Worm: I'm gonna kill him. (2024)

One of the species we encountered were well, pessimists. They had 50,000 words for various degrees of failure.

I've used them all in approximately 4.3 seconds. I'm using a personality overlay, mainly because a lot of my other thinky bits are off line, and more importantly, we don't do real well at working with short lived species when we're running our native mindset. Also, it makes it easier for me to start cursing. Especially when I start looking around.

Shards are supposed to be tailored for their user. Carefully designed to add capabilities and not cause issues. Not these. Mine are completely off the network and the rest appear to have been scattered at random, using the "oh shit, everyone else is dead" backups for deploying a shard to a user. The network is utterly fucked, with the shards making connections and dropping them at random, with even most of the royal and network command shards just… randomly acting out.

And Zion isn't talking. His primary command node network is locked up tight!

Did the idiot get into real trouble? Usually that means you're under some kind of dangerous info or memetic attack. But nothing on the world…

Or he's sulking.

I'm going to go with two.

I'm staring at Interrogator, which has latched on to a pre-adult human female. She's busy reducing a clerk to tears for making a joke about her intelligence.

What the… I go over the 50,000 words again.

I'm going to be doing that a lot in the future, but Interrogator is only supposed to go to adult hosts. Not just that, but hosts with a high degree of introspection and intelligence, because there's a danger of active shards like that doing things like…

Oh, convincing you that reducing the girl in front of you to tears is fine, without noticing that about half the people behind you now want to kill you.

What possible reasoning did it—aaaannnnddd I don't have Command or Network. But I do have Communication.

Bad news, It's Zion's shard and I don't have the command overrides I need. Well, I can always chat. I do have some shards for that. I'll just run a simulation to give the write answers.

Lisa sat down with her meal. She'd noticed that people were angry at her, so she'd walked away to a small park. Screw them. The girl had smirked at her and asked her if she wanted an address to a homeless shelter, or maybe get some mental help. Well, just because she was undercover for the Boss didn't mean that she had to…

The silver-haired woman who sat down at her stared at her. "Hi, can I talk about your shard?" She was wearing clothes that looked like they'd come out of the Goodwill bin. But her eyes and poise…

Wait what—Lisa stared at the woman. Her power—

Forbidden information.

What?

"So, I saw that you sort of used Interrogator to wreck that girl, but why?"

"I-um…" C'mon power! Oh shit, is she a nullifier?

"Not very creative, not for Interrogator, but I was wondering, why did you get it? Normally it's handed out to more… mature specimens."

LIsa was moving slowly. Her power was refusing to talk, but she looked away from the really scary woman and tried to think. Interrogator. That's what she calls my power . But get it?

"Are you sure—" she tired again, then winced.

"Yeah, don't do that, I'm an Entity and shards don't like trying to observe us. So…" And her voice changed., "How did you get your power."

Don't, don't, don't… "Reggie!" she burst out.

"Reggie?"

Lisa bit her lip so hard she drew blood. She wasn't, she wasn't…. "Reggie killed himself. He didn't tell me, I didn't know…I—" She bit her lip again, because it was all rushing back, finding him, her parents glaring at her, asking her why she hadn't noticed, why she hadn't seen…

"That doesn't make any sense…" The woman said. "You weren't ready. If anything that made things worse, warped your…" her voice trailed off, but Lisa had a hard time seeing her because her vision kept getting watery and she hoped that she didn't make her talk because she wasn't going to burst out into tears and be vulnerable she'd never be hurt like that—

"Here." Somehow she'd created a cloth. "Blow your nose."

Lisa obediently took it from her.

I let the girl blow her nose and run over what I know and then I repeat the 50,000 words. Several times.

Conflict. When I was in hibernation he tried that moronic conflict imperative again. We haven't used that since our first eruption into the void, because it doesn't work. And it looks like he didn't want to tell me, and since he's not good at pruning and reprogramming shards, he sort of grabbed the early, and super obsolete directives and then…

Hammered them into the shards with a sledgehammer.

The cycle is fucked, the shards are fucked, the host species, if the sniffling girl in front of me is any indication is also fucked.

And every time I try to talk to Scion I get REQUEST DENIED.

Oh deny away you little idiot. You've left half of your important shards lying around and I'm going to have to fix them first. Then I deal with you.

What's a little murder between mates?

And after that, I'll bring you back from backups and get creative.

It's also the last damned time I am letting you handle a cycle.

Right, first step. There are some priority shards out here, and I can start fixing them. Humans also naturally form… Yep. PRT and Protectorate. Also, linked to the people who were processing my body for juice. Unfortunately, looks like my precog shard went missing so gotta do this the hard way.

I look over and try… Yep, ther's Zion's Administrator Shard. That will be handy.

"Right, young lady, come with me."

"But—who are you?"

"The source of some of the powers of earth, the Entity, part of the first sapient species to exist—with the exception of my counterpart." I project my perception forward. "Have you ever heard of a place called Winslow?"

"Yes…"

"Good, I need to go talk to Administrator and… Huh, there's another shard there two. Seems to have…" I blink. "Well, thats interesting. Let's go."

"But…" she glares at me. "You cannot be telling the truth!"

"What does Interrogator say?"

"It's not…ow! Not working!" She's irritated, not crying. That's good. Unnecessarily upsetting hosts isn't something we do are you listening to me ZION?

"Wanna find out why not? Come with me."

I don't bother to look behind. As deep as interrogator has its hooks into her, there's no way she'll be able to resist.

Worm: I'm gonna kill him. (2024)

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