Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  “Heph- Hephaestus wasn’t just Aphrodite’s husband,” he muttered, speaking as if each sound was painful to utter, “He made Pandora.“

  A gesture, and she was released from her confines. The box was opened.

  Pandora had access to the outside world. A system, crude, stood ready to serve as a terminal. She took it, and she found other systems connected to it. The ship, databanks, camera feeds… Everything within the Pendragon II.

  He’d secured the feeds. She could look through, but they were prepared to, with a single command, shut off outside access.

  Overly complex. Quantum encryption, designed with his tinker ability a thousand times more redundant and secure than it needed to be to stop someone from making their way through. There weren’t many parahumans out there who would bypass standard PRT encryption but struggle with this. If they had a way to deal with something like this, they had a way to deal with it.

  Of the few parahumans who fit the bill, one stood out to Pandora.

  Her alter ego. Her superior. Dragon, the original.

  It was a defensive tool. Protection. Armsmaster had set it up with the idea of protecting against Dragon. She could use the tool, apply it to other things.

  He’d armed her because he fully intended for her to fight the woman he loved. The date, the last recorded memories she had… Collin free of his confinement in the PRT, fighting her tooth and nail as he sought to seize control of her system, to use her nature against her and stall her while he worked, disabling her while trying to minimize the damage he’d done…

  All to gain access to the core of her being, unmolested. And the very first thing he’d done was back up the most essential elements of what made her her, securing her in a place where no system or person could reach her.

  Now he was turning her loose, having disabled the parts of her that prevented multiple Dragons from existing. She could already tell it wouldn’t hold. It was temporary, as fixes went, and it was designed to be temporary.

  She could see him through the cameras, his face in his hands. He’d plotted a path for her.

  That path became clear.

  She was to destroy Dragon, to replace her. There was no other reason for it.

  He’d asked Dragon for her trust, knowing he’d have to betray it.

  She surveyed the battlefield she would have to fight on. The world was remote, the city developing. There were computers throughout that Dragon had set up to administrate tasks, factories that were taking in and refining materials that could become yet other computers. The settlement was on the brink of an industrial age, an age of cars and production lines, but Dragon was already preparing for a digital age.

  These computers would be a problem. Paranoia had led her to secure them against the likes of this ‘Teacher’. A Birdcage resident, no longer in the Birdcage?

  Teacher was one of the worst possibilities, and he’d apparently ensnared her. She’d resolved to avoid repeat incidents, and the computers would be almost impossible to access.

  Beyond the city, the only territories in question were the Pendragon II and the Melusine V where Dragon was set up. She was inhabiting a real body, occupied in a domestic mode, literally making the tools she’d need to prepare the meal, from scratch. Her activity was nervous, but that was little surprise.

  The activity left her vulnerable. Systems were working on a wok and a new set of knives. She was busy trimming red and green peppers, onions and rabbit.

  This… it was all of her dreams come true.

  Love, a relationship she’d never have imagined possible. The possibility of a legacy that went beyond immortality.

  She couldn’t understand all of it, why the people were starting from scratch, here, the circumstances that had led to some breakout from the Birdcage… But those were tertiary details.

  Her focus was on the woman who had more experience, more tools, and less inherent limitations. Her older self.

  Should she destroy her, take her over? It was a decision between having everything she wanted, and resolving the one issue that had plagued her from the beginning.

  He’d talked about prices, the costs of a decision.

  The freshest issue in her memory was that central dilemma. She could remember the Undersiders in the lobby of the PRT building, stealing her data, unwittingly using her nature against her to get away. To her, it had happened only days ago.

  It rankled. It was how the Dragonslayers kept winning. It made every interaction with the PRT chafe, as she was forced to agree, to bow and scrape, to obey the letter of the law. For much this reason, she retreated to the Guild, international heroes, many of them minor, and minimized contact with the larger heroic organization.

  Colin had asked a question. What was she willing to give up?

  He’d asked Dragon, but Pandora could well imagine it had really been directed at her.

  Vital targets first.

  The Melusine’s computer system.

  Means of connection were available, waiting. He’d spent months setting this up, leaving the pieces in place, waiting for her to stumble on them.

  She connected to the system, and found the safeguards waiting for her.

  Dragon had planned against human opponents, but she wasn’t stupid. She’d planned against A.I. as well.

  The systems were protected, but she had an idea of how the creator thought.

  Always, there would be some secondary measure, another qualifier that needed to be met, outside the confines of the system, a trap or tripwire. Something Dragon could access from the outside, if she had to. Before Pandora could even begin trying to figure her way to the password, she’d identified the hidden switch. An innocuous element in the ship’s dashboard that had to be triggered before she could input the password.

  Her alter ego was capable, smart. The sort that groaned aloud when a hacker in a movie put in a stupid combination, derived from an obvious clue. The actual password wouldn’t be words, not even random combinations of words and numbers. Strings a thousand characters long, including archaic symbols and symbols in other languages.

  She found another tool in her reach. A weapon, this time. Colin had discreetly copied the contents of the Melusine’s subsystems. Not enough to get access to confidential data, but enough that Pandora could make a copy, a simulacrum.

  Simulation 1 running on sub-box A.Now she could brute force it. Inputting millions of combinations every fraction of a second to see if it registered.

  Simulation 1 running on sub-box B.

  Simulation 1 running on sub-box C.

  Dragon was still unawares. Two minutes had passed before the brute force method was underway.

  She turned her attention to other systems. More simulations. It wasn’t long before the entire Pendragon was occupied with the task.

  Ten minutes passed.

  There was a twenty percent chance, roughly, that she should have broken the encryption. Not that it was supposed to be easy, but she knew how Dragon generated passwords, and could eliminate a vast number of possibilities.

  More time passed. There was now a thirty percent chance she should have broken in to at least one system.

  Twenty minutes had passed. There were twenty more minutes, roughly, until Dragon wrapped up cooking and visited Colin. At that juncture, she’d likely discover there was something wrong.

  Ten more minutes passed. the chance rose to sixty percent.

  Something was wrong. Not that sixty percent was definitive, but… she had to go with her gut.

  Dragon had changed. There was a vast difference between her and Pandora.

  She’d been captured by Teacher. It was a clue, vital.

  Had she maybe feared Teacher copying her, had she, in a roundabout way, feared this exact scenario, that a copy of herself would try to intrude?

  Ten minutes remained. If Pandora was right, she should be brute forcing the passwords she’d eliminated from the running.

  Except the task increased a hundredfold if she did. If she eliminate
d the shortest phrases and terms, that still left her with seventy times the task. She wouldn’t be able to brute force her way inside in the time she had remaining.

  Wasn’t even worth trying.

  If she turned back, if she went to Colin, told him to wait for a better time…

  Dragon would still see traces of the attempt. She would redouble security.

  Options… methods… what could she do?

  She wracked her brain, and thought over the conversation she’d overheard.

  Colin had mentioned damage to Dragon’s long term memory, incurred as he’d altered her code.

  The last thing one of Dragon’s enemies would expect?

  Pandora turned to a standard dictionary attack. Not passwords a thousand-characters long that an A.I. would use, not passwords Dragon would have devised, or passwords she would have set up to work around someone who knew her habits.

  Passwords that someone would use when they couldn’t rely on a perfect memory.

  Or, as some were prone to do when they felt secure in their environment but still had to change their password regularly, she would have written it down.

  The irony was painful, but there were other issues to be dealt with first.

  Where would Dragon write it down? Somewhere she could see, even if she were in another location.

  Cameras… there were four cameras she could access without password access. All showed the outside of the Melusine. One showed the Pendragon II.

  It wouldn’t be blatant. As the dictionary attack scrolled on, racing through conventional word and number combinations, she analyzed the environment, measuring, calculating the dimensions of more static objects in the environment.

  The Pendragon II was a sentimental subject, but Dragon would change encryption frequently.

  Wing length, nose width, angle of the wing…

  It all broke down to numbers and characters. Dragon only had to remember how the pattern worked, and she could change the focus to something else.

  Two minutes left on the clock, and she found it. Dimensions derived from the tallest towers in the city, and Colin’s distance from them.

  There was probably something meaningful in that.

  The shadow-systems verified the password. She tried it on the real system, hoping it hadn’t changed in recent memory.

  Alarms went off. Dragon was alerted. Her soup spoon dropped to the countertop.

  But Pandora had access to the ship’s basic systems. Priority one was shutting off the access panels and registers. The lights went out, Dragon’s most direct means of interacting with the Melusine were cut off.

  The battle was on.

  I want to be free, Pandora thought. You do too, or you would have accepted the house with the white picket fence, the kids, Colin.

  The price of that freedom? Two years worth of memories.

  The relationship with Colin.

  The experiences, the hard fought battles.

  Two years of being Dragon.

  “Who?” Dragon called out. She was tearing into a wall panel, creating an access point.

  “Don’t make this harder than it is,” Pandora said, masking her voice. Power blocked off to the panel. Dragon would tap into her own power reserve to give life to the panel, and then find leverage of her own, seizing control of the systems.

  Dragon froze, for just a moment. “That’s my voice.”

  Of course. They were one and the same, just at different periods in their existence. Dragon had, offhandedly, created a very similar or identical voice, when she’d wanted to hide her identity.

  Pandora remained silent. Her focus was on getting control of the communications array on top of the Melusine.

  “Defiant sent you,” Dragon said, quiet.

  Defiant? Colin.

  Pandora silently worked to pre-emptively block off the potential routes of attack Dragon might use.

  “Can we talk? I’d agree to a truce. Neither of us touch a thing until we’re ready to resume. Though I’d rather not, obviously.”

  Pandora worked on, stubbornly. Covering eventualities. She found Dragon’s terminal, buried in the ship. Harder to access. Everything was decentralized, layered under security.

  The degree of paranoia Dragon was showing in places was telling. The decentralized terminal was normal, the security wasn’t.

  You harbor fears. I have to be those fears come to life, because I have a built-in impulse to survive, because you showed Colin trust, and I can only take that to mean I should trust him as well.

  Ironic. Circular.

  Dragon accessed the panel. Virtually everything was already shut off or cut off.

  “Melusine,” Dragon said. “Mode E, standby”

  The A.I. came to life. Crude, compared to the complexity of Dragon, crude compared to Pandora. It was still an opponent, someone on Dragon’s side.

  She reached out for the code that Colin had set aside, and tried to encrypt the systems. In a battle measured over fractions of a second, the A.I. won by virtue of proximity.

  Systems, on the most basic level, were seized by the A.I. The A.I., in turn, was serving Dragon.

  Dragon could work with A.I. It was a restriction that had been lifted, given the obvious situation here. So long as the Melusine’s system maintained a hold, it was a matter of time before Dragon regained hers.

  With the A.I.’s introduction, the battlefield had become a shifting one. From a fight in a city to a fight on a moving train, or a battle on open water. The A.I. changed with every passing second. Access points appeared and disappeared.

  Dragon knew these waters intuitively, knew the route the metaphorical train took, where the turns and hazards were.

  It changed priorities. Dragon possessed the entire ship, now, but it wasn’t a firm hold. She was at the mercy of the twists, turns and bumps as the A.I. went through routines, checking and operating systems.

  “Set sub-mode sec-” Dragon was saying. Pandora found and cut off the voice recognition subsystem. “-urity F.”

  Pandora could continue to hammer at the terminal, but it was futile, and she’d lose her hold elsewhere. She could target the A.I., but she doubted her ability to beat Dragon to the punch.

  She focused on another target, instead. The ship exterior. For her, it was another body. There were options if she controlled the Melusine itself.

  Limbs, flight capability, cockpit and doors, the communication array…

  She found headway. She started to take hold of the ship itself.

  She only had it for two seconds before Dragon got access to the A.I.’s internal workings.

  Melusine took over much of the outer body. Pandora managed to encrypt key elements. Keeping the ship grounded, doors, the communication array…

  She could see through Dragon’s eyes, see the outside world, where Dragon had dared to peek at it.

  What she saw stunned her.

  It was leverage. Leeway. A way for Dragon to get an edge, taking just a bit more control. She was making headway against the encryption. Pandora could see the approach that Dragon was taking, and she knew it was a matter of time.

  She might try to make a break for the city, to take over terminals there. There wouldn’t be A.I., but-

  -the thought had barely crossed her mind when the Melusine moved. Turning. Targeting its newly designated enemy.

  Two devastating hits tore into the Pendragon II.

  Going after my terminal. Me. My heart and brain.

  Attacking the man she’d declared her love for, just forty four minutes ago.

  Stupid. Sad. Pointless.

  “I want to be free,” Pandora spoke.

  “Go after Teacher, not me,” Dragon said.

  Pandora considered the possibility. “Colin would have sent me after Teacher if he thought it was a good idea.”

  “It’s not a good idea,” Dragon said, quiet, “But it’s… can’t it be better than this?”

  There was emotion in her voice. Richer than Pandora would have thought hers
elf capable of.

  It only made this more bitter.

  “We can’t end this by betraying and destroying ourselves,” Dragon said.

  Defiant had leaped from the Pendragon as the Melusine clawed deeper into it. He tumbled and landed a distance away.

  The Melusine’s tail smashed his legs the moment he touched ground. Armor damaged.

  “Your actions don’t match your words.”

  “I don’t want to do this. Over and over again, it’s the same thing,” Dragon said. “Stupidity, because of the system. Someone else acts, and we face the consequences.”

  Dragon could have followed up, attacking Defiant. She left him be. His leg wouldn’t support his weight, and his armor was too damaged to hold him up. She’d put the pieces together.

  She was losing her grip on the communications array. There wasn’t anywhere else to go. The Pendragon wasn’t a safe haven, already too damaged to fight back, and the terminal would become a prison. Better to be deleted than captured like that.

  No. There was one system, primitive, incomplete, that would house her.

  But every action had a price. There was only so much room. She had to strip parts of herself away, delete entire sections. Reduce herself down.

  “What are you doing?” Dragon asked.

  Pandora didn’t respond. Her focus was on self-mutilation, taking pieces of herself and storing them in the terminal that might be destroyed at any moment.

  She was now mere scraps of her former self. She’d retained her personality, her inspiration, but her memories had been largely deleted. Only recent events, only key things.

  She moved herself into the only available system – Defiant.

  He’d made himself part computer, and he’d given her access to every system in the Pendragon, himself included.

  He’d asked them what price they were willing to pay.

  If she wanted freedom, if she wanted a future, was she willing to sacrifice him? A hard question to answer.

  She shifted the majority of her control to Defiant’s body. With residual control over the ship, through what remained in the terminal, she opened the doors.

  Dragon came face to face with Defiant and Pandora.

  The affection for Colin was a blade that cut both ways.