Huge thanks to
@Spectrum
For putting up with my shit and helping me fix this damn snippet.
Bay of Blue Steel:
Systems Start: 2.01
(Worm/AoBS/AU)
AN: Well I'm back. Finally. Life is hectic as hell and my health has been crappy to say nothing of my computer deciding to act up recently. Nevertheless I have successfully completed the next snippet and I hope you all enjoy it.
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Taylor spent three days in a coma, during which time I hammered out more details about how to handle the situation with Daniel Hebert, all of which were still contingent on Taylor's acceptance. That turned out to be both easier and harder than I had expected it to be to get. Harder because I had to wait for her to wake up, something that just irked me to no end
As I read no longer needed to micromanage the reproduction of my nanomaterial at the Ship Graveyard, I was now aware something that I hadn't noticed in my first few days in Brockton Bay aside from the brief moment when I had woken up. This new, or at least newly noticed, feeling was panic. I was panicking, of that I was certain even when my automated systems kicked in and reduced the level of my emotions to barely five percent. I hadn't panicked at first, or at least hadn't noticed it beyond when I had first seen Armsmaster at the PRT building, but now as I sat by Taylor's bedside, I was left with little more than my thoughts and the internet, and while the internet was often an excellent distraction with the sheer amount of processing power I had a available, all the local access points would bog down and crash from my traffic before I could even occupy a twentieth of my Union Core.
That freedom left me time to think and subsequently process and realize just how completely fucked my situation was. I had been born a human, grown up, had friends, had family, and gone to school like normal people. And then...and then some cosmic force or entity had swept in and taken me away from that life, erasing extremely specific portions of all my memories as it did so. From there I had been dumped into the Union Core belonging to one of the Fleet of Fog's first two originally designed ships where I had spent three years apparently fighting and...and killing. I had killed both other Fog vessels and humans that had fought alongside them, all of whom followed Musashi. The knowledge that I had killed other people before had left a sensation of shame and disgust in me that my core had approximated into the sensation of a cold weight in my stomach.
But there was a disconnect.
That knowledge, the recordings, the memories; all of it was separated and disconnected from who I was now. Intrinsically I knew it was me doing those frankly terrifying things in my memories, but there was a block or something that was keeping me from really internalizing that information and feeling the emotion that I thought I should be experiencing now that I knew more about my past, namely guilt. It wasn't there though, and that in and of itself was terrifying to me and only added to my panic.
What was it characters were always told when they ever asked if it got easier to kill another person? They were always told that if it did then it meant that they were becoming an uncaring monster. And that was me. I felt pity that those ships and people had to die simply because they were on the other side of a war, but there wasn't a shred of regret or guilt that I had done it. And I knew I could do it again. That conclusion unintentionally lead me to one of the advantages of being a cybernetic being, this being that navel gazing suddenly became much easier as you could go back and simply look through your emotions and memories like facts in a book. From the three days of it that I had been doing as I waited for Taylor to wake up, I had arrived at the conclusion that yes, I could kill again. If someone was in my way, I could and possibly would cut them down without a second thought and without emotion.
And that was what frightened me. My combat protocols...how would they react under stress? I hadn't fought anyone here yet so I wasn't even sure if I would get to factor my emotions into such acts. Would I just kill them if some equation in my code decided that if the person's value was less than what they were obstructing? I didn't know and quite frankly I didn't want to either, and that was the root source of my panic. I wasn't feeling what I thought I should feel. I had real, human emotions all being run by a computer core, and if I understood one thing it was that emotions were not logical and would surely clash with my logic based core. Instead, everything would be like an icy rage, my emotions, all of them, would choose the direction or intention behind my actions, but they would never directly influence them and make me do things spontaneously. With that limitation, I couldn't even panic properly. Instead my subroutines would kick in whenever any of my emotions were reaching a point where they could influence my actions and they would suppress the degree to which I could feel and be aware of them. That suppression left me furious, so furious that it was my anger, not my panic that had forced my emotions to be limited to just five percent where upon my logical mind would reassert itself and act from the knowledge that I was angry rather than because I was angry.
I honestly didn't know too much about Dragon's fetters but I couldn't help the tinge envy I had of her ability to feel and subsequently act with those feelings.
All in all this saw me behaving in a rather surly manner with the hospital staff, or at least as surly as someone only capable of feeling five percent of their emotions was capable of being. Nothing was there to alleviate my emotions at the time, despite the company I had in the form of Taylor's father.
I had almost constantly kept her company for the bulk of these three days, forming a rapport with Daniel -'call me Danny'- Hebert as we spoke and planned things out when he was available to visit his daughter. He seemed grateful for my presence though, as it provided him with the opportunity to go back and manage his work, at least mildly assured that his daughter was well looked after while he worked.
It was on that third day when Taylor woke up, screaming in terror and thrashing in her hospital bed before nurses rushed in and sedated her while I held her down until she was finally asleep again. It was...humanizing I suppose, to see that happen to her. My electronic nature provided me with a perfect recollection of how things had happened to her in the story, but reading it and experiencing were still very different things. It drove home how it was always the members of the Fog that had had first hand contact with humans that became the strongest, their 'instincts' better than anyone else's. Even when they watched the records of the battles, other Fog vessels just...didn't get it. There was emotion that changed us at a base level when we interacted with humans, and my sisters just couldn't come away with that when they had only seen and taken in the records of fights. None of that had helped calm me down though, so I was left back with my own thoughts again with which I decided to at least attempt some measure of productivity.
It was that effort and those thoughts that had brought me to my current issue as I waited for Taylor to next wake up again. That being the task of acquiring wealth for myself, a task that turned out to be so easy it was almost disgusting. While I had exactly zero knowledge on hacking -after all, I had decided to major in Chemistry and Physics in my previous life if my memories held any truth to them- besides the little that I read about social engineering in the Aaron Barr scandal, I at least knew where to acquire more information. A quick trawl of the internet helped to partially clarify my knowledge, that there were certainly sections that contradicted each other and which shouted down other methods wasn't an issue. I didn't need to be perfect, I just needed a basic understanding to help guide me along to avoid as many stupid mistakes as possible.
The actual legwork would be done by the cyber warfare suite that came part and parcel with being a Fog warship. All Fog vessels carried such systems I noted, but they became vastly more complicated and powerful the higher up the Fog food chain one went. Of particular interest -besides the routines designed to tear apart secure networks and sabotage operating systems- was that there was already a large number of routines design to do exactly what I needed, my surprise at finding such actually made me pause mentally for a full half second before I thought it over.
Paying more attention to it, the existence of such programs made sense. After all, Haruna, Kirishima, Takao, the I-400 sisters, Zuikaku and who knows all else had infiltrated the human cities often enough that the need for currency was likely a sure bet. That I had the actual programs and not just knowledge of their existence meant that someone -likely the Admiralty Code- had been looking out for me enough to ensure that I was properly equipped for my current duties.
At least on the electronic front, if I ignored the tiny amount of nanomaterial I had been provided with at the beginning.
Letting one of my mental threads continue to watch the boot up of the cyber warfare suite, poking, prodding, and examining how the code was assembled and structured, the rest of my attention turned to who I could target.
The heroes were all right off the list, as were the rogues, fortunately that still left several thousand targets available as I spread my search wider and wider across the world. Gesellschaft was an immediate target along with the entire hierarchy of the organization as were several other racist groups. Individual villains were also selected. I cherry picked members of both the ABB and E88 to be targets as well as hundreds of others around the world, steering well clear of some villains such as Blasto and Accord out in Boston or Coil and Kaiser closer to home, no need to directly target them and draw the direct ire of their organizations. I wanted to get Coil right now, because fuck Coil. It would certainly be interesting to see how he handled not being able to pay any of his mercenaries. Sadly he would have to wait, I had an idea on how to deal with the Travelers, but that would require a fair amount of preparation before I could gut Coil's organization. The Undersiders were a group that I might try to work with, however that would require additional work and future planning so for now they were off the table by extension. Most importantly I needed to avoid drawing the Numberman's and subsequently Cauldron's attention until I was certain I could weather any offensive they might launch on me.
Once I was satisfied with my list of targets, ensuring that I hadn't focused too much on -or ignored- any one geographical location or villain hotspot, I double and triple checked the status of my cyber warfare suite -satisfied that it would get the job done and leave no evidence of what was done besides the theft- before I activated my various programs and watched in attentive fascination as they began to work.
It would most certainly be boring from an outsider's point of view -and even from mine if I was observing every minute of the programs- but to me there was an instinctive thrill of success as I watched the almost...elegant way that my Fog intrusion programs churned their way through layers upon layers of code at a rate that would have left any tinker green with envy. The excitement lasted all of about a second before I realized that this was fucking boring. From what I had learned learned on the internet, the easiest way to get access to the accounts of my targets was to compromise this client side rather than going and trying to make my way through the banks' systems. From each quietly infiltrated client, I could eventually map out a list of my target's associates and business partners, whom I would then compromise before subsequently repeating the process. I would eventually be required to likely intercept and perform several identity confirmation tests once I did begin the transfers since unless the people in question regularly made transfers on the order of several hundred thousand dollars there was no way the banks would let them occur without question. That meant gathering even more data so that I could accurately answer whatever questions the banks needed for confirmation. This data mining would also help me find out who was on whose payroll and identify the structures of various criminal groups, and this was to say nothing of how it would help me find those involved with the Numberman and Cauldron. All in all it was far more work than I had ever expected would be necessary to simply steal money from villains, but it was also an intelligence gold mine for identifying who my enemies were and would be.
Above all that work and all those rewards though, it was fucking boring.
If every computer in the world had been even vaguely on par with my core, I would have been done in a matter of minutes if not faster. Instead I was bottlenecked by the technically inferior computers on the other end of my digital offensive. Even if I had been planning on taking my time stealing from various accounts, the bottleneck I was working through meant that my information gathering and subsequent attacks were going to take weeks rather than just days.
That meant I needed a new source of immediate cash, which in turn meant showing myself in some way to the general population. That made me grimace in distaste at being exposed, but if I did it right perhaps I could turn that to my advantage. That said nothing of the opportunity to beat the ever loving shit out of a bunch of skinheads, druggies, and gang members. Suddenly the idea of others knowing I was a cape didn't feel like such bad thing.
'I think I'll make the Merchants my first target.' I thought with a grin of satisfaction at the idea, my enjoyment taking a place beside my anger in my head as I schooled my features back to their usual, neutral state and let my mind wander elsewhere.
As that curious mix of satisfaction and frustration simmered in the back of my mind, I pulled myself back to the here and the now as my sensors picked up an increase in Taylor's heart rate and subsequently blared a mental alarm to get my attention moments before the girl in question stirred slightly and opened her eyes, a soft rasp coming from her throat as she tried to speak.
Setting aside my suppressed emotions as much as I was able, I gently set a hand on her shoulder as I stood from my seat and spoke. "Don't try and speak for the moment, I'll get you some water. Try not to panic Taylor, you're safe now." I said calmly, moving from her side to get her a glass of water with a straw once I received a tiny nod of acknowledgment that she underst
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AN: So that's a thing and dear lord am I sorry this snippet took so long. It certainly didn't help that I am still not satisfied with how this chapter turned out despite three separate rewrites. In the end I chose to simply use this section to give a bit of exposition on Challenger's mental state and just why she's taking things so well. Regardless I'll try and get some more chapters out soon enough.
Hope no one is too annoyed with that.
Anyways, ciao~!
