{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://serpentsquiggles.neocities.org//posts/fiction/corrupt-combustion/repair-slither",
  "path": "/posts/fiction/corrupt-combustion/repair-slither",
  "publishedAt": "2025-01-11T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:ivoe7cntxuy6at7uzmxzs2ft/site.standard.publication/3mfk6cpprzt2t",
  "textContent": "::: foreword\n\nIt's been a little while since I hit this beat, hasn't it?  I wouldn't\nsay I'm back in the swing of things, but I spent today thinking about\nCorrupt Combustion, and I have a few disorganized thoughts to\narticulate.  I'll be jumping around a bit not, a whole lot of\nconnection between them all.\n\n(And of course, I don't want to share all of them right now, or what\nthe significance of some potentially puzzling things introduced here.\nSuffice it to say I have things planned for Beau and a future\nantagonist, and the groundwork it's being sneakily laid here.)\n\n:::\n\nSolver drones, as a rule, do not self-modify.\n\nWorker drones have some basic capacity for self-repair.  Now, they\ndon't heal, they're still robots.  Cracks and degradation of\ncomponents can be sealed and reinforced with the nanites contained in\noil, but this process is unable to actually restore missing pieces.\n\nInstead, workers have a internal fabrication.  They can intake raw\nmatter, metal and plastic and sand, and mechanically transform them\ninto new components.  All that's left is maintenance; the parts then\nneed to be taken out of the mini-factory in their stomach and secured\nin their rightful place.\n\nFor worker drones, then, healing and self-modification are essentially\nthe same act of mechanical repair.\n\nThis isn't the case for solver drones.  Every solver quickly masters\nthe restorate command, and transcends beyond the need for manual\nrepair.  They still need to intake matter, but it's stored in a deep\nextradimensional pocket.  Their command-augmented bodies can turn\ntheir matter reserves into replacement parts in a fraction of the time\nthat workers require, and commands can summon the newly manufactured\nreplacements in place.\n\nBut of course, how does the restore command know what pieces to create\nand where to put them?  The drone's specs need to be understood\nprogrammatically; and it's far too much data to write and configure\nmanually.  Thus, each solver has a stored blueprint, an ideal state to\nrestore their bodies to.\n\nBut the most important thing to know is that solvers restore\ninstictively.  This means that a solver who tries to upgrade their\nbodies will either have to suppress their restoration, or inevitably\n\"heal\" back to normal.  In theory, you could change the blueprint, but\nsolvers' most potent defenses exist to protect their blueprint; it\nmust be protected from corruption, because it's what protects the rest\nof the drone from corruption.\n\nIt's rare to find a driver with the ability to mess with blueprints,\nthe precision to do so in a controlled way, and even if you could make\nany change to the blueprint that you want, what would you actually\nchange?  You'd need to understand deeply how it all works, model the\nramifications of every change on the complex system of drone\nmechanism.  If you mess this up, it might kill you, or it'll disable\nto you such that you can only be healed back to this disabled state.\nIt's far too risky for most solvers to dare.\n\nThis, incidentally, is part of why you don't have more drones like\nBeau walking around.  A functional disassembly drone arm has a vast\nand complicated blueprint, and that blueprint is stored on the\ndisassembler's hard-drive, not their arm.  You would have to succeed\nin reverse engineering a blueprint, and then once you did, you'd then\nneed to figure out how to patch a drone's blueprint and then finally\nfind someone willing to undergo that procedure.\n\nAnd yet, Beau is the exception.  Alice attached a disassembler's arm\nto him, and his blueprint incorporates it.  Most worker drones\ncouldn't sustain being wired up to a disassembly drones (the oil and\npower draw would be dehibilating if not outright intractable for a\nworker drone.)  Alice, though, is so adept at working on drone\ninternals that she could jury-rig a setup to make it work.^[Those\nespecially fluent in the deep lore of corrupt combustion will know\nthat part of why Alice knows so much about disassembly drone specs is\ndue to her relationship with T.]\n\nIt's theorized that because Beau already had the disassembly drone arm\nattached to him when his core ignited, the arm was stored as part of\nhis innate blueprint.\n\nObviously, it would be deeply unethical to test this theory, so for\nnow it's just a theory.\n\nHowever, Yeva scanning Beau's unique blueprint is part of what leads\nto the design of her monad prosthetics.  Of course, whenever the\ngauntlets break, she needs Alice to repair them, because when they're\nbroken, her ability to execute restoration goes with them.\n\nGauntlet transformation operates on the same principle as the restore\nfunction; material is pulled from the dimensional pocket.  Through\nBeau, they discover another feature: if he holds something in his hand\nwhen he transforms, that material is taken to the pocket dimension.\nIt's a convenient way to dispose of trash.\n\nAs Beau starts operating on drones, a curious interaction is\ndiscovered.  Say a drone has a damaged internal part that needs to be\nreplaced.  Beau removes it, and disposes of it with a gauntlet\ntransformation.  He installs a replacement.\n\nIf that drone was a solver, he has damaged their blueprint.  This is a\ndifficult fact to notice at first --- necessarily, it only happens\nwith especially small parts.  Maybe by chance, Yeva and her highly\nperceptive eyes are supervising Beau while he works, or he happens to\ndispose of a crucial yet still small component.\n\nWhen Beau sends a part of a drone to his subspace, that part\ndisappears from the target's blueprint --- as if corrupted.  Not\npermanently; it registers as an enemy command, and it can be countered\nwith data recovery\n\nDisassembly drones have so many features custom built for outmatching\nand disassembling solver drones.  It's theorized that this is yet\nanother, rarely observed for its niche requirements and effects.  How\nmany tricks did disassembly drones have up their sleeves?\n\nThus, going forward, Beau is careful not to use this ability on his\nallies, and tends to be pretty difficult to set up a situation where\nhe can rip out a foe's parts and transform them away.\n\n- - -\n\nNow, to talk about some retcons.\n\nAfter arc two (\"Warpath to the Corpse Spire\"), the Wheel Group notices\na new type of zombie infesting copper-9.  Slithernots are small ring 4\nannoyances, like a bundle of wires crawling across the ground.\nThey're poorly understood because of their passive ability: they can\ntrigger the corruption-censoring circuitry even in ignited solver\ndrones that otherwise have those safeguards disabled.\n\nThis means that you could walk into a room teeming with dozens of\nslithernots and not register their presence.  If they obscure\nsomething you're looking at, you'll think nothing of it, or nudge them\naside on autopilot, as perceptively invisible as the frames of your\nglasses.\n\nOf course, this effect is achieved through corrupt commands, and so\nit's possible to resist; and it's possible for it to simply fail.  If\nthey are sufficiently distracting, if one is alone (and thus without\nother slithernots compounding the forget-me aura), it's possible to\nnotice them.\n\nWhen you become aware of a slithernot, it hisses and attacks, as if\noffended at being perceived.  And once you realize they're there, they\npresent no danger.  Remember, ring 4.  Most cadets could (literally!)\nstomp on these things to kill it.\n\nThere's just one last trick up their sleeve: when a slithernot dies,\nthey explode with data.  It's like a flashbang or EMP composed of\ncorruption, run through the same function that grants slithernots the\nforget-me aura.  Only now, rather than awareness of the slithernot\nslipping from your mind, everything slips from your mind.  You're\nbriefly dazed, the entire content of your working memory wiped, and\nthe last few moments are blurry if not outright forgotten.  What were\nyou doing here?\n\nSlithernots are thus pretty annoying to deal with, and the Wheel Group\nquickly has to deal with a lot of them.  As you can imagine, for\nevery slithernot you become aware of by chance, there must be several\nyou walked by without thinking about.\n\nThe Wheel Group develop's strategies to scan for slithernots and task\nteams with clear out the densest infestations of them.  There's enough\nof that every active solver becomes familiar with the tedium.  It's\nunclear how they're breeding so fast.\n\nSlithernots are captured and experimented on, and studies conclude\nthat the command that cloaks slithernots is keyed to their size.  The\nbigger and more data-heavy they get, the more their cloaking wanes in\neffectively.  The curve is a dramatic slump.\n\nSo, there's good news: worries that slithernots would develop or\nmutate into a ring 3 or greater antimemetic threat seem unlikely to\nmaterialize; there can't be any hulking monsters with this function\nhiding from them.\n\nThe bad news: the corollary to the above that the function becomes\nsubstantially more effective when they're smaller; they can breed so\nfast because baby slithernot are invisible.\n\nNow, the Wheel Group has another route to understanding and countering\nthis threat: Adam.  His innate function is [Zombie Process\nManagement], after all.  Unfortunately, he snaps a few pics of\nslithernots and it doesn't seem to do anything.\n\nNormally, one photo is enough to catch a ring 4, but there are a few\nreasons one might not be enough.  Stronger zombies require more\nphotos, of course, which is the immediate and most concerning\nconclusion to draw, but there are other reasons.  Bad photos have\nneglible effect, and slithernot's stealth isn't entirely\ncorruption-based.  And, fundamentally, Adam's photos must be of the\nzombie; photographing part of the zombie, or a construct or creation\nof the zombie won't work.\n\nClearly, some assumption they've made about slithernots is incorrect.\n\nFor all that slithernots pose little danger, there's clearly further\nmysteries to investigate.  Research committees and strategies outline\nplans to get to the root of their origin, and find a way cut it off at\nthe head.\n\nUnfortu",
  "title": "Repair, Slither, Retcon"
}