Combustion Overview

Alright, let's do this again. In the Corrupt Combustion AU, the AbsoluteSolver copied Jujutsu Kaisen's homework. I'm gonna try to make this understandable if you aren't familiar with that franchise, but if it seems silly or doesn't make sense, just know that campy anime bullshit is the vibe here. But I think I'll leave the explicit connection to just this preamble here --- not least of all because there's anime only watchers, and I will be taking inspiration from the manga. - - - Dead drones explode, sometimes. There are many ways to improperly dispose of a worker drone. If the core is left within its casing, if some volume of oil still brims in the tanks, if the harddrive isn't reset to factory settings (or better yet, zeroed entirely), anomalies may result. Investors help you if you gambled with third party peripherals or aftermarket modifications --- they're against the terms of use for a reason. There are policies to prevent these anomalies: limiting exposure to sources of environmental error (such as cosmic radiation), limiting drones' operatational uptime to no longer than a year without a technician resetting memories; limiting drones' unsupervised interaction with other units to quarantine error propagation, and so forth. Nevertheless, carelessness, ill fortune, and outright malice ensure that across interstellar civilization, improper disposal is an inevitability. What are the risks? Well, there's a reason carelessness is the leading cause of disassambly failure; most of the time, it simply goes unnoticed, unnoticeable. Most of the time, nothing happens. But sometimes, dead drones explode. The technical term is absolute combustion. Oil burns, light flares, heat spills out --- but there's more. It's wrong. Instead of tongues of flame, holographic lines of aberrant code pour out from a broken chassis. The dark liquid pulsates and knits into repairs and grafts. The fingers splay out and the screen flashes online, and both project the holographic light of a glyph with three prongs. And the dead come burning back to life. So rises a zombie drone. The consequence of spawning from decommissioned units beyond recovery is that what programming remains as rule can only execute mindless, feral behavior routines, eratic and hostile to anything they encounter, lacking any drive but the pursuit of oil. The intelligence varies; the weakest are barely functional shamblers, but a rare few exhibit some cunning. The smartest are of course the most dangerous. Only one zombie drone on record has ever been known to produce articulate speech.^[This fact is recorded alongside the destruction of Elliott Manor and the slaughter of no fewer than thirty seven JcJenson shareholders.] The danger zombies pose to functional workers is worse than predation; for it is glowing code that engulfs the zombies, and the programming which empowers them bears resemblance to viruses --- or curses. It spreads. Optics that witness the printed command output will have this corrupted data seared onto their hard-drive, and suffer all the dangers of unsanitized input. Still, newer models have be endowed with safeguards against this vector of infection. Extremely thorough safeguards --- in practice, functional worker drones cannot even perceive zombie drones nor their anomalous command output. The study of and attempts to thwart these zombie drones have produced practical fruits. Still-functional drones can be modified to enable absolute combustion under controlled conditions. The result is capable of anomalous commands, yet retains a capacity to follow orders. The combustion innoculates them from further corruption by the zombies' infective code, making them the perfect tools which which to correct errors. For this reason, they called solver drones. There are six intrinsic commands any solver drone can execute: - Configure: command output circulates within the chassis, following the flow of oil. A basic sense of and manipulation of one's one internal command line is necessary for building and executing any of the more advanced programs. - Translate: command output engulfs a target object and provides anomalous acceleration. Cannot target like entities. - Duplicate: command ouput 'copies' and 'pastes', constructing a new instance of targetted object. Cannot target like entities. - Restore: command output repairs the users' physical state to an established backup. Injuries inflicted by the commands of like entities interferes with operation. - Augment: command output infuses the users' body, and physical properties are continually reenforced, amplifying offensive and defensive capability. - Connect: command output can 'ping' like systems, and transfer information, interacting with an exposed programming interface. Even after completion, every command leaves residual logs that can be scanned and analyzed. (The notion of 'like entities' bears some elaboration. Put simply, commands like translation and duplication cannot target solvers or zombie drones, and attempting to target the current active targets of those commands results in complex undefined behavior.) These basic commands were quickly replicated across all subjects, yet they alone were insufficient to explain the great diversity of zombie drone attacks. Every solver drone seemed to initialize with a unique command impossible for any other to replicate, like binaries compiled for another architecture. Further study eventually identified the relevant hardware component. Each drone core capable of absolute combustion possesses a special black box. Whether the product of manufacturing error or an undocumented 4D printing subroutine, the device is inseparable from the cores which possess it. Software instructions reach the black box through means of a combustion driver, exposing a special interface through which a solver executes their special command. Even if the code for a combustion driver were copied between one solver drone and another, lacking the hardware components meant at best, nothing would happen. At worst, a null pointer exception. Are black boxes the source of absolute combustion? Could all of the dangers of disassembly failure be averted if decommisioned drones were checked for inactive black boxes? Nevermind the difficulty of identifying them --- black boxes are never in the same place, never share the same architecture or apperance between solver drones --- this whole endeavor is doomed from the start. Most zombies don't possess black boxes. Oil is only half the story --- the true fuel of absolute combustion is corruption itself. Errors are inevitable in all software --- that's just Rice's Theorem --- but the errors produced by the drivers that interface with a worker drone's core are special. Each one comes with a leakage of waste energy, and this energy builds up in the error logs bit by bit. Before any of this was understood, drones were foolishly designed to vent this energy, allowing this corrupted data to spread like miasma. This data is most compatible with drone systems, but any electronics can be warped by it. When enough errors builds up in one place, it explodes into absolute combustion, and the code executes zombie processes. Intuitively, more error results in more dangerous zombie processes. This can be hardened into a more detailed taxonomy. The conventional breakdown is the ring schema. Ring 4 accounts for zombies on par with uncorrupted, 'civilian' worker drones. While not totally weak and harmless --- workers are industrial machinery, after all --- their capacity for harm is incomparable to what black boxes enable. Likewise, what is there to fear from a corrupted roachbot or corrupted crow? Ring 3 accounts those threats that would effortlessly destroy a worker drone, those that require fireteams of trained solders to put down. They are capable of little more than the simplest corrupted commands, instinctual augmentation and restoration. The majority of zombie drones are R3. As far as the public is aware --- hushed reports of rampant and glitched AI --- R3 is the worst it gets;^[To the public, it must be reported under names other than "Ring 3", of course, lest the terminology itself leak secrets.] all there is to fear are drones with no inhibitions on violence. Ring 2 accounts for genuine anomalies. R4 zombies behave somewhat aberrantly, and R3 zombies are vicious and relentless, but are mundanely explicable, if tenuously so. In Ring 2, corruption has compounded to the point where the zombie has power to warp the world beyond instinctual commands --- they translate and duplicate, and often bear flavors of unique functions and macros. Anti-drone sentinels demonstrate the firepower required to counter R2 threats. Ring 1 accounts for those exceptionally dangerous threats. In general, these machines have some special ability that requires specialized tactics to work around. Without that preparation, these threats might grind through armies, but there is a weakness to exploit. R1 is the point at which there is no substitute: solver drones are required to contain and neutralize these threats. Ring 0 accounts for the dangers of scale. It takes more than tactics to defeat corruption in R0, it requires strategy. Informally, a R0 threat is capable of singlehandedly toppling a nation. It takes more than raw power --- it takes a gimmick. Dubiously, a few have proposed a further step of classification severity. The notorious "Ring -1" accounts for, to put it frankly, planet busters. World-shattering threats no army nor organization could hope to defeat, contain, nor control. Ring -1 has never been an official designation, seen by far too many as an outright admission of defeat. And what would be the utility? There are only two entities anyone speaks of as R-1: Subject #002 and the so-called queen of corruption. - - - Enough of such dour topics. Even after combustion, a solver drone w