Redistribution of Power [SI/CYOA-ish]
- Thread starter sapient_cogbag
- Start date
I get that but what good is it if she is not also giving the same gusto towards other things like her adaptability, safety, and also retaliation efforts if she attacked, really like she is completely well not completely vulnerable to attack. All she is doing is running and hiding and causing trouble, please she needs to get other specialties ( combat, planning, strategy, augmentation, AI ) she is leaving herself weak in a way, well to me. Thank you for the chapter, can't wait for the next one.
I like the story but even mentioning mental masters and people like heartbreaker pisses me of and raises my blood pressure
AnantaAtman
I wandered, I watched, I judged
- Pronouns
- She/Her
They really were not afraid of making waves, huh? This story was pretty fun. However, there were some inconsistencies there. You are cracking down too hard on Alex. You should know that she was someone who was on a team with Legend so out of anyone, she should be the one who didn't have a transphobia.
Gumiho
Reach heaven through violence!
Yeah, its kinda weird how hard Lex and Dave are coming down on the transphobia, dont really remember that as something that really cared about ontop of the various other bigger concersn they have.
Precipitation of Autonomy - 3.5
- Pronouns
- Xe/Xem/They/Them
[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).
[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).
- Pronouns
- Xe/Xem/They/Them
On another note writing this story has sent me on a nice set of several physical-philosophical tangents related to the nature of all hypothetically possible realities and physical laws using types of set theory as a means of representation (though I have not had time to make too many conclusions or proper writing really, it's more thought-experiment-y). meow One way i've been thinking about this is using sets of possible states and interactions between them constituting new states as a means of conceptualising multiverse interactions and how perhaps it might? maybe? mean that Grothendieck universe - Wikipedia could be used as a representative tool?.
Also thinking about mechanisms of preserving a network's functionality in the case of hostile attempts at external modification (mastering), like for instance if you think of the mechanics of some universe using "conceptual magic", how would that end up messing with a neural network with external checks and what "depth" (e.g. checks, checks on checks, etc.) could actually be capable of fighting off external influence and could you implement self-referential checks (e.g. a check capable of applying to itself without needing infinite energy? nya), or perhaps a system with self-expanding checks that constantly grow larger. What level of trust do you need in the laws of a physical substrate? What about temporal/time-travel effects and what are the ways in which a quantum-mechanical universe interacts with time travel? Honestly there's just so much of these questions ;p nyaaa
It's fucking weird but thinking about mechanics of hypothetical multiverses is something i find waaaaay too enjoyable for my own good, i highly recommend it.
I have heard this criticism a lot, and I agree it's not necessarily what you'd expect from her from reading Worm. However, there is no WoG on whether or not she is or isn't transphobic (as far as I know of anyhow nya), and so I'm essentially making it her "pet issue" so to speak, as an extension of her controlling nature. And there are lots of folks who accept more "conforming" gay people (I'm not actually sure of the proper term here but basically people who can still mostly fit into the traditional notions of gender presentation and nuclear family norms but are gay) but are hostile to other lgbt+ issues.
Essentially, in my story, it hasn't come up until trans_morphic because Alexandria (and her alternate identity of RCB) is powerful enough both politically and parahuman-ly to get her way with trans capes (either branding them as villains and going hardmode on them, or getting them under the PRT's thumb with it's institutional transphobia and stuff meow) fast enough that it just hasn't hit the spotlight.
I'm working on the premises that:
* Bet is more progressive on gay people
* But trans acceptance and other similar things are actually worse off, because perception of biotinkers has bled into general biotechnology and lead to a very medicalised and transmedicalist view of how trans people can exist (or if they are allowed to exist at all).
* Basically, the larger prevalence of involuntary biomodification (C53s, Bonesaw, Nilbog, etc.) has bled over into a distaste for what people perceive as deviation from what is "natural" or just generally biomodification of all kinds nya.
* This is in direct contrast to the SI/MC, who is me, and who is radically transhumanist ;p
Maybe, or maybe not
Also thinking about mechanisms of preserving a network's functionality in the case of hostile attempts at external modification (mastering), like for instance if you think of the mechanics of some universe using "conceptual magic", how would that end up messing with a neural network with external checks and what "depth" (e.g. checks, checks on checks, etc.) could actually be capable of fighting off external influence and could you implement self-referential checks (e.g. a check capable of applying to itself without needing infinite energy? nya), or perhaps a system with self-expanding checks that constantly grow larger. What level of trust do you need in the laws of a physical substrate? What about temporal/time-travel effects and what are the ways in which a quantum-mechanical universe interacts with time travel? Honestly there's just so much of these questions ;p nyaaa
It's fucking weird but thinking about mechanics of hypothetical multiverses is something i find waaaaay too enjoyable for my own good, i highly recommend it
.I have heard this criticism a lot, and I agree it's not necessarily what you'd expect from her from reading Worm. However, there is no WoG on whether or not she is or isn't transphobic (as far as I know of anyhow nya), and so I'm essentially making it her "pet issue" so to speak, as an extension of her controlling nature. And there are lots of folks who accept more "conforming" gay people (I'm not actually sure of the proper term here but basically people who can still mostly fit into the traditional notions of gender presentation and nuclear family norms but are gay) but are hostile to other lgbt+ issues.
Essentially, in my story, it hasn't come up until trans_morphic because Alexandria (and her alternate identity of RCB) is powerful enough both politically and parahuman-ly to get her way with trans capes (either branding them as villains and going hardmode on them, or getting them under the PRT's thumb with it's institutional transphobia and stuff meow) fast enough that it just hasn't hit the spotlight.
I'm working on the premises that:
* Bet is more progressive on gay people
* But trans acceptance and other similar things are actually worse off, because perception of biotinkers has bled into general biotechnology and lead to a very medicalised and transmedicalist view of how trans people can exist (or if they are allowed to exist at all).
* Basically, the larger prevalence of involuntary biomodification (C53s, Bonesaw, Nilbog, etc.) has bled over into a distaste for what people perceive as deviation from what is "natural" or just generally biomodification of all kinds nya.
* This is in direct contrast to the SI/MC, who is me, and who is radically transhumanist ;p
Maybe, or maybe not
Last edited:
- Pronouns
- He
I hope Contessa just shot up Vista's computer and not Vista herself.
Amazing chapter, EVIL cliffhanger.
Wouldn't Mastering / removing Vista's memories take less steps then killing her?
Because I imagine there would be quite an investigation into Vista being killed in her home.
Including Thinkers getting involved and people trying to figure out the motive and whether Vista was doing anything at the time. Which leads to internet history.
Which can be navigated through, but not without more steps and time then mastering should take. It also better follows Cauldron's Ideals and isn't needlessly wasteful if all their efforts to hide Cauldron become Moot because of MC anyway.
So hopefully this is Just to scare Vista. Especially since it was 8 shots where you would expect Contessa to only need 1, maybe 2 or 3 for the computer and phone.
But it is possibly a path malfunction, or The Eye getting pissed at being denied a whole area and so wanting to hurt the one responsible for it through vista.
Because I imagine there would be quite an investigation into Vista being killed in her home.
Including Thinkers getting involved and people trying to figure out the motive and whether Vista was doing anything at the time. Which leads to internet history.
Which can be navigated through, but not without more steps and time then mastering should take. It also better follows Cauldron's Ideals and isn't needlessly wasteful if all their efforts to hide Cauldron become Moot because of MC anyway.
So hopefully this is Just to scare Vista. Especially since it was 8 shots where you would expect Contessa to only need 1, maybe 2 or 3 for the computer and phone.
But it is possibly a path malfunction, or The Eye getting pissed at being denied a whole area and so wanting to hurt the one responsible for it through vista.
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Gumiho
Reach heaven through violence!
Yeah, If your gonna invent even more negative traits to add to alexandria many canon sins and negative traits, just so your si can take the even more extra special moral high road, thats where i check out.
Avangelion
Princess Astra
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Hope Vista's still alive, nice to see you posting, and wow the tech stuff kinda made my head spin a bit but iz fun lmao.
'nyways, need to keep it short cuz I'm busy, but hope to see more and all that
The logical extrapolation I can kinda make sense with, and the transmedicalist BS becoming the norm and all that makes sense to me at least, and it kinda doesn't really entirely contradict things I feel, since transphobic, transmedicalist gay people are a thing and all that- just a mess and everything.On another note writing this story has sent me on a nice set of several physical-philosophical tangents related to the nature of all hypothetically possible realities and physical laws using types of set theory as a means of representation (though I have not had time to make too many conclusions or proper writing really, it's more thought-experiment-y). meow One way i've been thinking about this is using sets of possible states and interactions between them constituting new states as a means of conceptualising multiverse interactions and how perhaps it might? maybe? mean that Grothendieck universe - Wikipedia could be used as a representative tool?.
Also thinking about mechanisms of preserving a network's functionality in the case of hostile attempts at external modification (mastering), like for instance if you think of the mechanics of some universe using "conceptual magic", how would that end up messing with a neural network with external checks and what "depth" (e.g. checks, checks on checks, etc.) could actually be capable of fighting off external influence and could you implement self-referential checks (e.g. a check capable of applying to itself without needing infinite energy? nya), or perhaps a system with self-expanding checks that constantly grow larger. What level of trust do you need in the laws of a physical substrate? What about temporal/time-travel effects and what are the ways in which a quantum-mechanical universe interacts with time travel? Honestly there's just so much of these questions ;p nyaaa
It's fucking weird but thinking about mechanics of hypothetical multiverses is something i find waaaaay too enjoyable for my own good, i highly recommend it
I have heard this criticism a lot, and I agree it's not necessarily what you'd expect from her from reading Worm. However, there is no WoG on whether or not she is or isn't transphobic (as far as I know of anyhow nya), and so I'm essentially making it her "pet issue" so to speak, as an extension of her controlling nature. And there are lots of folks who accept more "conforming" gay people (I'm not actually sure of the proper term here but basically people who can still mostly fit into the traditional notions of gender presentation and nuclear family norms but are gay) but are hostile to other lgbt+ issues.
Essentially, in my story, it hasn't come up until trans_morphic because Alexandria (and her alternate identity of RCB) is powerful enough both politically and parahuman-ly to get her way with trans capes (either branding them as villains and going hardmode on them, or getting them under the PRT's thumb with it's institutional transphobia and stuff meow) fast enough that it just hasn't hit the spotlight.
I'm working on the premises that:
* Bet is more progressive on gay people
* But trans acceptance and other similar things are actually worse off, because perception of biotinkers has bled into general biotechnology and lead to a very medicalised and transmedicalist view of how trans people can exist (or if they are allowed to exist at all).
* Basically, the larger prevalence of involuntary biomodification (C53s, Bonesaw, Nilbog, etc.) has bled over into a distaste for what people perceive as deviation from what is "natural" or just generally biomodification of all kinds nya.
* This is in direct contrast to the SI/MC, who is me, and who is radically transhumanist ;p
Maybe, or maybe not
'nyways, need to keep it short cuz I'm busy, but hope to see more and all that
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
I mean I chalked "cash point" up to your SI being British, but this character is presumably American, and would say "bullshit", not "bollocks"
Also "Warp" doesn't fit with the fanciful names Ciara chooses for faeries. "League-Walker" or "Far-Strider" might work.
I do quite like the internal conflict within the triumvirate. Alexandria being very stuck in her mindset fits thematically with her powers.
- Pronouns
- Xe/Xem/They/Them
Thank you! It's hard to avoid my, uhhh, britishisms leaking through to American characters and I will update it.
You might be right about Ciara's shard/faerie names with this, I think I will change it.
On another note, real-life has been a giant pain (plus extreme hyperfixations) and also I got some vaccine-resistant strain of coronavirus this past week (I'm young and fairly healthy and am vaccinated though, so it wasn't horrific though self isolation has been very not fun nyaaa).
But I am working on the next chapter (now I am at least ^.^).
I really love this and hope to see more.
One thing it seems trans_morphic may not have thought of, a cryptographically secure genetic modification system is really nice. Unless someone else uses it on you and keeps the private key themselves and then it's horrific. Also, given they've released it open source, that ship's sailed. Even if they put in a system to prevent misuse like that there's nothing stopping anyone from just removing in on their version. The only solution I can think of would be to preemptively deploy a safe version to everyone.
One thing it seems trans_morphic may not have thought of, a cryptographically secure genetic modification system is really nice. Unless someone else uses it on you and keeps the private key themselves and then it's horrific. Also, given they've released it open source, that ship's sailed. Even if they put in a system to prevent misuse like that there's nothing stopping anyone from just removing in on their version. The only solution I can think of would be to preemptively deploy a safe version to everyone.
Last edited:
Precipitation of Autonomy - 3.6
- Pronouns
- Xe/Xem/They/Them
[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.
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:
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
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
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.
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
- Location
- Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Next step to keeping Cauldron a secret: Kidnap Phir Se, have him open a portal to the past before this happened, shoot past Contessa before she does this incredibly self-sabotaging and mind-numbingly idiotic thing that proves to the entire planet that there exists a conspiracy bent on preventing research into Case53's.
I'm sorry, it's just... I actually guffawed out loud at how bad a decision this was.
You can't actually de-power parahumans by removing their Coronas. The Corona is just a control interface to the Shard. That being said, if you remove the Corona and completely scramble the neural patterns (especially the memories of the trigger event) and genome of the target that might work.
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- Location
- Planet Earth
Cannot see the MC not outing Cauldron, their identities and actions, for attacking Vista.
- Pronouns
- Xe/Xem/They/Them
PtV is having lots more trouble because of the increasing unreliability of simulations, it's being a bit of a blunt instrument here ;p, though what happened with the computer is more interesting and slightly less blunt-instrument-y, but also not written down here ^.^ nya (not really for spoiler reasons).