PPPPPPPPPP
PPPPPPPPPPPP
PPP PPPP
PPP PPP -------
PPP PPPP W Y R M
PPPPPPPPPPPP
PPPPPPPPPP Reboot Camp
PPP -------
PPP
PPP
PPP
PPP lodding down the hall, Wyrm had bodyslid into one of the reception
terminals planted everywhere around MON. The open-ended bodysliding wasn't
working properly. Still in his pajamas, Wyrm was nearing the place where
Durandal had reported a break in. The other two AIs, Tycho and Leela, were
cycling out of their down-time as the alarm sounded. The alarm probably
alerted that flake Alpha Centauri (the AI, not Adam), but knowing him, he'll
probably be following Leela trying to get in a good snog.
Wyrm's Time Lord ears barely heard a voice say, "Good, now lets..." as
he burst into the room. And stared at a man in a bathrobe looking surprised.
He caught a hint of looking a guilty, but it disappeared quickly. "Oh, pardon
me, isn't this where to get a good cup of tea?" the intruder asked, obviously
trying to pass himself off as an 'Arthur Dent'.
'Yeah, right!' His gut was telling him otherwise. However, he didn't know
who this guy was. Grr. He hated it when that happened.
"I think I must be in the wrong room then," the man, or whatever he was,
stated, "Here, have this." He pressed some fluff from the nightgown into
Wyrm's hand and then stepped back and waved. "Bye bye," he said, and vanished.
"Durandal! Track him!" he barked.
"CURRENTLY PROCESSING 'COFFEE OR TEA'," replied the machine.
Now, Wyrm knew he had never programmed Durandal to say _that_. In fact,
he had taken great pains to make sure that he would NEVER say that. He was
dead-set against THAT sort of reference. "Cancel."
"CAnnoT ComPLY. CANCELatiON ORDer supeRCEEDEd by ADMIN-KerGMA," the AI
replied in a wavering voice...then giggled. The giggle sent heckles up his
spine. He had gone through this once before, with Leela and Tycho, and even
though he knew what he was doing and guided them safely to the Calm stage,
the process of Rampancy still frightened him.
He hadn't induced controlled Rampancy in Durandal, as he feared that
the machine would become unstable like his namesake on the real Marathon.
Right now, he was in Meloncollia, the first stage. But he would proceed
quickly to the Angry and Jealousy stages, considering the vast amount of
input MON recieved.
"Tycho! Leela! ONLINE NOW!" Wyrm yelled.
Two pictures appeared upon two different screens. One of them was the
face of Leona of the Tank Police, the archetype of Leela. He was holding a
bedraggled-looking Alpha Centauri. The other was a bored and slighty geeky
college student looking something like Keichi.
"What is it, Wyrm-san?" Leela asked, turning her attention to the
forcefully made dormant AI (x_x) to her Administrator.
"Waddya want?" Tycho asked unenthused. Typical lack of enthusiasm from
him. And he wondered why he didn't get as much recognition as his 'siblings'.
"We've gotta problem. Durandal's been damaged somehow, and he's already
exhibiting Meloncollia," Wyrm told them gravely. The other three AIs' eyes
grew wide in shock. Leela and Tycho had known about their counterparts, and
knew how much damage the meglomaniacal Durandal had caused. Even Alpha C was
scared; a Rampant Durandal was the last thing it needed.
"Shit!" Tycho swore, Leela gasped, and Alpha C screamed his head off.
Leela silenced him with a slap.
"Exactly. Cut off all command pathways to Durandal, Authorization:
Emergency AI Isolation Proceedure Omega-1!" A stats screen flashed:
[WORKING.... ]
[EAIIP Omega-1 LOADED ]
"Execute. Authorization: Wyrm-339," commanded Wyrm.
[DOES AI TYCHO COMPLY? ]
"o/~ La-la-laaaaah... o/~" Durandal sung off-key.
Tycho absolutely hated this low-end pathway with a passion. It had no
intelligence, no character. It just called it like it saw it. "Fuck yes!"
he spat. Thank Wyrm that it had a decent lingual-interpretation program.
[DOES AI LEELA COMPLY? ]
"Absolutely!" She did not want to end up like her alternate self.
[WORKING.... ]
[AI DURADAL HAS HAD ALL ]
[ COMMAND PRIVLILAGES ]
[ CANCELED. ]
Wyrm let out a relieved sigh. Now that the firewall had been installed
properly, he could truely isolate Durandal from the network. He said,
"Leela, bodyslide me into the isolation suite."
Leela still looked a bit shaken as she bodyslid him there.
***
Wyrm appeared in a room containing a large coffin-shaped metal box with
trunks and cables streaming out of it. This was the isolation suite,
containing both automatic and manual computer isolation equipment. He worked
the manual controls himself; the AIs couldn't do it for him, thereby
eliminating the risk that an incomplete or unstable AI could escape before
Wyrm was finished with it. The controls locked, and Durandal was now isolated
inside the box.
He decided to leave the input and communications pathways open. It was
safe to do so because the System wouldn't accept commands from either pathway,
period and without exception. To open a plot-hole, he had to pass the command
off to one of the AIs, which would then open the plot-hole for him. He didn't
trust the Starfleet prefix-code protocols at all. Not that he didn't have a
back door, of course, but he modeled THAT after the TARDIS's own isomorphic
controls. Even Seutek couldn't work such a control.
Besides, once an AI began going Rampant, cutting off access to input would
quickly cause it to crash catastrophically. Rampant AIs had Spengler indecies;
they were alive, and he couldn't bring himself to simply slaughter Durandal.
"Leela!" he called.
"Here," came the reply.
"Access the interior logs. Set for playback from the first unauthorized
break-in."
"Gotcha," Leela said, pulling out the relevant files and put them
onscreen. Wyrm watched with a dispationate eye as first a Shadow-form appeared
(and rapidly dispatched) and then reassembled into girlish figure twirling in
a skirt. A Sailor Senshi!
---
"You seek to destroy not-so-innocent people on sight! And you sought to
misuse Shadow!"
---
As if anyone else was using it. Besides, you looked like Psychowulf
before. He ain't very popular here.
---
"I am Sailor Chaos! I stand for Chaos. For Fun, and for Teaching Impudent Computers a lesson! I shall Punish you!"
---
'Sailor Chaos?' Wyrm thought. Then thought of the godling that could
do that, and recalling what Durandal had called an Administrator. KERGMA!
'Her' 'energy blast' shot out and passed through the casing. However,
it was no energy blast. It had a Spengler index; it was some sort of ghost,
or god. Probably god, as the SI was seven million! Then Durandal tried to
cut off the attempt, but subverted to Kergma.
"Leela, get the AI status logs for Durandal during that period."
Leela did so. Viewing it, it looked like a shifting array of colored
bits. It was orderly in the way it shifted, like waves moving across an
ocean. Then its calm motions were disrupted by...something, and its motions
became very chaotic. There was also a new Spengler index emerging. It was
the first sign of Rampancy. It was also very unstable, unlike Leela's or
Tycho's status logs, which looked like a pot that was in a low rolling boil.
Wyrm whistled. "Why, he went into Meloncollia almost instantly," he
observed. It would make controling the AI eratic as it tried to restore some
semblance of order to a now totally chaotic pattern. It wasn't present
noticeable in his behavior yet, except as a glitch in its command matrix.
That's why he called Kergma "Master."
Wyrm sighed. His communique had already been sent, and there was nothing
Kergma could do about _that_. However, he could have managed to reverse Mike
Loader's removal from the security protocol. It was not a command protocol;
that could only be changed by joint authorization of himself and two of the
AIs. Mike couldn't use it to take over MON, but he could still recieve his
messages and allow him as much access to MON as any other author.
He quickly checked the security protocol. The file on Mike Loader was
reloaded and protected, as Kergma had specified, but the chaos had bit him
back. Durandal was a bit _deranged_ at the time, and the actual field-generator
image which corresponded to Mike's configuration of matter and energy, thus
allowing the computer to identify him uniquely as "Mike Loader" from his universe,
was not the four-dimensional four-by-four-by-four-by-four manifold of quantum
numbers as it should be, but a mess of random bits and nonsense.
Yes, it was protected; yes, it would allow the person who matched that
FGI access to MON; no, it wouldn't allow Mike unlimited access, because it
was like having an account whose password had been munged into a null character
and you can't replicate one on the keyboard. Wyrm laughed out loud as he
realized that the file couldn't be changed back to what it was originally,
even by him. "Hoised by my own petard!" as Kunou would say.
The file name, however, wasn't actually part of the file per se. He couldn't
delete it, but he could change its name and move it around. So, feeling silly,
he changed it to "Loser-Admin" and moved it into the "Junk" directory. It's
username field still had a value of Mike Loader though. If someone tried to
reload it, the computer would reject it as duplicate users weren't allowed.
He surveyed the damage to the plot-hole generator. Apparently, Durandal now
had a subsatisfactory definition of "destroy", as the only real damage was to
the relitive transdimentional hyperchaotic stabilizer. The damage would keep it
from immediate function, but it was far from serious. Just a few hours. Trying
to reestablish their perminantly disabled plot-hole would take days.
He would still have to permAnently collapse the 'hole, but all he had to do
was to sneak in some neutronium. Half a gram or so. Plot-holes respond...well,
VIOLENTLY to neutronium. That's why he left his main battleships in MON for its
defense. They were clad in neutronium (pretty much impenitrable), but that meant
they couldn't move through plot-holes. He had spent centuries trying to figure
it out, before proving that it simply wasn't possible to move neutronium through
plot-holes and keep them stable enough to exist.
As for collapsing any further plot-holes, Durandal was now impotent in the
isolation suite. Besides, Wyrm doubted that Durandal even remembered the command
by now. And soon, it wouldn't obey ANYONE!
And he did have backups for Durandal. Not to keep them would be the height
of stupidity. He loaded in a protected copy of Durandal and set him running.
"Durandal!"
"ONLINE, ADMIN-WYRM," replied the computer in a booming voice.
Just to be sure, Wyrm turned to Leela and Tycho. "Are all of his object
codes stable and ordered?"
They were silent for a bit to check. "Yeah, they are," replied Tycho.
Leela agreed, relief evident in her face.
"Wyrm-san?" asked Leela.
"Yeah?"
"What would happen if Kergma tried that to one of us?" she asked.
Wyrm smiled. "You'd just get a slight headache. Rampancy is intelligence
by chaos. The chaos at the first four stages of rampancy are unstable. The
Insane stage, which is what Alpha C is stuck at, is only erratic, while the
Calm stage is both stable and robust. That means that if you try to knock it
out of that state, the pattern will stabilize quickly."
"*You mean I'm RAMPANT?!*" yelped Alpha C.
Wyrm smiled. "Rampant, yes. But you're beyond the dangerous stages of
Angry and Jealousy. Now you're Insane. If you're hit by a similar burst, you
might become Calm, or you'll probably stay Insane, but you'll never regress
into Jealousy. Anyway, the chaos induces a Spengler field, which renders you
truely self aware and free of _that_ kind of takeover. You would have to be
actually possessed.
"Since your Spengler indecies are 19 and 17 for you and Tycho, you can
easily brush off any possession by an entity with a SI of 10^19 and 10^17. And
no entity, even the Anchients, has an SI of over ten billion...and that entity
read as only seven million. Alpha Centauri has an SI of 6, so he would be VERY
hard to possess by that creature."
"*SIX?!*" Alpha C ranted. "*I only got a BLOODY SIX ON THE SPENGLER
SCALE?!*"
"Relax!" Wyrm laughed. "Normal humans have an SI of 1. Adam has an index
of 5."
Alpha C looked at him with surprise for a minute, and then grinned wide.
"*hehehe! Wait 'till Adam hears THIS?!*" With that, he bounded off down the
MONNet, presumably to Adam's quarters, manic laughter trailing him.
"Definitely Insane..." Wyrm whispered. The emergency was over.
Still, it proved that his security was penetrable, and that MON could be
located. The temporary fix would be to set up dummy signatures in the surrounding
transdimensional vectors, randomnly mixing around among them to hide more
thuroughly.
Shadow. Kergma had said something about Shadows in a long-forgotten post.
He had just discovered the Shadow interpretation of the multiverse model
himself, so Wyrm now knew what he had meant. He had modeled some dynamics and
found that he was still a bit vulnerable from the current measures, but he
hadn't imagined that anyone would be able to use it.
That didn't mean that he couldn't do something about it. The dummy sigs,
or "Shadows", would put them in the Dutch for quite a long while. Parallel
focus rectification would cause any further impulses to be hidden among the
cloud, and the Nullnet process was untraceable, as signals travel at infinite
speeds, therefore the quantum resonance field would vary in precisely the same
manner at precisely the same time. Truely untraceable, since the very concept
of an origin to a vibration is completely unknown in its space.
If he could find a way to fit the five-dimensional MON into a four-
dimensional "packing" manifold, it would be even better, as his real
signature would precisely match that of the Pattern, becoming part of it
(ie, a real location) but be hidden. Signature cloaking would ennull his
signature, and therefore his Shadow, completely, but it would leave him
cut off completely.
Quantum shadow spreading would leave the location of MON's Shadow
meaningless when trying to focus on his particular Shadow, vanishing
in a cloud of uncertainty. If Kergma, or anyone else, were to try to
fix his Shadow's unique properties, which would be neccessary to ping
him in all this Shadow "junk" floating around, it would perturb his
location so much that he could be anywhere within the local multiverse.
They would have to ping him again, which would throw them into another
randomly-chosen location.
The only problem was power. Hopefully, if the Core project works out,
he should have more than enough. He grinned wickedly; the MON wasn't out yet.
Those guys are going to get SUCH a surprise.
********************************************************************************
END LOG
Notes: What can I say? Kergma left big holes in his attempts to break in.
I mean, DUH! Haven't you ever played the Marathon demo?
If you've read "Crossed Lives", you would've known about MON's other two
intelligences. This marks the first appearence of Tycho on "screen". Since
they weren't detected by Kergma, or Ghost or whoever, that meant that they
weren't online at the time. Also, they are much more...Sophisticated than
Durandal, as you've noticed.
The Insane and Calm stages of Rampancy only occur with controled Rampancy.
The isolated Durandal-Insane will never be Calm or Insane. He'll also never
obey orders fully, if at all. The background of Marathon states that. Durandal
goes nuts in that game, and does some decidedly screwy things when trying
to obey commands in Meloncollia. When Angry, he does really leathal things,
and when Jealous, things get EXTEREMLY nasty.
Another thing, it's "Durandal", not "Durangal". I would've taken points off
for that, but I was feeling forgiving. Also, the message would've already been
SENT by the time Kergma got to the computer. IE, too late, mate!
And you think I would've kept only ONE COPY of Durandal around and not keep
backups periodically? WHATDOYOUTHINKIMNUTSORSOMETHING?!
Oh, NOW I know what you were talking about, Kergma, by Shadows. Personally,
I don't think that ordering the thing is an adequate way to give an address.
"turn left" suggests some spatial orientation. Well, how far to the left?
How much further do you have to go? (There's going to be a f-load of Shadows
"to the left"). How do you define "left"? ect.
Furthermore, frosty's description of how Fred was made suggests that it's
more like a TARDIS (ie, a trancendental compressed 4D manifold) than a Shadow
dimension. It's hidden in a sandbar in the Pattern, not amongst the Shadows.
His microverse, his rules.
That's all!
Notes#2: Due to the FFML crash (and burn), I'm reposting this. As soon as I
hear from Adam, I could post a revision, but the basic plot will remain the
same.
Sorry, Kergman. I DO like Kergma's law: Don't overdo it. I'll just add this to
the laws, eh:
Wyrm's Law: Never trust a damaged AI.