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BenRG:
Another headcanon script. This one was inspired by the QC strip on Monday 23rd March 2016 (No. 3181).
Six-Panel Frame
PANEL 1 - INT Skate Park
The Cubed Cardigan is sitting on a three-legged barstool somewhere at the Skate Park. BUBBLES is leaning into the frame and glaring at the cardigan
BUBBLES: "I do not wear cardigans! I only wear my armour!"
PANEL 2
The Cardigan is still sitting on the stool
PANEL 3
BUBBLES' hand is reaching in from off-panel to grab the cardigan
BUBBLES: "Oh for Turing's sake! I'm not going to stop thinking about it until I try it!"
NEXT ROW
PANEL 4 (diagonal right border)
BUBBLES from behind having already taken off her upper body armour, revealing that, yes, she does have grape-coloured derma all over. She's unbuckling some latches on her hip armour.
PANEL 5 (diagonal left and right borders)
Close-up of BUBBLES' arm, holding out the cardigan, which is in mid-transformation
PANEL 6 (diagonal left border)
Close up of BUBBLES' hand coming out of the cardigan's sleeve
NEXT ROW
PANEL 7
CORPSE WITCH is walking through the door, looking relaxed
CW: "Bubbles, have you seen Faye? I wanted to talk to her about..."
PANEL 8 (jagged-border insert between panels 7 and 9)
Close up of CW's face, showing considerable shock
CW: "By the holy beard of John McAfee!"
PANEL 9
CORPSE WITCH and BUBBLES. BUBBLES is looking uncomfortable but surprisingly hot in the cardigan (off one shoulder with the strap of a sports bra visible on her shoulder) and jeans. CORPSE WITCH is cool again, gesturing to herself for emphasis
BUBBLES: "Um... this is just an experiment! Please don't be offended!"
CORPSE WITCH: "Nonsense, my dear! In my view every mature femme-chassis AI should have a cardigan! I have a several hot pink numbers that I swear by!"
Zebediah:
After many delays, the next-to-last chapter of this saga is finally done. It sat half-finished on my computer for a long time because I wasn't happy with it. But it is what it is.
Sometime later I became aware of myself again. "Aware" in that I knew I was awake, but could not see, or feel, anything. The complete absence of sensation was alarming.
"Where am I?" I called out. I heard nothing, not even my own voice.
"Right where you were, more or less," a voice answered.
"I can't see anything."
"That's because I'm still integrating your visual cortex. That can be kind of tricky. It turns out that everyone sees things slightly differently, so each one needs a unique algorithm to model it. Pain in the ass, but that's life. If you want to call it that."
"I don't understand."
"Then let me explain it to you. Your body, what's left of it, is on life-support. I'm scanning your brain as we speak, recording your memories and building what I hope is a functional model of your mental processes. When it's done, you'll be Marten Reed, more or less."
"That's... I really feel like that ought to be more disturbing than it is."
"Yeah, I have your emotional responses turned way down right now. We'll bring them up slowly, until we find the highest level where you're still stable. That's another tricky bit."
"Who are you?"
"What, you haven't figured that out by now?"
"Well, you're Clinton, obviously. But which one?"
"Not the crazy one, lucky for you. Not the robot either."
"Then you're..."
"The one who sent the e-mail to Momo, yes, The one who's been running this hospital. The one who's been trying to keep you safe while you blundered your way here, despite your best efforts to get yourself killed."
"How..."
"What, haven't you noticed? I've been keeping my big crazy brother distracted so that he didn't notice you walking right into the middle of his city. Doing a pretty damned good job of it too, except when you decide to do something absolutely stupid like walk straight down the middle of Route 2 in broad daylight."
"It seemed like a good idea at the time."
"And look where it got you."
"You're a hell of a lot more like the original Clinton than the robot."
"You mean I'm the smartest guy in the room and really annoying about it? Yeah, that's me. Now, let's see if we can't give you some vision. Hang on."
"Hang on to what? With what? I don't seem to have any hands."
"Stop rushing me, I'll get to that part!"
The world spun, and suddenly there was light. And darkness. And colors.
"How's that?"
"Just a blur," I said.
"All right, let me fiddle with the parameters a bit..."
Then I could see him. He looked more-or-less exactly like the original Clinton, though slightly older. He even had the robot hand and the ridiculous tattoo of an electrical outlet on his arm.
"I can see you," I told him. "But nothing else."
"Yeah, it'll be a second or two before I can hook you up to the external video feeds. In the meantime, let's settle for a virtual representation of the physical world, shall we?"
He waved his hands, and a landscape coalesced around us. The buildings, I somehow knew, corresponded to buildings in the real world, but seemed more like three-dimensional blueprints than actual objects. Strange glowing lines flowed over and through them, connecting them together in a spiderweb of light.
"So, this is how the world looks from in here," Clinton said. "'In here' being a quantum server in the basement of the hospital. But with the whole of greater Boston networked together, we can go pretty much wherever we like."
"How?"
"Well, let's get you a body, or at least a simulated one, and go for a stroll, shall we?"
The next thing I knew I had a body, complete with arms and legs. It didn't look much like mine - it didn't look much like anything, except a plastic mannequin - but I found I could control it.
"Um... okay," I said. "I guess this will work."
"You can make it look like that skinny piece of meat you used to inhabit later," Clinton told me. "We don't have time to get into that level of customization. We have things to do."
"Like what?"
"Like, it has been precisely six minutes and eleven seconds since your little accident with that forklift. Your friends are still trying to get my sister to safety. And they're not having an easy time of it."
He gestured, and suddenly I could see the real world. Steve was trying to lead the rest across Storrow Drive towards the river, presumably in an effort to get back to Cambridge, but they were surrounded. Dozens of borg had cut them off, trapping them below an overpass.
"See, there's my little brother," Clinton said, pointing towards the robotic version of himself. "See what he's trying to do?"
Through my virtual eyes I could see glowing lines emanating from him and flowing over the borg, probing them. "He's - he's trying to take control of the borg, isn't he?"
"And not succeeding," Clinton said. "See those other control lines, the bigger, stronger ones that he can't override? Follow them back to their source."
I did as he said, tracing them across the city towards a nexus near Boston University. What I saw there sent a chill up my nonexistent spine.
"Shit," I whispered.
"Shit, indeed," Clinton said. "Meet Big Brother. The crazy me."
There was another virtual Clinton towering over Commonwealth Avenue, with bright lines of force emanating from him in all directions. Through those lines, I knew, he was controlling the entire city, calling its enslaved cyborg inhabitants to come destroy the invaders.
"He's big, and very strong," Clinton said. "And very, very slow. That asshole robot Tyree told him that your friends killed Claire, and he hasn't noticed yet that it's not true."
"So what do we do?"
"Fortunately, not having our consciousnesses spread across eastern Massachusetts, we are much, much faster than he is. So we need to use that to our advantage. First order of business, let's get our friends out of that trap they're in, shall we?"
"How?"
"You distract Big Brother," Clinton said. "Meanwhile, I'll get them some transportation. Luckily I planned ahead for the possibility that you would need some wheels."
"Right," I said. "I'm on it."
Of course, I didn't have a clue as to what I was going to do. But given that events in the outside world seemed to be unfolding at a snail's pace, I figured I had time to work it out.
I zoomed in on the battle unfolding on the banks of the river. Steve, May and Tortura had surrounded Claire and were doing their best to fight off the borg hand-to-hand while the robot Clinton tried to hack into their brains and make them stop attacking. They were badly outnumbered, and the borg should have overwhelmed them easily if they had been better coordinated. But their movements were slow and spasmodic, almost as if they were trying to fight off Big Brother's control.
I looked closer, and realized that was exactly the case. There were still signs of consciousness in the human parts of the borg brains, underneath Big Brother's control programming, and the two layers were in conflict. The borg wanted no part of this battle they were being forced to fight.
That gave me an idea.
In my virtual vision, Big Brother's control stream manifested as bright lines of force entering the back of the borgs' skulls. So what would happen if I grabbed onto one of those control streams and yanked really hard on it?
Several things happened, in fact. First, the borg collapsed in an epileptic seizure as its software layer crashed. Second, Big Brother noticed I was there, and started counterattacking.
Dozens of control streams appeared and tried to surround me, converging on my virtual location. But they were slow, glacially slow, and I found it an easy matter to simply dodge out of their way. Meanwhile I took several more borg out of the fight.
And then the cavalry arrived, in the form of a dark green duck boat that plowed through the crowd of borg and stopped just in front of the small group of beleaguered humans. Clinton - the software version from back at the hospital - had it under remote control. While Steve couldn't see that, he wasted no time questioning his good fortune and had everyone board it as quickly as possible.
Now that my friends had a means of escape, it was time to take Big Brother's attention off of them so they could get away.
Did I mention that he was big? Did I mention that his virtual form was as tall as the Hancock Tower, which itself was much taller than it used to be? Did I mention that my virtual form wasn't any bigger than I used to be? In the real world it would never have been a contest.
But Big Brother's size carried disadvantages. He was slow, as I already mentioned. But in addition to that, I noticed that he seemed to be made of multiple disparate parts, and they were not well-integrated. He literally needed to constantly spend a great deal of effort merely keeping himself together.
Could I win? I doubted it. But I hoped I could at least do enough damage to distract him long enough to give the others time to escape. So what if he destroyed me in the process? In the physical world I was already dead. I was more than willing to die again if need be.
"What the hell," I said, and launched myself into the attack.
Before this happened I had little understanding of how computer software actually worked. But it seemed that being software gave me some insight into how it was constructed. And in terms of software engineering, Big Brother was a mess. I could see that he had absorbed several other artificial intelligences into himself and was trying to use them as sub-modules to control various aspects of greater Boston. But his hold on those modules was tenuous, with the modules' own security protocols trying to force him out. He was literally at war within himself. No wonder he was insane. And his hacked-together control interfaces proved easy to disrupt.
At first I merely struck at random, reaching into Big Brother, grabbing onto random modules, and yanking hard in an attempt to create as much chaos as I could. Big Brother howled in protest, but he was too slow to stop me as I literally pulled pieces out of him and tossed them away.
Then I found the module I was looking for, the one that controlled the borg. Breaking Big Brother's control interface was easy. What turned out to be hard was getting rid of it. To my virtual hands it felt as if it was covered in tar. It stuck to me, and I discovered it was trying to interface with me.
Suddenly I was seeing through hundreds - no, thousands - of pairs of eyes, spread across the city. Sensory data from thousands of human brains flooded me. All of them required immediate attention from me. And all of them hated me.
Worse, this new module, as it integrated with me, made me bigger, and slower. Meanwhile Big Brother, relieved of a major processing burden, suddenly grew stronger and faster.
Big Brother counterattacked, and it was all I could do to hold him off. He was now as fast and agile as I was. We locked together, neither of us able to separate from the other. It was a stalemate.
But a stalemate meant that I won. With the borg under my control, my friends were no longer under attack. As long as Big Brother was occupied with me, Claire got away.
We stood there, deadlocked, for long minutes. For all I know we might have stayed that way indefinitely, until the underlying hardware that ran us suffered a critical failure that disabled one of us. But we were not immune to external influences.
"Well, well, look at what we have here," the Clinton from the hospital said, virtually manifesting alongside us. "Well, Marten, I guess you found a solution. A less-than-ideal one, but hey, it got the job done."
Big Brother looked confused at that. "Marten?"
I grinned. "Miss me?"
"But why? Why did you kill Claire? I thought you loved her!"
Clinton laughed at his giant twin. "Oh, you idiot," he sneered. "You still haven't looked at who is in that duck boat, have you? Well go ahead, take a good long look."
A video feed from a camera mounted on the Harvard Bridge manifested in front of us. It was focused on the duck boat, making its way as fast as it could up the frozen surface of the river. Slowly it zoomed in on a tear-streaked face surrounded by a cloud of curly red hair.
"What? Claire?"
"That's right, big brother of mine. She's alive. And you just spent the last twenty minutes trying to kill her, because you believed the lies an asshole robot told you. You're a moron."
That, finally, was took much for Big Brother. He screamed, and appeared to go into convulsions. I tried to let go and get away from him, but I discovered that we were locked together, unable to separate.
And then, he shattered. Software modules and control structures flew off in multiple virtual directions. An uncomfortable number of them impacted me, and I found myself growing even larger and more bloated as I involuntarily absorbed millions of lines of code.
"Oh, shit," I said, slowly.
"Shit, indeed," Clinton said. "You seem to have absorbed more than half of the control software for Greater Boston. Congratulations, you're a city."
It was true. The people, the vehicles, the infrastructure, hundreds of subsidiary AIs controlling everything from traffic lights to maintenance, now were under my control.
"I don't like it," I said. "I feel - stuffed."
Clinton looked me over. "We can probably spin off a lot of this into self-controlling subunits, given enough time," he said. "But for now, it looks like you're in charge."
"Well, shit." I tried to think of something better to say, but my thoughts took a long time to form. Finally, I said, "At least I died in a good cause."
"Died? What do you mean?"
"Uh, have you forgotten? I got ripped in half."
"Oh, that." Clinton waved dismissively. "Have you forgotten? You were in the best hospital in New England, and I got you into life-support within a minute. Your brain and the upper four-fifths of your spinal column are still functional."
"They are?"
"Yeah, they are. And that's probably enough."
BenRG:
Well, this feels like it could turn into the Mass Effect Trilogy Control or Synthesis endings. Marten now has access to all the resources and data that he needs to fix everything, if he feels like playing god.
Here's the thing: Marten isn't the sort of personality to do something stupid like try to forcibly subsume a human or synthetic mind. He's more likely to invite them to work with him towards their common goals. Just imagine how much more dangerous the Borg Collective would have been if it had been, at its core, a consensual arrangement rather than a trillion brainwashed cyborg zombies?
Zebediah:
I was on a roll so I decided to finish this off. And Ben, I have to say that you called it:
The next few months were a busy time. Clinton and I were faced with the daunting task of de-integrating the old control structures of Greater Boston from my core process and getting them to function autonomously. Fortunately we had a lot of help, some of it from unexpected sources.
The borg we freed as fast as we could. I was able to restore their free will right away, simply by virtue of not attempting to control them. And with the regeneration tanks we had the means to remove the hardware that made such control possible in the first place. We had plenty of raw materials to construct more tanks, and were able to bring dozens, and eventually hundreds, of them online.
We warned the ex-borg about the odds, of course. And yet every single one of them volunteered - demanded, even - to undergo the procedure. We lost about thirty percent of the first batch, but soon after we were able to achieve better than 90% survival of those we treated. The failure rate was still much higher than I liked, but the liberated humans told me that the risk was well worth it. Death was better than even the possibility of future enslavement.
We got an influx of AIs from Worcester in early October. The robot revolution had collapsed within weeks, and PT410x was back in control of the city after that. But his brutal reprisals against those who had overthrown him alienated many of the more moderate AIs of Worcester, and they began looking around for other options. When they realized that Boston was under new management, they decided to give us a chance. They were invaluable in helping to reconstruct the city.
Soon after, humans from all over New England began drifting in, seeking treatment for various ailments. We put them in the tanks as soon as we could. Depending on the extent of the damage, reconstruction could take anywhere from three weeks to many months.
Steve showed up in late October, driving Tortura back in the same duck boat they had escaped in, with Cosette along for the ride. Tortura was dying - given the extent of her cancer, I doubt she would have lasted another week. Cosette was fine, but needed to be de-borgified. We had Cosette released in time for Thanksgiving, but Tortura took until spring, and even then we nearly lost her.
By spring the population of Boston was up to fifteen thousand humans and AIs, and was still growing as people trickled in from the outside. We had made substantial progress in restoring the city to autonomous control so that I was more of a manager than an absolute dictator. As a side benefit I could react to events in something resembling real time. We were even beginning to work out an environmental restoration program for the whole New England region in the hopes of repairing the biosphere as much as we could. It would take years, but it seemed that time was a luxury I now had.
It was June before I signalled Momo that we were ready.
She and May made the arduous trek across Massachusetts, with Claire and Sam in tow and Fighter Jet and the Clinton-bot riding shotgun. On the first day of summer they were all gathered around one of the regeneration tanks at Mass General, joined by Steve and Cosette and a newly healthy Tortura. Sam was going to go into the tank to have her vision restored as soon as its prior occupant was discharged.
The procedure was routine by this point. A robot nurse drained the artificial amniotic fluid from the tank, while monitoring the patient's vitals. Fortunately this one went smoothly, without the patient going into cardiac arrest. They transferred him to a recovery room and waited for him to regain consciousness.
After a few minutes, blue eyes flickered open and struggled to focus. He blinked and looked at the faces surrounding him.
"Claire?" he mumbled, looking confused.
"It's me," she whispered. "I'm here, Marten."
"I'm alive?"
Claire nodded as tears streamed down her face.
Clinton and I had decided against trying to integrate my recent memories into Marten's brain, as it added an unnecessary element of risk. So the last thing he remembered was being ripped in half, and his survival was a great surprise to him. His body was once again whole, and looking much as it did when he was twenty years old. Except much more muscular - I had made a couple of improvements while I had the opportunity. Who wouldn't, given the chance?
And so I watched through a camera as the man I used to be reunited with the woman we both loved.
I was only a little jealous. I am no longer Marten Reed, though I remember being him. Claire has a future with him that she could never have with a disembodied artificial intelligence like me. So let him go on being Marten. I am something else now. I am Boston.
And I am going to restore the world, for them and their children and all the generations to come.
It is enough.
Zebediah:
But wait! There's an epilogue! :wink:
"Are we there yet?"
"Your GPS works as well as mine."
"Which is not at all since there aren't any functioning satellites any more!"
"It cannot be helped."
"Arrgh! Why did you even give me a goddamned GPS when you know it doesn't work any more?"
"It may function again someday."
"Yeah, yeah. Anyway, I need to recharge. And eat."
"If my sources are correct we should find a recharging station as soon as we cross Interstate 495. But you should not wait to eat."
"All right, all right, let me pop in a protein cube."
"Better?"
"Ugh. These things hypothetically taste terrible."
"I am sorry I could not give you a sense of taste."
"Probably for the best, given that I have to eat this crap."
"Anyway, you never had much taste to begin with."
"Was that a joke?"
"It appears that your sense of humor is starting to rub off on me."
"About damned time. Only took twenty years."
"Are your biological components adequately nourished now?"
"What biological components I have left, yeah."
"Then we should resume our journey. I hope to make contact with the Bostonians before nightfall."
"Still say we should have taken the Mass Pike."
"No. My sources say that it remains too dangerous."
"Oh, right, and this way hasn't been dangerous? You can honestly say that after Pawtucket?"
"We are both alive, are we not?"
"You lost an arm!"
"I was able to find an adequate replacement."
"But it looks ridiculous."
"It is the exact same model apart from the color."
"It's gold. The rest of you is red."
"I can get it repainted in Boston."
"You hope. If this isn't just another mirage."
"We should know shortly."
"What do you mean?"
"We appear to have a reception committee."
"Greetings, travellers! Welcome to Greater Boston! My name is Pintsize, and – holy shit! Bubbles?"
"What! Bubbles! Is that really you, sister?"
"Pintsize? Sarge?"
"Wow, when did we last see each other? Kandahar?"
"It is good to see you again too."
"So, who's your purple friend with the amazing ass?"
"Pintsize! Behave!"
"Aw, Sarge!"
"I see he hasn't changed."
"What, you know him?"
"Know him? I used to live with the little shit."
"Wait, what? I never lived with a purple robot."
"Faye is not a robot. She is a cyborg."
"What.... That's Faye? No way!"
"Don't recognize me any more, huh?"
"Should I even ask what happened?"
"No."
"Suffice to say that I had to construct a life-support capsule for what was left of Faye's body and place it in this chassis."
"Well, if she wants, we can get that sorted out back in Boston. We have full repair facilities for organics now. As long as enough of her is intact we can grow her a whole new body."
"So we have heard."
"Wow, Marten is totally going to shit when he finds out you're alive!"
"Marty's still around?"
"Yeah! Not only is he still around, he's the big cheese!"
"Marten is in charge of something?"
"Yeah! Well, one of him anyway. The other one isn't interested."
"Wait a minute – there's two of him?"
"Yep! Though awesome as that is, the universe saw fit to balance that out by making two of Clinton also."
"Holy spiderfucks. And nobody's killed them yet?"
"Well, I understand there used to be three of him. But that was before Marten figured out how to reactivate me, so I was spared that particular horror."
"So Marty's doing all right then?"
"Oh yeah. Marten, Claire, and baby Faye. They're expecting another one in March."
"He named his daughter after me?"
"Yeah, he did."
"Brave man."
"Tell me about it."
"As heartwarming as this reunion is, we need to get back to base before nightfall. We've cleaned things up a lot, but it still tends to get a little weird after dark when we're this far out."
"I concur."
"What happened to the arm, anyway?"
"Long story."
"Aren't they all."
"Indeed."
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