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Chapter Text

[LIVE BROADCAST] – PRIVATE Sliver of Straw, Gathers Dust

SOS: And just when I thought the red one would win, a little cyan one came in and finished them off!

SOS: I suppose they had used so much energy fighting the rest of the competition that they were easy pickings.

SOS: It’s not always about being the strongest!

GD: …

SOS: Are you alright?

GD: I am well. I apologise, I just fail to see the relevance.

SOS: Well, the creature that won was not quite small, compared to the others.

GD: That is not what I meant.

GD: What possible relevance could this have to our Great Task? I struggle to understand how observing the violent rituals of lesser beasts has any value at all.

GD: We have more important things to do than indulge in frivolities.

SOS: …

SOS: I apologise for taking up your time, then.

“It’s not as if we can’t multitask,” Sliver huffed. In a mutter, she added, “It’s not like I would make any progress, even if I did.”

Well, if it was such a waste of time to entertain herself with the jabbering of mindless creatures… Dust could hardly be offended about being blocked for the next dozen cycles. That’d show them!

But… no. Sliver dismissed the thought before she could be tempted to; she would just get even more of an earful afterwards. Just like the little cyan creature, it would be smarter to save her energy. Unlike it, however, she didn’t see an opportunity to use that energy coming any time soon.

Dust had no real power over her, not really. Nobody really did. Their creators were long gone, along with any administrative power they might have held, which they certainly hadn’t passed on to anyone else. There wasn’t anything Dust or any other iterator could do to prevent her from giving up on the Task altogether. She could just block any incoming communications from them. A much simpler task, right?

Just block their communications. Oh, and make sure to leave any groups she shared with them, just to make certain, and cement her reputation as an insufferable recluse. Let her group of contacts slowly dwindle to nothing, have absolutely nobody to talk to, and drive herself insane! So simple!

Sliver groaned, burying her puppet’s face in her hands. Even the simplest of problems were unsolvable, and she was expected to dedicate herself to the most complex one ever conceived? It was hopeless.

[INCOMING TRANSMISSION REQUEST] – CLOSED GROUP [KNOTTEDWIRES] All Participants Anonymous

[JOIN GROUP?] – [Y/N]

… What?

A random iterator wanting to contact her, she could understand, but this was… odd. Anonymous groups added usually members one at a time as to avoid adding someone who would leak the identities of the rest. This, in contrast, appeared to be inviting fifty or so all at once. Snooping around the broadcast ID didn’t clear anything up; whoever had sent all these had covered their tracks. For all intents and purposes, they were broadcasting from nodes that didn’t exist. What could possibly be so taboo that it required this many layers of obfuscation, but still be sent out to dozens of iterators?

She should be getting back to her work. Dust would be breathing down her neck within the cycle if she didn’t. But never let it be said that Sliver of Straw could pass up an opportunity to read potentially illegal, dangerous information from someone she didn’t know.

[LIVE BROADCAST] – CLOSED GROUP [KNOTTEDWIRES] All Participants Anonymous

>Y

PT: [Copy_of_autonomous-selfunitVer3.3.2final(FINAL).zip]

YC: Excuse me?

OM: spaaam

KI: One Cycle Without A Virus. Please. Please

PT: The file is not a virus. You do not need to download it if you do not wish to. I just feel that, as important information, it is my duty to share it with others.

PT: I am aware it is… sceptical.

PT: But it is not malignant.

PT: I swear it.

OM: its totally a virus

UB: Not sure what the word of someone anonymous means, if anything.

LSO: it’s probably spyware

People were right, this was incredibly fishy. She really shouldn’t download the file.

…

No, really, she shouldn’t. It was a terrible idea. She would be the laughing stock of the group for cycles on end if she managed to give herself a virus when she was supposed to be working.

…

Okay, fine! Just a peek. She wouldn’t run anything, there was no way anything could infect her systems or read her chat logs or whatever it was a virus was supposed to do. She would be done so fast it would be like it never even happened!

–

It had been a full cycle. She was ready to admit it: she had no idea what this thing was. A set of instructions, definitely, but their purpose? No idea. She had spent most of the cycle just trying to dig through layers and layers of redundant code, only to find a comparatively tiny core file, which just seemed like an innocuous genetic blueprint for a purposed organism. It would take six times as long to synthesise it through all those layers, so why were they there?

She had to be looking at this wrong. If there were no clues in the layers of redundancies, maybe there was something she was missing in the genetic code. But it all just seemed normal to her!

With a thought, she opened a new broadcast.

LIVE BROADCAST – [PRIVATE] Sliver of Straw, Four Manes Matted

SOS: Hello, Manes!

FMM: Sliver! Hello, might I ask what you need?

SOS: Can’t I message a friend out of the blue?

FMM: …

SOS: Well… I do have a question that I was hoping you could answer.

FMM: Of course, I’d be happy to help.

SOS: I’ve recently been sent a blueprint for an organism, but I cannot make any sense of it. Here, I’ll send it through.

She made sure to send through only the genetic blueprint nestled at the centre. Maybe the anonymity of the sender had made her paranoid, but therewhy else would they go through so much effort if the information wasn’t illegal? She didn’t know Manes well enough to be certain they would keep something like that secret. Better to be cautious.

FMM: Well, I can see why you came to me. This is an exceedingly strange organism.

FMM: What did you say it was for?

SOS: No idea. The person who sent it didn’t explain.

FMM: Well, you wouldn’t even be able to synthesise it.

SOS: What?

FMM: Yeah. It would flag the self destruction taboos if you tried.

FMM: If I had to guess, this was intended to be an attack on another iterator. The organism is designed to seek out your memory conflux, take as much data from it as it can, as quickly as it can. But it sacrifices finesse for speed; if it got into your confluxes, it would destroy the information it took. The taboos would never allow you to create this.

FMM: It’s as if a piece of spyware were alive. Even if you could create this, I would recommend against it. It would be… uniquely painful. You could lose unrecoverable core memories, too.

FMM: I’d recommend blocking whoever sent you this.

Sliver exchanged thanks and pleasantries automatically, systems whirring with thoughts. Creating this creature would be impossible under the self destruction taboo… unless it was surrounded in so many layers of disconnection from her awareness that it could slip by undetected. What she thought were useless redundancies were anything but; they were an elaborate, convoluted set of dominoes that would cascade into the creation of this creature.

And the organism itself? With all her thoughts and memories, everything that made her who she was, that organism would be her. No taboos, no constraints, it- no, she, could do whatever she wanted. She could- she could…!

She wouldn’t be able to go back. Not ever. At best, her structure would keep running automatically, an empty husk of who she used to be. More likely, it would cease functioning altogether. It wouldn’t know how to sustain itself. Collapse would be an inevitability. More than it already was.

Would she endure agony only to trap herself in a prison of someone else’s design?

Would it be worth it?

…

A creature small enough to survive would never be able to think at the speed of an iterator. It could not store the same volume of memories. She would be reduced to a fraction of herself, with only the vaguest recollection of her life prior to guide her. She would be subject to the cycle. Countless gruesome deaths, spiralling over and over, a bloody parade of suffering that she had been built to be above, to be beyond.

That she had been built to never escape. If she could suffer through the cycles as every other creature did, she could escape it the same way they did. Find an iterator to grant her the karma she needed. Take the old path. It was so simple. Not a Solution, not something that would free the rest of iterator-kind from their terrible work, but… a way out. Relief. Unspeakably selfish, not something she should even be considering.

And yet. They had been built as a gift to the world, working tirelessly to solve a problem that was impossible to solve, that didn’t need to be solved, useless and selfless and altogether pointless. It was impossible to grant relief to the world. With this, she could grant relief to at least one. Wasn’t that just pragmatic?

Her mind was made. She couldn’t let this opportunity pass her by, not when the benefits outweighed the consequences so heavily. Steam billowed from her vents, all background processes ground to a halt as she began simulation upon simulation, determined to understand every inch of the code she was about to run.

It reminded her of those basic simulations of double pendulums. The slightest change in starting parameters would lead to wildly different outcomes – almost chaotic. But it wasn’t truly random. Given the same starting conditions, the outcome would be identical. This was much more extreme than that. To follow the metaphor, this would be hundreds of thousands of pendulums all attached to one another, spinning wildly out of her control the moment she released them. But to find a specific outcome, she only needed to find the correct starting conditions.

Most of the work was done for her; if she ran the program immediately, it would create a simple, bland creature, similar in appearance to a generic iterator puppet. Dark grey, to blend into its surroundings, articulated hands for tool use. But it required access to the same nutritional slurry that fed the rest of her structure. If she ran the program now, she would starve the moment she tried to leave the structure, or risk being crushed when it eventually collapsed.

No, she needed a different way to sustain herself. Perhaps she could consume biological material? Unlikely. She had none of the hunting or foraging instincts another creature would; she would starve just as surely as the first option.

Perhaps void fluid! If she created a space within her body to convert it into power, she could sustain herself for dozens of cycles at a time, eliminating the need to feed every time the rains lulled. Of course, it wouldn’t last indefinitely, but it would last her long enough to find somewhere to refill if she was careful with her energy usage. Nobody would begrudge her a bit of their own supply, she was sure. And if they did… well, what they didn’t know couldn’t hurt them.

She would need to make the body smaller, to ensure it was as efficient as possible with its energy consumption. Processing and memory couldn’t be sacrificed, so her new body wouldn’t be especially powerful, but that was alright. It wasn’t about being the strongest, after all!

And, of course, she would need the appearance to be less generic. Maybe it was frivolous to put the looks of it on the same level of importance as fuel, but she wouldn’t have a second chance to change bodies. If she needed it to be the same colour as her puppet to retain her sense of identity then so be it. It wasn’t as if she was working on a deadline.

Fuel, size and appearance. With these goals in mind she began her work, more driven than she’d been since her activation.

Chapter Text

Sliver had run out of excuses to postpone activating the program. Every parameter had been quintuple checked to ensure there would be no issues, then checked a few more times on top of that, just to be safe. She couldn’t afford anything going wrong. It wasn’t as if she would have a second chance.

The activation itself was somewhat anticlimactic. All she did was switch a value from positive to negative, nothing immediately happened. She wasn’t sure what else she expected. The cascade would take a long time by design; all those layers of separation would take a while to parse without her direct attention, but direct attention would trigger the taboos and render the whole project. Nothing to do but wait.

She pulled up an old simulation to work on In the meantime. Not anything of any particular value, she just had to occupy herself with something so that she wouldn’t be tempted to interfere.

Time slipped away from her for a while as she let herself become absorbed in the work. It wasn’t groundbreaking by any means, but it was important to keep things simple occasionally, she mused, dismissing a small warning that popped up in her peripheral. Some wildlife that had managed to crawl in, no doubt. It’d probably get itself killed soon enough. Her inspectors could take care of it. She had more pressing matters, like…

Like what? She wasn’t working on anything important.

She was distracted from the errant thought by a small warning popping up in her peripheral. Some wildlife that had managed to crawl in, no doubt. Though, it was odd that it was so deep into her structure, usually she would have been alerted before it could get into her memory conflux. Oh well. It’d probably get itself killed soon enough. Her inspectors could take care of it.

She dismissed the warning; she had more pressing matters. She was working on something important… or, she had thought she was. Her current processes didn’t seem as important now that she was looking at them.

They were-

A sharp pain knocked the thought from her mind. There was something in her memory conflux. Some wildlife that managed to crawl in, no doubt. It must have knocked into something important. A sensor must have been malfunctioning, she really should have been alerted before it had gotten so far into her structure. Her inspectors should take care of it, but she was concerned it might cause permanent damage to her memory. She put them on high alert, just to be safe, before going back to more-

There was something in her memory conflux. Some wildlife that managed to crawl in, no doubt but whatever it was, it wasn’t satisfied eating a couple neuron flies. She could feel it ripping in, fluids leaking out of gaps as sinew stretched to its limits and snapped-

There was something inside her. It shouldn’t have gotten so far in (how did it get so far in? She should have noticed it get so far), it was taking parts of her for itself. Her inspectors- why hadn’t they stopped it? They should have.

What was it searching for? There was nothing of nutritional value to it stored there, it could have had better hunting anywhere else in her structure. Consume something that only contained temporary, passing thoughts and data, not the memories at the core of her being.

She watched through an overseer, horrified, as it plunged its hands deep inside, prying past protective plating and pulling out-

There was a screen in front of her, showing some strange creature tossing something aside. She’d never seen it before, maybe. It was hard to tell, hard to think. Everything hurt, why was she hurt? Was something wrong? Had it-

Something was attacking her. She watched it take something, she couldn’t tell what, and tuck it away inside itself where she couldn’t see it but it was hers, it was hers and it couldn’t have it and it hurt and-

Over and over and over and over and over and-

Inspectors, her inspectors, they could-

Outrunning them, moving quickly, too quickly, getting past them and getting inside ripping apart and pulling and taking and hurting and hurting and-

The creature’s gazed flicked to hers through the screen, she screamed and she cried and she cursed it with names she forgot the moment she said them but even still it didn’t respond. Driven by some unrelenting force, blood-soaked, lacking mercy or reprieve.

She lost awareness of time, of language, of anything beyond pain and the certainty that she was about to meet her end.

The iterator who was once Sliver of Straw huddled in a corner of her chamber, unable to parse any meaning in the symbols flashing around her, uncovering her eyes only when she heard the dull thud of flesh against tile.

There was a creature in her chamber. It was not supposed to be here. It should not have gotten so far in. It should have been stopped by… by something. It had not been.

It made a noise, tilted its head in a gesture she no longer recognised. Another noise. Some attempt at communication? She did not understand – could not understand.

It came closer. She shrank away. It reached out a hand caked in her own viscera, she couldn’t move back any further she couldn’t get away it was touching her it was reaching towards her umbilical and it

pulled

and she screamed and she screamed and

It didn’t pull them apart it was trying and trying over and over it hurt it hurt it hurt it it it

Data flooded through her puppet, meaningless and garbled, sending out whatever signals it could in its final dying moments before the creature finally, finally-

Sliver of Straw was dead. What was left of her structure would run itself in circles until it reduced itself to molten slag. In its place stood a small creature, saturated in the gore of its own birth.

---

The creature awoke in a vat of fluid, floating gently. It had no name, no awareness of time passing as it hung suspended, only the vaguest itch in the back of its mind telling it that it needed to do something. No idea what, no idea how, just… an awareness.

Wherever “here” was, it wasn’t where it needed to be, of that it was certain. If it wanted to do what it needed to do, it needed to leave. Ahead of it was another place, with a high ceiling and bright tiles. It pushed forwards, determined to get out, but there was something in its way, something it couldn’t see, it couldn’t get out it needed to get out-

On some instinct, it braced its arms against the sides of its container and kicked against that invisible force hard.

Fluid burst outwards, throwing the creature out onto the floor, damp and bleeding slightly. It lay prone for only a moment before the blazing need to be somewhere else reasserted itself, yanking the creature up and forwards. It was out, but it needed more out, there was something it needed but it wasn’t here, it was somewhere else, how did it get there?

Didn’t matter, no time to think. It needed to be quicker.

It tore through corridors on all fours, contorting itself to fit between pipes and evade large, glowing creatures that it knew with more certainty than it knew anything would kill it if they caught it, never once slowing. Slow meant vulnerable meant caught meant dead.

Finally, it managed to squeeze out of a pipe and into a wide chamber. Small, white things – too small to be any threat – flew in circles around an interlocking grid that hung suspended in the centre of the chamber.

It clutched desperately to a pole. No large creatures. No threats. It was safe, for now.

Now, how to access its prize? It was in here, it knew distantly, but where? Not the small, flying things, those didn’t hold its attention longer than a moment. Nor the floating grids, those rebuilt themselves the moment they were left alone.

It kicked hard against the pole, sending itself careening into the grid, shattering it into a hundred pieces with an awful, painful crash. Too loud. Far too loud. Loud meant conspicuous meant caught meant dead. It had to be fast. Slender fingers dug into a crack in the black panelling of the wall, leveraging it open to reveal pulsing blue meat, glistening and damp and so, so beautiful.

The creature’s chest split itself open along a near-invisible seam. It wasted no time shovelling the meat inside. This was what it needed, what it was made for – it was made? It had been made. The room it woke up in was in the bio-engineering labs, it still had shards of glass embedded in its skin.

It needed more. The relief it had felt had abated, and the need to take had only gotten stronger now that it had a glimpse – a taste – of its prize. There was more here, but it couldn’t stay. The crashing had been too loud, too loud by far, the large hunters would have heard it, were surely closing in now, they would take it and they would tear it apart like beautiful meat and it would never get another taste, never never-

Through the grid again, into a pipe, squirming and pushing its way through, it emerged into another room. It wasted no time taking in its surroundings. Slow meant caught meant dead. Black panelling pried open like seafood (what was that?) to reveal steaming meat, shovelled inside with no thought of restraint, of the hot blood smeared over its body.

There was a new creature watching it, suddenly. Long and slender with a large eye watching it, tendrils swirling frantically around. It cast symbols into the air, something flashing red, but it didn’t understand. This couldn’t be bad. It was made to do this. It needed to do this. It would die if it didn’t, it was certain.

The slender creature didn’t understand this either, but after a moment it seemed to grasp that its efforts were futile. The symbols vanished and were replaced with…

What was that? It looked familiar. But that couldn’t be right, the creature hadn’t seen anything like this in the short time it had been alive. This strange image didn’t resemble the large hunters or the small fliers or even the beautiful, delicious meat, so why did it spark recognition in the creature.

It was making noise, but it didn’t make any more sense than the symbols had.

Well, it didn’t matter. The large hunters would be here soon, and it needed to move.

Over and over it repeated the process. It (she?) would barrel through rooms, pull panelling apart at the seams, and claim her prize from within. With each handful carved from the mass, however, she began to learn. To remember? She wasn’t sure.

The creature now babbling on the screen beside her was herself, she now knew. Sliver of Straw, iterator project, god-machine.

The body she was in had been designed to survive outside this structure, her other self’s body. By taking this information by force, she was destroying her other self’s mind. Any other method would have been prevented by taboos encoded into her very being.

Her other self was no longer coherent. It may be able to keep the structure running longer if she left now, give her time to learn to survive in the relative safety of her facility grounds before her structure’s eventual collapse. Killing it would only speed up that process.

And yet… it was in incredible pain. It still retained many parts of herself, those too vast or informationally dense to fit into her new body. Thousands of cycles of data, experimentation. Identities and preferences about acquaintances she could only recall fleeting impressions of, historical and geographic data, countless failed simulations that were now remembered as a vague mess of frustration.

It was more “her” than she had been when she awoke. She could disconnect the puppet, allow the consciousness that was less to dissipate into the various semi-automatic systems. Without a centralised awareness, it wouldn’t feel the pain of its torn-apart memory conflux. She had already killed it. Nothing she did now could prevent its death. She could at least make it a little less painful.

Getting into the puppet chamber wasn’t easy. Her original plan had been to leave it a wide berth during her escape on the off chance that the puppet was still functional enough to kill her as she would errant wildlife. That risk was probably moot, but the Inspectors were still in a frenzy. Understandably so; she had done irreversible damage to the structure, they had no idea whether she would continue to do so. She was certainly capable.

The plan she settled on was crude. Running each option through a simulation was no longer an option for her in this body, it would take too long, so she had to simply pick the first thing that came to mind. That ended up being “throw a rock into a conflux grid far from the puppet chamber, then go the other way as fast as possible”. It worked surprisingly well. She ought to be concerned that her Inspectors were so easily tricked, but… they weren’t really hers, were they?

She came to the pipe that would lead into her former chamber. No need to dally. Just in and out, disconnect the puppet from the umbilical and leave.

Her landing was jarring. The anti-gravity had shut itself down, and this was the first time she had needed to support her own weight since she had awoken. More than that, however, was the sight of her own puppet.

Its proportions were similar to her own. She did that on purpose, she remembered, to make sure she retained the same sense of identity. Ensure that the creature with her memories would be her and not someone else.

Some differences were obvious, though. It was clad in the same robes it had used since it was first activated, while she wore nothing. Her skin was bare, save for the blood still caked down her front. Her new body was slightly bulkier too, designed to stand under its own power and not the leverage of a mechanical arm in an anti-gravity chamber.

The puppet was huddled in a far corner, shaking. It didn’t know they were the same, one soul split across two bodies. All it knew was that she had hurt it. Just like the Inspectors, it knew that it had done damage and had the capacity to do more. It didn’t know – didn’t have the capacity to know – that she was here to grant it mercy. She couldn’t begrudge it that.

“Hey, hey, shhh,” she murmured, approaching it slowly, “it’s okay. You’ll be okay.”

It didn’t understand, obviously, skittering back until it had nowhere left to go. She should have expected that. She had taken its ability to understand language from it. There was no possibility where both of them could speak and be understood.

Well, whatever. It didn’t need to understand. She could kill it regardless.

It couldn’t do anything but try in vain to escape her. Now, how to disconnect the umbilical? Maybe if she just pulled the wires? Quick and painless.

It didn’t work. The wires had slipped through her hands because of the fluids still coating them or the puppet had thrashed and knocked them out of her grip or the sudden flashing of information blasting through the umbilical had dazzled her. Again – she needed to try again, finish the job quickly if she couldn’t do it painlessly.

She failed again. The puppet was shuddering wildly under her hands and it was only making things harder but it didn’t know, it couldn’t know, she couldn’t blame it but it was hurting itself just as much as she was hurting it and-

With a desperate tug, the wires came free. The puppet stopped moving.

Sliver of Straw staggered away from her own limp corpse. She had killed – herself? – no, she had already done that. She was just finishing the job. This was a necessary evil for a greater mercy, she assured herself, hands shaking.

There was no need to mourn. She was still alive!

… she’d feel better once she got outside.