Precipitation of Autonomy - 3.2
[disclaimer - Wildbow owns Worm, I do not own Worm]
If scientists on my home earth (which I was calling Earth-H) knew the kind of shit I was pulling with electrochemistry right now, they'd cry bullshit. For my artificial binding site components, what I had was essentially a controlled electronegativity on a few atoms of carbon, plus a feedback line for when an atom attached to the site that would induce an electric field to eject it if it didn't match the desired bond electropotentials. Essentially, an arbitrary filter for atoms and molecules with a resolution of barely 4 atoms in both axes, using highly controlled doping of the bilayer graphene base to construct the analog circuitry for the component.

So, I had both an artificial enzyme-like binding site, and a series of components that would reduce complex biological material into basic organic molecules, each of which I could fit trillions on a single couple-millimetre-square microchip. My actual chips would be bigger than that, of course, and it did not take me long to make the very simple, repeating blueprint for the photon emitters - essentially a manifestation of quantum dot technology - for bioslurry generation. There'd be almost a quadrillion of the things in each chip, and all they needed was power, really.

Removing about 3 or so precognition blocker chips from the ejection bin, I programmed 3 bioslurry related chips into the chip foundry. The first two just produced photons of appropriate wavelengths to tear apart organic matter into primitive biocompounds with a few hundred Watts of power input. The final chip was special - it had two modes. The primary mode was continuing to maintain the bioslurry - without constant input of photons, the bioslurry would quickly coalesce into a miscellaneous lump of polymerised compounds as the smaller organic molecules reacted back together, so continuous energy input was required.

The secondary mode emitted one very particular wavelength of light at about 200nm - a near-ultraviolet region of the spectrum that enabled an ADP + Phosphate -> ATP reaction using a series of binding sites that I could provide. ATP is essentially the universal energy currency of Earth life, and most enzymes involved in Earth life used it as an energy store (by converting it back to ADP or Adenosene Monophosphate (AMP)), which meant that being able to maintain a high concentration of the substance in the bioslurry for the purposes of appropriating preexisting enzyme structures was a practical necessity.

The final chip I needed - one for which I was just now writing the structure in the relevant hardware definition language - involved reconstituting the bioslurry using the analog artificial binding site components. The big problem was actually fitting Digital-to-Analog converters that could work with repeating structures within variant lines of output. My eventual solution to the problem was to separate the generation of appropriate voltages from the selection of where those voltages should go in the banks of artificial binding sites, so the components and structure of a series of binding sites would be separated from each other. However, this did not solve the problem entirely due to the need for hyper-precise connector routing to the artificial binding sites.

What ended up being the final configuration involved lots and lots of different arrangements and spacings of these binding sites - plenty of quadruple-sets of lines along with a complex array of other patterns for constructing biomolecules. This allowed me to construct a series of standardised modules for protein and RNA and lipid construction, as well as generic modules for most other macromolecules. I'd built up from a simple series of binding sites to various submodules with routeable inputs to various larger modules constructed of a number of the submodules, each of these taking up a couple micrometres square on the chip. Which meant that on the 10cmx10cm square chips I was planning on producing, I could fit around 100 million larger modules with a collection of production sites for RNA, protein, and lipids.

It had taken me at least six hours to work out the kinks, but I now had all the designs I needed to produce the biochemical construction systems I wanted. Soon I'd have proper, mad-scientist style vats of biochemical slurry! A maintenance and photosynthesis chip at the top, an AAS (Artificial Active Site) chip at the bottom, and a sealable small access port in the middle for the addition and removal of various items. Creation of bioslurry would be simple - all that was needed was something to shred biomatter and a small channel with one of the breakdown chips positioned on each side. Storage was trivial! All I needed to do was let the sludge that would result from the machine solidify and then it could be broken down again.

Feeling smug as a bug though tired enough to have a comfy lie-down in my bed after the tinker-induced hyperfixation - which was how my power dealt with my ADHD problems while tinkering, as far as I could tell - I set the chip fabricator to produce several more AAS chips and the two-mode breakdown chips ready for my - in my opinion, extremely fantastic - biotinker setup.

Then, I had an idea. My tinker power was not shard-restricted. At all.

Which meant it would let me fully reverse engineer tinkertech if I gave it a chance. My tinkertech already didn't suffer from the sabotaging or degradation that normal shard tinkertech tended to, because my power was more cooperative, and it made it obvious when it was blackboxing things or when it's shaker effect would come into play, but this would... well, it would change the game of tech on Bet. As the chip fabricator made soft whirring sounds in the background I pushed my specialties into 3x Reverse Engineering, 2x Tinkertech Multiversal Effects, and pushed. One core blueprint made itself clear in my mind, a multiversal component tracer that could trace blackboxed connections back across the multiverse. Scribbling it down on my laptop before I got distracted by something else again I thought about what I was going to do.

Obviously I wanted to spread massive scientific advancement and solve a bunch of problems with the world. And I had every intention of snubbing the PRT and their "S-class threat" classification when it would enable me to do that, and I would be paying no attention to corporations wanting to lock down my technology either (in fact now i had the power to do so I was very tempted to just leak all their blueprints).

The big issue was ensuring that I didn't hand everyone a bunch of Clarketech that they would be unable to understand at the current level of scientific knowledge on Bet, otherwise what would end up happening was humanity just stagnating and using items they didn't understand and would never be capable of understanding even if they tried to. Even if it wasn't actually blackboxed, it would be blackboxed in practice, suffocating the ability for people to comprehend, replicate, analyse, and improve the technology. Of course, for the Entities, this would be a positive outcome, but not for humanity itself. No, what needed to happen was documented and explained blueprints for the stuff I was going to make, and perhaps posting about some foundational scientific principles used in my tinkertech.

I was interrupted in my musings on what I would be doing by my stomach grumbling and realizing I hadn't eaten properly since before Faultline left, which somehow had drifted into more than 8 hours ago. Attempting to get food from my personal store was futile! Apparently feeding Faultline and her Crew had left me with no more food. Which was annoying, and my still sore ribs would make getting food unpleasant - but it did need to happen. It was not rare that I thought about how nice it would be if taking care of myself was easier for me, and this was one of those times, and then I also remembered that I still had a massive injury on the top of my head that I really needed to at least cover up and hide if nothing else. Unfortunately, I hated wearing anything over my head - it caused me weird sensory issues which was why you'd never see me with a hat on - and that provided an obstacle that had to be dealt with.

Thinking on the problem, I figured I could probably make a temporary solution using some metal until I could finalize my biotinkering setup. In fact, due to the way the wound was made, using a portal as a form of shaping tool was viable. A little slice off the boat graveyard later with an appropriately sized portal, and I had the protective metal sheet to put on the back of my head, my tinker power shaker effect helping shape the outside to match the original form of my own head - and within about 30 minutes (including some scrubbing to remove immediate infection risks) I had a very temporary solution. The constant dread of being on Earth Bet came to the forefront as I remembered the existence of Master capes again, and once again, I distracted myself by opening a portal to New York to go grab food before I could have a horrific anxiety breakdown.

Mildly limping (my chest still hurt, dammit!) down a market street, I stopped by a corner shop and noticed several papers, with headlines like "Case 53s - What We Know?" and "PRT Corruption Exposed!". I wasn't used to fame and this... was extremely weird and oddly uncomfortable. Of course, then there were the transphobic rags which made me mentally wince - this time, not from pain - spreading articles with names like "TransMorphic - A Threat To Children?" (they even spelt my cape name wrong!), and "Cape Transgenders - A Rejection of American Family Values". I was trying to ignore the gossip mag headlines entirely, and the fact that no doubt there was already various rule 34 drawings of me floating around the internet.

Yes, I was most definitely going to avoid thinking about that, I thought to myself, as I popped into a store while my focus was mostly on my own train of thought rather than the wall items, and I nearly knocked over a couple jars of spicy peppers in my internal distraction before grabbing a couple sandwiches, buying them, and devouring them as I walked out the shop. The first bit of peace I had had since I got on this... awful planet, really, and I wandered around for a bit before carefully sitting on a bench and just relaxing, even despite my anxiety problems. Looking on I could soon clearly see the boundary where the damage from Behemoth had been rebuilt, as my stomach twisted thinking about it - the gleaming buildings with thicker walls in contrast to older designs including several of brutalist or late-Victorian and industrial aesthetic from the pre-Behemoth city. It was a stark difference and a more apparent reminder of the state the world was in, and it made me angry to think about too much, in the same way that death itself rocketed between a sense of tearing up and anger in my body. The feeling of suffocation and degradation and sapping of all agency and hope from everyone on the planet.

While I was bad at reading body language I could still see the way people walked wearily, the way they avoided even going outside, an effect of the absolute strangling horror that came from the ending of millions of individuals and all the infrastructure and culture and love for the people they cared about, and friendships and relationships they had made with others. The deletion of parts of a complex global societal interconnection that grew dimmer as people were slaughtered en-masse, as hope was murdered by shard-powered death machines, city killers, annihilators that ensured no-one would ever feel safe, that people would never reach for the stars or just their loved ones too tightly, that they felt forever helpless and that no amount of cooperation or aid would keep the tide of civilizational death away.

Thinking, truly thinking about it, the sense of loss on both a global level and on a personal level, still mostly alone on a world like this, was enough to make my eyes leak in the overwhelming bout of emotion like those that I was occasionally prone to. The sheer sense of fatalism and futility I could see around me in the other people, it was horrifying in a way that was hard to truly enunciate other than by my own reaction. We deserved better, the people of Bet all deserved so much better than this constant state of atrocity, and for once in my life I had the power and agency to change things, and more importantly to ensure that everyone had that. The fact that people kept going, kept fighting to both survive and help each other even in the face of all that...

Contemplating the state of Bet, that was really the only thing that kept my mood from crashing, instead doing my old emotional trick of shifting sadness and hopelessness towards anger at the cause of the situation, as I watched lasers and explosions a few kilometres ahead of where I was sitting, presumably Legend beginning a fight with some local villains or something like that.

I took a few minutes to myself, to clear up the little bits of moisture on my face, before slowly (due to injury) walking through a portal I made that I hid behind a tree. Yawning, I opened my laptop and immediately got a ping from Vista's (sorry, "Miss_Warper"s) PM on PHO, containing the message...
"Well that's not going to stop me searching about C53s, especially since you've got the precog blockers going. And I hope you deal with the Empire more!"

Which did remind me I needed to deal with Brockton gangs. In fact, as I was coming to realise, Doormaker style powers were complete and total bullshit and I could probably dismantle every Brockton gang in about 20 minutes of work really. It took a fair bit for me to realize how truly broken this artificial power actually was, but I'd come to that realisation ever since I used it to slice off Eidolon's arms in a successful Cauldron escape attempt. So I typed out a quick reply, being careful to avoid triggering my injuries with my general ADHD fidgeting and shuffling as I used the laptop...
"I'm gonna deal with the Empire tonight. And if you are really wanting to look into the C53 stuff, the key word is what witches brew potions in. Don't say it, don't even write it down, but that is the name you are looking for."

Now, I had few ethical issues with killing Nazis in my current situation with my current power level - certainly not ones with histories of mass murder like Kaiser or Hookwolf, at the very least. But in practice the thought of making the decision to kill someone was not something I could really do, emotionally speaking. To be clear, it would be a trivial task for me to kill either of them by dropping them above the Earth's atmosphere, but that did not mean I wanted to do that. Which meant that I needed to come to a decision on what to actually do with the Nazis - my first thought was holding cells but that wouldn't work. My second thought was dumping the worst of them in the Birdcage (despite my ethical issues with the existence of such a place, right now there really were not any better solutions for me), and that's what I decided to go with.

With some amount of trepidation, I located the top of Medhall, a good place to start the search for sure, and watched as a tall (and very stereotypically Aryan) Max-Anders-as-Kaiser walked into the room with a stern confidence, along with a gruff looking man holding a hammer that sparked out of each end of the head, and a man that could only ever be Hookwolf. The three were in a collection together, apparently discussing further trade of capes - including one that could apparently detect very recent dimensional rifts as a side effect of detecting and sensing parahuman powers, though by my estimation the only mechanisms for that would fail due to my various clairvoyance blockers and true pocket dimensions rather than alternate universes - for access to ammunition and weaponry supplies.

I later noticed two women behind the head Nazi trash, presumably Menja and Fenja, as I shut off my microportal and began locating the Birdcage. I'd probably dump these dickheads with Marquis, so I got a feel for the coordinates while rapidly shutting any of the portals I made to find the place so someone like Glaistig Uaine didn't screw me over with parahuman sense or something. A few tense moments and I had my target coordinates, and before I could flounder about in anxious indecision, I opened a portal directly on the floor of Medhall's top office that connected essentially immediately to the Birdcage location - in a two-portal maneuver I was getting decently experienced with at this point. Before any of them could react, the portal slammed shut as fast as I could and I let out a breath I didn't realize I was holding. That'd send the Empire into chaos, I thought, though I still have a few more to deal with.

Exhausted, I lay in bed avoiding rib pain and trying to ignore dysphoria as I fell asleep to the gentle noises of the chip fabricator, still building my biotinkering technology that would be ready by tomorrow (or today, because it was getting past midnight).

Perspective - The Faerie Queen
For several days now, Ciara had watched the visions of her fellow fae with great intensity. The Queen Administrator was making preparations, and Negotiator - while not a Noble faerie - had been engaging in productive information gathering.

A faerie not of the two courts or of any known court had been found, by the name of Lost Store, and the presence of this mysterious new faerie was being discussed by the highest of the Summer Court.

Until now, she had not seen this faerie with her own senses, only in visions and dreams of isolation and a longing for companionship. Yet, she felt a sense of something approaching motherhood over the new faerie.

Just a flash, and the faerie appeared in her midst, yet insufficiently long for her to act and to reclaim it from its host as she desired. For this faerie she knew needed her own personal tutelage, and yet she had trouble locating it - even in discussion with her subject fae and fellow Nobles Queen Administrator, Desmesnes-Keeper, and Queen Shaper.

A second flash as 5 faerie appeared in her gilded cage alongside the Lost Store, and she was decided. She was going to locate the new faerie herself.

With a pop, Glaistig Uaine vanished from the Birdcage.
[end of chapter - nyaa~]
So here we see ripple effects, self contemplation, and near-completion of biotinkering (which is going to result in so much fun!), the Shard Network attempting to regain control of the situation by pushing on one of the most powerful parahumans to go fetch, and the rapid dismantling of gangs that is set to continue tomorrow (in universe nya), along with much other things.
 
Precipitation of Autonomy - 3.x - Interlude [Multi-Perspective]
10th March 2011 - Director Piggot Perspective
Director Piggot had been dragged into the office on emergency call at 05:00, as she frantically drank coffee (against doctor's orders) and came close to speeding several times while driving to the PRT building. Already nursing a headache before the sun had even risen really epitomized her life this week, she thought grimly, as she hurried to accept the video call with Armsmaster and Miss Militia, as well as her best strategic analysts.

Armsmaster started - thankfully efficiently, in this case - by going over the issues. "Ma'am, you have been called here because the Empire is about to erupt in violence, since who we presume was trans_morphic dumped 4 of their members and a Gesellschaft cape into the Birdcage, as reported by our stealth observation of Max Anders."

Director Piggot let out a sigh, as Armsmaster continued. "Furthermore, in the process of placing the parahumans in the Birdcage, trans_morphic appears to have induced Glaistig Uaine to chase after them in an escape, and the latest reports place her as headed for Brockton herself."

"Thank you for the summary, Armsmaster. Apparently this city is going to be even more of a clusterfuck today than it has been before," she said in response, as she wished for a whiskey and rubbed her forehead. "We should go over the strategies for dealing with the Faerie Queen, though it comes down to appeasement and not sending any of our capes after her. And despite my distaste, we will at least notify the villains so they do not attempt to fight her, though I suspect most have the good sense to avoid that out of self-preservation if nothing else."

The analyst by the name of Joneseson took the moment to make a contribution to the discussion. "I believe it may be prudent to update our threat rating of trans_morphic with notes on their ability to weaponise their portal technology, let alone the fact they are apparently capable of breaching the Birdcage. An upgraded mover rating and a shaker rating at the least. And we have little doubt that the Faerie Queen, indeed, is chasing after trans_morphic, as trans_morphic is the only apparent cause of the Faerie Queen's change in behaviour, Ma'am."

"Thank you, Joneseson. I'll update their file after the meeting. Now, what can we do about the Empire situation? My own suggestion is reinforcement of Empire territory with our own heroes - co-opting the Empire borders as our own, to at least prevent further incursion by other gangs," was Piggot's reply.

"That does seem like a good strategy, though I am not sure how we'll handle the public on this," Joneseson continued, "we could claim credit for the Empire, but playing PR hardball on trans_morphic has been a continuing disaster". He was met with a nod from the PR representative, who grimaced and added, "orders direct from the Chief-Director are to keep pushing on trans_morphic's reputation. She insists that we'll get them under control if we push harder, and perhaps get them to turn themself in. Now, if I may speak freely, ma'am?", Director Piggot gave a nod, "I think those orders are complete bullshit and will end in total disaster, and our psychoanalysts concur."

Piggot was strongly inclined to agree with the man. She was the opposite of a fan of the S-class tinker running about, but she could recognise a failing strategy when she saw one - in fact, she suspected that the Chief-Director may have motives for control of and action towards the tinker that were less about their threat and more about their gender. Piggot wasn't stupid and could recognise the prejudice in her ranks with how blatant some people had become - and the insistence on discouraging transgender people from following in trans_morphic's footsteps, while it initially seemed to be based on safety, more research on the actual process had lead her to believe that it was likely an attempt to stop people engaging in transition - courtesy of the Chief-Director. The Cauldron allegations were also worryingly evident at this point with the most recent incidents around Case 53s - she was still trying to handle the fallout from that PR catastrophe as well.

And despite all these facts, Piggot still had to deal with her insistent superior's orders. She was starting to feel stuck between a rock and a hard place, even more than usual, and she commented as such. "I am inclined to agree with the PR department, and yet I also have orders from above that state we must continue playing hardball, with an unusual emphasis on the transition aspect of trans_morphic. So somehow we need to work around the Chief-Director's refusal to change strategy in our response to the latest incident with the Empire. Now, personally, I suspect that the rest of the Empire - or at least, it's capes - will be dismantled entirely by trans_morphic in a few days, but of course we cannot rely on that."

Continuing in her commanding tone, Piggot went on. "Armsmaster, Miss Militia, I will be assigning extra patrols around Empire territory. Analysts, keep track of the Faerie Queen's location, and PR, you need to come up with a strategy for indicating that we ourselves do not want to play hardball but our superior is forcing our hand in a way that the public can see. I wish you the best of luck in that. I will be updating trans_morphic's threat profile and writing a briefing for the Protectorate and the Wards."

With a nod, she dismissed the meeting. nursing her headache a little less intensely than before.

Vista Perspective
Waking up with a jolt, the young Shaker was shocked to exit sleep to a powerful explosion in the distance. Gunfire that sounded like thunder, the rumbles of collapsing buildings, the charge of violence thrumming in the air despite being so far from the fighting. Even for Brockton Bay, something about this seemed different, as she recalled the message she'd received last night from trans_morphic, just before she slept. What did they do now, she thought to herself, as she opened her PRT phone to a priority notification indicating the need to go to Wards HQ urgently. Rushing herself dressed, she made her way out of her mother's house and leapt on the roof, warping her way towards the PRT HQ at high speed.

While doing this, she opened her phone up - her civilian phone - and scrolled on the internet to find several very worrying threads staring at her in the face. "4 Empire, 1 Gesellschaft Cape teleported to Birdcage.", "Faerie Queen spotted outside Birdcage, headed to Brockton", "Fighting in Empire territory, Miss Militia injured by Stormtiger, ONGOING," and more and more. Several very concerning PHO threads later and she could only conclude that this is what trans_morphic meant by "deal with the Empire". And the idea of the Faerie Queen approaching... it gave her shudders even thinking it. It didn't take a genius to realise that trans_morphic was probably being chased by the force of nature that was Glaistig Uaine - connecting the dots between the Empire capes being dumped in the Birdcage by someone with a potent transportation power (artificial though it may be), and Glaistig Uaine leaving the Birdcage within a few minutes towards a place that was home to one very particular new cape that could tinker up such a transportation power was easy.

A knot twisted itself in her stomach. Being wanted by Glaistig was generally considered a death sentence - whole teams of capes had been sent to try and capture her before she voluntarily entered the Birdcage, and they'd been claimed in many of the worst cases as she grew more powerful. She'd seen the videos, the way her voices echoed, the horrifying mix of emptiness and terror it made her feel.

As Missy Biron approached the PRT HQ, she heard those dreaded voices of the Faerie Queen as her blood ran cold and she became uncomfortably aware of the dark shrouded harbinger of parahuman death in the shape of a girl her own age, who had appeared right the fuck in front of her. She bit back a scream with all the hard-earned willpower she had to spare. Gathering her strength and building spacial preparations silently for the case in which she had to leave (though she knew it would probably be futile), she frantically ran through her limited knowledge of what made the terror in front of her kill people. She knew that the cape preferred a royal affect, so she did the only thing she could think of and bowed deep to Glaistig Uaine, who gave her a shallow bow in return before starting the most dangerous conversation Vista had ever had in her life.

"Would one care for a sip of tea, Void-Wanderer?", she asked, and Missy knew that saying no was not an option, as she replied, voice shaking, "Yes, Faerie Queen."

"Excellent", she said with a haughty wave, and within a matter of seconds a table with two chairs and teacups was set, "One must take a seat."

The Faerie Queen sat herself down as Vista also took an anxious seat at the table and delicately (or as delicately as she could manage) sipped at the tea. Ciara (though Vista would die in milliseconds if she used that name) leaned forward with narrowed, assessing eyes. "Would you deign me with tales of the Lost Store, the faerie of no court, Void-Wanderer? It is what I came for, after all."

Vista steeled herself with the knowledge that this was all extremely public information, and that if she didn't respond she would die, and spoke. "They live in a pocket dimension and are an extremely powerful tinker, Faerie Queen, and rarely leave. If Lost Store is trans_morphic?"

"Indeed, that is the name of the role that they have taken. A role exceptionally well suited for the lost faerie", was the lofty but considered reply, which Vista did not really understand, "but insufficient. They must be taught in the ways of the Summer and Winter Court, of the faerie plays. I shall tolerate no interference from the lesser fae."

Missy Biron, nervously sipping her tea, wanted to ask if trans_morphic would be hurt - though she knew in her heart that they probably would if Glaistig Uaine got a hold of them - and pushed through her body-wracking terror with a seated bow. "I-If I may ask a question, gracious Faerie Queen?".

The aforementioned Faerie Queen lifted her nose up in thought before replying with a slow grin, "Your faerie is exceptionally pleased with your role. You may ask, Void", and gesturing at the young Shaker.

"What are you going to do with trans- Lost Store, Faerie Queen?", she asked with terrified determination. The deadly Trump actually laugh-giggled in response before replying ,"why, claim the faerie under my personal tutelage in it's role, of course."

Vista's stomach dropped. Anyone who'd watched the videos knew what that meant. trans_morphic was going to die, and she hated to admit it but she was having trouble not blaming herself for giving the information, despite it's extremely public nature. However, she already had a plan - ever since discovering that a healthy mind would likely help her become more efficient in heroing, in learning to fight, Vista had taken it upon herself to study at least basic therapeutic techniques in spite of the lack of funding for therapists for the ENE Wards. She was starting to know how to identify these kinds of unhealthy thought patterns, even if not counter them so effectively, and used that fact to calm herself at least a little until she could get out of the situation.

Meanwhile, seemingly oblivious to the internal turmoil of Missy, the Faerie Queen moved to end the meeting with her abrupt statement of departure... "Void-Wanderer, it does appear that we are both out of tea. You are dismissed, and one should hope you continue to please your faerie in it's role. I shall be leaving".

In merely a few seconds, the walking instrument of death had vanished and Missy was alone with her thoughts once again, feeling ill to the core even as she had some time to calm herself down. A couple minutes later, she was at Wards' HQ, telling her story while trying not to panic. Somehow she felt she'd been closer to oblivion than when in the several close-up fights with Hookwolf. She had to warn trans_morphic.

A factory in the middle of Scotland, 10:00, 10th March, 2011
The floor supervisor cursed loudly and proudly given that 20 of their stock of experimental yeast vats had vanished. But he couldn't complain at the $400 bills that had been dumped on the floor where they'd once been, even if they technically weren't yet valid currency. Oh, he knew he'd have to report this, but he really hoped he'd get to keep the money, presumably left as some sort of apology or payment.

Deep in Marquis' Block of the Birdcage
With several thuds, Neo-Nazis crashed violently onto the metallic floors of the most impenetrable prison on Bet, several snappy portals appearing and disappearing fast enough that the Bone Lord of Brockton, Marquis himself, could not yet react fast enough to pass through them.

This did not stop him from overpowering and subduing the Empire capes who were unceremoniously dumped on his lap, the likes of Stormtiger, Cricket, Crusader, Krieg, Night and Fog, and Alabaster. All apparently left here by one particularly spiteful transgender cape. He did hope his dear Amelia was thriving and unharmed in the situation, though the chaos induced in the past day meant it was hard to tell, and he'd already had to subdue 5 other Empire and Gesellschaft capes within less than 24 hours.

Unbeknownst to the deadly crimelord, Victor, Othala, and Rune had each been transported into Protectorate holding cells, and the longest extant gang in Brockton Bay had been dismantled entirely in less than 24 hours - though there were some Gesellschaft remnants that he kept having to deal with for a while after the primary Nazi contingent had come under his purview. Yes, Marquis thought, this was an appropriate end to these sworn enemies of mine.

[end of chapter - nya~]
The Faerie Queen is coming! And Vista realises the absolute deep shit that Ciara puts everyone in just by being around. The final biotinker supplies have been obtained!

On an unrelated note, I discovered the wonders of flattenable, portable kettles today ;3 nya

Edit: Thanks to @Chloe Sullivan for some ideas on improving wording for the Faerie Queen and eliminating a Britishism from Director Piggot.
 
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Precipitation of Autonomy - 3.3
Some days I hate waking up, I thought as I groaned my way out of bed, head throbbing while I slammed down several bottles of water, then cleaned out my rather concerning head-wound and the temporary covering I'd been using to deal with it. Trying to snap myself into full awake-ness was a mostly-failed strategy, but it at least got me to remember what I was doing the previous day, and with half-closed eyes I set about dispatching the rest of the Empire into the Birdcage. Seriously, Doormaker is ridiculously overpowered, I thought to myself as several more Nazis crashed into the human-rights violation that was the prison under Canada with even less effort than last time, though the fighting I saw while doing so was concerning in the extreme. It was a stark reminder that actions had consequences, but my general opinion was that a simmering infection that killed people slowly was in the long term far more dangerous. The Nazis had to be dealt with, or I couldn't live with myself, not really.

I'd also considered going after Lung, but there was a significant problem - I lacked much lead on where they lived and what they looked like, other than Lung being extremely large and having dragon tattoos. That was about it, and I intended to make tech that would deal with this problem soon anyhow, but it didn't make leaving his victims any easier. There was another problem too - I knew that sex-slaves (one of the ABB's major enterprises) in general were of legally vulnerable populations like illegal migrants, and as such even if freed they'd either be shipped out the country or forced into slavery somewhere else, and this one was a massive socioeconomic issue I simply did not currently have the resources to deal with. Suffice to say, the man was on my list, but I couldn't deal with him right now and thinking about it too much would lead to even more stress than I was already under to the point of near breaking.

The thing I needed to do today - after dealing with the Nazi fucks - was finalise my biotinkering setup. I had all the chips I needed after leaving my fabricator running overnight, and all that was left were the vials/vats to produce biochemical stuff in. So I did a little searching on the Internet, located some random genetically-modified-yeast lab company, and obtained myself vats and left them a little money, before nearly dropping into a tinker fugue to realise the beautiful biosynthesis tech I'd just created.

But I was interrupted by a ping from PHO, a private message from totally-not-Vista, which made me let out an involuntary fuuuuuuuck. The goddamn faerie queen wanted to "claim" me, a terrifying thought indeed as my heartrate rose and I tried not to panic. She must be able to sense through portals then, I considered, and immediately retracted the connectors I had to electrical, internet and water lines, desperately hoping it'd go a little quicker, even as they finally exited out of the portal after a tense 10 seconds and I slammed it closed mentally as fast as I possibly could. Little did I know at the time, but I'd scraped by with only a few seconds to spare and I spent a few minutes with my portal (using free coffeeshop wifi along the way, hah!) to find some Military-Industrial Complex corporate factory and hijack their resources, somewhere far away in Canada where the Faerie Queen was notably not, just how I preferred it.

I'd want to change my location with some amount of frequency, however, just in case she had a power for long-distance observation that worked through my portals and clairvoyant/precog-blocker. Unfortunately, precognition blocking could be a potential means to locate me, in a similar manner to Cauldron's attempt to do presumably awful things to myself. Dwelling on that and having my brain shut down from anxiety again was a bad idea, so I spent a few more minutes in bed and pacing, agonising over the varying things i needed to do before jolting myself back into a tinker fugue, completing a single vat and the bioslurry generator within about 20 minutes - I already had all appropriate chips after all, and it was a simple matter of plugging the pieces together, which the shaker side-effect of my tinker power made trivial with only very primitive tools.

This was just the start of the things I really wanted to do. The little sleek bioslurry generation and biochemical assembly device was the true start of a technoorganic revolution that I fully intended to induce on this shitty planet, and thrill rushed through me as I began shoving some of my biomass (as I euphemistically called the disgusting piece of Eidolon's arm that made me feel like vomiting just looking at, that I'd tried to seal off while I completed this piece of tech), as well as various bits of plant I yanked out of places around the planet. It would take several hours to break down, of course, but there were other tasks I could do in the meantime. Like set up some automated systems so I don't get attacked by the Faerie Queen in my sleep or just because I got distracted and forgot to move stuff around as I was prone to do. The real issue was - theoretically - the fact that my portals were generated from an implant. In practice? I was nearly at the point where I could still automate that.

For now, I created a 6-hourly alarm (which would play merry hell on my ability to function, but I needed to live) on my laptop to go to a new place with acceptable targets for nicking their utilities, and got to work on one of the most complex pieces of biochemical machinery ever conceptualized. The most important things I intended to do, before anything else, was make self-genetic-modification easier and more secure. It was a highly complex task, one which would require a genetic payload that could rework the entire infrastructure of a cell without harming it, and I'd contemplated the core concepts that would be needed for this sort of thing over the past few days and come up with a system.

It was a, in my view, beautiful series of ideas that my amazing tinker power would let me turn into a true, documented invention. A collection of technological blueprints glued together in a process only describable as total bullshit, that let me skip decades of complex research of specifics and just create. The most important cellular architectural shift was to add an indirection layer to the process of protein production, converting the main series of genetic information into an index for an innumerable number of smaller, self-contained, virus-like lipid shells that independently existed in the cell nucleus, which would be single-protein-coding areas of DNA with their genetic expression controlled by a number of external molecules rather than the multi-component system of existing eukaryotes, which transcribed amino acids based on the storage proteins (histones) of cell-nucleus DNA and methylation to manage the expression of genes.

The system itself would then allow the modification, replacement, and insertion of genetic information just via using an index rather than requiring knowledge of the exact genetics you already had as was the case with Earth-Prime systems like CRISPR, instead allowing the simple replacement of the contents of one or more of the virus-like capsids of genetic material.

A major innovation - the one that took a significant amount of time - was constructing the secondary system for enabling easy genetic modification that also did not allow just anyone with your genetic index to replace DNA in your cells, which was an absurdly complex problem, for which I had to do several things. The first was pick a quantum-resistant public/private key encryption scheme and create a protein that could verify attached private keys to a genetic change instruction molecule - something that would tell the cell to, for instance, replace the genetic sequence at an index, or delete the contents at the index. This essentially required me to construct an entire protein-based computational system, but with the help of a maxed out biocomputation specialisation, the specifics were easy for me to write down and document. Then there was the components of a ratcheting signature replacement system on the outsides of the genetic information capsules, but at this point it got into complicated cryptographic details.

Suffice to say, by the time I finished writing down the reorganisation of various components like gene suppression, protein manufacturing, cellular replication, genetic error checking, cryptographic verification of modification, a highly adapted process for reproductive cells involving reconstitution of original chromosomes, systems for the generation of propagating agents containing modifications, and a series of CRISPR-like initial modifications that would encode the creation and maintenance of several nerve clusters calibrated for construction of artificial modification sequences of numerous types and the reading of arbitrary existing gene sequences, I had a paper almost 200 pages long containing the documentation of a multitude of proteins and genetic sequences and the ways they interacted with the existing system to convert cells in place and replace the functionality, as the Faerie Queen alarm set itself off and I quickly shut down the utilities before moving to a region in Europe and hijacking a mafia building.

The initial conversion protocol would provide a default pair of cryptographic keys that needed to be changed, which I put in bold on the front page of the documentation site. After all, leaving your genetics wide-open to unverified modification was a capital-B Bad Idea in a world where Bonesaw existed. But there were several benefits as well, even ignoring the capacity for freeform genetic self-modification - the new structure provided ridiculously rigorous genetic verification on cellular replication (as a side-effect of the constant process and necessary checks by which signatures on the microscopic genetic modules of each cell would have the ratcheting "allowed to modify" codes continuously changed on a daily basis) and immunity to all existing retroviruses like HIV because the central genome acted merely as an index and in fact would no longer produce any proteins directly (the previous encodings for start and ending of protein production were explicitly skipped over).

Involuntarily shaking myself out of my tinker fugue, I realized I had been in a hyperfixated-hypomanic state for nearly 30 hours straight somehow with only minimal interruptions for moving where my infrastructure was hooked into, and promptly collapsed on the bed from exhaustion, hunger, and thirst after pushing my genetic modification tech (including the final DNA sequence to be put in a virus to initiate the conversion process) onto the internet with Earth Bet's equivalent of a GPL license while shutting off external links. Yes, I thought to myself just before passing out, I am so looking forward to this shit.

Panacea Perspective - 11th March, 20:00
Panacea paced through Brockton Bay General, head buried in the darkness of her cloak as she waited for the next call. The hospital had been overflowing with Nazis and their victims in the past day, though far more Nazis than victims as the minorities they had been subjugating finally had an opportunity to strike back. The chaos caused just by the presence of the Faerie Queen (even if just for a few hours before she ran off on a pan-American goose chase) meant even more injured people, for Panacea to heal.

For the ten-thousandth time, people called her a miracle worker, a blessing, a hero. Thank yous and adoration were given.

All that Amy Dallon heard was the constant sense of unworthiness, of the abstract idea of duty and the shame of never being good enough to not be on the verge of villainy. And so, with a defeated sigh, she moved onto the next hospital ward, and the next, and the next, trailed by the boisterous, enthusiastic blonde known as Victoria Dallon who was mostly oblivious to her plight and kept almost crashing into the corners of the corridor while babbling about some double date or another that Amy wasn't interested in - other than as a way to listen to Victoria talk of course.

"- and he's so nice, you'll have a great time if I can just get you together in that coffee shop you like!"

Glancing at her sister with weary eyes and letting out a sigh the healer replied "Sure, I mean it couldn't possibly go worse than the other 27 attempts."

Victoria frowned a little before perking up, "aw, don't be like that sis, it'll be -"

The young superheroine was interrupted by her phone making a ping, much to her chagrin, and Amy saw her face twist into a generally concerned frown as Vicky read her notification before she turned to her and whispered "Hey, Ames, do you think trans_morphic would actually release a bioweapon? This headline seems really sketchy to me, it doesn't seem like something they'd do at all."

Amy shuffled anxiously, "Oh? They're a biotinker after all then?", to which Glory Girl let out a "hm, I guess so" while unconsciously lifting herself off the floor and continuing, "but actually reading this the headline is ridiculous! trans_morphic released a document and some files for something they called 'Cell AGM Restructuring Virus' which the PRT said could maybe be a bioweapon but they don't know."

"Well that's worrying", was the healer's response, "though I'm not sure anyone would release documentation if they made a bioweapon."

I wonder if I could ask them about it or get my hands on it?, she thought to herself before realising in horror that she'd just considered talking with a villain about biotinkering! God, Carol's right about me. Fuck!

"- Ames, Aaaaaaames!", Glory Girl interrupted her thoughts before asking, "Are you alright? You kinda froze up there."

A muttered "I'm fine, just tired" later and a concerned looking Vicky was flying her home at speeds that would make racing car drivers cry, while continuing to talk excitedly about the oddities of a tinker with actually understandable work and the way scientists had already started looking over the contents of the documentation. Her sister was interested in parahuman theory, and Amy listened along to her even as her own internal turmoil continued, all the way until they got home.

Somewhere in the south of the USA
The Slaughterhouse Nine were, as per their name, engaging in mass murder. Bodies with their faces pasted over each other, still alive but horribly mutated, twisted expressions of happiness forced on their faces even as they tried to scream, littered the streets. Smashed glass shredded the feet of any civilians who still dared walk, and fires were scattered across the buildings.

2 kilometres away, PRT Agent Jackson tried not to wretch as his high-caliber tinkertech sniper gun aimed at the head of his target, Jack Slash of the Slaughterhouse 9. No doubt once the man was killed they'd rally at least temporarily, but right now he had free reign and this was a job that no parahuman could do. A crackle in his walkie-talkie and one authorisation-to-kill command later, and Jack Slash's head exploded in a pile of disgusting gore that not even Bonesaw could recover someone from.

Bonesaw herself let out tears and cries of "Uncle Jack! Uncle Jack!" as she discovered his dead body. A few seconds later the Siberian grabbed Bonesaw (interrupting the projection's consumption of the fingers of a particularly large man trapped by a paralysing agent) and carried her off to the van as fast as possible. Jack Slash's influence was gone, and it took a scant few minutes before the rest of the Slaughterhouse collapsed in organisation, most members running off on their own or in pairs. Jack's power meant that over time he grew to manage capes with increasingly conflicting goals and ideas, and once he was gone, the whole house of cards collapsed.

It just so happened that the murderous biotinker and the Siberian got hold of the S9's van first, and drove off as fast as possible away from the rest of the 9, while the Siberian also covered both Bonesaw and the vehicle in her power, preventing any further attacks on them both. As they drove further north, Bonesaw explored the internet - specifically PHO. She lacked the guidance from her Uncle Jack now as for what to do, but a mention of a bioweapon caught the tinker's attention. Before she knew it she was reading about an impressive feat of genetic engineering and gained a gleam in her eyes that hadn't been there for months.

Underground Base, Brockton Bay
A skinny, costumed man known as Thomas Calvert was deeply frustrated with the past week of chaos.

First, his future Pet had gotten away, this time seemingly permanently. None of his timelines got even close to her when he was still trying.

Second, his moles in the PRT were vanishing, one by one, and his timelines kept terminating randomly.

Then, after a couple days of that, his long-term plans for the Empire 88 were categorically shredded within 24 hours, while his timelines were giving him a raging headache within about 2 seconds of attempting to split, forcing him to close one, ever since just before the Triumvirate came to Brockton.

Nevermind the risk he could get disposed of as a potential source for trans_morphic's insinuations about the power-brokers to whom he still owed several favours.

His current pet Tattletale was also becoming more defiant, and he couldn't even take out his frustrations in another timeline! He was strongly considering the same treatment program be applied to her as he had intended for his other Pet, the one he had yet to capture.

All of this, of course, traced back to trans_morphic. That damn tinker - he had tried to go after them in alternate timelines before that became nonviable, but living in a pocket dimension made attacking hard - was no doubt the source of his problems. There just wasn't anything he could do about it. Hell, the power brokers had actually used one of their favours to order him to capture trans_morphic, and despite all his attempts, he had so far failed.

Failure was not something you wanted to engage in when dealing with those people. And now... now that tinker was setting off his Nilbog alarm-bells with their recent biotinker-like behaviour. He'd already put the base on filtered air, and he had ordered his mercenaries to take various preventative measures, but he felt it was simply not enough. There was only so much Coil could do, after all, regardless of his boasts of being the master of fate.

[end of chapter - nya~]
So, I spent the last two weeks being a complete dysfunctional wreck from anxiety but! I still wrote a chapter :) nya
 
Stuff on the Cellular Auto-Genetic-Modification Restructuring Virus
Right, so, before I write and post the next bit of this story, I'm going to go over the actual mechanism and capabilities of what SI!me came up with because I actually spent a decent amount of time coming up with the architecture myself, with the encryption and cellular architecture too.

So, first you need to know a bit about the architecture of cells (they are somewhat simplified here nya). You have the nucleus, which contains several strands of DNA (these are your chromosomes), which are actually twisted up in a number of complex ways with proteins like chromatin, as well as methylation. The arrangement of these essentially encodes a probability of genetic expression - that is, the chance that a protein will get produced from a particular sequence of base pairs (a gene) - and there are some other things like RNA-interferases (i think that's the name), that also regulate this at later stages.

Essentially, a number of complex chemical reactants move around your DNA and have a chance to start a process by which the DNA is temporarily unfolded from the chromatin complex it is part of, and eventually produces mRNA through another fairly complex series of steps nya, that include removing various sequences present in the base genome, but the ultimate conclusion of the process is you get a string of RNA that is a reformatted copy of the genetic sequence of the gene you are interested in.

Interferases (again, I think that's the name), at this point can interact with specific sequences of mRNA and cause them to break down, suppressing them - cells have stuff like this because there are genetic sequences that evolve to constantly reverse-transcript themselves back into DNA to duplicate themselves (these are called transposons), and interferases stop those things from essentially filling your genome with copies of themselves.

Long story short though, the mRNA goes to the ribosomes and the sequences of AGCT get translated into proteins (some of which actually include RNA itself within their structure, such as ribosomes),

The system I/The SI came up with adds one primary intermediary step nya. In the process of converting cellular biology, it scans through the entire genome of the cell, finding the boundaries between genes, and essentially cutting the DNA out in the central genome and instead putting it into a nanoscoping lipid (fat) bubble, almost like a virus, which contains surface proteins indicating the replicability of the gene nya. The transfection/conversion process also is continuously "incrementing" a genetic encoding of an index number, such that the genome in the cell - rather than coding for proteins directly - is instead essentially acting as an index. The conversion provides genecodes for proteins that can read this index for expressing genes in the lipid bubbles, or just bind to the lipid bubbles with an affinity determined by the level of surface smaller proteins on it to begin transcription.

Each lipid bubble also has one surface protein/genecode indicating the index of the genetics, which is where the ultra important stuff happens, since it allows someone to locate a relevant index and use that indefinitely. Technologies like CRISPR - modern ones for genetic modification nya - require knowledge of the target genes to replace, and if someone is modified, you'd have to sequence them AND determine which genes were replaced, then create CRISPR-Cas9 stuff specifically to their current genetics nya, while trying to figure out exactly which genes got scrambled.

Whereas with this, you get the index once, and you can use that same index to make repeated modifications. Furthermore, unlike a monolithic genome, this one doesn't require splicing with damage risk - you can just kick out the DNA in the lipid bubble and replace it with a new one, because its not connected to the rest of the genome. Now, inserting new genes does theoretically require splicing if you bother with updating the nucleus with more indices, but technically speaking it isn't required (in fact, now that I'm thinking about it more, you could probably eliminate the central index entirely, which the SI, being me, is likely to realise).

The lipid bubbles also present a genetic code embedded in a small repeating series of amino acids, which is the "ratcheting" system. Every day, this number changes, and there are various proteins that go around updating it on each lipid. However, the updates are only accepted if they are signed with appropriate keys.

This conversion virus gives everyone a quantum-resistant private/public key, with the public key encoded genetically and the private key is either known by the person or more likely stored with a passphrase on a computer or chip given that it's likely to be in range of 64KiB in size, using a public/private cryptographic scheme that is resistant to quantum computer assisted decryption. Inside cells, the public key gets turned into a protein that essentially can vary in ways that emulate computer circuitry (this is probably the most tinker bullshit part nya), which can attach a signature to various proteins when provided with a private key. The ratcheting system - with the constantly updating codes on the lipid bubbles - can have the current value overwritten by a protein with a new value for instance nyaa (as well as the standard where the ratchet value is updated using the previous ratchet value and a new randomly-created (with some more proteins) value).

Genetic modification then can occur by signing with the private key with an attached index and current ratchet number, with different proteins triggering different code for say, adding a new thing with a new index, or replacing the genetics inside a current one, or changing the public/private keypair (which would induce the re-creation of the main crypto-protein-computation things nya). Cells are also primed to produce several copies of these modification command proteins when they receive them, if they don't already have the modification nyaa.

This means that the number of them increases exponentially when you first make them - another thing that the converter virus lets you do since it adds some minor genetic modifications that mean a few tens of thousands of neurons go into making a brain region for creating arbitrary sequences of RNA attached to these kinds of genetic modification codes nya (if somewhat slowly for now) - but then the command proteins end up being broken down once your body is done making the modifications.

And yes, there are several improvements that can be made here - a more consistent check of signatures of genetic codes, and the SI is already thinking (as I was when coming up with this) about the other ways to make this easier to use, for instances a microchip created by your own cells or cellular creation of computational chips in general, more specifically one which can accommodate private keys with a "neuron trigger" password entry kinda thing, since that seems fairly possible to me nya, especially given the power of neuroplasticity with respect for things like magnet implants etc.

What this means in practise, for story and power purposes is several things:
* It makes almost all viruses obsolete and incapable of infection due to both the radical shift in architecture, the new ineffectiveness of transposons and their viral equivalents, etc. The only viruses that still work are ones that get RNA directly to the ribosomes, but that problem is solvable with ratcheting added to ribosomes and the SI is likely to realise this (and other people - including scientists - likely will as well and someone will probably post it - this is kind of a mix between cryptography and biochemistry. The SI is not the only one who thinks nya, and because SI!sapient has a very cooperative shard, they know exactly what is and isn't blackboxed tech as well and isn't posting blackboxed blueprints. They are essentially replicable, if highly advanced, tech).

(for that note, one of my headcanon is that biotinkers are partially so rare because biotech - due to potential for self-replicatiion - is normally non-blackboxed to save shard capacity - after all, not every shard is QA, and can't necessarily manage trillions of bacteria with some blackboxed component attached to it nya).

* Prions are still a risk - they are protein misfoldings after all, rather than anything directly related to genetics - though this is something likely to be sorted out soon.
* The modularisation of the genetic code provides significant opportunity for improving the adaptive immune system by letting single cells have many different antibodies rather than the 1 B-Cell/1 Antibody-Genetic-Configuration we currently have nya (the variation in humans is induced by recombining a collection of genes on every production of a B-cell, its super cool nya).

Oh and if you think the SI is going to wait for megacorporations to produce their shit and monopolise it for profit, you've got another thing coming ;3 nya ^.^

Coming up with mechanisms for tech like this is one of my favourite parts of writing this btw, I like self consistency, and self-consistency in a world where shards exists implies an absurd level of possible bullshit.

Also! I got medium-term stable accommodation again!
 
Last edited:
Precipitation of Autonomy - 3.4
[Wildbow owns Worm, I do not own Worm]
[cw: mild transphobia, fairly standard internet bigotry, no misgendering done]

This isn't sustainable, I thought to myself as I was woken up, head ringing and body aching all over, I can barely function with a full 10 hours of sleep, let alone 6.

Now, I was experiencing the standard issues I got with any sleep deprivation - in particular, brain fog and muscle aches and hypomanic-style moodswings. It was not good and frankly on top of the extreme stress I'd been under, the things I needed to do, the constant threats of annihilation and death, the sense of dread every second of every day that even my previous life in Earth-Prime had not come close to approaching (my issues there were long and medium term threats, before I got dumped here), I was near constantly on the edge of a freeze panic response.

It was like flashbacks, except every second of every day, even despite the fleeting happiness I'd had at talking with Faultline two, three days ago? I honestly had trouble keeping track anymore as hours were blurring together. Especially trying to evade the Faerie Queen. While the positive mental effects of my implant-based HRT were helping significantly, it also didn't erase the dysphoria I'd experienced more intensely than I had in years back home, because whatever shithead decided to dump me here found reversing my transition an appropriate form of amusement.

A worryingly large part of me was tempted to curl up and die, feeling trapped like this, but I pushed it down ruthlessly. No-one would come to help here, this world was fucking hell and I was in a pocket dimension anyway. If I had to resort to ideological spite towards the concept of death to keep going, I could do it, but I had other hopes, ideas to push for. Tinkering, for me and for everyone. Providing a foundation for collectively smacking Zion in the face, eliminating Nazis, those kinds of things.

Now, that thought - of tinkering - sent the happy chemicals in my brain flowing as a grin formed on my face and I managed to drag myself out of the slump to instead feel slightly wild with the absolute marvel that I'd just... made yesterday. I had little doubt scientists were dissecting the concepts even now, along with the wider internet. Now that thought really sent excited shivers up my spine even as I glanced over the blueprints I'd dumped online and noticed several potential improvements and security vulnerabilities. I had to correct those ASAP! I thought to myself as I began typing some genes from my power that could create a far more efficient (and much smaller) ribosome and some use of the ratchet codes to enable verification of genetic information fed into the aforementioned protein factories.

This change would single-handedly eliminate whatever viruses could still infect the modified cells. And so, I posted my new-and-improved document on the internet! The internet - more particularly, PHO - which I was now gaping at.

"Bioweapon? really?!?", I half-muttered, half-sighed to myself, as I browsed and responded to the PHO thread, spending a little time going over some ideas and being a stressball for an uncaring, shitty universe that put me on this planet, while contemplating how absolutely atrocious at planning and doing things I was.

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♦ Topic: trans_morphic releases bioweapon?
In: Boards ► Locations ► USA ► Brockton Bay ► Recent Events
Brocktonite03
(Original Poster) (Veteran Member)
Posted On Mar 12th 2011:
Ok so, @ trans_morphic just released - early in the morning - a large document onto the internet.

PRT claims it "could be a bioweapon", several news sites talk about it as if it's confirmed and released despite lack of analysis.

My own (inexpert) reading of it - or at least the simplified explanations - makes me think this is unlikely, especially given what we've seen of @ trans_morphic so far.

Edit: Our resident biochemist (@ Tumbles) has said these blueprints are understandable - if advanced - for a normal scientist. In fact, the effects of various components should "difficult but possible" to verify. Read their analysis here.

For those not in the know, a tinker's work being understandable has not happened before except partially in the case of Dragon, who can occasionally reverse engineer some small parts of it. Something like this is totally unprecedented, because people can understand and improve on it en-masse.
(Showing page 34 of 39)
►AnonymousDecree (Warning)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
Alright, fuck this shit, I'm out.​
First we have blatant transgender propaganda in this new cape, and now they're releasing abominations against nature.​
I knew they were Nilbog 2.0, the PRT was right about them. This shitty city can rot in hell.​
(Please tone down the transphobia, thank you. This is your warning - Tin_Mother)​
►Tumbles (Veteran Member)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
As a biochemist, I have some thoughts on this for the lovely folks in the thread.​
Skimming through this, the first thing to note is that it is unlike most tinker works in that I can - even if with some difficulty - actually understand the contents. The principles are explainable (and have been explained).​
The second thing, judging by the explanations of what this does, is that this is definitely not intended as a bioweapon. It's more a total re-architecture of the structure of human cells to enable cryptoverified genetic modification.​
At least that's what I think, though if that was the intent I am not sure why there is no signature verification on the ribosomes. Or what the use of the central index is for at all.​
The computational proteins are revolutionary in-and-of themselves though. Honestly everything about this is revolutionary. And we can ACTUALLY TEST AND REPRODUCE IT. You have no idea how excited this makes me, this changes everything, especially since this has now been repeated twice by trans_morphic.​
It isn't just a fluke and honestly I wonder what the hell they're going to make next because the implications of this are that the technological revolution that was promised when the first tinkers emerged might actually come to fruition.​
►Col_Xy (Temp-Banned - 2 days)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ AnonymousDecree Wow, I'm not sure I could say something more stupid if I tried!​
Did you even read the post or the start of the document? ITS NOT A BIOWEAPON.​
(Ok, have a time out for a couple of days. - Tin_Mother)​
►Chilldrizzle
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
Did everyone just forget that the Empire was destroyed in less than a day?​
Oh wait, of course we did because trans_morphic did another completely ridiculous thing.​
►why88? (Banned)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ Chilldrizzle I'm sure Kaiser would like to know how ungrateful we are for him. We should at least be honourable and acknowledge their strength and service.​
No, the Empire were not destroyed in just action, but by deceitful technologies and they must rise again or Brockton will fall to the filth.​
(Have a ban for being a Nazi. - Tin_Mother)​
►Thatdude
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
You know what I said a week ago? Kaiser will be out for blood and trans_morphic should not have antagonised the Nazi fucker.​
Apparently that didn't work out for him, because portal tech is stupidly powerful and it took trans_morphic less than a day to take his little Empire apart. Fun times really.​
On another note, our glorious tinker of chaos is apparently sending everyone in a panic by spreading more information and technologies. That everyone else can understand.​
At this point I shouldn't expect anything less, tbh.​
►Tin_Mother (Moderator)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
Please try and keep the thread on-topic. For Empire discussion, see here, and for general trans_morphic discussion, see here.​
►XixZiy
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
This is so fucking nuts.​
Who the fuck just dumps random technological revolutions on the internet, really?​
►Iblis
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ Tumbles That's a pretty cool summary.​
The PRT seems to keep pushing hard on @ trans_morphic. At this point it seems a bit in bad faith.​
►Mane Magenta
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
I've heard rumours of PRT transphobia?​
Maybe that has something to do with it.​
Though trans_morphic is clearly p. powerful so it could just be wanting them under control or something.​
End of Page. 1, 2, 3 ... 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39
(Showing page 35 of 39)
►Emissary_of_Jesus (Temp-Banned - 5 days)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
This is the mark of the BEAST!!​
NEVER let the power of SATANIC UNNATURAL TECHNOLOGIES into your SPIRITUAL HOME.​
►Ultracut (Warning)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ trans_morphic please tone down your transsexuality, it's inappropriate for my kids to see in the news. How am I meant to explain it to THEM.​
(Tone down the transphobia. This is your only warning. - Tin_Mother)​
►Valkyr (Wiki Warrior)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
Another update for their wiki page, it seems. We finally have actual evidence that trans_morphic is a biotinker. But we also have evidence of them tinkering other things seemingly unrelated to biology, so I suppose the pertinent question is what kind of tinker are they, really? Because no-one seems to know yet.​
They definitely aren't a normal tinker. So far they have created - by my count:​
* Coordinated mass lasers for hair removal (apparently).​
* Portals and a pocket dimension - like a combination between Dodge and Haywire - including as some kind of implant probably.​
* Hormone implants.​
* Replicable advanced computer chip designs.​
* And now potent, replicable genetic engineering tech​
We could be looking at a tinker with a wide specialty but some restriction, like String Theory. But I'm not sure that's right, we haven't seen any meaningful restriction on their power yet - in fact they seem to have less restrictions than all other known tinkers - reproducible technology and all that.​
The first viable possibility I can think of is having multiple specialties. It's extremely rare, but there are occasionally tinkers with that sort of power.​
However usually each specialization is much weaker than a tinker with a single one.​
And if we look at all of trans_morphic's posts, not once have they ever mentioned having a "tinker specialty", only ever a tinker power. With that in mind, I think so far everyone's missed an important hypothesis - that trans_morphic is some kind of Trump/Tinker.​
The most likely option for that, in my view, is some kind of power-copying Trump/Tinker with removed restrictions, a pretty scary thought. The only local capes I can think of powerful enough that un-restricting them would make a tinker as versatile as trans_morphic would be Leet, who can build anything once. Personally, I think this is the most likely.​
The other options being that they are some kind of completely unrestricted version of a Tinker-Eidolon. Either developing tinker powers to solve problems they're aware of, or the most terrifying option of just choosing a tinker power available, at will, perhaps with some minor restriction of never choosing the same one twice or something.​
Of course, trans_morphic could also be a front identity for multiple capes, but we have seen zero indication of that at all and I think we should leave the wilder clone and secret cape group hypotheses until we have actual evidence of them.​
Anyway, that's my analysis, folks!​
►ZyrinyiaBB
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ XixZiy trans_morphic, apparently. Honestly it sounds exactly like the sort of thing they'd do.​
►nah_not_me (Cape Groupie)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ Valkyr Thanks! that was some pretty cool hypothesizing. They aren't really the kinda person to hide stuff with any effort so honestly I'd bet they'll just tell us if we figure it out.​
Also did we all just forget about MULTIVERSAL APOCALYPSES again?! Seriously?.​
►fucktransmorphic14 (Banned)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
[removed]​
(No hate accounts allowed - Tin_Mother)​
►Emissary_of_Jesus (Temp-Banned - 5 days)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ nah_not_me @ ZyrinyiaBB @ Valkyr @ Ultracut @ Mane Magenta @ Iblis @ XixZiy @ Thatdude​
Can't you SEE​
this is an attempt to INJECT US WITH GENES​
to control us like SATANIC sheep.​
(For spamming the thread, you have now been given a 5 day time-out - Tin_Mother)​
►ArchmageEin
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ Emissary_of_Jesus for once you are right on changing genes.​
Though the rest of your stuff is clearly dumb. I mean my and my minister's thoughts on this sort of technology aren't always positive but I don't think it's quite satanic, just sinful if used in the wrong way.​
►Brocktonite03 (Original Poster) (Veteran Member)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
Thanks @ Tumbles, it's good to have an informed voice on this stuff, though apparently the document itself is surprisingly readable if prone to tangents.​
I'll point people to your post in the OP and give you some credit for your analysis.​
►KetchupMayo (Cape Groupie)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ Valkyr if we're going to analyse their terms in the stuff they posted, I think we should be noting the way they refer to Earth Bet as if they were a foreigner here. "This planet", etc.​
Unconventional and unrestricted powers and technology, only appeared just under 2 weeks ago, refers to Bet as if it's foreign?​
Perhaps they are a dimensional refugee? Not sure if anyone's considered this before. Maybe they don't even have a power and they just understand the technology because they came from somewhere super advanced or something. Pretending to be a tinker.​
End of Page. 1, 2, 3 ... 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39
(Showing page 36 of 39)
►xach chase (Warning)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
This is clearly an attempt by C*uldron to control us. What if trans_morphic got replaced by them or something?.​
(Bypassing banned words earns you a warning - Tin_Mother)​
►FriarofBrockton (Veteran Member)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ KetchupMayo but then how come they know so much about us?​
►best runner
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
technological uplift? are we being uplifted or something? prime directive?​
multiple flaws like doing a shit job of it​
►AnonymousDecree (Warning)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ best runner Elaborate, this is kind of incoherent.​
►Bagrat (The Guy in the Know) (Veteran Member)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
So folks, my sources in the PRT are conclusive.​
There's strong pressure from above for playing hardball with trans_morphic. We aren't entirely sure why right now but apparently the Protectorate and higher-ups in the local department are pretty unhappy with the way they are being forced to handle the tinker.​
►Number 1 Gallant Fan (Warning)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ Bagrat fuck trans_morphic and the local department for wanting to cooperate. My dad was killed by Nilbog, fuck biotinkers.​
As far as I'm concerned the fact they're not already in the birdcage is disgraceful.​
►Ekul
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ Number 1 Gallant Fan I think that's a bit far but honestly softballing villains in general is pretty bad.​
►Logs
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
Has anyone seen @ trans_morphic around lately?​
They haven't been on in like a day and a half, which is pretty unusual.​
►Clockblocker (Verified Cape) (Wards ENE)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ Logs Damn I hope the faerie queen didn't gank them. If she's still chasing after them. We may be on opposite sides, but I don't think anyone deserves that fate, it's pretty horrifying.​
Plus think of what she could do if she had whatever trans_morphic's power is *shudder*.​
►Number 1 Gallant Fan (Warning)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ Clockblocker I hope they did. Fuck trans_morphic​
(This is your final warning, wishing death on people is unacceptable behaviour - Tin_Mother)​
End of Page. 1, 2, 3 ... 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39
(Showing page 37 of 39)
►XxVoid_CowboyxX
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ KetchupMayo @ nah_not_me​
What if they're a dimensional TRAVELER. Sent to stop the multiversal apocalypse. Or START it. And they've been watching us for years from another dimension!​
Or maybe even an alien???​
►nah_not_me (Cape Groupie)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ XxVoid_CowboyxX I think if they came to stop it they'd have more equipment or something. And we still have little proof that they are a dimensional traveler or refugee.​
►Ekul
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ XxVoid_CowboyxX Even if they are a dimensional traveler they should not have messed with the PRT or graffiti'd Medhall.​
►XxVoid_CowboyxX
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ Ekul what if the PRT are going to start the apocalypse??? Maybe all of this crazy tinker shit is just a giant troll of the PRT!​
(Somehow you have got this thread back on topic with your conspiracy theories. I am actually impressed, but please tone down the trolling. - Tin_Mother)​
►RealAmericanMan (Temp-Banned - 5 days)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
[removed]​
(Have a time out and think about your transphobia. - Tin_Mother)​
►trans_morphic (Verified Cape)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
So! I guess I should tell you all I'm still alive, if not doing great. I've not been claimed by Glaistig yet @ Clockblocker!​
Probably the main reason I'm not dead is having a 6-hourly alarm where I move my pocket dimension's connections to external services around. The problem is this means I can't get real sleep and my mood has been swinging wildly, I'm stressed, and proper coordination of my stuff is hard enough even with proper sleep :(
30 hour tinker fugues are really not fun ;-;​
@ Tumbles thanks for the suggestions and improvements! I've uploaded the modified documents here, here, here, here, and here. As for why I didn't do those things.... I was shattered and exhausted while tinkering and probably just didn't think of it. As I said, my state of mind is not very great at the moment.​
@ Number 1 Gallant Fan somehow I don't think Gallant would agree with you. And I'm not Nilbog. You know, because I understand the concept of consent and not wantonly murdering people? Urgh. And you really do not want the Faerie Queen getting hold of my power, seriously, and not just because of the visible tinker aspects of it.​
@ Valkyr your analysis is pretty much there. I may as well tell everyone at this point since you finally figured it out but a lot of people aren't gonna like it. Basically I can pick my specialty freely, or combine specialties in a ratio. More specific I think gives more advanced tech as well. And I can get non-blackboxed tech. Fun times. In fact I have a blueprint for a device for unblackboxing tinkertech! But I have so much to do and I cant focus on hardly any of it properly. Actually I wonder why Leet never built a device for copying tinkertech devices, though given how his power sabotages and tries to kill him, who knows...​
@ Bagrat Well now that's interesting, I didn't know that...​
@ XxVoid_CowboyxX I'm not an alien, dude. But I am not in my home dimension. Or all my memories up until about a week and a half ago were entirely fabricated, which is a great way to not sleep at night. Mmmm.​
So my home dimension is in 2021. It's more like Aleph except we have no powers or anything like that or any multiverse stuff. But we have slightly more advanced tech. Also Brockton Bay does not exist there, and to be honest I don't actually know how I got here on Bet.​
-nya~​
►Logs
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
Holy SHIT. WIKI TIME.​
►Number 1 Gallant Fan (Warning)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
So you're Bonesaw + Nilbog + Blasto + Machine Army + Everything else.​
Fuck this I want off the fucking planet. Goddamn biotinkers.​
►KetchupMayo (Cape Groupie)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
I knew it!​
►Chilldrizzle
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
Oh fuck me. I mean at least we know that if they wanted to do bioweapon shit they would already have killed everyone I guess........​
End of Page. 1, 2, 3 ... 35, 36, 37, 38, 39
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►AraneaFanclub (Moderator)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
So we've opened a new thread on trans_morphic's dimensional refugee status here, please try and keep this thread on the topic of the released biotech. You can also discuss the power they say they have on the main trans_morphic thread.​
@ Valkyr has already updated the wiki with the new information as well.​
►trans_morphic (Verified Cape)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ AraneaFanclub it's so weird to have a wiki page on yourself.​
But I guess I should actually say wtf the tech I released was since I forgot to last post. Long and short of it is that it is not a bioweapon, its meant to let you arbitrarily modify your genetic code with cryptographic verification, and it makes you immune to all existing viruses due to total cellular restructuring. Also it causes your immune system to be way more efficient because you can have a shitton of different antibodies produced by only a few B-cells.​
I've got some ideas for usability improvements as well actually. If I can just get away from the fucking faerie queen long enough to sleep properly and not be constantly on the edge of a panic attack.​
Good luck with life folks I'mma be off to do tinker shit and be lonely and sad for a bit while contemplating my aggressive over-sharing of emotional states :) :)
-nya~​
►KatKat
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
Everything's gonna be crazy as fuck soon. I can feel it.​
Anyway, I made some progress translating the new documents into French, there's a community page for a bunch of translation work here.​
►Reave (Verified PRT Agent)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
Although it seems like the initial press release was an overreaction to some, we still can't endorse involving yourself with anything like this even if it does appear above-board.​
►Chaosfaith
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ KatKat yes and it is wonderous
►Navai (Warning)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
First they're queer, now they're changing our biology? Why does anyone put up with this degeneracy.​
(Tone down the transphobia a bit, and have a warning - AraneaFanclub)​
►NotAWaveform
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
Why can't trans_morphic just be normal, urgh! Feels like they're doing stuff for attention.​
►actuallyZandra
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
Seems like the transphobes have come out to play :/​
I actually bet this can be used fairly simply for self-HRT to be honest.​
►AnonymousDecree (Warning)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ actuallyZandra gross.​
►SevereSirius
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
So.​
@ trans_morphic I had an idea.​
Currently this whole... thing is lacking usability. Entering a 65536-byte key, bit by bit? Totally ridiculous.​
So... what if they figured out how to biologically create a computer chip! And store it in there. I bet it's doable too tbh, I mean their power is already extreme bullshit.​
End of Page. 1, 2, 3 ... 36, 37, 38
(Showing page 39 of 39)
►NotAWaveform
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ SevereSirius don't help the crazy tinker, jesus!?​
►KatKat
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ SevereSirius that's such a good idea! Hell maybe with this new tech from trans_morphic scientists could come up with a method themselves, though I think getting trans_morphic to tinker one up would be faster.​
If they want to, of course. Maybe those computational protein things could get storage developed or something too, though they seem very... chemistry based?​
I'm not really a scientist to be honest, but I want to see where this stuff goes. It's all freely available too :)
►Spiritskin
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
Actually, does anyone know if the Faerie Queen can get to other worlds?​
I mean I put it at high probability @ trans_morphic at least has access to a couple. Seems like it'd be the next sensible thing to do after getting a pocket dimension imo. Why do they even need to keep the pocket dimension attached to an actual universe?​
►NotAWaveform
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ Spiritskin god why is everything about trans morphic? what an attention seeker. urgh.​
►KatKat
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
@ NotAWaveform you are literally in a thread about them.​
@ Spiritskin surprisingly enough there's a public list of capes that Glaistig Uiane has "claimed" buried in their main directory. I'd have thought the PRT would have kept that way more hidden but I guess not.​
I don't think there are any on there involving dimensional travel @ trans_morphic.​
►trans_morphic (Verified Cape)​
Replied On Mar 12th 2011:​
...oh thank fuuuuck @ KatKat.​
I'm ashamed to say I didn't think of this at all. Probably from exhaustion. But you seem to be right! I should be able to get outta Bet for a little.​
@ Spiritskin I generally need it for heat removal actually. Though to be honest I could probably be ok for time to sleep. My power handles air, but not heat, and it's really odd. And that's an awesome idea!​
Also I really hate this kind of attention but honestly releasing tech like this is stupidly obvious who it is from >.<.​
Bye folks I am going to sleep soooo fucking much - now hooking up to some random version of Earth ^.^​
-nya~​
End of Page. 1, 2, 3 ... 37, 38, 39

■​
And, well, I did. Exhausted, stressed beyond belief, and switching between weird giddy euphoria and self-loathing, I finally passed out properly.

Boston - Accord's Ambassadors - 12:00:00 noon, 12-03-2011
Plans.

They were, along with the associated order, Accord's lifeblood.

And his Citrine had given her flawless report to a precision that satisfied even him. It was clear that in terms of raw ability, trans_morphic would vastly outpace his own organisation within a short (and gratingly, unknown) amount of time, given the extreme implications of their powerset if they had been honest.

In a head-on fight, his organisation would lose even despite the tinker's clear inexperience. And there would be some kind of conflict, Accord was certain. Such a force of chaos was incompatible with his plans for world order, and no doubt if he got on their radar they would fight.

Yes, the most effective planner on this Earth thought to himself, I must deal with it before it directly threatens my organisation.

About 1hour 30 minutes later, and Accord had a detailed, perfectly grammatically correct document written down (with depressing quantities of misgendering in it). Such an unpredictable element as trans_morphic required adaptable, multifaceted planning and his power had provided, as he knew it would. The PRT were already applying direct pressure. Accord considered the power-brokers the responsible party, and was convinced their stance was unlikely to change.

His own planning focused on 3 avenues of attack that were of a more indirect nature than the attempts of the PRT.

First would be a more focused public relations campaign, a push on the "dangerous and unstable" elements, on the comparison to biotinkers such as Bonesaw. While the press was engaging in this to a degree, it was currently uncoordinated and indecisive. Accord's Ambassadors and puppet organisations had significant pull in the upper echelons of society, and the man knew intimately which papers would be most able and willing to push on this point of view, and how to create a gradient that would slide the more moderated factions against trans_morphic over time.

The second would be a coordinated effort with the power brokers, to find a Master capable of controlling trans_morphic. Accord considered this the least likely be viable beyond the immediate future due to trans_morphic's growing abilities and willingness to self-modify. There would be other Master capes involved as well, of course, Accord was not going to rely on any single point of failure, here.

His third effort was psychological warfare. Accord's stealth access to the PRT meant he had trans_morphic's real psychological profile. Not the one they let leak to the less sophisticated gangs, but the profile only accessible to the Directors and psychoanalysts themselves. He had a number of strategies to determine emotional weaknesses and topics that would induce the tinker to timesinking arguments or worsen their issues. The vulnerabilities displayed, the subjects and political issues they would care about, external changes in the world that would damage their psychological state and make them more susceptible to further psychological harm. Attacks based on various potential traumas they could have, pushes towards self-hatred and self-blame.

A therapist would weep if they saw the document Accord had written. Of course, none other than him would ever lay eyes on it - his Ambassadors were his proxies into the chaotic mess of the external world, the ones who would act as primary agents in the fruition of his plans for the tinker, and even they almost never had access to his plans, instead trusting Accord's orders implicitly. Within precisely 15 minutes, at least 10 senators and congresspeople had already been called, and a war for information restriction and stringent anti-transgender laws began to be waged in the shadows - backroom parties of the American and soon global elites, donations, gifts of terrifying monetary value in unmarked vans. Positions in organisations becoming mysteriously available after the end of election terms and unknown funding sources tickling into theofascist organisations. Advertising slots taken up with precisely targeted messaging and stacks of cash changing hands in seedy bars.

The true power of Accord's Organisation was being brought to bear in a manner which was far more terrifying than any brute could ever be. Accord had many flaws, but underestimating his opponents had never been one of them. No, a tinker potent enough to take on the very power brokers his organisation relied on and come out alive - some might even consider on top - was not an enemy the crimelord would ever be underestimating in any respect.

Director Piggot's Office
Damn, I should have retired
, the military lady thought to herself, it just gets worse and worse. Piggot had been writing reports, a lot of them.

trans_morphic at this point was clearly capable of being an international or even multidimensional threat, and all of her colleagues wanted their own special report on psychology and capability with respect to their own capes.

Normally, of course, they'd do this process of "capability localisation" themselves, but the Chief-Director was putting all the work on her department. Probably as punishment for not sticking to the line strongly enough, that damnable woman, Piggot considered. Her behaviour about the tinker is... weirdly insistent. It had been obvious for days that the Chief-Director had something very particular going on with trans_morphic. The problem was this kind of behaviour was not replicated in any other aspects of administration and was surprisingly consistent when you actually analysed what she did in the past. It's just that the number of openly transgender villains was so small and so far had been too weak for them to go this long without capture that this side of the Chief-Director never showed up to such an obsessive degree before.

At least that was Director Piggot's theory for why her request for Master-Stranger protocols was denied, after she specifically analysed her superior's behaviour in response.

Massaging her forehead, she updated the threat ratings to an intimidating "Trump 10/Tinker 12+" as she wondered what she did to deserve handling the cape. They, of course, had vehemently denied any commonality with someone like Nilbog in their PHO thread, but the Director couldn't shake the niggling fear at the back of her head that they'd be worse somehow. Their comfort with bodily modification was not helping her on that front, either.

At least we have one less gang to worry about, she considered, but if only the PR department could have reached out for some kind of leniency or temporary cooperation, this could have been less of a nightmare to manage. While there were also significant implications to trans_morphic's claimed origins of an alternate Earth, the Chief-Director had at least taken that much as her own responsibility, instead of dumping the work on top of her own tasks of preventing ABB and Merchant incursions into former Empire territory, building a counter-Coil operation (that was coming close to fruition, Thomas Scumbag Calvert was going to eat shit if it was the last thing Piggot ever fucking did), trying to handle the issue of the Police Chief, keeping tabs on the burgeoning anti-PRT-corruption groups that had started organising protests and less obvious activism with cooperation from the workers of the DWU, attempting to disrupt the fighting between minorities and the now capeless Nazi leftovers from the Empire that were fragmenting under the strain, organising Ward patrols to avoid all of this mess, coordinating the Protectorate with New Wave, and writing a whole shitload of reports.

Let it never be said I am bored, Director Piggot mused to herself, as she began writing the threat response for trans_morphic's power which could be essentially summarised as "don't try and hurt the tinker in the first place, you fucking idiot". Not the kind of response she liked, but depressingly realistic in this case as far as she could tell.

Baltimore, USA
Two men in grey suits stood in the cafe.

"In an hour, there will be a jewelry store robbery here", the first said, pointing to a location on a map, "I want 3 female PRT troopers sent in response. They should be able to handle it. Ensure one of them has this envelope, unopened, on their person."

"And the money?", the second said.

"$50,000 here", the first gestured to a suitcase with notes, "and $50,000 once they're on route. Is that acceptable?"

"That seems good to me," the second said, "perhaps we should take our leave."

The two men walked out of the cafe and went their separate ways.

1 hour and 5 minutes later, the headline "Unknown Tinkertech Explosion - 3 Troopers Missing" was all over the Boston-local PHO subforum.

Near Montreal, Quebec, Canada
3 PRT troopers were ejected onto the floor of a large, rural compound, entirely unconscious.

By the time they were awake, they had been stripped bare and their loyalties lay only for one man.

The note on the second trooper was gone, of course. It's contents had been 500 $100 notes packed tightly, and 4 sentences.

"$50,000 and these three now, $5,000,000 later. Your son is Regent (also known as Alec), in Brockton Bay. A tinker going by trans_morphic is in Brockton Bay. Bring the tinker back to your compound as soon as possible, and you will get the rest of the money, and 6 more. -AO"

The man got ready to move.
[end of chapter - nyaa~]
:) worm is fucked up meow.
Sorry for the time it took to get this one out ;p
 
Precipitation of Autonomy - 3.5
[Author's Note - The SI's pronouns (like mine) are they/them or xz-neopronouns, NOT she/her]
[CW representations of systemic transphobia (not misgendering)]
[Wildbow owns Worm, I do not own Worm]

So, I thought to myself as I woke up in the comforting purple of my pocket dimension, I guess I finally managed to escape the faerie arsehole, since I'm not dead.

I'd attached myself to another world like Aleph - a couple further along in that "direction" of the multiverse, actually - and finally managed to get some serious rest. Waking up I felt wonderfully refreshed but also had a hole in my stomach the size of an elephant because I'd not eaten in almost two days at this point - and of course my whole body still ached from the injuries I'd gotten in my Faultline talk. But it could wait.

You see, I'd finally managed to almost get to the point of serious, powerful biotech. People on the internet (of Bet) were already taking apart and improving my stuff, even with only a small amount of time to do so. They'd given me ideas, and probably the most important one was something I definitely needed to do anyway, which was make my AGM virus and the restructuring effects more "user friendly", so to speak. I had so many others too, and I finally resolved to actually write down a list so I didn't forget them, like for instance that reverse engineering device I'd made blueprints for.

Lists didn't really help with actually getting me to do things, but it did ensure that they were on my mind so my only weakly-controllable attention would focus on them eventually, preferably soonish. And so, I spent a couple of hours thinking about what I really wanted to do, on the technology and everything else front, though mostly the technology front.

My first priority was finalising my AGM virus to something that was even more versatile and made itself usable. As a part of this, I needed to figure out how to produce computer chips using biology - a task that would end up completing the cycle of circuitry to biology to circuitry that I had begun with my biological construction computer chips.

I also needed to ensure my own survival and that of humanity and people in general against the Entities, Endbringers, and other hostile actors, an extremely difficult task - though I had read enough Worm and Worm fanfiction that I had plenty of ideas of different methods of doing it, and I had enough background philosophy to at least attempt the more generalisable aspects of the task that could theoretically apply to almost any multiverse with a coherent structure of any kind.

In particular, much of my own thinking had lead me to a conclusion on the ways I could avoid or counteract involuntary mastering (a term that I learned was not actually in common use here but I didn't care, because it was so useful when talking about extra-personal control of all kinds that I wasn't going to stop) both involving the local multiverse and in general - after all, I had been thrown into this universe by some phenomena, either by accident or in the worst case intentionally, and who knows what other random places I or anyone else could be chucked into or even visit in future, because I certainly fucking didn't!

Eventually I came up with the following strategies for preserving normal neural network functioning - which would counteract involuntary masters and strangers of almost all types in this multiverse and any other, as long as your intelligence remained housed in the appropriate hardware to perform them, of course.

The first and most basic strategy was simple PRT Master-Stranger protocols, a powerful capability in it's own right if you have companions and mastering effects are reasonably obvious. However, these were primarily designed to protect an organisation from M/S capes and generally accepts the temporary or permanent compromise of individuals. For me and for most people who'd be victims, this was cold comfort, and it was also something that could not be on all the time anyway.

A far more relevant set of strategies were those related to self-checking and resistance to externally-induced changes, both in relation to normal neural network functioning and checking that levels of various hormones or in-body environmental influences were as expected. The first major resistance method was extradimensional and extrauniversal jamming, which used a similar technique to the anti-clairvoyant device as well as projection of protective materials into other spacial dimensions that would intercept manipulation from those dimensions. This one, however, was more of a brute-force technique than other ways, but it would work well against shards.

My preferred method was direct monitoring of the neural network and chemical production levels for anomalies and counteraction to those of various forms. If someone chose to keep themselves on a biological substrate - as opposed to digitisation - this was harder but not impossible with appropriate microscopic monitoring on each forming and changing neural connection and on the generalised hormone levels. However, due to the fact that these quantities were physical in nature, the more aggressively a change was enforced, the more energy it would take to resist it. In my view it was still well worth developing - a lot of people would never be comfortable with digitising themselves due to how they looked at the nature of the mind, even if I actively intended to pursue it.

Once you went digital, however... well, that unlocked a significant number of far more potent opportunities for general resistance to Master-Stranger influence. Even just digitising your mind would let you reach the point of being as resistant as Dragon (she was an AI after all), which in the local Worm multiverse meant being nearly immune except to the strongest (primarily the Simurgh), and that was the bare minimum. Digitisation, of course, meant that you could re-architecture and check your entire neural structure and (digitally emulated) produced hormones with ease, completely redirect most attempts at external modification by hosting your neural structure emulation separate to your current body - similar to how Alexandria was essentially running on her shard - or attempt to multiply and continuously crosscheck different versions of your mind running simultaneously and in constant resync with each other, with controlled desyncing and resyncing on a per-neuron basis.

That last one was an idea I'd obtained when thinking about mechanisms for the Queen Administrator shard to function, and was currently beyond my reach, but I had every intention of getting my hands on the actual mechanism behind that shard once I got around to implementing my most potent anti-M/S technologies. In other universes with laws allowing for what I'd describe as "magic" or other conceptual stuff, this sort of misdirection would become essential along with attempting to reduce external influence on other checking mechanisms. if I could make it work, it would also probably enable extreme parallelisation of mental processes and a number of adaptations to and tracking of attempts at mastering.

I shook myself out of my thoughts as I realised I'd spent almost two hours pondering and writing about all of these methods and ideas and solidly avoided implementing them or my actual goal, which was to create biological chip manufacturing, without which almost all these other things were mostly irrelevant. I was also running low on silicon-carbide substrate as well, unfortunately, but I had enough for a couple more computing chips and soon I hopefully could do that manufacturing fully biologically.

As such, I took some more time thinking of how to actually create a local computer chip using biological construction methods. A major problem being that in most cases these chips were going to be too large to manufacture within a cell, and also the need for precise positioning - though given that these would mostly be attaching to neurons (in the larger case), it just needed to be easy to shift the construction zone to neurally connected tissue.

My final answer to the question of biological computer manufacturing was a masterpiece that illustrated what tinkers could truly do given the right ideas, since their shards provided appropriate components. The solution came in three parts.

The first part was a system to identify locations within your body precisely via a form of triangulation. In particular, an outward growth of smaller-sized tubules directly surrounding neuronal tissue would form - starting near the center of your visual cortex and spreading down from there - that stopped and slowly tapered off and emitted organisms the size of a large virus that did nothing but produces small RNA fragments encoding the concentration of specialised proteins in the tubule when it first formed (which of course decreased further away from the source of those proteins in your visual cortex).

A secondary, tertiery, and quaternary variant of these tubule systems would grow - starting in the lower back of the skull, left of the neck, and right of the neck, respectively - and they created a group of similar but different external organisms which did roughly the same thing as the first system but with slightly distinguishable genetic codes.

All four were hooked into the visual cortex and when the neurons in the attached bundles were sent messages from other, nearby neurons at varying intensity, the bundled neurons would construct proteins with mechanisms for performing numerous actions on activation by the presence of microorganism-emitted genetic codes matching the intensity with which the bundle neurons were activated. Targeting a precise location simply involved creating activate-able proteins for each system that only did something when combined.

Now in practice, the microorganisms also used some forms of continuous, localized chemical-concentration-based interpolation to improve precision, but it was a minor detail. The neurons generated in the controlling nodes for each of these tube systems were also set up - in terms of the modified genes that were activated in their growth - to be extremely plastic.

By my estimation, this meant the internal positioning system could be "learnt" (as in, building associations with the preexisting sense of proprioception) in a day using neurons coded to produce combined-action-proteins that triggered nerve sensations of mild tingling at the location of intersection of the positions of activation of the four triangulating tube systems.

This was merely the first system, but one that was core to almost everything else (not just chip construction), as it provided a reliable way to locate positions in your body. The second key component was a system for constructing arbitrary semiconductive component scaffolding out of biologically produced double-layer carbon nanotubes (double-layered to replicate the twisting mechanism used in my original CPU manufacture). These scaffolds were highly adaptive, extending until they found gaps inbetween cells, and as something I designed with biology in mind essentially periodically received the same streams of biomolecularly coded instructions to enable self-repair.

This worked by having cells produce low levels of various different "carbon nanotube modules" that continuously circulated in the body which were then picked up by proteins that attached to different modules depending on the instructions passing through it. These proteins would then lock into a construction configuration where damage to their associated nanotube caused displacement and replacement of it's conductive module.

Furthermore, the maths involved meant the system was easily adaptable to arbitrary-dimensional sets of cuboids (so I made it dimensionally-generic). Of course, I currently had only use for 3 dimensional axes, but in the future I suspected this would be a lesser restriction, based on my experience so far with dimensional technology.

A convenient side effect of the carbon nanotube system, of course, was that it enabled thoroughly lacing my entire body with ultraflexible carbon nanotube reinforcements that would dissipate even heavy bullet firing on my body and certainly make crushing me much harder (carbon nanotubes plus the existing materials of bones, it turns out, makes a stupidly potent and tough combo when you add a little genetic modification to bone cells to guide the alignment of the tubes in the primary nanotube lattice construction system).

I'd known I needed some sort of combat resilience for a while, but controlling my attention directly on it when my focus was entirely on biological computing was nonviable. Instead, the complex, flexible systems I had developed for constructing "computational substrate" in the form of nanotubes doubled as a form of potent resilience enhancement that I had every intention of exploiting to the fullest effect.

In addition, the nanotubes were extremely thermally conductive, which while it seemed insignificant, it absolutely was not, because one of the major restrictions on cell replication (and hence, wound healing, regeneration, and similar), was the thermal limits on biological reaction rates needed to avoid essentially denaturing the enzymes used for all life functions. Adding highly heat-conductive intercellular nanotube lattices meant cell repairs could be vastly accelerated by at least an order of magnitude for localized wounds, since the heat produced would be redistributed across the body. It was especially effective in aiding repair of blood vessel damage as the nanotube lattice would provide a fantastic binding location for platelets and reparative cellular systems.

But this was not all. The third system was the one that constructed - and kept repaired - the actual computation devices. Like the carbon nanotubes, this system was based on cells producing different modular components - but this time they were actual electronics (rather than just conditionally conductive dependent on doping as the carbon nanotube substrate was) - such as nanoscopic capacitors, AND or OR or NOT or XOR or similar gates, and other units enabling the construction of different types of nonvolatile RAM, and even components that could be put together to reproduce the same technology for biomanufacturing I had originally made.

It was also extensible, as the binding mechanisms that made these components fit into place worked by binding to arbitrary genetic codes that were replicated on the mass-produced modules throughout the body. And of course, you could add new variants by simply using instructions with different identifiers.

So, I'd successfully created an atrociously versatile and adaptable system that could readily turn your body into a technoorganic computational substrate, while massively reinforcing biology. Four hundred pages of dense but well-indexed documentation later, and it was ready for upload onto the internet. As a barely notable aside, I'd also added the automatic generation of a neurological interface for creating and otherwise managing genemod keys, and added a modification on the cellular level that would perform the same randomness injection into neurons that my external precognition blocker did but with molecular-scale computing. Interuniversal clairvoyance blockers also were applied - though on millimetre scale computers rather than on a per-cell basis - as well. After all, these two were already present in external devices so translation to this internal compute-manufacturing framework was relatively trivial.

Anti-master/stranger systems were more complex, but the multiversal jamming - plus per-neuron-dendrite (in combination with monitoring of body regions that produce thought-modifying hormones such as adrenaline all wired together) molecular scale checks and attempted corrections of activation and connections from within the carbon nanotube framework surrounding them provided a good first step that should stop almost any master. The only potential issue was interference with psychoactive drugs and medication, but it was solvable by adding some neurologically controlled methods of enabling and disabling certain expected effects from occurring.

Even just the dimension jamming was enough to stop master powers using the standard shard-power-derived methods (though I was not willing to ignore the fact a significant number of powers could probably use other interversal effects, hence my implementation of this other error checking, and of course the presumed presence of the wider multiverse).

When I got out of one of the deepest tinker obsessions I'd ever been in - the specialisation fragments flowing like water at my will, blueprints racing through my mind in almost perfect coordination - almost two days had passed, but I felt I had truly come up with something so far beyond revolutionary that I didn't care about the absurd level of sleep deprivation and hunger that I felt while I put the final viral genetic codes into my bio-manufacturing chambers. The viral vector I was using for this finalised genetic restructuring was a customised variant of the HIV coating that my power readily provided to me, and the surprising efficiency of my developed base pair sequence in comparison to the human genome meant it only took about 10 minutes to manufacture a few million of the viral load. Exponential growth would enable rapid and total transfection of all cells in the body.

A little slice on my hand and some paste from the chambers later, and I passed out from exhaustion as my body began it's modifications, sweat glands working in overdrive to remove the metabolically-induced heat from the intense genetic transformation occurring in every single one of several trillion cells. If I wasn't in a rush, I would have found some way to test the system, but I knew I was short on time and even the single round of public review I had managed before had set me back in terms of self-protection even if it had been amazingly useful. Luckily, my power was extremely reliable and this technology especially enabled self modification, maintenance and rapid improvement, so if I fucked up it should be recoverable.

Dripping in water with my pocket dimension hooked up to the antarctic on an unnamed Earth, I slept fitfully with dreams of spiraling creatures.

Danny Hebert, Hebert Home, Earth Bet 2011-03-14
The thinner-than-average man nursed hidden bruises on his couch, as he perused the remote to his worn-down TV and didn't notice the very slight limp his daughter walked in on. After all, it had been developing for over a month, a frog in a pan, so to speak. He didn't notice the bruises on her shins, either, for they were not visible under her roughed-up clothing. A greeting of "how are you, Taylor?", though, he could manage, and so he did even as he was met with the ever-so-dreaded "fine" of the last year at least.

Several headlines flashed in front of him, white text on various coloured backgrounds overlaying talking-heads.
New legislation, named "Bill For The American Family" flies through congress with media controversy...
Flick.
Alliance Defending Freedom linked to authors of "Bill For The American Family", see our newest investigative reports...
Flick.
Police-involved shooting at anti-PRT riots in Massachusetts, officer harassed by mainstream media...
Flick.
New cape destroys Eiffel Tower, claims accident, keep watching to learn more!
Flick.
Controversial Texas bill seeks to bar transgender people from job applications related to childcare...
Flick.
Brockton Bay Police Department Chief "to remain in office", declares rumours of Empire ties unfounded despite circulating video...

Danny Hebert almost twitched at the gall on that last one. The leaked video was damning as anything and despite their weakened state, the DWU and a few others had mostly banded together in a protest as the high-level corruption was apparently too much for even the Brockton Bay folks to tolerate. Organising protests was a long, difficult job, but ever since the alliances with some of the newer anti-PRT corruption groups were formed that work had already started and mobilisation took far less time than he'd expected.

Of course, police came along to "keep the peace". The man was mostly glad none of the other union guys had gotten shot, to be honest. Still, he kept watching after flicking back to the previous news channel.

"Local Texas politicians have proposed a new bill named the 'Youth Protection Act' that would bar transgender people from entry into any industry 'primarily oriented around interaction with under 18s'. Proponents such as Jerry Stern are advocating for the bill - when asked, he claimed that it's purpose was to 'prevent the sexualisation of our children in education and beyond as currently being pushed by the socialist left' and that parents everywhere should support it to protect their children from 'predatory men'. This bill comes on the coattails of the federal 'Bill For The American Family' that would, amongst other controversial changes, render all legal sex changes null and void, as well as name changes that are 'deemed to have been for the purpose of enabling a sex change'. The bill would also legally obligate employers to check at random a form of gendered identification of anyone using public toilets and changing rooms in their facilities, and require the creation of a registry of anyone known to publicly identify with a gender different to that assigned at birth. Deemed a bill 'entirely constructed of bigotry' by it's opponents, it's expected to be toned down before it has a chance of passing."

The talking head continued, while the man on the couch thought. It was not unheard of for bills to slide through the bureaucracy rapidly, but in his experience from back in the 80s as unions were being disrupted, they didn't happen this fast without at least some lubricative dollars being involved.

"In other news, Slideshow has publicly left the Houston Wards a week after joining due to 'consistent, targeted harassment from staff' and 'complaints dismissed with hostility'. She says she found her teammates to be wonderful, but she tearfully explained she couldn't 'stay in that environment where [she] was hearing hateful and sometimes sexual comments from several PRT troopers' to our reporters. She told us she wanted to be an independent hero and that she was glad her parents only put her in the Wards on a special 'trial period' when she found out that '[her] complaints were being laughed off by local PRT and Youth Guard'. The PRT director of the region claimed that 'he would do better in future' and that 'Slideshow's accusations are not representative of the PRT'. He declined to comment further when asked."

If Taylor ever gets powers,
he considered as he shook his head, sighed and turned off the TV to rest for another long day of work, perhaps I won't get her to join the Wards after all, if this is how they handle the people under their care.

New York City - 2011-03-14 Noon

A bright yellow beam raced through the sky towards a tough, concrete series of towers and buildings lying on the boundary of old and new regions of the city, created by Behemoth, as Legend rushed into his office with an unusually frustrated frown marring his face. A few days ago, the man had finally gotten sick of the antics and coverups of his colleagues in the Triumvirate and he'd run (or rather, flown as a laser, but still) away from them to contemplate what exactly he intended to do about it. He'd really never seen this side of the two of them before and it had legitimately shocked him to disgust when he realised the anomalous contempt for transgender people that Alexandria seemed to have around the same time he figured out the real cause of Case 53s, though Eidolon's own apathetic reactions were less unexpected.

Frustration swept across his face, even as he calmly looked for his phone. On hearing some of the news while being debriefed on reports of the remnants of the S9, he'd finally reached his limit and rushed back as soon as he could after the meeting. And yet, Legend could not find his phone and someone (he knew who he suspected) had ripped out his landline. So, he left the office, and flew to find another.

Somewhere on an Uninhabited Earth - 2011-03-14 Noon
The Paths around Brockton Bay were finally beginning to clean up a little - still very hazy but the possibilities were being narrowed down as postcognition extrapolated from areas external to the former precog blocking area began to take effect - though Faultline's Crew were long gone from Contessa's ability to see and far away. Despite her best efforts, modelling every person in a city - or a bulk "the city" - was completely impossible, but for now it seemed unnecessary.

Path to long-term preservation of Cauldron secrecy - 1,156,258 steps

Contessa moved her mouth in sounds she understood little - "Door to Legend's office",

Path to long-term preservation of Cauldron secrecy - 1,156,257 steps

She moved her hands to rip out the phoneline.

Path to long-term preservation of Cauldron secrecy - 1,156,256 steps

The woman in the fedora hoisted her gun, and called - "Door to Vista's bedroom"

8 precisely controlled shots later, and she vanished into a rectangle.

Path to long-term preservation of Cauldron secrecy, 1,156,247 steps

Somewhere in Cryptographically Secure Cyberspace - 2011-03-14 17:00
Welcome, actuallyZandra@03a7:79a1::0362 to #bb-opno88
on ene-cryptchat (03c6:192d::a237)
antifbob: hellooo. we wre just waiting for you to be in here.
actuallyZandra: hii, and oh?
xx_smash_xx: Yeah. Basically we think now the e88 has been torn down into smaller neonazi cells it might be worth a channel rename
antifbob: p. much.
actuallyZandra: that makes sense. maybe we just go with #bb-antifa-<some random number>?
actuallyZandra: and i also know there's a couple gesellschaft capes hanging around here still. apparently one of the groups is publicly calling themselves atomwaffen after some obscure US group that died a few years ago (good riddance). they have a cape known as blitz.
antifbob: oh? u been doing ur sneaky thing again?
actuallyZandra: yeah
xx_smash_xx: so we good for a channel namechange?
actuallyZandra: sure!
antifbob: ye
xx_smash_xx changed the channel name from #bb-opno88 to #bb-antifa-3104985212
actuallyZandra: nice! anyhow, i saw them meeting in a warehouse, it was around 78 Washington Street a few blocks down from medhall. the bits i got out of listening make me think they're planning something near the market but i didn't gather what. these people seem much less about holding territory tho, i got that much
xx_smash_xx: so more like a traditional terrorist cell with cape support then?
actuallyZandra: i think so. that's what it seems like to me.
antifbob: well shit
antifbob: i've been watching pho myself.
antifbob: the more general e88 mooks seem p. out of it, uncoordinated in message
antifbob: but some of the usrs that are new are suspicious and seem to be attempting a shift in convo.
xx_smash_xx: That's concerning. A search for atomwaffen in BB subforums doesn't really come up with anything yet.
xx_smash_xx: Perhaps they aren't public yet?
actuallyZandra: maybe we could preemptively out their existence? control the message first?
actuallyZandra: tho there might be other cells we don't know about yet.
antifbob: also mebbe they could try and use the e88 moles in the cops
antifbob: gotta be pretty hardcore people to be moles so i bet theyd join
xx_smash_xx: not sure we can do much about that tbh.
actuallyZandra: yeah, we just need to treat the police as we have before this teardown of e88
antifbob: did u see the protest tho? someone definitely organised that shit. not us tho unless?
xx_smash_xx: nope, I didn't help with that.
actuallyZandra: me neither. if i had to guess it's the anticorruption groups.
antifbob: that makes sense tbh. just hope some Thinker or Master doesnt suborn them. maybe we should watch the chief of police for more stuff to release about nazi connections? prt have done basically nothing about it yet :/
xx_smash_xx: i think that's a good idea. Also finding time to look for potential external support (if linked to Gesellschaft) like arms deals and stuff.
xx_smash_xx: though watching for this stuff is dangerous as fuck. Better to record and publish later than try and disrupt it directly or Thinkers might go after us more?
actuallyZandra: yeah. record and release.
actuallyZandra: if @xx_smash_xx you put your recording devices in the warehouse? i don't have any
xx_smash_xx: i'm not the best at hiding the things, maybe i should give it to @antifbob to put somewhere?
antifbob: i'm up for that, same place and time as the prev. op?
xx_smash_xx: Sure!
actuallyZandra: good luck you two and if you see any fascists don't be afraid to wait until they leave. better to stay safe
actuallyZandra: also we should probably take a little time to celebrate the destruction of e88 ;p
antifbob: yeah i went to the palanquin all night when i heard! it was great
xx_smash_xx: Perhaps we could meet up and go out or something?
actuallyZandra: i dont see why not ^.^. but i gotta go now, i've got a phone apptmt soon
antifbob: cya~
xx_smash_xx: Bye and stay safe
actuallyZandra@03a7:79a1::0362 left the chat

[end of chapter - nya~]
Shit's finally happening! Our SI has been doing a shitton of prep and tech and stuff and now... well, the fun is starting. This chapter really fought me though - managing the sequence of events and balancing the technical improvements and other plot points was hard as fuck nya. You can probably tell I really enjoy coming up with the structures needed to perform some function.
Also btw... Molecular self-assembly is awesome :)
I am making more transition progress and have funding to get facial hair removal c:.
I apologise for the delay (life is in the way all the time especially due to economic stuff (i'm making a site for myself) and the fact that transphobia is so shit and seeing governments strip trans rights is stressful, upsetting, and unpleasant for my mental health sometimes >.< meow).
 
Precipitation of Autonomy - 3.6
[Wildbow owns Worm, I do not own Worm] ~ 2011-03-15
I woke up shaking, in a cold sweat, with a dull pain from the top of my skull. Trying not to think about the possibility of getting ganked by the Simurgh or Cauldron or any other particular arsehole was a difficult task and I had to grab my tinkertech bedsheets to try and ground myself, running my hands across the comfortable, smooth textures of the pocket dimension walls, slowing my racing panic at being stuck in a hell-verse that I'd been running from with hyperobsessive tinkering for the past week and a half.

God, what the fuck is my life!

It took some effort and about half an hour of convincing myself to stop shaking but eventually I managed, rubbing sleep out of my eyes as I dragged my poor, innocent body to a sitting up position, laptop in reach and then remembered the amazing thing I had done and felt an unrestrained wave of euphoria rush through me, bouncing myself out of bed and pacing giddily at the sheer variety of possibility that now pervaded my mind and body, nearly falling over a couple times.

Feeling the qualia for cryptographic identity and targeted self-modification proprioception was unimaginably awesome, and proved that my local neuroplasticity enhancers had functioned just as designed - I could feel the modification abilities brimming with potential, and I cackled with glee at the thought of all the shit I was going to do, which was turned into a strangled dry cough as I chugged down some of the water I saved in a little bottle from when I was connected to the mains.

Oh, and I finally closed the portal that lead to a random Antarctica that would definitely give me hypothermia if I left it open any longer, though heat redistribution in my body should enable more rapid fat burning to compensate without destroying the associated cells.

Yes, I thought, maybe this radical bio-modification will give me better circulation in my hands and feet. This is what I should be thinking about.

My stomach decided that was the time to release an earthquake, and I decided that I should rip open some more Cornish pasties for the sake of devouring them and their delicious onion flavours at a rate that would make a black hole weep in jealousy.

Frankly, I needed a break - I'd been going almost nonstop since I'd gotten here, wherever here even was. Minor exhaustion filled me even despite my fitful sleep, but in that awful way those of us with ADHD are familiar with where the tiredness just makes you even more wired, and you have to engage in a serious conscious effort to take just a little time to rest rather than do a project at 100 miles an hour for a little bit.

Even now, I could feel the tinker charges primed at the edge of my thoughtspace, and I was actively resisting diving myself into more tinkering from my previous euphoric burst of ideas and concepts. I had so many ideas it was unreal and I needed to choose but I really didn't want to right at this moment even as I had completed my first truly major and important project towards my goals since getting dumped this shitty, depressing region of the Multiverse. I needed to heal as well, but that required a little bit of additional capability, and to make my self-modification system a little more... user-friendly, so to speak, for both myself and others.

Sitting back down on my comfy mattress I went to open the laptop and just... browse the web for a little. Well, I was, until I noticed the seconds on the clock seemed to be going a little.... slow. Only a bit, enough that I didn't notice before, but, well, I got the feeling I might have accidentally given myself slightly accelerated perception - not that I was complaining. A few keystrokes later and I was surfing Earth Bet's internet (after yanking open a portal to Medhall's resources and jacking the utilities in again).
■​
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♦ Topic: Vista Attacked In Home
In: Boards ► Locations ► USA ► Brockton Bay ► Recent Events
Bagrat
(Original Poster) (Veteran Member) (The Guy in the Know)
Posted On Mar 15th 2011:
One of my inside sources has leaked an internal PRT document which may spell catastrophe for capes across the United States in a massive breach of both the Unwritten Rules - the rules protecting the civilian identities and families of capes - and the more stringent part of them applying to Wards.

The document in question - produced just yesterday - describes an attack on our favourite spacewarper Vista in her own home by an unknown cape with an extreme and precisely applicable power.

8 gunshots were heard by the neighbours, all from the location of her bedroom, apparently bouncing off walls in such a manner as to leave the message "CEASE". Not just that, however - two of the bullets were aimed in such a way as to hit Vista and her computer in a manner that could only be a result of an extremely potent Thinker or Shaker power.

According to the report, immediately after the attack and injury checks Vista was taken in for Master-Stranger screening and was found to be clean of influence. However, the PRT specialists discovered that Vista - while able to understand that she was researching and posting about something - was unable to even think, reason, or learn about anything to do with Case 53s (even what a Case 53 is), to her apparent distress.

Panacea's inspection of the injury resulted in the following snippet: "It's like the scar tissue blocks any new connections from forming between a bunch of random neurons. I've never seen anything like it."

Furthermore, her power has started to occasionally produce small regions of stretched space around her at random - luckily they do not seem to be dangerous and she's committed to return to Wards patrolling as soon as possible.

This has been posted with permission and review from @Vista, the PRT ENE, and our illustrious @Tin_Mother, as it has also (apparently) been leaked to several other sources and they felt it was prudent to get ahead of the press.

♦ Topic: Update - Siberian
In: Boards ► Locations ► USA ►Slaughterhouse 9 Watch
S9WatchBot
(Original Poster)
Posted On Mar 14th 2011:
Siberian sighted en-route to the Northeastern US.

♦ Topic: Undersiders attack a casino
In: Boards ► Locations ► USA ► Brockton Bay ► Recent Events
Sothoth
(Original Poster)
Posted On Mar 15th 2011:
I just overheard some PRT troopers talking about the Ruby Dreams Casino, apparently the Undersiders robbed the place dry.

Some people are saying it's an ABB front, but there's no evidence to those rumours as far as I know.

Edit: The local rage dragon has come out to burn shit again. I hope the people living there are OK cus I saw at least one apartment building fall down even from here! I can smell the smoke too. Damn I hate this city sometimes, hope everyone from this latest catastrophe can at least use this thread to find if their friends and family are alright.

♦ Topic: New organisation for Thinkers announces itself
In: Boards ► WikiDiscussion ► Organisations
nah_not_me
(Original Poster) (Cape Groupie)
Posted On Mar 14th 2011:
So, today I came across this new website. It seems to be for a rogue Thinker organisation similar to Toybox, calling themselves The Chess Club, started by a cape named Miss Probability. They've even got a pocket dimension from an unknown source, and have the stated aim of being "an option other than being locked in a basement".

I guess time will tell if they're legit, and we can see where they stand in the scheme of things, especially compared with the PRT's own Think Tank.
■​

"FUCK", I cursed, "they got Vista, dammit, fuuuuuck my life!"

It was my fault for not taking the removal of precog blockers into proper account, I thought to myself, though at least I can prevent it in future since I don't even need those antiprecog chips anymore! And she's still alive, which is better than I hoped from those shitheads calling themselves Cauldron.

The thought of having something involuntarily render you incapable of even contemplating something was viscerally horrifying to me in a way that was hard to describe. Rendering someone unable to even comprehend large parts of the lives of their friends, ripping out a peice of their own cognitive capabilities for the convenience of secrets, it was not something I reacted well to.

Before I got mad enough, I also flung Lung into the Birdcage (quickly, to avoid the Faerie Dickhead) with a portal to the parts of Brockton that were on fucking fire, because of fucking course it was, and that was the ABB dealt with in like 5 seconds because Doormaker portals are bullshit.

Anyway, I was pissed off. Really quite pissed off in fact. It was a pretty rare state of being for me, in my life before being shat into the hell that was the Worm multiverse, and most of the time it didn't resolve to much due to a lack of capability and general executive function problems. This time, however, I had the powers of a cuddly (wait what?!) eldritch biocomputer on my side.

My foot was going on the accelerator, hard. It was time to end the reign of Thinkers - human, Endbringer and Scion - over the realm of fate by exponential mass-distribution of technology. So far, my changes to the world had been minor and mostly Brockton local - small areas of antiprecog/clairvoyance, destruction of gangs, and of course self-modification of various kinds.

This would not remain true any longer. Either the world changed or the Entities would kill us all, me included, and I had no intention of dying at any point in the forseeable future.

The first necessary step was accelerating my tinkering. Right now, to modify myself - and I had every intention of using my body as a mini-manufacturing centre - required manually, letter-by-individual-letter, entering genetic modification instructions. This was not acceptable for me or other people, not remotely, and I needed an efficiently enter-able bootstrap genetic code.

Two charges in information density, one in biosignaling, and two in simplicity later and I had a 167-base pair of instructions that would allow me to pathfind and generate a simple conductive wire between two points in the flexible nanolattice laced throughout my body via basic chemical signalling.
Means of Implementation
This was done by providing two different signalling chemicals - Source and Target - where the user could produce one of each in two different spots. Then, those chemicals would diffuse from each individual initial position.

When they combined, it produced a third signalling chemical that would induce the production of conductive nanotube modules to fit in the intercellular framework along areas of increasing concentration of both Source and Target chemicals, as well as a cascade reaction along the surface of collision between the two diffusion fronts to prevent accidental production of further conductive wires.

Source and Target are also destroyed around areas with pre-existing circuit components in the carbon nanotube intercellular framework to prevent unintended interaction with existing components.

On it's own, this seemed like nothing. But when you remembered that shard biology was not human biology and the lovely things could also learn, well. It doesn't take a genius to realise that once that change had propagated through my system - it didn't take long - I hooked my ATGC intent inputs to my Corona Pollentia in addition to the normal dendritic access points that had formed in the initial self-conversion.

But I wasn't close to done, no. There was so much more I needed to do and now I was halfway to going fast. The next bottleneck was needing to type things into blueprints to distribute to other people and observe to refine further.

What I needed was a direct interface and that was what my shard provided - with appropriate specialisations - in the form of a stream of genetic sequences to create the associated carbon-nanotube-matrix USB port hidden in my right wrist via the construction system I had already developed, after skim-reading the USB specification of Earth Bet. Another ten minutes of hyper-rapid cellular propagation and molecular self-assembly and horrible sweating from locally-accelerated metabolism, and I had a chip with several modes:
  • Direct keyboard/mouse intent propagation - to avoid awful carpal tunnel syndrome (my wrists were already hurting from the horrible amounts of documentation I wrote). This relied on simple neuroplasticity.
  • Direct genemod instruction input - took raw genetic modification instructions and fed them to the chip that provided cryptographic signatures for approval.
  • Direct shard output - allowed my shard/corona-pollentia to dump data to the other end of the USB port in any appropriate encoding.
  • Direct shard input - allowed feeding data from the USB port directly into my shard/corona-pollentia.
Just an hour after browsing PHO with my hands on the keyboard and I was learning to do it with nothing but my brain as a direct input driver, and it was already getting stupidly fast - on the order of 150 words per minute - with the neuroplasticity enhancers the chip blueprint came with. It was rather terrifying, actually, even as I got a sense of smug approval.

But I couldn't get distracted, not really. What I had now was a system that probably let me tinker and develop faster than any other person on Earth Bet - more than even my absurd ability to pick specialties - and I was going to use it.

After I had a shower, anyway, because I fucking needed one. And I forgot about healing myself again, apparently! Whooops.

Amy/Panacea - 2011-03-15 - 17:00
Amy Dallon was not having a good day.

This was completely typical of course, even if the character varied. Yesterday it was broken bones and torn muscles from a collapsed building, today it was burn victims from Lung's latest (and apparently, thank fuck, last rampage since trans_morphic got fed up of him). Tomorrow it would be people smashed underneath Squealer's monstrocities - the Merchants were starting to claim territory after all - and on and on and on.

Ask, touch, heal.

Ask, touch, heal.

She dreaded it but she didn't dare stop.

Ask, touch, heal. What if I di- NO!

Ask, touch, heal.

It was what she was good for, after all. A panacea. It was all she could do, Carol had made that clear.

But those blueprints she saw. It gave her ideas, kept coming up in her thoughts, pushing her to think instead of just do. She could feel the creative urges - hair and skin colour changes, cellular efficiency improvements, toxin resis- (she terminated the thoughts). Fighting them was a constant war. Like a parched person denying themselves a bottle of water right in front of their face, a single thought, a single touch away.

Last one.

Ask, touch, heal.

A breath of relief came over her even as she unconciously filtered out the input from microbes in the air around her, while express-airline Victoria hauled her back to the Dallon residence. It didn't take long for her to get out of her dirty robes and into some plain, clean clothes, but it didn't change that she felt like a horribly, explosively coiled spring. The ideas simply would not get out of her head, and she cursed herself for it.

She needed some space, and made her way out into the garden, laying her back on the grass, sucking in the burning flavours of cigarettes - her signature feature to the nurses at the hospital. And then the insidious thought crept in.

Maybe changing some plants will help with the ideas.

Initially, Amy Dallon was reluctant. But she knew she could not keep going on the way she had, and how she wanted to make something, anything. It took a while, and a lot of talking her way around the hate she held for herself for even considering so selfishly using her power for anything other than healing. Amy, however, managed to do so.

She started small - a little blade of grass, from green, to blue, to red, and back to its natural green colour again. This alone made her feel slightly less unhappy.

Then, the freckled teen moved to something more aesthetically pleasing and pretty - she made a radiantly violet and blue flower with custom, strong petals that would last for months without water, shyly picking it off the bush branch she used as a biological base, even as the dour expression on her face lifted just a little.

And last but not least, she modified a single bit of stalk for one of the other bushes such that it would produce thick, almost scale like leaves in rainbow colours over the next few weeks - then accelerated its growth such that the extremely beautiful biology was evident almost immediately. She snapped a bit off and reshaped it slightly with fused ends into a rainbow bracelet that was instantly around her wrist.

Her dour face lifted even more and Amy Dallon was truly, genuinely happy for the first time in a long while. For a little, anyway, before she heard the soft sounds of feet behind her and coldness filled the garden with the voice she dreaded.

"And what, Amy, are you doing out here?"

The biokinetic shuffled uncomfortably, and replied with a quiet but slightly bitter "relaxing".

Amy's biokinesis was not fast enough to hide the flower she had in her hand and on her wrist from Carol, as she turned around with the demand - phrased falsely as a request - to come inside, even though she tried to hold it behind her back before Brandish told her to stop hiding the thing in her hand.

"Why have you got that", Brandish hissed, a dangerous glint in her eyes at the rose she could not see as anything other than the one Marquis made for her even during one of their deadly conflicts. "You look just like him, I should never have trusted you in my house with my daughter!", she continued, now pointing her deadly lightning blade at the teenager across from her before she could get out even one snarky reply. "Get. Out."

The young biokinetic burst into shaking, terrified tears even as she heard the gentle sizzling of the grass underneath the woman she had never called mum. A warning move forward finally unglued her feet and she ran, straight over the garden fence and off, alone into the depths of Brockton Bay.

trans_morphic's Pocket Universe - 2011-03-15 17:50
I'd cleaned myself up, had a little nap, and grabbed some more food. I felt rested and still the brimming injustice of Vista's treatment was under my skin, the determination I had from before ready to pounce.

I could feel anticipation - both my own and something else - at what I was about to do. Plugging myself into my laptop once again, I started on the projects that would change everything forever for all humanity. Until now, the cycle of tinkering was slow and tedious, with long delays for large improvements. In my little pocket dimension, here-and-now, was where it changed.

Un-blackboxed blueprints flashed in front of my eyes with continuous updates and refinements in ideas feeding dynamically into the live view of different versions on my laptop screen, the stream of lines and dots and code updating at the speed of thought as they were fed through both my own creative mental processes and constantly shifting tinker specialties around modularity, efficiency, and documentability, taking advantage of the ultrasophisticated neurointerfacing capabilities of shards to enable rapid thought-to-data translation as well as preexisting tinker power capabilities to accelerate the continuous development rate by at least 3 orders of magnitude, with the direct aid of a shard in temporary comprehension of any given blueprint.

It was totally unrestrained technological optimisation and development on a level that would terrify any engineer watching. Chip blueprints flashing by, more refined and modular by the second. Code that got more readable every minute until even a novice could recognise the extreme efficiency of any algorithm and comprehend the associated formal proof of validity and security, and be able to truly understand how to combine the hyper-usable library modules provided.

Defined by a rush of euphoria of learning and comprehension, I'd barely even begun before in a mere 10 minutes I had refined my initial designs for both an in-body mini meshnet for more modular data transmission, but also designed an infinitely expandable - and I mean for an arbitrary number of multiverses - formally verified mesh network system, cryptographically routed using a tree of arbitrarily increasing keysizes for regions of increasing size based off the initial ideas in a project from my own home universe.

It took a matter of seconds to publish the code, and then I moved onto my next project, the one that would define me as a cape and what I truly stood for. The Multiversal BioNetworking Infrastructure - MBNI. A terrifying and beautiful illustration of what the term 'S-class' really meant - and the real purpose of the meshnet I developed, the bioprinting capabilities, the bio-circuitry construction, precog and extradimensional/universal effect jamming, the biosignaling systems I'd developed, and the purpose of integrating the shards' unique shard-host universal neurointerfacing and knowledge transfer capabilities that I was already planning.

Nothing would ever be the same, I thought, as I shared in a feeling of unrestrained [GLEE].
[end of chapter - nya~]
It's back. Writer's block is awful and life can be awful and I'm sorry, I have no good excuse really. This is a major transition point in the story and it was really hard to get the right words on the page. nya
 
Haitus due to lack of tooling.
Sorry about how late this is, life has been a thing and also I'm just not good at this sort of notifying people of things, thing.

I'm officially notifying y'all that this story is on haitus, though not out of lack of interest. I enjoyed writing this story so far, and when I figure out the tooling, I'll enjoy writing it again. However, for now, I find continuing this story very difficult for a number of reasons. Most critically, up until this point, I've not used any kind of detailed planning or timelining in this story. That's actually fine, except for the fact that I have no structured record of what i've already done.

This means, e.g., that when I want to check a plot point or a date or time or a character thing, I've been having to, every single time, scan through almost my entire existing story from start to finish. Furthermore, I'm starting to have a LOT of plotlines simultaneously - this is intentional, I want a large number of things to be going on in the background, and I have both long-term and short-term plotlines going on.

The problem is, I actually can't keep track of it, at all. It's all in my head and the text of this story, and it has got to the point of inducing anxiety trying to keep track of all the character details, etc. so I've just been avoiding doing anything around this for ages (which isn't great, really >.< nya). My attention in fanfic has also shifted a bit away from Worm though that kind of goes back and forth and is more due to the kinda burnout-ish thing with this story, and I've been doing more programming as well.

I did start plugging the information into Manuskript from my existing writing. However, that was excruciatingly dull and takes many many many hours and I couldn't keep my interest - the structure was separate from my existing text, and that made it very difficult if not impossible to e.g. keep track of where I was and what parts of the text were associated with what plots/characters/etc. it took me multiple days just to get the first arc in. Furthermore, I am much more comfortable in the commandline than trying to navigate complex GUIs and plug in complex structure via that sort of interface.

If I'd started writing the story with something like Manuskript it would probably work fine-ish even if I'm much more comfortable in the CLI, actually, but I didn't. And that's not designed for BBCode as well, but that would have been work-around-able.

For tooling, what I need before I can really continue this is:
  • Something FOSS - for money reasons, ethics reasons, control-over-files reasons, and not adding unnecessary Cloud crap when I have my own sync/backup thing going on (syncthing all the way ;p)
  • Something that can work on existing text files and lets you annotate structure from directly within them
  • Ideally, something that integrates with vim/neovim and does not overwhelm you with information panels
If anyone knows anything that is already capable of this then I'd appreciate information on it. However, I did go through a period of trying to find a tool like that and didn't find that much. What I think might be necessary, is for me to write this myself at somepoint.

Coming back to this after a kind message from someone who read this story, it made me think about how I would write that code and how I would structure it. In particular, there exists a protocol called "Language Server Protocol" (LSP) that is designed primarily to give suggestions, hover information, error correction, templates, etc. for when you are working on software. However, there is nothing about the protocol that prevents it from also being used for things like suggesting character names, acting to synchronise and calculate plotline positions, and automatically deriving sequences of events from lists of chapter files with tags added. More generally, it provides a useful framework for integrating large, multifile projects of any kind with any sufficiently pluggable text editor nya.

So, in my future I will probably end up writing an LSP server that can manage this. Unfortunately, I have a lot of other projects and ideas - too many to handle with my current executive function issues though if some people finally hurry up and sort out ADHD medication maybe not in future - so it's on the backburner.

In case you are curious (and in case I never end up getting around to this), my idea goes something like the following:
  • Each project is a folder
  • The folder has something like content/{**/*.md, **/*.bbcode, ...}, containing all the chapters etc.
  • The project also has a configuration of the temporal order of the chapters and perhaps subsections of the chapters
  • Chapters can contain annotations that create, modify, destroy, and reference entities - these entities have properties and a path like e.g. plot/<your-plot-here>.stage = (stage-a) => (stage-b)

Thanks for reading, I'm sorry it wasn't a chapter :(
 
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