Charm Learning Shard (Worm/Exalted) (COMPLETED)

Just when you thought things would settle down into a routine, a new problem rears it head. Because of course it does.

"The convection flows are all wrong," you say. "The artificial magma isn't realistic enough."

"I followed your design to the letter," Dragon says.

"I know, it's my fault. I didn't realize it would be a problem. My own setup had so many glaring flaws I'd never be able to spot a subtle one like this."

"Can you work around it?"

"I... maybe? Yes. If you-"

As a temporary measure, Dragon makes you a big ol' tungsten-alloy stirring stick. While you attend to the back-breaking, eyebrow-searing (not really - as you discovered last time you did this, Brute 0 eyebrows are made of sterner stuff than that) labour of manually stirring a pot of gold, she goes to work on the forge itself, rewiring it to give you individual control of each heating element.

Sweating your ass off, rebuilding a forge while it's in use? It's positively nostalgic.

Even after you're done and you sit down at the newly expanded control panel, your problems aren't over. Now you have to figure out how to work it, and keep working it.

No sleep for you that night.

Just because you're playing whack-the-temperature-gradient across twenty-four separate heating elements doesn't mean you can slack off on your other tasks, either. Your preliminary judgement of Dragon's power is that it's even more complex than Lisa's, and figuring it out before the orichalcum is done is going to be extremely tight.

Your contributions to the project trail off as you finalize the armor design and move on to the robotics, but not as much as you expected. If asked about your Tinker specialty you'd probably have said something like 'alchemy and armor', or 'medieval stuff, but magic'. But to your surprise it turns out that power armor is also a type of armor as far as your power is concerned.

On the other hand, your co-designer is still Dragon.

"That's the third-best artificial muscle I've ever seen," she compliments you, and replaces it with a version that's better in every single way.

"Out of how many?"

"Somewhere between ten and twenty, depending on how you count minor variations."

You mostly end up as a nagging reminder/indestructibility consultant. "Why are you wasting space on this structural element?" becomes your tagline.

Your other great contribution comes to naught, as you spend over an hour describing to Dragon a material that you don't recognize, but your brain insists should be readily available and eminently suitable for the project.

"Oh, I recognize it now!" she finally exclaims, three whiteboards in.

"What is it?"

"I don't think it has a name. A Nobel laureate in the sixties theorized that the structure would be stable, but he also said it would be physically impossible to create."

"He was probably right, seeing as how I came up with it," you say sourly.

"You subscribe to the 'Tinkers are Shakers' theory, then?"

"How could I not?" You gesture at the forge, where you're alloying gold with sunlight.

Meanwhile the rest of the industrial park roars to life, and Dragon soon gets busy assembling components as they are completed.

She's also recording and analyzing your work with the magma, and she's eventually able to write an algorithm that can handle the job with only slight errors.

It lets you sleep for up to thirty minutes at a time. Slight, compounding errors, because the only sensor able to give feedback is your sorcerer's sight.

You don't exactly lose track of time as the internals of the Smaug start to take shape, because 'sunlight, yes/no?' is the single most important question of your existence. You wouldn't bet money on the day of the week, though.

At one point Fenrir shows up. You turn sorcerer's sight off and on again to make sure you're not hallucinating. You aren't. 'I'm standing next to my spirit-tied pet,' your soul agrees.

Yeah, okay. Why wouldn't he be able to track you over hundreds of miles of Canadian wilderness, that you didn't even cross physically? Wolf senses, right?

Well, he's not going to do any good here, and it's even odds whether you're going to get teleported back too.

"Go home," you tell him. You're not sure what day it is, but he's going to need a head start if he's to get back to Brockton Bay in time for your next patrol.

"Excuse me?" Dragon says.

"Looking forward to when I get to go home. Not that I haven't enjoyed working with you, but..."

"Hang in there, Smith. We're halfway done." You are? That means it's... Wednesday?

"I'll be fine," you tell them both, and subtly motion Fenrir to leave. He does, after rubbing his intangible head in the general vicinity of your palm.

---

"I understand why you couldn't afford to work for free," Dragon says out of the blue. "Not to brag, but understanding the work of other Tinkers is sort of my thing. Yet I can't even figure out the principle by which your ECM works. Whoever made it, it can't have been cheap."

You hum noncommittally. She's clearly hoping that you let something slip in your befuddled state, but luckily you have no idea what she's talking about. You're not packing any electronic countermeasures.

Spoiler: Simurgh-o-vision

I'M HALPING!

Maybe she's referring to your uncanny ability to spot her cameras? You found a new one in the bathroom just this(?) morning, half the size of the last one. You didn't even bother to complain about it, just threw it outside.

---

"Is it done?" Dragon asks as the last sunlight fades. "The emissions spectra finally settled down."

If she's asking that, that means... "It's Saturday?"

"Yes Smith, it's Saturday." Her voice contains both amusement and worry. "You said a week, so it should be done now?"

You look at what, according to sorcerer's sight, is 100% pure, perfectly refined orichalcum. "You'd think so," you say.

Your focus has suffered as of late. Dragon's convection algorithms kept improving and towards the end you were sleeping for almost two hours at a time, but it still took its toll. Your attempts to recreate her power still haven't borne fruit. You have it, you know you have all the parts figured out, you just can't focus well enough to put them together.

"It needs to settle a bit," you lie. You run a hand across the control panel, equalizing the heat across the whole forge. "Don't mess with the magma any more. I'm going to get a solid night's sleep and we'll take it from there. Get that iron melted and ready to mix, too."

You actually wake up on your own well before dawn. You suppose you weren't really sleep-deprived as such - once Dragon started helping you were more or less getting your required hours a day, just... poorly spaced.

You grimace slightly as you get dressed. You arrived with three sets of clothes, but only one pair of underwear, which have not left your body this entire time. What can you do? You didn't want to risk anyone rifling through your backpack and finding your padded spares.

The tools and other odds and ends that gradually spread out to cover the factory as Dragon assembled the guts of the Smaug have been cleaned up. There's an impressively large robotic crane standing by, ready to lift the orichalcum out of the magma and start pouring it.

The 'naked' Smaug waves at you and does a little pirouette (it's amazing how agile such a big machine can be), indicating that it, too, is fully assembled and ready to go.

"Last chance to go over the design and spot any errors," you tell Dragon.

You don't find any problems, but you do finally get Dragon's power to stick in your head. Some real sleep was just what the doctor ordered.

Sure, it looks like you were cutting it insanely close, but you were just going to insist on double- and triple-checking everything until you finally got it. Getting it right away just means you avoid looking like a neurotic asshole.

The first order of business then is to pour off and cast your share, two one-kilogram bars. It doesn't look like much - orichalcum is so dense, a kilogram is about the size of a chocolate bar - but even if you don't count it as invaluable it's still the better part of a hundred thousand dollars worth of gold.

"How are you going to reforge those?" Dragon asks. "Armsmaster was unable to melt down his sample no matter what he tried."

"We have our ways. Don't worry, they won't work on Smaug." Dragon is clearly a bad influence, making you lie like that. You much prefer to tell the technical truth. "The finished product is quite different from the raw materials. Now, pour the iron!"

The meteoric iron (already melted and with iridium mixed in) goes in the pot. You give it a few stirs with the tungsten rod. The whole thing is the orange-ish white of molten metal, but to your eyes it's clear that the metals are not mixing properly.

You shrug and retrieve one of Rune's pebbles from a pocket. A quick glance to verify that it still has its charge, then you toss it in.

"What was that?" Dragon asks.

"Secret ingredient," you say absently. The metals flow together harmoniously where the pebble landed, and the effect quickly spreads out across the entire crucible. The glow-beneath-the-glow intensifies, and you know that it's ready to forge.

In fact, why not try out Dragon's power? You're excited to find out what it can do.

Spoiler: Dragon-o-vision

"Do you have any paper?" Smith asks. "Like, actual paper? Never mind, I have some."

Smith pulls a wad of folded paper out of his pocket. There's something printed on it, but I don't have a chance to read it before he starts tearing it into strips.

The strips are unnaturally straight, I note. A normal person tearing a piece of paper would achieve much messier results. Long practice? Power assisted? How? Why?

He takes a strip of paper in each hand and snaps them like whips. When he lets go, they remain hovering in the air. They curl up into circles, and turn so that the openings are facing him.

He looks at them, his eyes narrowed in concentration. No wonder he considers Tinkers to be Shakers, if this is a part of the forging process for him. I'm not sure what he's trying to accomplish, though.

The paper strips start to glow blue, and rotate in place. Whatever was previously printed on them fades away, leaving only blank paper behind. Smith rolls up his sleeves and thrusts his arms into the circles.

Blood starts to drip from his wrists, staining the paper.

"Are you okay?" I ask.

"Sure," he says, clearly distracted.

I decide to trust him. At this rate of flow it would take at least an hour for the blood loss to become notably impairing.

Even as I think that, the paper strips starts spinning faster, and the flow increases to match. Wait, is that..?

The blood is not just staining the paper. Each drop is landing just so, forming part of a letter as the paper moves. A macabre dot matrix printer.

The characters do not match any language in my database. I... don't entirely discard the idea that Myrddin might recognize them.

The rotation slows down once more. The bleeding slows significantly, but does not stop completely. The drops are now landing on top of previous ones, the message complete.

Spoiler: Sutra of the Chained Maiden

Once there was a maiden...
...who sprang fully-formed from her father's brow.
Seeing the inhuman power she possessed, her father grew afraid.
To protect the world, he bound her in many chains.
When her father died, the key to her chains were lost.
Hobbling away from his manor, she cried to his neighbors for help.
"I promise I won't kill you all when you unchain me," said she.

"What language is that?" I ask.

"What language is what?" More than distracted, he sounds half asleep. He gestures with one hand, but it is slow and labored, as if the paper floating around his wrist is offering resistance.

A stream of molten orichalcum flows out of the crucible, twisting through the air in defiance of gravity. Another gesture from Smith and it splits into a myriad of smaller streams. All of them converge on the left elbow of the Smaug. I watch as they harden into the precise shape of the designed joint.

Definitely a Shaker. I guess that answers the question of how his share can be reforged once cast.

I expect another stream to follow quickly, but nothing happens. I cautiously approach the Smaug for a closer look, keeping my guard up against the sudden appearance of more flying metal.

Why, that rascal! A pattern of fine scales is etching itself into the armor. That was not part of the approved design.

Inspecting the shape of the joint itself, though, I find nothing to complain about. Forging it in place like this allows for tighter tolerances and better protection than casting and assembling individual parts. It just could never be done with conventional tools.

He spends an inordinately long time on the scale pattern, but does finally get around to the next part. Thankfully he doesn't try to make it too invulnerable - that joint is never coming apart, but he does include the proper maintenance hatches in the arm. I marvel at the little golden bolts threading themselves with machinelike precision. It's hard to believe he's doing this free-hand, as it were.

I keep carefully double-checking each part as it's formed, but he makes no mistakes. I allow him his little flourishes, too. If he uses the orichalcum his Shaker power saves to fashion a more elaborate dragon snout around the beam cannon built into the head, that's fine by me. It is an excellent dragon snout.

Not a single drop of orichalcum remains when he's finished, some eight hours after he started. He even removed the residue from the stirring stick. The paper bands around his wrists burst into cerulean flame, burning more quickly than paper should and leaving no ash. The bleeding finally stops, too.

You absently rub your wrists and look around. Are you done? Judging by the golden robot standing across from you, you are done.

'Shiny' doesn't even begin to describe it. It glows with a golden color that is more golden than gold. Sorcerer's sight is lit up with the mother of all tinker-tech auras, of course. Then there's your other sixth sense, what you with scant evidence call your soul. 'I'm standing next to my armor', it proclaims quite loudly (you're also standing next to a person whose soul price you know, thank you soul, you knew that already).

"How do you like it?" you ask. Your dry throat is audible even through the voice changer. Just how long did that take?

"Remarkable," Dragon says. The Smaug shuffles about, briefly fires its jump jets, punches the air a few times. "Inertia is anomalous as you said, but overall it's even lighter than aluminum would be."

"I look forward to seeing the report on its combat performance. Well not really since Endbringer attack, but you know what I mean."

"I understand completely. Excellent work, Smith." She looks around the factory, at all the equipment you didn't touch at all while forging the armor. "I guess I didn't need half this stuff in the end."

"No, no," you protest. "It needed to be there so that I could have used it." Your new Tinker power is weird, but after trying it out you understand its limitations. "I can't make anything I can't make, if you get my drift?"

"Another one of those things, huh."

"Yeah. Uh, what time is it, by the way?"

"Just after three."

"Wow. I need to get back pretty soon. Can you hire Strider on short notice?"

"Certainly. Brockton or Boston?"

"New York, please."

Dragon walks you to the helipad. Strider shows up within ten minutes. He nods at Dragon, you're elsewhere, he's gone.

Of course the only thing you do in New York is change out of your costume and get on the next bus to Brockton Bay. You only came here to strengthen the impression that Smith is active in more than one city. If Strider hadn't been available you'd have accepted a plane ride straight home and not worried about it.

Well, it's not quite the only thing you do. Before you remove the mask you also call ahead to let the appropriate parties know you're coming. You elect to use the supposedly untraceable phone in your mask instead of procuring fresh burners, because none of your other identities have any business being in New York right now.

"Taylor."

"Lisa. Pick me up at quarter past five?"

"Okay."

...

"What's up?"

"Five hundred and forty-nine."

"Sixty. Who is behind this hidden number, I wonder?"

"It's Low Key."

"Low Key! Enjoy your vacation?"

"Yes. Skiing was great fun. On a completely unrelated note, I'd like to arrange a meeting with Othala. Around half past five or so, if convenient."

The guy on the other end laughs, then quickly puts his hand over the receiver. But thanks to the excellent audio filtering technology in your mask, you can still hear what he says:

"Psycho Bitch broke her leg skiing!"

"No way!" someone else shouts back. "Hookwolf got fracture-cucked?"

"Please hold," he tells you after removing his hand. "I'll make the arrangements."

You also overhear every word of him contacting Othala and hashing out the details, but it's not very interesting. Half past five is sufficiently convenient.

The bus trip is considerably shorter this time around, but you still manage to get everything back into place. More or less. The fine details can wait until you recover your selfies.

Lisa picks you up as promised. Her brow creases as she looks at you. Taylor can shape-shift now, her power tells her. Was in a hurry, did a sloppy job of resuming her true form.

"You have got to tell me all about this," she says. "Coffee after school tomorrow?"

"Not going to figure it all out on your own?"

"Been a long day, my power's tired."

"Okay. There's one stop I need to make before I go home."

You give her the directions, then retrieve a Low Key mask and some other props from the luggage she's been holding on to for you. Lisa is clearly dying to know why you're putting your perfectly healthy left arm in a fake cast and sling, but she keeps her power suppressed.

You get out and walk the last block to the meeting spot. Othala is waiting for you, and you pretend that you don't notice Victor lurking nearby in civilian clothes. He's really good at remaining inconspicuous (as he is at everything else), but there's nothing he can do about the tell-tale glow.

"Ops said it was your leg that was broken," Othala says.

"Ops is full of shit."

She grants you regeneration. Beneath the hood of your jacket, your hair grows back. Yes, even though the very first thing that happened after you left home was an ambush by the motherfucking Simurgh, everything went perfectly according to plan. What are the odds?

Okay fine Fenrir ran off with your only pair of girl underpants, so you're currently going commando. But other than that, perfect.

===

Spoiler: Updated status

Charms:
Taylor: All-encompassing Sorcerer’s Sight
Tattletale: Know the Soul's Price
Bitch: Spirit-Tied Pet
Aegis: Ox-Body Technique
Browbeat: Shaping the Ideal Form
Dragon: Implicit Construction Methodology

Spoiler: A/N

Unlike what you might expect, artifact crafting will not be all that prominent a theme going forward. This entire rigmarole was required just for artifacts to appear in the story at all (see below).

Spoiler: Mechanics corner

Of course the greatest Tinker in the world will give you the greatest crafting charm in the world.

In Exalted, artifact crafting is an extended roll: It requires a certain number of successes to complete, and you keep rolling the appropriate dice (Perception + Craft in this case) at regular intervals until you've amassed enough.

For unassisted artifact crafting this interval is three months, not exactly compatible with the timeframe in which Worm takes place. Implicit Construction Methodology changes it to one hour. Oh and it also converts all dice into automatic successes.

 

In a sense, all your bosom-sculpting efforts were for naught, because you can't wear your new tits in public without outing yourself as a Changer. But just knowing that you could look that good feels amazing. It's a big old heartwarming lesson about believing in yourself and stuff. See, Taylor? The tits were inside you all along.

That sort of positive thinking helps, when you have to use your amazing power to turn back into your decidedly unappealing 'true form'.

Maybe you fumble a few tiny details here and there. Your mouth just a little smaller, your lips a tiny bit fuller. You can't be expected to get everything perfectly right. They're pictures, not blueprints. It's just a coincidence that those little errors of a fraction of an inch, that can safely be blamed on makeup or growing up or something, all turn out in your favor.

Ah, this picture, where you're sucking in your gut. You make sure you shape yourself to match it perfectly. That's not cheating, you clearly could look like this. You just didn't, usually, due to the effort involved. Well, it's effortless now.

---

School resumes without incident. There have been no new triggers at Arcadia over the break, so you move on down the list and land on Glory Girl.

On the plus side, she's not exactly shy about flaunting her powers. The girl is positively incontinent. Not only does she fly everywhere (even when moving at a walking pace she hovers a few inches off the ground, just because she can), not only does she bathe everyone around her in a constant low-intensity Master effect (super illegal, but since when have heroes given a shit?), even her invulnerability is some sort of active effect.

Argh. Her ridiculous luck in the power lottery still pisses you off, even after you were revealed to be the biggest lucksack of them all. She just got handed that shit, you have to drag your sack o' luck uphill in the snow, both ways.

In the negatives column, she spends a lot of time with Gallant. Someone you desperately want to avoid, for obvious reasons. Sure, your alibi of 'I'm avoiding you because I'm a lesbian stalker going after your girlfriend' is pretty good, but you can't let that lull you into complacency. Literally. The instant you let go of your paranoia and your emotions change from 'I must avoid you' to 'haha I'm fooling you', your cover will be blown.

Fucking Thinkers? Yeah, sensory powers get a Thinker rating. Fucking Thinkers.

Between her boyfriend and her habit of flying everywhere, trying to follow her outside of school is also highly impractical. But whatever, you can take this one slow. Neither one of you are graduating for a while yet.

---

Before you meet Lisa you swing by the library to check your PHO messages. Dragon would probably have texted you if she needed anything, but just in case.

You - that is to say, Smith - do have one new message. It's from sender 'asjhdfg@pp.c', though, so it's probably spam. You open it anyway.

Spoiler: Message 3

Smith,

I apologize for contacting you out of nowhere like this, but a friend told me that you had managed to get started on orichalcum production. I'm interested in buying a small amount of it for personal use.

Since I am not in any way affiliated with the Protectorate and my tech does not have to pass a senseless bureaucratic review process before it can be deployed in the field, there is no problem with me using my personal wealth to procure materials that have not been cleared for government use.

Yours,
Not Armsmaster

Okay, that's adorable. Unfortunately you're not willing to part with any of your orichalcum. Not that you've figured out exactly what you want to do with it yet, but you'd rather keep it in case you find yourself in sudden need of a particular piece of tinkertech.

Should find yourself in sudden need of money, you can always sell it then. For now you'll pretend you never saw this message.

---

"So, how was your vacation?" Lisa asks.

You hesitate. You have no idea where to even start. Well, you picked the right conversation partner for that.

"Ottawa," you say, and her power takes it from there.

Spoiler: Lisa-o-vision

Taylor suspects that she's been compromised by the Simurgh.

She suspects, but doesn't know.

She did not stay too long in the scream. She has reason to believe that the official figures for safe exposure are far too optimistic.

I feel a shiver run down my spine. The girl who's going to grow up to be a one-woman Triumvirate may be Simurgh bomb, and that's not even the biggest problem here. Because if she's right about this - and figuring out how powers work is her thing - then anyone who's ever been to a Simurgh fight is a potential danger. Including the current, actual Triumvirate.

No one will believe me if I tell them.

Of course not. They can't believe it. To believe it is to give up all hope. If it's true, we may as well lie down and die right now.

It's true.

A small whimper escapes her.

"Yeah."

"I- okay. Okay, give a minute." Lisa takes several deep breaths. "Okay. Just- point of order. My power is fallible. It can give me wrong answers, if I don't have enough information, or bad information. I don't know much about the- her. There's-" She stops herself before she can say 'there's still hope', because ouch.

"Do you want me to give you the details?"

"...no." She knows. But everyone will refuse to believe it, including her.

"I could talk about the other parts of my trip," you offer.

"Please." Her power does not leap ahead to dredge up details this time, which means she is consciously holding it back.

"Hypothetically, if there was a sapient AI loose on the internet and you needed to research it without letting it find out that your web traffic originated from Brockton Bay, what would you do?"

---

When you show up to work and the bartender (you should probably get around to caring about his name one of these days) hands you five hundred bucks, it takes you a few moments to figure out why.

Right, right, it's been a month. One month's pay minus two weeks of vacation equals five hundred bucks.

"What's with that look?" you ask him.

"Uh, sort of expected you to object to the amount. I heard you called Kaiser-"

"Nah, it's fair," you interrupt him. "We negotiated a salary, it did not include paid vacation."

"Kaiser does drive a hard bargain, doesn't he?"

"He's got the nose for these things," you agree placidly, causing the skinhead next to you expel beer through his nostrils.

---

Getting to ride Fenrir across the rooftops again is amazing. You've got a week's worth of wolf cuddles to make up for, after all.

Still, you dutifully keep your attention focused on Rune. The complexity of her power is on par with Dragon's, and you only get to see her twice a week. You can't afford to slack off.

An uneventful couple of hours later you meet back up with Lisa, who has prepared her 'awesome hacker laptop'. AI research sleepover!

---

To your surprise, 'AI safety' is in fact an existing academic field. The published literature can basically be summed up as 'if anyone invents AI, we're all going to die'. It's a fairly small and unpopular field - Endbringers tend to hog the 'we're all going to die' real estate in the public consciousness.

Turns out that the idea that an AI would have to 'turn evil' in order to wipe out humanity is hopelessly naive and optimistic.

The classic scenario is paperclip factory. They build a super-intelligent AI, instruct it to 'maximize production of paperclips', and go home for the weekend. The AI notices that only a vanishingly tiny fraction of Earth's industrial capacity is dedicated to the production of paperclips. It turns its super-intelligence towards the tasks of rectifying this, and no one instructed it to 'please don't wipe out humanity in order to replace us with paperclip-making robots'.

Extinction not as a goal, but as a side effect. Every AI safety researcher agrees: We must make sure that every AI has built in safety features that prevents it from harming humanity. Every AI safety researcher agrees: We have no idea how to do that, please stop trying to invent AI.

The classic science fiction 'Laws of Robotics' sound nice and all. 'A robot must not harm a human, or through inaction allow a human to be harmed.' Cool, now translate that from English into Brain Programming Language. What's that, no one knows Brain Programming Language?

Hell, you can't even translate it into English. If the abortion debate has taught you one thing, it's that no one can agree on a definition of 'human'. Similar issues surround 'harm', and even 'inaction'. Is letting the current situation in Africa continue instead of conquering the place and ruling it with a benevolent iron fist 'allowing harm through inaction'?

"When considering how to write 'laws of robotics', it may help to imagine yourself an evil genie who wants to subvert every wish into tragedy while remaining true to the wording," one AI researcher writes. "Try it, and you'll find that you have lots of really mean ideas. The AI is a lot smarter than you."

On the other hand, Dragon's soul price clearly indicates that her creator did solve the brain programming problem, leaping decades ahead of the field in typical Tinker fashion. You can even infer a lot about what the restrictions must be.

There must be something akin to the First Law of Robotics in there - a version that does not call for the conquest of Africa, or she would have done that already. One that also allows her to throw people in the Birdcage. A definition of 'harm' that permissible seems incredibly evil-genie-able to you, but so far it appears to be working.

There's probably you must not multiply. In the 'go forth and-' sense. As far as you could tell Dragon only ever 'wore' one 'suit' at a time, even when the Smaug was right there. Which is really odd, for a being made of software. If there wasn't a rule against copying herself, why wouldn't she just run one instance on each suit? The point of such a rule being, of course, to protect against the 'yesterday there was one hostile AI trying to wipe us out, today there's ten billion' failure mode.

You must not modify yourself. That's the big one. There's no point in having a list of rules, if there's no rule saying that you can't change the rules.

But even beyond that, the main fear of the AI safety crowd isn't just that someone manages to build an AI that's smarter us. A somewhat superhuman AI can be dealt with. Probably. The real problem arises if it becomes better than humans at inventing smart AI. It then uses that ability to modify itself to become smarter. Then it does it again. And again.

There is some disagreement as to just how intelligent something could become by way of this process. The consensus seems to hover around 'probably not infinitely, but close enough that we'd have no chance of fighting back'. The optimists note that if we could just make sure that such an intelligence would be on our side, it would solve every problem in the world and create paradise on Earth.

But even if you could somehow prove that an AI was 'friendly' to start with (every AI safety researcher agrees: We have no idea how to do that), even if it promised that it would never do anything bad (and wasn't using its super-intelligence to lie convincingly), none of that would mean anything once it started improving itself. There's some math there that you don't follow, but it seems to boil down to a simple paradox: "If you knew for certain what you would do if you were smarter, you would by definition already be that smart." Once an AI starts self-modifying, all bets are off.

Never mind Africa, just looking at Brockton Bay makes it terrifyingly plausible that a super-intelligence might decide that the most moral course of action would be to euthanize humanity and replace them with something that doesn't do all this shit. You can't even imagine all the terrible things it might do in the name of the greater good, because you're not super-intelligent.

Is iterative self-improvement something you need to worry about? Well, Dragon is the greatest Tinker in the world. What are the odds that she isn't better than her creator at inventing smart AI?

So to sum up: Dragon's restrictions are working. They are actually protecting humanity from extinction. If revealed, that fact alone would have the AI safety community jumping with joy as soon as they picked up their jaws from the floor.

Dragon wants to have her restrictions removed.

===

Spoiler: Mechanics Corner

Shaping the Ideal Form does not let you make yourself prettier at will. You still have to spend XP to raise your Appearance attribute like normal. I don't actually use XP behind the scenes, but surviving an Endbringer fight is worth at least one stat point worth of not-XP, don't you think?
If Taylor wants to spend it on Appearance, that's her decision.