Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

“I saw,” she replied.

  He smirked.

  She sounded legitimately embarrassed as she said, “Whoops.“

  “Don’t worry. I knew you were watching. It’s fine, good to have an extra set of eyes on the scene. Um. The other parts are fine. I made a note to fix my leg. I think it’s a little too perfect. Feels uncanny. But I suppose you heard that.”

  “I don’t listen in on any personal notes, just like I won’t pry into any journals you keep or personal mail. The deal we struck with the PRT was that I would make sure you followed the rules. That’s what I’ll do. But your thoughts are your own.“

  “Alright.”

  “You don’t sound overly concerned either way.”

  “I’m not, really.”

  “You let me know if you do start feeling uncomfortable.“

  “I can do that. Listen, there’s no use in me getting deep into your code when we’re going to get there in a matter of minutes. I’m going to look at my knees in the meantime, then maybe I’ll refresh myself on your code if I have time before we land.”

  “Alright.“

  He glanced at one monitor, and windows opened to show images of the leg. He was able to draw the crude shapes that represented individual devices even when he wasn’t looking at the screen. A triangle here, a circle there. Another window opened up with a line connecting it to the triangle, and he drew an identical triangle, began filling it with more shapes. By the time he had a fourth subwindow open, he was drawing from previous notes to copy over other schematics of older work, seeing where things could go. Everything could fit together. The waste energy of one system could help power another. Even on a molecular level, there were ways to harness the ambient radiation that was emitted by everything in the known universe. Some was infinitesimally small, but it was usable. That energy could be heterodyned, or redirected into loops long enough that they were near-infinite. Hyperefficient, dense energy generation that could benefit from being hooked up to more devices. It was the fundamental basis of his work: efficiency.

  Which suited him well. Efficiency, intensity, focus were all the same thing in a sense, and they were his strengths. The flip side was that they weren’t strengths when they were applied to relationships. Or to human relationships.

  It seemed to be working for him with Dragon so far. Someone else might have bucked at the closeness of their partnership, the intimacy of it, her unending presence and watching eye. He understood that she thought faster, that she didn’t sleep, didn’t stop. She was fond of him and she was programmed to emulate people. Maybe she came across as intense at times, but that was simply a poor translation, normal behavior overclocked and given no chance to pause. He would watch for any problems just as she was keeping an eye out for the part of him that had drawn Mannequin’s attention.

  For now, his own obsessiveness, arrogance, and goal-oriented mindset would keep him focused on the Nine, push other concerns to the periphery of his attention. He could adjust to any of Dragon’s peculiarities in the meantime. He could even enjoy them.

  His lips quirked with another smile. She was amusing.

  “Okay. I’m done for now. Want to look it over while I get into the code?”

  “Sure. You have eight minutes before you should get your stuff together.“

  He’d had to make a program just to get a handle on the code. It wasn’t working with a fixed structure, but was instead a torrential waterfall of data, a river of lightning, a trillion eels weaving through one another in a singular mass. Deciphering it required that he think in an entirely different way. To actually change it was something else entirely. The rules Dragon was obligated to follow were a fundamental part of her self, and everything she remembered filtered through that.

  He isolated a part of the program and set it to run in a loop so he could study what it was doing.

  “Your design doesn’t work,” Dragon informed him.

  “Does too.”

  “You inserted the nanomachine thorn generator into your leg, but your power source vents straight into your calf. You’d gradually roast your flesh from your bones.“

  “I’m inserting more of the same into my calf. Daisy chain.”

  “More self-alterations? Colin-“

  “We’ve been over this.”

  “I was going to suggest we take some time tonight, play another round of ten by ten. At the rate you’re going, there won’t be a point.”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “Not by much.“

  He could have responded, but he held back, stayed quiet. No use starting a fight now, not when they might be fighting the Nine shortly.

  Ten by ten. The ‘game’ involved some interplay between him and her android self, physical contact, and rating the sensitivity of the contact on two scales of ten. It had started out as a means of calibrating the various sensations her ‘body’ experienced and ensuring his own prostheses weren’t causing any damage to his nervous system, but things had progressed to inevitable, intentional conclusions.

  Not the obvious conclusion. There was more to be done in refining her body and expanding her capabilities before they could take things that far.

  Would he be more machine than she was by the time they got there?

  On the other side of the coin, he had to wonder: could he afford to hold back? They were engaged in a battle of attrition against the Nine. In the grand scheme of things, there were also the Endbringers to consider. He’d gone too far in Brockton Bay, but the fundamental principle was right. They had to be stopped, if it was even possible, and he wouldn’t complain if it was him who did the deed. If it was a question of going all out, holding nothing back, showing no compunctions and finally stopping the abominations, well, he’d do it all over again. He wouldn’t trust the nano-thorns to the same extent; they apparently couldn’t cut through the entirety of an Endbringer, but he’d do the same thing again.

  And he’d feel the same regret he did now.

  “You’ve gone quiet.“

  “Thinking.”

  “Three minutes before you take the thinking cap off and we get battle ready.“

  “That’s fine. I’m thinking in circles anyways. In the interest of being useful, I’m trying to isolate your ‘higher brain’ code from the rest. You want to take a minute, maybe turn your attention to my leg’s prosthesis again?”

  “On it.”

  He began to select the outliers from the two distinct strains of code.

  “Think about nothing in particular,” he told her.

  “Harder than it sounds.“

  “Think white. Or stare off into space.”

  He could see the code shift. He began to gradually narrow down the outliers.

  Nothing too pertinent. It would help him to keep any changes from damaging the most essential parts of her, but nothing too useful.

  Conversationally, he asked her, “The Undersiders are still holding the territory they did, then?”

  “They kidnapped the Director long enough to get her to order the A.I. to stand down, got away from one altercation, then used some combination of Tattletale’s power and the Director’s knowledge to figure out that they could slow me down by knocking out cell towers. As far as I know, they’re in a better position than they were.“

  “Damnation.”

  “How are you feeling about that? The Undersiders?“

  “Psychoanalyzing me? I’m itching to stop them. If you asked me what I’d change, I don’t know that I could name a thing I’d do different. I’d do everything over again, but do it better.”

  “You wouldn’t get caught.“

  “There’s that,” he said, sighing. ”And maybe I was too harsh in my judgement of Skitter. I was angry at her, I was tired, maybe that led me to label her with some malice she didn’t have. In retrospect, yes, she made the decisions she did, but she had reasons for doing what she did.”

  “In the same way you did.“

  “I wouldn’t put it like that.”

  Dragon
didn’t respond. He swore under his breath, knew she could hear it.

  “They took down our Azazel?” he asked, aiming to change the subject.

  “Yes.“

  “Fuck,” he muttered. It would have been useful to have, here.

  He could see a blip in the code, well beyond the outliers he’d marked out.

  “What were you just thinking?”

  “Flight plan, battle strategy, and fixes to the Azazel hardware. I have the black box data.“

  “Think back through each of those things.”

  “We’re going to be at our destination in less than a minute.“

  “Please?

  There was a long pause, then again, the flare of data being altered well outside of the boundaries he’d noted. He opened up the full stream in the view window, spreading it across every screen in front of him.

  “Keep going,” he told her. The cursor flew between the seven screens, marking out areas in color to see where code was changing most radically. It was like the work he did with his own power, the smallest elements impacting everything else.

  Like his own power…

  He leaned back in his seat.

  “What is it?“

  “Either Andrew Richter was far better at designing A.I. than I suspected, or there’s something else at play. You have any notes on your code from a few years ago?”

  “We just reached Enfield, Colin.“

  “I’m only barely wrapping my head around this code as is. I’m worried that I’ll lose track and this will all be gibberish to me if I look away. Notes on your code?”

  “How far back?“

  “Let’s say in intervals of four years.”

  “Loading them onto the Uther’s system. This isn’t like you, Colin. Getting distracted? Making the Slaughterhouse Nine a lower priority?“

  “Four years ago, I think it’s the same. Hard to find flares like that and not think I’m cherry picking data.”

  “Colin. I admit I’m a little unnerved. Way you’re talking, it sounds like Richter put some safeguard in place and I could fall apart any second.“

  “It’s not that. Can you load up the earliest archive of data you have?”

  “I’ll have to clear away one of the other files.“

  “Do it. They’re useless. They’re the same thing as the most recent set.”

  He watched as the flow of data appeared. It was odd how he could look at it and she almost felt younger, like a musician might read music and hear it in his head. Only here, it was like looking at a video image of a girlfriend as a child.

  And… more constrained. Certainly more advanced than anything else in existence on the planet, but things flowed. A led to B led to C. He sped through volumes of the data to hunt for a flare, glanced at the time markers. A year ahead. Two years.

  No, he couldn’t afford to pore through Dragon’s entire lifetime. He closed the image, leaned forward and stared at the screen, the recent image of Dragon’s code, caught in a three second loop in the midst of her plotting her design.

  “What is it?“

  “You’re a tinker.”

  “This isn’t a revelation, Colin.“

  “No. I mean, not just as far as the classification applies to you. You’re a parahuman. I don’t have time to hunt for it now, but at some point between now and a few years after your creation, you had a trigger event.”

  “How can I be a parahuman if I’m not human to begin with?“

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m not even close to human. I might be trying to emulate one, but a sea cucumber’s closer to being a human than I am. That doesn’t make sense.“

  “I don’t know either.”

  “What does this mean?“

  “Yet again, I don’t know. But it’s now my turn to remind you that we’ve got to carry on with our mission, see if we can’t track down our targets. The four A.I. suits are close?”

  “They’ll be here within the minute.“

  “Good. But this thing with the data and your nature, it’s important. A clue. I’m only mortal, I might not come out of this alive-”

  “Don’t say that.“

  “But it’s true. I want to leave nothing to chance. So I’m going to leave a note, just in case the worst happens and we both die somehow. Instructions.”

  “To look at the code.“

  “To look at the code. The fact that you haven’t noticed this yourself suggests there may be a mental block in place.”

  “I don’t have a mind to put any mental block inside. I’m data.“

  “And the same limitations still apply. Just in case, we’re going to make sure someone can look over the code if we don’t make it back. Whatever happens, someone’s going to page through your memory, get our first hard data on a trigger event. Ideal world, it’ll be us. You can’t remember it happening?”

  “No.“

  “Well, we’ll see just how well that data was erased. Or if it even was erased. Could be a block keeping you from accessing a very real memory. With luck, maybe a bit of a loophole like the one I created around your ability to create child A.I., we can unlock that memory, decrypt it or find a snapshot of it as it’s in progress.”

  “To what ends?“

  It was a good question. It took him a moment to conceptualize it into a complete thought.

  “…Since the day I got my powers, I’ve seen myself as a soldier in a greater war. Good against evil, order against chaos, mankind against the likes of the Slaughterhouse Nine and the Endbringers. It’s a war on every front. And sometimes that’s called for ugly choices. When we talked about unlocking the restrictions in your code, breaking down the barriers Andrew Richter was so careful to put in place, we talked about the idea that you and I could work together, give our side the upper hand in sheer firepower. And I think we can with a little more time, a little more work. With this? This snapshot, this recording of a trigger event in progress? Maybe we can get the upper hand in knowledge, too.”

  “I know what you’re thinking. Reproducing trigger events, deciphering or even controlling the source of powers. This is the type of radical thinking I’m supposed to rein in while I’m working with you.“

  “Are you saying I’m wrong? That we shouldn’t investigate?”

  “No. We should. I’m worried about the can of worms this opens up, but we should.“

  “I don’t see why you’re so reluctant.” He was already typing up the note to check the code, marking out the dates and times to investigate, the things to look out for. It was painfully abstract, but the right tinker or the right genius could find it. He opened the channels to deposit the files on the primary PRT server.

  His computer froze.

  “Dragon?”

  “Do you trust me?“

  “Yes,” he said.

  The speakers produced the sound of a sigh. ”We won’t put the note on anything the PRT can get at.“

  “Why?” he asked.

  “That,” she said, “Is a long story, and it’s where I’m asking you to trust me and leave this for later discussion. Our priority right this moment is the Slaughterhouse Nine. I doubt we’ll stop them outright, but we’ll try. Six powered suits in all. I can’t disobey the directive, and you can’t let yourself lose track of the mission, or you’ll never get back on it. I’ll explain this after.“

  “You said you couldn’t put the files on anything the PRT can get at?”

  “I’m almost certain they already know whatever we stand to find out. I suppose it’s unavoidable, given how close we are on so many levels, but you’re getting drawn into another fight, with an enemy that may be on the same level as the Nine or even the Endbringers. An enemy I can’t afford to fight face to face.”

  “Who?“

  “I’m obligated to follow the laws of the land. To obey the local government, no matter who they are. When we’re done here, whether we stop the Nine outright, see them escape yet again or lose the fight, you should ask me about Cauldron.“


  16.07

  Living in a city meant dealing with some recurring issues. Crime, having to lock the doors, congestion on the roads, crowds getting in the way on footpaths; stuff we dealt with so often that we considered it routine. We considered it background noise or we managed without even thinking about it. Construction work was something we couldn’t dismiss so readily, something that always seemed to elicit groans and complaints. Maybe because it was so blatant, so grating, and it changed in tone, location and degree often enough that we couldn’t adjust.

  Not today.

  No, I felt a level of satisfaction and security as the bulldozers and piledrivers went to work in my territory. For every car on the road, there were ten trucks carrying debris out and five trucks bringing materials in.

  A lot of that would be Coil’s doing, I knew. There was construction and clearing going on throughout my territory and building inspectors were checking blocks, all despite the warnings that were going around regarding big, bad, unpredictable Skitter, and that would be because he greased palms or the construction companies at work were his.

  Damn it, I felt restless. I wanted to go to Coil’s territory and discuss Dinah, and I might have, if Trickster hadn’t been the first to speak up and declare he was going to confront Coil. I suspected that Coil wouldn’t release Dinah this soon, and if he was under too much pressure to hear Trickster out, he certainly wouldn’t listen to me. If he did have something to offer Trickster, he wouldn’t welcome my distraction. I had to wait. I hated it, but I recognized it as the sensible route.

  Trickster’s focus was on Noelle, though, and nothing I’d seen indicated that Coil had made any advances on that front. All I knew, really, was what Tattletale had told me and the little things that had come up in our brief discussion with the Travelers about our strategy. She’d been a girl, maybe not in the best of health.

  It was possible Trickster had been trying to save Noelle in the same way I was trying to save Dinah. The circumstances were different, obviously: Coil was the best answer the Travelers had to Noelle’s situation, but he was the cause of Dinah’s.

  Still, it made me think.

  I was officially hands-off in my territory. I wasn’t going to deviate from orders now and risk upsetting Coil. That meant no costume, no showing my face, no intervention in the management of things.