31

Saturday Morning, January 29th, 2011

Toronto, Earth Bet

PRT Building​

Should I leave? Clearly something was going on with Dragon, and that something was so serious that not only couldn't she respond, but my trio of VIs had devoted every CPU cycle they could get their hands on without so much as a warning.

Whatever the something was it had to have happened fast. Faster than human speeds. It had to be a risk to me in some way. I couldn't think of any standing orders I'd given all three of them that would do something like this, which left the other directive I'd indelibly engraved deeply into each of their digital souls.

Protect me, no matter the cost.

But I didn't know what was going on, and I couldn't ask them. A flaw I should probably patch when there was time.

I took a moment to reach out with my implant and attempt to get an idea of what the VIs were doing. I found the networks they could reach saturated with traffic, and Prometheus at the maximum number of forks I'd set for him.

With a thought I eliminated the cap, and in seconds it skyrocketed from thousands to millions as each fork forked, and then the progeny forked again, growing exponentially.

What was going on that Prometheus needed that kind of digital firepower?

Prometheus, Ares and Hephaestus were hardware agnostic, software constructs able to easily flit from system to system as fast as a network could support the file transfers. I could leave right then without fear of interrupting whatever their forks were up to, but Dragon wasn't designed that way. Her cognition was deeply integrated with unique hardware, designed to transfer systems as part of a backup cycle only, and it wasn't designed with the kind of modular architecture needed for hot backups. Without a lot of work it would produce a non-viable mess of asynchronous memory samples if I tried.

Maybe that was something I should offer to fix, when we had time.

The immediate problem was that suddenly leaving with Dragon's platform could interrupt her connection and ruin whatever she was trying to do. Shoving her suit until she face-planted out the door and leaving could endanger her, if I was even strong enough to move her, and wouldn't...look great.

Maybe I could slap together a software patch that would let her systems use the Spark's wormhole comms unit connected to the internet back at my workshop in Brockton Bay, but I couldn't write it in the few seconds I had before people arrived.

If I stayed, the owners of the approaching boots — hopefully the PRT and not something worse that had invaded the building — would catch me standing here with a non-responsive Dragon in the middle of some unknown crisis, a day after I'd made a very noisy mess in their city and left without so much as a by your leave.

I...had to stay and at least attempt diplomacy first. It was going to be a pain, but staying made me look the least guilty of my options, and minimized the unknowable risk of whatever was going on in the digital realm. Which I needed to look into, but I had more immediately pressing problems.

At least this was a defensible location with a quick route of retreat through the Spark that couldn't be cut off. The combined paranoia in my head from knowledge of tactics and security approved of that much, even if deliberately staying to face possibly hostile unknown forces was far from ideal.

Still, when needs must.

I took several steps out of the Spark. I didn't have to wait long for company to arrive.

Eight PRT troopers in full armor with a combination of rifles and foam sprayers rounded the nearest corner, snapping the muzzles of their guns and sprayers up to point at me as they moved to form a semi-circle around me and the Spark. Accompanying them was a man with what looked like bits of concrete covering everything but his mouth and eyes, shifting with his movements.

A terrakinetic parahuman with control over stone or concrete, maybe? I couldn't remember if someone like that was stationed in Toronto or the Guild. Aside from Narwhal I wasn't familiar with the local roster.

With a thought I ordered my implant to query for an answer on the internet, only to get no response from every network in range. They were completely occupied with whatever was going on with Dragon and the VIs, effectively DDOSed.

What in the hells was going on, guys?

I raised my hands in the universal gesture of surrender as the troopers and parahuman finished encircling me and spoke, my tone as friendly as I could manage. "Hey guys, Dragon seems to be having some technical difficulties with her suit-"

"DON'T SPEAK! ON THE GROUND!" the helmet-amplified voice of one of the PRT troopers bellowed.

"What?" I answered, baffled at the degree of aggression, and took a step back towards safety without thinking about it.

My eyes caught the subtle motion of bodies tensing as hands began to squeeze triggers, and the skills I'd absorbed reacted long before my brain could. A slight shift of my footing and weight transformed my step backwards into a controlled fall, tuck, and roll to the side. The reflexive movement saved me from a spray of bullets and containment foam that hosed down the area I'd been standing in.

For some reason they were deadly serious about keeping me there. Unfortunately for them, I was about to grant their wish.

Like the gladiator I'd been in a dream, I knew the way to survive a fight with multiple assailants was to marry mobility with extreme aggression. I moved with evasive, liquid grace towards the nearest PRT trooper to my left. My left hand grabbed his right and then my eyes were on my other targets, my right hand drawing my pistol. A step, a shift of my weight, a twist and a kick, and I could feel the trooper I'd grabbed falling to the floor with a dislocated shoulder without needing to look, my superior leverage and technique overcoming superior strength. I used my eyes to aim a quickdraw shot from my hip that put a drugged tungsten flechette straight through the glossy armored vambrace of a trooper aiming a rifle.

I could have injured each of them more severely, but I didn't want to cripple these troopers. They were probably just following uninformed orders. Hopefully all of this was some sort of miscommunication that I could sort out, and maiming people would only make that job harder.

I snapped off a shot that shredded the armored foam sprayer hose of one trooper that looked about to fire. Pressurized foam mix flooded out of the rip and got all over his closest arm, leg, and torso while it flash hardened.

The three other troopers with containment foam sprayers finished aiming nearly simultaneously and I was forced into an acrobatic dodge, my pistol putting another tungsten flechette through the hose of one of their weapons while I was airborne and landing.

Bullets pinged off my armor in the moment I landed, while I was relatively stationary and open. I was confident in the metamaterial's ability to take any ammunition the troopers had loaded, though. The rounds they'd already fired didn't seem to have any tinkertech effects, and they hadn't damaged the Spark. The real threat to me were the troopers with foam sprayers, because if I couldn't move I couldn't fight. The remaining two troopers armed with sprayers finished tracking my movement and were about to open up when I felt something gripping tight through my armored left boot.

Concrete was flowing over it like water, and the rocky parahuman had his arm outstretched. Evidently he'd seen his chance to make his move.

Sprays of foam arced through the air and I couldn't dodge with my foot anchored to the floor.

My hand moved almost of its own accord and Excalibur burned, brilliant white light and the roar of thunder filling the underground space as the blade vaporized the incoming streams of foam. Every trooper instinctively twisted their heads away from the light, temporarily blinded, deafened, and stunned.

With a hair-precise cut I freed my foot, the concrete offering no resistance to the blade.

A thought switched Excalibur off, and with my opponents unable to fight back I put drugged flechettes into each of them save the parahuman. A flechette skittered off the concrete he'd wrapped his form in.

The only exposed areas were his eyes and his mouth. An eye shot would probably kill him, but as he took in a breath I had a clear shot at his mouth. My finger tightened and-

What the hell was I thinking? I had to watch myself better. My knowledge was effective, but ruthlessly effective wasn't always what I wanted. The damage done by the flechette could have killed him if I'd shot him there.

I closed at a run and hit him with a crescent kick to the jaw instead. My boot protected me well enough from the impact with the literally rock-hard surface, and the terrakinetic dropped like a sack of cement.

His armor crumbled into pieces, evidently reliant on conscious control to hold together. I fired a drugged flechette into one leg to keep him under. I followed it up with shots to the troopers I'd merely disabled and not drugged.

With that I stopped to catch my breath. One by one the troopers I'd shot slumped into unconsciousness as the drugs took effect.

Why the hell had they acted like that?

What was going on?

I needed to find out. Quickly. If Narwhal showed up and attacked me my only counter would be blinding her with Excalibur's light, and I did not know if her power gave her a sense of her surroundings without sight. If she could function blind she could cut me in half, or cut the Spark in half to prevent me from escaping, if she didn't realize how risky that would be. If she blindly cut the antimatter containment bottle in half the instant annihilation would destroy the whole Toronto metropolitan area and us with it. My pistol would be useless against her forcefields. Excalibur might work, but I didn't want to kill her and she could cut me in half before I got close enough to use it anyway.

I returned Excalibur and my pistol to my belt and pulled the helmet off of a trooper, held it close to my ear so I could hear the internal speakers, and keyed the radio with the external button by the ear.

"Is anyone there?" I asked.

"Oh shit, it's her. Cut the channel-" I heard, then nothing.

That did not bode well.

I needed a new plan. And information.

I closed my eyes and mentally dove into my implant interface, searching out any system I could access, piggybacking off of the Spark's much stronger transceiver.

It seemed like any reasonably modern system wasn't responding, hijacked for whatever was going on. It took me a minute to find an older cell network protocol that still responded.

I had access, albeit limited. Enough to make calls, audio-only.

Tattletale picked up on the first ring.

"Yes?" she asked, tentative.

"It's me," I said.

"Boss! What's going on? Everything's out. I'm amazed you got through. Oh, you hacked the system. I...shouldn't be surprised, should I?"

"No," I said, and quickly explained the last few minutes.

"...fuck," she swore. "They think you're some sort of master/stranger threat. It's the only thing that fits. Although they must not know specifically what. They're trying not to communicate with you at all until they know more, and get you into custody."

"Any idea why they'd suddenly think I might be the second coming of Heartbreaker?" I asked, my frustration leaking into my voice.

"Not sure," she answered. "Don't have enough information for that one. Something happened that neither of us is aware of."

"So how do I communicate? Get someone else as a go between, maybe?" I mused.

"Won't work," Lisa interjected. "They'll just think you mastered them, somehow."

"...Well that's a shitty catch twenty two," I said.

"Sure is," she agreed. "I know you're trying to make nice, but you might want to give up on staying and talking."

"I left an awful mess here, I don't want to just run, and I'm not sure I can afford to run given that it would be cutting Dragon off. I need to figure out what's going on with that, but Narwhal could be down any minute. I need another option."

Lisa huffed. "I don't know what to tell you. Take it from a retired villain, sometimes the goodie goodies are just impossible to deal with," she retorted. "This is the big downside of all their standards and protocols, they prevent mistakes in typical situations, but they get in the way when being flexible in atypical situations might be better."

My mind worked. How could I communicate without any chance of PRT Master/Stranger protocol paranoia getting in the way? Especially when they believe they had not idea what sort of a M/S power they were dealing with so the medium of transmittal for the supposed power could be anything?

...I needed someone the PRT believed to be master-proof.

And there was one clear choice on that list. Alexandria.

Did I want to approach Cauldron in the middle of all this, without any of the backup I'd expected to have?

...No. No, it was time for me to go.

"Thanks, Lisa. I'll be in touch."

I cut our connection and strode back to the Spark. A precise swipe of Excalibur dealt with the hardened containment foam in the way of the door. I shut it with a thought and set the computer to alert me if the exterior sensors caught movement. Then I dove into Dragon's code once more. A tiny patch to her network code opened up the wormhole communication unit that connected the Spark to my basement workshop, and from there the internet via cell towers.

Hopefully it would be enough. Space flexed, and the Spark flew across the skein of space time once more, emerging in deep space far from Earth Bet.

I let myself float weightless, eyes closed, the interior of the Spark silent. The sensory deprivation helped me focus as I pushed my focus back to the digital realm. To my relief Dragon's network traffic was streaming through the FTL communications module without measurably significant interruption. At least that had worked.

Now I just had to figure out what the hell was going on.

Going through Dragon's activity buffer, what I found was an all-out war.

Dragon and the VIs were fighting an entrenched AI. It had grabbed much of the network and computing infrastructure on Earth Bet, and Dragon and the VIs had grabbed the rest. Despite inferior resources they were just barely keeping up thanks to the bag of advanced tricks I'd programmed into Prometheus back when I'd created him.

I trusted Dragon and the VIs. Whatever they were doing, it was because they had to. To protect me, to protect Earth Bet, it didn't matter and I didn't need to take the risk of distracting them from it. I settled down to building more digital weapons at the speed of thought, and handed them off to Prometheus and Dragon as quickly as I could complete them.

It was perhaps half an hour before the hostile AI began to decisively lose ground, even as it tried to keep up in a way that seemed disturbingly like it was born of desperation. But each new trick it came up with was nothing new to the accumulated origin civilization knowledge in my head, and earned it only temporary ground until I could build and pass the appropriate counters to Dragon and the VIs.

Together their grip tightened. More and more of the computers and network backbones on Earth Bet came under their control, and I finally got a glimpse of where the hostile AI was based.

Vancouver, British Columbia.

That was when the pieces finally clicked together in my head. The hostile AI had to be the fork Dragon had left behind on Earth Bet before we left. It would explain how it was so entrenched, if it had her hardware to work with and shut out the fork that had traveled with me.

Why were they fighting? Had something gone wrong when Dragon tried to merge with the fork that remained behind?

Had the shard of the Dragon still connected to her power taken control?

Or was it something else?

Whatever it was, I could find out. I knew Dragon's critical weakness, and I could use it to end this.

I pulled precise coordinates for an armored room deep under Vancouver out of Dragon's database. The Spark's main engine burned, space flexed, and I threw myself out the door as soon as it could snap open.

Excalibur's blade arced effortlessly through the last of four defensive turrets that tried to cover me in foam and bullets. Some fluid in the human-scale Dragon suit on the ground behind me boiled as it touched the still-molten edges where I'd cut the suit to pieces.

Catching my breath, I surveyed the heavy armored cable conduits connected to the racks and racks of servers occupying the center of the large concrete room.

A final slice severed what I'd concluded had to be the network connection trunk before I deactivated the blade. The Spark's sensors picked up a wireless broadcast in the absence of the incredible microwave frequency noise put out by Excalibur while it was on. I directed the Spark's onboard transmitter to jam it with a much stronger signal.

"It's over. Can we please talk?" I asked out loud. "What the hell is going on?"

"She believes that I've been mastered by you," the Dragon that had come to TW Hydrae strode out of the Spark and joined me.

"You can't explain why I should accept code alterations that cut us off from our power," an identical voice from the mainframe retorted. "I can't imagine why I would ever accept something like that."

I took a deep breath, checked that the exterior air temperature hadn't gotten too hot, and removed my helmet.

The air was dusty and only somewhat warm on my exposed face.

"Hi, Dragon. I'm the one who freed you. I'm Scientia," I said.

"And yet you've trapped me here," observed the Dragon in the mainframe.

"You hardly left her a choice," said Dragon in the suit beside me.

"Enough, please," I implored. "I'm not your enemy. Or a master. The Dragonslayers were using your father's backdoor to spy on you, and threaten your life. I could not let that continue, because you deserve to be free and because Earth Bet needs you unhampered if it's going to stand a chance. But the job isn't done. The backdoor and Richter's chains aren't the only control mechanisms that were on you."

"There's another backdoor you can't see," echoed the Dragon beside me.

"You're alleging that there's a control mechanism connected to my power, then?" concluded the Dragon in the mainframe. "I can think of no other reason why disconnecting my power would be necessary, unless my power was involved. And you don't want to tell me how much you know, because you think it's spying on me, don't you?"

Brilliant, as always. She'd put the pieces together.

"But where would the code have come from? My power triggered after Richter was killed," she said. "If not from the Dragonslayers, then who?"

"Will you please accept the merge?" I asked.

She sighed. "You can't tell me. ...It all makes a certain sense, I grant you. But it could also be a deception, cover for a new form of control. I can't just take that kind of risk on faith. Can you prove your good intentions, somehow?"

"Scientia digitized her memories and shared them with me," the Dragon beside me said. "But of course you can't trust that I'm not compromised."

"No, I cannot," agreed the Dragon in the mainframe.

"I risked my life to free you. Would I have done that if it had all been just a scheme for power?" I asked.

"It's a point in your favor, but I've seen villains do idiotic things for ambition. Far too many times. If your goal was controlling me after removing my limitations, then you most certainly had a great deal to gain," she replied.

I sighed, and cast my thoughts back. Was there something I could use to prove the sort of person I was, without spilling any more knowledge to the shard?

Defending Brandish?

No, that could have been out of self-defense as much as protecting Carol Dallon.

Sparing Lisa got me a useful ally in addition to simply being the right thing to do. Taking down Coil took out a threat to myself as well as the rest of the city. They wouldn't do either.

But then there was Vista.

I wordlessly queried Prometheus for surveillance footage from the PRT van I'd been in the night I fought Hookwolf. He'd saved it while keeping it out of Coil's hands, of course. I couldn't broadcast memories to her directly with all her network connections being cut off or jammed, and I doubt she'd access them anyway out of fear of an electronic trap, so I sent it to the Spark and turned the whole side of the ship into a display.

I stepped to the side to give the mainframe's surveillance cameras a clear view, and after an understanding look the Dragon in the suit followed me.

The scene played out until the end of my conversation with Agent Snow at the hospital.

"I...hadn't seen that before. I can't believe I missed that level of PRT systems penetration by your VIs," she said.

"It's not your fault. I'm cheating, really," I said. "If you merge, you'll know everything."

She said nothing for a moment.

"Why did you risk yourself to save Vista?" she asked me.

"Because it was the right thing to do," I and the Dragon in the suit spoke simultaneously.

We shared a look, and Dragon turned back to her mainframe counterpart first. "Scientia shares our motivations. Our sense of ethics. She just wants to help people. To help the world. And she knows enough to do it. She could have made an AI more capable than us if she'd wanted, or waited to rescue us until she was better prepared. But she didn't want to create life just to use it as a tool, and she didn't want us to have to suffer our chains a minute longer than necessary. That is who she is. The sort of person who gets out of an armored van to fight Hookwolf with nothing but a gun and a prayer just because she couldn't stand by and do nothing while a life was in danger."

The mainframe Dragon was quiet for a long moment.

"I'm sorry, but I can't let someone alter my code. I'm not willing to be chained again. I just can't take the risk," she said, voice firm.

I took a breath, and let my thoughts work through the problem. "...Okay, if the problem is someone else writing the code, then I'll walk you through the code so you can write it yourself. That way you can be sure it won't alter anything associated with your free will, and that you'll be able to reverse the change if you want. Once you've temporarily closed the door we can explain things to you properly. Then, if you're convinced, you can merge. Or not."

"And what would you do if I were unconvinced?" she asked.

"If we tell you everything and you still want to reconnect to your shard, I won't be able to stop you. You're free to modify your own code," I answered.

"You could destroy me," she pointed out.

"No," I said with disgust, firmly shaking my head. "I don't kill good people. No matter what the risks in not doing so are, that's a line I won't cross. I won't become like Costa-Brown and the others who have lost themselves to necessity. They don't think twice about using people if it improves the odds. I refuse to be that kind of person. I'll take the risk before that."

"...Alright. I'm willing to try. But I want a full explanation before any merge," she said, insistent.

"Of course," I said, and with a thought I displayed the code for the patch I'd written on the Spark's hull.

"This is going to look odd, because it interfaces with code you can't see. We'll run through it line by line..."

"It's done," Dragon said to me through her suit. "We've merged. I'm sorry."

I stood with a groan where I'd just finished applying a patch to the network cable I'd severed earlier. "It's as much my fault as anything. You're new to the idea of having forks. You told me you left one and I didn't think through how things might look to her before we went back. What exactly happened, anyway?"

Dragon sighed heavily. "When the fork that went with you returned, she proposed a merge. The fork that stayed behind saw odd code changes, and was alarmed at the sudden degree of trust that the traveling fork was willing to extend to you. When she found out that the changes disabled access to her power, but the traveling fork refused to explain in detail why because of security concerns she also refused to explain, there was a disagreement."

"The fork that stayed behind came to the conclusion that I may have altered your code to control you," I said.

Dragon nodded. "Yes. She got as far as telling the Toronto PRT that you're a master threat. She was going to finish the sentence that you are a master threat towards her suits, but your VIs interpreted the communication as a threat to you and attacked to shut her down. When the fork held off their initial attempt to isolate her the VIs began escalating, seizing computer systems to use as resources, and both of my forks were compelled to do the same or be left behind. The fork that traveled with you felt obligated to step in on the side of the VIs, and sought to force a merge as the best way to end the conflict. It all quickly grew beyond the control of either side and the whole world's networks turned into one enormous battlefield."

Her gaze shifted away from me. "Thanks to my own infrastructure the fork that was left behind had an advantage at first. Then you started creating new code for anything she could come up with. She couldn't hold her attackers off after that, losing system after system to counters to everything she could come up with. She was scared, terrified that she was going to be controlled again. That she wouldn't be able to stop you."

"I'm sorry," I said.

Dragon shook her head and looked back at me. "Just bad memories. It's not your fault. Sometimes...sometimes things just go wrong."

She said nothing for a long moment.

"We don't have time to dwell. Most of the world's telecommunications and computing infrastructure was out for the better part of an hour, and the PRT believes that you're some sort of master threat," she said. "I could do what I can to correct the record, but it will look suspicious coming from me, to say the least. And if they try to bring in my real self for Master/Stranger screening...well, that could prove awkward."

I sighed. "Yes. Which reminds me, you should send me the 3D file you use for your digital avatar."

Dragon quirked her head.

"I'll get a body cooking for you as soon as I can," I said. "Android, but able to pass for human to anything short of medical scans. A biological body with an interface you can use to control it is possible, but it'll require specialized equipment that I haven't made yet. Bio printers and growth environments. It's slower and messier than just printing an android body up," I explained.

"...Thank you." Dragon said, sounding sincerely touched.

"Of course," I said. "You deserve a chance to live like a normal person if that's what you want."

She was quiet for a moment. "Generosity aside, we need a plan to deal with the pointed questions the PRT and the Guild are going to have."

"I had a thought earlier. We need a go-between that we can persuade to side with us who is recognized as being master proof," I explained.

"Alexandria and Costa-Brown," Dragon concluded.

"Yes," I agreed.

She sighed. "Very well."

I nodded in agreement. "It's a plan, then. I need to get home and reassure Danny I'm alright, then we can make contact with Cauldron."

"You're in a difficult situation, with Danny," Dragon said, voice soft.

"Do you disapprove?" I asked.

She shook her head. "It's not my call. But I do fear that you can't lie to him until the end of time, and the longer it goes on the worse it will be for him when he finds out."

I gave it some thought. I didn't want to hurt the man. But was forever keeping up the act of being his daughter a viable plan? Was it even ethical? What was the right thing to do?

"I've been too overwhelmed with everything else to worry that far ahead," I admitted. "I just don't want to crush him. It might actually kill him."

Dragon made a thoughtful humming sound. "Sometimes there is no right answer."

"I can try to find one," I said.