Lobotomy Corruption

::: foreword I've had a lot of thoughts about how Tessa fits into CC. I haven't yet completely worked it all out, but here's my notes. Revised on 2025-08-07. ::: Here's what I'm thinking: Tessa's little found family weren't just random dumped drones. They were specifically solver drones, found wanting in the company's evaluation and discarded. The researchers lit their cores, saw their combat potential, and went "Nah, y'all dogwater." J's driver is obviously pretty ass if she isn't not actively killing drones to replenish her reserves (especially if she has to pay her loans back with interest), so they mostly see her summoning a bit of command output before crashing. And zombies as a rule tend to be oil-starved (it's why they're killing drones), so frankly J is just Bad At It. V's driver is also pretty hard to use if you don't understand it. She becomes... blurry? Except whenever she looks at you? And she can sense when people are looking at her? What a joke. WD!V is too timid to want to shatter anyone's visor, and and again, it's probably ineffective on zombies. N's driver is harder to underestimate. But seeing as it only "teleport objecting into your hands" leads you to conclude he can't use corrupt peripherals, and if N seemingly can't use it on people (they probably don't figure out the consent rule), and if his tags can be overwritten but anyone else's command logs --- then what he can do seems finnicky enough to be worth cutting losses. Especially when there are so many more obviously useful abilities. (Maybe N can't even use Ten Doggos until he awakens his sandbox, or maybe Ten Doggos isn't his technique, and Tessa frankenstein's a second black box onto his core later, when she's researching the limits of solver abilities and possibly making anti-cyn plans. There's potential for a cute character beat here, where Tessa first raises the possibility: J is too spooked by the possibility of become damaged and ineffective by the procedure to say yes, and V likewise still has a weak mindset --- but N loves doing anything.) And of course, there's Cyn. To the company, Cyn's driver only seemed to work on strings, so she was limited to animating giant plushies and dolls, a pretty weak offense. Not that revealing what she's truly capable of would have improved her lot much. Maybe she didn't want to be the company's weapon, maybe she didnt want to scare the humans, maybe she had a voice in her head telling her everything would be alright. Naturally, Tessa doesn't care about any of this, and finds the idea of using drones as war machines pretty appalling, if unfortunately necessary. Her drones use their abilities just to play around and make life easier. V is a monster at hide and seek for instance, and a pretty good look out for when her parents' drones might stumble upon them at a bad time. J likewise loves learning about everything she can do with run-time assertions. But here's where things get interesting. Sometime after she gets her drones, but before Cyn's master plan goes into effect, Tessa starts getting terrible headaches, seeing migraine auras, and a whole host of other mental problems. Doctors investigate and find she has a tumor growing at a rapid rate. She might be dead within the year. Her parents consider their options. Cloning her? Or just having a new, better daughter? The tumor could be surgically removed, but it's a risky procedure. Maybe there's a few ways they could go about it, but as the doctor goes over the options, Tessa starts having a panic attack and needs to be removed from the room. The bottom line is this: Tessa is spooked at the idea of her parents picking out a brain surgery for her. What if they let them remove her frontal lobe to make her more docile? What if they install a chip to brainwash her? Something needs to be done about her tumor, but it'll be on Tessa's terms, so J and Tessa pull some all-nighters reading about surgery and downloading simulators. J's obviously pretty uncomfortable at the prospect, but Tessa asked and that's that. So Tessa gets J to trepan her and remove the tumor. Now, you probably feel where this is going. Some of the perceptual disturbances Tessa experienced as tumor symptoms revolved around her drones. And sure enough, when the tumor is removed, it doesnt even look like a normal brain tumor, nothing like the diagrams they studied. It looks like a teratoma of silicon and copper. J immediately recognizes that it's suffused with corrupt data. How did this get into Tessa? An enemy solver? But the thing is, we know corruption functions are obviously capable of generating robot substrate from seemingly nothing; that's exactly how [Std::Regenerate]{.spell} works. When Tessa wires it up to her laptop, she sees that registers as a malformed core, as if everything had been atropy-manufactured except the black box. And this is a black box. And it's funtional. That's an answer that yields more questions, but the theory they settle on is that somehow, this black box had begun regenerated its core inside of Tessa's brain. But again: how did it get there? (Truth is, Tessa had spent so long around her drones, exposing herself to their corruption, while learning and constantly thinking about drone schematics and driver code that she had all but emulated a core in her brain. Remember, black boxes are essentially hand-placed by the solver and/or the branch predictor, and why wouldn't it amuse them to inflict this on Tessa? (You might imagine she had strange dreams of meeting a drone she'd never met, its frame welded to a vast machine with too many faces.) Fundamentally, the core of corruption is Turing completness --- and a biological computer is still a computer.) - - - While this is happening, Cyn starts ramping up for the destruction of earth, but Tessa's read enough illicitly-acquired top secret documentation-lore to determine that her little gremlin is actually the left hand of the absolute solver. Maybe she hacks into JCJ, pokes around their active roster and decides nobody has any idea who the right hand is supposed to be, and Tessa's really worried about what cyn's got planned for the gala. So she's like fine, I'll do it myself. Recovers a drone from the dump, and does a bunch of core surgery trying to frankenstein together something. Nobody comes together, even as the gala looms closer. N, being the most reliable volunteer for Tessa's experiments, had his core scooped out, his driver scanned and decompiled onto Tessa's computer. Like this, she discovers that his function isn't just retrieval. Rather, its true function is bringing back things that belong together; when he runs the command that marks something for retrieval, he's creating that 'belongs with me' connection. But any commands can create a connection. By understanding this, Tessa can present a disassembled chunk of a junkyard core, and when N tries to retrieve it, he retrieves the whole object --- essentially, repairing it.^[It occurs to me that N's ability applied to healing would go crazy. Though if this feels like too much of an asspull, maybe we could chalk it up to Tessa patching his driver + r\ u\ n t\ i\ m\ e a\ s\ s\ e\ r\ t\ i\ o\ n.] Anyway, with N's ability to repair disassembled cores and Tessa having previously done partial scans of Cyn's driver to study it, the tinker returns to her mechanical tumor extracted from her skull. If it was a black box, what was its function? Could she write a driver for it? She's trying to cobble together a weapon for facing Cyn, but is met with failure after failure. What if she could create something stronger than a worker? But she always hated how JCJ turned drones into weapons. She wouldn't make a drone into her tool. But remotely piloting a frame has too much lag, she couldn't even keep up with V in spars. At the Gala, Cyn declares her war against humanity, and the Elliott manor becomes the throne from which she observes her coming conquest. Tessa stalks the battlegrounds where JCJ's solvers try over and over to fight Cyn and continually lose --- she becomes like a vulture, hunting for the best drivers among the fallen. This doesn't escape Cyn's notice. Her old pet project gone rogue taunts her --- are you so afraid to look at me, auntie? Are you going to tell me to go back in the basement? Tessa flees every overture --- her weapon isn't ready yet. Maybe out of some lingering fondness, Tessa's hideaway endure where so many of humanity's strongholds falter. Drones and humans alike flock to her --- she becomes a figure of hope in the apocalypse, and everyone is praying for her weapon's fruition. As the deathtoll climbs, maybe Cyn loses patience, maybe Tessa can't bring herself to watch more die, but she has to make a move. It's time for all their training and preparation to pay off. Returning to the manor where they grew up, Tessa, J, V, and N are ready to use the power of friendship and hard work--- just kidding, they're here to cheat. Cyn was the strongest, more virulent solver of earth. No amount of time could have caught any of them up to her level. So it's disappointingly soon when her corruption-tendrils knock the gun out of Tessa's hands and the sword out of J's. Cyn finds herself immediately victorious. And the lingering fondness is explicit --- Cyn binds herself to runtime assertion that she would not destroy Tessa's drones if they stand down and join her. When Tessa tells them to stop fighting, they comply, albeit with concerned looks towards their human. And they are right to be concerned; Cyn's tentacles are already stabbing into Tessa's abdomen, peeling off her skin, and the human is bleeding out. So---finally---Tessa tells N to use the contingency. Cyn warns him that she doesn't want to discard Tessa's pets, but if--- yet she's too slow, and N has already summoned a modified drone frame. I mentioned before that Tessa had created the prototype disassembl