ic Crash and Burn

[Poncho]

Mid October, 2024, Emerald City

 

There had been a rash of car crashes and accidents on the road lately.

 

Over the last week, it had happened enough that news was reporting on the sudden surge of automobile accidents.

 

The police were repeatedly reminding people to be careful when driving, basically every news program included a five minute speech from the police chief. Look both ways, don't look at your phone, keep the radio turned down, always be aware of others.

 

It didn't really seem to be helping though. Crashes were still constantly occurring, hourly or even faster. Heroes around the city were going almost from accident to accident, as much as EMTs, trading shifts to constantly make sure none of the crashes got out of hand.

 

It had been almost 8 days of this; exhaustion was nearing it's peek.

 

And then the Kessler Industrial Technology Building that the Emerald Spider had been in a few weeks ago, repaired and functioning, replaced all it's adds for a few seconds with a blinking green spider symbol. It went back to adds for a moment, then flashed with the spider again.

 

Someone was requesting a meeting with the Emerald Spider on top of the skyscraper.

[Tiffany Korta]

Emerald Spider

 

Other people took vacation time to go somewhere nice, maybe visit friends or family, Peri was using it to rescue people from car accidents. She'd gotten pretty good at balancing work and patrolling, with naps and snacks as needed. Every noodle and hotdog stand in the city had been visited, with her taking a few seconds to chat and always paying before moving on with her work. In fact the few chances she'd had to check social media were her rescuing people from cars or at various stands buying food.

 

She'd almost missed the "Spider" Signal, the small child she'd just scooped off the road helpfully pointed out for her (between going whee! and enjoying the ride). After setting them down and making sure everyone was safe, she took to the air on a quantum thread swinging towards the building. She made good time to the roof, despite having to quickly stop for a few more accidents on the way!

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

It was not particularly surprising that it was Joseph on the top of the building. He looked much more like a Silicon Valley tech CEO now, even though he wasn't the CEO of KessKorp obviously. A long sleeve turtleneck in black under a tan blazer and slacks, he had a Bluetooth headset in one of his ears that he was talking into, but when he realized the Spider was approaching, he changed his talk of whoever he was talking to.

 

"Look, I'll call you back, okay. I've got someone here who can handle it. Don't worry about it." then he turned off the headset.

 

"Emerald Spider! Quite a...not so lovely day, in our fair twin cities, yes? Can't say I'm a fan of having to play Twisted Metal on my way to and from work." he always had a calm, cheerful attitude about him, even when he was clearly stressed, though he could be pushed. The information folder was expanded. "I know you and all the other Emerald City heroes have been working quite hard on this little situation. And it just so happens that after the last week of investigation, I've figured out exactly what's going on here...kind of." That was a little vague there. "Suffice to say, KessKorp may have a significant...let's say responsibility. To assist in clearing up this issue. I am more than willing to explain what is going on, if you're willing to help." He specifically hadn't asked for secrecy on the matter. Was that because he didn't think he could get her to promise that, or because he didn't care?

[Tiffany Korta]

Emerald Spider

 

Joseph might have been one of the better ones, but he was still a corporate type and hence everything had to be filtered through an annoying level of corporate speak. Having worked for a literal evil corporation Peri had a fight her instinct to just shut this all down. But if this was going to stop the madness going on in Emerald City then it was worth biting her tongue, to a point at least...

 

"Not to be rude..." she said, being slightly rude "But it's been a long day... long week really! So if you could cut to the part where you explain how we stop this, then after stopping it, and maybe naps we can talk about corporate responsibility and mutual back-scratching."

 

Superheroes, like Engineers (Peri having been both) could get away with a lot if people thought they were useful, but she was aware that there were limits and she was probably straddling the line here!

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

"Fine fine, don't worry." he raised his hands in mock surrender. "I didn't mean anything bad by it. Sometimes a little humor can go a long way, right? Just trying to be cheerful."  he smiled again. 

 

"So, here's what I know. Around the time that the wrecks started happening, I was running inventory on some of our projects. And one came up empty, so I have been investigating since then, figuring out if it was connected. And it just so happened it was. I had my suspicions but given my status and how I like my job, I didn't want to move rashly."

 

"That's a long winded explanation to what I know. The actual process is this; Kessler Industrial Technologies has a government contract to develop a new armor and camaflouge plating. They wanted the next generation of spy planes and drones, a successor to the SR-71 Blackbird, basically. We had a few different prototypes, and since it's supposed to work at sea level as well, we coated several cars in the paint and would take them out to drive. Only at night, of course, and always with very careful consideration to avoid accidents. Just some general testing to make sure the camo and radar invisibility and all the fancy bells and whistles worked. And they did. We had a high model electric sports car completely kitted out. Invisible, basically silent, tough enough to take any collision head on and keep driving..." Where this was going seemed pretty obvious.

 

"A week ago, a different project- a military co-pilot and drone management system- started a cascade failure due to a programming error. The programmer attempted to dump the failure before it got fully into the system, but it just shunted into the fleet of cars instead. At which point the system activated and the cars fled, invisibly, into the city proper. So now there's a fleet of invisible, armored cars that are immune to radar detection being driven by a wide ranging drone management system racing around the city. With the camera systems installed on current cars and their own programming, the wrecks are being caused partially by the safety features in cars being aware of something approaching but not being able to confirm what it is, and the cars themselves bashing into things and sending them off track. They were hoping the failure state would eventually lock the cars, but obviously it's been a week and they haven't stopped yet, so I think they're going to be going for awhile yet. And since they were hoping that would happen, they wanted to not tell me so they could retrieve the cars without me knowing. But now I know. So now I'm telling you."

[Tiffany Korta]

Emerald Spider

 

"And I'm sure some senior engineer called it the KIT 2000, so they could call it KITT!" obviously she was self-aware enough that her set-up was called the SPDR Rig to get Spider, though in her defence she hadn't named it only inherited the term

 

If it hadn't already caused injuries and several sleepless days, she would have laughed at the ridiculousness of the thing. And it had to be serious for the guy to swallow his pride and tell her about the whole situation. The whole thing was probably classified well above the level that even her mother would have earned.

 

"Tell me at least that you have a shutdown signal..." she was sure she'd played a mission like that on one of the few days she had time to play video games "... and a way to track them down?"

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

"Haha, well...I didn't ask for a name, because I'm going to try and decommission this entire drone AI as soon as it gets back under wraps...but as for a tracker, well...let's say the people making the camouflage probably did their job a bit too well. You're going to have to get real close before any of the technology we have will catch them... which probably works for the best, because you're going to have to get even closer to actually shut them down."

 

He produced a flash drive and a handful of small mechanical devices, about the size of a lighter.

 

"The drive has the scanning program. Once you're in...I dunno, maybe a hundred feet? maybe 50. You'll be able to at least hear them, hopefully see them too if you can get it set up right with your suit. Once you're there, you just need to hook one of these devices onto the hood. It should shut down the engine. You don't have to leave it on, thankfully; once the car shuts down, pick it up and you can use it on the next one. But these three are the only ones I have, so if you lose them all...I don't know how long it'll take me to make new ones. We have serial and scan codes on all the cars, so we'll be able to track how man you've taken down. If we stay in contact, I can give you a running tally." he explained, frowning.

 

"Though, I have to also note...Some of these cars might be more built up then just a regular car, so be careful. Weapon systems, high top speeds, defensive-counter measures...I can't tell you what you might run into since we don't know which cars you're running into until you've already shut them down."

[Tiffany Korta]

Emerald Spider

 

Peri had some doubt about all this, her previous experience showed that somehow they'd come up on top of all this. But time was a pressin' so she held out her hand to take the flash drives.

 

"Anything nasty on these that I need to know? I might need to tweak these to help find the drone, especially if they have some kind of learning algorithms!" she sighed and added, "Please tell me that they don't have advanced learning algorithms?"

 

Considering her week these drones were probably packing much, much worse than she imagined!

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

"Well, to be honest. Each of the machines is a state of the arc tech system. Like I said, I'd expect automated turrets, electro webbing, smoke screens, maybe even missiles." Jacob said, frowning.

 

"Though there's one I'd be the most scared about. You know Transformers right? Well...let's say Nemesis Prime happens to be out there causing some issues...So if you start getting punched by a giant invisible transformer, uh...good luck." he smiled a little.

 

"As for those things; you can do whatever you want with them. They should only be tuned to shut down the Drone AI, so as long as you leave that function alone, you'll not have to worry about them coming alive and shorting out your suit or anything, if that helps at all. They aren't 'smart' devices or anything; I'm the kind of programmer that keeps no technology except a printer in my house and a gun to shoot the printer if it makes a weird sound."

[Tiffany Korta]

Emerald Spider

 

"Was more a GI Joe kind of girl, but the point stands! I'd ask for danger money, but it seems for some reason I'm not on the payroll! So wish me luck instead...!"

 

She ran and leapt off the building, dropping out of sight for a minute before swinging up and away on a Quantum thread. She'd been formulating a rough plan and time spent swinging through the air only helped, it might not work but it was worth a pop at least. She was making for one of the big broadcast towers, by borrowing just a tiny bit of their bandwidth she should be able to track the drone in (almost) real-time. Then she could work out what order to carry out this quest!

 

Then again what was that saying about plans and reality? 

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

Hanging off the broadcast tower, the scanner and the drone slowly started to synchronize. It expanded with each bounce; the range expanding each time it landed back at the tower the Emerald Spider was on and bouncing back off.

 

One signal.

 

Three signals.

 

Six signals.

 

Six different machines? That's what it seemed to indicate. After a moment, names started to appear underneath them.

 

Nemesis was obvious, Jacob had said that one would be there. The others...

 

Warthog, Speed Racer, Speed Buggy, Mystery Machine, KITT.

 

Each driving wildly about the city, causing mayhem and havoc. Would they be aware of each other when the Spider began taking them out? It was a possibility, but right now, Speed Racer was about to- by the Spider's check, about to start careening through the Emerald City University Campus. Which was almost certainly not a good place for an invisible, super fast car.

[Tiffany Korta]

Emerald Spider

 

As the scanner did its stuff she got her Spider Phone and sent a quick update to those heroes she knew. Unlike the bigger cities, superheroes were rare enough that everyone more or less knew each other. And that meant they could share information relatively painlessly.

 

She gave a quick version of events, leaving Kessler out for now, including where the car was right now! With some luck, one or two might be sorted out before she had to worry about them, but right now, it was triage—deal with the biggest threat first!

 

Leaping into the air and firing off a quantum thread she quickly made her way to the University district and a showdown with this Speed Racer!

 

[Poncho]

(GM Post)

 

Beleaguered, tired superheroes responded to the call by Emerald Spider. It was nice to at least have an explanation for what was going on, even if it raised more questions. It gave a renewed source of momentum to know it wasn't people willingly disregarding the safety of their fellow man for no reason. So when Spider ended her warnings, it seemed that morale was up, at the least. 

 

But solving the issue would be on her.

 

Emerald City University was packed with students. It was a walkable campus, which meant cars were rarer, and on school dorms meant no risk of accidents coming and going to school. At least in theory. But putting theory into practice was a premise of many colleges, and Speed Racer was about to put that theory to the test!

 

As the Spider got there, she could already see several cars knocked over, the shell shocked inhabitants slowly crawling out, some yelling at each other in confusion. Who would think an invisible car had sideswiped someone, causing them to careen into you? No one reasonably sane. 

 

The little tracker continued to beep, now that the Spider was getting closer to the car. She couldn't see it, but she could see the beeps. 

 

And she coule see the path. The innocent pedestrian in the crosswalk, about to be flattened by a speeding, invisible car. 

 

What's a Spider to do?