Damn I love this story. And the hilarious (and often insightful) comments that ensue.
Even with the most efficient computing technology currently available, however, Decimator couldn't see how the network for one ID would avoid covering the entirety of a significant landmass at a height which would stress conventional materials.
Giggle. No, that sounds about right...
I'm awaiting the "poink" sound effect that accompanies a disturbing realization any time now.
It was simply unfeasible, and that meant he was missing something vital. He regretted prioritizing misinformation over simply keeping the alien nearby to answer his many, many questions.
...data?
"Holy shit. She actually documented everything."
In some ways, this is probably more of a problem than if she had left it out. There's only so many times you can wonder what an occipital heterodyne wrench is before you transfer into a field that is less stressful.
"Wait, that link cannot possibly be authorized—" "Is this a link to Symbie?" "Wonderful, a sim download size measured in petabytes."
Nah, that's just the metadata. Although making a link that's itself impossible is a nice touch.
"Apparently we have an outbound loopback connection on Localhost..."
"Huh, it seems that mauve has the most RAM."
"
Seriously?"
"No, look..."
"Wait... but the
source IP address is... Pure-Chan's ID divided by...
is that a solution for pi?!"
"Dang black boxes. It perfectly represents pi, but we
still don't know what the actual value is!"
"I'm still trying to figure out how a message is being sent on bandwidth
we don't physically have from a
foreign connection originating from and going to the same
local port. Call medical if I start frothing."
"Now I feel like I slept through the fucking rapture."
Maybe this will convince them to "upgrade" themselves a bit more. Who needs sleep?
It didn't seem to match the normal channels used by shards, but it was well outside the wavelengths humans used for their own communication. Perhaps their Symbiotic Support Frames had taken an interest?
Oh craaaap...
I still haven't read the full text of BAHHSCQ, but something tells me that either no one believes that the Cores are sentient, or there's a coverup. With that said, it has to be a worrying sign if they're actively interested in something enough to possibly blow that cover. What I'm not sure about is whether it's worrying because they're about to realize that they're hosting alien intelligences, or because they're about to get "reassigned" if they learn that fact.
"Audio file from Symbie. It's just echoed purring." "Okay, adorable, but seriously how—" "Strange colors~" "I took a fucking snapshot and it's still moving—"
Wait, is that
Symbie purring?
That bit with the picture reminds me of TV's little fractional-dimensional decoration that they gave to Danny at that one birthday party...
Has anyone been able to speak with Symbie? I'm confused.
Welcome to the club.
Something tells me that if this ever changes, they'll be
more confused.
Her volley only cleaned off a small stretch of floor before silver eyes opened along the lengths of tentacles all over the room. A moment later, those eyes swiveled to look at her and began to glow red. The two Valkyries ducked back into the previous room and behind the door before a barrage of laser fire could drain their impeller fields.
Don't tell Ozpin about this. Heck, I'd give it a fair chance that due to Murphy, they actually WOULD be connected somehow to the silver-eyed warriors.
"Oh, good," Emily sighed. "I was worried for a bit."
"You're happy they can fire back?"
"You clearly don't consume the same media I do."
Still not
quite a guarantee of safety. I wonder if Taylor is meanwhile trying to figure out what she did wrong if whatever the hell that was is reassuring?
Also, I suspect that most people don't consume that sort of media. We just make jokes about it.
Simplified sim still the size of petabytes, haha. For reference, the initial draft for the Wave Force equation only took 9.3 TB, and processing it still made Anna collapse. (EDIT: That's only the size of the central equation though; actually running the equation, plus the deep-network dive and extrapolative models at the same time likely strained Anna by several orders of magnitude more than a few measly TBs.)
That's an interesting and worrying point to make...
So, basically, shards attach their photo to each message, so other shards can look at them, compare with the ID and see whether the speaker is or isn't who they claim to be. Although, considering the ID's ever-changing nature, it may be closer to a live feed.
Snerk! That sounds EXACTLY like them. Gloriously overcomplicated systems, all to implement something stupidly trivial in a way that it actually works perfectly.
Then again, we're using biometrics as authentication...
Poor Decimator, that is not how Shards roll bro.
They give guns to everyone.
I wonder if she can stop the war simply by a combination of MAD and making everyone involved too confused to bother anymore?
"Actually, they are more like crossbows…"
Perfect callback. Love it!
"In our experience, children are the best people to give heavy weaponry to; they always do something interesting with it." - Shards
The worrying part is that this is starting to make sense, if I look at it in just the right way...
Shards pretty much view conflict like a fireworks display. They don't care who comes out on top, if it went to plan or if it all got set off by accident, they just want care that it produces interesting explosions.
Data!
There's a good chance that UNOMI may in fact be aware of Decimator's anomalous behaviour here, and they're bound to dedicate no small degree of consideration towards it. Decimator stayed in close proximity to Cadet Hebert for an extended period of time and never did the expected in summarily killing the crap out of her, and now Decimator is just sitting there almost idly and spamming missiles very erratically, to no real effect beyond being about as useful as shouting at everything to stay away. Coupled with the weird new Valkyrie appearing to basically be a cyberwarfare god, that looks... interesting.
"Well, that's just great. They're
both broken. That's just
wonderful."
"And we can't even get any straight answers out of her about what happened out there."
"You don't suppose..."
"Did she have some sort of ability that would let her disable the Antagonist at the cost of her
own sanity?"
"Oh my. That's a horrible sacrifice for her to make..."
"I know, right? If we had access to her
before this happened, we could have taught others to use it too! But now it's too late; she's clearly cracked."
Anna shocked onlookers at one point in canon by just expressing her entire inventory of missiles directly instead of taking the far longer time to load small, individual volleys from their launchers, and simply coping with the difficulties of directing the massed bevvy of missiles all launched simultaneously. For QA, that may prove to be her standard tactic. QA has little issue with storage capacity and already has loads of missiles, in addition to easy means of manufacturing her own, and she wouldn't have any trouble at all coordinating them. I expect that she'll employ Friends as well, certainly, but missiles are essentially just cheap, expendable drones, honestly.
I love this plan. Given that this is in the start of canon, or what there was of it, there's a good chance that Anna may not be the first or only one to do this in the sims for that matter.
I'd love to see them both do this at once. Cue "there's two of them" groaning...
I really want to see the sort of murderswarm she unleashes on some unsuspecting soul. It'll probably inspire both existential terror and a billion-dollar research spree.
The scary part is that QA is good enough to actually use it repeatedly, whereas Anna wrote it off after the first try or two.
Yeah... therapists. QA really, really comes across as needing a therapist immediately. When Liz and Emily get back with their findings, the reports are probably going to have people pouring over every scrap of footage over QA's behaviour, and this looks alarmingly as though it might have associations with the practice of observers in the bunker arming participants and having to kill their chosen participant if the weapon is deemed too dangerous. QA seems as though she may indeed have some very serious issues forming attachments with her peers out of fears of helping them too much having disastrous consequences.
I never even looked at it that way. The funny part is that it's not even entirely wrong, in either prior or current experience!
She isn't even really a fake, per se, so much as heavily altered. QA got the design from Decimator, and really did make an actual Valkyrie Core... except a Friend edit of one, and with patches made where Decimator's design wasn't actually complete.
Oh good. She can creep out the Cores at the same time now. I wonder what a traumatised/insane Core sounds like, and how well Symbie will accidentally press
all those buttons?
Due to that broad usefulness, I could very much see QA following suit; she already has a prior instance of "confining herself" to a combat tentacle with a weak laser-eye, so the tentacles encountered by Liz and Emily are probably outright likely to make a reappearance—or at least something very similar—but the fact remains that Anna had loads of lasers first. Despite it being a matter of convergent development, I think a lot of people are going to look at QA and think her emulating her obvious crush.
This is just beautiful. Note also the earlier posts about the same thing with the missile spam...
There are sure to be more amusing misunderstandings.
"
Mooom, she's flirting again!"
That said, Anna goes for raw power. QA goes for quantity. I suspect that it may also be overlooked... at least until they get an idea of just what that quantity
is.
Oh, you know what QA's Emotional Support Organisms (ESOs?) look similar to? An integrated component of a Valkyrie Frame, complete with an ability to rebuild/repair. So from the CC's point of view, she is running multiple AIs on a part of her Frame and just giving them away left and right, implying that the cost to her is negligible.
*spittakes*
That alone is going to draw
all the attention. Also something I never considered.
There will soon be shouts of "Impossible" and "Bullshit" from more than the crafting club. At least Anna's cannons are theoretically comprehensible...
Yes, as my wife told me when I read this aloud because it made me laugh, it's called anti-stalking and is still considered stalking.
...seriously? That's a thing?
I think the UN is going to be scrambling to throw her at the Ginnungagap Project. She seems very likely to be a cultist survivor dual-classing as a number crunch witch for doom cannons and an e-war god, which isn't actually far from the truth.
"We are Queen. Prepare to be Administrated."
They're not wrong. I'm just not sure of the wisdom of exposing her to their top research projects. Or top research
ers...
More likely:
"Yoink."
"And FYI, String Theory's was better.
Byeeeeeeeeee."
*comes back two days later with an even better cannon that makes even
less sense. And may actually contradict several physical laws.*
Also, still shots of her super-code aren't actually still. At this rate, pure witchcraft really is starting to look the less impossible answer.
Well, we are apparently dealing with enough dimensions that even a physical recording of it in a mere three dimensions
still contains enough subsets that it keeps moving...
And her ID is somehow self-aware enough that if it detects something interacting with it
even as data it can manifest physical effects and assimilate people...
Is there really a difference? That last part especially sounds something like the Law of Contagion...
I'm actually starting to get worried that eventually one of the Crafting Club will memorize the code, then realize their memory of it keeps changing.
"That which holds the image of an angel becomes itself an angel." That honestly seems a legitimate possibility. That, or the memory might just be conspicuously blank or something, maybe not something like the forced forgetfulness commonly enforced with Aisha's shard, but possibly none the less inaccessible for trying to run shard code on hardware not up to the task. Of course, it also might get corrupted or adapt and compensate to make the brain of the unfortunate individual more in line with shard design, so... Oops?
Please let this be a thing. It perfectly suits eldritch space creatures, and bodes well for her eventual AdMech cult *prays to Her Lordship in binary* and what may end up be her own new solution to the Question.
After all, converting other people ex nihilo into more Shards with new viewpoints is either the answer or a good way to get there.
Even on its own it would be hilarious if she were apparently memetically contagious.
Also, am I the only one who's excited for the potential dumpster fire/trainwreck/explosion that is Symbie communicating with the other Valk Cores?
No, you are most emphatically not. I'm cackling with mad glee as to what sort of weirdness they'll soon be exposed to.
With her weird organic Frame design it begs a conclusion that she hooked up more of brain to herself to bypass the above limitation. Which would also nicely explain her weird behaviour, because messing with her own mind made her insane.
Again, it's all true, if seen from the right angle. Admittedly, Anna's the one closer to having
actually done that in the way they
think it happened, but yeah...
No wonder that QA appreciates her ("platonically, I swear!") so much.
