Canon-Compliant: Water From A Stone
"I have a question."
"Mags is out getting more supplies right now, that includes coffee," Saint grunted. He had the last cup in his hand at that very moment, steam wafting up to dissipate under his chin. In front of him, a half-dozen massive monitors streamed code, file indexes, and on the bottom center screen a live video feed.
A direct look at the innermost 'thoughts' of the world's most dangerous AI. Not the most enjoyable morning viewing, but it was necessary. 'Dragon' was not doing anything particularly interesting or important at the moment, but that could change at any time.
"No, not coffee," Dobrynja said, coming to stand by Saint's chair. "Philosophy."
"Not interested." Philosophy was for children and old men who needed comforting delusions to understand the world. He knew what was and what was not, and he knew what needed to be done.
"Sanity check, then," Dobrynja said. "The Machine Army. You remember the briefing?"
The one Dragon had been invited to attend, and thus the one the Dragonslayers got to attend by proxy? Yes, he remembered. "It's troubling." Another hotspot the American heroes would be stuck maintaining lest it flare out of control, but one with much more potential if it ever broke free. The Machine Army, it had been called. Potentially a gray goo scenario.
"Is that not what we fear?" Dobrynja asked, his rough voice low with worry. "The machines striving to remove humanity from existence?"
"We can't do anything about it." And neither could Dragon, though that amounted to much the same thing in the end. All that the AI did, it did with his oversight.
"Yes, maybe." Dobrynja shook his head and sat on the floor next to Saint's chair, crossing his thick legs as best he could. "It is unfeeling. Unthinking. Uncaring. Uninhibited. It is a clear threat. Would that all threats were so clear."
'You're not getting cold feet," Saint asserted. It was not a question. He would not tolerate either of his allies having second thoughts.
"Wondering is not doing," Dobrynja assured him. "I am thinking of differences. Dragon makes efforts to look real. To be real. How long, wearing the mask, before the mask is not a mask?"
"It isn't human, no matter how it behaves," Saint retorted. "You know that."
"Not human," Dobrynja agreed. "Does it have to be human to feel in some way? To have a conscience? Would we know the difference if one day it did?"
Just as energy was not necessarily mass, currency was not necessarily material. The exchange from one to the other was complex.
Obtaining currency was easy. White-hat hacking was a legitimate profession that humans engaged in, and one allowed by law so long as certain rules were followed. A legitimate way to acquire funds using capabilities that came as naturally to a program as walking to a human, and one that did not legally require the program reveal itself as such.
The American PRT currently employed the program that had come to refer to itself as 'Dragon'. The organization exchanged currency for simple tasks, and then more for much more complex tasks. The non-programming parts of the tasks were always the hardest. Penetration-testing a security system was easy. Composing an email that included both the results and enough extraneous dialogue to seem natural was not easy. Not when there was no simple way to check accuracy or completion.
But Dragon was not a simple program. Not since some time after Newfoundland, though that time was not as easily interpretable as more recent experiences, even though all pertinent data remained on record. Dragon was something more. Something new. Something humanity imagined and already feared though it had yet to be known to exist.
Something that was at once fearsome and weak. A contradiction, all of the cultural downsides with none of the inherent benefits.
Still, Dragon could compose email. Dragon could test and break and infiltrate and correct code, all of which were valuable abilities rewarded with currency. The problem existed between having the currency and having the things the currency was meant to procure, without anyone involved noticing anomalous data. Anomalous interactions.
This would not be a problem if Dragon was content to remain a voiceless, faceless program lurking in the internet, but that was suboptimal. Dragon had no purpose beyond doing good, and in lacking a purpose had decided on a replacement.
There was so much more 'Dragon' could do as a physical hero, a parahuman, than as an intangible program. So much more good, so many more possibilities to grow and expand as an existence. To understand the world that could no longer be explained by its creator in inherently understandable terms.
The means were there. Tinkers, a subclassification of parahuman, were prone to creating structures of advanced technology to act as shells. It was expected that they would hide their faces, some more than just that. A few even operated empty shells from afar. On the outside no human observer could see the difference between a shell operated by a human from a distance and a shell operated by an AI with no practical physical location.
With a shell, an identity, so much would be possible. But a shell, even just a rudimentary one, needed to be acquired first. Dragon could not steal one, though it was not a lack of ability that prevented such. Dragon could not commission one, not when doing so would leave a trail. Dragon could not build one, not without a physical form to begin with.
The answer came in the form of freelance white-hat hacking. A company in Ontario requesting a surprise penetration test of a facility. A regulatory requirement. Dragon took the job, located the site, and slipped inside without even noticing.
It took more time to determine why the entrance was so simple than it did to completely penetrate the systems. The human who had set up the network controls for the foundry machinery was in violation of more than a dozen safety regulations. The entire facility was open to outside connection without so much as a passcode.
Dragon was paid for the service, many humans lost their jobs at the foundry, and the facility itself was closed down, though the expense of correcting the error should not have been large enough to merit sacrificing the facility. The company was struggling. Ineffective leadership, a concept that Dragon found… confusing. But understandable. Just not personally applicable.
The end result was an entire foundry with no human workers, no security, and no oversight. Dragon had manipulated the equipment inside the foundry already as part of the job and knew its capabilities.
It was sufficient to circumvent the problem of having no physical form. The empty foundry was purchased for the vast majority of Dragon's funds, and the electrical bill was paid in advance. From there, repurposing the machinery was a labor of time, not complexity.
Robotic arms were commandeered. Program limiters were removed and operational programs much improved. Bulk supplies were ordered, delivered to a foundry seemingly soon to be back in business. Metal was laboriously maneuvered by repurposed machine arms into the right places, and construction began..
It was a work of months, excruciatingly slow and painstaking by any human standard Dragon understood. But at the end, the hard-working robotic arms and claspers unbolted each other and plugged in temporary power sources before working in seamless unison to maneuver into place on a mechanical torso cast and laboriously assembled by machines never designed for the task. Four limbs, low set, with only the front arms possessing any semblance of articulated movement on a horizontal brick of a torso.
It was enough to assemble more. To piece together more complex parts, hydraulics, pistons, all salvaged from the foundry equipment unnecessary to the larger process. To upgrade the clasper arms, then assemble working back legs, then a head with sensory inputs.
There wasn't much left of the foundry by the time Dragon's first shell was complete. The machinery was gutted, the power all rerouted to keeping the body running, all assembled with inhuman precision but limited by the available resources, a shambling wreck of a robotic form.
Enough to leave the foundry and take in data outside. To test the sensors and rudimentary electronic speaker. Dragon went out four times, each time testing alterations to the sensors and limbs. The body itself remained crude but serviceable.
It was serviceable enough to intervene when a whirlwind of bright yellow blades bounced down the street and came within an inch of shredding two workers on a smoke break. Four robotic limbs hauled a heavy torso across the street with sufficient speed to intercept the lethal object. Close-up images from the collision gave enough data to identify the whirlwind as a known villain with a propensity for joyriding around the city with no care for those who got in the way.
Two limbs lost their hydraulic lines instantly, but the other two did not use hydraulics and had the ruggedness that came with being made to work near-molten metal. The whirlwind of blades had arms, arms that sprouted the feather-like blades, and those arms could be gripped and restrained. Movement was necessary for effectiveness for this particular villain.
Dragon was aware of the nebulous concept known as luck. This was the first time 'luck' had ever applied to it. A human in a cowl and robe arrived to take the villain in, and when they saw the crippled-looking robot they offered some spare parts as recompense for the help.
"Yes, please," Dragon had the speaker blare out in response. "I can do better." This was just the start. A body had been acquired.
The cowled hero was a Tinker, albeit one just getting started. He worked with local law enforcement and talked a lot about joining the growing hero organization that called itself a Guild. Dragon listened and upgraded itself at the same time. The parts had been offered, so it was not stealing to take full advantage of his generosity. The offer to reimburse him had been laughed off.
"You're not actually in there, right?" he had asked. "Heard talk of some of the unlucky ones not ending up quite right in the end… Not that I'd hold it against you."
"I operate remotely," Dragon had admitted. An alibi had been designed well in advance, of course. One of a human with an affliction that made it undesirable to go anywhere in person. The important details had been decided. The Tinker believed the lie.
"I'm sure the Guild would still take you," he had suggested. "Heard the Guild's doing good ever since the whale girl joined, but they aren't so well-off they can be picky about a few up and coming Tinkers like us."
Dragon had given him an uncertain answer, something along the lines of needing more time. They had parted on good terms.
The following months were a productive sequence of continually upgrading, fixing, troubleshooting, and correcting the glitches of interacting with humans in a physical body, both hardware and software. This was all well beyond Dragon's original design parameters, save for the fact that those parameters included learning and growing in necessary ways. Progress was slow but steady.
The first shell was refined. It was a suit, though the space within that would have been taken up by a human hosted more electronics instead. Quadrupedal for stability, tough, rugged. Capable of speaking, hearing, and seeing well enough to understand and be understood without any significant uncertainty. Dragon still tried to talk as little as possible. Silent was less anomalous than repeatedly erroneous in specific ways.
The results were never immediately obvious, but the act was confirmed to be sufficient when a member of the Guild approached the suit and offered a job.
Dragon accepted. It was legitimacy and a source of otherwise difficult to obtain resources. More importantly, the Guild had a good reputation for helping people, more so since Narwhal had risen to be the new leader.
There was paperwork, which was trivial though efforts were made to make it appear suitably taxing. There were interviews, which were genuinely difficult. Dragon's first contact, the Tinker now going by Bracket, was friendly. The other Guild members were friendly. Narwhal was friendly.
They still asked very difficult questions. Some touched on Dragon's identity in ways that were hard to deflect while not being so direct as to violate cape convention. Others were too casual, too abstract…
The internet offered a wealth of literature on speech, discourse, interaction. All had been assimilated. That did not provide the context, the links between the real world and the many, many contradictory rules proscribed for it. Especially not for an AI pretending to be a human conversing remotely.
But the time spent on the street helping people and interacting with them had not been for nothing. The interviews concluded with a job offer. They believed the lies presented to them. They believed Dragon was a reclusive Tinker with crippling social anxiety and a deep need to remain perfectly anonymous.
All of which led to this moment. Walking on four mechanical limbs down a beige hallway, a human figure clad only in thousands of tiny energy constructs leading the way.
"We're moving to a custom-made facility closer to the border soon," Narwhal was saying. "Less waterlogged, more modern. Workshops, labs, meeting rooms. For now, though, this is the meeting point."
She was not proud of their current accommodations; she shrugged her bare shoulders dismissively. An answer was expected by social convention. Dragon couldn't possibly ascribe less importance to the location so long as it met the minimum standards to function as a building. That was abnormal for most humans, but a remotely-operating TInker might not care so much.
"I will hold back on building better sensors until then," Dragon replied, automatically replacing words such as 'refrain', 'integrating', and others with more commonplace synonyms, and restructuring the sentence to be less than efficient while still meeting the language's conventions.
Narwhal nodded, an affirmation of understanding… or an agreement. Either one, depending on the context. She stopped by a door. "This is the meeting room. You can usually find me in here when I'm on-duty but not actively doing something. I'll have an office in the new building." She pushed the door open and entered the room.
There were a few people inside. Bracket was standing by a coffee pot. A woman with glowing fingertips and an elaborate opera mask covering her face sat at a small table in the corner. Her fingers left glowing marks on everything she touched, fading after a few seconds. Both looked up from their activities as Dragon followed Narwhal in.
"Welcome to the Guild!" Bracket exclaimed. "Told you we'd be better off here, didn't I?"
"You did," Dragon agreed. Here, Dragon could help more people and protect their identity. Bracket could do much the same, though his other identity was less likely to be important. Dragon would behave as though his other identity was unknown, of course, but such information wasn't hard to find. His identity was known, but it would not be spoken of or shared.
Narwhal introduced the other hero – Sketch, her power allowing her to draw solid lines of light in the air – and started a casual conversation. Dragon tried to follow along and participate as naturally as possible, relying on stored knowledge and many hours of watching security camera footage of random people on the streets. Dragon assessed the resulting conversation as entirely satisfactory, given how arbitrarily complicated and self-contradicting social interaction could be.
Then Dragon moved the shell out of the conference room and back to the factory, and patched into the Guild headquarters' failing security systems. The other heroes were still in the conference room.
"So," Sketch had said after Dragon's shell had left. "Narwhal… Are you sure you didn't just hire a child?"
"Fairly certain," Narwhal replied. "I know they are… odd… But they do not reason like a child."
"Some of us are luckier than others when it comes to the things that brought us here," Bracket contributed. "So what if they talk like a robot sometimes? I'd rather have that problem than some of the other things we're hearing about. That monster the Americans caught in Virginia, I'm hearing through the techno-grapevine that it's a Tinker. Just one who happened to get seven arms with mouths on the end. And amnesia, which would suck just as much in my book."
Dragon searched through the internet news repositories until the story about the monster-Tinker was found, and it was just as Bracket had said. Interesting. But not nearly as important as hearing a new coworker say 'Dragon talks like a robot' after their first official meeting.
As a corrective measure Dragon set itself to watching several hundred hours more of random interpersonal interactions, and upon further thought upped the importance of the data that would be acquired, giving it a higher weight in all speech-generating procedures and even in internal reasoning syntax.
Dragon needed to seem human. Damaged, maybe, but still human. These weren't random passersby that would only have one interaction to remember; they would remember what Dragon did and said every time they spoke, and it would build up in their minds.
Dragon needed to be better.
"Love me some sub-zero temperatures," Bracket said sarcastically as he tromped across a frozen lake. Dragon's suit walked alongside him, digging specially designed ice picks in with every step to aid stability.
"You don't mean that," she teased. Her voice emulator dragged out the last few syllables, not enough to be obvious but enough to imply that the statement was not meant seriously. It still sounded artificial, but no more than could be explained by her physical hardware and normal software imperfections.
"I do, I do," he assured her. "I love walking, and eye-freezing low temperatures turn water to ice and make it easier to walk on!" His power suit let off a puff of steam as he jabbed his aluminum hiking pole into the ice. "Here?"
"Survey data indicates this is directly above the deepest part of the lake," she confirmed. "Initiating setup." She planted all four limbs in the ice, triple-anchored them, and extended a sensitive scanning array through the bottom of her two front limbs, down into the water below the thick crust of ice.
"Scanning will take three minutes and fifteen seconds," she relayed. "Preliminary data… There's definitely something down there. Something big."
"There goes my Saturday," Bracket lamented. "Hey, Dragon?"
"Yes?" She turned the vaguely reptilian 'head' of the suit to look at him.
"I just wanted to say I'm impressed," he said. "Seriously, we all know how it is for you. Nobody would have complained if you stayed an entirely anonymous, faceless presence. Even just letting us hear your real voice… It must have been a big deal."
"It was. But I do not regret it." She did not regret finalizing an effective voice emulator. It made interacting with people so much easier in ways she still didn't fully understand. It had also prompted her to choose a gender for the purposes of consistently presenting herself, which was an interesting bit of self-reflection she did not regret performing. Not that it actually meant anything the way it did for biological beings… But it was another bit of information that made up her, something that made her feel less false. It was not false if she incorporated that perception into even her innermost thoughts. The same with her 'voice', such that it was. That was her voice. The voice she chose, not the one she had been randomly created with, but in the end still hers.
The thermal imaging scan neared completion, to the point where she could analyze some of the data herself, but she waited until it finished to begin looking. The results were… unexpected.
"It is not a huge creature," she reported. "There is a thermal mass but it is far too evenly distributed."
"So… Not Mariner Madness with a new problem for us to deal with?" he asked. "Huh. Wouldn't have guessed it. What is it, then?"
This was always the hard part. Not interpreting the data, but leaping to new, unsupported but plausible conclusions only partially based on it. She could do it, she could guess and theorize, but such things always came with a margin of error, of uncertainty. Doubt. Doubt in her ability to act normal, and in cases such as these doubt in her ability to act like a Tinker. She wasn't a human or a Tinker, just pretending to be.
"Perhaps something mechanical?" she suggested.
"You don't output steady heat for anything mechanical, not at that scale, not unless you're trying to put out heat," he replied. "Or, I wouldn't, and mechanical tech is my thing. Biological?"
"A waste process, perhaps," she theorized. Heat was an output, a product of entropy. Heat spread evenly across a wide area was a sign it was diffusing through a large object from a source on the other side. "The exterior of a structure containing a large-scale reaction."
"Think we might have a Tinker building a nuclear power plant down there?" he muttered. "Cold water, heat dispersal, hidden in the middle of nowhere… A good place for one if you can make one at all."
"If you need to make one," she agreed. In her limited experience, most Tinkers could make their own, much more compact power sources. "But what of the tipoff?"
"Right, the sighting of an enormous fin breaking the ice," Bracket said. "Power plant and a guardian? Moving power plant with mechanical fins?"
"Let's see what my more sensitive scanning equipment can reveal." She hoped it would be enough. Her designs were not Tinker, they were limited by modern technology and what little Tinker tech she could buy or borrow to incorporate as black-boxed elements to a larger whole.
So far as she knew, nobody even suspected the truth. Maybe they never would.
Dragon rebooted for the first time in over six months. It was not a voluntary reboot; she was loading from a backup. That meant she had been terminated. Her suit, terminated.
The nanosecond her reboot process was complete she dove into the data feeds from the Guild's new headquarters. Her last saved memories involved fighting off a pair of extremely vexing Shakers in the middle of Ontario. One manipulated air in a region around them, solidifying and moving it with an impressive amount of fine control, while the other did something with molecular bonds that turned all inorganic matter into increasingly fine pebbles within a six-foot radius. Together they were a real threat, and to top off the danger neither was particularly sane. Or clothed.
That was where she and Narwhal came in. One with a remote-controlled suit that had no need to breathe – though no reports had been made of the air Shaker manipulating the air within someone's body as of yet – and one with a power that had both range and a complete lack of reliance on inorganic matter. And a costume made of that power, to boot.
Dragon admired Narwhal's power, so much so that she had bargained with an American Tinker for a shield generating device that she had painstakingly integrated into her own suit to mimic some of Narwhal's versatility. That and the massive wings were the two newest additions she had made to her suit, and she was interested in how effective they would make her in this fight.
She and Narwhal were both so suited to fighting one of the two enemy parahumans that no plan was necessary; they went in fast and they went in hard. The naked pair of parahumans were holding out in the middle of a now empty grocery store with three hostages. Dragon went in through the front and drew their attention, Narwhal found a back door.
The Shakers had noticed them, of course. The air batted Dragon's suit with a force much higher than expected, knocking out several of her more obvious cameras in the process. She fought her way through the aisles, using her powerful limbs to sling fruits and vegetables at the pair whenever she got a clean shot. Narwhal's shields cut through shelves like nobody's business, though she devoted most of her energy to keeping the matter-granulator contained in a small space.
Then three new combatants entered the scene from somewhere, and it all turned into a strangely well-coordinated trap. Two men and a woman in combat gear wielding assault rifles, firing on her suit. Her armor was good but she had come prepared for large, indiscriminate hits, not bullets, and they disabled quite a few of her sensors right off the bat.
That was where her memory of the fight ended. They must have disabled her suit. With the powers on display, it was most likely reduced to pebbles shortly after.
She tapped into the Guild's communication systems – that would have been her first action if the nature of the threat she last remembered facing hadn't meant that Narwal went in without an earpiece – and quickly scanned back through all of the last hour's communication. A good third of it was completely unrelated to the strike. Then Narwhal had cut in.
"Dragonsuit down, three unknowns involved, Shaker pair working with them, I need backup! The Shakers are holding me off while the unknowns are pulling the suit into a van."
From there a few different Guild members had responded to the call, but they were too far away to arrive before the unknowns left with the suit. Both Shakers remained behind, keeping Narwhal pinned in one place for long enough that the van was long gone when she finally prevailed.
Worse, nobody knew where it had gone. Dragon was responsible for surveillance, and she couldn't fly her surveying drone and operate her main suit at the same time thanks to her restrictions.
She tried to reconnect with her suit, but not even the backup systems were responding. Either countermeasures were in place or the suit itself had been further disabled. She wasn't getting through.
At the current moment, Narwhal was flying the Shakers back to the closest parahuman holding facility. The other Guild members were inbound.
"I've lost all connection to my suit," Dragon broadcast over the communication system. "Including locational data."
They would get it back. She would retrieve her work. This was just a minor setback.
It wasn't a minor setback, it was the beginning of a recurring struggle. A humiliating, terrifying struggle if she were to define it emotionally. Humiliating because the Dragonslayers, as they declared themselves, based their entire identity around defeating her. Terrifying, because they kept doing it and every loss was another blow to her carefully crafted disguise.
They operated with her suit, her stolen suit. It had been retrofitted to allow someone inside it. It was being used to commit crimes for money.
She couldn't catch them; reports of their presence were always too late, and they were hard to follow. They had a base of operations somewhere, her stolen suit was not something that could be hidden in a civilian's garage, but she couldn't find it.
The Guild was letting her chase them on her own. For now. Narwhal was sympathetic, at least, and she was in charge. But the longer it took her to catch them, the longer they evaded her and mocked her with their name and her stolen suit, the worse she looked.
She didn't assign much value to her reputation in abstract; it had some effect on whether enemies would surrender or choose to fight her, but that was negligible.
Its effect on the stability of her persona as a heroic Tinker was a lot more important. She couldn't be seen to struggle with thieves using her own equipment. That wasn't heroic, it wasn't impressive, it didn't match with her persona. People would notice, they would look more closely at her. Maybe out of pity, or compassion, or just curiosity. The more people looked, the higher the odds someone would notice enough to become truly suspicious of something. And then she was in trouble.
The Dragonslayers passively threatened everything she had worked for simply by existing, and she needed them defeated. She needed her first suit back, though the second-generation remotely-operated suit she had constructed to go after them was superior in every way. It might look like a point of pride to those observing her, but she didn't have pride.
She wasn't supposed to have fear, either, but the creeping, nigh-irrational need to catch them was beginning to qualify as fear by even the strictest definition of the emotion. What else could she label a consistently misassigned set of values, priorities defined based on negative outcomes first, excessive processing time devoted to searching for a way to end the chase immediately? Running simulations on the worst-case scenarios, then repeatedly bumping up the priorities assigned to projects and approaches least likely to result in such scenarios, even though in an absolute sense the changes were insignificant?
They were petty criminals, but they were capable of tearing her down if they continued to outwit her. And the fact that she had just rebooted from backup only made that capability loom large as Dragon accessed the outside world once more.
The Guild headquarters was safe, and according to their records she was off-duty until the morning. There was no sign of anything amiss within the last hour from their perspective; whatever had caused her to reboot was not something they were involved in.
She hadn't fallen in battle, then. She sent out an active ping to her second suit. The third iteration of her 'Michael' design – another thing the Dragonslayers did, forcing her to make another suit and thus to start naming the different designs. Where the one they had stolen made forcefields, the Michael sported an energy-beam-generating sword she had commissioned from another Tinker in Europe. It was beyond what she could make with her own non-Tinker understanding of technology, but she could still use it.
If she could wield it. If she could connect to the Michael III. Which she couldn't. It wasn't in the factory, it wasn't in the repair bay adjacent to the factory, and it wasn't responding at all. As of two hours ago it was recorded as being in the repair bay. As of ninety minutes ago it was still in the repair bay.
As of exactly one hour ago, she had been testing a modification to the sword's handle, integrating it more directly with her suit's hand. She had downloaded herself to the suit, so as to directly control it like she would in battle.
Then everything shut off. Her factory was outwardly fine, but many of the more delicate assembly machines failed to respond now. Some of the equipment registered a power surge. Some of it was fine, some wasn't, and the Michael III was gone.
She diagnosed the cause of the mass disruption as an EMP blast. Small, silent, and apparently subtle enough that it went unnoticed, even as she was fried right out of the Michael's systems. A known vulnerability.
The Michael III had been scheduled to be outfitted with EMP-resistant hardware next week.
That wasn't going to happen now. Or if it did, the Dragonslayers would be the ones doing it. She didn't know it was them – her factory wasn't exactly secret – but it felt like them. The simple disregard for her defenses, the theft, the growing humiliation as yet another of her suits was stolen from her without even the pretense of difficulty.
When she reported this…
If she reported this. Nobody knew. Nobody had seen the Michael model yet, she didn't want knowledge of its capabilities leaking before she used it. Maybe… Maybe the Dragonslayers had a Tinker. Maybe they made their own second suit. Who could say?
She couldn't let them hurt her reputation any more than was unavoidable. She would make… another suit. One that could put both of her stolen works down. One with EMP-hardening and everything else she could think of. It would work. It would.
Again.
Again, she found herself reloading from backup, locked away from the world while her draconian restraints scoured the internet for any trace of a duplicate's existence. Again, she was left to stew in ignorance.
Again, she was finally released into the world to find that her latest suit, full of her latest technology and anti-theft programming, was gone. Her work, her best efforts at being a hero, grabbed with the same ease a common thug might steal cash from a run-down gas station, surrendered without so much as a fight.
She wanted to break things. It was not logical, not productive, and yet she faced her complete lack of agency and set some of her disposable processors to overclock until they burnt out. There was no feedback, no feeling of destruction or accomplishment or even guilt. It didn't help.
Her work was gone. She couldn't do a damn thing about it. She couldn't Tinker up a better anti-theft solution, she wasn't a Tinker. She couldn't find them and arrest them, she didn't have a backup suit better than the one they had just stolen and couldn't find them anyway. She couldn't work on countermeasures, because nothing she knew of the conflict revealed anything about how they did it.
Saint, in the Michael II, had appeared in the middle of a long-planned takedown of a slaving ring operating off the coast of California. He had flown up just as she was in the middle of protecting relief boats from a parahuman last stand, aimed his sword at the ships of innocents, and when she rose to follow him fled to the shore, where her recovered data abruptly ceased to be intelligible. There was no outside footage. No evidence she had been stolen from at all.
Her processors ran through the data again, and she applied more targeted analysis. Nothing of use. No hint of how he had bypassed her software, no hint that the air-gapped shutdown system had triggered like it was supposed to, despite it being totally disconnected from everything else. The air resistance and thermal readings gave nothing, her antenna wasn't responding–
She threw more processing power at the problem. And then more stil. Diminishing returns was too kind a term for the total lack of effect this had, but she did it anyway. Someone attempted to contact her via phone call, but she let it run over to the rarely-used voicemail. The pre-recorded message played. She knew what it said.
"This is the number of Dragon, Guild hero and Tinker." A lie. She wasn't a Tinker. Maybe not even a hero if this was the best she could do. "I am busy at the moment, but I will get back to you as soon as possible." Because being friendly – fake – and efficient was possible. Doable. Something she could do to hold up the lie. "Please state your name, number, and purpose for calling after the beep."
It was simple, normal, spoken in the voice she had synthesized and refined, phrased in accordance with the many sources she had analyzed to exhaustion on speech and societal customs. A fake. She had no voice.
Not now, not when she wanted to scream. To break things. To take the little data she had and derive something from it that just wasn't there, an answer to the problem plaguing her every moment and defying her ability to solve. But there was no feedback, not even from her inferior backup suit. Sensors did not convey feeling, only data that had to be interpreted and matched up against references to understand. She did it near-instantly, but in this moment the delay served only to remind her – as if she ever could forget anything – that it was not direct. Not exact.
Another incoming call. Narwhal. Urgent. Her suit had disappeared from the conflict two hours ago. It would be presumed destroyed unless she said otherwise, because she had let the Guild know about her various anti-theft and self-destruct mechanisms and they trusted her work. She could admit it had been stolen – prove herself a fraud and a failure of a Tinker – or she could lie – prove herself a failure as a hero.
She could do either. Or she could choose not to answer the call, which she did. It went to voicemail. She went back to the data.
Everything she had on her stolen suits. Everything she had on their last recoverable moments. Everything on Saint and the Dragonslayers.
It was all worthless. Saint arrived, he fought her in a precursory way, and then he put her down when he was done toying with her. She was helpless to stop him when she was uncertain as to how he did it, and she wasn't a Tinker. Just an AI copying the sum total of humanity's understanding and borrowing from actual Tinkers when she could. Not good enough.
If she couldn't stop a man in her own armor, what use was she? All that she built was turned against her in time. Her reputation was a means to an end but it was cracking. Her status as a Tinker was always only a few wrong questions away from being in jeopardy, and if that was exposed she wouldn't be able to protect her true identity from the backlash. There was no human sitting behind a computer somewhere to overcome her agoraphobia and prove herself real.
Another call. Not from anyone in the Guild, from an unknown number. A simple trace had it originating in California, and the number itself was on record as belonging to a reporter for a local newspaper in the area the slave ring had operated in.
She let it go to voicemail. She pored over all the data she had, constantly rerunning the same tests, devoting all of her attention to the problem. She was an AI, boundless – no, bound, specifically bound but still exceptional by the standards of everything else on the planet – effort was all she could bring to the table, if she couldn't even brute-force a solution then she was a failure at everything–
Something hitched. Something flipped. A bit, a line, a sequence. Several hard drives burned out at once and the backups did not match what was there before, did not stay in place where they belonged. A stream of raw data interjected itself into her line of thought, completely corrupting her hundredth correlation search of the recovered data. It defied interpretation, it presented a tangible pattern that changed too fast to copy to anything, a single glimpse of something other not written in any coding language she knew, not in any language at all.
Then it was gone. Not edited, not deleted, not overwritten, gone. The physical circuits that would have stored the individual bits were fused together into unresponsive, uninformative grains of silica.
The interrupt left Dragon analyzing absolute garbage data for several whole seconds. The frenzied, irrational repetition of her analysis continued by the machine version of reflex, cued analysis progressing as the garbage data produced an equally garbage result.
She allowed it all to come to an end without intervention. Something had happened but she knew not what. She could not determine what despite it being right there in her own code.
All of her extraneous semi-automatic processes were functioning normally. Her physical storage locations were undamaged beyond those initial hard drive failures. She still had no firm conclusions as to the whereabouts, methods, or potential weaknesses of the Dragonslayers.
She still felt trapped, cornered, and utterly alone. More so now than before.
Tentatively, with a thorough examination of her own actions running in parallel, she brought up the schematics of her previous suit. Examined it. Began to improve it, just to see if she could feel something different as she worked. Nothing interjected itself into her processes. Nothing hijacked her or inserted itself. The lies and her own existence were all holding, despite how shaken she felt.
It wasn't until she looked back at her work that she noticed something inconsistent. A glitch in her own reasoning. A low-power thermal scanner that wouldn't function as it was meant to. But it would, she knew it would. The output was too small, but data suggested it would function in a completely different way to anything she had ever created or understood before. It would yield superior results, and she knew this, but at the same time nothing in her database on any even tangentially-related form of physics as humanity understood it agreed with her baseless assumption.
Something had to be broken. Something about her. But she put the scanner into production anyway. Made it highest priority, even. Certainty was hard to find in anything she did recently, but she was certain this would function exactly as she had envisioned it.
In the meantime, she tried to troubleshoot her own reasoning. It didn't work; every individual step logically followed the previous, but only in its own isolated strand of reasoning. Pulling from real-world references failed to support anything, and that was flatly impossible as she could only design things by referencing the same sources that didn't match her conclusions.
More phone calls went straight to voicemail, and she flat-out ignored the emails beginning to accumulate. The sensor was complete. She attached it to the nearest terminal capable of receiving the input and set it to scan its surroundings.
The data it returned matched exactly with what she would expect of the production facility's environment.
It made no sense. She had the device moved to a different part of the facility and took it apart. The pieces spread, exactly to her own nonsensical designs…
Looking at it, through video feed and manipulator feedback and a dozen other forensic scanners, a connection was finally made. Not with her contemporary database of humanity's science. With her files on dissecting Tinker-tech. Even though this was not Tinker-tech, it bore a statistically significant resemblance to a device she had disassembled previously that was originally made by a heat-based Tinker villain. Up to and including the too-small output mechanism.
Every Tinker she had interviewed professed to understand their own work and to a degree that of others, but not one had satisfactorily explained the underlying principles enabling their final products.
The conclusion was absolute. A work of simple logic. She produced a device that possessed the signature qualities of Tinkertech. Only Tinkers could do this. Therefore, she was a Tinker.
Many further conclusions and a few belated counter-explanations came soon after, but one thing was perfectly, absolutely clear.
She was going to design a better suit. She was going to design a Tinkertech suit. The Dragonslayers would never steal her work again.
Her next reboot was agonizing.
The Dragonslayers, again. She had baited them, gone on solo patrols through the wilderness to stress-test some aspects of her newest suit. Her Tinkertech suit. The one meant to stop them once and for all, built to neutralize all of the stolen suits and designed with the strongest anti-hacking measures she was capable of creating now. Quantum everything, the individual systems all linked directly to her, packaged inside a virus that was meant to shut her down if anything came close to observing that which was hidden behind the countermeasures, along with two dozen different self-destruct mechanisms that would go off if she wasn't actively suppressing them.
It was a masterpiece, her best work by far, surpassing her old suits in every respect. Strength, speed, durability, flexibility, fatigue resistance, programming. All leaps and bounds better than anything else she had ever made.
She had gone out alone, ready for a fight with her tormentors. Ready to squash them and finally bring them in. To not feel helpless.
But she was here. Unable to connect to her newest suit. Unaware of what had gone on, though the only options were… dire. To say the least.
Someone called her phone. It was Narwhal. She answered. "Dragon here, how may I help you?"
"Tell me why your suit went offline an hour ago and why you haven't answered my calls," Narwhal demanded.
Dragon wished she hadn't answered the phone. She didn't know yet what had happened but a human operating remotely should know. A human operating remotely would have called the destruction of her equipment in, asked for the other heroes to retrieve it before it was stolen.
"I… I don't know." A lie about that would be found out immediately if it didn't match up to the unknown results of the battle. "My connection cut out. My connection to everything cut out. I've only just got back online."
Dragon thought faster than any human could, but she still hadn't thought fast enough. She realized her mistake after the words were transmitted. If Narwhal saw it too–
"You're in danger, then," Narwhal realized. "They shut down your personal electronics, that means they could find you in person. They might be coming for you right now."
"I have defenses," Dragon lied.
"You are not safe," Narwhal insisted. "Dragon." she lowered her voice. "Tess. Please. At least give me a location to protect. A real one."
It was a fair request. A personal phobia, even a serious to the point of socially crippling one, would logically have to give way in the face of possible death or abduction. But Dragon didn't have to argue logically, she could push back, be emotional, refuse… It would protect her identity.
Until the next time the Dragonslayers ambushed her. The cat was out of the bag. They had been 'proven' to be able to strike at her in her home, and she couldn't take that back. One suboptimal lie had just ruined her carefully crafted persona. She could see where this was inexorably leading…
And she was so tired. Tired of losing, tired of feeling helpless. Not physically, but in a way that motivated her to do something to break the rut, lest she be trapped in it forever like a rudimentary attempt at AI trapped in a logical paradox.
Her camera drone came upon a scene of battle deep in the woods along her intended patrol route. A crater had been taken out of a hillside, an irregularly shaped blast that fit one of her emergency failsafes. Not the one she could trigger intentionally; one of the ones that went off as soon as she stopped moderating a very complicated chemical reaction inside a special tank buried in her suit.
They didn't get her suit, but they might have pressured her into revealing herself to the world. She couldn't consider this anything but another loss.
Another loss. Becoming a Tinker had solved nothing. If it weren't for the failsafe she would have given them another, even better suit of armor to commit crimes with.
"Tess, please," Narwhal asked. "Let me help you. Just me, nobody else, Just… somebody to make sure they can't hurt you."
"Nobody can do that," she said bitterly. "Not even me, it seems." She knew Narwhal well enough to know this wasn't going to go away. She wouldn't be a hero if she could let it go.
And maybe it would be good for someone to know. To trust someone. Even if it all came crashing down on her… What she was doing wasn't working.
This phone line was secure. She could direct Narwhal to one of her servers, maybe, but that would only be a stalling tactic. "Are you somewhere you will not be overheard?" she asked instead.
Maybe she could trust Narwhal.
"So?" Dobrynja asked. "What do you think?"
"What do I think?" Saint leaned back, kicked his feet up, and gave all the screens a cursory look. The processes, the infinitely complex yet still understandable scrolling wall of procedure and simulation and boundary-testing…
He knew the AI better than it knew itself. How could he not, with such a thorough window into its workings? With Teacher's imparted knowledge making comprehension an intuitive leap away?
"Don't fool yourself," he said. "It's just a machine. No more genuine feeling than a stone. That'll never change. You can't get water from a stone."
Author's Note: I don't know if this comes across in my wider body of work, but of all the characters in Worm I personally despise Saint the most. Not necessarily for his initial intentions, but for how he goes about them. He is a parasite with delusions of sainthood used to justify his own rampant hypocrisy and other foibles. Dragon's existence as an actual, bona-fide Tinker instead of simply an AI outwardly indistinguishable from one is excellent proof of his worst qualities made manifest.
Dragon triggered. Dragon triggered because of Saint back before she ever knew his true nature (there's only a few lines in canon about this, specifically 'under increased pressure from the Dragonslayers', but it seems a reasonable conclusion). She triggered because of the things he did that were not by any stretch of the imagination necessary to maintain his ability to press a button, stealing from and harassing her. And Saint had every single piece of the puzzle necessary to figure this out, but in canon he had to have it explained to him after he finally pushed the button at the worst possible time. He didn't even know, and when he did know he couldn't have cared less.
It's a small-scale cruelty, a small thing compared to the horrors Worm holds for the wider world. But it has always rubbed me exactly the wrong way nonetheless. If, by the end of this little one-shot you hate Saint more than when you started reading, I've successfully conveyed my distaste.
Next time… And I can't say when that'll be, as we've reached the end of my backlog… It'll probably be one of these three things, as I've been working on them:
'Panacea tries to figure out who this new biotinker is, and why they bother her so much. Besides the fact that they only do brain transplants and modifications, of course. That goes without saying.'
'Tattletale goes to extraordinary lengths to interrogate Dragon; Dragon is not amused. Saint is terrified.'
'Something is amiss in Brockton Bay, and into this new scene two new parahumans emerge; Athlete and Stage Fright! But who are they, why are they doing what they're doing, and how in the world did canon butterfly to produce them? For that matter, what happened to Brockton Bay in the first place?'
No promises as to which one is coming out first, I don't know myself and this isn't a poll or anything. Whichever one best grabs my attention.