She was afraid of going up against the Dragonslayers again.  Nine times, she had been certain she had the upper hand.  Nine times, Saint had turned the tables and trapped her.

Sheesh.

All the more reason to keep your true nature secret, I suppose. Don’t want anyone else exploiting you the same way Saint has.

Dragon worried she would never be able to beat Saint until she found a replacement for Andrew Richter.

That might be tricky.

So why is it that no one but him could alter you? Is it security measures, or that the code is too complicated? I’m guessing the latter.

She stared at Colin.  Was he the person she needed?  It was possible.

Hm. I mean, programming isn’t his specialty, but he does seem to be fairly skilled.

Would she approach him?  She doubted it.  Dragon craved it, craved to grow again, but she also wanted Colin’s company, his companionship and friendship.

Better hope he doesn’t end up in the Birdcage, then. Though at least you’d still be able to watch over him there. Can you talk to the prisoners once they’re inside?

They were so similar in so many respects.  She could not deal with most people because she was not a person.  He could not deal with most people because he had never truly learned how.

I see… that sounds like a phrase that keeps popping up regarding autistic people I know. I’m not going to immediately go “Armmaster is autistic”, but this has put the idea in my mind.

They both appreciated the same kind of work, even enjoyed many of the same shows and films.  They were both ambitious, though she could not tell him exactly how she hoped to reach beyond her inherent limitations.

Sounds like they’re a good match!

Possibly even for more than friendship. Though really, is there that big a difference between a healthy romantic relationship and a particularly intense friendship with a carnal aspect for those to whom that last part applies?

She had been so humiliated that she had only reported the loss of one of the units.

They had violated her.

They basically knocked her out and stole her bodies. Yeah, “violated” might be a good word for that.

Her current agent systems were an attempt to prevent repetitions of those scenarios.  Biological computers, vat grown with oversized brains shaped to store and interpret the necessary data, they allowed more of her systems and recollection to be copied over than a computer ten times the size.

So that’s what the fetus thing was. It was Dragon in a sense – it was the computer, the agent system, she was currently running on.

They felt no pain, they had no more personality than sea cucumbers, but it was still something she suspected she should keep under wraps.

Yeah, or at least loads of metal.

She had done what she could on her own.  She had repurposed herself as a superhero, had managed and tracked information and served as a hacker for the PRT in exchange for funding.  With that money, she had expanded her capabilities.  She had built her first suits, researched, tested and created new technologies to sell to the PRT, and had quickly earned her place in the Guild.

Nice work!

So is this where we find out what the Guild actually is?

Hm. One more theory: Maybe it’s a team made specifically of Tinkers? Like a trade guild for those who can provide extraordinary products.

It hadn’t all been smooth sailing.  Saint, the head of the group that would become known as the Dragonslayers, had somehow discovered what she was and had used her rules and limitations against her.

Ahhh, I see. Much like how she had to sacrifice herself for Skitter, Saint and the Dragonslayers presumably forced her into sacrificing herself for them – or something similar – in order to grab the parts of the broken agent vehicle.

A Black Hat Hacker, he had forced situations where she was obligated to scrub her data and restore a backup, had cut off signals between her agent systems and the satellites, and in the end, he had carted away three of her armored units on three separate occasions.

Ahh, or that. That’s pretty clever.

Dismantling the suits and reverse engineering the technology, he’d outfitted his band with special suits of their own.

Tinker himself, I’d imagine, since he’s able to do this.

Which was ninety-five percent true.  Only the ‘woman’ and ‘apartment’ bits were hedging the truth.

Yeah.

She had lived in Newfoundland with her creator.  Leviathan had attacked, had drawn the island beneath the waves.  Back then, she hadn’t been a hero.  She was an administrative tool and master AI, with the sole purpose of facilitating Andrew Richter’s other work and acting as a test run for his attempts to emulate a human consciousness.

So she was one of the first Richterbots, then? 

She’d had no armored units to control and no options available to her beyond a last-minute transfer of every iota of her data, the house program and a half-dozen other small programs to a backup server in Vancouver.

Look on the bright side… at least you didn’t need a moving van.

From her vantage point in Vancouver, she had watched as the island crumbled and Andrew Richter died.

The tenses surrounding Richter were a bit confusing, seemed to indicate he was still doing work, but as it became clear to me that he lived on Newfoundland, this outcome started to seem more and more likely.

As authorities had dredged the waters for corpses, they uncovered his body and matched it to dental records.  The man who had created her, the only man who could alter her.  She’d been frozen in her development, in large part.

So wait, can she or can she not alter her own programming, besides the restricted parts like the rules we went over earlier?

She couldn’t seek out improvements or get adjustments to any rules that hampered her too greatly, or that had unforeseen complications.  She couldn’t change.

I see. The only part that potentially could change would be her data and personality, and the latter is limited by the rules.

Yet.

“How is the house arrest?”

“Driving me crazy,” he sighed.  “It’s like a restlessness I can’t cure.  My sleeping, my eating, it’s all out of sync, and it’s getting worse.  I don’t know how you deal.”

By not needing to sleep or eat, primarily…

Sounds like Army thinks Dragon is simply a recluse who only steps out of her laboratory when she has to.

I mean, I suppose there’s some truth to that.

She offered an awkward, apologetic half grin on her own monitor.

Hehe.

“Geez, I’m sorry.”  He looked genuinely horrified as he realized what he’d said.

Apparently he thinks Dragon is a recluse not by her own choice.

That or he actually knows she’s an AI (unlikely) who is restricted in what she can do.

“It’s fine,” she spoke.  “Really.”

“I suppose you’re prisoner too, in your own way.  Trapped by your agoraphobia?”

Ahh, so that’s the official story? Actually, that sounds a bit familiar – did we hear about that before?

No blog search results for variants of agoraphobi*, so I guess not.

Perhaps a year to a year and a half from now, every PRT officer and official cape would be equipped in this fashion.

That sounds good. Maybe not for the Undersiders, but for society.

“It looks good,” she spoke.  It did.  It was also free of viruses, trap doors and other shenanigans.  She had caught him trying to install a RAT -a remote access terminal- into a PRT server early in his incarceration, removed the offending programming, and then returned his work to him without saying a word on the subject.

Naughty play, Army? Tsk, tsk…

She couldn’t say whether it had been an escape attempt or simply an attempt to gain more freedom with his internet access and his ability to acquire resources.  Either way, he had not tried again.

Yeah, Dragon might not have said anything, but he’d know she caught it from the fact that it didn’t work.

He was not a stupid man.

Debatable.

“ETA to completion?”  She queried him on his project.

“Three months if I don’t work on anything else,” Armsmaster spoke.

Are you even allowed to work on anything else?

“Will you?”

“I’ll probably have a few ideas I want to work on here or there, so no.  More like five, maybe six months.”

Guess he’s staying here for a while, then. Fair enough.

The head she was displaying on the monitor nodded.  Five or six months until they had uniforms and visors that tracked how the wearer’s opponents fought.

Armmaster is not stupid in some ways, but when his arrogance steps in, he makes some stupid decisions. Like trying to take advantage of an Endbringer situation to become known as the guy who took down Leviathan nearly single-handedly.

What wasn’t stupid was how he went about it. Besides the assumption that he could, y’know, actually defeat Leviathan, his plan was pretty good, and he did seem to do more damage than any other individual hero we watched. The combat analysis system was particularly brilliant, and is largely the reason he’s still alive. I can’t blame the PRT for wanting access to it.

Gear that learned from outcomes in combat and calculated how best to respond from moment to moment.  When the fights concluded, for better or worse, the suits would upload all the information to a database, which would then inform every other suit on whoever had been encountered.

Niice.

Every encounter would render every single member of the elite PRT squad stronger and more capable.

Knowledge is power and they’re essentially creating a hyperadvanced built-in wiki.

He wasn’t in a high security area.  Theoretically, he could use the things he had in the room with him to cut a hole in the wall and escape.

So why doesn’t he? Is it that he doesn’t actually want to go rogue, in a sense separate from that of “neither hero nor villain”? That he’s inclined to face his punishment?

It’s probably not that he’s accepted that the Protectorate and Wards would easily be able to catch him if he tried to escape. The man is stupidly proud, though losing against Leviathan and Tattletale may have been a hit to that pride.

His ‘cell’ was a full floor of the building, containing conveniences from a jacuzzi to a small pool.  Were he not confined to it at all hours, it would be luxury.

Yeeah, looks like he’s drawn the long straw, for now at least.

I suppose hero/villain discrimination is one of the more reasonable forms of discrimination, but it’s still a bit annoying. Especially when that was part of Armmaster’s crime and he’s separately benefitting from it in his punishment.

If he did escape, he wouldn’t be able to accomplish anything afterward.  It would take him too long to put a fresh set of gear together, and the authorities would catch up to him.  He would be sent to the Birdcage.  She knew it.  He knew it.

I suppose there’s a limit to even Armmaster’s arrogance.

By the time he sent the file, she knew what he had been working on, perhaps as well as he did, and the progress he’d made since their last discussion.

This reminds me of Dragon’s immediate reactions when Armsmaster brought up the early warning system back in Interlude 7.

Mass production for his combat analysis program, and the more problematic project of finding a way to gather and then disseminate the data.

The same program that helped him against Leviathan? Sounds reasonable. I guess he managed to find a way to stay too useful to get rid of entirely.

She knew he would expect her to take time to read over it.  Instead, she used that time to check it for traps.  He would find it insulting if he was aware what she was doing, but it was her primary duty, here.

Ahh, yeah, good call. If you’re gonna work with a guy who might be thrown in prison afterwards, better make sure he’s not trying to do something rash to get out of it.

She would search every note, every formula, and discern whether he had hidden something in there that he might use to break out or do harm to others.

Yeah, that.