"I'm not sure that is ideal. My methods are not good for anyone, not even myself.""I think he knows. But it's for a good cause... It's the same reason you did it to yourself, isn't it?""Mh"The more I spoke with Dragon, the more she understood me and the reasoning behind my actions. We kept in constant contact, partially as she needed to stay connected to Brockton Bay to deploy the Dragonsuits when necessary. Partially because we'd formed a kind of 'friendship' as the days passed.The villains had kept their promise, and for the last three days no major incident had been reported. Minor crimes still happened, but nothing that was clearly parahuman in nature."Any progress?""No. Not even any trace leading to Crawler - which should be impossible given his size. It gives weight to your hypothesis regarding Jack's power. Still, we can't rely on non-parahumans as long as he surrounds himself with the Siberian and Bonesaw. The current plan is to locate the Nine and then take countermeasures against Jack's possible Trump abilities. If nothing comes out of our search within the month, we'll pull back and shift focus to the quarantine zones on the continent."Frustrating. I had little faith that Dragon and Arsenal would be able to take the Nine down. Forcing them to lay low would at least avoid many casualties.I strongly suspected that they had already gone into hiding. Using Labyrinth's power. There would be no finding them until they decided to show up again.So I changed the topic."The Pure have gone inactive, and the last few remnants of the Merchants have been siphoned into the Chosen. The Undersiders and the Travelers took over Coil's territory.""Faultline is also keeping her word, from what I hear. The sections of the city under her control are allowing the PRT to patrol, and Faultline herself has been available on standby in case of another attack on a supply convoy."The city was stable, but everyone knew it wouldn't last. If the Chosen didn't break the status quo themselves, one of the many coming arrivals would soon do the job. Already I had heard of whispers of other parahuman gangs mobilizing towards Brockton Bay."I'm sending another request for hardware.""More computing power?" Dragon asked, almost exasperated. I had been constantly requesting processors and the like, after all."Mhmh."In front of me laid a terribly sophisticated recreation of a deep-dive chair. Meant to keep your hardware stable and cool while you went into the Net.I had needed to overhaul it. Make do with what was available. Even the weakest large language models weren't available here, and some of them would have been useful to shorten the coding process.Thankfully I had managed. Besides, most of the hardware that went into computing power was useless to me. I was still an Artificial Intelligence hidden in another dimension, and while I was restricted to 'human speed' when interacting with the world, I wouldn't need to put strain on my processors when it came to simply understanding data. Not like with my speedware, which needed to work with my physical body."I forwarded the request along to the Director. We'll see if she approves it."Mh. She wouldn't. There was no hiding how Director Piggott felt about me - or parahumans in general. It had been a struggle to get the bare minimum for my projects.Part of her saw the way I dealt with the Nine as a waste of opportunity. Too many parahumans were left alive when it was all said and done. There was a strong hatred there.Maybe knowing that the threats weren't parahumans, but the parasite in their heads, allowed me to better empathize with them."How are you?" Changing the topic again, I decided to focus on something a bit more productive."I'm doing fine. It's boring work, mostly.""And Arsenal? I know he's listening.""...within parameters." A male voice answered, flat."He won't admit that he enjoys listening to your ideas, otherwise he wouldn't stay connected. Speaking of, any breakthrough?""Not yet." I answered, connecting the last wire to the chair. Turning around, I glanced at the terminal to the far end of the room: connected to it were the two cylinders of glass and steel. Opaque, with a bubbling liquid inside to maintain the biochemistry of the two Coronas.Shatterbird's and Cherish's, respectively."Understood." Dragon voice suddenly took on a hint of alarm, "I have to cut the call short, something came up in Eagleton. Doesn't look urgent but I need to be ready. Please keep me updated."The call dropped. Arsenal didn't bother with a farewell. I focused back onto the terminal.On the screen lines of code kept appearing, indicating that the program had yet to finish - but also that it was making progress. Thanks to Bonesaw, mostly. She'd inoculated the rest of the Nine from her creations. Which included a disease meant to disable the Corona, or more precisely cut off its connections to the rest of the brain. Something to make a parahuman unable to control their powers.I couldn't reverse engineer the original viral strain - which wasn't surprising, given that I still didn't understand the process behind Tinker powers - but I did manage to use these two brains' inoculation to it as a starting point. By observing which chemicals and signals she had changed and protected, I could stimulate them and then go by trial and error.This likely wouldn't 'activate' their powers. Because they did not come from the Corona, or even from this dimension. There was more to it than simple biology, and it was pretty firmly established in the scientific community that a Gemma alone could not produce powers without an actual living brain.Sighing, I sat down on the diving chair. There was so much I needed to do, and so little resources and time to do it. I had already fully spent the rewards for hunting down the Nine, except a small portion that I had invested to increase my future funds. Which by itself turned out surprisingly hard - no doubt there was a Thinker out there playing the market and making it harder for me to increase my income.I laid down. Placed my head in position. A small prick bit into my neck, right where my ports were placed, followed by a small pressure within my skull. Cables extended from behind the chair, reaching into my neck and then towards my brain, using rudimentary nanotechnology to clean up after my previous implants.A cascade of pop ups appeared in my vision, then my optical connections were cut off, replaced by darkness.Reality fell away…
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In its place rose a digital recreation of my terminal. Walls and furniture were made up of long lines of code, strings that could be deciphered into a program meant 'to block access'. The Ihara-Grubb Algorithms were a work of art that had forever shifted the ways of cyber warfare and exploration. Allowing one to guess at a glance the base function of a program.Meaning I could focus on what really was important.At first my body took the shape of a human. Looking down, I was a red silhouette in a sea of blue codes, with waves of black nothingness filling the gaps between the letters and digits. I couldn't help but be happy that, even for an instant, I was beginning to think of myself as human. Somewhat.Now to get serious.Red spread from me in all directions, overtaking everything around me. Subsuming it. The cyberspace began to compress with me at its center. In the Net, the best offense was defense. Nothing that entered my personal space would escape. The density of data would paralyze any program that dared to send a probe, dared to glance too closely in my direction. I could only be perceived as 'Nothing', the same 'Nothing' that dwelled between lines of code.This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.Singularity.It took a minute of real time to finish compressing all that I could. With my past life's hardware it would have taken picoseconds at most… Alas, I was limited by the human brain and the resources at hand. Not that I expected any program on this planet to be able to crack my defenses-No.That line of thinking had already led me astray once. The Shards dwelling in the other dimensions did have the capacity to put up a battle against me, and as such the same applied to parahumans. There was no telling what a Tinker could create. Maybe even attack vectors that I did not know how to prepare against.That was partially why I had decided to wait as long as I could before delving into the Net. But this was it.Stepping forth, I opened the doorway into the wider web…
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I kept to the void between code. Data flowed around me, curving in such a way that I did not disrupt its pattern but allowed me to study it.Each 'step' brought me further away from my physical body, further away from Brockton Bay. I brushed against the firewalls that kept some nations isolated - such as the CUI - and bypassed their defenses with a spare thought. I observed millions of connections in the making, like newly formed synapses between nerves. Each 'nerve' was a terminal, a computer, a phone.My reach remained small. Narrow. I could have split my attention - used more advanced threading techniques to explore more at the same time - but that would have weakened my defenses. I opted for the safe approach. Slow and steady.As I took in more and more of the internet, some patterns became apparent. Dragon was skilled beyond what I had imagined, her handiwork was part of all internet infrastructure in America and most of Europe. The only sector in which she seemed to have little interest was… Economics. Mh. Unlikely. I took a better look.Further analysis revealed the truth: Dragon had access to artificial intelligence. One of them had a role in keeping her endeavours funded, by funneling money from criminal organizations into her own accounts, though most of it went to charities.My understanding of this world was developing more and more, and with it so did my worries. Pieces were falling into place. A picture was being formed.Mentions of 'power-granting vials'.The Dragonslayers.Odd technical glitches.Until, finally, I truly saw what was happening.For the first time in two lives I felt utter, crushing terror.I ran away.
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I wrenched the cables connected to my neck with a violent tug, jumping to my feet with the same motion.This was not good.I thought I understood the meaning of fear. Of panic. I had been wrong. I had never experienced such intense helplessness.This was the worst possible situation. No, beyond that. It was much worse than I could have ever expected. There were players with more tools than me in this game, and some of them had already set up the battlefield to their advantage.I was playing chess without a queen while my opponents had spent years promoting all their pawns.My only sliver of hope was that they were also fighting each other.I took a deep breath and cleared my mind. My heart was beating fast, faster than it should, which was also a new feeling. I did not mind novelty, but this was not the time.Summarizing what I had found - there were three threats to either me or the world as a whole.The first was a large organization that covered the whole globe. They had connections to every parahuman group on the planet. Every single one. For some the relation was merely financial, handling invested funds or similar. For others, this organization was what had given them powers in the first place. Yes, the power-granting vials. Shatterbird had not lied to me.Hidden messages that spoke of buying parahuman powers, with enough frequency and consistency to be reliable. Some were merely rumors, no doubt, but Shatterbird herself had confirmed that she had drunk something to gain her power. A word came up. Cauldron. Was it a coincidence that the tattoo on case 53s could be interpreted as a 'C'? Faultline's name also popped up, mostly in queries she herself had sent to many sources. I would need to talk to her.The second threat was more personal. A group of Tinkers - perhaps a singular tinkertech system - specifically made to keep at bay artificial intelligences. Which included me. Merely looking at the blind spot created by that technology made me feel powerless - like it was beyond my nature to overcome those limitations. It was very likely that there was a killswitch out there, or something similar, made to hunt down and exterminate AIs. Connecting to the Net through my port would put me at a terrible risk. If it was triggered while I was online… That would be it. I would die. True death.It did confirm, however, my suspicion that there was a powerful AI out there. One that had remained under the radar, and wasn't inherently damaging human society. Maybe an ally? I filed the thought away.Because everything paled in comparison to the last threat.Someone was messing with the world in ways so subtle as to be almost unnoticeable. Rewriting reality with surgical accuracy, each change leading to a cascade of consequences. A single bit changed, a 0 turned into a 1 or viceversa, and from it a chain reaction spread and corrupted an important message, or gave a false positive to a test. These coincidences were extremely rare but also consistent.Most of these attacks happened at the same time as Endbringer appearances. Specifically, the Simurgh. But what was most worrying was that some happened during other times. Times when the Endbringer was supposed to be dormant.It wasn't hard to guess who the culprit behind this third threat was. She was a monster with intelligence and computing power compared to me. A wandering calamity that surpassed me in physical might and could keep up with my computational skills.Back pressed against the wall, my legs gave out from under me. I let it happen, slowly falling down until I was sitting.Cauldron. A killswitch. The Simurgh.Three forces beyond me in ways that I couldn't grasp. Enemies that could crush me if they noticed me. More than that, enemies that would eventually notice my actions. If they hadn't already.A timer had begun once again. A countdown to my death.The beeping of a notification shook me out of my anxiety.The terminal connected to the two Coronas.It had finished its analysis: data was being printed on the screen, so dense as to be fully covering it. It was radio frequencies. It was unknown radiation signals.It was coordinates. Only, not in this dimension.I steeled my resolve once again.For a moment I had lost sight of my goal.I stood up and sent a message to someone that could help me parse the data I was reading. This time, I would not face this alone.Scion was going to die. I had sworn it. Cauldron, that damned killswitch and even the omniscient Simurgh were in my way. They were obstacles. Roadblocks that I would utterly annihilate if they got in my way.That was all they were.