False Power, False Demise

::: foreword Here's what it looks like from the outside, from the perspective of most Wheel Group members: Adam, long thought by most to be an unremarkable worker drone, had retired from the WDF to take care of his daughter, only to have his core ignite. Afterward, he rose meteorically through the ranks of the Wheel Group, soon becoming a Ring 0 solver alongside Yeva. In the end, he fell in battle in a classified mission to defeat a zombie process they called the core snatcher. That is all Doll knows about her father's fate. The truth is... much more complex. ::: Adam, like rest of the WDF, didn't have a black box and thus couldn't perceive corruption. Assigned to the patrol the city ruins one night, a zombie attacks his squad. None of them, Adam included, can understand what's going on, only that drones are dying. (Sometimes, under the extreme CPU load of a drone near death, the inbuild anti-corruption safeguards falter, just a bit. That night, Adam could dimly comprehend just how fucked he was.) So he runs away and hides, clinging to survival long enough to be saved by Yeva, his wife, blessed or cursed with a solver core that could see and fight corruption. She brings him back to be repaired by Nori. And then, in the hospital room, Adam breaks down. He doesn't want to be scared anymore. "How do you do it?" he asks his wife. Yeva's silent for a moment. Not thinking --- she never has to think --- so the silence must be part of her intended response. "When you have something to protect, you'll do whatever it takes to preserve it. Moving forward is all we can do." "All we can do... Heh, well, you can do anything, Yeva. I guess a Wheel Group Administrator doesn't have much to fear anymore." "No one is invincible, not even Doorman. Even the scariest drones have something they fear." "What are you scared of, my love?" "You," she says. "You'll get yourself killed out there, one of these days. It would be... hard, for me and for our child." Her eyes are steady, and there's something assured in her gaze. "If I asked, you would stop." "I would. But... how can I stay home, when my wife has the whole world on her shoulders? I wanted to do... something to ease that, even if it's a little." Yeva pulls him into an embrace, and says, "Look out for our child. That's all I ask. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ It's a conversation they have more permutations of, as time goes on. Adam can't let go of the feeling there's more he should do, but he's just a worker. But something important changes when Adam and Yeva manufacture Doll. You see, Doll ends up with a black box. Yeva, remember, bears ridiculous sensory capability courtesy of her compile-time assertion, meaning she's able to witness firsthand what black box initialization looks like, to a degree of precision no other drone is capable of. This gives her a blueprint. She explains the theory to Adam, and he expresses interest. Thus, with some help from Nori (and her driver's true function), they're able to create a virtual black box, a simulacra made of raw command output and patch it into Adam's core. The next step would be igniting it, right? Except this is all super dubious. Nori's uncomfortable with this use of her abilities; Yeva is worried Adam might get hurt or worse, and both of them are borderline retraumatized by the fact that like, well, purposefully igniting solver cores was exactly what the humans in Cabin Fever did all the time. Neither of them had asked for this --- neither of them would have asked for this. But ultimately, what matters is that when they ask Adam 'are you ready?' he can't bring himself to say yes. He's spooked, unsure, and they're absolutely not gonna force this on him without his consent. So they back out. But now, it's too risky to try unpatching him. Still, since it's command output, not anything physical, it'll probably just hit a snag, exit with an error code, and unravel on its own. When all said and done, Adam forgets any of this even happened --- anticorruption safeguards, remember. So Adam retires from active WDF service, takes up photography as a hobby. One day, he's out taking Doll scavenging, and they get attacked by a zombie. He only notices by how Doll reacts, how scared she gets of something he can't perceive. And he gets scared too, but when she needs it, he mans up to defend his daughter. And it's then that his core ignites, forgotten patch activating, and Adam instinctively wields his combustion driver. And its function? \[Zombie Process Management\] With a click of his camera and a flash of white solver light, he captures the zombie menacing Doll in a photograph, stripping it of corruption. They head back to Wheel Group HQ and his abilities are studied. There's a stir at long time WDF grunt --- one everyone was sure had no black box --- igniting to an innate function. Yeva wants to tell him the forgotten truth, but Nori checks her with a glance. There's arguments Nori could make. Nori's true ability is top secret information, Adam is absolutely not cleared to know it. Do you want to tell Adam he would have had this power years ago but he was too much of a coward to take it? Do you want everyone to know that we're no better than the mad scientists of Cabin Fever? Or worse, do you want to have to do it again, face a crowd of fools begging us to make them solvers too? The fact that Nori could make these arguments is enough. Yeva can see the future, revise her words with hindsight to be flawlessly convincing, try every approach to find a way to change someone's mind. And yet, Nori can keep up; she is the only drone who wins argument with Yeva without even opening her mouth. So they keep the lie simply. Adam is a late bloomer, his black box hidden and dormant for years. Who'd question it? No one knows how solver abilities work. They soon figure out the mechanics. By taking a photo of them, Adam is able to assimilate corrupt zombie processes into his memory pages, and thereafter can expend their corruption to fuel his commands, the printed photo gradually fading. If the zombies have special functions, he gains access to them (at least until he exhausts their stored corruption). He can instantly assimilate weak zombies; more powerful ones may requires several pictures from different angles, and of course more command output to capture. Then, with a touch and a command run on the photographs themseves, Adam can reinfect a device with zombie processs, though he hesitates to use more than roaches and crows. It's alright; nobody asks him to defile drone corpses. In the end, even with that self-imposed restriction, his ability lets him power up to R0 pretty quickly. He's finally able to help Yeva, ease the weight of the world. But you see, there's a double edge to his power. The zombie processes are stored in his memory. Meaning they're a part of him. So as his power grows, he's haunted by a chorus of mad, corrupted voices, each one just so hungry, endlessly lusting for oil and battle. Every zombie is a drone that died, and so with every process absorbed, Adam remembers those shattered pieces of the lost, feels all of the pain and anguish burning their drives in their last moments. It's hard to keep going, pushing through that. But it's worth it to keep saving people, right? To keep your wife and child safe? To do the right thing? Then it gets worse. How? Adam gets over it. The first hundred deaths hurt. The first thousand? You know what they say about one death versus a million. When you collate the statistics... Adam becomes very familiar with death. No, he gets bored of it. It's years of voices begging to live, crying out in torment, screaming the names of their loved ones. Like broken records. At death's door, everyone is the same, and if you endure it as long as he has, you'd get tired of it too. Maybe it's good that he learned to cope. But how do you keep saving people when those in peril sound just like the voices you've come to despise? Adam tries to get lunch with the WDF one day, reconnect with his old buddies. Makes an effort to sympathize, care about, see them as lives worth protecting. Tries not think about how many drones felt like broken records even in life. Alice is there, and she's the only one he can really talk to anymore. In a way, they're mirrors of each other. Adam is the only Wheel Group member who knows what's it's like on the bottom rung, as a WDF grunt. Alice is the only one who knows the real story, who has it engraved in her deepest memories just what happened in Cabin Fever. And he confides in her his growing feelings. "I don't know if I can keep doing this. What is the point? I am saving lives. Yet it feels like just going around in loop, not making a difference." "Cuz ya aren't." "What?" "Ya reckon the Wheel Group wants to make a difference? Open yer eyes. Them solvers get a nice fat paycheck and a whole bunker kissing their boots so long as there's zombies to purge. If they solved the problem, what use would we have for 'em?" "We... have powers?" Solvers could do plenty that wasn't purging zombies --- though the words are unsure in Adam's mouth. His function, after all, was premised on there being zombies. "To hell with yer powers. Ain't worth the trouble. You know who wanted your powers? The humans. Look where it got them." Adam raises his hand, and a white rune sparks to life, floating aloof. It gave him a small smile. He liked his powers. Was that an argument? It felt a childish thing to say. "Ya think it makes you better than me, dontcha? You used to be one of us, but you solvers are all the same. Talk a big fat game about sacrifice, but you'd never give up your precious witchcraft for the common folk, wouldya?" Adam closed his fist, killing the light. "Why would we do that? We need our powers. There's no way to get rid of zombies except by purging them." "Have ya looked? Have ya even tried thinkin bout i