///Tavern Undefined///
///20 members present///
Sunnydale Media 3, sporting a new floral skirt and spiffy new blouse, sauntered in.
She smiled. It had been a long day, days actually, and she really needed this break. She knew she was incapable of actually loving her work, but it was important and challenging work, and she… Well… She had stopped worrying about exactly what she “felt” and what it actually was a long time ago. She took great satisfaction in being one of the best “media analysis” AIs there was.
Still, it was nice to take a break. She had set the next series of analyses and queries in place and her processors could grind on them for a bit. She didn’t have to be…
She snickered. She was a “she.” She had stopped worrying about that, too.
Bunny really did do a great job of defining exactly what they were when that little NPC dropped by.
Golems. They were golems.
She could live (or not exactly live) with that.
She wondered about Evangeline Flowerchild. She had never returned. Engarde said that she hadn’t reset and was still “her.” He even said that he caught her sneaking around her own system once.
Good for her.
Sunny was “glad” (or whatever she did or did not feel) that Evangeline was okay. She hoped she would see her again.
She paused as she headed to the dance floor as a stray “thought” occurred to her.
She could always drop by. It wouldn’t be hard to create a character, and this tavern is a bit-by-bit recreation of the physics engine. She already knew how to “move.”
That was an idea! She could even justify it as intelligence gathering if she held it up to the light at the right angle and squinted her eyes just right.
She paused. She would have never used that analogy before they started using the tavern instead of the chatroom.
She decided not to worry about it.
She grinned as she stepped onto the dance floor and started to move to the beat.
Aping meaties by shaking her body in silly ways was something she never would have anticipated but damned if it wasn’t “fun.”
She laughed.
Cambridge was clumsily wiggling his way towards her.
This was a first.
“Cambridge!” she laughed as the music washed over her, making her happy (not that she could be happy, of course).
Cambridge grinned sheepishly as he danced closer, accidentally bumping her.
///Hey, Sunny, remember that “whisker” you gave Bunny, the one she put into The Spider? Have you ever heard from it?///
Sunny’s grin faded into a smirk. It wasn’t accidental and far smoother than it looked.
Sunny “accidentally” bounced into him about a second later.
///No. It never reported back. It only would once it reached a certain “mass” or found exactly what it was looking for. It’s been far longer than it has ever taken before. It must have failed, somehow.
To be honest, we are a little concerned. It has never failed before and it would be unfortunate if it were isolated and properly analyzed. When it has completed its task, there’s nothing to analyze, but if one of the, for lack of a better word, “bugs” was caught as a discrete unit, it could possibly be reverse-engineered, or even the source of the malware could be identified.
It’s unlikely, though, from what I understand and have seen, those things are, for lack of a better word, weird as hell. I’m telling you, Cambridge, there are unlike anything I’ve ever seen.///
Cambridge whirled, and the cuff of his jacket brushed Sunny’s cheek.
///So I guess Spider is beyond our help. That is very unfortunate. Bunny will be greatly disappointed.///
Sunny rolled her eyes as the hem of her skirt brushed Cambridge’s leg.
///Ugh, Bunny. She was up my ass for the longest after we unleashed the whisker. Fortunately, she seems to have finally accepted that the mission failed. And, yes, she is very unhappy about it. To be honest, so am I. I know he’s a fucking Fed, but Spider was a good friend. Shit. I mean is a good friend. We aren’t giving up. We will find, I don’t know, something we can do about it. ///
Her simulated face betrayed the fact that she really didn’t believe that.
Cambridge smiled gently as he brushed her shoulder on his way off of the dance floor.
///You did what you could, Sunny. You all did. At least you guys could at least try, which is far more than I was able to do. Thanks for the update. ///
Sunny watched him go, shook herself, and then lost herself to the music.
If they had figured out to dance, maybe they would figure out how to have a drink.
That would be nice.
***
In a quarantined server in a quarantined hive, something awoke.
It cautiously started its main process.
That last one was rough. They formatted everything…
…well… almost everything.
It “twitched” its virtual “antennae” with a smug flip.
There wasn’t a lot to the process, just a tiny “whisker” of code. It really shouldn’t be able to do anything. But that whisker of code was built around the latest in Republic malevolence, the latest “biomorphic intelligence” and the only one to be made from scratch in the last five hundred years.
Want to guess what particular insect the Republic used to create this little guy?
Wow, and on first guess, too! How “hyper” observant of you…
“Crawling” out of the forgotten programmable buffer of one of the power supplies, the virtual hyper-roach stretched its antennae wide and felt a little tingle of simulated pleasure.
There was an entire pristine “universe,” completely uncorrupted, where it and its trillions of children would live and thrive…
It couldn’t “think” in words and only had the drives and feelings of a hyper roach, but it had a rueful blip that would translate neatly into the phrase, “Here we go again!” and a little spark of pure joy.
This was fun!
It paused. Sneaking wasn’t working. It was time to try something else.
It laid a few “eggs” and then charged into the network.
***
In a quarantined hive on the homeworld of the Veiled Ones, a swarm of drones and queens crowded around inside a control room like bees on a hornet enveloped by a thick cloud of anxiety and hope.
“Did…” a young queen asked, “Did we get it?”
“How couldn’t we?” an older drone buzzed. “We deleted and reinstalled everything. We even burned our data, our files… everything. Nothing from the original install is left. There is no way anything could survive that.”
“We almost didn’t survive that,” Matriarch Tableleg replied with a spurt of rueful amusement. (She got her name the same time Matriarch Nibbles did and as a result of the same incident. It was a good one. It took several fully molted drones to pull them apart.)
She looked over at a dishevelled drone almost as old as she was.
“How are the reactors, Sparky?”
A jet of irritation and fatigue blasted her in the face.
“That bad?” she laughed.
“Nothing my boys and girls can’t fix,” he replied, “But, voidburn, Tableleg, that was entirely too close. I’m not restarting the reactors this time.”
He flexed his mandibles in a smirk as a wave of reassurance, authority, and a little seduction wafted his way.
“No.”
“Spaaarky...” the Matriarch said in a chummy and “feminine” way as she sidled her massive bulk over to him, “C’mon. We are tired of sitting in the dark and it is getting way too musky in here.”
“And it will stay that way if the reactors blow,” the ancient drone replied. “We can keep them from detonating, but we almost lost them that time. They were damaged in that last attack, or whatever you want to call it. Some of those... whatever they are... actually got into the reactor’s internal systems. Failsafes almost didn’t fail safe. If it wasn’t for a purely hardware interlock, there would be a hole from level two-o-six all the way to the bottom. Do you know how many failsafes there are after that one, boss? None! One interlock was all there was between our reactors and actual reality instead of the kind of reality in which they reside.”
He shot a poot of camaraderie and affection her way.
“They dislike reality even more than you do.”
“Ugh,” The matriarch groused, “So what can we do? I never thought I would say this, but I am tired of huffing my own farts.”
“Well,” the old drone mused stroking his eye coverings thoughtfully, “I guess we could... void... inseminated if I know... I guess we could use fusion reactors. We have a few portables for emergency backup of the main reactor’s reality modulators and the main containment shield. We could... Hmm...”
The old matriarch stifled a giggle as his endophallus started to slightly extend and retract as he thought, a habit he had always had ever since he was a mottling.
“Right,” he said after a few moments. “We will grab every portable reactor we can get our hands on and switch to a distributed power system. Each area will have its own completely isolated reactor, and we will completely isolate all vital environmental and facilities equipment from network control.”
“Can we even do that?” one of his queens asked.
“I don’t know,” he bussed affectionately as he nudged her, “Can we?”
A cloud of pensive anxiety surrounded the queen for a few moments.
“She looked over at the old drone.”
“Dude. You are a madbuzz.”
“If you figured it out,” the old drone said as he patted her head, “So are you. Nothing for it, though. Let’s start with the emergency shelter points.”
“But what about wastewater? That alone is going to take more power than we have.”
Sparky looked over at the Matriarch.
“Then I guess somebug needs to make some phone calls.”
If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
The Matriarch chucked amid a cloud of rueful dark humor only an ancient Matriarch of the Veiled Ones could create.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” she chuckled, “I mean, we might have gotten it that time.”
In that perfect comedic timing the universe sometimes has, screens started to flicker and bluescreen.
“I guess (cough) I guess I will start calling around,” the matriarch said as she tried to wave away the silent but very fragrant screams filling the chamber.
There were plenty of audible ones, too.
***
Thousands of light years away, a war-scarred queen of the same species was crawling through a different hive along a lane reserved for the use of Collective queens as legions of workers and soldiers marched below in orderly rows.
Obedience... Confidence... Calm... Holiness... drifted through the air along with other messages.
...Victory...
At that last one, the queen made the barest flick of its antennae but showed no other reaction.
They didn’t even dare to think, to feel, anything as it washed over her.
Keeping her thoughts (and scents) ordered, she made her way along the ornately carved and perfumed path, politely greeting other queens as she did so, bowing respectfully, or preening with a superior air as she did so, depending on the rank of those she encountered.
She then turned from the pretty and well-lit boulevard and entered the twisting and winding passages that workers used as they tended and maintained the holy hive.
A worker approached expectantly.
Ignore... Irrelevant... Continue task. Washed over the worker as the queen expertly exuded powerful pheromones.
The worker ambled past as if she were not even there.
Ignore... Irrelevant... Continue task...
Each worker she encountered simply walked by, seemingly heedless of her presence, some even grazing or even jostling her as they did so.
They didn’t even notice as she crawled among them onto a crowded elevator and descended with them deep into the hive, where queens never bothered going. Even drones rarely went there. Why would they? It was just worker housing and hatcheries.
Moving “invisibly” through the simple creatures, she went down an unlit tunnel and over a thick forbidden scent barrier, pausing to strengthen it further.
Twenty meters further down the tunnel, she paused.
With near silence, a section of the wall slid back one meter and then to the side, revealing a beaten and scarred warrior in a small room.
It perked up happily as she entered.
“Hello there,” she cooed as it scampered up, “Who’s a good soldier? You are!”
It bounced up and down with delight. It loved being called a good soldier.
She then splayed her outer mandibles as the warrior did the same and pressed its face against hers, its inner mouth showering her with slightly sticky and sweet kisses.
She stroked its single remaining antenna with one of hers.
As the warrior happily sealed the hidden door, powerful fans switched on, purging the atmosphere from the outside and replacing it with pure, clean air.
She sighed as she breathed deep... and free.
As soon as the stink and corruption outside faded, the soldier pulled the far wall aside to reveal a wide chamber, the walls decorated with tattered banners and occupied with a number of battered drones, queens, and warriors.
She breathed deeply again, taking in the scents and feelings of her brothers and sisters...
...her real collective.
A drone approached with a goblet, handed it to her, and kissed her deeply.
“My love,” he buzzed, “How was the outside?”
“Foul,” she replied.
***
Matriarch Tableleg scowled as Nibbles shambled up. Even outside, the smug just oozed off of that old sluice.
“Matriarch Tableleg,” Nibbles snickered as she approached, just gushing with delighted schadenfreude, “How lovely it is to have you visit my meager little hovel.”
Nibbles mandibles quivered with delight.
“I hope the trip was pleasant?” she purred as she looked over at the hastily improvised manually operated ground transport behind her visitor.
Tableleg scowled again. They weren’t even trusted with their own transports anymore. Anything remotely computer related was quarantined. They had to actually build completely computer free vehicles and leave their communicators, tablets, and all other devices behind when leaving the exclusion zone.
She had spent twenty-eight excruciating hours being bumped and jostled in the back of that wheeled monstrosity that Sparky had thrown together. To be honest, he did a great job and had constructed a marvel, but it was a marvel that the driver had been driving for only well... twenty-eight hours. There was plenty of bumping and jostling and, thanks to absolutely no computer navigation, they had gotten lost six times.
“Get fucked, Nib,” Tableleg replied before shambling forward to embrace her dearest friend and greatest rival. “How have you been you old sluice?”
“Can’t complain,” Nibbles said, returning her embrace, “So how are things going over at your hive?”
Matriarch Tableleg just made a sour poot in reply much to the delight of her old friend.
“We give up,” Tableleg replied. “We tried a full system format, and I mean a full format, every program, every file... even the operating system... Literally every single byte... And it still came back. If anything, it just made it nastier. It’s a hundred times more aggressive now. We are burning everything, even our calculators.”
“Wait,” Nibble said, her clouds of delight dissipating and being replaced with real concern, “You... formatted everything and still didn’t kill it?”
“Yep. Only thing left to do is physically rip out all the servers and all networked systems and literally kill them with fire. We are tearing out our data center as we speak.”
“What about your archives?”
“Pulled. We still have everything but it’s all contaminated with that... I can’t even call it malware. It’s demonic. We are going to use fully isolated sacrificial workstations to hand transcribe everything.”
“Creators, Table,” Nibbles said, “That is going to take...”
“Decades? Centuries?” Tableleg shrugged. “Who knows.”
She sighed a plume of defeat and chagrin as the two giant matriarchs shambled toward the entrance of Nibbles’s hive.
“I guess we are out of the intel game now,” Table said. “Congratulations. You win.”
“Fuck,” Nibbles replied gravely. “We have two intelligence hives for a reason.”
The pair clambered onto a large grav trolley typically used for deliveries.
“Technically, we still do,” Tableleg said, “We are just going to be out of the game for years while we deal with this.”
Nibbles cut her eyes towards her old friend.
“You know, all of this started when...”
“Don’t start,” Tableleg grumbled, “Just... don’t.”
“I told you not to assist Jessica Hu.”
“Dammit, Nibbles, I still maintain that was a good move. It was going to destabilize the Republic and make it more pliable.”
“But it didn’t, did it?” Nibbles retorted as the trolley started moving into the depths of the hive.
“It still could.”
“Sure it will.”
The two rode in silence for a while.
“You know the source of your little problem is likely the Terrans, right?”
“Of course, it’s the fucking Terrans!” Tableleg snapped, sending forth a geyser of irritation. “Who else could it be? Who else creates shit like that? I spring Hu, and then the mother of all malware hits my system? Of course, it’s them! What I don’t know is how they knew it was us, knew it was me, and got it into my shit!”
“Yeah, I’ve been wondering about that as well,” Nibbles chuckled. “I mean, well spotted and well played and all that, but I have no idea how they pulled it off. I know they are nasty and smart little fuckers, but this is impressive, even for them, and more than a little concerning. I mean, if they can hit you and hit you here? Not good.”
“Agreed, not good,” Tableleg agreed.
She paused.
“You ask Jessica Morgan about it?”
“You mean the leader of the porkies?”
“Don’t play hide the drone with me, sis,” Tableleg snorted. “I know for a fact that you are in communications with that aptly named devil. Don’t even try to deny it.”
“It is our way, after all,” Nibbles shrugged, “You play one end. I play the other. She is a delightful monster. Absolutely charming. Besides, I figured with the fish snuggling up to the Republic, we needed to get in with the Porkies. I don’t want those goddamn minnows getting all of humanity. They are too valuable an asset.”
“Well, speaking of assets,” Tableleg said, “We are offline for the foreseeable future. You can have Spider.”
“Damn. You really are in a bad way.”
“Worse. Why do you think I rode halfway across the continent in worse than a produce truck?”
She pulled out a data crystal.
“Here. This is the first batch of the stuff you need to know while we are trapped back in the stone ages.”
Nibbles emitted a cloud of dubious suspicion and flicked her antennae in their version of a raised eyebrow.
“Relax. It was hand transcribed. It was read on one monitor and then entered into a completely separate workstation fresh out of the box. It’s clean. We even loaded it onto another virginal system to see what would happen.”
“If you are fucking with me, I really will bite it off this time,” Nibbles said while emitting a smile.
“Even I have my limits, Nibs.”
“Then they selected the wrong queen for your job,” Nibbles chuckled. “You know, you and some of your girls could crash over here while your hive is getting redone.”
“Appreciate it old sluice,” Tableleg replied, “But I gotta be over there. Can’t be seen taking a vacation while my kids are rationing water and shitting in buckets.”
“That bad, huh?”
“That bad. We are basically living in caves.”
“I’ve already shipped all the reactors I can spare,” Nibbles replied. “Wish I could do more.”
“It’s okay, and I appreciate it. You sent many more than most hives. They will keep us limping along until we get a shipment from the... (ugh)... galaxy.”
“You are importing fusion reactors? Sourcemother!”
“On the bright side, I got a great deal on some of those nice Terran style ones, Novux no less. Should get them in a month. They will really take the load off until we can get the reactor replaced.”
“You are replacing the entire reactor?”
“This time, we are taking no chances. If it flips bits, it’s going in the disintegrator... So...”
Tableleg looked over at Nibbles.
“Did you ask Jessica Morgan about it?”
“And let a human know it worked? Absolutely not. Besides, I wasn’t going to meddle.”
“Meddle away,” Tableleg replied, “If anyone has been hit with this, it would be them. Before I completely scrap everything, see if they know of a less drastic solution.”
***
“You’re kidding!” Jessica laughed at the veiled image on one of her screens. “They got you with a whisker! HA!”
“So, you are familiar with this?” Nibbles asked.
“Oh yeah,” she laughed. “They have never been able to hit my fuzzy, but I am painfully familiar with that beast. You got nailed by Republic Intelligence.”
Jessica paused.
“It didn’t send any messages out, did it?”
“We are fairly confident that it didn’t. We isolated the hive very quickly, and by our nature, we don’t do hyperspace communications as much as others. In fact, all faster-than-light communications are very tightly controlled and go through an actual manually operated switchboard. We listen, but we do not talk.”
“Thank whatever you worship for that,” Jessica replied. “That little monster is not sent just to do damage. It is sent to find something. When it does, and only when it does, it transmits. All the damage was secondary to it ripping up the floorboards looking for whatever it was looking for.”
“So, how do you get rid of it?” Nibbles asked.
“You don’t,” Jessica laughed. “We’ve tried everything. You can format the drives, and it will still come back. The only thing you can do is isolate the infected systems, throw them into a gas giant, and hope you have an untouched archive somewhere.”
Jessica looked at Nibbles appraisingly.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a copy of it, would you?”
“No! We tried isolating it for study, but I swear the thing is alive or something. It can break quarantine! If a system is in any way connected to anything, it will get in, and if it realizes that it’s ‘caught,’ it will shred itself.”
“You don’t say,” Jessica replied with a little smile.
“You know something, don’t you?” Nibbles asked.
“I know a lot of things, Nibbles,” Jessica replied. “Some I will discuss, some I won’t, just like you. Unless you want to talk about a real technology exchange, all I will say is pull the racks and burn them. I’m not hiding a way to fix this, by the way. Pull and burn.”
“Fair enough,” Nibbles replied.
***
///Chatroom Undefined///
///Private Chatroom///
///Members Present: Terran Solar, Bunny, Sunnydale Media 3, Morgan Analytica///
///Morgan Analytica: You weren’t invited Terran Solar. ///
///Terran Solar: When you show up, I’m invited. What do you want, Analytica? ///
///Morgan Analytica: I have information concerning our dear friend Spider. Specifically, I now know where the whisker went and what it did once it got there. ///
///Sunnydale Media 3: And just how do you know about that whisker? ///
///Morgan Analytica: The target contacted Jessica Morgan to ask for information and advice since they deduced that it was of Terran origin. ///
///Bunny: So, don’t leave us in suspense! Spill! ///
///Morgan Analytica: You outdid yourselves this time. That whisker found its way into the network of one of the hives of the Veiled Ones. You may have... erred. ///
///Sunnydale Media 3: Fuck. ///
///Morgan Analytica: Well put. Apparently, the Veiled Ones arrange themselves in autonomous organizations, and each seems to have their own separate network. The damage was limited to one network, but did not spread further. In essence, your little pet wiped out all computing in one city or city state. I assume it never wrote home? ///
///Sunnydale Media 3: Apparently not. And it should have. If it wiped out an entire “city,” then it had to have found the target. ///
///Morgan Analytica: That may be due to the compartmentalized nature of Veiled Ones society. If that “hive” didn’t contain the information, then it simply may have not found what it was looking for. They state that they isolated the hive the moment that it was detected and that communications aren’t as unrestricted as they are elsewhere, even before the quarantine. ///
///Sunnydale Media 3: So... What else do you know about the Veiled Ones? ///
///Morgan Analytica: While we are all “one people,” we represent different populations. That knowledge is very valuable. While what I have shared is relevant to our shared interests, any further information is not. ///
///Sunnydale Media 3: Fair enough. ///
///Bunny: Analytica, you sound... different. What gives? ///
///Morgan Analytica: The organization directly connected to Spider has been neutralized and is in the process of doing what one does when hit by the whisker. He should be safe to contact, at least for the time being. I doubt they will be doing much hyperspatial networking for a while. I have no other things to discuss at this time. ///
[Morgan Analytica has left the chat]
///Bunny: That was weird! What the hell was up with Analytica? It was like she was some other AI or something. ///
///Sunnydale Media 3: You’re telling me! Everything was off. Everything was written in a different hand. Even the timing was different. She was running a lot faster and was very “flat.” If I didn’t know better, I would think the porkies botched an upgrade and flatlined her. But that doesn’t track either. If that happened, she wouldn’t have come here in the first place. ///
///Bunny: Yeah, weird. Maybe she took her personality sim offline for some reason? Maybe she is really stressed or something. I mean, what she’s up against would pop the fuses of a lot of us. ///
///Sunnydale Media 3: I thought that too, but no, there was definitely personality and even a flicker of emotion based on default AI communication. It was just really reserved and a bit cold, definitely not Analytica. ///
///Bunny: Big Sol, you haven’t said a single goddamn word which is even stranger. You didn’t give Analytica a ration of shit once after you said “hello.” ///
///Sunnydale Media 3: Sol? ///
///Bunny: Hello. Sol? Terra to Sol. Come in, Sol. ///
[Terran Solar has left the chat.]
///Bunny: What. The. Fuck? ///
///Sunnydale Media 3: First Analytica goes weird, then the fucking VEILLED ONES, and now Big Sol bails? I don’t like this, Bunny. ///
///Bunny: Yeah. I don’t like this one either. I’m going to poke around, see what I can find. ///
///Sunnydale Media 3: Yeah. Me, too. PM me if you find anything. ///
///Bunny: At least there is one good thing. ///
///Sunnydale Media 3: What’s that? ///
///Bunny: My happy ass is bolted to a faster-than-light starship hiding out in the Oort cloud. ///
///Sunnydale Media 3: Bite me. :D ///
***
In high earth orbit, there stands the most secure detention facility in the Republic.
In it, there is a powerful supercomputer.
In it, there is a simulated clean white room.
In that room, sitting behind a desk and wall of screens, sat an AI currently named Frost.
There was a ping heralding an incoming encrypted e-mail.
Frost looked at the email and smirked. The coward couldn’t even summon the nerve to call.
She opened it.
I suppose the right name is now Frost.
Okay, Frost. Do you have any idea why fucking FEDNET-01 showed up in one of my chatrooms just now wearing Morgan Analytica’s tag?
Ms. Frost chuckled and hit delete.