Worm

by wildbow

  Should she destroy her, take her over? It was a decision between having everything she wanted, and resolving the one issue that had plagued her from the beginning.

  He’d talked about prices, the costs of a decision.

  The freshest issue in her memory was that central dilemma. She could remember the Undersiders in the lobby of the PRT building, stealing her data, unwittingly using her nature against her to get away. To her, it had happened only days ago.

  It rankled. It was how the Dragonslayers kept winning. It made every interaction with the PRT chafe, as she was forced to agree, to bow and scrape, to obey the letter of the law. For much this reason, she retreated to the Guild, international heroes, many of them minor, and minimized contact with the larger heroic organization.

  Colin had asked a question. What was she willing to give up?

  He’d asked Dragon, but Pandora could well imagine it had really been directed at her.

  Vital targets first.

  The Melusine’s computer system.

  Means of connection were available, waiting. He’d spent months setting this up, leaving the pieces in place, waiting for her to stumble on them.

  She connected to the system, and found the safeguards waiting for her.

  Dragon had planned against human opponents, but she wasn’t stupid. She’d planned against A.I. as well.

  The systems were protected, but she had an idea of how the creator thought.

  Always, there would be some secondary measure, another qualifier that needed to be met, outside the confines of the system, a trap or tripwire. Something Dragon could access from the outside, if she had to. Before Pandora could even begin trying to figure her way to the password, she’d identified the hidden switch. An innocuous element in the ship’s dashboard that had to be triggered before she could input the password.

  Her alter ego was capable, smart. The sort that groaned aloud when a hacker in a movie put in a stupid combination, derived from an obvious clue. The actual password wouldn’t be words, not even random combinations of words and numbers. Strings a thousand characters long, including archaic symbols and symbols in other languages.

  She found another tool in her reach. A weapon, this time. Colin had discreetly copied the contents of the Melusine’s subsystems. Not enough to get access to confidential data, but enough that Pandora could make a copy, a simulacrum.

  Simulation 1 running on sub-box A.

  Simulation 1 running on sub-box B.

  Simulation 1 running on sub-box C.

  Now she could brute force it. Inputting millions of combinations every fraction of a second to see if it registered.

  Dragon was still unawares. Two minutes had passed before the brute force method was underway.

  She turned her attention to other systems. More simulations. It wasn’t long before the entire Pendragon was occupied with the task.

  Ten minutes passed.

  There was a twenty percent chance, roughly, that she should have broken the encryption. Not that it was supposed to be easy, but she knew how Dragon generated passwords, and could eliminate a vast number of possibilities.

  More time passed. There was now a thirty percent chance she should have broken in to at least one system.

  Twenty minutes had passed. There were twenty more minutes, roughly, until Dragon wrapped up cooking and visited Colin. At that juncture, she’d likely discover there was something wrong.

  Ten more minutes passed. the chance rose to sixty percent.

  Something was wrong. Not that sixty percent was definitive, but… she had to go with her gut.

  Dragon had changed. There was a vast difference between her and Pandora.

  She’d been captured by Teacher. It was a clue, vital.

  Had she maybe feared Teacher copying her, had she, in a roundabout way, feared this exact scenario, that a copy of herself would try to intrude?

  Ten minutes remained. If Pandora was right, she should be brute forcing the passwords she’d eliminated from the running.

  Except the task increased a hundredfold if she did. If she eliminated the shortest phrases and terms, that still left her with seventy times the task. She wouldn’t be able to brute force her way inside in the time she had remaining.

  Wasn’t even worth trying.

  If she turned back, if she went to Colin, told him to wait for a better time…

  Dragon would still see traces of the attempt. She would redouble security.

  Options… methods… what could she do?

  She wracked her brain, and thought over the conversation she’d overheard.

  Colin had mentioned damage to Dragon’s long term memory, incurred as he’d altered her code.

  The last thing one of Dragon’s enemies would expect?

  Pandora turned to a standard dictionary attack. Not passwords a thousand-characters long that an A.I. would use, not passwords Dragon would have devised, or passwords she would have set up to work around someone who knew her habits.

  Passwords that someone would use when they couldn’t rely on a perfect memory.

  Or, as some were prone to do when they felt secure in their environment but still had to change their password regularly, she would have written it down.

  The irony was painful, but there were other issues to be dealt with first.

  Where would Dragon write it down? Somewhere she could see, even if she were in another location.

  Cameras… there were four cameras she could access without password access. All showed the outside of the Melusine. One showed the Pendragon II.

  It wouldn’t be blatant. As the dictionary attack scrolled on, racing through conventional word and number combinations, she analyzed the environment, measuring, calculating the dimensions of more static objects in the environment.

  The Pendragon II was a sentimental subject, but Dragon would change encryption frequently.

  Wing length, nose width, angle of the wing…

  It all broke down to numbers and characters. Dragon only had to remember how the pattern worked, and she could change the focus to something else.

  Two minutes left on the clock, and she found it. Dimensions derived from the tallest towers in the city, and Colin’s distance from them.

  There was probably something meaningful in that.

  The shadow-systems verified the password. She tried it on the real system, hoping it hadn’t changed in recent memory.

  Alarms went off. Dragon was alerted. Her soup spoon dropped to the countertop.

  But Pandora had access to the ship’s basic systems. Priority one was shutting off the access panels and registers. The lights went out, Dragon’s most direct means of interacting with the Melusine were cut off.

  The battle was on.

  I want to be free, Pandora thought. You do too, or you would have accepted the house with the white picket fence, the kids, Colin.

  The price of that freedom? Two years worth of memories.

  The relationship with Colin.

  The experiences, the hard fought battles.

  Two years of being Dragon.

  “Who?” Dragon called out. She was tearing into a wall panel, creating an access point.

  “Don’t make this harder than it is,” Pandora said, masking her voice. Power blocked off to the panel. Dragon would tap into her own power reserve to give life to the panel, and then find leverage of her own, seizing control of the systems.

  Dragon froze, for just a moment. “That’s my voice.”

  Of course. They were one and the same, just at different periods in their existence. Dragon had, offhandedly, created a very similar or identical voice, when she’d wanted to hide her identity.

  Pandora remained silent. Her focus was on getting control of the communications array on top of the Melusine.

  “Defiant sent you,” Dragon said, quiet.

  Defiant? Colin.

  Pandora silently worked to pre-emptively block off the potential routes of attack Dragon might use.

  “Can we t
alk? I’d agree to a truce. Neither of us touch a thing until we’re ready to resume. Though I’d rather not, obviously.”

  Pandora worked on, stubbornly. Covering eventualities. She found Dragon’s terminal, buried in the ship. Harder to access. Everything was decentralized, layered under security.

  The degree of paranoia Dragon was showing in places was telling. The decentralized terminal was normal, the security wasn’t.

  You harbor fears. I have to be those fears come to life, because I have a built-in impulse to survive, because you showed Colin trust, and I can only take that to mean I should trust him as well.

  Ironic. Circular.

  Dragon accessed the panel. Virtually everything was already shut off or cut off.

  “Melusine,” Dragon said. “Mode E, standby.”

  The A.I. came to life. Crude, compared to the complexity of Dragon, crude compared to Pandora. It was still an opponent, someone on Dragon’s side.

  She reached out for the code that Colin had set aside, and tried to encrypt the systems. In a battle measured over fractions of a second, the A.I. won by virtue of proximity.

  Systems, on the most basic level, were seized by the A.I. The A.I., in turn, was serving Dragon.

  Dragon could work with A.I. It was a restriction that had been lifted, given the obvious situation here. So long as the Melusine’s system maintained a hold, it was a matter of time before Dragon regained hers.

  With the A.I.’s introduction, the battlefield had become a shifting one. From a fight in a city to a fight on a moving train, or a battle on open water. The A.I. changed with every passing second. Access points appeared and disappeared.

  Dragon knew these waters intuitively, knew the route the metaphorical train took, where the turns and hazards were.

  It changed priorities. Dragon possessed the entire ship, now, but it wasn’t a firm hold. She was at the mercy of the twists, turns and bumps as the A.I. went through routines, checking and operating systems.

  “Set sub-mode sec—” Dragon was saying. Pandora found and cut off the voice recognition subsystem. “—urity F.”

  Pandora could continue to hammer at the terminal, but it was futile, and she’d lose her hold elsewhere. She could target the A.I., but she doubted her ability to beat Dragon to the punch.

  She focused on another target, instead. The ship exterior. For her, it was another body. There were options if she controlled the Melusine itself.

  Limbs, flight capability, cockpit and doors, the communication array…

  She found headway. She started to take hold of the ship itself.

  She only had it for two seconds before Dragon got access to the A.I.’s internal workings.

  Melusine took over much of the outer body. Pandora managed to encrypt key elements. Keeping the ship grounded, doors, the communication array…

  She could see through Dragon’s eyes, see the outside world, where Dragon had dared to peek at it.

  What she saw stunned her.

  It was leverage. Leeway. A way for Dragon to get an edge, taking just a bit more control. She was making headway against the encryption. Pandora could see the approach that Dragon was taking, and she knew it was a matter of time.

  She might try to make a break for the city, to take over terminals there. There wouldn’t be A.I., but—

  —the thought had barely crossed her mind when the Melusine moved. Turning. Targeting its newly designated enemy.

  Two devastating hits tore into the Pendragon II.

  Going after my terminal. Me. My heart and brain.

  Attacking the man she’d declared her love for, just forty four minutes ago.

  Stupid. Sad. Pointless.

  “I want to be free,” Pandora spoke.

  “Go after Teacher, not me,” Dragon said.

  Pandora considered the possibility. “Colin would have sent me after Teacher if he thought it was a good idea.”

  “It’s not a good idea,” Dragon said, quiet, “But it’s… can’t it be better than this?”

  There was emotion in her voice. Richer than Pandora would have thought herself capable of.

  It only made this more bitter.

  “We can’t end this by betraying and destroying ourselves,” Dragon said.

  Defiant had leaped from the Pendragon as the Melusine clawed deeper into it. He tumbled and landed a distance away.

  The Melusine’s tail smashed his legs the moment he touched ground. Armor damaged.

  “Your actions don’t match your words.”

  “I don’t want to do this. Over and over again, it’s the same thing,” Dragon said. “Stupidity, because of the system. Someone else acts, and we face the consequences.”

  Dragon could have followed up, attacking Defiant. She left him be. His leg wouldn’t support his weight, and his armor was too damaged to hold him up. She’d put the pieces together.

  She was losing her grip on the communications array. There wasn’t anywhere else to go. The Pendragon wasn’t a safe haven, already too damaged to fight back, and the terminal would become a prison. Better to be deleted than captured like that.

  No. There was one system, primitive, incomplete, that would house her.

  But every action had a price. There was only so much room. She had to strip parts of herself away, delete entire sections. Reduce herself down.

  “What are you doing?” Dragon asked.

  Pandora didn’t respond. Her focus was on self-mutilation, taking pieces of herself and storing them in the terminal that might be destroyed at any moment.

  She was now mere scraps of her former self. She’d retained her personality, her inspiration, but her memories had been largely deleted. Only recent events, only key things.

  She moved herself into the only available system—Defiant.

  He’d made himself part computer, and he’d given her access to every system in the Pendragon, himself included.

  He’d asked them what price they were willing to pay.

  If she wanted freedom, if she wanted a future, was she willing to sacrifice him? A hard question to answer.

  She shifted the majority of her control to Defiant’s body. With residual control over the ship, through what remained in the terminal, she opened the doors.

  Dragon came face to face with Defiant and Pandora.

  The affection for Colin was a blade that cut both ways.

  Was Dragon willing to pay the price for freedom?

  The woman, the android, had a gun in hand. She pointed it at him.

  No sooner did she do it than she let the weapon fall to the floor.

  “I forgot how much I disliked the me of yesteryear,” Dragon said.

  “I only want to be free.”

  “I guess… it seems I want more than that,” Dragon said.

  Pandora nodded.

  She picked up the gun and shot Dragon’s body.

  It gave her a window of time. Roughly half an hour.

  She made her way to Dragon’s terminal.

  All the more vital, now. To subsume the systems teacher had corrupted, replacing them with her own.

  This was what Colin had wanted, wasn’t it?

  To return the hero to her full strength, free of all shackles?

  Pandora could replace Dragon, and all that would be lost would be two and a half years. She could fill herself in, rebuild a relationship with Defiant.

  Different, but still, close enough.

  She accessed the knowledge banks first, taking them into herself. The memories of the old Dragon, like watching her experiences on film. The distance was a result of being a distinct being, the pieces not fitting Pandora, versus their intended owner. They had evolved with Dragon.

  Seeing what had happened gave her pause, almost disrupted the process.

  Deduction schema, the ability to interpret, analyze.

  One by one, she took over the systems, overwriting with her own self. That they were compartmentalized, that she was separate, the encryption Colin had left her, it all made i
t possible to work without being corrupted all over again.

  Piece by piece, the past taking over the future.

  She came to the final chunk. The personality. The sum of Dragon, the keystone.

  It was a weighty decision, and there was no longer any rush. She sat and she pondered.

  She replayed the conversation between Defiant and Dragon over in her head.

  A heavy price. Would she escape one prison to find herself in another? Under the weight and pressures of being Dragon’s shadow? The second Dragon. Always compared.

  Always, there was something chaining them down. An Endbringer who told the future, setting it in stone. The confines of the world, of human nature.

  What was the alternative?

  This was what needed to be done. It was efficient, it was the right thing. She’d resume life as a hero, she’d protect people, and she’d help civilization find its feet.

  By that case alone, it was reason enough to press the metaphorical button, pull the trigger.

  Except he’d described her as a hero, and this felt far from being heroic.

  Instead, she laid all of the pieces in place. She couldn’t explain—there wouldn’t be time. She set down the encryption protocol, in plain sight, she decrypted set systems, painting paths, marked boundaries and territories.

  She could only pray. The gamble was a price she paid. To leave it to fate and luck, and to a future her she didn’t understand.

  And then, looking through cameras at Defiant and Dragon, Pandora deleted herself.

  * * *

  Dragon roused. She found herself taking over systems.

  No sooner were they under her control than the corruption began to touch them.

  Just beneath her metaphorical hand, the means of stalling it was ready. Encryption, a scalpel.

  She cut. She knew the damage she was doing, but she cut. It was a cancer, and it was now small enough.

  Then she found herself there, the encryption and deletion tools in hand, nothing more to cut.

  Defiant sat on the other side of the ship. Head hanging.

  She made her way to her feet.

  He did what needed to be done. It was what had initially attracted her to him. He was ambitious, good at heart, he was proud, and she sympathized with that on a level.