Author: Krixwell Jace

A doofus.
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It was irritating, but at least she was free to think idly.

She didn’t enjoy this.  What was one supposed to call a father who, with his newborn child fresh out of the womb, severs the tendons of her arms and legs, performs a hysterectomy and holds his hand over her nose and mouth to ensure she suffers brain damage?

…holy fuck.

Did that act as Dragon’s trigger event? Did she get her powers as a newborn, and end up staying that age physically? Did her father make her into what she is… whatever she is, as an experiment?

The answer was obvious enough.  A monster.

Yeah.

Yet she was all too aware that the man who had brought her into this world had done very much the same thing, had done worse, and she was supposed to be grateful just for being brought into the world.

Who the fuck is this man? We’ve heard about him for all of three paragraphs and I already want someone to punch him in the dick, hard.

It chafed, grated, however strange it was for an artificial intelligence to feel such irritation.

Alright, confirmation. Nice.

So was that an elaborate metaphor, then? For a programmer limiting the abilities of his program?

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No corruption, everything in working order.  Core system restored.  Loading…

■

I’m guessing this is where we exit the log-style writing? It seems like it’d be hard to tell the whole chapter like that.

To Dragon, it was as if no time had passed from the moment she deployed the Cawthorne rapid response unit and the moment she found herself back in her laboratory.

Interesting. I mean, from the moment the Cawthorne exploded would make sense, but why doesn’t it seem like time passed since the start of the mission?

It was a bittersweet thing.  She was always a little afraid she would not come back when she died, so there was definite relief.  But there was also a great deal of hassle involved.

Yeeah, even if she’s not entirely virtual, there’s definitely some degree of integration going on. Maybe the fetus thing was Dragon after all?

A quick check verified she’d successfully restored from her backup.  She set background processes to handle the peripheral checks and redundancies.

She certainly seems to be virtual, but she also “found herself back in her laboratory”.

Until the checks were complete, safeguards would prevent her from taking any action beyond the limits of her core drive.  She couldn’t take any notes, work on her projects, check the priority targets or converse with anyone for the seven to nine minutes the checks took.

I guess maybe that means she has a main robot body?

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Signal terminated for 30 minutes and 5 seconds.  Restoring core system from backup NXDX-203 from time 4:45am on date June 4th of year 2011.

Oh shit.

I think we’re following Dragon.

Or maybe one of her systems, which would be an unusual but interesting choice, reminiscent of Interlude 4. It’s also possible that there’s no difference between those options, but that’s a pet hypothesis with just about no actual evidence. Either way, if we are following Dragon directly or indirectly, this is probably where we find out for sure.

Restoring…  Complete.

Checking knowledge banks…  Complete.
Checking deduction schema… Complete.
Checking longterm planning architecture… Complete.

Not gonna lie, though, this sounds like the system is putting Dragon back together, thirty minutes after her sacrifice earlier in the Arc.

Another thing we might learn something about in this chapter is what the fuck that fetus thing was. Maybe we won’t learn that much about it, and if the chapter continues being written like a log, what we do learn might be a bit obscured, but a few, difficult-to-read hints are better than nothing.

Checking learning chunk processor… Complete.
Checking base personality model… Complete.
Checking language engine… Complete.
Checking operation and access nodes… Complete.

This is all sounding like stuff an AI would have.

Checking observation framework… Complete.
Checking complex social intelligence emulator… Complete.
Checking inspiration apparatus… Complete.

An advanced AI. Inspiration apparatus is especially interesting considering Dragon’s nature as a Tinker.

Interlude 10.5 (Bonus)

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…alright, so that’s how we’re doing this now. For those keeping track, the Interlude numbers so far, in order: 1, 2, 3, 3½, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8, 10, 10.5… Well, I’m sure he’ll figure out how he wants to do this eventually. 😛

Anyway, hi! It’s time to read some more Worm!

Last time, we followed Regent as he showed us his true colors. The words “holy shit” summarize that experience pretty well.

This time, my primary suspect is Imp, in which case we’ll probably learn more about how she came to be an Undersider and what using her power is like. If it’s not her, it can be just about anyone else, so I think I’ll leave it at that this time.

Let’s just jump in and see how off-the-mark I am! 🙂

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So for some reason, a browser reboot put my Worm tab back to Interlude 8b. As I hovered over the “next chapter” link to start working my way forward to the chapters I’m supposed to be at, I noticed that the url for Sentinel 9.1 says “cell-9-1” instead – I guess Arc 9 got renamed at some point? (The url for Sentinel 9.2 says “sentinel-9-2”, so it probably happened early.)

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Interlude 10a is one of the most infamously controversial chapters among the fandom, with reactions to it going all the way from “Bully for Regent! Finally that bitch got what she deserved” to “Regent is the most horrifingly evil monster in all of fiction and I wish he dies in a nuclear fire”. Either way it is often considered one of Wildbow’s finest pieces of writing. Your bolded “holy shit” response did not disappoint, but could you expand a bit more on your emotional reaction to the chapter?

I can absolutely see how this would be a true base breaker. I’m closer to the “horrifyingly evil” side, I think, though not quite that extreme – he’s not the most horrifyingly evil, nor do I necessarily wish death on him (that takes a lot).

But it’s hard to ignore the fact that what he did was supremely fucked up (even if he was bluffing about actually going through with it if Sophia stayed in town), and if there’s anyone who deserves the treatment Sophia got, it’s not her. She’s a horrible person, sure, but she’s a petty one – she deserved retribution, but the one Regent gave her was disproportionate, especially if it was only for the specific crime of fucking with his teammate.

I think one of the primary emotions I had during the climactic scene was one of disbelief. Not in the story, but in Regent, shock that he actually seemed to be going this far, that kind of thing. Wildbow really did a good job with revealing the true extent to which Heartbreaker fucked up Regent’s morals.

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So I don’t really get why you’re doing the tw thing cause anyone who’s finished Worm probably doesn’t have any left (jk lol), but with that said, if you’re doing them you might want to give post #169967097234 (the one about Regent having sex with bodies he’s controlling) a tw: rape cause that’s one of the more horrific forms of rape out there, even if fictional :p

Yeah, good point. I kind of glossed over that fact when I learned about that, though it did occur to me.

It does cross my mind from time to time that people who would read this blog would generally be well aware of, and usually okay with, the upcoming triggers. I think the main reason I’m still doing trigger warnings nonetheless is that the posts might end up getting shown to someone outside the fandom by accident, such as by them showing up in a sitewide search for a phrase that shows up in the post.