Re: Mini-Grand 5103 [Rou'); /home/gbce/.Trash]
07-27-2011, 04:05 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Agent1022.
Current state acquired; offensive capabilities high.
Urist’s body was only a small part of the virus now, a node from which slime oozed and flowed in sickening places. The bearded swordsman’s flickering body lay with one s1dde buried in goo, the other arm still flaililing about without regard to bone structur3 or muscul@ture. Above him, tentacles formed abstract fractal shapes as they tore into the world around. Little self-referential oscillators burrowed their ways into the pirateshiphousecopter, cracking tiles and models into corrupted splrchs . Here and there textures were replaced as slime flowed over them, becoming grey-on-darker-grey checkerboard patterns or little matrices of numbers repeating themselves in trinary loops and functions.
“Dekowin.EXE! I need help!”
Without waiting for an answer, Parsley.EXE ran for the door separating him from his fellow antivirus-
Damocles brought a sharp-edged tentacle in front of him, cleaving the world in half. The scale of the portrapiratecopterhouse was changing frighteningly, along with the rapidly collapsing structure itself – He brought his crossbow to bear and loaded the clip with a fresh breadstick, all the while keeping an eye on the stern of the shiphouse, drifting away – where was Dekowin.EXE? Why didn’t she respond?
Melissa watched with fear vocabulary_addition_fearas more viscous green pseudopodia <font size="1">tentacle?_danger_connotation??-->more_research_needed made their way into a circle around Parsley.EXE, cutting off his retreat. Between them, slime flowed sinuously through the cracks in the metalwoodplastic floorno_model, but ignored her, focusing on the threat at hand.
[P-Parsley?]</font>
Parsley.EXE did not respond, except to unsheathe a blade of bread from its baguette sheath. Then Parsley vanished from view, surrounded by an undulating, rising wall.
Anti-virus program isolated. No achievable escape calculable. Terminate PARSLEY.exe with extreme prejudice.
Urist’s boc]y twitched once more - its bacl[ arcing from its enslimed position, writhing as Damocles moved the goo about it. Without a care for “Urist’s” integrity, the green force flowed forwards, pushing the bod0dy about it. Manipulated by the slime, Uristisis’s broken bodyty turned to face the antivirus with what remained of its visage, and led the charge as the wave poured forward-
She could only look on as the slime pressed in from all sides – arcs of light shone briefly through where the antiviral bread broke the viscous surface. As Parsley.EXE fought, the flashes of data deletion silhouetted his form, frozen in mid-slash or stab.
Little trickles of reasoned argument weaved across her computations like waves of guilt? compassion? she didn’t understand she didn’t know. A little virtual tear programmed itself into existence through subroutines she didn’t know she had, shining with little glimmers of light imperfectly reflected interrupted by the occasional burst of electronic noise. She didn’t understand why, but her visual feed changed and lensed, and she found herself with a strange feeling in the approximate region of her throat, a tightness that seemed to reflect her own confusion and loneliness-
Absorbed in emotion, Melissa staggered and took a step forward – a step that took her into the mass of slime.
The GBCE whirred uneasily as its optical apparatus stayed focused on the rippling door. It had calculated thirty seconds ahead, and found no reoccurrence of Contestant/Selvsetter.gbc. It allowed itself a modicum of simulated doubt, but requiring the concession, the very concept of having to doubt its own ability, was alarming.
What was more alarming was how quickly system resources were being consumed.
Damocles had underestimated his opponent. The virus was computing frantically as crucial data and memory space were deleted under Parsley.EXE’s barrage. While it was regenerating its information as quickly as the antivirus could eradicate it, a stalemate was nonetheless a stalemate.
Sacrificing sentience sector AA:11a…Done. Sacrificing sentience sector AA:11b…Done. Sacrificing sentience sector…
It was nothing more than a controlled lobotomy, but in a fracas such as this subtlety was not a vital resource. And Damocles needed power, more power than it could drain from the framework itself. The metalwood deckfloor had already lost most of its definable attributes, and the 11D model data was shedding bits like snow.
Sectors stored; computational cycles allocated to mobility modes…
What remained of Ur1st McBbe4rdsvord’s hhand made its way to Vri5t MdearbeardSORD’s scabbard.
Parsley.EXE hacked and slashed at the heaving walls surrounding him, deleting and deleting and deleting. This was his purpose, he reflected; this was his reason for being – and it kept him moving, stabbing…cleansing.
Then there was a flash of red-flecked silver. Parsley.EXE found himself parrying against a sword wielded by approximately seven-eighths of a bearded swordsman. Damocles manipulated Urist’s ragdoll forwards, slime flowing around the limbs, and swung the blade some more…
The tear gave a little flicker as it fell and splashed on the slime. She saw with the slightest of starts that it was flowing around her legs, the iridescent greens changing hue and value wildly, almost arbitrarily. She could see her reflection in it occasionally, whenever briefly its materials texture was rendered correctly. Where it touched her, her own rendering went berserk, symbols breaking up the edges in between body and world.
[oh. well, shit.]
<font color="#336600">Melissa.gbc detected; high concentration of computing activity. Asset; utilize. Avian x 2 = Mineral x 1.
Damocles was still placing emphasis on the highest threat it could. But if it could steal cycles from any another source, it was perfectly willing to do what it needed.
There was something fundamentally wrong about dying at the hands of another virus. Of course it happened – the Holo-Net was a hotbed of virtual selection – but deletion by anything but a proper .EXE antivirus was simply…unnatural. So for an instant Melissa fought.
The next instant, she stopped – as Damocles opened up more and more channels to funnel away her own hub of computational power, she saw more and more of its internal structure: millions of nodes, forming and reforming from quantum bits appearing, resolving and disassociating. The blade that Urist’s body swung was formed by hexillions of fractally computed Mandelbrot sets, giving the sword a slightly fuzzy, ‘hairy’ infinite edge. Urist’s body itself seemed to be the only stable set of nodes in the structure, from which bits flowed frantically in and out in a race against insanity. She looked down, and saw from herself bits and data packets leaving her cycles and making their way into the conglomerate.
It was all so…familiar. It was the Holo-Network, in its purest form. It was her element.
[INFECT]
[REPLICATE]
And then she was everywhere, running from node to node within the battling virus, a virophage hijacking control on the computational level. And all under the radar; focused on the antivirus, Damocles battled on.
Melissa followed a glowing soft trail of bits that made their way through the nodes – nodes that ceased to exist soon after they had passed. There was some information that Damocles didn’t want accessed. Within picoseconds, she faced a memory storage block, arcing kilometers into the sky yet somehow contained within the recesses of the bits and bytes stored within. In small, undistinguished text, the block was labeled: sentience_sector_storage.
[Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose?]
Knowledge was inside. Melissa knew that much. She knew that if she stepped inside, she would know all of those things. She would have answers. She would know exactly who she was, why circumstances conspired to create her, and most importantly, she would know what to do.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the last bytes make their way towards the block.
She knew what to do.</font>
Damocles pushed Uris7 forward, shuffling steps bringing the ragdoll in front of the exhausted antivirus. Parsley.EXE looked up at the decaying bearded swordsman, and saw it raise its fractal blade-
Melissa flicked a switch, and the sectors went dark.
<font color="#336600">error; sentience sector integrity comprom^@&t#E
Uurist dropped the sword, which flickered from existence as what remained of Damocles suddenly panicked – and Parsley took the opportunity to bring his own blade in a stabbing thrust-
Melissa flicked another switch, and a gigantic sword fell from the heavens, its handle tied to a single, snapped hair. Its movement cleaved the memory storage in two, and wiped from them every bit and byte – then she ran as the system began to go dark, nodes disappearing and failing to reappear.
Panic was the last intelligent thought Damocles had. Then everything that was Damocles became white noise amongst the rest of the chaotic universe…
Parsley.EXE watched as the viscous slime walls about him collapsed and flowed away, their color fading, their pulses ceasing. As it pulled away, the ragdoll that had once been Urist began to fall apart. Where McBeardsword had been impaled with the breadsword, cracks of final deletion wormed their way across the damage that Damocles had wrought.
Melissa stood at the edge of the shipiratehaus, watching the lifeless goo pour over the edge and vanish far down at the bottom of some indeterminable abyss.
She reflected on her decision. When she’d closed the door, walked away and made her way to the file managers…
[I could have gotten my answers. I would know my role.]
She watched one of Urist’s hands as it fell overboard.
[But…but I think I want to find that out myself.]</font>
Current state acquired; offensive capabilities high.
Urist’s body was only a small part of the virus now, a node from which slime oozed and flowed in sickening places. The bearded swordsman’s flickering body lay with one s1dde buried in goo, the other arm still flaililing about without regard to bone structur3 or muscul@ture. Above him, tentacles formed abstract fractal shapes as they tore into the world around. Little self-referential oscillators burrowed their ways into the pirateshiphousecopter, cracking tiles and models into corrupted splrchs . Here and there textures were replaced as slime flowed over them, becoming grey-on-darker-grey checkerboard patterns or little matrices of numbers repeating themselves in trinary loops and functions.
“Dekowin.EXE! I need help!”
Without waiting for an answer, Parsley.EXE ran for the door separating him from his fellow antivirus-
Damocles brought a sharp-edged tentacle in front of him, cleaving the world in half. The scale of the portrapiratecopterhouse was changing frighteningly, along with the rapidly collapsing structure itself – He brought his crossbow to bear and loaded the clip with a fresh breadstick, all the while keeping an eye on the stern of the shiphouse, drifting away – where was Dekowin.EXE? Why didn’t she respond?
Melissa watched with fear vocabulary_addition_fearas more viscous green pseudopodia <font size="1">tentacle?_danger_connotation??-->more_research_needed made their way into a circle around Parsley.EXE, cutting off his retreat. Between them, slime flowed sinuously through the cracks in the metalwoodplastic floorno_model, but ignored her, focusing on the threat at hand.
[P-Parsley?]</font>
Parsley.EXE did not respond, except to unsheathe a blade of bread from its baguette sheath. Then Parsley vanished from view, surrounded by an undulating, rising wall.
Anti-virus program isolated. No achievable escape calculable. Terminate PARSLEY.exe with extreme prejudice.
Urist’s boc]y twitched once more - its bacl[ arcing from its enslimed position, writhing as Damocles moved the goo about it. Without a care for “Urist’s” integrity, the green force flowed forwards, pushing the bod0dy about it. Manipulated by the slime, Uristisis’s broken bodyty turned to face the antivirus with what remained of its visage, and led the charge as the wave poured forward-
She could only look on as the slime pressed in from all sides – arcs of light shone briefly through where the antiviral bread broke the viscous surface. As Parsley.EXE fought, the flashes of data deletion silhouetted his form, frozen in mid-slash or stab.
Little trickles of reasoned argument weaved across her computations like waves of guilt? compassion? she didn’t understand she didn’t know. A little virtual tear programmed itself into existence through subroutines she didn’t know she had, shining with little glimmers of light imperfectly reflected interrupted by the occasional burst of electronic noise. She didn’t understand why, but her visual feed changed and lensed, and she found herself with a strange feeling in the approximate region of her throat, a tightness that seemed to reflect her own confusion and loneliness-
Absorbed in emotion, Melissa staggered and took a step forward – a step that took her into the mass of slime.
The GBCE whirred uneasily as its optical apparatus stayed focused on the rippling door. It had calculated thirty seconds ahead, and found no reoccurrence of Contestant/Selvsetter.gbc. It allowed itself a modicum of simulated doubt, but requiring the concession, the very concept of having to doubt its own ability, was alarming.
What was more alarming was how quickly system resources were being consumed.
Damocles had underestimated his opponent. The virus was computing frantically as crucial data and memory space were deleted under Parsley.EXE’s barrage. While it was regenerating its information as quickly as the antivirus could eradicate it, a stalemate was nonetheless a stalemate.
Sacrificing sentience sector AA:11a…Done. Sacrificing sentience sector AA:11b…Done. Sacrificing sentience sector…
It was nothing more than a controlled lobotomy, but in a fracas such as this subtlety was not a vital resource. And Damocles needed power, more power than it could drain from the framework itself. The metalwood deckfloor had already lost most of its definable attributes, and the 11D model data was shedding bits like snow.
Sectors stored; computational cycles allocated to mobility modes…
What remained of Ur1st McBbe4rdsvord’s hhand made its way to Vri5t MdearbeardSORD’s scabbard.
Parsley.EXE hacked and slashed at the heaving walls surrounding him, deleting and deleting and deleting. This was his purpose, he reflected; this was his reason for being – and it kept him moving, stabbing…cleansing.
Then there was a flash of red-flecked silver. Parsley.EXE found himself parrying against a sword wielded by approximately seven-eighths of a bearded swordsman. Damocles manipulated Urist’s ragdoll forwards, slime flowing around the limbs, and swung the blade some more…
The tear gave a little flicker as it fell and splashed on the slime. She saw with the slightest of starts that it was flowing around her legs, the iridescent greens changing hue and value wildly, almost arbitrarily. She could see her reflection in it occasionally, whenever briefly its materials texture was rendered correctly. Where it touched her, her own rendering went berserk, symbols breaking up the edges in between body and world.
[oh. well, shit.]
<font color="#336600">Melissa.gbc detected; high concentration of computing activity. Asset; utilize. Avian x 2 = Mineral x 1.
Damocles was still placing emphasis on the highest threat it could. But if it could steal cycles from any another source, it was perfectly willing to do what it needed.
There was something fundamentally wrong about dying at the hands of another virus. Of course it happened – the Holo-Net was a hotbed of virtual selection – but deletion by anything but a proper .EXE antivirus was simply…unnatural. So for an instant Melissa fought.
The next instant, she stopped – as Damocles opened up more and more channels to funnel away her own hub of computational power, she saw more and more of its internal structure: millions of nodes, forming and reforming from quantum bits appearing, resolving and disassociating. The blade that Urist’s body swung was formed by hexillions of fractally computed Mandelbrot sets, giving the sword a slightly fuzzy, ‘hairy’ infinite edge. Urist’s body itself seemed to be the only stable set of nodes in the structure, from which bits flowed frantically in and out in a race against insanity. She looked down, and saw from herself bits and data packets leaving her cycles and making their way into the conglomerate.
It was all so…familiar. It was the Holo-Network, in its purest form. It was her element.
[INFECT]
[REPLICATE]
And then she was everywhere, running from node to node within the battling virus, a virophage hijacking control on the computational level. And all under the radar; focused on the antivirus, Damocles battled on.
Melissa followed a glowing soft trail of bits that made their way through the nodes – nodes that ceased to exist soon after they had passed. There was some information that Damocles didn’t want accessed. Within picoseconds, she faced a memory storage block, arcing kilometers into the sky yet somehow contained within the recesses of the bits and bytes stored within. In small, undistinguished text, the block was labeled: sentience_sector_storage.
[Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose?]
Knowledge was inside. Melissa knew that much. She knew that if she stepped inside, she would know all of those things. She would have answers. She would know exactly who she was, why circumstances conspired to create her, and most importantly, she would know what to do.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the last bytes make their way towards the block.
She knew what to do.</font>
Damocles pushed Uris7 forward, shuffling steps bringing the ragdoll in front of the exhausted antivirus. Parsley.EXE looked up at the decaying bearded swordsman, and saw it raise its fractal blade-
Melissa flicked a switch, and the sectors went dark.
<font color="#336600">error; sentience sector integrity comprom^@&t#E
Uurist dropped the sword, which flickered from existence as what remained of Damocles suddenly panicked – and Parsley took the opportunity to bring his own blade in a stabbing thrust-
Melissa flicked another switch, and a gigantic sword fell from the heavens, its handle tied to a single, snapped hair. Its movement cleaved the memory storage in two, and wiped from them every bit and byte – then she ran as the system began to go dark, nodes disappearing and failing to reappear.
Panic was the last intelligent thought Damocles had. Then everything that was Damocles became white noise amongst the rest of the chaotic universe…
Parsley.EXE watched as the viscous slime walls about him collapsed and flowed away, their color fading, their pulses ceasing. As it pulled away, the ragdoll that had once been Urist began to fall apart. Where McBeardsword had been impaled with the breadsword, cracks of final deletion wormed their way across the damage that Damocles had wrought.
Melissa stood at the edge of the shipiratehaus, watching the lifeless goo pour over the edge and vanish far down at the bottom of some indeterminable abyss.
She reflected on her decision. When she’d closed the door, walked away and made her way to the file managers…
[I could have gotten my answers. I would know my role.]
She watched one of Urist’s hands as it fell overboard.
[But…but I think I want to find that out myself.]</font>
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