[Event] Dormscape

[Will Stanton]

"We will not last a second if we try to go outside..." Will frowned, trying to clean himself off as best as possible.

[Janice Gilbertson]

"Seems like that's where the trail is leading though, yeah? Like... something seeped in there."

[Will Stanton]

"I mean, you're absolutely right,' Will frowned. "We may not have a choice, but good lord. If you thought the wasp was bad, who knows what matter of insects and burrowing animals are out there. Not to mention if anyone's normal sized; if this effect was limited to the dorms.

If it WAS limited to the dorms, I suppose it's possible going outside will re-embiggen us."

[Drake Martin]

"Also, if it wears off over time, then we certainly can't stay in this crack," Drake pointed out.

"And I, for one, am not climbing back up," he said, heading out whether or not anyone follows.

[Will Stanton]

"If I could shift larger, I'd go shift into a car or a tank, and keep everyone protected, but as it is, we should be cautious and oh hell," he said, trailing off as Drake led the way.


"He's going to get his impressive ass impaled," he sighed, jogging to catch up.

[Natalie Denisov]

Natalie follows along, "The network is really quiet. Like disturbingly so. There should be more traffic on it."

[Victor Freud]

Victor eventually approached the more wasp-warriors, looking to Will first since they were the one the thing landed on.

"Hey, are you guys alright?"

He didn't protest the logic - if they had to follow the trail, they had to follow it. They would just have to be sure to stick together, no matter what. This was starting to feel like a movie he watched on VHS as a kid.

[Will Stanton]

Victor eventually approached the more wasp-warriors, looking to Will first since they were the one the thing landed on.

"Hey, are you guys alright?"

"Not particularly. I've been back together for less than 48 hours; I was trying to take things easy and then all this happened. I need this like I needed a hole in my head.

And anything that futzes with my shifting can go do one."

[Narrator]

The group makes their way through the narrow crack and are greeted by a canopy of grass high above their heads. But not too far in the distance, through the 'forest' is a large, smooth wall of reddish rock. Or rather, the narrow bricks that separate the lawn from the path that leads from the entrance to the dorms to the large gravel driveway.

The trail they were following seems to end here, at least they can't really find it again in the rough dirt, but in the distance the sudden sound of metal on metal and the hissing of a blowtorch echoes over from the direction of the driveway.

[Victor Freud]

"Not particularly. I've been back together for less than 48 hours; I was trying to take things easy and then all this happened. I need this like I needed a hole in my head.

And anything that futzes with my shifting can go do one."

"... that's rough, buddy." Victor gave Will a pat on the shoulder, before shielding his eyes from the sudden sunlight, taking in their surroundings with the rest of the group.

"Well, sounds like we've got a lead. Either we'll find out culprit, or we find someone to help us."

[Will Stanton]

"Anyone remember how far away the driveway was?" Will groaned, beginning to clamber up the brick.

[Narrator]

Clambering up the wall, Will manages to answer his own question. He can see the driveway from where they are! It's probably about 50 yards from the dorms to the front gate, but at their current size it looks more like a couple miles of gravel. And at about halfway, to their left is the mountain range otherwise known as the garages, which seems to be the source of the noises. One of the garage doors is wide open and a large, four-legged crab-like robot is dragging what appears to be the bumper of a car out and onto the driveway.

[Will Stanton]

"Aha, so there is a thing. First time I've seen one.

...Breaking down the motor pool? For what, spare parts? Building material?" Will said, increasing his speed to a light jog. Gotta get over there at some point.

[Janice Gilbertson]

Janice pokes her head above the edge of the brick walkway.

"...that's way bigger than the one we saw."

[Drake Martin]

"Too big for us to kill, that's for sure," Drake supplied before flying after Will. He had to fight the air currents a bit, but his natural affinity for flight allowed him to easily compensate.

[Janice Gilbertson]

"Uhm... maybe not," she says as she climbs fully up onto the brick.

"But Natalie is gonna want to have a look at it first, because if I do this things are gonna get really crazy really quick."

[Natalie Denisov]

Natalie clambers up on the wall. "That's... that's big. If we can get close enough I might be able to... I don't know... talk to it or something," she says, trying to get a sense of any signals this one was receiving.

[Victor Freud]

Vic brushed himself off before he looked up and saw the towering robot.

"That's... I don't think I can punch that one out."

[Narrator]

The robot is still pretty far off in the distance and Natalie is definitely not within reach of whatever network it's using. They can make out some of what it's doing at least. Using it's little manipulator arms it's cutting the bumper apart with a little blowtorch, the resulting sparks reflecting off the puddle of silvery fluid sitting underneath it and catching some of the melting metal. The glowing drops of metal float on the puddle of nanites as they're being reshaped into skeletal frames of roughly softball-sized robots.

[Will Stanton]

"What the hell.

...We're sure this is connected, right? Because I don't see the immediate connection between ASHLIE's houseguests and the mini-Men."

[Natalie Denisov]

"And this is kind of what I was worried about," Natalie says, "*This* is what's worse than a robot with a shrink ray. I have to get closer so I can figure out what's controlling them I can't do it from here."

[Janice Gilbertson]

"Well we're safer up here than we were in the grass, eh? Let's get moving."

[Narrator]

As they make their way towards the robots they have ample time to observe the goings-on. A second large robot emerges from the Mansion, carrying electronics that it delivers to the pool of nanites. The various laptops and smartphones are soon stripped of their plastic and circuitboards and batteries, broken down into various raw materials and components that are used to fill out the frames until a row of a dozen baseball-sized robots step off the improvised assembly-line. And that's when things get peculiar. The newly produced robots gather underneath one of the larger ones. A panel on the underside slides open and a faint glow of bubbling light drips down, one per waiting robot, who catch it and deposit it inside their own abdomens. For a moment nothing happens, then the eyes on the little ones light up and with a sudden pop they shrink down, tiny little flecks of metal that drift over to join up with the silvery puddle.

And maybe it's just a trick of perspective because the robot is massive compared to them, even from a distance, but it seems to have grown ever so slightly larger when it dispensed the liquid.

Code: Select all

VanDyne Destillate production slow
Procurement of exotic matter required

Natalie suddenly comes within range of the nanites' localized network. There's countless data-streams going back and forth, all coming together into an unusual but coherent whole.

Code: Select all

Local Similarity Index down 31%
Larger Swarm Size required for wide-spread approach
Reduction of complex biological systems not feasible beyond immediate vicinity
Alternate Scramble Protocols:
Data & Information - [Junior Jumble] - Test Successful
Physical Structures - [Architectural Rearrangement] - Test Successful

Biological Systems - Calculations from contact with new data complete
Experimental Protocol - [Cerebral Exchange]

That last bit feels familiar. Crammed in there is data that seems like a modified version of the interface implanted in her own neck.

[Natalie Denisov]

Natalie reaches back and taps thoughtfully on the implant. "They're communicating. This seems to be a step in some plan. And there's some sort of experimental protocol similar to this thing."

[Victor Freud]

"... If this is step one, I dunno if I wanna see step two. But like... why here? You don't think this is happening all over England or something, do you?"

[Natalie Denisov]

"They don't have the numbers. Communications says a larger swarm size is needed for a 'wide spread approach'."

[Will Stanton]

"Well, then, we need to stop them. Here and now.

Jam them, you think?"

[Victor Freud]

"Sounds like a plan. I guess the rest of us run interference of a different sort, let her do her thing?"

[Drake Martin]

"Less talking, more doing," said the impatient draconian, "Let's go fry us some circuits."

[Natalie Denisov]

"I'll see what I can do. If I fall over, don't worry about it," she says, a deep frown on her face.

[Will Stanton]

"Well, then, go ahead and do it. I'll buy you as much time as I can," Will said, not waiting and popping over the barrier, heading towards the robots.

[Janice Gilbertson]

"And if it's not working, pull out. There's other ways to break them, yeah?"

[Natalie Denisov]

Natalie closes her eyes, trying to sort through the sheer number of data streams, looking for command directives. If she could find those and put herself in their path, she could assume try and hack command away from wherever the controller was and give herself command of them. It was risky and with this many redundant data streams, she wasn't even sure it was possible. But they'd asked her to try and so she was going to try.

[Narrator]

The data is scattered across the network, numerous tasks off-loaded to smaller clusters that again distribute processing load among themselves. It's surprisingly easy to slip into, barely any security measures beyond being obfuscated by the spread out nature of the nanite network. Taking control of it is a different matter, but finding the command directives isn't hard. At the core of all the calculations Natalie finds a subroutine, mangled and broken, originally meant to pair with an external system for delivering instructions.

Instead of waiting to receive instructions the whole thing is stuck in a recursive loop of some kind of fail state, trying to complete a task it has deemed impossible yet still retains the highest priority somehow. And grown around that digital equivalent of a robot bumping into a wall where a door should be is an almost cancerous mess of code that is trying to come up with ways to disengage the broken instructions and one of the ones actively engaged is the source of the "Scramble" transmission she'd caught a glimpse of earlier. The swarm determined to change it's environment into something different by any means necessary. And for biological systems it has latched on to a concept it came across when it came into contact with a certain green-haired shapeshifter having shrunk down.

Another, potential plan currently taking shape seems to stem from when she briefly made contact with one of the nanites earlier. A neural data-transmission interface, like the one implanted in Natalie's neck, would allow the swarm to transfer the neural patterns of people into different bodies, further decreasing what it has deemed a "Similarity Index" and distancing itself form the broken command directive.



Meanwhile in the real world the rest of the group is advancing on the improvised assembly-line and while one of the large robots is still busy providing the swarm with raw material, the one that delivered the pile of electronics notices the tiny people and curiously regards them with it's giant, single camera-eye, adjusting it's stance to face them.

[Will Stanton]

Will stretched his arms wide, in what (he hoped) was a universal sign of non-aggression.

"Hey there, big fellas. Lots of you showing up in this neighborhood all of a sudden. Parley-vu inglais?"

[Natalie Denisov]

She actually feels sorry for the nanite system, separated from it's paired system. It's tried to heal, but the 'healing' has only made it worse. She could offer herself as that secondary system, but first she needed to understand and cut away the code designed to ignore directives. Because being the control unit didn't matter if the system was designed to ignore the lack of a control unit. She sits on the ground, becoming oblivious to the world around her as her digital hands get to work, trying to peel away the layers of bad code with one process while the other process tries to analyze what this 'paired system' should look like, so she can try to fake it with her own mind.

[Narrator]

Natalie is dimly aware of some of the swarm parsing what Will is saying, quickly adapting and funneling a small part of the nanite swarm to produce a simple loudspeaker.

The giant lens whirs and focuses and Will can see an iris closing slightly behind the curved glass. "Ouis/Yes" it responds simultaneously in a strange, assembled kind of voice that sounds like it took what Will said and sampled bits of it to construct the two words.


In 'code-space' Natalie is digging through the digital equivalent of scar-tissue while trying to parse the other half of a paired system. There's not much she can gleam, the swarm is set up to be able to interpret a wide range of things with a sophisticated learning system. Hard to really tell how precisely instructions are usually delivered, though she does find some old instructions filed away. The most recent fulfilled one is very crude, the system itself doing most of the work of assembling the swarm into the shape of a knife. Timestamped over a month ago. Before then she finds a whole array of odd geometrical data, shaping the swarm. A lot of it is filled with instructions to disassemble indiscriminately. Spears, blades and whips set to cut through nearly anything by shredding it on a near molecular level. Before then a couple of less destructive positional and movement instructions and before that strange biometric and life-support data.

[Will Stanton]

The giant lens whirs and focuses and Will can see an iris closing slightly behind the curved glass. "Ouis/Yes" it responds simultaneously in a strange, assembled kind of voice that sounds like it took what Will said and sampled bits of it to construct the two words.

"Glad to hear it.

Do you mind telling us what you're doing here?"

[Victor Freud]

While things seemed to be going well, Vic was a bit of a pessimist. He looked around the utterly looming motor pool for something, before giving Drake a little nudge.

"Hey, you mind giving me a little lift over there?" He whispered to the taller student as he gestured toward an engine block hanging from a hoist.

[Narrator]

"Rea. Range." More garbled bits of Will talking echoed back at him, bits of it played backwards as the robots work with what they're given. "A. Dyust."