Stahor
BookWorm
- Location
- Russia, Moscow
Arpeggio of Blue Steel - Manga | Page 19
It won't reduce amount of questions you have, but change them to different ones
Transposition, or: Ship Happens [Worm/Aoki Hagane no Arpeggio | Arpeggio of Blue Steel]
- Thread starter ensou
- Start date
- Crossover
It won't reduce amount of questions you have, but change them to different ones
Neruz
Rogue Spiderbanana
- Location
- The Land of Fire and Poison
So the Fog have been here since WWI, for some reason, and Gauss and co. find the Admiralty Code and... something happens...Arpeggio of Blue Steel - Manga | Page 19
It won't reduce amount of questions you have, but change them to different ones
That helps not at all!
My brain, the answers do nothing!
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Guardsman_Sparky
The Clueless Wonder
- Location
- Virginia
The Fog are clearly hyper advanced presumably alien and\or time-travelling war machines, as I can't see how WWII humans could possibly have constructed anything even remotely like them even with Anime shenanigans. The big question is why in gods name were they taking orders from said scientist?
And what the crap is the Admiralty Code up to!? And why does it\she wear a space suit? Did the Apollo missions find something on the moon in Arpeggio-verse? But the Apollo missions happened after WWII.
AAAGH!
Okay, lemme see if I can't elucidate.So the Fog have been here since WWI, for some reason, and Gauss and co. find the Admiralty Code and... something happens...
That helps not at all!
My brain, the answers do nothing!
As I understand it, basically, the Admiralty Code landed on Earth at some point, along with the Fleet of Fog, a series of deep space vessels/warships, which went into hibernation deep under the sea or something. At some point, around WWI I think, someone found the Admiralty Code, and it eventually made its way into the hands of the Nazis. They had fuck-all luck with it in any fashion. Then in 1945, right as Germany's inevitable defeat loomed closely, someone finally had a breakthrough and managed to give the order to the Admiralty Code to have the Fleet of Fog interdict the seas. It didn't work, because the Fleet of Fog basically rolled over and went back to sleep, and the very next day, Germany surrendered.
Then, for some unknown reason, the Fleet of Fog reactivated spontaneously sixty-odd years later and began carrying out the final command they'd received from the Admiralty Code: interdict the seas. And since no one knows where the Admiralty Code is since Nazi Germany fell (and possibly don't even know of its existence, or that of that last command, at all), no one can do the obvious thing and cancel that last order.
And I'm not sure for certain, but I think the reason the FoF took on the form of WWII vessels was due to the Admiralty Code having a pique of fancy or something. Apparently it has a literal mind of its own.
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Neruz
Rogue Spiderbanana
- Location
- The Land of Fire and Poison
The Code has shown up actually, it\she was secretly visiting Kotono Ameha in the 2050s. Given that Kotono Ameha may or may not be a\the first Mental Model of Yamato, this only raises more questions than it answers.
The next time was in 2056 when Haruna went berserk and targeted an annihilation attack on the three Japanese capitols. The Code showed up, aborted the attack and then vanished again.
The Code also wore an Apollo series spacesuit when it\she showed up to stop Haruna. Presumably that means something. Something.
And then there's Chapters 94\95 of the Manga, which answer a bunch of questions by creating dozens more. Because apparently nanomaterial used to be magic. And there were users before the Admiralty Code.
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ensou
Magical G̶i̶r̶l̶ Servant Mordred-chan
- Location
- NEW YORK CITY!??
- Pronouns
- She/Her
To be honest, I've basically accepted that this is probably the largest/most-used thread for AoBS discussion. It's more the Worm stuff that's not relevant that I care about since there are highly frequented dedicated discussion threads for it.
Take that as you will
Next chapter (Counterpoint 3.1) is at 5.2k and needs to go past my editor, chapter after that is at 1.2k and counting.
The funny thing about Clarke's Third Law? The one that says "Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"? That little adage can cut both ways. Turns out the same is true in Arpeggio, and the AC being implied to be some sort of ancient, possibly interdimensional and magical entity is interesting, and something nobody saw coming. I was honestly expecting something like an AI or the equivalent thereof.
Also, Gunzo wearing lederhosen had me in stitches.
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Burning Baron
This position needs more entrenching.
- Location
- In here, not out there.
Aerial targets at sea were very much a thing when they went into hibernation
- Location
- Earth Prime
Technically, the third law is acknowledgement that the first cut's both ways. The first being "Sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology."The funny thing about Clarke's Third Law? The one that says "Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"? That little adage can cut both ways. Turns out the same is true in Arpeggio, and the AC being implied to be some sort of ancient, possibly interdimensional and magical entity is interesting, and something nobody saw coming. I was honestly expecting something like an AI or the equivalent thereof.
Also, Gunzo wearing lederhosen had me in stitches.
Neruz
Rogue Spiderbanana
- Location
- The Land of Fire and Poison
And when considering Clarke's Laws it is important to remember that 'magic' is an old code-word for 'I don't know how it works.'
Strictly speaking, if you know how it works, it's not really magic.
Rajvik_wolfboy
Wolf amongst the stars.
- Location
- Florida
Just re-found this, thought I had it watched before but I guess I didn't. Looking good though.
MWKillKenny84
Lurking from the Trauma Switch.
- Location
- Vado Ligure
No, it become magecraft instead of 'true' magic.
- Location
- Russia
The thing with Nasuverse magic is that it becomes objectively less useful the more you understand it.
- Location
- Santa Barbara, CA
That makes zero sense what so ever.
Knight-Radiant
Recovering Rageaholic
Well... it kinda does.
Ya see, as far as I can tell, a big part of Nasuverse magic is centered around the conservation of mystery.
For instance, Magic in the Nasuverse is something done with a spell that cannot be replicated without that spell with everything else being the less rare (and less powerful) magecraft. IE Flying and Electrocuting someone used to be Magic but thanks to Edison/Tesla and the Wright Bros both are now magecraft. So scientific advancement is actively downgrading magic into magecraft and in some cases even replaces magecraft. Like for example... if a spell that can take anything that is written on a specially prepared scroll and copy it instantly on another scroll on the other side of the world was impressive once, a common fax machine was superior in every way (to say nothing of email) and so that spell is now pointless.
Another thing about Nasuverse magic is the fact that the more people who know a spell the weaker that spell becomes, IIRC the example given is if a spell lets one person make a pound of gold every year, two people using that spell would only net each 1/2 a pound, and so on until the spell becomes useless. Therefore each magus guards his lore fiercely as not only would leaked secrets weaken him, it would also make him a target as people would want to maximize the effectiveness of the spell by limiting the number of living practitioners.
For this reason older magic is stronger than modern magic as there was more "mystery" less humans (and therefore less mages) and more magical creatures running around.
TLDR; Magical Knowledge, like Ninjutsu, is more powerful the fewer people have/understand it and science killed off the unicorns.
- Location
- Santa Barbara, CA
So them trying to understand there magicraft better would result in it weakening that is so weird.
Also great story so far Ensou.
Also great story so far Ensou.
Rajvik_wolfboy
Wolf amongst the stars.
- Location
- Florida
Quite frankly, I see it as a matter of faith. So long as they believe they will have power, but figuring out how something works suggests a lack of faith in it, therefore, blind faith will give you more power than "so this is how it works"
- Location
- Mi
While I do love me some Nasu, it has little to do with this story in particular or AoBS in general. Maybe take it to a Nasu thread?
eschwartz
Glorious Wordsmith and Author-Whisperer
- Location
- Roundworld
I prefer Sanderson's First Law | Brandon Sanderson, also, Harry Dresden. Maybe in the Nasuverse, faith murders magic, but I tend to enjoy the stories where the reverse is true.
Neruz
Rogue Spiderbanana
- Location
- The Land of Fire and Poison
I'd always understood it as being because the Nasuverse is past the Age of Gods, in the Age of Gods magic is everywhere and without limit. After the Age of Gods however the 'source' of magic basically starts drying up, leaving the 'verse' with a limited total amount of magic. So the more you spread it around the 'thinner' and thus weaker it is.
It's also tied into knowledge somehow, which has something to do with the Root, but that part seems deliberately obfuscated and excessively philosophical so I can't really comment.
That said, this has definitely gone way off topic and should probably be ended here.
It's also tied into knowledge somehow, which has something to do with the Root, but that part seems deliberately obfuscated and excessively philosophical so I can't really comment.
That said, this has definitely gone way off topic and should probably be ended here.
Amusingly enough, this is how the Church's Sacraments work.
Counterpoint 3.1
ensou
Magical G̶i̶r̶l̶ Servant Mordred-chan
- Location
- NEW YORK CITY!??
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Counterpoint 3.1
Humans —physically— are complex things.
Very, very complex.
Evolution is not a clean design process. You get fragments, bits that are left over that have no purpose anymore, parts that are extremely vital but are somehow precariously dependent upon this one other random element that's completely useless otherwise.
It's a hot mess.
Brains are not exempt from that. They're tangles of neurons, with thousands of different functions, drowned in a delicately balanced cocktail of hormones and neurotransmitters. And if one of those was off, even just a bit…
So much could go wrong.
So, I had to figure it all out and get it right, or this would all be pointless.
The clock was ticking.
I didn't sleep that night.
I lay in my bed, my 'body' completely ignored as I focused all my attention on the impromptu work area I'd created in the Graveyard.
There was too much to do, too much to solve, to replace.
Transfer fluids, shock absorption, temperature regulation, viscous matrices. Dedicated nanomachine designs that would function for molecular transport, systems to track and regulate vital requirements.
All on a time limit.
The first problem was keeping her brain alive, and the system needed to be solid. Over-engineered to the extreme, with tolerances far beyond what it should have to handle. Other things I could wait and iterate on, but this, this needed to be done right, and I had the means to do so relatively easily, considering my skill with nanomachines and atomic manipulation.
The nanomachines I was constructing were 'smart'—unlike my nanomaterial, which was 'dumb'. Nanomaterial had no capacity for self-actuation or any ability to perform tasks on its own. In comparison, the ones I designed were hundreds, thousands of times larger and more complex than my own nanomachines, able to communicate in a mesh network that would coordinate every type I was creating. I kept them highly specialized other than the common communication system, following that age-old wisdom that had been passed down from our forefathers for generations:
Keep it simple, stupid.
One type for O2/CO2 transport and regulation. Another that could break down practically anything that had glucose in it and separate the simple sugar from everything else. A third for acid and waste regulation. A fourth for maintaining homeostasis of the new liquid cerebral matrix I'd created. A fifth for safely finding and disposing any nanomachines that got damaged (which would shut down immediately at the first sign of corruption).
That took six hours.
Only once I was absolutely certain that the brain was doing okay, that the electrical activity matched what was expected for a perfectly normal unconscious person, that the bare-bones nanomachines I had constructed were in place to feed it oxygen and glucose and remove carbon dioxide were working… Only then did I start work on the rest of the body.
This wasn't like my own body, which was an artificial construct, a totally alien thing that was only human-like in outward appearance.
I was building a person.
I didn't have time to get quality elements or ingredients. I had to make do with what I had, and what I had was metal.
Metal, glass, silicates, and plastics.
My nanomaterial… There was no way I could build a processor or computation system that would be able to handle the load of automatic nanomaterial control the way I could. There was just too much to have something like my old wholly-nanomaterial body.
Components had to be discrete, parts independent.
And, if I was being completely honest, I didn't want it to involve any of my nanomaterial, because I'd still be able to sense and control it no matter what, and the thought of that as part of somebody else…
No. Just… no.
So I didn't.
I started with the head, neck, and torso.
The frame and skeleton was being built out of steel. Plastics and hydrocarbons went into the joints. Contractile steel-fiber bundles were muscles, with dedicated nanomachines acting as the tiny actuators, similarly to natural muscles. Microns-thick fiber optics acted as artificial nerves, connecting to the shell that held her brain.
That… that was the easy parts.
The hard part was the intricate components. Visual and auditory and olfactory sensors that required so much attention to detail I only managed to get ten percent of the design done by morning, much less construct them and what would be needed to interface them properly.
It was messy and slapdash compared to my own body. All of this was. But I was also doing this as a stopgap, something that would work for now, that would work as an intermediary so I could work on a better system without worrying about her as much.
By the time it was eight, I'd barely completed twenty percent of the skeletal body, but it was enough that when my dad knocked on my door and asked me if I wanted breakfast, I was able to pull back to my own body and tell him yes. I'd also seemingly got a set of text messages from Brianna that I hadn't even noticed telling me that the mall thing was off because it was closed and that she'd send me details for when it got rescheduled. I sent back a simple 'okay', my attention still not wholly there.
My shower that morning was spent ensuring that I could still work on the frame and the muscles idly, not needing my dedicated focus for those things.
When I finally got downstairs, slumping into my chair at the dining table, Dad was already at the stove, pancakes cooking on the griddle.
Ten minutes later, there was a stack of pancakes, a few slices of bacon, a cup of orange juice, and a bottle of syrup in front of me.
This was the way my dad did things. He wouldn't ask what was wrong, or if I wanted to talk about it. I had to be the one to start it, or it wouldn't happen.
That's what had happened with the bullying.
"I found someone dying, last night," I started, looking up as my father froze halfway through cutting his pancakes. "I found someone I'd met before, dying, and I tried to save them. Really dying. Not from something simple like a gunshot wound, but broken bones and major burns and bacterial infections and bleeding out."
I took a breath, sipping at my orange juice.
"We were too far from anybody who could help, hospitals or emergency services or anything. And with the bomb attacks… There was no way they'd be able to help. So, so I tried to save her myself."
My dad looked at me with pitying eyes. "Oh, Taylor…"
"At first… At first I thought it was just a matter of getting her blood back inside her. So I did that, but it didn't help much. So I started cleaning out the burn wounds and shoring up the healthy cells." My eyes dropped. "A-and then, her kidneys must have been failing, because the toxins and lactic acid in her blood weren't getting filtered out and I didn't know, so her muscles started failing and her heart stopped beating.
"So I starting pumping her heart myself, but it just… didn't do anything and then her brain started to shut down and so I stopped everything else and focused on that because brain death would mean I'd failed.
"A-and it worked. I got oxygen in and carbon dioxide out and glucose and sodium and potassium in and everything was working so I went back to the rest of her body and, and… i-it had been two hours. Two hours."
I looked up to find my dad's face pale. "Her body had been dead for long enough that it was already starting to break down, and there was nothing I could do. I-I don't know enough about biology to even try to fix what was happening. So I just… stopped."
My dad's face, which had already been pale, now was bone-white.
"And now all that's left is her brain and her spinal cord," I said. "Just her nervous system, encased in nanomaterial and hooked up to this thing that's dealing with the O2 and CO2 and glucose and everything else. And that's it. I couldn't… Everything else was too far gone. I saved her. I saved her, but would she have wanted it to be like this?"
My dad looked uncomfortably out of his element. "I don't think that's something that anyone can say except for her?"
I nodded. I hadn't actually expected him to try and answer.
"Isn't there something about doctors doing everything they can to help someone?" he said carefully.
"'I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures that are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism,'" I quoted. "from the Hippocratic Oath."
"Yeah. I think… I think that if you did everything you could do, then you were only doing what any doctor would in your position," he said.
I sighed. It was easy to say that. It was harder to believe it.
I let out a breath and sipped my orange juice. "Yeah. It's just that I helped all these people yesterday, working with Emergency Services, but when I find someone who really needed my help I… I couldn't."
"I saw that," he said, nodding his head at the TV in the living room, and I blinked.
"You… saw that?"
"What you didn't think I would try and look up what my daughter's been up to? There's quite a few people saying some very nice things about you in the thread on that parahumans forum."
What?
"There are?" I repeated incredulously, simultaneously connecting to the internet and checking myself.
And holy shit. My thread had exploded. There were a couple blurry camera-phone pictures of when I'd spoken to Brandish and walked with Glory Girl, and a couple of me and Glory Girl working on the second building we'd done, and a veritable album of me shifting rubble and working alongside the emergency workers.
There were even people thanking me in there, saying that I'd helped save them and that there needed to be more heroes like me and New Wave.
It was… overwhelming.
"Um. Taylor?"
I refocused back on my dad. "Yeah?"
"Your eyes…?"
Oh. "They do that when I do things on the internet," I said. "I'm just surprised. There's so much there."
He nodded.
"Anyways. Um, what's happening now?" he questioned, and it looked like he was forcing himself to act normal when he picked up his silverware and started eating his pancakes. "Is she okay? You said you kept her brain alive. Does, does that mean…?"
"I'm building her a body. Right now. I don't need to be near my nanomaterial to control it. I've finished basic life support, I think. It seems to be stable," I said, picking up a piece of bacon and nibbling on it.
My dad just stared at me. "…Building her a— Building a body? That's— How?"
I finished the strip of bacon and moved onto my own pancakes. "I told you it could do anything. That I could make things you couldn't imagine. 'Engines. Computers. Chemicals. Lasers.'"
"Yeah but that's…" He took a breath and ran a hand through his thinning hair. "Jeez. Okay. It's just, I guess I didn't really think about that? You made a golf ball. A body is…"
"A bit more complex," I finished, and he nodded. "Yeah. All those TV shows and movies make it seem so easy, but it's not. And I'm not a true Tinker. I don't have the ability to just know how to do things. Everything has to be engineered, and my focus is limited."
"Is there anybody that could help you?" he asked.
I shook my head. "Not really. Armsmaster might. Maybe. But Tinker-tech just doesn't make any sense. I… I don't trust it. If I can't understand how it works then it shouldn't be used. Not for something like this."
My dad gave me what was probably supposed to be a reassuring smile. "I'm sure everything will work out okay."
I sighed. "Yeah. I hope so."
"And… I think I'm starting to understand," he said.
I jerked up in shock. "What?"
"I… I can't say I know what this is like, or that I like it, but if you can truly help people, people like this girl, then I can't blame you for doing that. I can wish that it wasn't you, that you didn't have to deal with this, that it wasn't your responsibility, but I understand wanting to help her as much as you can," he said with a sad smile.
And in that moment, that was exactly what I'd needed to hear. "Thanks, dad."
It was around ten o'clock and I was in the middle of working on the hydrogen fuel cell that would be the 'heart' of the body when I got the text.
'hey. u doin ok after yesterday?'
Glory Girl.
I was about to just reply 'yes' on reflex when I thought about it. She'd probably had some pretty close experiences with almost-dying too, and probably tried to save a person only to do it at a cost or something.
If anybody would know what I was dealing with, it was probably her.
So instead I sent back, 'Not really.'
':('
'saw that giant missing space the bomb did. dunno if anything could really protect from that.'
Wait. They thought the portal-cut I'd made with my field and graviton manipulation was the bomb's fault?
…Huh.
I mean, it made sense. I was the only one to see the bomb go off and the black hole it made, much less the effects it had. To everyone else it probably just seemed that the bomb ate everything in a certain range.
I couldn't decide that was good or bad. Probably good? It meant that I had a trick others didn't know about.
'did u see ur pho thread?'
'Yeah. It's kinda crazy.'
'haha. welcome to being a hero.'
There was a few minutes pause, and then another message.
'whatre u up to?'
Um.
…How the hell are you supposed to say 'building a body for a girl that I had to save by ripping her brain and spine out' in a way that doesn't sound super creepy or reveal that you're a Tinker that wouldn't be out of place on the Triumvirate?
Hrm. Better just go with…
'Project right now.'
'school?'
'For someone else. An apology.'
There was a knock on my door and I turned to it. "What's up, Dad?"
He opened the door. "Hey, Taylor. I was wondering when you'd like to do those shelves for in here?"
I stood up from where I was sitting at the chair in front of my desk. "Now?"
"Now? Aren't you… busy right now?" he asked.
I shook my head. "I'm trying to figure out processor designs that would interface the best with a human neural structure. I can do that in the background pretty easily."
And it was true. I was chewing through processor cycles with simulations of neural structures and attempts at creating a distributed processor system that would work well with it, both general-purpose and highly specialized for various tasks (motor control, sensory integration, both exteroceptive and interoceptive, autonomous system regulation, etc.) But that only required me to check on it every few hundred iterations as my systems searched for the best way to do this, particularly based on what I knew of Tattletale's own cranial and spinal nerves.
I'd traced every single nerve down to their endings when I'd realized I couldn't extract and preserve her entire nervous system, only the centralized parts. So I now had an exact map of what her brain was going to expect, though considering the neuroplasticity of a teenager she'd likely be able to adapt relatively quickly to anything that was changed.
Also phantom limb sensation was supposed to be a bitch, and keeping that from happening would be really good.
"…Alright then," he said. "Um. You… you still want to do this, even when you could just make the shelves with your, uh, nanostuff?"
"Nanomaterial," I corrected. "And… yeah. Kinda. I don't really have much here right now, and I don't think I'd be able to do it with what I do have, so…"
He smiled, and I knew I'd made the right decision. This was something for Dad and I to do together, no matter the fact that I could just make all the shelves I wanted if I brought the nanomaterial over from the Ship Graveyard.
"Alright. Well, I went out got a couple pine boards and some brackets. If you ever want to put anything heavy on them we should probably mount them in the studs instead of the drywall…" he said. "Where did you want them? Maybe at the foot of your bed? You've already got that one above your desk…"
"Yeah, that would work," I agreed, nodding.
He smiled. "Well, come on then, let's take a look at how we're going to do this."
I grinned. "Okay."
Excepting one minor mishap with the circular saw where I'd sharpened the blade with my nanomaterial and made it too sharp, catching my dad by surprise, we managed to get the two boards up in under an hour, mounted into the studs in my wall with a set of rather fancy quarter-inch steel rods that extended into the boards. They were threaded, a short bit getting screwed into the wall, and then a longer segment screwed on to that actually held up the boards.
They were staggered, flush with the wall to the left of my bed, but the higher board was a full foot shorter and three and a half inches less deep than the other so it looked almost like steps.
Once they were up, my dad and I were grinning at each other as he wiped the sweat away from his forehead.
"Ready to put some stuff on them?" he asked and I nodded, clambering off my bed where I'd been kneeling and moving over to the box next to my closet, picking it up and bringing it close to my bed.
I carefully pulled each of the wrapped models out, along with the small stands I'd found at the bottom of the box.
As soon as I started unwrapping them, though, I knew something was different.
There was something…
I picked up the model of the Taylor, and it was like something that had been fuzzy before was now in perfect clarity. The technology I had and could construct was so much more.
And this ship…
How had I not noticed this? God, I knew so much more now. Like I'd only been looking at the child section of a library and now I'd moved onto Teen/YA as well.
"Taylor?"
I looked up at my dad. "I…" I swallowed. "I know how to make this."
"The model?" he asked.
I shook my head. "No. The actual ship." I could construct a Fletcher-class destroyer with less effort than it had taken to design my fighter jet.
I had the design right there. It wasn't truly the USS Taylor, old parts and all, but something very much like it, while also being far more advanced and complex. Like a spacecraft from a science fiction film in the shape of the Taylor.
"What?" he asked, sounding off-balance.
"I can build this. A Fletcher-class destroyer, but upgraded to the highest level of Tinker-tech you can imagine. I-I don't know how."
And this felt right. Something in me longed for me to do it right now, to use a portion of the nanomaterial I had in the bay to form this three-thousand ton warship.
Because this was what I was meant for.
I looked over at the USS Harder and realized I knew how to make that as well.
In fact, I could construct not just the Gato-class submarines, but also the Balao and Tench. It was the same with the destroyers. Not just Fletcher, but any destroyer-class that had ships built between 1939 and 1945.
This…
I shook my head, bringing myself back to my room and my father. "I guess we know why I knew so much about these ships."
He just laughed awkwardly.
Even as I said that, I looked over at the models of ships in other classes. But none of them triggered that knowing that I had with the subs and destroyers.
Not yet.
"Anyways," I said, refocusing on the ship in my hands and turning to lift it up onto the smaller top shelf. To its left went the Harder, and the Albacore—the second Gato sub in the box. On the bottom shelf was the Maury, Nashville, and then Wisconsin to the far left. All the models were angled to the right, pointing towards my desk.
My dad looked at it admiringly. "Pretty good for an hour and a half project, huh?"
I nodded. It really did look good.
Impulsively, I isolated a rectangular portion of what I was seeing and sent it to Victoria.
'what's that?'
'What I did this morning.'
'oh cool. the project?'
'Something else. They were my grandfather's.'
'what are they?'
'Models of a few of the ships that were built in Brockton Bay during World War 2.'
'huh. didn't know that.'
'that's pretty cool.'
In the time I'd been messaging Victoria my dad had started cleaning up, packing the cordless drill away. After closing up the case, he glanced over at me. "You want to have lunch in about a half-hour?"
I nodded. "Sure."
"Alright, then."
"Hey dad?" He paused, a hand on my door, looking at me. "Thanks."
"Of course," he said, smiling, before he stepped out and closed the door behind him.
I refocused back on my processor simulations.
It… seemed like they were done, the chip designs complete and ready for production. But the wetware interfaces were… weird. They were almost organic, practically a physical neural network so complex that, much like an organic brain, it was the patterns of connections between nodes themselves that formed the translation systems.
It would grow and adapt alongside the brain, eventually forming a tangle so embedded in the brainstem that the boundary between organic and artificial neural structures would be impossible to discern.
Not that they would impossible to replace or anything. Everything that would be directly connected to the brain had the ability to dissolve hard-coded into it as part of the physical construction.
I was not taking any chances with this.
Combined with the total map of her previous peripheral nervous system, I was hoping it would make the transition as seamless as possible.
Now… now I just had to figure everything else out.
Neurotransmitters, hormones, sensory organs…
I took a metaphorical breath. One step at a time, Taylor. Break it down into smaller problems.
Still, this had been a pretty large step.
My nanomaterial began constructing the processors, taking the carbon for them out of… out of her previous body.
I refused to think of it as a corpse. I just couldn't. Not while she was still alive in some capacity. It was just a collection of materials, now. Carbon and oxygen and hydrogen. And it was almost… fitting that her old body would become a part of her new one.
'so battleships and 2 submarines?'
Victoria's text drew my attention away from the construction, though I still kept a watch on it.
'No they're…' I tried to think about how to describe it.
'Have you ever played Battleship? The game?'
'like, years ago'
'You know how there's different pieces? It's not just battleships, there's destroyers, submarines, cruisers, and carriers too.'
'yeah?'
'There's only one battleship here. Up on the top shelf, there's a destroyer and the two submarines. The bottom shelf has a destroyer, a light cruiser, and the battleship. The big one.'
'oh'
'For comparison, at full size the battleship would be three times longer and thirteen times heavier than the destroyer. 900 feet and 40,000 tons.'
'holy shit'
'and they made those here?'
'Yep.'
'huh. so hows the project thing coming?'
'Slowly. It's really intricate and I don't want to mess up.'
'thus the slowly'
'Right. What are you doing?' I asked, realizing that the entire conversation had been almost exclusively focused on me.
'eehhhh. just watchin tv'
'was going to go out today to the boardwalk but everythings still closed and ames is at the hospital'
'…You're still in your pajamas, aren't you?'
The response was practically instantaneous. 'no!'
I laughed and decided to wait to see if she would say anything more.
About thirty seconds later I got an 'okay fine yes' which just made me laugh more. 'no judging!'
'I'm not,' I replied.
Seventeen seconds, and I got some sort of link with an attachment. Following it gave me a picture of Victoria with her eyes closed sticking her tongue out at the camera.
What.
Um.
How was I supposed to respond to that? Is this sort of thing normal for texting?
Alright just… just act normal.
Breathe.
'Cute,' I sent back.
'haha glad you think so'
Oh my God I was being sarcastic. Fucking—
A lack of social interaction for a year and a half does not help you talk to other people. Who'd have guessed?
Instead of trying to reply to that, I rolled off my bed and made my way downstairs for lunch.
Lunch was sandwiches. Lunch conversation was Dad asking for details about the fights I'd gotten into so far.
Including the Lung fight. Which he had… not been happy learning about, but also seemed to decide that there was no point in getting really upset about after seeing what Uber and Leet had put me through with their holodeck knockoff.
I wisely did not tell him that I was unsure of my invulnerability when I'd gone up against Lung.
After lunch I worked more with my nanomaterial in the Graveyard.
I wanted to construct one of the ships. I really wanted to. But that plus Tattletale would be too much to focus on.
There was also the fact that I didn't want to alert anybody to my presence, and sections of the Ship Graveyard missing with a submarine suddenly in the Bay wouldn't exactly help with that.
And finally, I had nothing to power it with. None of what was needed to power it.
Thanatonium.
Matter that decayed into pure gravitons. Extremely energy-dense.
It was much like nuclear fission: how unstable isotopes of uranium (236, for example) would break down into fission products and neutrons, the neutrons binding to other uranium atoms and making them unstable, thus creating a chain reaction. Thanatonium was a non-baryonic fermion that, when it absorbed a free-graviton, would itself decay into gravitons, triggering a chain reaction. Gravitons, much like photons and gluons, were energy carriers, and thus a perfectly usable source.
The problem was that manufacturing thanatonium used dark matter. That stuff that makes up like eighty percent of the universe and loses practically no energy because it only interacts through gravity? Yeah. That.
And well, I didn't have any.
Okay, I sort of did.
Dark matter passed through the Earth much like neutrinos. There just… wasn't much of it. Our solar system was too far from the galactic center, where dark matter would be densest.
On Earth, in a one cubic mile, there was only 1.6 nanograms of dark matter. And within a single cubic foot that was 7.4 times ten to the negative twenty-one grams.
So I was going to need to make some.
And of course stupid entropy would ensure that the energy I got out would be less than I put in.
…I was going to need a really big fusion reactor, or some way to efficiently collect all of the energy being put out by the sun for half a second.
…
Fusion reactor it was.
I basically spent the entire day working on Tattletale's body. Or rather, the tiny delicate pieces, considering the body I was building as a placeholder was comparatively simple.
Dinner with Dad was quiet. But it was a comfortable quietness.
Brianna texted me and said they'd rescheduled for the next Saturday and wondered if that would work for me. I replied in the affirmative.
Victoria didn't text me again, which was honestly a little relieving. I wasn't really sure how to interact with her. I liked talking to her, she was understanding and easy-going and a little silly and I just… I didn't know how?
It wasn't like Emma, where we grew up together and there wasn't any of that awkwardness. Making friends now was so much more complicated. I'd say unnecessarily so, if I didn't recognize the fact that I needed anchors. The more… creative and immersed I got in my own… otherness, my nature as Fog , the more I was going to need normal things, people to keep me grounded.
And I couldn't afford to let those slip by, not with how fast everything was moving: a week ago, I was planning on going outside in an armor of hand-molded steel. Now I was a fluid shapeshifting construct that had flown as a fighter jet, consumed the entire Boat Graveyard, and was building a catatonic girl a new body.
I finished eating the Boat Graveyard at three-thirty in the morning. It was now mine in every way that matter, a part of me at the most fundamental level.
Over a hundred and eighty thousand tons of steel, converted to nanomaterial.
…Now I just needed somewhere to put all the nanomaterial when I decided to spirit it away from under everyone's noses.
I was thinking of taking it to the old shipyards, hiding it in the slips and warehouses.
Oh well. I didn't necessarily have to decide that moment.
At four-oh-six ante meridiem, I finally finished Tattletale's body. Or, I'd done enough that I could finally step back and stop.
There wasn't any blood. I just… couldn't. There were too many support systems (marrow, kidneys, leukocytes, etc.) needed for it, and when it would be such a small amount…
Her central nervous system was held in a shock-absorbing fluid swarming with several classes of nanomachines that acted for transport, monitoring, and self-management. Nothing for cellular repair right now (as that was going to be obscenely complicated), though it was high on my to-do list.
The processors and artificial-neuron tangle were embedded in her brainstem and thalamus, and everything seemed to be interfacing with her sensory and upper motor neurons properly.
Her CNS was encased in a shell of the metamaterial I had around my own bones and Core. I'd spent all day and night synthesizing it in-place, and it was the thing that had actually taken the longest.
Well, that and all the fiddly bits.
Do you know how complicated the motor neurons in the upper half of your torso is? Ridiculously so. All the tiny facial muscles, twitchy eye movements, the mouth and tongue, the things your pharynx has going on, hell, speaking. And that's not even getting into your heart and lungs.
I just… I wanted this to work.
It had to work.
I knew there were going to be issues. Things that I could do better when I had more information. Problems that I couldn't foresee. It was inevitable, really. That was just how development worked.
I'd done my best, though. In the end that was really all I could do.
Now… now all that was left was waiting for her to wake up.
And then at eight thirty-two, she did.
A/N: I did so much neuroscience and neurology research for this chapter you have no idea guys. It's part of what I love about writing this story, though, so I can't really complain. The ending's a bit weak, but this really is a filler chapter, even if it's necessary filler in order to get to the good stuff.
Hope you enjoyed, and the next chapter'll hopefully be out in a few weeks.
Also, you can decide how canon or not the next bit is
A week later.
Amy stared at her sister's phone, a flash of jealousy flickering through her before she squashed it flat and looked up at Victoria.
"You were flirting."
"What? No I wasn't!"
"Crystal?" Amy looked over at her cousin on the couch, who stood up and walked over to where Victoria and Amy stood, looking over the healer's shoulder at the phone screen, before reaching around and scrolling a bit.
"…You were totally flirting."
Victoria spluttered. "N-NO I WASN'T!!"
"I never took you for one to be in denial, Vicky~" Crystal sing-songed as she went back to the couch.
"I'm not!!"
Amy gave Victoria a flat look while Crystal hummed. "Mmm-hm. Somebody's got a cruuuush~"
Victora reached out and snatched the phone away from her sister's hands, her face burning red. "Screw you guys."
And with that final parting statement she spun on her heel and stalked off, muttering under her breath.
Amy noted suspiciously that her sister hadn't denied it.
Humans —physically— are complex things.
Very, very complex.
Evolution is not a clean design process. You get fragments, bits that are left over that have no purpose anymore, parts that are extremely vital but are somehow precariously dependent upon this one other random element that's completely useless otherwise.
It's a hot mess.
Brains are not exempt from that. They're tangles of neurons, with thousands of different functions, drowned in a delicately balanced cocktail of hormones and neurotransmitters. And if one of those was off, even just a bit…
So much could go wrong.
So, I had to figure it all out and get it right, or this would all be pointless.
The clock was ticking.
I didn't sleep that night.
I lay in my bed, my 'body' completely ignored as I focused all my attention on the impromptu work area I'd created in the Graveyard.
There was too much to do, too much to solve, to replace.
Transfer fluids, shock absorption, temperature regulation, viscous matrices. Dedicated nanomachine designs that would function for molecular transport, systems to track and regulate vital requirements.
All on a time limit.
The first problem was keeping her brain alive, and the system needed to be solid. Over-engineered to the extreme, with tolerances far beyond what it should have to handle. Other things I could wait and iterate on, but this, this needed to be done right, and I had the means to do so relatively easily, considering my skill with nanomachines and atomic manipulation.
The nanomachines I was constructing were 'smart'—unlike my nanomaterial, which was 'dumb'. Nanomaterial had no capacity for self-actuation or any ability to perform tasks on its own. In comparison, the ones I designed were hundreds, thousands of times larger and more complex than my own nanomachines, able to communicate in a mesh network that would coordinate every type I was creating. I kept them highly specialized other than the common communication system, following that age-old wisdom that had been passed down from our forefathers for generations:
Keep it simple, stupid.
One type for O2/CO2 transport and regulation. Another that could break down practically anything that had glucose in it and separate the simple sugar from everything else. A third for acid and waste regulation. A fourth for maintaining homeostasis of the new liquid cerebral matrix I'd created. A fifth for safely finding and disposing any nanomachines that got damaged (which would shut down immediately at the first sign of corruption).
That took six hours.
Only once I was absolutely certain that the brain was doing okay, that the electrical activity matched what was expected for a perfectly normal unconscious person, that the bare-bones nanomachines I had constructed were in place to feed it oxygen and glucose and remove carbon dioxide were working… Only then did I start work on the rest of the body.
This wasn't like my own body, which was an artificial construct, a totally alien thing that was only human-like in outward appearance.
I was building a person.
I didn't have time to get quality elements or ingredients. I had to make do with what I had, and what I had was metal.
Metal, glass, silicates, and plastics.
My nanomaterial… There was no way I could build a processor or computation system that would be able to handle the load of automatic nanomaterial control the way I could. There was just too much to have something like my old wholly-nanomaterial body.
Components had to be discrete, parts independent.
And, if I was being completely honest, I didn't want it to involve any of my nanomaterial, because I'd still be able to sense and control it no matter what, and the thought of that as part of somebody else…
No. Just… no.
So I didn't.
I started with the head, neck, and torso.
The frame and skeleton was being built out of steel. Plastics and hydrocarbons went into the joints. Contractile steel-fiber bundles were muscles, with dedicated nanomachines acting as the tiny actuators, similarly to natural muscles. Microns-thick fiber optics acted as artificial nerves, connecting to the shell that held her brain.
That… that was the easy parts.
The hard part was the intricate components. Visual and auditory and olfactory sensors that required so much attention to detail I only managed to get ten percent of the design done by morning, much less construct them and what would be needed to interface them properly.
It was messy and slapdash compared to my own body. All of this was. But I was also doing this as a stopgap, something that would work for now, that would work as an intermediary so I could work on a better system without worrying about her as much.
By the time it was eight, I'd barely completed twenty percent of the skeletal body, but it was enough that when my dad knocked on my door and asked me if I wanted breakfast, I was able to pull back to my own body and tell him yes. I'd also seemingly got a set of text messages from Brianna that I hadn't even noticed telling me that the mall thing was off because it was closed and that she'd send me details for when it got rescheduled. I sent back a simple 'okay', my attention still not wholly there.
My shower that morning was spent ensuring that I could still work on the frame and the muscles idly, not needing my dedicated focus for those things.
When I finally got downstairs, slumping into my chair at the dining table, Dad was already at the stove, pancakes cooking on the griddle.
Ten minutes later, there was a stack of pancakes, a few slices of bacon, a cup of orange juice, and a bottle of syrup in front of me.
This was the way my dad did things. He wouldn't ask what was wrong, or if I wanted to talk about it. I had to be the one to start it, or it wouldn't happen.
That's what had happened with the bullying.
"I found someone dying, last night," I started, looking up as my father froze halfway through cutting his pancakes. "I found someone I'd met before, dying, and I tried to save them. Really dying. Not from something simple like a gunshot wound, but broken bones and major burns and bacterial infections and bleeding out."
I took a breath, sipping at my orange juice.
"We were too far from anybody who could help, hospitals or emergency services or anything. And with the bomb attacks… There was no way they'd be able to help. So, so I tried to save her myself."
My dad looked at me with pitying eyes. "Oh, Taylor…"
"At first… At first I thought it was just a matter of getting her blood back inside her. So I did that, but it didn't help much. So I started cleaning out the burn wounds and shoring up the healthy cells." My eyes dropped. "A-and then, her kidneys must have been failing, because the toxins and lactic acid in her blood weren't getting filtered out and I didn't know, so her muscles started failing and her heart stopped beating.
"So I starting pumping her heart myself, but it just… didn't do anything and then her brain started to shut down and so I stopped everything else and focused on that because brain death would mean I'd failed.
"A-and it worked. I got oxygen in and carbon dioxide out and glucose and sodium and potassium in and everything was working so I went back to the rest of her body and, and… i-it had been two hours. Two hours."
I looked up to find my dad's face pale. "Her body had been dead for long enough that it was already starting to break down, and there was nothing I could do. I-I don't know enough about biology to even try to fix what was happening. So I just… stopped."
My dad's face, which had already been pale, now was bone-white.
"And now all that's left is her brain and her spinal cord," I said. "Just her nervous system, encased in nanomaterial and hooked up to this thing that's dealing with the O2 and CO2 and glucose and everything else. And that's it. I couldn't… Everything else was too far gone. I saved her. I saved her, but would she have wanted it to be like this?"
My dad looked uncomfortably out of his element. "I don't think that's something that anyone can say except for her?"
I nodded. I hadn't actually expected him to try and answer.
"Isn't there something about doctors doing everything they can to help someone?" he said carefully.
"'I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures that are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism,'" I quoted. "from the Hippocratic Oath."
"Yeah. I think… I think that if you did everything you could do, then you were only doing what any doctor would in your position," he said.
I sighed. It was easy to say that. It was harder to believe it.
I let out a breath and sipped my orange juice. "Yeah. It's just that I helped all these people yesterday, working with Emergency Services, but when I find someone who really needed my help I… I couldn't."
"I saw that," he said, nodding his head at the TV in the living room, and I blinked.
"You… saw that?"
"What you didn't think I would try and look up what my daughter's been up to? There's quite a few people saying some very nice things about you in the thread on that parahumans forum."
What?
"There are?" I repeated incredulously, simultaneously connecting to the internet and checking myself.
And holy shit. My thread had exploded. There were a couple blurry camera-phone pictures of when I'd spoken to Brandish and walked with Glory Girl, and a couple of me and Glory Girl working on the second building we'd done, and a veritable album of me shifting rubble and working alongside the emergency workers.
There were even people thanking me in there, saying that I'd helped save them and that there needed to be more heroes like me and New Wave.
It was… overwhelming.
"Um. Taylor?"
I refocused back on my dad. "Yeah?"
"Your eyes…?"
Oh. "They do that when I do things on the internet," I said. "I'm just surprised. There's so much there."
He nodded.
"Anyways. Um, what's happening now?" he questioned, and it looked like he was forcing himself to act normal when he picked up his silverware and started eating his pancakes. "Is she okay? You said you kept her brain alive. Does, does that mean…?"
"I'm building her a body. Right now. I don't need to be near my nanomaterial to control it. I've finished basic life support, I think. It seems to be stable," I said, picking up a piece of bacon and nibbling on it.
My dad just stared at me. "…Building her a— Building a body? That's— How?"
I finished the strip of bacon and moved onto my own pancakes. "I told you it could do anything. That I could make things you couldn't imagine. 'Engines. Computers. Chemicals. Lasers.'"
"Yeah but that's…" He took a breath and ran a hand through his thinning hair. "Jeez. Okay. It's just, I guess I didn't really think about that? You made a golf ball. A body is…"
"A bit more complex," I finished, and he nodded. "Yeah. All those TV shows and movies make it seem so easy, but it's not. And I'm not a true Tinker. I don't have the ability to just know how to do things. Everything has to be engineered, and my focus is limited."
"Is there anybody that could help you?" he asked.
I shook my head. "Not really. Armsmaster might. Maybe. But Tinker-tech just doesn't make any sense. I… I don't trust it. If I can't understand how it works then it shouldn't be used. Not for something like this."
My dad gave me what was probably supposed to be a reassuring smile. "I'm sure everything will work out okay."
I sighed. "Yeah. I hope so."
"And… I think I'm starting to understand," he said.
I jerked up in shock. "What?"
"I… I can't say I know what this is like, or that I like it, but if you can truly help people, people like this girl, then I can't blame you for doing that. I can wish that it wasn't you, that you didn't have to deal with this, that it wasn't your responsibility, but I understand wanting to help her as much as you can," he said with a sad smile.
And in that moment, that was exactly what I'd needed to hear. "Thanks, dad."
It was around ten o'clock and I was in the middle of working on the hydrogen fuel cell that would be the 'heart' of the body when I got the text.
'hey. u doin ok after yesterday?'
Glory Girl.
I was about to just reply 'yes' on reflex when I thought about it. She'd probably had some pretty close experiences with almost-dying too, and probably tried to save a person only to do it at a cost or something.
If anybody would know what I was dealing with, it was probably her.
So instead I sent back, 'Not really.'
':('
'saw that giant missing space the bomb did. dunno if anything could really protect from that.'
Wait. They thought the portal-cut I'd made with my field and graviton manipulation was the bomb's fault?
…Huh.
I mean, it made sense. I was the only one to see the bomb go off and the black hole it made, much less the effects it had. To everyone else it probably just seemed that the bomb ate everything in a certain range.
I couldn't decide that was good or bad. Probably good? It meant that I had a trick others didn't know about.
'did u see ur pho thread?'
'Yeah. It's kinda crazy.'
'haha. welcome to being a hero.'
There was a few minutes pause, and then another message.
'whatre u up to?'
Um.
…How the hell are you supposed to say 'building a body for a girl that I had to save by ripping her brain and spine out' in a way that doesn't sound super creepy or reveal that you're a Tinker that wouldn't be out of place on the Triumvirate?
Hrm. Better just go with…
'Project right now.'
'school?'
'For someone else. An apology.'
There was a knock on my door and I turned to it. "What's up, Dad?"
He opened the door. "Hey, Taylor. I was wondering when you'd like to do those shelves for in here?"
I stood up from where I was sitting at the chair in front of my desk. "Now?"
"Now? Aren't you… busy right now?" he asked.
I shook my head. "I'm trying to figure out processor designs that would interface the best with a human neural structure. I can do that in the background pretty easily."
And it was true. I was chewing through processor cycles with simulations of neural structures and attempts at creating a distributed processor system that would work well with it, both general-purpose and highly specialized for various tasks (motor control, sensory integration, both exteroceptive and interoceptive, autonomous system regulation, etc.) But that only required me to check on it every few hundred iterations as my systems searched for the best way to do this, particularly based on what I knew of Tattletale's own cranial and spinal nerves.
I'd traced every single nerve down to their endings when I'd realized I couldn't extract and preserve her entire nervous system, only the centralized parts. So I now had an exact map of what her brain was going to expect, though considering the neuroplasticity of a teenager she'd likely be able to adapt relatively quickly to anything that was changed.
Also phantom limb sensation was supposed to be a bitch, and keeping that from happening would be really good.
"…Alright then," he said. "Um. You… you still want to do this, even when you could just make the shelves with your, uh, nanostuff?"
"Nanomaterial," I corrected. "And… yeah. Kinda. I don't really have much here right now, and I don't think I'd be able to do it with what I do have, so…"
He smiled, and I knew I'd made the right decision. This was something for Dad and I to do together, no matter the fact that I could just make all the shelves I wanted if I brought the nanomaterial over from the Ship Graveyard.
"Alright. Well, I went out got a couple pine boards and some brackets. If you ever want to put anything heavy on them we should probably mount them in the studs instead of the drywall…" he said. "Where did you want them? Maybe at the foot of your bed? You've already got that one above your desk…"
"Yeah, that would work," I agreed, nodding.
He smiled. "Well, come on then, let's take a look at how we're going to do this."
I grinned. "Okay."
Excepting one minor mishap with the circular saw where I'd sharpened the blade with my nanomaterial and made it too sharp, catching my dad by surprise, we managed to get the two boards up in under an hour, mounted into the studs in my wall with a set of rather fancy quarter-inch steel rods that extended into the boards. They were threaded, a short bit getting screwed into the wall, and then a longer segment screwed on to that actually held up the boards.
They were staggered, flush with the wall to the left of my bed, but the higher board was a full foot shorter and three and a half inches less deep than the other so it looked almost like steps.
Once they were up, my dad and I were grinning at each other as he wiped the sweat away from his forehead.
"Ready to put some stuff on them?" he asked and I nodded, clambering off my bed where I'd been kneeling and moving over to the box next to my closet, picking it up and bringing it close to my bed.
I carefully pulled each of the wrapped models out, along with the small stands I'd found at the bottom of the box.
As soon as I started unwrapping them, though, I knew something was different.
There was something…
I picked up the model of the Taylor, and it was like something that had been fuzzy before was now in perfect clarity. The technology I had and could construct was so much more.
And this ship…
How had I not noticed this? God, I knew so much more now. Like I'd only been looking at the child section of a library and now I'd moved onto Teen/YA as well.
"Taylor?"
I looked up at my dad. "I…" I swallowed. "I know how to make this."
"The model?" he asked.
I shook my head. "No. The actual ship." I could construct a Fletcher-class destroyer with less effort than it had taken to design my fighter jet.
I had the design right there. It wasn't truly the USS Taylor, old parts and all, but something very much like it, while also being far more advanced and complex. Like a spacecraft from a science fiction film in the shape of the Taylor.
"What?" he asked, sounding off-balance.
"I can build this. A Fletcher-class destroyer, but upgraded to the highest level of Tinker-tech you can imagine. I-I don't know how."
And this felt right. Something in me longed for me to do it right now, to use a portion of the nanomaterial I had in the bay to form this three-thousand ton warship.
Because this was what I was meant for.
I looked over at the USS Harder and realized I knew how to make that as well.
In fact, I could construct not just the Gato-class submarines, but also the Balao and Tench. It was the same with the destroyers. Not just Fletcher, but any destroyer-class that had ships built between 1939 and 1945.
This…
I shook my head, bringing myself back to my room and my father. "I guess we know why I knew so much about these ships."
He just laughed awkwardly.
Even as I said that, I looked over at the models of ships in other classes. But none of them triggered that knowing that I had with the subs and destroyers.
Not yet.
"Anyways," I said, refocusing on the ship in my hands and turning to lift it up onto the smaller top shelf. To its left went the Harder, and the Albacore—the second Gato sub in the box. On the bottom shelf was the Maury, Nashville, and then Wisconsin to the far left. All the models were angled to the right, pointing towards my desk.
My dad looked at it admiringly. "Pretty good for an hour and a half project, huh?"
I nodded. It really did look good.
Impulsively, I isolated a rectangular portion of what I was seeing and sent it to Victoria.
'what's that?'
'What I did this morning.'
'oh cool. the project?'
'Something else. They were my grandfather's.'
'what are they?'
'Models of a few of the ships that were built in Brockton Bay during World War 2.'
'huh. didn't know that.'
'that's pretty cool.'
In the time I'd been messaging Victoria my dad had started cleaning up, packing the cordless drill away. After closing up the case, he glanced over at me. "You want to have lunch in about a half-hour?"
I nodded. "Sure."
"Alright, then."
"Hey dad?" He paused, a hand on my door, looking at me. "Thanks."
"Of course," he said, smiling, before he stepped out and closed the door behind him.
I refocused back on my processor simulations.
It… seemed like they were done, the chip designs complete and ready for production. But the wetware interfaces were… weird. They were almost organic, practically a physical neural network so complex that, much like an organic brain, it was the patterns of connections between nodes themselves that formed the translation systems.
It would grow and adapt alongside the brain, eventually forming a tangle so embedded in the brainstem that the boundary between organic and artificial neural structures would be impossible to discern.
Not that they would impossible to replace or anything. Everything that would be directly connected to the brain had the ability to dissolve hard-coded into it as part of the physical construction.
I was not taking any chances with this.
Combined with the total map of her previous peripheral nervous system, I was hoping it would make the transition as seamless as possible.
Now… now I just had to figure everything else out.
Neurotransmitters, hormones, sensory organs…
I took a metaphorical breath. One step at a time, Taylor. Break it down into smaller problems.
Still, this had been a pretty large step.
My nanomaterial began constructing the processors, taking the carbon for them out of… out of her previous body.
I refused to think of it as a corpse. I just couldn't. Not while she was still alive in some capacity. It was just a collection of materials, now. Carbon and oxygen and hydrogen. And it was almost… fitting that her old body would become a part of her new one.
'so battleships and 2 submarines?'
Victoria's text drew my attention away from the construction, though I still kept a watch on it.
'No they're…' I tried to think about how to describe it.
'Have you ever played Battleship? The game?'
'like, years ago'
'You know how there's different pieces? It's not just battleships, there's destroyers, submarines, cruisers, and carriers too.'
'yeah?'
'There's only one battleship here. Up on the top shelf, there's a destroyer and the two submarines. The bottom shelf has a destroyer, a light cruiser, and the battleship. The big one.'
'oh'
'For comparison, at full size the battleship would be three times longer and thirteen times heavier than the destroyer. 900 feet and 40,000 tons.'
'holy shit'
'and they made those here?'
'Yep.'
'huh. so hows the project thing coming?'
'Slowly. It's really intricate and I don't want to mess up.'
'thus the slowly'
'Right. What are you doing?' I asked, realizing that the entire conversation had been almost exclusively focused on me.
'eehhhh. just watchin tv'
'was going to go out today to the boardwalk but everythings still closed and ames is at the hospital'
'…You're still in your pajamas, aren't you?'
The response was practically instantaneous. 'no!'
I laughed and decided to wait to see if she would say anything more.
About thirty seconds later I got an 'okay fine yes' which just made me laugh more. 'no judging!'
'I'm not,' I replied.
Seventeen seconds, and I got some sort of link with an attachment. Following it gave me a picture of Victoria with her eyes closed sticking her tongue out at the camera.
What.
Um.
How was I supposed to respond to that? Is this sort of thing normal for texting?
Alright just… just act normal.
Breathe.
'Cute,' I sent back.
'haha glad you think so'
Oh my God I was being sarcastic. Fucking—
A lack of social interaction for a year and a half does not help you talk to other people. Who'd have guessed?
Instead of trying to reply to that, I rolled off my bed and made my way downstairs for lunch.
Lunch was sandwiches. Lunch conversation was Dad asking for details about the fights I'd gotten into so far.
Including the Lung fight. Which he had… not been happy learning about, but also seemed to decide that there was no point in getting really upset about after seeing what Uber and Leet had put me through with their holodeck knockoff.
I wisely did not tell him that I was unsure of my invulnerability when I'd gone up against Lung.
After lunch I worked more with my nanomaterial in the Graveyard.
I wanted to construct one of the ships. I really wanted to. But that plus Tattletale would be too much to focus on.
There was also the fact that I didn't want to alert anybody to my presence, and sections of the Ship Graveyard missing with a submarine suddenly in the Bay wouldn't exactly help with that.
And finally, I had nothing to power it with. None of what was needed to power it.
Thanatonium.
Matter that decayed into pure gravitons. Extremely energy-dense.
It was much like nuclear fission: how unstable isotopes of uranium (236, for example) would break down into fission products and neutrons, the neutrons binding to other uranium atoms and making them unstable, thus creating a chain reaction. Thanatonium was a non-baryonic fermion that, when it absorbed a free-graviton, would itself decay into gravitons, triggering a chain reaction. Gravitons, much like photons and gluons, were energy carriers, and thus a perfectly usable source.
The problem was that manufacturing thanatonium used dark matter. That stuff that makes up like eighty percent of the universe and loses practically no energy because it only interacts through gravity? Yeah. That.
And well, I didn't have any.
Okay, I sort of did.
Dark matter passed through the Earth much like neutrinos. There just… wasn't much of it. Our solar system was too far from the galactic center, where dark matter would be densest.
On Earth, in a one cubic mile, there was only 1.6 nanograms of dark matter. And within a single cubic foot that was 7.4 times ten to the negative twenty-one grams.
So I was going to need to make some.
And of course stupid entropy would ensure that the energy I got out would be less than I put in.
…I was going to need a really big fusion reactor, or some way to efficiently collect all of the energy being put out by the sun for half a second.
…
Fusion reactor it was.
I basically spent the entire day working on Tattletale's body. Or rather, the tiny delicate pieces, considering the body I was building as a placeholder was comparatively simple.
Dinner with Dad was quiet. But it was a comfortable quietness.
Brianna texted me and said they'd rescheduled for the next Saturday and wondered if that would work for me. I replied in the affirmative.
Victoria didn't text me again, which was honestly a little relieving. I wasn't really sure how to interact with her. I liked talking to her, she was understanding and easy-going and a little silly and I just… I didn't know how?
It wasn't like Emma, where we grew up together and there wasn't any of that awkwardness. Making friends now was so much more complicated. I'd say unnecessarily so, if I didn't recognize the fact that I needed anchors. The more… creative and immersed I got in my own… otherness, my nature as Fog , the more I was going to need normal things, people to keep me grounded.
And I couldn't afford to let those slip by, not with how fast everything was moving: a week ago, I was planning on going outside in an armor of hand-molded steel. Now I was a fluid shapeshifting construct that had flown as a fighter jet, consumed the entire Boat Graveyard, and was building a catatonic girl a new body.
I finished eating the Boat Graveyard at three-thirty in the morning. It was now mine in every way that matter, a part of me at the most fundamental level.
Over a hundred and eighty thousand tons of steel, converted to nanomaterial.
…Now I just needed somewhere to put all the nanomaterial when I decided to spirit it away from under everyone's noses.
I was thinking of taking it to the old shipyards, hiding it in the slips and warehouses.
Oh well. I didn't necessarily have to decide that moment.
At four-oh-six ante meridiem, I finally finished Tattletale's body. Or, I'd done enough that I could finally step back and stop.
There wasn't any blood. I just… couldn't. There were too many support systems (marrow, kidneys, leukocytes, etc.) needed for it, and when it would be such a small amount…
Her central nervous system was held in a shock-absorbing fluid swarming with several classes of nanomachines that acted for transport, monitoring, and self-management. Nothing for cellular repair right now (as that was going to be obscenely complicated), though it was high on my to-do list.
The processors and artificial-neuron tangle were embedded in her brainstem and thalamus, and everything seemed to be interfacing with her sensory and upper motor neurons properly.
Her CNS was encased in a shell of the metamaterial I had around my own bones and Core. I'd spent all day and night synthesizing it in-place, and it was the thing that had actually taken the longest.
Well, that and all the fiddly bits.
Do you know how complicated the motor neurons in the upper half of your torso is? Ridiculously so. All the tiny facial muscles, twitchy eye movements, the mouth and tongue, the things your pharynx has going on, hell, speaking. And that's not even getting into your heart and lungs.
I just… I wanted this to work.
It had to work.
I knew there were going to be issues. Things that I could do better when I had more information. Problems that I couldn't foresee. It was inevitable, really. That was just how development worked.
I'd done my best, though. In the end that was really all I could do.
Now… now all that was left was waiting for her to wake up.
And then at eight thirty-two, she did.
A/N: I did so much neuroscience and neurology research for this chapter you have no idea guys. It's part of what I love about writing this story, though, so I can't really complain. The ending's a bit weak, but this really is a filler chapter, even if it's necessary filler in order to get to the good stuff.
Hope you enjoyed, and the next chapter'll hopefully be out in a few weeks.
Also, you can decide how canon or not the next bit is
A week later.
Amy stared at her sister's phone, a flash of jealousy flickering through her before she squashed it flat and looked up at Victoria.
"You were flirting."
"What? No I wasn't!"
"Crystal?" Amy looked over at her cousin on the couch, who stood up and walked over to where Victoria and Amy stood, looking over the healer's shoulder at the phone screen, before reaching around and scrolling a bit.
"…You were totally flirting."
Victoria spluttered. "N-NO I WASN'T!!"
"I never took you for one to be in denial, Vicky~" Crystal sing-songed as she went back to the couch.
"I'm not!!"
Amy gave Victoria a flat look while Crystal hummed. "Mmm-hm. Somebody's got a cruuuush~"
Victora reached out and snatched the phone away from her sister's hands, her face burning red. "Screw you guys."
And with that final parting statement she spun on her heel and stalked off, muttering under her breath.
Amy noted suspiciously that her sister hadn't denied it.
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