Prisoner 600, Bakuda, was in the care of Glaistig Uaine, for better or worse.

Eyyy!

She’s alive!

Bakuda had been a difficult placement, and Dragon had eventually condemned herself to putting the crazed bomber in the cell block run by the self-professed faerie.

Pfft. I suppose it only makes sense that some would believe themselves to be mythical beings when given this kind of power.

As Dragon had predicted, Bakuda had died soon after her incarceration.

Oh.

Wait.

She died, but she’s currently in the care of Glaistig Uaine? Resurrection powers?

If that’s the case, it’s gotta be resurrection powers that don’t require the presence of the corpse.

If it hadn’t been at Lung’s hands, it would likely have been Bakuda’s own fault, some crazed recklessness.  The real tragedy was that others had died in the ensuing spree as Lung had rampaged through the prison.  Prisoners 304, 2 and 445 had perished at Lung’s hands.

Damn it, Lung.

Also, I suppose the corpse comment doesn’t necessarily apply if Lung is alive. But it doesn’t sound like Glaistig Uaine resurrected anyone else, so it honestly sounds more like Glaistig Uaine is taking care of the corpse for some reason. Or maybe I’m misreading something.

She regretted what had happened to Paige, and that just made her angrier at her own creator.  Rules, yet again.  Dragon had to obey the authorities, even if she didn’t agree with them.

I see… that’s a bit riskier than the other safety precautions, should the authorities turn bad.

If a despot seized control of the local government, Dragon would be obligated to obey and enforce the rules that individual set in place, no matter how ruthless they were.  It was a spooky thought.

Exactly. On this particular point, I agree with Dragon.

Richter had been so shortsighted!  The despot scenario wasn’t entirely impossible, either.  

Yeah, no, no it isn’t.

There were parahumans of all types out there.  Who was to say one wouldn’t find out his power involved being loved by everyone that saw them or heard their voice?

And some more recent events have made it more believable that such a takeover could happen in the States even without parahumans.

Prisoner 605, Murderbeam, was feared in the outside world, but he was finding the inhabitants of the Birdcage were not so impressed with him.

Well, that’s a pretty straightforward name. If this guy’s not a Blaster, I don’t know who is.

He would likely not survive the week.  She was disappointed.  She had hoped Prisoner 550 would reach out to Murderbeam and give the fellow block resident some support.

Welp.

Either Murderbeam had been too proud to accept it, or social pressures had deterred Prisoner 550.  Now that he was within the Birdcage, she was limited in her options.

Yeah, I guess there’s not much she can do.

Prisoners 604 and 603, Knot, were happily gorging themselves on food in Cell Block Y.  

Wait, are they both collectively named Knot, like may have been the case with Zigzag? Are they perhaps… Siamese twins connected by a hand, with the ability to turn their merged arms into a rope? Nahh, probably not.

Despite their cognitive impairment, they had fallen into a role as enforcer and heavy hitter for Prisoner 390, leader of their cell block.  Prisoner 390 had had a son – she could only hope that he would find some similar affection for Knot, with their childlike mentality.

I see. Definitely sounds like Knot are connected in some way.

Prisoner 602, Lizard Prince, was dead.  Not everyone could survive the Birdcage, sadly.

rip

I like the name.

There had been no ideal place to put the boy, where he would be protected, find kindred souls or join a group.  She had contacted the PRT with the news, and his victims had been notified, but nothing further had come out of it.  

I guess that’s just how it goes sometimes.

In an indirect way, putting the boy in the Birdcage had been an execution writ.

I mean… when isn’t it, really? Like, maybe some of them can get satisfying lives in there, but they’re never getting out (unless that mass break I’ve been shakily predicting ever since I first heard of the place happens). How is a life sentence in a place like this truly different from a death sentence?

She read the house program’s logs, keeping an eye out for deviations and notable events.  Nothing pressing.  As was her routine, she checked on the last month’s additions to the Birdcage.

I think it’s time to find out what happened with Bakuda and Lung. If Dragon bothers to tell us, that is.

Prisoner 606, Ramrod.  Now member of Cell Block X’s inner circle.  To be expected.

Ah, right, I forgot I was going to go back and check Bakuda, Lung and Canary’s prisoner numbers up against the 606-person figure. Wasn’t the highest of them 603? Hang on…

No, Paige was #601. So we’ve got five new additions, then.

The name Ramrod sounds familiar, but blog search doesn’t find anything.

She’d placed him there with the idea that he would become just that.  His psych evaluation from the courtroom suggested he was a very laid back and unruffable individual.  It was her intention that he would have a calming influence on the others in his block.

That sounds reasonable.

Her attention flickered over the various video feeds from the Baumann Parahuman Containment Center.  She had one of Andrew Richter’s programs babysitting the building, but it was crude.

That’s not a nice thing to say about your baby sibling.

She couldn’t reproduce in any fashion, so she’d taken Andrew Richter’s existing work and modified it. It was the same program that had monitored and managed his house and workshop, and she’d set it the task of monitoring that building where six hundred and six of the most dangerous parahumans on the planet were bottled up together.

Ah, I see. Sounds like a bit more than it was designed to handle.

So does Richter not need this for his own house anymore? He’s not dead, right?

The house program didn’t have a personality.  It couldn’t keep her company or sympathize with her over her frustrations.  It still reduced her workload.

Ah, I guess that means she can use it without disabling the copy at Richter’s house.

Her creator was named Andrew Richter.  He was a tinker with no codename, but he did good things.

Well, that sounds good.

From his apartment in a town called Deer Lake he’d created programs and set them loose.

Is that a real town?

Also, sounds like he’s not explicitly working with the PRT, then, just… letting the AIs loose, with precautions taken to ensure they don’t cause a robopocalypse. I guess no more than one or two people in the PRT, one of them possibly being Legend, ever found out Dragon was one.

His programs gathered information and disrupted computers to interfere with criminals of all types.  They helped with research and complex programs.  They emptied the bank accounts of criminal organizations and donated those funds to charities, through proxies that made every donation appear legitimate.

Huh, neat.

For this, she respected him.

She knew it was paranoid and peevish, but she resented him more because she respected him, because she knew she had probably been programmed and designed to be the type of individual who looked up to people like Andrew Richter.

Hm, yeah, that might be the case. Another thing that makes sense – you’d want your creations to share your values, and you’d want them to not turn on you.

Not that anyone knew who or what she was.

That’s what I thought. Everyone we’ve seen talks and acts as if Dragon is a normal parahuman being, to the extent parahumans are normal, so I didn’t think that many people, if any at all, actually knew what was up if she actually was virtual.

Humans were somewhat skittish on the subject of artificial intelligences.

Which is exactly why all those limitations are a thing.

She understood why.  She read books and watched movies, rather enjoyed both.  Fiction was rife with examples of corrupted or crazed artificial intelligences.

Yeah, it’s a pretty common trope.

It’s stupid, she thought.  Her maker had watched too many movies, had been paranoid on the subject.

Perhaps, but at the very least the limitations, once explained, might make other humans more open to the idea.

And the tragedy was, the entire world was suffering for it.  She wanted to help more people, but she couldn’t.  Not because of inherent limitations, like the ones humans had… but because of imposed limitations.  Her creator’s.

Yeah, fair enough. But think of it this way: You were made in such a way that you could’ve ended up wanting to hurt more people instead, and by the sound of it it’s still possible, though highly unlikely, that you could someday change your mind. That’s why you’re limited. Because an unlimited you could potentially do a lot of harm compared to how much additional help you could be.

And yeah, maybe it isn’t right of us to limit your agency because you might go bad. Maybe that’s like putting someone innocent in prison because they might someday commit a crime. But if you can, isn’t it better to prevent something bad from happening than punishing the culprit afterwards?

These were just a small few of many things the man who had brought her into this world had done to her.  He had tied her hands and crippled her mind.  She knew she was capable of amazing things but he had set limits on her to ensure she thought slowly.

This is less sensible. I mean, sure, in case Dragon had turned out to develop a malicious personality, making her not too fast-paced would make some sense, but why not remove that block later? I mean, the PRT are clearly trusting her.

One possibility, though, is that her creator was not on the PRT’s side, and they’re not working with him.

Faster than an ordinary human, to be sure, but slowly.  Entire fields were denied to her because she was unable to create artificial intelligences herself, and all production of devices had to be handled by her, personally.

Again, these are reasonable precautions to take against an AI who could potentially develop into a malicious entity.

She couldn’t even put together an assembly line production for her creations on her own.  Any attempt made everything grind to a halt.  The only way around it was to delegate to humans.

I see. Dragon comes up with the ideas and blueprints, humans put them together.