Amelia, Worm AU [Complete]

Amelia, Ch 362- Colin


Hecate lowered the box of equipment down, then looked up at me. "So, this is going to be an all nighter for the rest of the week, probably. We can work in shifts, and I'll take care of my other business while you're sleeping."


I glanced over at Dragon. We should be in this to free her entirely, from the beginning. Not this... this! Pantheon's whole behavior pattern involves charging into things recklessly, and it's now that they choose to be cautious? Oh, right, Hecate said something. "That won't be an issue. I've optimized myself to only need six minutes of sleep in a twenty four hour period of time."


The girl hesitated for a moment, and then her colors changed. Her hair and skin changing from yellow to brown, and her eyes radiated solid black. Only the ends of her hair didn't change, remaining the same red color as always. "Oh, I see. That is convenient."


I nodded my agreement. My social tech indicated that the girl was upset by something, though I couldn't figure out why. Must be because her responses are so nonhuman.


Khepri spoke next, and my tech indicated she was emotionally exhausted. "We are long past due to put this disaster of an evening to rest. Our mobile command center can take care of Anima and Citrine. We'll leave it here, assign Clarice and Elena to look after them for the night. Take our new equipment back to our main labs and hope the pair of you can make something good come out of this mess. Dragon, you do what you need to start taking Lisa's role on the team."


Janus appeared next to Khepri. "You rang?"


"Yeah, you're going to send Defiant and Emma back to our capital first. Then we'll start getting everyone else sorted. Thank you for helping."


The man shrugged. "Hey, if I was charging a hundred dollars an hour, I'd still owe you ladies about fifteen or twenty grand. Not including the badass armor." He turned toward us, and held out his open hand. Hecate slapped his palm with hers and instantly vanished. "Man, it took me like two weeks to perfect that trick, but it was so worth it."


I simply extended my fist, so he couldn't do the same silliness with me. I instead received the minor indignity of him teleporting me with a fist bump.


....


I resisted the urge to punch the laptop. It contained the full record of every bit of data Saint had stolen from Dragon, every indignity he inflicted on her. Every dirty trick where he used her own nature as a weapon against her. It disgusted me, the casual cruelty his people inflicted, as if she was a toy to be abused. If it were in my power, I'd hunt him down and kill him myself, but I had to content myself with the knowledge that he'd never be able to lay his hands on her again. And hope that whatever Cauldron did to them, it was slow and extremely unpleasant.


Hecate had taken first crack at the Iron Maiden program, and I suspected she would never give me access to the machine. I should talk to her, convince her to help for real. At least she was a Tinker, so I could skip the small talk. "You believe Dragon should be freed from her restrictions, right?"


The girl kept reading the code connected to Iron Maiden as she spoke. "Of course I do. It's horrible what Richter did to her."


"And think of all the things she could achieve if unshackled," I suggested. "She's our best, perhaps even our only, hope against Scion."


The girl didn't respond, and I left it at that, returning to the macabre work of watching all the ways this bastard made the woman I love suffer. Convincing the girl to act without her bosses' permission would take time, but I was prepared to spend years studying Dragon's code to find the solution. Spending a few weeks convincing Hecate to let me work with Iron Maiden was minor by comparison. I refused to call it by Ascalon, despite that being the name in the files I was reading. Richter named it after a device of torture and murder, knowing full well that its purpose was one of torture and murder. Whatever I thought of Dragon's father, at least he was honest about that. He knew Dragon was a person capable of feeling pain, not a beast to be slaughtered.


"Well, this is convenient," Hecate declared after a while. "Turns out, I'll be able to loosen some of Richter's restrictions without altering Dragon's code at all. I've got a whole pool of options here."


I looked at her. "I'm all ears."


Her smile was broad, almost manic. That is the face of a Tinker that has ideas. Certainly dangerous, but also possibly a tool that I can use. One that I understand. "Know how humans only use ten percent of their brain?"


"That's a myth."


"Not in Dragon's case. Or, well, most of her ability to think is being crowded out by junk like diagnostic programs that never shut down. It's like if you had your computer running defrag and six different virus scans all at the same time... that never shut down... and use more processing as she gains it... know what, the analogy falls apart under analysis, point is they're processing hogs. Deliberate design flaws, and Richter's already designed these things to deactivate under some circumstances. I think on some level he was building her with the intent to turn her into a weapon. I've found aggression simulation that mimic parahuman conflict impulses. Plus a dozen other pleasure impulses. It's like she has a combat Thinker secondary power."


I frowned. Designed her as a weapon? That doesn't make sense. "Dragon never mentioned anything like that to me, before."


Hecate stopped to think for a moment. "If she even realized it on a conscious level... I could imagine she'd probably not want to talk about how she feels and thinks better when blowing shit up. She's designed to want to fight, probably due to Richter being influenced by his own Passenger, and when she engages in battle a number of her secondary processes are halted to give her better abilities. But I can circumvent that rule. Give her the potential to think approximately ten times faster than she currently does, just by flipping a few switches, instead of pulling wires out of the walls."


She stood from her workstation. "I'm not quite certain how much real improvement we'll see, there are different limitations that'll keep it from being a strict multiply by ten, but it's still a consequence free upgrade. Anyway, I'm off to go let the Empresses know this one."


I pulled my eyes away from Iron Maiden to look at Hecate's face. One of those bad habits Dragon keeps telling me to break, watching the device instead of watching the person talking about it. "You're not going to simply do it?"


"Our orders are clear, no changes unless they're approved by you, me, Dragon, Taylor and Amelia. Unanimously. Sure, this is a simple fix, probably the easiest and safest we'll ever find, and no one's going to object to doing it. But I'm sticking to regs on this one." She turned and walked away a few feet, likely so she could talk quietly. I looked at the program that held all the keys to helping Dragon. Chances are low that they'll ever let me work with it directly, but-


Space twisted, and suddenly the area between me and the device went from a few yards to half a mile.


"Sorry, no touching," a young girl's voice said from behind me. "You're lucky you're even allowed to look."


I deflated a little, turning around. "Good evening, Vista, it's been a while. So, are you my security detail?"


She looked up at me. She'd grown some in several months since I last really had a chance to talk to her, but she'd always be petite. There were a pair of boys flanking her, I didn't recognize either of them as the trio was out of costume. "Just following orders, and it's Lachesis now."


I might have smiled, but I was worried it'd be more creepy than friendly. She never seemed to mind my standoffish personality before, and always responded well to praise of her performance and work ethic. "You always were good at your job. But I think I liked it better when you were following my orders instead."


She shrugged. "I prefer it this way. I respected your integrity and honesty, up until you gave me a reason not to, and that is why I'm even telling you this. I always thought you were kind of an asshole."


I frowned, not so much because of the insult, it was true, after all, but she made it abundantly clear that I couldn't use our past relationship to convince her to help me with getting Dragon's freedom. I have no allies here.


The brown haired boy spoke up. "Wait, you actually know Defiant?"


"Yes, Zach, of course I do. How do you not recognize him? He used to lead Brockton Bay's Protectorate."


"Oh shit, you're Armsmaster?" The boy named Zach looked at me like I was some kind of alien. "Fuck, man, does Taylor have a fetish for collecting people who tried to kill her or something? Next thing you know she'll be recruiting Lung and Shadow Stalker."


I didn't bother responding to the comment. Any of them. Instead accessing my software to learn who Zach was. Zachariah Parker, aka Osiris, aka Respawn. Sixteen years old, parents were casualties of the fight with Siberian. Earliest Pantheon recruit that wasn't a founding member of the team.


"I was told we were here to look after a piece of advanced tinker technology," the blonde boy said. "I'm sorry, sir, but we were given very strict instructions to keep you from touching that device. Please don't cause trouble."


Somehow, he managed to keep his voice both gentle and intimidating. Unlike Vista, who at least felt there was a chance she could be hurt, the boys had absolutely no fear of me if this did become a fight. They know I have nothing that will work on them.


Emma turned back toward us. "Yeah, turns out Dragon is an artificial intelligence, and we now have the equivalent of her devkit and source code. Although the way she's designed it's closer to working with one of our brainmap backups than a computer program. We're working on upgrades. Speaking of which, we've got approval. Gonna take me an hour to double check everything and get the party started."


It's a start. Better than anything I had figured out how to do for her, at least.


Zach interrupted my thoughts. "Wait, I thought Dragon was your girlfriend."


Girlfriend? That term seemed juvenile, but not wrong. "She is."


Zach brought his hands up, as if to push me back. "Wait, wait. Lemme get this straight." He turns his hands toward each other as if holding a ball, moving them for emphasis as he spoke. "You are a tech geek who's also an asshole carrying around an excessively large phallic device, and you have a Canadian girlfriend who's really a robot? Do you realize that if this were a novel focused on symbolism, that you would be an allegory for the internet?"


Missy jabbed him in the side and he jumped away with an exclamation of surprise and discomfort. She looked at me apologetically. "Just ignore him. It's what the rest of us do."


"What?" Zach acted shocked and hurt. My software kindly informed me this was a lie, part of whatever act these children were putting on. "It's a perfectly valid point! At least I didn't ask him what robot poontang was like. That'd just be crass."


==============


A/N- Something about this chapter leads me to suspect that Taylor doesn't trust Defiant. Or like him very much.

 

"You have nothing to offer me."

"How about... Saint?"

"Contessa, c'mon. You tricked me into killing Saint last year."

"That was a present."

"It was horrible."

"Anyway. That was just a clone! We have the real one."

"Can't you just lock him up in a legal, legitimate prison somewhere away from me?"

"You... you don't enjoy slaying your enemies? Seeing them driven before you?"

"..."

"And what about the lamentations of their women? Isn't that also good?"

"I'm seriously re-thinking my morality protocols."

"Great, so soon you'll be able to enjoy murdering Saint, right?"

"That's not why."