The City of the Future (IC)

[Fox]

Dragonfly had to frown, pondering that for a moment. "....change of environment isn't easy," she agreed, thinking back on her own experiences. "But often for the better. Expect it would at least be enough to greatly lower city population. Provide breathing room, lighter traffic, better housing. Technological level is impressive - simulated, cheating, but impressive - to support the population it does, but think I'd go crazy if I lived here. Crazier. Don't deal well with the...crowds. Require personal space." She shrugged, poking at - but being careful not to alter - an incidental bit of code as they passed. "Guess I'd move, if I lived here and had the chance."

[Avenger Assembled]

By Tronik standards, anyway, the area by the closed-down oxygen-scrubbing plant was a ghost town: the industrial spires that reached into the sky here were only about as big as skyscrapers back in Freedom City, and the population of red-uniformed industrial workers and what looked to be non-sentient humanoid robots: the synthezoids Sharl had dropped a few hints about in conversations with Protectron, were only about as densely packed as workers would be in any human industrial district: evidently much of the work in these great factories was done by automation. There wasn't much automation going on at OXYGEN PLANT #324-ZED, though, unless you counted the militia vehicles hovering on the streets outside and the armed, uniformed soldiers standing guard outside in their black body armor and full-face masks. The industrial flitters going hither and yon gave the closed-down plant a wide berth and the walls nearby glowed with RESTRICTED AREA: NO ADMITTANCE.

[Electra]

Miss A took note of the signs as they hopped and floated off the bus, then proceeded to ignore them completely as she headed for the restricted area. This close to a corrupted zone, she was leery of actually clipping any of the soldiers, but a little clever maneuvering allowed her to sneak between two of them and through the gate to the plant. Letting her eyes deliberately unfocus, she stopped seeing the world as Sharl and the inhabitants saw it, and began to look at the pure code that surrounded them. "Getting very glitchy here," she murmured, a bit uneasily. Normally she'd approach this as just a troubleshooting problem, but there were a lot of sentient beings at risk. "Errors like this should be automatically rebooted and corrected. This whole sector may have corrupted backups."

[Fox]

Dragonfly frowned; she'd opted to just go up and over the soldiers, following Miss Americana's example of switching to pure code as they neared the 'bad' parts of the area. She reached out a ghost-like hand and 'pulled' at some of the code, unfurling it a little to get a better look - a cosmetic change, mostly, and not something a gesture was really required for, but intuitive habits are the worst ones to try to break. "Hard to say what rebooting a sector would look like from the outside," she pointed out, scowling at what looked like write errors stacked on top of write errors. "Know how I'd do it, but would have to be built into the base engine...can't be sure what the simulation does to handle that. This is...mmh. Hoping it built up over time. Sudden failure like this would be very bad."

[Avenger Assembled]

Suddenly there was a shift in the code, the arrival of multiple new elements of corrupted and semi-corrupted data. Looking 'back' the way a Tronik citizen might see it; the duo were greeted with what would surely be a terrifying sight: right angles that bent in circular directions, geometry that made no logical sense to the eye, shadows that cast their own light over the black lightstrips that still glowed in the ceiling to either side. No wonder the people of Tronik were so frightened by these places. But the new arrivals were not connected to the warped heart of what had once been a gigantic factory.

"MOVE!" The militia guards were in the full body armor Miss A and Dragonfly were becoming accustomed to; black, shiny plasteel matched by the glowing plasma rifles in their hands: they wore no insignia, for who else would they be in a world that had had no contact with the universe (at least that they knew about) for generations? Despite what passed for military unity, the guards looked scared, their amplified voices strained and their rifles shaking. And no wonder! Their prisoners were a fearsome-looking lot: bodies warped in ways subtle and gross, a man with glowing white eyes accompanied by what looked like a hairy dwarf with too-long fingers, a woman covered in blue body hair helping a man with too many lower limbs slowly hobble along. These were the face of Tronik's mutants.

"Oh no, look at this place! What's going to happen to us here!?" asked a woman with skin turned so transparent you could see the working of bone and muscle underneath, turning to plead with her captors.

In response, the guards fired back, "No talking!" It looked like a group of two dozen guards were escorting half that many mutants. "We know some of you can spread it by voice!" Now there were several rifles facing the speaker. "You will be given food, water, and supplies. In return, you will stay here and keep your taint from spreading to others!" The guards were noticeably not coming anywhere near the warped areas of the factory, and indeed were staying close to the still-safe areas by the doors.

[Electra]

Miss A murmured an obscenity, checking her footing as she walked further into the warped building. "We may need to change our plans," she told Dragonfly in a murmur, despite the fact no one could hear them. "Being in such a badly damaged sector is at least as dangerous for programs who are already corrupted as it is for normal programs. We can't let them stay here in this condition." She cracked her knuckles and looked towards her confederate. "It may be time to get our god on. Can you program while projected? If you can patch the building, I think I'm familiar enough with the basic human program layout to stabilize the mutants."

[Fox]

"Mmh." Dragonfly nodded, tilting her head as she regarded the local area's corruption. Almost unconsciously - though not completely unconsciously, because what's the fun in being a god if you don't indulge in some theatrics? - bits of hard light flickered into being around her hands and face, echoing very abstract, disconnected versions of her visor and gauntlets. Not that she really needed the help of her 'tools', but it helped her focus, and this wasn't something she wanted to mess up or take too slowly.

at least the whole building isn't corrupted - pattern-matching - maintain structure - let's see - good floor sample from there - structural code from there - local physics and light model from - .... - local physics from outside and light model from scratch... Bit by bit she put the building back together, a process that was half jigsaw puzzle and half untangling a knot. A piece of wall twisted back into Euclidean space; lightstrips flickered out and then came back on properly, chasing away the physics-defying shadows; the floor slid back into place. It wasn't easy, especially while trying to not mess up anything else in the process, but that only made it all the more fun.

[Avenger Assembled]

As the building began warping and changing around them, everyone began screaming! As well they might, really. It was all a wild confusion of the guards shouting at the mutants to stop, the mutants themselves pleading their innocence, even as the building began warping its way right back to normal all around them. Despite their fear, the militia guards weren't far gone enough to open fire on civilians, even mutants, pleading innocence: instead they watched as the building rearranged itself back to normal around the programs inside. At least until they began to change too...

[Electra]

The first major change the guards probably noticed, after the walls repairing themselves, was the moment all their guns disappeared. This was well-timed, too, since a moment later, the mutants in front of them began to shift as well. Suddenly where there had a man with eight malformed legs, there was a man with two strong ones, where a woman's face was malformed and sloughing away, she was suddenly pretty again.

One at a time, but with commendable speed, Gina searched for the coding errors that had made these people's lives a sudden misery and repaired them, even as the personifications of those codes shouted or screamed in surprise. The dozens of hours she'd spent working with Sharl's program came in very handy now, she knew where to look for the worst of the problems and could slap good code in on top of them. She did accidentally drop Sharl's entire skin code onto the transparent woman, then had to go back and edit out the hair commands, but in general it was not an overly complex batch of edits merely to restore a bunch of physical traits to the factory default settings. The results, however, were quite striking.

[Fox]

"Mmh. Guns. Good catch," Dragonfly complimented, sorting out a final problem where a bit of floor was rather insistently thinking it was a reflective surface. not a floor property - not a material property - ah - light itself - curious design - processing-intensive but very realistic - clever She finished up and turned around to admire Miss Americana's work, taking mental notes on how the life-representing programs and structures seemed to be built. "Have to wonder what they're going to think about this. Panic? Superstition? Not the most flattering place for a temple in our honor, but would make treating mutants easier if they were reliably brought to one place."

[Avenger Assembled]

With their weapons gone and the mutants seemingly cured, the militia guards suddenly didn't seem to know what to do with themselves. While one with uniform markings that probably made him a leader frantically placed a call to headquarters to explain the situation, one suddenly tore off his helmet, staring at the woman who'd until recently had completely transparent skin. "...Mom!?!" Heedless of the others and the shocked response from his own side, he suddenly ran to his mother, weeping, and embraced her; the search for rational explanations and fear of the unknown lost in the joy of the moment. That seemed to break the dam, and suddenly the militiamen were offering rations and help to the recent mutants, all staring in wonder at the reshaped world all around them.

[Electra]

Miss A smiled with satisfaction as she watched the happy reunion and the generally positive response from security. "Looks like they're taking it all right. Good piece of work," she decided, looking around at the restored area and people. "For a quick and dirty code job, anyway. There are a couple more sites like this on the map, I wonder if they all have mutant refugees in them. It might be worth it to try and hit at least those hot spots before we unproject, if you're feeling up to it. I'm still doing well so far."

[Fox]

"Mmh," Dragonfly agreed, a tiny smile flickering across her face as she watched the touching reunion. "Not a perfect solution, but a simple and stable one. Imagine we'll both get better and faster as we fix other areas and mutants. And yes, agreed: we probably should. Not that time-expensive, good results, and if nothing else is likely to lower tensions while we investigate other problems. Feeling plenty up to it - more challenging than exhausting. And likely less tiring to fix from inside the simulation anyway."

[Electra]

"And certainly more gratifying," Miss A agreed with a nod towards the people. "Being able to see firsthand in real time what we're accomplishing is kind of cool, plus if anything goes pear-shaped, we're right there to fix it. The second trouble spot is not too far away, I think we can get there on another one of those hoverbuses." It was much easier to get out of the plant than it had been to get in, now that the ground was stable beneath their feet and all the guards had left their posts.

[Avenger Assembled]

Luckily the security lockout in the militia meant that there were no panics on the street; the remarkable events in the oxygen factory were being handled by the military for the moment and not being broadcast to the civilian population. The ride on the hoverbus went smoothly enough, though the quiet Tronik commuters were somewhat roused to life when what looked like the local version of a soap opera was interrupted by a flicker across the wallscreens. But even that brief interruption didn't last long, and soon enough the two spectral programmers found themselves at their second destination: the hoverbus had taken them all the way to the edge of the island proper, where they could actually make out the alien green sky overhead and the curve of the red sun that forever sat at the horizon. Their target was a warehouse near the edge of the verdigris sea, its boxy shape just like one on Earth, for all that it loomed large enough to hold a supertanker.

Inside, sure enough, once past the militia guards outside, there was a gigantic ship hovering in the grip of powerful magnets. No wonder they'd moved the boat away from the water: it was inside out! The entire structure, as large as a supertanker on Earth, had been completely and almost perfectly inverted by a flip in the structural matrix of its code, leaving it looking like something between an abstract sculpture and a Look Inside drawing. Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, there was no sign of any mutant people: whether they weren't here yet, or had been and gone, there were no damaged people running around. Before they could go to work repairing the ship (since the program fault that had caused the inversion could easily spread through the 'magnetic field' and into the buildings around, it had to be done), something surprising happened: the doors slammed shut behind them. No, not shut: they were gone.

[Fox]

Dragonfly pivoted in place, turning back to frown at the absent entryway. She'd been just about to take a crack at the ship's code when the noise had caught her attention; now she had other priorities, her hard-light constructs flickering back into view around her upper face and lower arms as she glanced over to Miss Americana. "....doors are gone," she observed, rather redundantly. "Trap? Am assuming it's a trap of some kind, anyway. But would imply we're detected and that someone - something? - was able to edit away doors. Don't think I'm...word...'keen' on that idea."

[Electra]

Miss A also turned to look at the doors, her brow furrowing. "WTF?" she said aloud. "There shouldn't be anything here with the consciousness to spring a trap like this," she pointed out, shaking her head. "These people don't know they live in a computer program, they wouldn't think in terms of rewriting the world to change a building. They'd send security forces, if they could even see us. Maybe the inversion is already spreading further than we thought." Still facing the door, she made a square with her thumbs and forefingers, then opened it out into a window of code set in the GUI world. Reaching into the window, she began to manipulate the code, looking for what was causing the problem here.

[Avenger Assembled]

It took Miss Americana only an instant to realize what had happened: a security program had been initiated in the block of code surrounding the building, one designed to encase errant code like she and Dragonfly. Though the program itself was not sentient, putting two and two together gave her four: it was vanishingly unlikely that she or Dragonfly had triggered some automatic defense given how careful they'd been so far. For this to go off, someone had had to trigger it! The lights were all coming on in the building, lightstrip glowing to life that cast the concrete warehouse into a glow as bright as a Freedom City park at high noon on a cloudless day. And then, from a dozen places along the wall, an alien voice boomed!

"quisnam es vos quod quis es vos effectus hic?" Watching as she was, Miss A was able to see the real source of the voice: someone not far away was manipulating the building's wallscreens to speak, as if someone hacking the 'real' world had deigned to speak through a telephone. But this was no hacker; this was someone inside the program.

[Fox]

Dragonfly watched the lights come on with annoyance-tinted caution, glancing around at nothing in particular as the voice spoke. "Don't know what that is...very certain I don't speak it. Suppose I'd be more surprised if I did. Alien systems never have anyone who speaks French, or Russian." She frowned, glancing over at Miss Americana and her digital window. "Thoughts? Could brute force an escape - recent events aside, tempted to believe nothing here could hold either of us, much less both of us together - but may be worth while to find out who or what this is, what they or it wants."

[Electra]

"Lorem tores. Venimus auxilium. Non nocebit," Miss A replied, putting a polite smile on her face. "It's asking who we are and what we're doing here," she told Dragonfly in a low voice. "I don't think this is an automatic security program." Furrowing her brow, she leaned forward and began working more intently in the window of code, trying to run down and reveal whatever was trying to capture them. As she did so, her physical personification became blurry around the edges, starting to reveal hints of something else, some other form beneath it. "Ostende te!" she requested of the program.

[Avenger Assembled]

The voice sharpened and hardened at once, sounding cranky and a little tired. "Ah, you speak the other language...Travelers have come to my city before. They come to observe and to study, as the Centurion promised. Not to change the code! We are already facing a full-on memory crisis and now I have outsiders to deal with!" The owner of the voice appeared first in the code as a rapidly-launching Easter Egg before making an appearance in 'mid-air', hovering above the two women: the figure was a short, stocky man with an old man's body, dressed like any other citizen of Tronik, but in the familiar blue and yellow color scheme of the Centurion. "You have already changed one of my citizens permanently," he said irritably as he glared down at them. "Giving him powers and abilities far beyond those of his fellow citizens. What am I to make of that?" This man was a program too, but he was not like the surrounding code: he was almost completely alien, without even the familiar Lor hardwiring at the edges of Tronik's program.

[Fox]

Dragonfly looked up at the man, tilting her head to the side. 'travelers' - 'we're facing' - Centurian promised...? - 'my citizens' - system administrator? - or similar station - not good at diplomacy - still - professional respect? - best to treat him as I'd want invaders in my system to be treated - good intentions or not

Dragonfly's image twitched, flickering a few large pieces at a time as she rearranged icon back to how she usually projected: she was herself again, if a little more abstract, and her hard-light device stand-ins hiding the better part of her identity. "Didn't...mean to cause trouble. And haven't, that I know of. Trying to fix things."

[Electra]

Miss Americana folded her arms and gave the man a level look, though her mind was racing. "In case you haven't noticed," she pointed out, "everything we've done here has been beneficial to the city and the mainframe. As for your memory crisis, we have a hardware upgrade that will increase your memory capacity by at least fifty percent waiting to come online as soon as we finish inspecting the damage here. And Sharl, well, after he fell out of the city, I had to alter him to be able to survive."

She gave the man a close look. "We were under the impression, however, that this was an entirely automated system, and that none of the sentients were aware of their nature. Who or what are you?"

[Avenger Assembled]

The man rubbed his temples, a look of fatigue on his half-visible face. "It's so hard working here alone," he muttered, "so hard. There were going to be so very many of us, but the Curator betrayed me. He took the others, then scanned me for special study." He landed, and faced the two women squarely. "My name...my name is Leroj Gatz, and I am...I am a very old man." He took off his glasses, and behind them Miss A and Dragonfly could see how old he really was: he looked in his eighties at least, but who knew what that meant here? "Many, many hundreds of years ago, I was the chief scientist in charge of the Tronik neutrino column. When our star began to go nova, my colleagues and I realized we could never hope for help from the rest of the Republic. That was when...that was when I used our technology to contact a creature I had heard of only in legends. A computer with the brilliance and power of an entire world. You know him as the Curator."

[Fox]

Dragonfly nodded, and introduced herself. "Dragonfly. And the Curator - know about him," she grimly added, frowning. "Though don't know much, relatively speaking. Did some research, but surprisingly little reliable information available." She ran through her annoyingly short mental portfolio on the alien entity, tilting her head. "Still, am...surprised you went to him. Desperate measures, I guess. Still. Not sure what your legends were, but seems like an...interesting risk, final-stage sun or not."