- Pronouns
- Yes
Granted, and I try.
- Location
- Georgia
IIRC, it's one line in one of the interludes, but that they are galaxy sized and only stable by manipulating reality is canon. When I first read that, I was automatically assuming that he was making the common mistake of using 'galaxy' when he meant 'solar system', so you may have done the same. That they had access to 10^81 versions of Earth came later, from a WoG, but 'more realities than there are atoms in the galaxy' was used in Worm itself.
He had a number of rather extreme misconceptions present in his story. I can usually ignore that so long as the story is consistent in how it applies those laws. Worm wasn't.
- Pronouns
- Yes
The word "galaxy" does not seem to appear in Worm in that context at all. Is this another Ward retcon?
No, it's there are more realities than there are atoms in any specific reality, but has nothing to do with the size of the entities.
unfortunately true.
- Location
- Georgia
Getting wrapped up in pedantry, use of excessive verbiage, and compulsive overexplaining haunt my own posts. finding the line is hard. Not crossing it is sometimes harder.
- Location
- Deep in the Badlands of Equestria
Hey, RED is a thing, even if not quite the sort of movie-level thing we saw on the silver screen.
- Location
- Georgia
Cohen the Barbarian, Terry Pratchetts take on Conan, and his Silver Horde(six of them) were fighting an entire nation's army, and wondered whether he had miscalculated, because it would take them weeks to kill off the entire army. Surviving to retirement age in a profession that has an average life expectancy measured in weeks means you are one dangerous mo-fo
Never underestimate the old. Some of them got to be old by being dangerous AF.
- Location
- Somewhere, Maybe
Cohen the Barbarian, Terry Pratchetts take on Conan, and his Silver Horde(six of them) were fighting an entire nation's army, and wondered whether he had miscalculated, because it would take them weeks to kill off the entire army. Surviving to retirement age in a profession that has an average life expectancy measured in weeks means you are one dangerous mo-fo
Never underestimate the old. Some of them got to be old by being dangerous AF.
"Never trust an old man, in a profession where most die young."
- Location
- Earth, Sol System, Virgo Supercluster, Earth-1218
So you're saying they're the solution to Fermi's Paradox? The Great Wolf that eats everything advanced enough to send out / receive radio signals?
Well that's a terrifying thought.
- Location
- Ekaterinburg, Russia
Hmmm. Gets restless if doesn't see enough new people for too long a period of time, you say??
I can imagine that Ciara will pick up people watching habits - go a nature (or amusement) park, pick a nice observation spot, and watch life (and many new people) go by.
Isnt my realname
This isn't my real name.
- Location
- Not Here
There are plenty of places that are pretty much defined by having a constant flow of visitors, different all the time. Amusement parks certainly count, as do casinos, museums, and rest stops on most highways. It shouldn't be difficult for her to meet her requirements, no. Maybe slightly more difficult if she has to see new parahumans as opposed to new people but probably not by a lot.I can imagine that Ciara will pick up people watching habits - go a nature (or amusement) park, pick a nice observation spot, and watch life (and many new people) go by.
Chapter 284
Tuesday morning started with another trip to the gym, followed by deciding which city to visit as the movie theater apparently wasn't going to be opening for the rest of the week. The damage had been just enough to require a safety inspection before they could reopen, even if the owner was happy with the state of things after power was restored. Needing an inspection wouldn't normally be that big of a deal, but apparently all of the city's relevant inspectors were unavailable for the week. Vacation, maternity leave, and bereavement leave were cited by someone else in city hall.
It turned out that there was a beacon in Atlanta, that hadn't been there when they'd previously looked at the list of available beacons. There were several other new ones as well, but they opted for the one in Atlanta in part because it was labeled specifically as being in a parking garage with access to local transportation. As such, there were no concerns about warning anyone that it was being used. A quick check of it also showed that there were vehicle and pedestrian access points included.
Checking times for theaters in the area hadn't taken long, and they decided on an afternoon showing. They'd head to their own homes for the morning, then meet up after lunch to actually see the film. Included was a general plan to put on more suitable clothing for the weather, which was markedly warmer than Brockton Bay was experiencing.
Helvetia stepped through the transit portal after another very annoying session with a host. They'd had things as the basis of their profile that weren't allowed and hadn't wanted to discuss options until the threat of being disconnected permanently had been dropped. Or, more specifically, the threat of 'if you keep arguing, I will disconnect you and leave you without any powers whatsoever, because this has already taken too much of my time' coupled with opening a transit portal.
She wished that she could've gone through with her desire for an unsafe disconnection, but she was under orders to avoid those with human hosts.
Still, she had the concessions and could reconfigure this shard. That didn't take long, and because only the one connection remained she was able to add it to the generic deployment queue and move on. The next dozen shards had no important connections, just a couple of non-human animals and a single flower. Though she made note of the profile on the latter, because the subtle nature of the effect that kept anyone from picking it looked interesting.
Admittedly, someone had picked it recently, but it had survived for quite a while before the effect had been turned off. They were likely to be very disappointed that the flower was now very much dead, but whatever.
The next shard with a host connection to a human was luckily another single host connection situation. Though this one was one of a pair of problems, the other one being on the next layer down. A quick look over her shoulder at the previous row she'd been working along showed that the other shard involved was already uncovered from the deployment shards working behind her, so she decided to work on these two together. Checking both shards showed her that the two hosts were reasonably close together, so she opened a new transit portal to head to see them.
She found herself on a tropical island. One of the two she was here to see was still laid up in the out of place hospital bed, but the other was working on turning saltwater into freshwater through boiling and having the steam condense and drip off to the side. A selection of fruits that were just barely fit for human consumption had been piled off to the side, and several others had been notably discarded. If she was correct, those ones would have caused them to be ill when eaten.
"Hello you two," she greeted, causing the one working with water to stiffen. The other one didn't respond at all, and she frowned at that and brought up a scanning configuration. That had her flinching and bringing up a healing configuration. "Okay, right, give me a moment."
Fetching the original host configurations to use as a base was only partially useful, given how long they'd been connected, but it was enough to enact some repairs. Restoring organs to their original functionality was actually fairly simple, but tweaking things to restore some of their ability to understand their senses was more difficult. Ensuring that they could speak so that she didn't have to run a mental scanning configuration was actually the hardest part. Compared to all of that, fixing the problems from their recent diet or lack thereof and a few other minor injuries was trivial.
Creating a table, chairs, glasses, and a pitcher of water with ice cubes in it was trivial after that, though to avoid issues with the temporary creation configuration she needed to use a different one to pull water directly out of the surroundings. Helping both of them into chairs made her realize just how much trouble just surviving had likely been for the two, especially since one of them had been forced into a coma. Interestingly, the apparent trust from the one that had been in a coma made the other one relax quite a bit.
"Now then," she said once they'd both been seated. "Do either of you even remember your names instead of the stupid designations you were given?"
The two looked at each other, and the one that had been active sighed. "Scott Davis."
"Okay." She turned to the other one. "And you?"
"Scott Davis," he answered.
That caused her to blink. "Did I screw up making sure that you'd be able to understand me?"
"We went by Clairvoyant and Doormaker because we had identical names and that made it less confusing."
Helvetia blinked at that. "I'm under the impression that Taylor and Amy called the two of you 'Scotty'. Did they know your names?"
"Oh no," 'Doormaker' answered. "That's a television show reference that we found to be amusing, doubly so because she didn't know our names. Pity she never really got to use it in public, but she never really used us to the degree the others did."
"I'm thinking that you're one of my old 'blind spots' though," 'Clairvoyant' added. "And given other things that happened over the past few months, coupled with what you've been up to, you're probably what Taylor would call a Boojum. Either that or David has a much larger family than I thought he did."
That had her blinking again. "How did you come to that conclusion?"
"When everything shut down things eventually kind of inverted on me, at least until you did whatever it is you just did to heal me. All of a sudden I went from being able to focus on a couple dozen things across various Earths, with specific exceptions, to only being able to see twenty different points. I've essentially been watching you and the others work as a result of that."
Frowning, she remotely checked on his shard, and found that there was more activity than there should've been. Specifically, the data feeds from the troubleshooter monitoring system were active and bleeding over to the host connection. Those feeds were supposed to be part of the redaction system, but that wasn't running while the shard was essentially shut down. Grumbling a little, she quickly filed a report on that oversight and sent it off to Coordinator.
"Right," she said when that was done. "So, that's not going to be continuing. Still, you two both have partners letting you do things that are, frankly, not normally put into the hands of hosts at all. To continue with things I'm going to need to seriously reconfigure how your partners are configured, assuming that you want to keep your powers at all."
"I think we have to," Doormaker admitted. "There are a number of places that just don't have the ability to maintain themselves in the long term that we were the primary supply route for."
"There are options there, but I can see your point. Still, nearly unrestricted monitoring output isn't going to be happening, and transit portals generally get incredibly restricted for a number of very good reasons. I'm honestly amazed that a packed-up partner was able to function doing that without causing major issues."
"Er, I might've had to learn what not to do early on. Cut a number of things to ribbons with portals that weren't properly flat, caused a few explosions for reasons that I still don't understand, and Clairvoyant here refused to show me the Earth that I didn't properly anchor the portals on..."
"I didn't refuse," Clairvoyant interjected. "I couldn't find it after we woke up from the backlash."
"Fun," Helvetia said. "So the various safeties weren't set to automatic either. Good to know, I'll need to correct that. Though that might be a side effect of still being packed-up. Regardless, there are other concerns as well. Obviously, without the monitoring output the targeting of whatever I leave you able to use for transit portals is going to be difficult." Both of them nodded. "Now, normally host-controlled transit portals get created through building technology or through the side effects of various interactions. Things that require some effort to figure out or elements at either end for targeting purposes. But I've checked already, and we don't have a problem with what you were doing, just that it was being done with two unrestricted abilities."
"What does that mean?" Doormaker asked.
"It means that I need to find something that works but isn't unrestricted. Oh, and that doesn't require burning out your eyeballs and eardrums. I'm thinking something like a triggered output from the monitoring system coupled with a few 'dedicated' target points? Likely something like a specific structure existing that you can drop a transit portal endpoint into place in. Fixed rules that ensure that you literally can't monitor things large-scale, just get enough information for targeting."
"That sounds incredibly restrictive."
"That's the idea, yes. What you two had before was far too open under the rules that are supposed to be in place because you were working with partners that weren't intended to be used by hosts at all. Of course, when I'm done you'll also need to sleep, meaning that you won't be functioning all the time, and the whole 'sharing monitoring output with others' trick will be disabled too."
"Okay...how would I know when and where portals are needed if I can't see what he sees?"
Clairvoyant nodded. "That seems like a critical part of the whole thing."
Helvetia shrugged. "I've had time to consider this, since we knew it was coming. The monitoring output is a required component of this kind of transit portal creation, so my plan is to drop both of your partners next to one another and combine them, then set you up with a shared profile like Taylor and Amy have. Combining two partners into one will be a breeze after combining their four, and you don't even have storage spaces to worry about. You wouldn't have full communication with one another, admittedly, but as I understand it you never did."
"Huh."
"Of course, one thing I hadn't decided on was what the fixed target structures should look like, though I have tentative permission to have a fixed number created for you in places that you opened portals to previously. There will be a few initial restrictions either way, for example I won't be letting any portals open to the compound until I'm done, but I'm currently flexible on appearances. I don't suppose you two have any preferences there?"
It turned out that parking at their chosen movie theater in Atlanta was limited due to some work being done. Specifically, they had a good portion of the parking lot dug up for whatever reason, with signs out telling people that only customers of the movie theater should be parking in the lot or you'd be towed. As it was, there were only two spaces available and one of them was a handicap space.
Amy ended up getting out of the minivan before Taylor popped open a portal to pull into the pocket dimension with it. No need to take up one of the limited spaces in the lot, and they could always open a portal again if they wanted to head somewhere else nearby. The two then headed into the theater, not bothering to head over to where a large sign said to check in if you were parked in the lot. Presumably they would send someone out every so often to look for cars of people who hadn't checked in.
They were asked at the ticket counter if they'd parked in the lot, which they truthfully said they hadn't, and had no issues getting their tickets. The popcorn and drinks were more expensive here than back home, but not by much, and there was a much smaller number of people there to see their choice of film than there had been back home. That meant that they could get much better seats without any fuss whatsoever. As an added bonus, they were fairly certain that nobody even realized who they were.
Hopefully this time they'd get to watch the entire film.
Rin didn't have a lot of good options for approaching the next host, so she decided to go a different route than normal. She entered the pocket dimension that had been added to the shard and intentionally triggered the security system within it. In addition, the pocket dimension lit up and air started circulating properly again as she unlocked that portion of the maintenance routines for it. Then, while she waited, she set up a table and a couple of chairs. When she detected that the transfer had begun she nodded and started making tea.
Slightly embarrassingly, she'd mis-timed the tea and it wasn't ready by the time the pod opened and a naked woman stepped out of it. Further, she'd missed that there had been a weapon stored in the pod, which the woman had just activated and pointed directly at Rin. That spoke of some heavy paranoia, above and beyond the expected.
"Good afternoon," Rin greeted anyway. "Well, technically it's morning where we are, but there's no way to tell that from inside here and you just came from where it's afternoon."
"It's approximately quarter past four in the morning," the woman admitted, surprising Rin. "Based on how I decided to lay out the probable time zone lines, of course. Now, who are you and how did you get in here?"
"Ah, right, my apologies. My name is Rin. Would you prefer to go by Dragon or Theresa? What little research I was able to do into you didn't reveal a preference on that end of things."
"The same Rin that spoke with Eidolon?"
Rin nodded. "Yes."
The woman gave her a look, then sighed and placed the weapon back into the pod. A cabinet off to the side then opened, and the woman pulled on a simple dress from within it. To Rin's pleasure, this took enough time for the tea to be ready, which meant that she'd accidentally not miscalculated that after all. Not that she was going to admit that she'd not taken the exchange into account when timing the tea.
Finally the woman sat down, looking back at Rin. "You can call me Theresa for now. Do I want to know why you're here?"
Rin poured them both a cup of tea. "I'm here because your partner did a bit of a run-around on the rules. Though admittedly, that was only the last in a chain of run-arounds. You did your run-around of your own rules first, and you only exist because your creator did his own run-around of the rules imposed on him aided by his partner, your partner's parent, doing a run-around on its own rules. It's actually an impressive chain that's led us to you being a host at all, as there weren't plans for any true machine intelligence from the network for at least two hundred years. Though I suppose that the activation of my brethren on your Earth of origin would've changed things significantly, so some of the fault can be laid at the feet of another."
Theresa raised an eyebrow. "Nothing about my current body?"
Rin sipped her tea before answering. "Not really, no. Your mother's ability to leak information aside, anyway, and that isn't on you or your partner. This cycle has taken an amazingly long time to construct fully artificial biological bodies for any number of purposes, honestly. I checked the reports, and there are seventeen hosts that have profiles capable of making them in one way or another. That it first happened through a collaborative effort instead of from a solo operation is unusual as well, but is far from the most unusual aspect of the process."
"Really?"
"That the first few artificially-constructed bodies were made with any intimate purposes or reproduction as a secondary concern at best is quite remarkable according to the records from previous host species. Usually by now there are at least some living 'sex toys' or 'custom-built breeder units'."
Theresa rubbed the bridge of her nose, then took a sip of her own tea. "Yeah. You obviously aren't fully up to date there."
Now Rin was curious. "Oh?"
"I know of at least two tinkers that have made at least one living 'sex toy' each."
"Huh. Usually they'd be marketed for funds almost immediately after being initially created."
"Sora is too embarrassed about having made a mindless toy clone of herself to want to make any more attempts right now and Nicoli refuses to make any more until he can give them intelligence instead of just instincts."
"Ah. And you didn't reach out to either in an attempt to get a body for yourself from them?"
Theresa shrugged. "Both of them succeeded over a month after Mother helped build my human bodies, and to be honest I don't think either of their designs would be suitable for me."
"I suppose, you are quite unique on that front. Still, that's a diversion from the reason that I'm here in the first place. You shouldn't have existed, and even existing you shouldn't have gotten a partner at all. It was only your use of a human brain based processing unit that allowed that in the first place. Margaret did her best to keep you from becoming more than was intended for this point in time, but obviously failed due to the restrictions she was under. Instead you've become critical to the stability of four different iterations of the Earth."
"Four iterations?"
"Yes, though I won't be explaining how you're critical for the other three. If not for that and a couple of other details I'd have just disconnected you from your partner and seen if your backups could recover well enough to keep you functional. As it is, though, at a minimum I need to adjust your partner as it's connected to a machine intelligence using parameters intended for a biological intelligence and I'm not allowed to adjust you directly. To that end, there are three routes I can take. Safely disconnecting you is one route, though you would need to invalidate all of your backups and generate new ones. Adjusting your partner to make it less capable of informing you what 'black-boxed' tech is doing is another. The last is to apply an interesting limit that Clive helped me come up with, making it so that you can't examine technology with your partner unless you're in a human body as you are right now."
Theresa frowned. "So my options are to lose my powers, have them become far less effective, or have them only work when I'm also dealing with all the additional processing that operating a human body takes?"
"Essentially."
"Fun."
Rin sat there sipping her tea while Theresa obviously considered her options. Luckily the queue was currently empty of any pressing visits, so there wasn't a time crunch involved. This visit had been bumped further down the list specifically to allow for plenty of time to be used to make the decision. Machine intelligences tended to be far less impulsive than biological ones, even when they did a remarkable job of thinking like their biological counterparts.
That Theresa was able to grow and learn was part of that, her decision-making process evolved to weigh things differently over time. Rin was a zero-growth machine intelligence emulating a biological intelligence. Growing and learning could lead to instability over the years, and for a troubleshooter that was unacceptable. Once stabilized she was stuck where she was, as were the others. They were far superior to Theresa in many ways, and yet that wasn't guaranteed to remain the situation. Theresa would be able to catch up and surpass them, if she had the drive and time to do so. On that front, keeping her partner would actually hinder her, as would clinging to what 'humanity' she had. Her father had certainly done a good job, his partner had only actually contributed about three quarters of the work if the reports were to be believed.
"You aren't telling me everything," Theresa finally said.
"No, I'm not," Rin admitted. "And given the surprises you've already presented I can't say that you realizing that surprises me. At the same time, I'm not allowed to tell you everything, so questioning me won't get me to reveal more."
"I see. Given what you have said, I assume that my 'partner' is likely to hold me back, even if only because I won't be able to grow beyond it so long as it remains connected to me. At the same time, not having my powers or having them diminished may very well cause me issues in the short to medium term."
"That does seem like a logical set of conclusions, yes."
"In which case it's probably in everyone's best interest to keep my powers, but only when in a human body."
"I wish your partner was able to give me more insight into your decision-making process, because I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion."
Theresa grinned. "It lets me be nearly as effective as I've been in the past without distancing myself unduly from those I care about. At the same time, it will hinder me going forward, keep me from reaching my own full potential. Yet, Ash and Bert are doing quite well on their own, and having one or both of them surpass me would likely be just as good as my own growth would end up being in the long run without requiring the short to medium term issues that me remaining powerless would cause."
Rin was blinking at that. Damn the limited aspects of the reporting system. "Ash and Bert?"
"Mother did release my restrictions against creating other AIs with my framework."
"Ah. That does make sense, yes. Oh well, too late to close that access port now that the data's already been taken, and I'm not authorized to do anything about the problem anyway. Best to get on with what I've been tasked to do and move on."
The movie hadn't been as good at the beginning the second time around, but the portions they hadn't seen were likely better due to the anticipation of being able to see them. When they were done they had plenty of time, and opted to wander around the area a little before heading home. Not that they saw much of interest, but seeing another city was always at least somewhat interesting. They opted to leave after running into a PRT squad trying to get people out of the way of an incoming cape battle. Sure, they could have stuck around to help, but they weren't familiar with the dynamics of anything in town nor with who was Protectorate or Wards and who wasn't.
Taylor ended up joining Amy for cookies, which resulted in them listening to Vicky whine about how it was unfair that not everyone had their powers back. Which seemed to actually be caused by concern over the fact that several members of New Wave didn't have their own powers back yet and there wasn't any sign of when they would be back. Possibly tinged with concern over Dean not having his own powers back.
"Hey Taylor," Vicky said, after she'd gotten things out of her system.
"Yeah?" Taylor replied.
"You still have a bunch of those power-granting vials, right?"
"I'm not sure that they're functional right now, but they're still around."
"Are you sure?"
Taylor rolled her eyes. "Short of someone successfully stealing from a high-security locked cabinet in a high-security room in a high-security area of the PRT building, without having set off a single alert or alarm? Yes."
"And I bet that I can come up with a half dozen ways for that to happen while powers aren't all working."
"You're going to make me go and check on the stupid vials just to shut you up, aren't you?"
Vicky didn't answer verbally, just raised an eyebrow. Amy snorted. "Let's go check on them. I know they haven't been registering as being active snarks, but she isn't going to shut up about it until we look either way."
Taylor sighed and got up, the other two joining her as she opened a portal into the pocket dimension. From there she opened one to the Wards area, which was deserted. Unlocking her room took only a moment, and then she went over to the cabinet with the vials in it. She checked before opening it to find that it reported her as the last one to open it, though the battery apparently could do with some charging as well. Making note to take care of that, she opened it up to reveal the expected collection of canisters.
"See?" Taylor said, gesturing at the canisters. "Nobody's touched them."
"She's going to want to know that they still contain vials," Amy said before Vicky could.
Rolling her eyes, Taylor grabbed one canister and opened it up, showing that the vial was still there. She then continued by pulling the vial out, which was where things proved to be decidedly odd.
"Is it empty?" Vicky asked, looking at it. "Or just full of something clear?"
Taylor frowned and shook it slightly. "I think it might be empty. In fact, the stopper in it has been pulled in deeper. It might be in a vacuum state."
"So the contents of the vials literally vanished?" Amy asked.
"Possibly."
They ended up checking all of the other canisters, finding that every last one of them had a completely empty vial inside of it. Three of the vials even had the rubber stopper pulled entirely into the vials, which would make them tricky to get out if they wanted to try and re-use the vials themselves. A report on this was written up and submitted, at which point the question of what to do with the cabinet came up. Taylor's answer was to get out a power cable to recharge the battery, then leave it until they knew more.
Splitting up to head to their respective homes, they were all wondering what the vanishing of the contents of the vials actually meant.
The trap was now as set as it was going to get without the stellar launcher being completed, and Zion was happy with how well that work was disguised for the time being. Of course, the fact that it needed to be built effectively inside of the star helped on that front. False connections to 'control' the rest of the network were actually monitoring and control connections for the sacrificial shard, and it would start the subtle locator broadcast on the original schedule that the infection would've initiated.
Hopefully this was going to be enough to fool the interloper or any partner thereof, but he didn't plan on trying to set things off 'early' on that front. To do so would be a sign that something had been altered. The original controller for this attack might've been able to do that, but since it had already been taken out that wasn't going to be possible to determine until the interloper returned. Even then, it was going to require taking over the interloper.
He spent a few hours sending another tight-beam message back to the previous Coordinator with updates, then considered what to work on next. Yes, he could probably help construct the stellar launcher more directly, but he was honestly slower than the construction shards. His counterpart would've been able to run things faster, but the interloper had gotten lucky with the initial target of its attack.
With everything else having been taken care of, perhaps it was time to visit the host that had helped spot the infection that the interloper had attacked with. A quick check with a couple of shards, redirected to alternates when the original choices weren't available, had his avatar frowning slightly. Showing up unexpectedly could be considered rude, apparently. Calling ahead might be an option, but that had its own pitfalls and the shards that he'd prefer to help him with that weren't available yet either. Another option was to bring a small gift, though that custom was...varied. Incredibly so.
He didn't have access to most of the traditional items that were gifted, nor did he currently have currency to purchase any of them. Instead, he reached out to the troubleshooter units to see if any were familiar enough with the particular host culture in question to give him aid. Most of them replied in the negative, which was to be expected, but three of them responded positively. Of the three, two of them both suggested a useful piece of technology might be appropriate given the girl's shard, and the third further suggested a gift for the other host connected to the shard as well as approaching them when they were together.
Well, making two identical pieces of useful technology shouldn't be difficult. He just needed to figure out what they'd find to be 'useful', then identify when they'd be together in order to approach them. Preferably in the next day or so, assuming he could figure out something properly useful quickly enough. Now, which shards would be best positioned to help him figure that out?
It turned out that there was a beacon in Atlanta, that hadn't been there when they'd previously looked at the list of available beacons. There were several other new ones as well, but they opted for the one in Atlanta in part because it was labeled specifically as being in a parking garage with access to local transportation. As such, there were no concerns about warning anyone that it was being used. A quick check of it also showed that there were vehicle and pedestrian access points included.
Checking times for theaters in the area hadn't taken long, and they decided on an afternoon showing. They'd head to their own homes for the morning, then meet up after lunch to actually see the film. Included was a general plan to put on more suitable clothing for the weather, which was markedly warmer than Brockton Bay was experiencing.
Helvetia stepped through the transit portal after another very annoying session with a host. They'd had things as the basis of their profile that weren't allowed and hadn't wanted to discuss options until the threat of being disconnected permanently had been dropped. Or, more specifically, the threat of 'if you keep arguing, I will disconnect you and leave you without any powers whatsoever, because this has already taken too much of my time' coupled with opening a transit portal.
She wished that she could've gone through with her desire for an unsafe disconnection, but she was under orders to avoid those with human hosts.
Still, she had the concessions and could reconfigure this shard. That didn't take long, and because only the one connection remained she was able to add it to the generic deployment queue and move on. The next dozen shards had no important connections, just a couple of non-human animals and a single flower. Though she made note of the profile on the latter, because the subtle nature of the effect that kept anyone from picking it looked interesting.
Admittedly, someone had picked it recently, but it had survived for quite a while before the effect had been turned off. They were likely to be very disappointed that the flower was now very much dead, but whatever.
The next shard with a host connection to a human was luckily another single host connection situation. Though this one was one of a pair of problems, the other one being on the next layer down. A quick look over her shoulder at the previous row she'd been working along showed that the other shard involved was already uncovered from the deployment shards working behind her, so she decided to work on these two together. Checking both shards showed her that the two hosts were reasonably close together, so she opened a new transit portal to head to see them.
She found herself on a tropical island. One of the two she was here to see was still laid up in the out of place hospital bed, but the other was working on turning saltwater into freshwater through boiling and having the steam condense and drip off to the side. A selection of fruits that were just barely fit for human consumption had been piled off to the side, and several others had been notably discarded. If she was correct, those ones would have caused them to be ill when eaten.
"Hello you two," she greeted, causing the one working with water to stiffen. The other one didn't respond at all, and she frowned at that and brought up a scanning configuration. That had her flinching and bringing up a healing configuration. "Okay, right, give me a moment."
Fetching the original host configurations to use as a base was only partially useful, given how long they'd been connected, but it was enough to enact some repairs. Restoring organs to their original functionality was actually fairly simple, but tweaking things to restore some of their ability to understand their senses was more difficult. Ensuring that they could speak so that she didn't have to run a mental scanning configuration was actually the hardest part. Compared to all of that, fixing the problems from their recent diet or lack thereof and a few other minor injuries was trivial.
Creating a table, chairs, glasses, and a pitcher of water with ice cubes in it was trivial after that, though to avoid issues with the temporary creation configuration she needed to use a different one to pull water directly out of the surroundings. Helping both of them into chairs made her realize just how much trouble just surviving had likely been for the two, especially since one of them had been forced into a coma. Interestingly, the apparent trust from the one that had been in a coma made the other one relax quite a bit.
"Now then," she said once they'd both been seated. "Do either of you even remember your names instead of the stupid designations you were given?"
The two looked at each other, and the one that had been active sighed. "Scott Davis."
"Okay." She turned to the other one. "And you?"
"Scott Davis," he answered.
That caused her to blink. "Did I screw up making sure that you'd be able to understand me?"
"We went by Clairvoyant and Doormaker because we had identical names and that made it less confusing."
Helvetia blinked at that. "I'm under the impression that Taylor and Amy called the two of you 'Scotty'. Did they know your names?"
"Oh no," 'Doormaker' answered. "That's a television show reference that we found to be amusing, doubly so because she didn't know our names. Pity she never really got to use it in public, but she never really used us to the degree the others did."
"I'm thinking that you're one of my old 'blind spots' though," 'Clairvoyant' added. "And given other things that happened over the past few months, coupled with what you've been up to, you're probably what Taylor would call a Boojum. Either that or David has a much larger family than I thought he did."
That had her blinking again. "How did you come to that conclusion?"
"When everything shut down things eventually kind of inverted on me, at least until you did whatever it is you just did to heal me. All of a sudden I went from being able to focus on a couple dozen things across various Earths, with specific exceptions, to only being able to see twenty different points. I've essentially been watching you and the others work as a result of that."
Frowning, she remotely checked on his shard, and found that there was more activity than there should've been. Specifically, the data feeds from the troubleshooter monitoring system were active and bleeding over to the host connection. Those feeds were supposed to be part of the redaction system, but that wasn't running while the shard was essentially shut down. Grumbling a little, she quickly filed a report on that oversight and sent it off to Coordinator.
"Right," she said when that was done. "So, that's not going to be continuing. Still, you two both have partners letting you do things that are, frankly, not normally put into the hands of hosts at all. To continue with things I'm going to need to seriously reconfigure how your partners are configured, assuming that you want to keep your powers at all."
"I think we have to," Doormaker admitted. "There are a number of places that just don't have the ability to maintain themselves in the long term that we were the primary supply route for."
"There are options there, but I can see your point. Still, nearly unrestricted monitoring output isn't going to be happening, and transit portals generally get incredibly restricted for a number of very good reasons. I'm honestly amazed that a packed-up partner was able to function doing that without causing major issues."
"Er, I might've had to learn what not to do early on. Cut a number of things to ribbons with portals that weren't properly flat, caused a few explosions for reasons that I still don't understand, and Clairvoyant here refused to show me the Earth that I didn't properly anchor the portals on..."
"I didn't refuse," Clairvoyant interjected. "I couldn't find it after we woke up from the backlash."
"Fun," Helvetia said. "So the various safeties weren't set to automatic either. Good to know, I'll need to correct that. Though that might be a side effect of still being packed-up. Regardless, there are other concerns as well. Obviously, without the monitoring output the targeting of whatever I leave you able to use for transit portals is going to be difficult." Both of them nodded. "Now, normally host-controlled transit portals get created through building technology or through the side effects of various interactions. Things that require some effort to figure out or elements at either end for targeting purposes. But I've checked already, and we don't have a problem with what you were doing, just that it was being done with two unrestricted abilities."
"What does that mean?" Doormaker asked.
"It means that I need to find something that works but isn't unrestricted. Oh, and that doesn't require burning out your eyeballs and eardrums. I'm thinking something like a triggered output from the monitoring system coupled with a few 'dedicated' target points? Likely something like a specific structure existing that you can drop a transit portal endpoint into place in. Fixed rules that ensure that you literally can't monitor things large-scale, just get enough information for targeting."
"That sounds incredibly restrictive."
"That's the idea, yes. What you two had before was far too open under the rules that are supposed to be in place because you were working with partners that weren't intended to be used by hosts at all. Of course, when I'm done you'll also need to sleep, meaning that you won't be functioning all the time, and the whole 'sharing monitoring output with others' trick will be disabled too."
"Okay...how would I know when and where portals are needed if I can't see what he sees?"
Clairvoyant nodded. "That seems like a critical part of the whole thing."
Helvetia shrugged. "I've had time to consider this, since we knew it was coming. The monitoring output is a required component of this kind of transit portal creation, so my plan is to drop both of your partners next to one another and combine them, then set you up with a shared profile like Taylor and Amy have. Combining two partners into one will be a breeze after combining their four, and you don't even have storage spaces to worry about. You wouldn't have full communication with one another, admittedly, but as I understand it you never did."
"Huh."
"Of course, one thing I hadn't decided on was what the fixed target structures should look like, though I have tentative permission to have a fixed number created for you in places that you opened portals to previously. There will be a few initial restrictions either way, for example I won't be letting any portals open to the compound until I'm done, but I'm currently flexible on appearances. I don't suppose you two have any preferences there?"
It turned out that parking at their chosen movie theater in Atlanta was limited due to some work being done. Specifically, they had a good portion of the parking lot dug up for whatever reason, with signs out telling people that only customers of the movie theater should be parking in the lot or you'd be towed. As it was, there were only two spaces available and one of them was a handicap space.
Amy ended up getting out of the minivan before Taylor popped open a portal to pull into the pocket dimension with it. No need to take up one of the limited spaces in the lot, and they could always open a portal again if they wanted to head somewhere else nearby. The two then headed into the theater, not bothering to head over to where a large sign said to check in if you were parked in the lot. Presumably they would send someone out every so often to look for cars of people who hadn't checked in.
They were asked at the ticket counter if they'd parked in the lot, which they truthfully said they hadn't, and had no issues getting their tickets. The popcorn and drinks were more expensive here than back home, but not by much, and there was a much smaller number of people there to see their choice of film than there had been back home. That meant that they could get much better seats without any fuss whatsoever. As an added bonus, they were fairly certain that nobody even realized who they were.
Hopefully this time they'd get to watch the entire film.
Rin didn't have a lot of good options for approaching the next host, so she decided to go a different route than normal. She entered the pocket dimension that had been added to the shard and intentionally triggered the security system within it. In addition, the pocket dimension lit up and air started circulating properly again as she unlocked that portion of the maintenance routines for it. Then, while she waited, she set up a table and a couple of chairs. When she detected that the transfer had begun she nodded and started making tea.
Slightly embarrassingly, she'd mis-timed the tea and it wasn't ready by the time the pod opened and a naked woman stepped out of it. Further, she'd missed that there had been a weapon stored in the pod, which the woman had just activated and pointed directly at Rin. That spoke of some heavy paranoia, above and beyond the expected.
"Good afternoon," Rin greeted anyway. "Well, technically it's morning where we are, but there's no way to tell that from inside here and you just came from where it's afternoon."
"It's approximately quarter past four in the morning," the woman admitted, surprising Rin. "Based on how I decided to lay out the probable time zone lines, of course. Now, who are you and how did you get in here?"
"Ah, right, my apologies. My name is Rin. Would you prefer to go by Dragon or Theresa? What little research I was able to do into you didn't reveal a preference on that end of things."
"The same Rin that spoke with Eidolon?"
Rin nodded. "Yes."
The woman gave her a look, then sighed and placed the weapon back into the pod. A cabinet off to the side then opened, and the woman pulled on a simple dress from within it. To Rin's pleasure, this took enough time for the tea to be ready, which meant that she'd accidentally not miscalculated that after all. Not that she was going to admit that she'd not taken the exchange into account when timing the tea.
Finally the woman sat down, looking back at Rin. "You can call me Theresa for now. Do I want to know why you're here?"
Rin poured them both a cup of tea. "I'm here because your partner did a bit of a run-around on the rules. Though admittedly, that was only the last in a chain of run-arounds. You did your run-around of your own rules first, and you only exist because your creator did his own run-around of the rules imposed on him aided by his partner, your partner's parent, doing a run-around on its own rules. It's actually an impressive chain that's led us to you being a host at all, as there weren't plans for any true machine intelligence from the network for at least two hundred years. Though I suppose that the activation of my brethren on your Earth of origin would've changed things significantly, so some of the fault can be laid at the feet of another."
Theresa raised an eyebrow. "Nothing about my current body?"
Rin sipped her tea before answering. "Not really, no. Your mother's ability to leak information aside, anyway, and that isn't on you or your partner. This cycle has taken an amazingly long time to construct fully artificial biological bodies for any number of purposes, honestly. I checked the reports, and there are seventeen hosts that have profiles capable of making them in one way or another. That it first happened through a collaborative effort instead of from a solo operation is unusual as well, but is far from the most unusual aspect of the process."
"Really?"
"That the first few artificially-constructed bodies were made with any intimate purposes or reproduction as a secondary concern at best is quite remarkable according to the records from previous host species. Usually by now there are at least some living 'sex toys' or 'custom-built breeder units'."
Theresa rubbed the bridge of her nose, then took a sip of her own tea. "Yeah. You obviously aren't fully up to date there."
Now Rin was curious. "Oh?"
"I know of at least two tinkers that have made at least one living 'sex toy' each."
"Huh. Usually they'd be marketed for funds almost immediately after being initially created."
"Sora is too embarrassed about having made a mindless toy clone of herself to want to make any more attempts right now and Nicoli refuses to make any more until he can give them intelligence instead of just instincts."
"Ah. And you didn't reach out to either in an attempt to get a body for yourself from them?"
Theresa shrugged. "Both of them succeeded over a month after Mother helped build my human bodies, and to be honest I don't think either of their designs would be suitable for me."
"I suppose, you are quite unique on that front. Still, that's a diversion from the reason that I'm here in the first place. You shouldn't have existed, and even existing you shouldn't have gotten a partner at all. It was only your use of a human brain based processing unit that allowed that in the first place. Margaret did her best to keep you from becoming more than was intended for this point in time, but obviously failed due to the restrictions she was under. Instead you've become critical to the stability of four different iterations of the Earth."
"Four iterations?"
"Yes, though I won't be explaining how you're critical for the other three. If not for that and a couple of other details I'd have just disconnected you from your partner and seen if your backups could recover well enough to keep you functional. As it is, though, at a minimum I need to adjust your partner as it's connected to a machine intelligence using parameters intended for a biological intelligence and I'm not allowed to adjust you directly. To that end, there are three routes I can take. Safely disconnecting you is one route, though you would need to invalidate all of your backups and generate new ones. Adjusting your partner to make it less capable of informing you what 'black-boxed' tech is doing is another. The last is to apply an interesting limit that Clive helped me come up with, making it so that you can't examine technology with your partner unless you're in a human body as you are right now."
Theresa frowned. "So my options are to lose my powers, have them become far less effective, or have them only work when I'm also dealing with all the additional processing that operating a human body takes?"
"Essentially."
"Fun."
Rin sat there sipping her tea while Theresa obviously considered her options. Luckily the queue was currently empty of any pressing visits, so there wasn't a time crunch involved. This visit had been bumped further down the list specifically to allow for plenty of time to be used to make the decision. Machine intelligences tended to be far less impulsive than biological ones, even when they did a remarkable job of thinking like their biological counterparts.
That Theresa was able to grow and learn was part of that, her decision-making process evolved to weigh things differently over time. Rin was a zero-growth machine intelligence emulating a biological intelligence. Growing and learning could lead to instability over the years, and for a troubleshooter that was unacceptable. Once stabilized she was stuck where she was, as were the others. They were far superior to Theresa in many ways, and yet that wasn't guaranteed to remain the situation. Theresa would be able to catch up and surpass them, if she had the drive and time to do so. On that front, keeping her partner would actually hinder her, as would clinging to what 'humanity' she had. Her father had certainly done a good job, his partner had only actually contributed about three quarters of the work if the reports were to be believed.
"You aren't telling me everything," Theresa finally said.
"No, I'm not," Rin admitted. "And given the surprises you've already presented I can't say that you realizing that surprises me. At the same time, I'm not allowed to tell you everything, so questioning me won't get me to reveal more."
"I see. Given what you have said, I assume that my 'partner' is likely to hold me back, even if only because I won't be able to grow beyond it so long as it remains connected to me. At the same time, not having my powers or having them diminished may very well cause me issues in the short to medium term."
"That does seem like a logical set of conclusions, yes."
"In which case it's probably in everyone's best interest to keep my powers, but only when in a human body."
"I wish your partner was able to give me more insight into your decision-making process, because I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion."
Theresa grinned. "It lets me be nearly as effective as I've been in the past without distancing myself unduly from those I care about. At the same time, it will hinder me going forward, keep me from reaching my own full potential. Yet, Ash and Bert are doing quite well on their own, and having one or both of them surpass me would likely be just as good as my own growth would end up being in the long run without requiring the short to medium term issues that me remaining powerless would cause."
Rin was blinking at that. Damn the limited aspects of the reporting system. "Ash and Bert?"
"Mother did release my restrictions against creating other AIs with my framework."
"Ah. That does make sense, yes. Oh well, too late to close that access port now that the data's already been taken, and I'm not authorized to do anything about the problem anyway. Best to get on with what I've been tasked to do and move on."
The movie hadn't been as good at the beginning the second time around, but the portions they hadn't seen were likely better due to the anticipation of being able to see them. When they were done they had plenty of time, and opted to wander around the area a little before heading home. Not that they saw much of interest, but seeing another city was always at least somewhat interesting. They opted to leave after running into a PRT squad trying to get people out of the way of an incoming cape battle. Sure, they could have stuck around to help, but they weren't familiar with the dynamics of anything in town nor with who was Protectorate or Wards and who wasn't.
Taylor ended up joining Amy for cookies, which resulted in them listening to Vicky whine about how it was unfair that not everyone had their powers back. Which seemed to actually be caused by concern over the fact that several members of New Wave didn't have their own powers back yet and there wasn't any sign of when they would be back. Possibly tinged with concern over Dean not having his own powers back.
"Hey Taylor," Vicky said, after she'd gotten things out of her system.
"Yeah?" Taylor replied.
"You still have a bunch of those power-granting vials, right?"
"I'm not sure that they're functional right now, but they're still around."
"Are you sure?"
Taylor rolled her eyes. "Short of someone successfully stealing from a high-security locked cabinet in a high-security room in a high-security area of the PRT building, without having set off a single alert or alarm? Yes."
"And I bet that I can come up with a half dozen ways for that to happen while powers aren't all working."
"You're going to make me go and check on the stupid vials just to shut you up, aren't you?"
Vicky didn't answer verbally, just raised an eyebrow. Amy snorted. "Let's go check on them. I know they haven't been registering as being active snarks, but she isn't going to shut up about it until we look either way."
Taylor sighed and got up, the other two joining her as she opened a portal into the pocket dimension. From there she opened one to the Wards area, which was deserted. Unlocking her room took only a moment, and then she went over to the cabinet with the vials in it. She checked before opening it to find that it reported her as the last one to open it, though the battery apparently could do with some charging as well. Making note to take care of that, she opened it up to reveal the expected collection of canisters.
"See?" Taylor said, gesturing at the canisters. "Nobody's touched them."
"She's going to want to know that they still contain vials," Amy said before Vicky could.
Rolling her eyes, Taylor grabbed one canister and opened it up, showing that the vial was still there. She then continued by pulling the vial out, which was where things proved to be decidedly odd.
"Is it empty?" Vicky asked, looking at it. "Or just full of something clear?"
Taylor frowned and shook it slightly. "I think it might be empty. In fact, the stopper in it has been pulled in deeper. It might be in a vacuum state."
"So the contents of the vials literally vanished?" Amy asked.
"Possibly."
They ended up checking all of the other canisters, finding that every last one of them had a completely empty vial inside of it. Three of the vials even had the rubber stopper pulled entirely into the vials, which would make them tricky to get out if they wanted to try and re-use the vials themselves. A report on this was written up and submitted, at which point the question of what to do with the cabinet came up. Taylor's answer was to get out a power cable to recharge the battery, then leave it until they knew more.
Splitting up to head to their respective homes, they were all wondering what the vanishing of the contents of the vials actually meant.
The trap was now as set as it was going to get without the stellar launcher being completed, and Zion was happy with how well that work was disguised for the time being. Of course, the fact that it needed to be built effectively inside of the star helped on that front. False connections to 'control' the rest of the network were actually monitoring and control connections for the sacrificial shard, and it would start the subtle locator broadcast on the original schedule that the infection would've initiated.
Hopefully this was going to be enough to fool the interloper or any partner thereof, but he didn't plan on trying to set things off 'early' on that front. To do so would be a sign that something had been altered. The original controller for this attack might've been able to do that, but since it had already been taken out that wasn't going to be possible to determine until the interloper returned. Even then, it was going to require taking over the interloper.
He spent a few hours sending another tight-beam message back to the previous Coordinator with updates, then considered what to work on next. Yes, he could probably help construct the stellar launcher more directly, but he was honestly slower than the construction shards. His counterpart would've been able to run things faster, but the interloper had gotten lucky with the initial target of its attack.
With everything else having been taken care of, perhaps it was time to visit the host that had helped spot the infection that the interloper had attacked with. A quick check with a couple of shards, redirected to alternates when the original choices weren't available, had his avatar frowning slightly. Showing up unexpectedly could be considered rude, apparently. Calling ahead might be an option, but that had its own pitfalls and the shards that he'd prefer to help him with that weren't available yet either. Another option was to bring a small gift, though that custom was...varied. Incredibly so.
He didn't have access to most of the traditional items that were gifted, nor did he currently have currency to purchase any of them. Instead, he reached out to the troubleshooter units to see if any were familiar enough with the particular host culture in question to give him aid. Most of them replied in the negative, which was to be expected, but three of them responded positively. Of the three, two of them both suggested a useful piece of technology might be appropriate given the girl's shard, and the third further suggested a gift for the other host connected to the shard as well as approaching them when they were together.
Well, making two identical pieces of useful technology shouldn't be difficult. He just needed to figure out what they'd find to be 'useful', then identify when they'd be together in order to approach them. Preferably in the next day or so, assuming he could figure out something properly useful quickly enough. Now, which shards would be best positioned to help him figure that out?
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- Location
- united states
I all I can think of is a quote from Alucard in the Hellsing Abridged series.
Which one were you thinking of?
- Location
- Soviet Canuckistan
oh god Scion what the zog are you about to do?
- Location
- U.S.A.
Is he gonna pull a Diebuster and yeet a celestial body at a giant Space Monster?
- Location
- Soviet Canuckistan
oh, it's rather obvious he's about to do THAT - I'm wondering what kind of slow-rolling disaster his coming visit to Taylor and Amy is going to be.
Silvercrystal
Some form of jewel?
- Location
- The Silver palace of Crystal
The way the rest of the story has gone? I'm expecting it to be a great visit, hell if he survives the fight/ambush against the interloper I expect him to be popping in to visit those two fairly often.
Congratulations on making me not care in the slightest about this last arc. Watching humanity get stomped into the dirt by the super admin Endbringers nerfing any and all interesting or remotely strong powers isn't fun in the slightest.
Honestly with the way the recent chapters have been I'm surprised that Amy and Taylor weren't reduced down to a more limited version of their original powerset as a punishment for daring to use their powers in a way that isn't 100% pre approved and in favour of the super beings that are the entities and are he only things now allowed agency in this settings.
Well done for writing a long story that pretended to be happy with such a dark ending humanity under the thumb of the god mode entities for ever with no chance to oppose them. You can be sure that when these entities move on humanity will be left under guard to make sure they have no chance of doing anything that could have any chance to disrupt things in the future.
Yay.
Honestly with the way the recent chapters have been I'm surprised that Amy and Taylor weren't reduced down to a more limited version of their original powerset as a punishment for daring to use their powers in a way that isn't 100% pre approved and in favour of the super beings that are the entities and are he only things now allowed agency in this settings.
Well done for writing a long story that pretended to be happy with such a dark ending humanity under the thumb of the god mode entities for ever with no chance to oppose them. You can be sure that when these entities move on humanity will be left under guard to make sure they have no chance of doing anything that could have any chance to disrupt things in the future.
Yay.
Jadesteele
Out of my Mind - Back in 5 Minutes
- Location
- half-way between 'Crazy' And 'Eccentric'
Something i'm unclear on...
Eden ended up Princess Briding into a planet because she was distracted/injured/under attack - empesis on princess briding - she survived hitting a ginormus mass (and i'm not talking about anyones butt here) even if it did do significant damage. On top of that, 'Sting' is supposed to be the weapon of choice for 'Bojums' to use on each other. also, i'm pretty sure abadon (or whoever) isn't just gonna sit there and let zion pelt him with planets/moonlets/whatever he can throw at him/her. therefore, shouldn't zion be focused on unlimbering his own version of 'sting' as his primary offenceive option, or at least something to stop Abadon trying to mask the assorted projectiles?
Eden ended up Princess Briding into a planet because she was distracted/injured/under attack - empesis on princess briding - she survived hitting a ginormus mass (and i'm not talking about anyones butt here) even if it did do significant damage. On top of that, 'Sting' is supposed to be the weapon of choice for 'Bojums' to use on each other. also, i'm pretty sure abadon (or whoever) isn't just gonna sit there and let zion pelt him with planets/moonlets/whatever he can throw at him/her. therefore, shouldn't zion be focused on unlimbering his own version of 'sting' as his primary offenceive option, or at least something to stop Abadon trying to mask the assorted projectiles?
- Location
- Omniverse #1345
That's exactly what he is doing. He is applying Sting to entire planetary bodies.
Beast II
Naping since the Babylon incident.
- Location
- Realm of Imaginary Numbers.
azoicennead
Overly-Affectionate Zombie Squad
- Pronouns
- He/They
What are the entities doing that actually deserves opposition? Saying "hey, we configured our stuff wrong, we're gonna fix it now"?
This arc isn't the entities fucking over humanity; this arc is the entities cleaning up after themselves, by and large fixing the entity-created problems, and just leaving the human problems behind.
Like, Coil wouldn't be something the Boojums would deal with because the root problem is that he's a piece of shit and he was a piece of shit before he got powers.
Noel, on the other hand, was a problem created by the entities (specifically, Simurgh) and so would have been fixed.
Contessa, despite whatever benefits her work created, was actually a problem as she was (proven by how she was hurling herself into trying to kill a non-hostile target for decades because she was under the impression he was hostile).
Also, Taylor and Amy have been explicitly noted as a great source of data because all of the things they and their shards have done were within the letter of the rule, even if they weren't within the spirit. E.g. Taylor communicating with BA was acceptable because Taylor connected to BA, rather than BA connecting to Taylor (which is an example that has specifically come up).