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The Amazing Arachne (Spider-Liv Sequel!)
- Thread starter open_sketch
- Start date
- Archive Superhero
- Location
- Earth
[X] You are not the only person here to tamper with the robots.
Gh055twr1t3r
Idle Prophet
- Location
- United States
[X] You are not the only person here to tamper with the robots.
The robots being active is interesting but I'm curious as to who our mysterious fellow interloper might be.
The robots being active is interesting but I'm curious as to who our mysterious fellow interloper might be.
Solarstream
It's all in the cards
- Location
- Zombie World
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] The robots are being transported active, and are surprisingly resistant to tampering.
[X] You are not the only person here to tamper with the robots.
This sounds cool!
Might not be the best for liv, or at least might be risky, but I'm not making this choice as a decision for Liv, who, after all, can't affect this. I'm making this choice for me, and this seems interesting to read.
This sounds cool!
Might not be the best for liv, or at least might be risky, but I'm not making this choice as a decision for Liv, who, after all, can't affect this. I'm making this choice for me, and this seems interesting to read.
- Location
- United States
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] You are not the only person here to tamper with the robots.
- Location
- Diamond City
[X] You are not the only person here to tamper with the robots.
Vebyast
Nascent Transhuman
I wonder if May went back home and asked her parents the same thing.
I wish I'd listened to my parents when they told me this.
- Location
- Somewhere.
[X] You are not the only person here to tamper with the robots.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
[X] You are not the only person here to tamper with the robots.
Reprogramming
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
You launched yourself gracefully from the top of a tree and landed with a perfect roll onto the truck, even remembering to roll left so as not to catch your artificial arm. You feet stuck fast the the roof of the sleek silver box, and you gave yourself a moment to look over all the truck's systems, disabling its rats nest of alarms and looping its security cameras before popping open the electric lock on the rear door and jumping in.
There, strapped to the wall on either side, quite deactivated, were twenty-four Stark police robots, painted white and blue. They looked similar to the ones you'd seen in the Robotic Department of the Stark building, but these ones were field models. They had armour over select areas, and open panels on the sides where the police's existing sidearms or M4 carbines could be attached for the machine to use. Piled at the back were accessories, like riot shields and two of what you were pretty sure were sonic cannons for crowd dispersal.
Fuck these things, Jesus.
"I know you are enthusiastic for robots, but that's a little far."
"Eww." you said. "They're cops, Athena. Now let's get reprogramming."
You sat down, popped the diagnostics panel on the chest of one of the units opened, and plugged your phone in. With a thought, you had it booted to offline standby mode and started logging in, the system gleefully revealing its secrets to you as you probed the local copies of the instructions. Athena was taking notes for you as you worked out the details, because sure enough the robots had instructions patched in to tag their fellow cops and exclude them from their protocols. What was wild, though, was that a lot of this was just turning off functions they already had: evidently whoever had structured the adaptive programming was a lot more principled than the departments that'd use them.
These cops were supposed to have a few ways of being used. One was, obviously, they were an implacable force in a riot situation, which, gross. The second was that they could be first in the door for active shooter events and such, which was a lot more reasonable in your estimation: you knew that with the uptick in far right terrorism Germany and Norway had bought a few exclusively for their armed response teams, and with the objective of taking shooters alive without having to risk officers to do it. But the third, and the one that would probably cause the most misery in the long run, was as autonomous beat cops, tireless and perfectly attentive. They could detect crimes as they happened, and unlike the drones the NYPD kept trying to buy (and, mercifully, kept getting blocked on 4th Amendment grounds) they could intervene directly and immediately. That was going to get a lot of people killed.
But, you reasoned, the people they'd probably spend the most time around would likely be the officers around them, because these things weren't terribly charismatic. So if you just commented out stuff here, the bots would treat the cops with just as much scrutiny as everyone else. You debated a bit if it simply shouldn't recognize the cops as having any authority at all and thus shutting down any force they used, before instead going in and adjusting some weights so it was very concerned about using reasonable force. You gave it three days, tops, before one of these bots put a fellow officer under arrest for mistreating a suspect.
The real art, though, was in the automatic updating. See, once this went wrong, they'd likely restore the machines from backups from the JARVIS computer, so two things had to happen. First, you wrote a dirty little installer that would run after the update and reinstall your fork, and secondly, you tried to adjust all the markers you needed so that the supercomputer would think this was legit and reinstall it with each update. Furthermore, you'd had enough time in the Stark building now to, hopefully, if you didn't fuck it up, get a virus in there that would do nothing but go in, override the backups with your changes, propagate as deep into the system as it could, then quietly clean up after itself.
Optimally, you'd make it so that it'd take months of development time at least to find out what changes you'd made and change it back. But even if you failed that, you might make the NYPD distrust the bots enough to get the police union against it, and that'd be that.
It took you about half an hour to do the first. Now you just had to do the rest, but it'd be faster now that you knew what you were doing. You were on the third one when you heard something hit the roof of the cab.
"The fuck was that?" you asked, glancing up. With a thought, you fed the external driving camera feeds through your smart glass, spotting something red dropping down the back of the truck, and you heard something bang against the metal of the door and the electric lock pop open. On the other side was a figure swathed in a formless red cloak, a hood pulled over their face. The whole thing danced to your tech sense.
"Hey, what-" you started, but then there was a flash of bright light and noise, and your vision went white and your ears rang. You collapsed, splitting pain in your head, and you could just barely see the figure come and stand over you, the lights of their cloak fading, nothing but a black void under their hood. The power that rippled through the cloak felt like standing too close to a campfire, blurry from the pain.
---
There, strapped to the wall on either side, quite deactivated, were twenty-four Stark police robots, painted white and blue. They looked similar to the ones you'd seen in the Robotic Department of the Stark building, but these ones were field models. They had armour over select areas, and open panels on the sides where the police's existing sidearms or M4 carbines could be attached for the machine to use. Piled at the back were accessories, like riot shields and two of what you were pretty sure were sonic cannons for crowd dispersal.
Fuck these things, Jesus.
"I know you are enthusiastic for robots, but that's a little far."
"Eww." you said. "They're cops, Athena. Now let's get reprogramming."
You sat down, popped the diagnostics panel on the chest of one of the units opened, and plugged your phone in. With a thought, you had it booted to offline standby mode and started logging in, the system gleefully revealing its secrets to you as you probed the local copies of the instructions. Athena was taking notes for you as you worked out the details, because sure enough the robots had instructions patched in to tag their fellow cops and exclude them from their protocols. What was wild, though, was that a lot of this was just turning off functions they already had: evidently whoever had structured the adaptive programming was a lot more principled than the departments that'd use them.
These cops were supposed to have a few ways of being used. One was, obviously, they were an implacable force in a riot situation, which, gross. The second was that they could be first in the door for active shooter events and such, which was a lot more reasonable in your estimation: you knew that with the uptick in far right terrorism Germany and Norway had bought a few exclusively for their armed response teams, and with the objective of taking shooters alive without having to risk officers to do it. But the third, and the one that would probably cause the most misery in the long run, was as autonomous beat cops, tireless and perfectly attentive. They could detect crimes as they happened, and unlike the drones the NYPD kept trying to buy (and, mercifully, kept getting blocked on 4th Amendment grounds) they could intervene directly and immediately. That was going to get a lot of people killed.
But, you reasoned, the people they'd probably spend the most time around would likely be the officers around them, because these things weren't terribly charismatic. So if you just commented out stuff here, the bots would treat the cops with just as much scrutiny as everyone else. You debated a bit if it simply shouldn't recognize the cops as having any authority at all and thus shutting down any force they used, before instead going in and adjusting some weights so it was very concerned about using reasonable force. You gave it three days, tops, before one of these bots put a fellow officer under arrest for mistreating a suspect.
The real art, though, was in the automatic updating. See, once this went wrong, they'd likely restore the machines from backups from the JARVIS computer, so two things had to happen. First, you wrote a dirty little installer that would run after the update and reinstall your fork, and secondly, you tried to adjust all the markers you needed so that the supercomputer would think this was legit and reinstall it with each update. Furthermore, you'd had enough time in the Stark building now to, hopefully, if you didn't fuck it up, get a virus in there that would do nothing but go in, override the backups with your changes, propagate as deep into the system as it could, then quietly clean up after itself.
Optimally, you'd make it so that it'd take months of development time at least to find out what changes you'd made and change it back. But even if you failed that, you might make the NYPD distrust the bots enough to get the police union against it, and that'd be that.
It took you about half an hour to do the first. Now you just had to do the rest, but it'd be faster now that you knew what you were doing. You were on the third one when you heard something hit the roof of the cab.
"The fuck was that?" you asked, glancing up. With a thought, you fed the external driving camera feeds through your smart glass, spotting something red dropping down the back of the truck, and you heard something bang against the metal of the door and the electric lock pop open. On the other side was a figure swathed in a formless red cloak, a hood pulled over their face. The whole thing danced to your tech sense.
"Hey, what-" you started, but then there was a flash of bright light and noise, and your vision went white and your ears rang. You collapsed, splitting pain in your head, and you could just barely see the figure come and stand over you, the lights of their cloak fading, nothing but a black void under their hood. The power that rippled through the cloak felt like standing too close to a campfire, blurry from the pain.
---
[ ] Your priority is to escape. You reprogrammed three bots, the virus will be uploaded. Hopefully that'll be enough, and they won't be able to use one of the bots as a backup.
[ ] Your priority is to win the fight. You can't leave the job half-finished, and who knows what this person will do. Besides, you can't have the police be forewarned.
[ ] Write in.
- Location
- Leeds
Anyone know who this is?
Queshire
Wants a pink flamingo for their lawn.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
[X] Your priority is to win the fight. You can't leave the job half-finished, and who knows what this person will do. Besides, you can't have the police be forewarned.
I'm thinking this might be the local version of Cloak & Dagger? Or at least Cloak with Dagger hidden somewhere inside his pocket space.
Though that's just a wild guess since a red cloak doesn't fit.
EDIT: Though the theme of fighting against versions of the avengers makes me think Always Late might have the right of it.
I'm thinking this might be the local version of Cloak & Dagger? Or at least Cloak with Dagger hidden somewhere inside his pocket space.
Though that's just a wild guess since a red cloak doesn't fit.
EDIT: Though the theme of fighting against versions of the avengers makes me think Always Late might have the right of it.
Last edited:
Always Late
Lacking in coffee, sleep, and brains
- Location
- Ohio
Given the use of sense-distorting equipment, the cape, instant access to Stark-tech secutiry, and an impeccable sense for theatricality? MCU!Quentin Beck doesn't want Arachne upstaging their revenge on Stark.
Or we're facing the Arachne-verse Sorcerer(or Sorceress) Supreme, and that's the cloak of levitation.
[X] Your priority is to win the fight. You can't leave the job half-finished, and who knows what this person will do. Besides, you can't have the police be forewarned.
Either way, I'mma deck 'em in the schnozz.