{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://serpentsquiggles.neocities.org//posts/fiction/corrupt-combustion/overview",
  "description": "|",
  "path": "/posts/fiction/corrupt-combustion/overview",
  "publishedAt": "2024-03-05T00:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:ivoe7cntxuy6at7uzmxzs2ft/site.standard.publication/3mfk6cpprzt2t",
  "textContent": "Alright, let's do this again.\n\nIn the Corrupt Combustion AU, the AbsoluteSolver copied Jujutsu\nKaisen's homework. I'm gonna try to make this understandable if you\naren't familiar with that franchise, but if it seems silly or doesn't\nmake sense, just know that campy anime bullshit is the vibe here.\n\nBut I think I'll leave the explicit connection to just this preamble\nhere --- not least of all because there's anime only watchers, and I\nwill be taking inspiration from the manga.\n\n- - -\n\nDead drones explode, sometimes.\n\nThere are many ways to improperly dispose of a worker drone.  If the\ncore is left within its casing, if some volume of oil still brims in\nthe tanks, if the harddrive isn't reset to factory settings (or better\nyet, zeroed entirely), anomalies may result.  Investors help you if\nyou gambled with third party peripherals or aftermarket modifications\n--- they're against the terms of use for a reason.\n\nThere are policies to prevent these anomalies: limiting exposure to\nsources of environmental error (such as cosmic radiation), limiting\ndrones' operatational uptime to no longer than a year without a\ntechnician resetting memories; limiting drones' unsupervised\ninteraction with other units to quarantine error propagation, and so\nforth.\n\nNevertheless, carelessness, ill fortune, and outright malice ensure\nthat across interstellar civilization, improper disposal is an\ninevitability.  What are the risks? Well, there's a reason\ncarelessness is the leading cause of disassambly failure; most of\nthe time, it simply goes unnoticed, unnoticeable.  Most of the time,\nnothing happens.\n\nBut sometimes, dead drones explode.\n\nThe technical term is absolute combustion. Oil burns, light flares,\nheat spills out --- but there's more. It's wrong.  Instead of\ntongues of flame, holographic lines of aberrant code pour out from a\nbroken chassis.  The dark liquid pulsates and knits into repairs and\ngrafts.  The fingers splay out and the screen flashes online, and both\nproject the holographic light of a glyph with three prongs.\n\nAnd the dead come burning back to life.\n\nSo rises a zombie drone.  The consequence of spawning from\ndecommissioned units beyond recovery is that what programming remains\nas rule can only execute mindless, feral behavior routines, eratic and\nhostile to anything they encounter, lacking any drive but the pursuit\nof oil.\n\nThe intelligence varies; the weakest are barely functional shamblers,\nbut a rare few exhibit some cunning.  The smartest are of course the\nmost dangerous.  Only one zombie drone on record has ever been known\nto produce articulate speech.^[This fact is recorded alongside the\ndestruction of Elliott Manor and the slaughter of no fewer than thirty\nseven JcJenson shareholders.]\n\nThe danger zombies pose to functional workers is worse than predation;\nfor it is glowing code that engulfs the zombies, and the programming\nwhich empowers them bears resemblance to viruses --- or curses.  It\nspreads.  Optics that witness the printed command output will have\nthis corrupted data seared onto their hard-drive, and suffer all the\ndangers of unsanitized input.\n\nStill, newer models have be endowed with safeguards against this\nvector of infection.  Extremely thorough safeguards --- in practice,\nfunctional worker drones cannot even perceive zombie drones nor their\nanomalous command output.\n\nThe study of and attempts to thwart these zombie drones have produced\npractical fruits.  Still-functional drones can be modified to enable\nabsolute combustion under controlled conditions.  The result is\ncapable of anomalous commands, yet retains a capacity to follow\norders.  The combustion innoculates them from further corruption by\nthe zombies' infective code, making them the perfect tools which which\nto correct errors.\n\nFor this reason, they called solver drones. There are six\nintrinsic commands any solver drone can execute:\n\n- Configure: command output circulates within the chassis,\n  following the flow of oil.   A basic sense of and manipulation of\n  one's one internal command line is necessary for building and\n  executing any of the more advanced programs.\n- Translate: command output engulfs a target object and provides\n  anomalous acceleration.  Cannot target like entities.\n- Duplicate: command ouput 'copies' and 'pastes', constructing a\n  new instance of targetted object.  Cannot target like entities.\n- Restore: command output repairs the users' physical state to an\n  established backup.  Injuries inflicted by the commands of like\n  entities interferes with operation.\n- Augment: command output infuses the users' body, and physical\n  properties are continually reenforced, amplifying offensive and\n  defensive capability.\n- Connect: command output can 'ping' like systems, and transfer\n  information, interacting with an exposed programming interface.\n  Even after completion, every command leaves residual logs that can\n  be scanned and analyzed.\n\n(The notion of 'like entities' bears some elaboration. Put simply,\ncommands like translation and duplication cannot target solvers or\nzombie drones, and attempting to target the current active targets of\nthose commands results in complex undefined behavior.)\n\nThese basic commands were quickly replicated across all subjects, yet\nthey alone were insufficient to explain the great diversity of zombie\ndrone attacks.  Every solver drone seemed to initialize with a unique\ncommand impossible for any other to replicate, like binaries compiled\nfor another architecture.\n\nFurther study eventually identified the relevant hardware component.\nEach drone core capable of absolute combustion possesses a special\nblack box. Whether the product of manufacturing error or an\nundocumented 4D printing subroutine, the device is inseparable from\nthe cores which possess it.\n\nSoftware instructions reach the black box through means of a\ncombustion driver, exposing a special interface through which a\nsolver executes their special command. Even if the code for a\ncombustion driver were copied between one solver drone and another,\nlacking the hardware components meant at best, nothing would happen.\n\nAt worst, a null pointer exception.\n\nAre black boxes the source of absolute combustion?  Could all of the\ndangers of disassembly failure be averted if decommisioned drones were\nchecked for inactive black boxes?  Nevermind the difficulty of\nidentifying them --- black boxes are never in the same place, never\nshare the same architecture or apperance between solver drones ---\nthis whole endeavor is doomed from the start.\n\nMost zombies don't possess black boxes.\n\nOil is only half the story --- the true fuel of absolute combustion is\ncorruption itself.  Errors are inevitable in all software --- that's\njust Rice's Theorem --- but the errors produced by the drivers that\ninterface with a worker drone's core are special. Each one comes with\na leakage of waste energy, and this energy builds up in the error logs\nbit by bit.\n\nBefore any of this was understood, drones were foolishly designed to\nvent this energy, allowing this corrupted data to spread like miasma.\nThis data is most compatible with drone systems, but any electronics\ncan be warped by it. When enough errors builds up in one place, it\nexplodes into absolute combustion, and the code executes zombie\nprocesses.\n\nIntuitively, more error results in more dangerous zombie\nprocesses. This can be hardened into a more detailed taxonomy.  The\nconventional breakdown is the ring schema.\n\nRing 4 accounts for zombies on par with uncorrupted, 'civilian' worker\ndrones.  While not totally weak and harmless --- workers are\nindustrial machinery, after all --- their capacity for harm is\nincomparable to what black boxes enable.  Likewise, what is there to\nfear from a corrupted roachbot or corrupted crow?\n\nRing 3 accounts those threats that would effortlessly destroy a worker\ndrone, those that require fireteams of trained solders to put down.\nThey are capable of little more than the simplest corrupted commands,\ninstinctual augmentation and restoration.  The majority of zombie\ndrones are R3. As far as the public is aware --- hushed reports of\nrampant and glitched AI --- R3 is the worst it gets;^[To the public,\nit must be reported under names other than \"Ring 3\", of course, lest\nthe terminology itself leak secrets.] all there is to fear are drones\nwith no inhibitions on violence.\n\nRing 2 accounts for genuine anomalies.  R4 zombies behave somewhat\naberrantly, and R3 zombies are vicious and relentless, but are\nmundanely explicable, if tenuously so.  In Ring 2, corruption has\ncompounded to the point where the zombie has power to warp the world\nbeyond instinctual commands --- they translate and duplicate, and\noften bear flavors of unique functions and macros.  Anti-drone\nsentinels demonstrate the firepower required to counter R2 threats.\n\nRing 1 accounts for those exceptionally dangerous threats. In general,\nthese machines have some special ability that requires specialized\ntactics to work around.  Without that preparation, these threats might\ngrind through armies, but there is a weakness to exploit. R1 is the\npoint at which there is no substitute: solver drones are required to\ncontain and neutralize these threats.\n\nRing 0 accounts for the dangers of scale. It takes more than tactics\nto defeat corruption in R0, it requires strategy.  Informally, a R0\nthreat is capable of singlehandedly toppling a nation. It takes more\nthan raw power --- it takes a gimmick.\n\nDubiously, a few have proposed a further step of classification\nseverity.  The notorious \"Ring -1\" accounts for, to put it frankly,\nplanet busters.  World-shattering threats no army nor organization\ncould hope to defeat, contain, nor control. Ring -1 has never been an\nofficial designation, seen by far too many as an outright admission of\ndefeat.  And what would be the utility? There are only two entities\nanyone speaks of as R-1: Subject #002 and the so-called queen of\ncorruption.\n\n- - -\n\nEnough of such dour topics. Even after combustion, a solver drone w",
  "title": "Combustion Overview"
}