Vigil VII: Strife Amidst the Clouds

[Ironsmith]

[Eun's Lab - Solving A Serum]

"So then, other than scientific curiosity, the hope is that, what, I might be able to make something like that for you?" Eun asks. "Because if that's the end goal, it's so much easier. I already have a few hundred formulas for organic coolants. If you wanted me to give you a shot that lets you turn off your fire for a while, I'm a good ninety percent of the way there already." She gives Felicity a little smile.

[Earl of Purple]

Eun's Lab- Solving a Serum

"Mostly it was scientific curiosity, and maybe find a way to reverse engineer it or improve it slightly. Vigil fights the biggest baddies, right? So super powers might help with that. I... Wasn't expecting you to have a way to stop me burning. Organic coolant, huh? That sounds awesome." Especially if it can stop her blood burning when it contacts air. Currently that means Felicity has to avoid doing anything that might lead to surgery. She's smiling pretty widely, though; this is exciting her.

Also, part of her motivation was spending time with Eun.

[Ironsmith]

[Eun's Lab - Solving a Serum]

Doctor Bu is, of course, entirely oblivious to this. Not that she minded spending time with Felicity, either; she usually enjoyed it, even. Bur her focus now is on the digital representation of the coolant she mentioned; a slowly-spinning mass of holographic spheres, which her projector was now showing instead of any insects.

"It is a little neat, yeah." Eun smiles, spinning the model around. "Okay, so my immediate thoughts go to this fire suppressant. You see these structures here and here?" She says, pointing to them. "Normally, they react with O₂ gas endothermically to produce some organic products that we can breath safely. Naturally, it's not... exactly safe to just inject into your veins, but I'm thinking we might be able to modify it into a synthetic protein. Think like the biological equivalent of a controlled detonation; it'll set off the flammable parts of your blood, but in a reaction chain the comes out close to thermal neutrality and which leaves you with regular, non-combustible human blood." She bobs her head a little as she explains this, before conceding, "Yeah, it's not quite that simple, but there's your basic principle. The effects would be temporary as your body replaces the non-flammable components with your natural flammable ones, but it should give you roughly..." She does some quick mental calculations. "...Three weeks or so of not catching fire, followed by another two or three of not catching fire as much."

[Earl of Purple]

Eun's Lab- Solving a Serum

"And it won't be something that would inhibit my blood in any way?" That seems pretty great, though Earl just realised blood is supposed to move oxygen around; how does Felicity's blood do that if oxygen makes it burn?

Science magic, I guess.

[Morty]

[Laboratory - Clone]

"Maybe... Prime doesn't just wants vessels. He wants people who will worship him." Wenomir frowns. "But interpreting the motives of people like him has never been my strong suit."

Then Star of Hope knocks at the door. The warrior steps into the room and stares down the clone.

"That was informative. Your loyalty is misplaced in more ways than one. We're the only thing standing between you and becoming a meat-puppet."

[Ironsmith]

Spoiler: Laboratory - Clone

Show

Laboratory - Clone

"You're overlooking what seems to me a very obvious possible explanation for why this ghost has done what he has," the clone remarks, glancing over his shoulder at the cloning vat behind him. His reflection is pretty clear, and just what he expected it to be. This would be fine if he had his implant, though. No need for a powerful physique when everyone around can be ordered to obey your every whim, even at the cost of their own pathetic, meaningless lives. We just need to get it back somehow, need to convince them it's in their best interest for us to be restored to our former glory. Then we need to get rid of this 'other Magtok,' steal the secret of his youth and vitality and take our rightful place as the true and only Magtok.

"I don't know where or when your other Magtok was developed, but perhaps Prime can only do what he was already doing prior to the point where Omega threw a sedan at my-at his head. Prime just doesn't have the technology to create a younger form, or didn't when he made me, which the databanks say was fairly recently. Maybe a ghost can't grow as a person, they're just a caricature, a shallow imitation. It's a snapshot of what Prime was, just mindlessly focused on what he'd been doing the last few years. Whether or not it's the most optimal strategy, he's trying to be the old man we were, ruling and conquering and guiding impoverished peasants out of their hovels and into the modern era of peace and automation," Oldtok tries to explain, though his idea of 'peace' comes from the smoking barrel of a laser gun held by one of thousands of faceless robot soldiers, subjugating the masses and keeping them in line. And obviously Oldtok will be much better at it than Prime, as soon as he returns to power and takes back what is rightfully his own. He might even take a brief detour outside the Nexus to check up on the rest of the Empire (which is obviously real), arm himself accordingly, and then show these imbeciles and ingrates what their hubris has wrought.

"And for your information, I'm not loyal to him. I'm loyal to me, to the empire you provincial fools have somehow never seen, but which very much exists, whether or not we have added your sad little crossroads world to its majesty," he adds defensively, with a cold and spiteful little scowl.

[Laboratory - clone]

"Then I'd say your loyalty is misplaced - because your idea of you is a fabrication by that ghost, a shallow imitation of a shallow imitation", Star of Hope notes. The clone's words have, if not outright confirmed, at least strenghtened his suspicions of Prime's nature and limitations. Now he just needs to find a way to exploit them.

"Really, it would be best if I just killed you now and wished you better luck in your next life. But, it's not my call to make. I think my time's up. Time for you to talk to some other people." He walks around the clone to the laboratory door and gives it a knock, signalling for Wenomir or anyone else willing to step in.

[Laboratory - Clone]

"Maybe... Prime doesn't just wants vessels. He wants people who will worship him." Wenomir frowns. "But interpreting the motives of people like him has never been my strong suit."

Then Star of Hope knocks at the door. The warrior steps into the room and stares down the clone.

"That was informative. Your loyalty is misplaced in more ways than one. We're the only thing standing between you and becoming a meat-puppet."

[Laboratory - Clone]

Miranda moves to stand, but stops when Wenomir steps into the chamber. A one-at-a-time approach seems to be the most reasonable course of action, for the time being. Overwhelming Oldtok might not present much of a threat to them, per se, but it wouldn't help much in gathering information. She'll sit back in the chamber for now.

So will Eun, for that matter, but that has more to do with the fact that she doesn't want to be anywhere near such an obviously-malicious psychic than anything else.

Eun's Lab- Solving a Serum

"And it won't be something that would inhibit my blood in any way?" That seems pretty great, though Earl just realised blood is supposed to move oxygen around; how does Felicity's blood do that if oxygen makes it burn?

Science magic, I guess.

[Eun's Lab - Solving a Serum]

"That's what clinical tests are for." Eun replies. "I can't guarantee that at the moment, but we should be able to refine it like that, yes." She strokes her chin in thought. "We might have to see about tweeking the duration, too. Three weeks strikes me as an awfully clunky period of time if you ever have a need for self-immolation."

[Earl of Purple]

Eun's Lab- Solving a Serum

"You mean like hosting a barbeque party in the village? Although, yeah. Might be I need to go somewhere dangerous, in which case burning things with my blood might be very useful." Or getting stranded in an ice-bound wilderness. Felicity with a knife is never at risk of freezing to death.

[Ironsmith]

[Eun's Lab - Solving a Serum]

"Something like that." Eun gives Felicity a lightly-amused smile, before turning her attention back to her simulation. It won't be long before she's busy testing hypotheticals again; for this new protein, apparently. She starts at it like she's only going to be turned away for a moment...

And then a moment goes by, and she's still typing and projecting and recording. Within minutes, the whole lab seems to have left her perception as she goes into an almost trance-like state, burying herself in her work. The lab lights dim over time, sensing a lack of activity and working to save power, resulting in just Eun's face being framed in the glow of her projector.

She seems to have already forgotten Felicity is there, ironically.

[Earl of Purple]

Eun's Lab- Solving a Serum

Felicity's happy to watch, though when the lights go out she sees to realise something's up. She's genuinely interested in what's going on, since it's maybe going into her body, or lead to things that will, but... she's been forgotten. "Um... should I go?" If Eun doesn't reply, Felicity's going to jot down a little note and then pack up and leave.

[Ironsmith]

[Eun's Lab - Three Hours Later]

"...There we go. I think that might..." Eun turns to where she thought Felicity was, only to find empty space and a note. "...have a... thing..." She trails off, with a frown.

...Goddammit. She did it again, didn't she?

Eun looks down at her watch and confirms that, yes, she had indeed lost track of time, as she is wont to do. Felicity must have gotten bored waiting, or...

Crap. She'd been ignoring her all this time, hadn't she?

Eun picks up the note and reads it, mentally preparing herself for being chewed out for her rudeness in written form.

[Earl of Purple]

Eun's Lab- Solving a Serum

Felicity's note is a slightly singed piece of paper, which has been folded twice. Eun- You got a bit distracted, and I tried letting you know, but you were too engrossed to notice. I've left- well, obviously, I'm not there and you're reading my note- and tried letting you know, but you didn't notice. I've left you some of the samples, taken the rest. It was really interesting seeing you work and talking about what my serum has done and maybe making stuff easier for me. If the biocoolant works, could it maybe help get a sample of marrow or whatever? Might still be risky, but I wanted to ask and you... well, didn't hear me.

I look forward to working with you further, and seeing you again.

-Felicity

Underneath her signiture, is a scribbled out... maybe a heart? It's been scribbled out quite a lot, so it's hard to tell. It's not a burn; Felicity wrote in blue ink, and whilst the page is a little burnt around the edges, it hasn't burnt blue.

[Ironsmith]

[Eun's Lab - Solving a Serum]

Eun's shoulders relax as she reads the letter, and a small smile works its way onto her lips. That's twice now Felicity's surprised her with being nicer than Eun expected. At some point, she was going to have to learn what kind of person Felicity really wa-

Eun's eyes trail down to the scribbled-our heart, and her smile fades a little bit. If Felicity had left the space blank, Eun never would have suspected anything was amiss. Had she been more confident about the heart, Eun also wouldn't have thought anything of it; some girls were just like that, putting hearts on everything (though she had no idea why). It was this... bizarre, in-between gesture that got to her. Felicity's scribbled-out heart showed a certain hesitancy... this wasn't normal for her.

Huh.

Eun folds the note over and puts it in her breast pocket. She probably wasn't going to be getting a lot of sleep tonight.

[Lord Magtok]

Laboratory - Clone

"That was informative. Your loyalty is misplaced in more ways than one. We're the only thing standing between you and becoming a meat-puppet."

The elderly newborn scoffs, crosses his arms against his chest, and leans against the vat he was slumbering within only a few minutes ago. "Don't pretend you're doing me any favors here. I'm already a meat-puppet, just in your hands instead of his. This only goes one of two ways, you know. At some point, one of you is going to slip up and give me an opportunity to escape, and maybe, maybe I'll put together a miracle instead of getting struck down on my way out, or more likely, you're going to decide you've gotten as much information as you can, and your boy there is going to cut my head off. Easiest execution he'll ever perform in the field, given my state."

[Vahnavoi]

[Laboratory - clone]

Star of Hope, who has decided to stand silently near the door, gives Wenomir a look that can be construed as meaning "He's not completely wrong". Then he resumes warily watching the clone's actions. Wenomir might be fast enough to cut the clone down should he try anything funny, but it won't hurt having someone watch his back.

[Morty]

[Laboratory - clone]

There's a brief moment where it looks like Wenomir might do just what the clone is suggesting. Cut him down and end this here. One might get the impression that if he chose to do so, it would be over before the clone could blink.

"We might yet think of some other outcomes. Prepare for an extended stay with us. You'll be treated as fairly as any prisoners would be."

[Lord Magtok]

Laboratory - Clone

"Hold on, before you lock me up anywhere, I have a question. I think I'm still entitled to at least one more, probably," the Magtok insists. Things got a little fuzzy after the first few questions, with neither he nor Star of Hope hewing too closely to the initial 'question for a question' rule established at the beginning. I suppose it's just the nature of Magtoks to start blabbing at the first opportunity you give them, embracing a chance to make others listen to them speak, even if it'd be more advantageous to keep a few secrets up their sleeve for later.

"This other guy wasn't entirely clear about one important detail. How many Magtoks are there, exactly?" A very important question to this clone, who'd like to imagine he's one of only like three Magtoks in existence, but something about Star of Hope's phrasing, something about the nature of his being here and the questions he's been asked...something isn't adding up.

[Morty]

[Laboratory - clone]

"Quite a few," Wenomir says off-handedly, but with every sign of honesty. After all, it is true. "Lots of clones running around. They're a bit of a nuisance, to be honest, but we deal with them. We hadn't heard of this empire you mentioned until just now."

[Vahnavoi]

[Elsewhere]

Eun's got mail!

Snail mail. Good, old fashioned, thick paper envelope with an USB stick and research report inside. The reason for avoiding electronic communications becomes obvious once she reads the abstract.

The report concerns the (set of) artifact(s) brought to Vigil by Codebreaker for safekeeping. The artifact is under lock and key somewhere, Mia makes it clear it ought to be kept away from technological devices (especially information technology with wireless access) and should not be handled without protection from mindreading. She also opines it's likely unsafe to keep around at all.

So what about the USB stick? The report tells that while cataloguing parts inside the artefact and doing a computer search for possible assemblies, the search algorithm accidentally generated a new computer program. Mia quarantined it and copied on the memory device. There's a warning attached, forbidding use of the USB stick on any computers with internet or wireless connection, or any extant workstations for that matter. While Mia is offering other researchers the option to look at the program, it's clear she thinks nothing good can come out of it.

So, will Eun take a peek? Or will she pass this particular hot potato to the next poor sucker in line?

[Ironsmith]

[Eun's Lab]

Doctor Bu carefully reads and re-reads the attached notice to ensure she's taking all proper precautions while transporting the USB to her lab for further study. The room was meant for studying spatial anomalies, existing adjacent to regular space-time so it would be cut off from the rest of the facility in the event of an accident. That same feature made it an ideal isolation chamber for most things, including what she guessed was probably some form of super-virulent computer worm. She'll leave her Hotbox back in her quarters, to make sure it doesn't get infected (the note doesn't say whether a physical connection is needed, and this being the Nexus, Eun would rather not take that chance), opting instead to print off a burner laptop (with internal q-membrane power cell) and bring just that with her. She turns five corners in her lab, to enter a completely empty, tech-less room, and locks the door behind her.

Now that proper barriers are in place, Eun switches on the laptop and loads up the contents of the USB.

[Vahnavoi]

[Eun's lab]

As the burner laptop boots up, its screen blooms into an evolving, black-and-white fractal-like pattern. Eun might realize she is looking at a cellular automaton, similar to a game of Life, with a very large amount of cells set up to create an increasingly complex pattern.

If she thinks to touch the keyboard, she'll find arrow keyes allow zooming in and out to get a better look at parts of the pattern. It's too early to say what the ultimate end result of the process will be - the pattern's rate of evolution is limited by processing power of the laptop, and from the looks of it, it is already pushing the laptop to its physical limits. It may take a long time for the program to finish, provided it can.

Still, in about fifteen minutes, she can make some sense of it. She is looking at machine architechture - virtual implementation of a computer inside a computer. Mia's analysis program has turned into an emulation of the original artefact - or at least, emulation of some machine capable of being built from parts of said artifact. It's a good thing Eun left her "hotbox" outside - if this program had access to it, her box would be spitting out copies of the artifact in short order.

[Ironsmith]

[Eun's Lab]

Now that's fascinating. A self-replicating machine. This isn't Eun's first exposure to such a device- she sleeps in a tube full of them on a semi-regular basis- but one of this size and complexity is a novelty all the same.

Still, while that's conceptually interesting, as far as Eun can tell, this isn't much more than an abnormally pretty computer virus. Introduce it to a system, set it off, and watch as the automaton consumes all system resources to create a design for a processor. Someone really wanted attention, in the worst way.

Eun shrugs and takes to studying the pattern. Maybe this person had some genuinely good ideas, despite their bizarre method of propogating them. If nothing else, being able to create a massive system architecture from minimal resources would have huge implications for fabrication technology.

[Vahnavoi]

[Eun's lab]

"Minimal resources" doesn't look like a goal the original designer had. Many parts of the virtual machine appear to consist of gears and wheels that would have to be constructed at above-microscopic scales to work. How the real parts could fit inside the real artefact(s), given Mia's measurements of the outer shell(s), remains an open question. Similarly, what materials any of this should be made of is not easily answered by staring at the cellular automaton.

As the process continues, a dialogue box opens up on top of the automaton. Or at least, Eun can be fairly sure it is a dialogue box. Sadly, it's in some alien, possibly logogrammatic script she can't read. Some of the glyphs look like simplified version of the machine's parts, while others are largely abstract - triangles, swastikas, dots, so on and so forth. The actual message is short, only three lines with five symbols each, with what seems to be two options consisting of two lines with three symbols each.

[Ironsmith]

[Eun's Lab]

That's... huh. Eun squints at the dialog box, but quickly concludes that she's neither going to be able to decipher it, nor will the Nexus's translation effects do it for her. Although that second option might be because she's technically outside the Nexus itself just now. With that in mind, she pulls out a sticky note and copies down the symbols; maybe she can figure out what they mean when she leaves isolation.

For now, she's still left with the conundrum of what to actually do with the dialog box. If this were an Earth computer, she could probably get away with just clicking the default option, which was probably some variant on "okay, keep going". But whoever built this thing could be using a completely alien set of standards, and she has no way of telling.

Eun sighs and presses her fingers to the bridge of her nose, weighing her options. If the program is still running, she decides to just leave the dialog box alone. If not, she's going to pick a random button and click it, ready to reboot the whole system if something weird happens.

[Vahnavoi]

[Eun's lab]

The cellular automaton is still running in the background. It doesn't seem necessary to click anything for it to keep running.

[Ironsmith]

[Eun's Lab]

Not much to do, then, other than just sit and watch. Eun sits back and lets the automaton run for a while, keeping her eyes in the patterns as she tries to glean what it's all for...

Very likely without much success.

Ugh. She wishes she brought a snack or something. It's hard to think properly on an empty stomach... but she'll manage it, somehow.

Eun zooms in on one of the less complex parts of the automaton and starts checking to see if she can interact with it somehow. Alter its state, maybe? If she wants to figure out what's going on, experimentation is essential.

[Vahnavoi]

[Eun's lab]

One of the simpler, central components is a spinning wheel which looks like its part of the power generation system. It looks like in a physical system, you could just halt it or reverse its direction to stop the program or to make the automaton disassemble itself. There's also lines consisting of very basic, largely static cell structure, which Eun can safely assume to correspond to wires or pipelines, and recurring collections gears which seem to act as logic gates for signals moving along the lines. By stopping or reversing direction of gears, she could turn a bit of information from true to false, or change the direction of the signal. So, how to alter the state of the machine is fairly clear. What altering the state of the machine would do, other than causing it to halt due to an error, is not.

Eun can also observe there are a lot of lines which are "dark" - they are continuously sending empty signals back to the heart of the mechanism. If she thinks to zoom back out, she can see a clump of these dark lines, running along a similarly-sized clump of "bright" lines, terminates in a more complex structure which looks like a syringe. She can guess this is some kind of a connector, meant to plug this machine to another. Observing the end points of said connector offers one plausible interpretation for contents of the dialogue box: the program running inside the virtual machine wants her to plug it into... something. It looks like a swastika is the stand in for that something.

Figuring this out would be so much easier, if only Eun had someone to ask who's seen this machine in its intact form.

[Lord Magtok]

Laboratory - Clone

Spoiler

Show

[Laboratory - clone]

"Quite a few," Wenomir says off-handedly, but with every sign of honesty. After all, it is true. "Lots of clones running around. They're a bit of a nuisance, to be honest, but we deal with them. We hadn't heard of this empire you mentioned until just now."

"...a bit of a nuisance. Clones of the greatest psychic overlord in the universe are a bit of a nuisance to you," the clone repeats skeptically, trying his hardest to convince himself Wenomir just has no obvious tells when he's lying. I mean, he has to be lying, right? This world couldn't possibly be that powerful; nothing he's seen so far has suggested that level of sophistication. They got lucky, ripping out his psionic enhancer before he stepped out of the tank, but if he still had them, if he was free to run rampant on their feeble little minds with his full power...

"Nothing any of you say makes any sense. What the hell is going on in this world?"

[Vahnavoi]

[Laboratory - clone]

"That is a great question", Star of Hope can't help interjecting. "As a recent arrival myself, I have to note this place contains a confusing mix of people and things from various eras, some of which, to me, were merely speculative before encountering them here. It is possible you and your predecessors have tripped on the same, hmmm, quality."

[Ironsmith]

[Eun's lab]

One of the simpler, central components is a spinning wheel which looks like its part of the power generation system. It looks like in a physical system, you could just halt it or reverse its direction to stop the program or to make the automaton disassemble itself. There's also lines consisting of very basic, largely static cell structure, which Eun can safely assume to correspond to wires or pipelines, and recurring collections gears which seem to act as logic gates for signals moving along the lines. By stopping or reversing direction of gears, she could turn a bit of information from true to false, or change the direction of the signal. So, how to alter the state of the machine is fairly clear. What altering the state of the machine would do, other than causing it to halt due to an error, is not.

Eun can also observe there are a lot of lines which are "dark" - they are continuously sending empty signals back to the heart of the mechanism. If she thinks to zoom back out, she can see a clump of these dark lines, running along a similarly-sized clump of "bright" lines, terminates in a more complex structure which looks like a syringe. She can guess this is some kind of a connector, meant to plug this machine to another. Observing the end points of said connector offers one plausible interpretation for contents of the dialogue box: the program running inside the virtual machine wants her to plug it into... something. It looks like a swastika is the stand in for that something.

Figuring this out would be so much easier, if only Eun had someone to ask who's seen this machine in its intact form.

[Eun's Lab]

So this device is meant to interface with... something. It's difficult to tell what, since that syringe-shaped connector doesn't match any computer port she's ever seen. But her studies do seem to yield a potentially useful nugget of information; giving the machine certain bad inputs would cause it to halt. As far as safety measures go, it's not the best option, but knowing how to intentionally crash the computer would make for a useful makeshift shutdown if the program's physical counterpart started causing too much trouble. Over the next several hours, she's going to develop and test out a number of such shutdown codes, enough to fill out a small notebook. She's also going to make a note of any self-disassembly codes she finds this way; rather pointedly so they aren't used except in the worst case scenario.

It also occurs to her that this measure has a better than even chance of breaking the machine; if nothing else, crashing the physical device without having any idea how to restart it would leave it locked in an unusable state. So for each code, she's going to develop a counterpart that restores the system to nominal functionality. She's also going to check if the system can recover from a crash on its own (unlikely, but this is the Nexus) and how long that will take.

[Vahnavoi]

[Eun's lab]

The benefit of working with a virtual machine is that even if Eun breaks it, she can restart the cellular automaton from the USB stick and wait for it to make a new one. She'll only be losing time and electricity.

Stopping the spinning wheel turns out to be equivalent of putting the machine into "off" or "rest" state, halting the program and causing the dialogue box to wink out. Reversing the wheel partially reverses the cellular automaton, wiping out all connector lines, reducing the machinery to bunch of "still lives", that is, static cell patterns. A look into Mia's report reveals that this still state is equivalent to the disassembled state of the physical artefact when it was brought to Vigil.

Spinning the wheel back into motion restarts the machine in five minutes or so. Eun can infer that in a physical machine, the speed of the process would depend on how forcefully the wheel is accelerated. The upper limit would depend on material properties of the wheel, which remain obscure. The speed of the virtual machine remains limited by the processor of her burner laptop.

Tinkering with individual logic gates has less dramatic results. Individual altered "bits" or signal patterns usually get absorbed or overwritten by larger cell structures before they cause significant alteration in the machine's behaviour. This suggests the machine has hardware level redundancy and is fairly resistant to minor interferences such as those caused by cosmic rays in electronic computers. Sometimes, a more interesting thing happens and the entire gate, along with all connectors linked to it, gets erased, then replaced with a new copy some time later. This is accompanied by new dialogue boxes. These boxes usually include glyphs reminescent of higher level machine architechture surrounding the area Eun tampered with, so it's likely they are error messages. This suggests the program inside the machine is capable of monitoring its own hardware and repairing at least minor damages. If she's still writing down what the boxes say, she'll eventually have enough notes to do a rudimentary statistical study on the language being used.

As she moves on to more ambitious attempts at a shutdown sequence, she might notice something: the rules of the cellular automaton set a limit to how fast information propagates through the system - a conceptual "speed of light". Because she can stop the virtual machine and make changes in multiple unrelated parts at once, she's effectively altering the machine faster than the speed of light - and thus faster than the machine could react to. This poses a limit to which kind of shutdown codes would be replicable in a physical machine. Based on prior observations of the spinning wheel, she can derive a formula for how fast a real person would have to alter direction of gears to stay ahead of the "light" and thus be able to feed the code to a physical machine before the machine can react and correct itself. There's still some uncertain variables - most importantly, physical size and mass of the system - but she can limit her targets - clusters of gates to feed her code to - to few vital-looking structures near the spinning wheel.

One of her codes causes a gate cluster to explode. In a physical system, this would mean gears, shrapnel and pressurized liquid flying everywhere. There would be blood, horror and screaming. On the laptop's screen, a fraction of the virtual machine just bursts into a cloud of disconnected cells which quickly disappear, leaving a blank spot in their place. All dialogue boxes wink out, signifying that whatever program was running on the virtual machine has terminated.

Then, slowly, the machine rebuilds itself. It takes about as much time as it originally took from starting the cellular automaton, to the first dialogue box appearing. But then, an entirely new message box. The message is much longer than any of the ones before it, with many glyphs Eun didn't see before. It goes on and on, filling the entire screen many times over.