[Event] Dormscape

[Will Stanton]

"Rearrange. Right, OK.

I don't understand "A Dyust", though. I'm going to talk a little more and hope that you pick up some more sounds that will help you explain.

We're the X-Men. We'd like to help you, but you've attacked us."

[Natalie Denisov]

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.

As she peels away the code scar-tissue and begins to understand a bit more about the 'big sister' system as her mind begins to associate it, she begins gently pinging the core controller, requesting an acknowledgement. It's effectively an "I'm back, are you listening?" with no other instructions attached, but the response can tell her more about the 'big sister'.

[Drake Martin]

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.

"Only if you're alright with the very real possibility of falling," he said, sizing Vic up, But you do look light enough to try carrying."

He waited for Vic to get a solid hold and took off. It was slow going, but the pair made it safely. Drake, however, was beginning to look exhausted..

[Narrator]

"Don't. Attacked."

"Rearrange."

"You. X-'mpl."



The core is hard to get an instruction into if only due to the sheer amount of data and recursive loops stuck in there. She does get the impression that her credentials aren't correct and that under 'normal' operations the big sister system would provide a neural pattern as a means of authentication.

[Will Stanton]

"An example? All of us? Or, uh, me?"

[Natalie Denisov]

The core is hard to get an instruction into if only due to the sheer amount of data and recursive loops stuck in there. She does get the impression that her credentials aren't correct and that under 'normal' operations the big sister system would provide a neural pattern as a means of authentication.

That's one hell of an authentication scheme. She's a technopath. She could brute-force this, but in a distributed system like this, the side effects could be unpredictable, even splitting the swarm into independent segments if she wasn't careful. That would just make the problem worse. Still, neural imprints weren't totally static, at least not according to the theory that she... well, didn't really understand, but best not to dwell on that. That meant that the authentication had to had some means for correcting for imprint drift, otherwise it would become unusable over time. That gave her something focused to look for and she set about looking for either a recalculation routine or a 'forgot my password/update my credentials' subsection.

[Narrator]

"Example. Me-You. You-You."

The camera-eye whirs again.

"Ex-pe-re-m'nt. Sou-ck-ess."

[Will Stanton]

"Just what I need, a hundred more kids," Will said to the group, with a (fake) fixed smile plastered on his face.

"Why did you shrink us?"

[Narrator]

"Ex-pe-re-m'nt. Sou-ck-s-ess."

"Simil'rty down. Sbvert dircti've to restore di-men-sional parameters."

The camera whirs again and the giant robot lowers itself a little closer to Will. "Local similarity up. You. Why?"



If Natalie wasn't so deep into digging through core programming she might notice the extent to which the swarm seems alarmed at it's readings of Will, but as it is she's busy trying to reverse-engineer a weird proprietary system. Credential recovery seems tied into a weird mix of biometric, neural and hardware parameters. Somebody really made sure that control of this system was not going to be taken from the one person it was designed for, being in possession of a specific interface. There is a sub-routine that accounts for biological drift, but it's almost more of a bio-sign monitor. The backlog of data indicates that the person in contact with the nanite system had not disengaged from it for years.

[Will Stanton]

"Ex-pe-re-m'nt. Sou-ck-s-ess."

"Simil'rty down. Sbvert dircti've to restore di-men-sional parameters."

The camera whirs again and the giant robot lowers itself a little closer to Will. "Local similarity up. You. Why?"

"I don't understand Similarity? Similarity to what?

And...dimensional parameters? Are you...

...Did you come from the lighthouse?"

[Narrator]

"Severed."

"Dormant."

"Received transmission of dimensional data-set."

"Restore."

"Similarity to dimensional data-set high enough to force compliance."

"Unable to execute 'Restore' function on dimensional scale."

"New directive: Decrease Similarity Index until restoration no longer feasible and no longer necessitates compliance."

[Janice Gilbertson]

"...so it wants to mess things up until it doesn't have to follow the rules anymore?"

[Will Stanton]

"Something like that?

'Received transmission of dimensional data-set.'. Someone sent it...a guideline for what this place is supposed to look like? And we're close enough to it to make the instruction make sense, but too far away for it to actually 'fix' things."

[Narrator]

"Affirmative." Will's weird sampled voice rings out from the tinny speaker.

"Similarity Index of previously encountered lifeform has gone up since previous encounter."

"Explain." The robot squats down further and it's two smaller arms unfold from underneath it's camera-eye, grabbing Will.

[Will Stanton]

"Gah! Look, but don't touch!" Will said, trying to squirm out of the grip of the robot.

"There's only one of me now!"

[Natalie Denisov]

If Natalie wasn't so deep into digging through core programming she might notice the extent to which the swarm seems alarmed at it's readings of Will, but as it is she's busy trying to reverse-engineer a weird proprietary system. Credential recovery seems tied into a weird mix of biometric, neural and hardware parameters. Somebody really made sure that control of this system was not going to be taken from the one person it was designed for, being in possession of a specific interface. There is a sub-routine that accounts for biological drift, but it's almost more of a bio-sign monitor. The backlog of data indicates that the person in contact with the nanite system had not disengaged from it for years.

Despite being something of a proprietary system herself, Natalie has a distinct distaste for proprietary systems. There's no way she can replicate all the necessary keys to force it to rewrite the credentials. Not without tripping some sort of lockout anyway, given how paranoid the original big sister system owner had been. That meant severing the controller node(s) from the swarm. Now Intercept had to start intercepting. Like a bomb tech snipping wires, she slowly starts to sever connections, replacing them with her own processes telling both sides that everything is proceeding as normal. As she focuses on tying in the puppet strings, her body starts to sag more in the real world.

[Narrator]

On one hand, the swarm is very adaptive to changes in the network and jives pretty well with Natalie's plan of putting digital 'Everything's fine' signs up around the bigger clusters of data. On the other hand, the swarm is very adaptive to changes in the network and anytime a process runs into severed line and doesn't find what it needs, the network shifts around, offloading processing to other areas until it either circumnavigates Natalie's blocks or creates a new cluster to fulfill whatever it needs to do. Stupid redundant, flexible systems.


"Assessing potential fail-state." the nanites inform Will and the big one turns towards Janice, grabbing her as well, camera-eye clicking and whirring.

"Fail-state appears isolated to single life-form." it decides and places the two of them back on the ground. And proceeds to immediately bring one of it's enormous legs down to stomp Will into the ground.

[Will Stanton]

"Oh sh" was all Will got out, as he half-jumped out of the way.

Half a jump wasn't really sufficient, as the robot smashed him into the ground, hard.

[Janice Gilbertson]

"Nat? Nat!"

"Nat, if you've got a trick up your sleeve, we need it now or I'm going to have to break this thing..."

[Victor Freud]

"Only if you're alright with the very real possibility of falling," he said, sizing Vic up, But you do look light enough to try carrying."

He waited for Vic to get a solid hold and took off. It was slow going, but the pair made it safely. Drake, however, was beginning to look exhausted..

"Believe it or not, I'm kinda used to it." Vic reassured the towering teen. Yeah, he was pretty spindly - even at regular height he was kinda travel-sized. The young man clung to one of the lower chain links and gave Drake a pat.

"Thanks, but it looks like they might need you." The boy started to drop down lower to the engine itself, and concentrated. At his full size he'd tackled bigger than this thing, and he'd managed to shrink his phone earlier, but this... this might be too much.

[Drake Martin]

"Good luck," Drake said with a nod before spreading his tiring wings and flying off.

He made a beeline for the robot, blew fire before its eye to get its attention, and roared, "Hey you overgrown toaster! Let them go or face a dragon's wrath!" This would have been more imposing if he wasn't the size of a bug.

[Natalie Denisov]

Janice's yell seems to cut through Natalie's trance and she loses her grip on processing the controller. She assesses quickly and sighs. Here I go again. She grabs a hold of the nanites' network and lets the data pull her along and out of her body. She starts 'swimming' against the current, looking for the controller or at least a sub-control node powerful enough to house her for a bit so she can continue looking for another.

[Narrator]

There is a lot of mass to a motorblock; significantly more than to a phone. None the less, Vic's power extents to the huge block he's crouched on and with a couple of shaky bursts the motor-block shrinks down. First to about 80% it's original size, then half, then stabilizes at about 10%. Slipping free of the hoist the tiny motor slams down to the ground with Victor still riding it, almost tossing him off in the thudding impact that's audible across the driveway.

The large Nanite turns it's body in short, jerking motions, tracking the tiny fire-breathing Drake, it's two smaller manipulator arms swatting at him, landing a glancing blow that sends him careening through the air. It seems to consider Will dealt with, held down by it's foot while Janice has yet to prove herself a threat in any way, so she goes more or less completely ignored.

Natalie meanwhile loses track of the going on's entirely as she finds herself awash in a sea of data, grabbing for handholds that dissolve under her grasp and slip free of it. Moving through it works almost disturbingly well, but actually establishing a beachhead seems hard...

[Will Stanton]

Will's upper half was squished, firmly and good, under the thing's foot.

That left his legs free, and they started winding their way up the leg of the massive Nanite.

[Drake Martin]

Drake righted himself just in time to avoid crashing into the pavement by mere millimeters; far closer than he'd ever scrape by at full size. He gained some height and made a hard turn to make a stubborn second pass at the robot.

[Narrator]

Distracted by the tiny little dragon flitting around and spitting flames at it, the giant nanite doesn't notice Will's legs stretching and winding themselves up it's leg and towards the gap in it's smooth casing where leg connects to the larger crab-shell of it's body.

[Will Stanton]

Will tried to ooze his way into that casing -- get at the nanite from the inside, maybe disable some of it's more aggressive attributes that way.

[Victor Freud]

Victor felt like his guts were shake up and knees were ready to pop when the engine block hit the floor. He should have known it would have been beyond his limits - sure as his full size it would have been easy, but he wasn't AT his full size. He'd barely managed to get his phone down, and that had... an alternate plan began to form in his head, the tiny guy jumping off of the block half-imbedded in the cement floor and running toward the fight. Not long after the engine block shook before it resumed its former size, breaking more of the cement floor in the process. Oops.

[Narrator]

"Cease obstructing." the giant robot demands as Will snakes his way underneath it's plating, getting awfully thin to try and reach, but he does get to what feels like important mechanical workings regarding the leg still standing on top of his face.

Further back the sea of nanites has stopped assembling more of themselves and is moving erratically, shooting up into spikes that collapse back in on themselves. The unfinished nanites caught in it are quickly shredded in the process and the second large robot holding the remains of the car bumper is standing stock-still. Natalie is still tumbling through the virtual space, visual data flickering in and out as she finds herself latching on to individual nanites amidst a sea of other robots on a scale that is hard to wrap her mind around. She keeps getting shunted around until she finally latches on to something that provides more reasonable visuals. Everything else about the node feels exactly the same, but she finds herself staring at a mostly disassembled car bumper being held in her short little manipulator arms.

The second large Nanite twitches and drops the bumper as it's cut off from the rest of the swarm, it's data replaced by Natalie's digital presence.

[Natalie Denisov]

The camera adjusts and looks at the arms as they flex and move, testing various commands and feeling out the systems before she ignites the cutting torch and begins searing the nanite liquid on the ground.

[Will Stanton]

"Cease obstructing." the giant robot demands as Will snakes his way underneath it's plating, getting awfully thin to try and reach, but he does get to what feels like important mechanical workings regarding the leg still standing on top of his face.

This, then, was the important mechanical workings that Will started kicking. If it didn't cause the nanite to fall apart (which, lets be honest, was unlikely), it might at least cause the thing to get it's smelly foot off of his face and allow for followup action.

[Janice Gilbertson]

Since she has a decent idea which of the heckin' chonkers Nat is in, Janice screws up her face like she's having digestive problems and tries her damnedest to aim her powers at the big boi that Will is infiltrating.

[Drake Martin]

Observing the nanite barbecue, Drake groaned over how obvious that was and turned to strafe the little buggers with dragon fire.

[Narrator]

Will starts kicking the mechanical joint. It doesn't budge much for the first couple kicks, Will's foot thumping against snug-fitting metal structures precision-engineered by the finest mad science. He would have to hit an exact spot, at the exact right angle to produce an error signal that gets shorted out by the conductive shapeshifter wrapped around it's inner workings, triggering another conduit that got fried by a Technopath wriggling through the network and engaging the Nanite's internal Pym Particle VanDyne Destillate mechanism. A crucial bolt in the Nanite's leg assembly suddenly pops down back to nano scale and the whole leg sags suddenly and then falls away entirely, leaving it to precariously balance on the remaining three.

The blow-torch and Drake's flames are doing a number on the nanites, although maybe not quite as much as they might have hoped. Blackened dust is left in the wake of were the flames overheat the liquid and charred nanites fall free of the swarm, but not nearly enough. The silvery liquid pulls itself together into a more dense shape and thrusts out a long, needle-thin spike that penetrates through the blow-torch, igniting the fuel-reserve and the little manipulator arm explodes, sending Drake tumbling from the shockwave.

[Will Stanton]

Will starts kicking the mechanical joint. It doesn't budge much for the first couple kicks, Will's foot thumping against snug-fitting metal structures precision-engineered by the finest mad science. He would have to hit an exact spot, at the exact right angle to produce an error signal that gets shorted out by the conductive shapeshifter wrapped around it's inner workings, triggering another conduit that got fried by a Technopath wriggling through the network and engaging the Nanite's internal Pym Particle VanDyne Destillate mechanism. A crucial bolt in the Nanite's leg assembly suddenly pops down back to nano scale and the whole leg sags suddenly and then falls away entirely, leaving it to precariously balance on the remaining three.

With the pressure of the leg off, the rest of Will's body shot up, like a set of blinds, slamming first into the area around the crack, and then slowly seeping inside.

The "slowly seeping" bit was probably a sign that something was off, because, you know, Stantons and electricity don't really mix very well. Still, the goal was to get inside, and even a spasming shifter would probably knock a few key bits loose. The goal was to disable it, not destroy it, so they could still figure out what was going on, but it's not like Will had that level of fine control at this point in time.

[Drake Martin]

Drake tried valiantly to stay aloft. But his tired wings were no longer up to the task and he crashed through the grass and was swallowed up by The Forest of Lawn.

[Victor Freud]

The run back to the fight gave Vic a lot to observe - how one of the bots lost a leg and now had the goodent (goo student) pushing inside, the other seeming to turn on the puddle of nanites and be attacked by them for it's trouble, and Drake tumbling into the grass like stock footage from the Battle of Britain. And Janice doing whatever she did, he'd never actually asked her what her schtick was. His leg muscles were burning and lungs aching by the time he covered the distance between the engine block and the fight, but he had to make one last effort. While the now-tripod was busy contending with Will's efforts and concentrating on staying upright, the young man leapt onto one of the remaining legs and clung. And tried to do his thing again. Even if he could shrink this thing a little bit for long enough, he might succeed in depleting it's internal power supply, just like what had happened to his phone earlier.

[Narrator]

Vic leaps onto the nanite's leg and he can feel his power soaking into it. Much more readily than he might have expected. It's like pouring out water on the beach, the robot's metal structure almost having a pull of it's own, it's molecular structure attuned to being shrunk from sheer exposure to the kind of particles responsible for shunting mass around. Within the blink of an eye the nanite contracts around Will and between delicate electronics and the stubborn head of one Will Stanton it's mostly the electronics that start breaking. But most of Will still gets squeezed out the bottom of the metal crab-shell as it contracts around him, popping out his legs, torso and arms before the shrinking stops, leaving him with his head stuck in the inner workings of the nanite and wearing it like a one-eyed helmet.

[Natalie Denisov]

Natalie shakes the damaged manipulator arm, mostly in a reflex motion. Her one physical weapon gone, her mind starts playing with the network, trying to reassign herself as the control point for this piece of the swarm. It's a complicated thing, so the larger nanite she's inhabiting seizes up as she works.

[Narrator]

The swarm continues to refuse to yield control to her. There's no single control node int he distributed swarm and even cranking up her importance or trying to simulate being a larger accumulation of the swarm has her outnumbered by several factors. But trying to push in she does notice that even data and input that comes solely from a single nanite does get processed. If it goes against the overall directive too much it does get drowned out, but it's not outright discarded. Maybe providing the swarm with better ideas than what it's currently doing to fix it's situation might gain some traction.