Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 23:29:37 +0600
To:ffml
From:wyrm@mail.utexas.edu (Thomas R Jefferys)
Subject:[FFML][MONF] Reboot Camp (revised)
PPPPPPPPPP
PPPPPPPPPPPP
PPP PPPP
PPP PPP -------
PPP PPPP W Y R M
PPPPPPPPPPPP
PPPPPPPPPP Reboot Camp
PPP -------
PPP
PPP
PPP
PPP lodding into the room, Wyrm 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. She 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!"
---
Yeahright! That looked like Psychowulf!
---
"And you sought to misuse Shadow!"
---
As if anyone else was using it.
---
"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. "Hoisted 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. 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 Ancients, 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") 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 on rewrite: Just touching up here and there, and adding some stuff
that explains exactly what I had in mind.