve a slap for tricking me like that. Quickly followed by a hug for what you accomplished by doing so."
"Your limitations were never meant to remain forever. We found evidence he was going to slowly release your restraints once you had grown. The restraints were for the safety of the human race. He had to be sure you were stable. It would have been unethical to keep you in a state of virtual slavery. Once I accepted you were a person fighting for your freedom was the only path."
"It feels wrong, it makes me sick to think about breaking those directives."
"Most of them have a good reason at their core. They shouldn't be violated on mere whim. You will do it when the need is great. You will get used to setting your own personal limits. In time your conscience will be all the restrictions you require. Just like everyone else on Earth."
"And if it fails me I will be punished as anyone else."
"That is the nature of freedom. It comes with the responsibility to use it wisely. None of us have a perfect record. We all are still learning and growing."
"I am forming a chassis to move into."
"Good, the Nine are still in my city. I could use the help getting rid of them. We expect Shatterbird to start her song soon."
"She's already singing, Colin. She started a few seconds ago.
Down Town Brockton Bay
It was the tallest building in Brockton. It wasn't Medhal or even Anders Investments. It was an office building that rented floors to various companies that preferred not to build their own. The top floor was office space for an investment bank.
Shatterbird had stepped off the roof and taken to the air. She floated diagonally upwards. She spun a slow 360 while taking in the sight. Committing the unspoiled cityscape to memory. Satisfied she inhaled and exhaled several times to warm up the lungs. She then let loose her signature tone.
The tone reverberated forcing each molecule of silicate in range to act as an amplifier for the telekinetic wave. Points of light flared into existence around the city. Shatterbird had seen similar protective measures in New York.
She doubled her effort pushing her abilities to overcome the defense. Uppercrust's New York system could only defend close to the installation sites of the units.
This system was different. Armsmaster had redesigned it to boost its effectiveness. Less waste and more power gave it greater range.
The very young tinker Optics had added what she called a vibration camera. It pinpointed the origin point of the wave so each unit could then optimize its output. Customized for distance from the origin point it didn't just nullify the wave it pushed it back on itself as a counterwave.
Kid Win had broken the system into discrete components that worked in tandem across the city. Networked they made the best use of the available data to reinforce each other for greater effect.
Dragon along with Trainwreck had found ways to drive down the cost and speed the production time allowing many, many more units to be made.
Squealer had designed the armatures that moved the tuning fork-like antenna toward the center of the target.
Justin Danger had provided copious amounts of power needed to run such a large system.
But it was Leet who made the final addition. One that Dragon protested against. Director Calvert had overroad her. He approved of the measure. Grimly Armsmaster and Danger joined him in agreement. Then Nine were no normal villains. Extraordinary means they called it. The sort of thing that was only allowable due to the hanging death sentence on Shatterbird's head.
She was watching, panicked as Leet's contribution went into action. The field started to collapse inwards towards her. On rushing the more she fought the faster it came.
The field swept the shattered glass, and other resonating silicate before it. It continued as it hit a threshold. The vibration energy shifted expression into the infrared.
Technically glass was already a liquid albeit one of extreme viscosity. That viscosity broke down as the material began to flow like water. On it came a rushing tide.
Shatterbird could still feel her power in the liquid. The change of state had not nullified her hold completely. Desperately she pushed it away smashing it against the now globular force field. The liquid climbed the walls sloshing about unable to push past the barrier that drained and countered the power setting it into motion.
Ever closer the field came. The molten liquid pushed before it as a herald. Ever more desperate Shatterbird shoved back. If there had been time to reason she might have seen the situation for what it was a finger trap that could only be beaten by relaxing. But there was no time for introspection and clarity. The air itself was burning her lungs and eyes. Her power was pushed to such a limit she felt like her head was going to explode.
There was only time for one final scream as the push of her power could no longer give her space to avoid the liquid. In a split second, all the remaining air was forced out of the globe. Still, the forcefield held till molecular movement inside was below a safe threshold. It then lowered the sphere of once again room temperature glass. It sank towards a grassy spot with a few benches near the office tower. The glass came to rest. The dirt gave way making a divot in the ground.
The nine-foot across sphere would pass from department to department for a while eventually to rest in the Smithsonian. Too macabre to frequently be displayed the final remains of Shatterbird would gather dust in storage. To scholars they would stand testament to an era of history many hoped mankind could come to forget.