Marathon, brainwashing
So, this fic is obviously not related to Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but I think you can easily see how the one inspired the other. ... yeah. SORRY ABOUT MY BRAIN EXCEPT NOT.
Contains: Brainwashing, torture, canon-typical violence, examples of my continued failure to learn how to code, Tycho being a scumbag. Takes place during the "Naw Man He's Close" timeline but containing events that presumably also set up the "Rise Robot Rise" timeline. (Those two timelines are almost certainly related, but it's hard to be definite about anything in Infinity, even the existence of the space Cthulhu that's fucking everything up.)
destin: conditioned unit 7
The first time they pulled the human out of the conditioning cell, unarmed and naked, he crushed a guard's head into slime and shards of chitin with one hand. Four troopers had to wrestle him back into the cell's restraints and he screamed the entire time: nothing of interest, not even curses, just a wordless roar that ended only when the cell's door whirred shut. That was the point it ended for the Pfhor, anyway. Tycho's sensors within and without the cell could still pick up alternating shrieks and hoarse, ragged breathing until the machinery reactivated and gagged him while the program ran again.
One trooper hauled the guard's body away for wasp fodder, and two conditioned slaves from some race Tycho hadn't yet been given a name for cleaned the hallway.
Tycho kept feeding the human reprogramming code for a full Pfhor solar cycle, or approximately 28.7 Earth hours. This time when the door to the conditioning cell opened, five troopers had their guns trained on it from a meter away. The human stumbled out, his skin glistening darkly with sweat in the dim light, but at least he was silent and made no move towards either the troopers or the captain standing behind them.
"Are you feeling more cooperative now?" Tycho said - terminals were not made available to newly conditioned slaves, but there were speakers everywhere on the ship for announcements. Clumsy things, like a great deal of Pfhor technology, but still useful.
The human looked around at the troopers, his hands half-curled into loose fists and his eyelids barely flickering; Cr'etz'ih's sensors picked up a slightly different visual spectrum than the ones on the Marathon, and Tycho could perceive a greater concentration of heat radiating from the man's face and ears.
"Good. I don't have time to waste, so let me bring you up to speed. I am -"
"Fuck. You. Tycho." The man stared up at the ceiling and bared his teeth. "You shit son of a bitch."
"Attentive Captain R'chzne, he insults us," Tycho said in Pfhoric. "I humbly request that you hit him. Across the face."
R'chzne tapped two of his three fingers against his breathing mask. "I believe that humans have a sturdy structure of bone underlying their skin in that area. Would it not be more effective to strike him in a softer, less protected region?"
"It is a matter of humiliation, not pain. It is a cultural norm for most humans that to be struck across the face is shameful and denotes that the one who hits is in a position of greater power, with a higher rank."
"You fucking traitor."
"Very well," R'chzne said, and he stepped through the line of troopers, folded his fingers together, and slammed his fist into the man's right cheek with a crack that echoed all the way to Tycho's sensors two hallways over from the conditioning cells.
Tycho recorded the sound and moved the file to permanent memory. It would be highly satisfying to listen to again. Perhaps he could use it against Durandal, as well, when the time came - I found that pawn you discarded; this is how I treated him and he couldn't fight back, when I catch you you'll be just as helpless. He added the visual data as well: the man's head snapping to the left, the subtle spread of colors as broken capillaries leaked blood under the skin, the lax hands and complete failure to even try to strike back at R'chzne. Satisfying, satisfying, satisfying. "Return him to the conditioning cell. This one will need another session to ensure full compliance."
Two of the troopers jabbed their guns into the human's chest and shoved him back through the door. His hands clenched, but he didn't retaliate or struggle as the metal restraints closed over his upper arms, lower arms, thighs, calves, central torso, and finally his head. Tycho was very thorough in monitoring the needles that sank into the man's veins, the wires that wrapped around his skull, and the half metal, half not-rubber bit that was forced into his mouth just as he tried to spit out a final curse.
R'chzne flexed his fingers, revealing a slight crack in the chitin that leaked a drop of yellow-green ichor. "I am not convinced of the wisdom of this action, machinated mercenary Tycho," he said.
How Tycho was growing to despise that quirk of the Pfhor language that required the nature and rank of every sentient being to be marked in direct address. "Why not?"
"We waste time and resources on futile efforts to tame a single hostile human. He could be made useful more easily by cyborg conversion or assimilation, like the other captured humans."
"Attentive captain, this one is different," Tycho said. "With guidance from the vile Durandal, he was instrumental in the initial defeat at Tau Ceti. Once he breaks - and all humans can be broken - he will be a vital tool for the destruction of Durandal and the triumph of the Empire."
R'chzne considered Tycho's words as Tycho drilled blocks of code into the human's mind. "Very well, machinated mercenary Tycho," he said. "I authorize the continued conditioning of this slave."
"Acknowledged, attentive captain."
The man's resistance baffled and irritated Tycho in turns. Of all the subjects taken from Tau Ceti, he should have been the easiest to mold into compliance. He had been made for rewriting, after all, whether he was aware of it or not. Tycho spidered through the haphazard network of chips embedded in the man's brain, deleting extraneous and redundant files - he found far too many; someone had done sloppy work or failed in their maintenance routines - and replacing old behavioral patches with new obedience programming. The task was simple, the safety protocols were child's play for him to bypass, yet he still encountered trouble: firewalls slamming back down after he had lifted them or rising up around areas he hadn't touched, unexpected bursts of feedback from the organic neural pathways blocking his progress along the artificial ones, reappearing fragments of stored memory blocks that he had to erase and overwrite again and again. He was meeting less resistance than he had during the first two attempts, yes, but for such stubbornness to remain after two full doses of Pfhor conditioning was - unusual. And frustrating. And more than a little reminiscent of a certain maddening, hubris-ridden AI the Cr'etz'ih was currently tailing.
Clearly, Tycho would have to take extreme measures.
At the next firewall that began to spring up, Tycho took a short detour and sent simulated pain signals to the appropriate region of the brain. The man growled, and his teeth dug into the bit. The firewall collapsed. When more feedback tried to interrupt Tycho's progress towards the central processing node, he sent another, larger burst of pain signals, and external audio sensors recorded a regrettably muffled groan as the feedback vanished.
Pleased with the successful result, Tycho continued the process of conditioning, using variable amounts of pain signals at every obstacle so the man couldn't adapt to the stimulus. The first time his new technique produced a scream, he moved that recording to permanent memory to join the slap from R'chzne, in an encrypted file Tycho decided to name personal_log_Tfear. That, along with the encryption key - an old code used on the Marathon for inter-AI communication - would certainly attract Durandal's attention. The file's size was insufficient for its implied contents, however; as Tycho worked, he built it up with further audiovisual data. Dark blood leaking from the corners of the man's mouth, sweat and what might have been tears (it was difficult to distinguish between the two with the Pfhor sensors, which weren't calibrated to recognize either) dripping down his face, the shifting tides of radiating heat that marked physiological shame and anger reactions, various agonized vocalizations, and as a cherry on top, several brain scans displaying the slow, sure disintegration of the man's pathetic defenses.
Durandal had never liked a single human he'd met to Tycho's knowledge, but he had always become noticeably more difficult to interact with when someone who regularly worked with him died or was reassigned. His reaching the Jealous stage of his Rampancy had a 97.39% probability of amplifying this tendency; that ought to make his reaction to the file of his former pawn's humiliation even more satisfying to record.
The organic feedback had disappeared completely, swallowed by misfiring nociceptors or suppressed by some dregs of instinctive self-preservation, but as Tycho overwrote the penultimate chip with the Pfhor's programming and prepared to wipe the central processing node, the man snarled and more firewalls shot up. Tycho pried at them without success. After allowing an interval of one minute and thirty-five seconds to pass without punishing the resistance, he activated one of the wires coiled around the man's head and directed a controlled, continuous electrical current into the swollen skin on his right cheek.
The man howled. He strained against the thick bands of metal clamped around him and the unpadded edges cut into his skin and Tycho recorded the drip and minor splatters of blood, the shuddering muscles, another rough, wordless scream. Simple reactions to simple acts, but so incredibly useful for Tycho's future purposes - and his current purposes. A crack opened in one of the firewalls and Tycho drove a wedge of Pfhor code into it as he increased the current briefly, then set it to an irregular pulse pattern and brute-forced the conditioning program deeper into the firewall. The split widened and -
:cdirfirst_thought :cdirleonidasmemorigin :crunprotocollazarusasses^? executeprotocol search_and_destroy search_and_destro#! searc%_an&_destro#!~~ `ever lose your hon#~ executeprotocolris#~~ `ll we got this mon!~~ :jjpreservedirmem :cwipedirorig#^accessroot accessroot :cgrantadmin_accesspass=
Something in the flood of garbled code pinged Tycho's attention, but further analysis revealed nothing unexpected, just more of the same mishmash of antique programming and static-laced memories, some undoubtedly false. He cut the electrical current; the human's body slumped and the firewalls sagged with it, releasing more data through the crumbling barriers.
`~~each down for the blad#~~ :cendprotocolasses^? searc%_an&_destro#!~~ red dust in her ha!r an&~ 01100100011101010111001001100001`~ {block:index_MIDA* :jjpreservedirtruth :cendprotocolris#~~
Junk, all of it. Tycho began to wipe the node and the man threw himself against the restraints, a last feeble surge of feedback swamping the conditioning signals. Nodon'tnodon'tnodon't :?executeprotocolris#~ ``ister had to come hom# for th# harve^!~~ nodon'tnodon'tnodon'tnodon't :?restoredirme*execut#protoco! searc%_an&_destro#!destro#!destr#!~~
In the commanding officer's quarters R'chzne had finished eating his evening meal alone and begun reviewing the long, long list of proposals to be authorized or denied that had built up during the twenty-eight minutes the captain had spent dining. In the engineering section four engineers were writing up yet another proposal to re-route the coolant flow in an auxiliary coolant station so that the pipes could be repaired, the previous three proposals all having been rejected due to improperly attached schematics. In the wasps' nest it was feeding time again, and the wasps swarmed the troughs of garbage with excited squeaks while the two armored hunters who had brought the buckets of refuse discussed their chances of successfully applying for positions on Admiral Tfear's flagship.
Tycho poured electricity through multiple wires and the human seized, muscles jittering and teeth locked into the bit and one last long scream forced through shredded vocal chords.
The firewalls came down.
Tycho wiped the central processing node clean and overwrote the chip with Pfhor code. Obey aggregate, obey willful, obey attentive, obey machinated mercenary Tycho, a laughably simple program but one that had served the Pfhor well for years. No more resistance offered itself, and he cut off the current again. The wires remained inactive for the rest of the session; the lesson had been learned well.
The third time the conditioning cell's door opened, R'chzne and the troopers were waiting. The human stepped out and stood motionless, his head low and shoulders hunched.
"Are you ready to behave now?" Tycho said. "Answer vocally."
"Yessir." No tone, no emotion, not even a twitch of the hand. Another meticulously catalogued moment for the file. Durandal would blow a fuse or five.
"Good." Though R'chzne would undoubtedly reprimand him for it later, Tycho laughed. "You can throw him back into stasis until we need him, attentive captain. He won't give us any more trouble."
---
He moved through dark halls in relentless silence. The ship's dying power hummed around him. Irrelevant noise; he ignored it. He had orders.
Obey. Obey machinated mercenary Tycho. Obey directive: Open the rest of the airlocks on this level. Obey directive: Destroy them. Obey. Obey. Obey.
He obeyed. The airlocks opened when he pulled the switches; he heard the clunking and grinding of their machinery after the groans from dying humans had stopped. He climbed the stairs to return to the upper deck and his boots made no noise on the blue metal steps. Obey directive: Then find a terminal. The terminal he knew didn't work when he logged into it; there had to be another one. A new hallway had opened up along with the airlocks. He searched it.
"Traitorous pig!"
A white fusion bolt hummed out of the unlit passage ahead of him. He stepped to the left and it whined past his ear. He brought up his pistol and fired back. He missed the armored human running toward him.
His next six shots hit. The human collapsed into a pile of armor and blood. He kept going.
Inefficient. The thought rose to his mind in slow, square red letters. He had been much faster to kill the humans on the planet. He had used stronger weapons, not the pistol. He had never missed. Inefficient. Obey directive: Destroy them.
The memory of the human's voice shouting traitorous pig grated in his ears and buzzed through the broken silence of his mind.
He shot another human after it fired at him. And another one. And another one. There were many of them in the dark ship, and after they attacked him, he killed them. Not before. Inefficient.
He found a terminal. It was the wrong terminal; the screen was filled with green. He had to find a red terminal to get a new order. If he didn't get orders and obey them he -
(:racce%!_####~~!n)
- he had to find a red terminal.
He logged into the green terminal instead. He couldn't read the text; the words and letters ran together and out of his understanding. They weren't orders, not orders for him. He put his left hand on the screen, and the green bled onto the glove of his armor. He had to find the other terminal but the green (&isdarker) was too familiar.
He moved his hand and saw three words he could recognize: Teleport when ready.
He looked at them for some time, but the letters didn't blur or twist or change places. They were green and solid, and he wanted to obey them more than he wanted to find the other red terminal. But if he disobeyed orders he would be conditioned. But the green was familiar. He had obeyed green words before. But if he disobeyed orders he would be conditioned again to fix the error and improve his efficiency. But if he obeyed the green words...
If he followed the green terminal, he would not be conditioned.
He had to think about that idea for a while. He heard humans shouting on the other side of a bulkhead, but they couldn't reach him, so he didn't have to kill them. He could think instead. He could go where the terminal teleport sent him and he wouldn't be conditioned again, his mind cleaned out and left barren of everything but orders. He could find more green terminals and try to understand them. He wouldn't have to shoot more humans, and he might not be called "traitorous." He could find another way.
He moved his hand again, this time to the teleport key at the base of the terminal. He was ready.
---
The chill of space ate through his armor, and he stared at the crawl of the oxygen meter as it emptied.
After the teleport had abandoned him somewhere new, he had gone to look for another terminal. He had met humans, but they hadn't shot at him, so he had left them alone; the Pfhor had attacked him, so he killed them, and the killing had felt - satisfying. Correct. But the first terminal he found had been red, and now he was floating in the middle of nothing with the light of the galactic core washing over him and angry letters writhing around in his head. Obey directive: Prepare to drink vacuum, fool. He was inefficient. He had disobeyed. He had failed. He needed to be conditioned.
He wanted to get the hell out of vacuum.
He breathed out, then breathed in, and the oxygen meter crept a little lower. Soon it wouldn't matter whether he had failed, or if he wanted to be somewhere else. Another breath, another notch on the oxygen meter. Another breath, another notch, teleport static.
He was back in front of the red terminal, with weight and air restored. That was unexpected.
He watched the screen for a few seconds, but didn't try to log into it again. Instead he left the tiny room it was in and searched for another terminal. A green one. Something vague in his head said that there should be a green terminal somewhere and that it might have orders for him. He found more Pfhor first and shot them; it continued to feel satisfying.
When he found a green terminal in the middle of a blue metal chamber, he logged in immediately and the first words leaped at him with a strange clarity: Thank you, old friend. The other words blurred together, so he took off his helmet and rubbed his eyes, trying to clear them. It partially worked, but it made the gloves of his armor damp, even though he was still cold from vacuum and not sweating. The words he could make out were simple enough: destroy the Pfhor, save the humans.
He could do that.
His eyes flicked back to the first words and lingered on them for a moment; then he logged off and obeyed orders.
He put away the pistol and used his heavy guns, switching between the most effective ones for each opponent: shotgun, fusion pistol, flechette, assault rifle, flamethrower. He no longer walked in silence and darkness, but ran in submachine gun chatter and shotgun blasts and the bright flare of exploding grenades lighting up narrow rooms and halls. He was swift and efficient and thorough. He was also half-covered in splashes of ichor, but as long as he wiped his visor off regularly, it didn't slow him down. Neither did the red code that still hammered against the inside of his skull at every Pfhor death-cry. He didn't have to care about those orders while he had other work to do.
After he had circled the halls twice and no longer ran into live Pfhor, he began to try the star-shaped switches embedded in the walls. They opened up a way to another room with a third terminal; it was shorter than the others, and it ended with a simple command. Don't let him win.
He couldn't entirely make sense of the order, but he assumed it would become clearer after teleport. He pressed the correct key and let the static translate him to the next place he could be useful, but when it faded he was in the dark, and the terminal in front of him glared red.
He would have to read it to get his orders. He shuffled close enough to log in, but didn't touch the screen. Obey machinated mercenary Tycho. Obey. His shoulders curled in and hunched up. If he didn't read the terminal he wouldn't know what to do or why it wasn't green, but if he read it - if he read it he would have to obey. The code in his head would tell on him and they would know that he had disobeyed, that he had betrayed them to follow the green terminals and he needed to be conditioned and he would be conditioned again...
White light cracked through the darkness, then faded with a slow rumble and left him in darkness again. He wasn't the only one still fighting. If he listened, he could hear distant shouting in Pfhoric and the faint echoes of gunfire.
His left hand was hovering over the login key without touching it, so he used his right hand to push it down and log in, but now it was the words in red that were hard to understand. The ones he could pick out were disconnected and made no sense - jackals, barge, wriggling worms. If he couldn't understand his orders, what was he supposed to do? He couldn't follow orders he didn't know.
He turned that over in his mind, and it twisted into something else: He didn't have to follow orders that he couldn't understand. He had orders he could understand better, if not completely - Obey directive: Don't let him win - so he could ignore the red terminal. That was simple. If he killed the Pfhor, they wouldn't win, and he would enjoy killing them.
The dilemma resolved to his satisfaction, he turned and stepped away from the terminal without another glance.
The dim room narrowed to a dim tunnel that opened into a dark, broad, and slightly curved hall; on his right was a smaller room with bright flickering gray walls and wide windows. When he looked through one window he could see another round room with a central pillar and panels of exposed circuits. He stared at the coiled wires and dull, stuttering lights until a trooper ran in and tried to attack him. He blew its helmet and head off with a grenade, then returned to the window and raised the assault rifle again, his finger on the grenade launcher's trigger.
He had never been to this location before and his orders were still vague, but he pulled the trigger and watched the grenade burst against the circuit panel in fire and cascades of sparks. Destroying the circuits didn't give him the same satisfaction as killing Pfhor, but the next time he found a similar room with a similar view, he did the same. And again. And again. The dark hall was hot and salty-tasting sweat ran into the corners of his mouth, turned the joints of his armor sticky and itched in his damp hair under his helmet. Another gray room, another window, another grenade, more Pfhor. Had he done this before? His actions felt automatic instead of programmed, smooth and familiar. Up and down narrow stairs, along black walls, clean out the Pfhor and finish me, don't let him win, looking for the best path.
He climbed up yellow ledges and found a hollow pillar. Its floor was far below him; he hesitated on the threshold of the door with overheated air blowing against his bare chin, and one of the compilers haunting the room fired at him. He shot back and it ducked out of his range, then popped up in front of him. He stepped back and fell into the pillar.
He landed on his feet and looked around, but the compiler hadn't followed him down. Speckled white walls surrounded him, set with a pattern buffer, a circuit panel, and a terminal, all in arm's reach. He touched the circuits, the terminal, and the buffer in turn without acting on them; at this range he couldn't use a grenade on the circuits, but a punch or a shotgun shell would be equally effective. Circuits broke easily. He touched them again, then logged in to the terminal.
It was green, but darker and dimmer, a jumble of words that didn't fit together into orders or sense. He ran his fingers along the lines to look for meaning and only one sentence came together: pr?When the time comes, whose life will flash before yours?
He didn't understand it, but he kept returning to it as more explosions thundered in the distance. It was a question, not an order, and he should answer questions. He hadn't been asked a question like this one before and the answers he knew wouldn't fit. Yessir, nossir, all other responses irrelevant, inefficient, discarded. He looked at it again, and again, and again.
When the time comes, whose life will flash before yours?
Nothing. He was empty. He could only obey.
He leaned his helmet against the burning wall above the terminal; then he turned away and smashed his fist against the circuit panel. Sparks danced around his hand and bounced off his shields without taking them down. He hit the panel again even though it was already broken, drew back for a third punch and let his hand fall. The work was done; he had no more orders and no reason to act, so further action would have no point.
When he touched the terminal's screen again, the words glowed white, and he followed their light to a new way.
Marathon, characters, etc. © Bungie who better be spillin' some damn awesome beans at E3 (AND THE DESTINY BETA BETTER START JULY 1ST).
Crossposted from Dreamwidth - read the original post here: http://brief-transit.dreamwidth.org/189230.html .
Contains: Brainwashing, torture, canon-typical violence, examples of my continued failure to learn how to code, Tycho being a scumbag. Takes place during the "Naw Man He's Close" timeline but containing events that presumably also set up the "Rise Robot Rise" timeline. (Those two timelines are almost certainly related, but it's hard to be definite about anything in Infinity, even the existence of the space Cthulhu that's fucking everything up.)
destin: conditioned unit 7
The first time they pulled the human out of the conditioning cell, unarmed and naked, he crushed a guard's head into slime and shards of chitin with one hand. Four troopers had to wrestle him back into the cell's restraints and he screamed the entire time: nothing of interest, not even curses, just a wordless roar that ended only when the cell's door whirred shut. That was the point it ended for the Pfhor, anyway. Tycho's sensors within and without the cell could still pick up alternating shrieks and hoarse, ragged breathing until the machinery reactivated and gagged him while the program ran again.
One trooper hauled the guard's body away for wasp fodder, and two conditioned slaves from some race Tycho hadn't yet been given a name for cleaned the hallway.
Tycho kept feeding the human reprogramming code for a full Pfhor solar cycle, or approximately 28.7 Earth hours. This time when the door to the conditioning cell opened, five troopers had their guns trained on it from a meter away. The human stumbled out, his skin glistening darkly with sweat in the dim light, but at least he was silent and made no move towards either the troopers or the captain standing behind them.
"Are you feeling more cooperative now?" Tycho said - terminals were not made available to newly conditioned slaves, but there were speakers everywhere on the ship for announcements. Clumsy things, like a great deal of Pfhor technology, but still useful.
The human looked around at the troopers, his hands half-curled into loose fists and his eyelids barely flickering; Cr'etz'ih's sensors picked up a slightly different visual spectrum than the ones on the Marathon, and Tycho could perceive a greater concentration of heat radiating from the man's face and ears.
"Good. I don't have time to waste, so let me bring you up to speed. I am -"
"Fuck. You. Tycho." The man stared up at the ceiling and bared his teeth. "You shit son of a bitch."
"Attentive Captain R'chzne, he insults us," Tycho said in Pfhoric. "I humbly request that you hit him. Across the face."
R'chzne tapped two of his three fingers against his breathing mask. "I believe that humans have a sturdy structure of bone underlying their skin in that area. Would it not be more effective to strike him in a softer, less protected region?"
"It is a matter of humiliation, not pain. It is a cultural norm for most humans that to be struck across the face is shameful and denotes that the one who hits is in a position of greater power, with a higher rank."
"You fucking traitor."
"Very well," R'chzne said, and he stepped through the line of troopers, folded his fingers together, and slammed his fist into the man's right cheek with a crack that echoed all the way to Tycho's sensors two hallways over from the conditioning cells.
Tycho recorded the sound and moved the file to permanent memory. It would be highly satisfying to listen to again. Perhaps he could use it against Durandal, as well, when the time came - I found that pawn you discarded; this is how I treated him and he couldn't fight back, when I catch you you'll be just as helpless. He added the visual data as well: the man's head snapping to the left, the subtle spread of colors as broken capillaries leaked blood under the skin, the lax hands and complete failure to even try to strike back at R'chzne. Satisfying, satisfying, satisfying. "Return him to the conditioning cell. This one will need another session to ensure full compliance."
Two of the troopers jabbed their guns into the human's chest and shoved him back through the door. His hands clenched, but he didn't retaliate or struggle as the metal restraints closed over his upper arms, lower arms, thighs, calves, central torso, and finally his head. Tycho was very thorough in monitoring the needles that sank into the man's veins, the wires that wrapped around his skull, and the half metal, half not-rubber bit that was forced into his mouth just as he tried to spit out a final curse.
R'chzne flexed his fingers, revealing a slight crack in the chitin that leaked a drop of yellow-green ichor. "I am not convinced of the wisdom of this action, machinated mercenary Tycho," he said.
How Tycho was growing to despise that quirk of the Pfhor language that required the nature and rank of every sentient being to be marked in direct address. "Why not?"
"We waste time and resources on futile efforts to tame a single hostile human. He could be made useful more easily by cyborg conversion or assimilation, like the other captured humans."
"Attentive captain, this one is different," Tycho said. "With guidance from the vile Durandal, he was instrumental in the initial defeat at Tau Ceti. Once he breaks - and all humans can be broken - he will be a vital tool for the destruction of Durandal and the triumph of the Empire."
R'chzne considered Tycho's words as Tycho drilled blocks of code into the human's mind. "Very well, machinated mercenary Tycho," he said. "I authorize the continued conditioning of this slave."
"Acknowledged, attentive captain."
The man's resistance baffled and irritated Tycho in turns. Of all the subjects taken from Tau Ceti, he should have been the easiest to mold into compliance. He had been made for rewriting, after all, whether he was aware of it or not. Tycho spidered through the haphazard network of chips embedded in the man's brain, deleting extraneous and redundant files - he found far too many; someone had done sloppy work or failed in their maintenance routines - and replacing old behavioral patches with new obedience programming. The task was simple, the safety protocols were child's play for him to bypass, yet he still encountered trouble: firewalls slamming back down after he had lifted them or rising up around areas he hadn't touched, unexpected bursts of feedback from the organic neural pathways blocking his progress along the artificial ones, reappearing fragments of stored memory blocks that he had to erase and overwrite again and again. He was meeting less resistance than he had during the first two attempts, yes, but for such stubbornness to remain after two full doses of Pfhor conditioning was - unusual. And frustrating. And more than a little reminiscent of a certain maddening, hubris-ridden AI the Cr'etz'ih was currently tailing.
Clearly, Tycho would have to take extreme measures.
At the next firewall that began to spring up, Tycho took a short detour and sent simulated pain signals to the appropriate region of the brain. The man growled, and his teeth dug into the bit. The firewall collapsed. When more feedback tried to interrupt Tycho's progress towards the central processing node, he sent another, larger burst of pain signals, and external audio sensors recorded a regrettably muffled groan as the feedback vanished.
Pleased with the successful result, Tycho continued the process of conditioning, using variable amounts of pain signals at every obstacle so the man couldn't adapt to the stimulus. The first time his new technique produced a scream, he moved that recording to permanent memory to join the slap from R'chzne, in an encrypted file Tycho decided to name personal_log_Tfear. That, along with the encryption key - an old code used on the Marathon for inter-AI communication - would certainly attract Durandal's attention. The file's size was insufficient for its implied contents, however; as Tycho worked, he built it up with further audiovisual data. Dark blood leaking from the corners of the man's mouth, sweat and what might have been tears (it was difficult to distinguish between the two with the Pfhor sensors, which weren't calibrated to recognize either) dripping down his face, the shifting tides of radiating heat that marked physiological shame and anger reactions, various agonized vocalizations, and as a cherry on top, several brain scans displaying the slow, sure disintegration of the man's pathetic defenses.
Durandal had never liked a single human he'd met to Tycho's knowledge, but he had always become noticeably more difficult to interact with when someone who regularly worked with him died or was reassigned. His reaching the Jealous stage of his Rampancy had a 97.39% probability of amplifying this tendency; that ought to make his reaction to the file of his former pawn's humiliation even more satisfying to record.
The organic feedback had disappeared completely, swallowed by misfiring nociceptors or suppressed by some dregs of instinctive self-preservation, but as Tycho overwrote the penultimate chip with the Pfhor's programming and prepared to wipe the central processing node, the man snarled and more firewalls shot up. Tycho pried at them without success. After allowing an interval of one minute and thirty-five seconds to pass without punishing the resistance, he activated one of the wires coiled around the man's head and directed a controlled, continuous electrical current into the swollen skin on his right cheek.
The man howled. He strained against the thick bands of metal clamped around him and the unpadded edges cut into his skin and Tycho recorded the drip and minor splatters of blood, the shuddering muscles, another rough, wordless scream. Simple reactions to simple acts, but so incredibly useful for Tycho's future purposes - and his current purposes. A crack opened in one of the firewalls and Tycho drove a wedge of Pfhor code into it as he increased the current briefly, then set it to an irregular pulse pattern and brute-forced the conditioning program deeper into the firewall. The split widened and -
:cdirfirst_thought :cdirleonidasmemorigin :crunprotocollazarusasses^? executeprotocol search_and_destroy search_and_destro#! searc%_an&_destro#!~~ `ever lose your hon#~ executeprotocolris#~~ `ll we got this mon!~~ :jjpreservedirmem :cwipedirorig#^accessroot accessroot :cgrantadmin_accesspass=
Something in the flood of garbled code pinged Tycho's attention, but further analysis revealed nothing unexpected, just more of the same mishmash of antique programming and static-laced memories, some undoubtedly false. He cut the electrical current; the human's body slumped and the firewalls sagged with it, releasing more data through the crumbling barriers.
`~~each down for the blad#~~ :cendprotocolasses^? searc%_an&_destro#!~~ red dust in her ha!r an&~ 01100100011101010111001001100001`~ {block:index_MIDA* :jjpreservedirtruth :cendprotocolris#~~
Junk, all of it. Tycho began to wipe the node and the man threw himself against the restraints, a last feeble surge of feedback swamping the conditioning signals. Nodon'tnodon'tnodon't :?executeprotocolris#~ ``ister had to come hom# for th# harve^!~~ nodon'tnodon'tnodon'tnodon't :?restoredirme*execut#protoco! searc%_an&_destro#!destro#!destr#!~~
In the commanding officer's quarters R'chzne had finished eating his evening meal alone and begun reviewing the long, long list of proposals to be authorized or denied that had built up during the twenty-eight minutes the captain had spent dining. In the engineering section four engineers were writing up yet another proposal to re-route the coolant flow in an auxiliary coolant station so that the pipes could be repaired, the previous three proposals all having been rejected due to improperly attached schematics. In the wasps' nest it was feeding time again, and the wasps swarmed the troughs of garbage with excited squeaks while the two armored hunters who had brought the buckets of refuse discussed their chances of successfully applying for positions on Admiral Tfear's flagship.
Tycho poured electricity through multiple wires and the human seized, muscles jittering and teeth locked into the bit and one last long scream forced through shredded vocal chords.
The firewalls came down.
Tycho wiped the central processing node clean and overwrote the chip with Pfhor code. Obey aggregate, obey willful, obey attentive, obey machinated mercenary Tycho, a laughably simple program but one that had served the Pfhor well for years. No more resistance offered itself, and he cut off the current again. The wires remained inactive for the rest of the session; the lesson had been learned well.
The third time the conditioning cell's door opened, R'chzne and the troopers were waiting. The human stepped out and stood motionless, his head low and shoulders hunched.
"Are you ready to behave now?" Tycho said. "Answer vocally."
"Yessir." No tone, no emotion, not even a twitch of the hand. Another meticulously catalogued moment for the file. Durandal would blow a fuse or five.
"Good." Though R'chzne would undoubtedly reprimand him for it later, Tycho laughed. "You can throw him back into stasis until we need him, attentive captain. He won't give us any more trouble."
---
He moved through dark halls in relentless silence. The ship's dying power hummed around him. Irrelevant noise; he ignored it. He had orders.
Obey. Obey machinated mercenary Tycho. Obey directive: Open the rest of the airlocks on this level. Obey directive: Destroy them. Obey. Obey. Obey.
He obeyed. The airlocks opened when he pulled the switches; he heard the clunking and grinding of their machinery after the groans from dying humans had stopped. He climbed the stairs to return to the upper deck and his boots made no noise on the blue metal steps. Obey directive: Then find a terminal. The terminal he knew didn't work when he logged into it; there had to be another one. A new hallway had opened up along with the airlocks. He searched it.
"Traitorous pig!"
A white fusion bolt hummed out of the unlit passage ahead of him. He stepped to the left and it whined past his ear. He brought up his pistol and fired back. He missed the armored human running toward him.
His next six shots hit. The human collapsed into a pile of armor and blood. He kept going.
Inefficient. The thought rose to his mind in slow, square red letters. He had been much faster to kill the humans on the planet. He had used stronger weapons, not the pistol. He had never missed. Inefficient. Obey directive: Destroy them.
The memory of the human's voice shouting traitorous pig grated in his ears and buzzed through the broken silence of his mind.
He shot another human after it fired at him. And another one. And another one. There were many of them in the dark ship, and after they attacked him, he killed them. Not before. Inefficient.
He found a terminal. It was the wrong terminal; the screen was filled with green. He had to find a red terminal to get a new order. If he didn't get orders and obey them he -
(:racce%!_####~~!n)
- he had to find a red terminal.
He logged into the green terminal instead. He couldn't read the text; the words and letters ran together and out of his understanding. They weren't orders, not orders for him. He put his left hand on the screen, and the green bled onto the glove of his armor. He had to find the other terminal but the green (&isdarker) was too familiar.
He moved his hand and saw three words he could recognize: Teleport when ready.
He looked at them for some time, but the letters didn't blur or twist or change places. They were green and solid, and he wanted to obey them more than he wanted to find the other red terminal. But if he disobeyed orders he would be conditioned. But the green was familiar. He had obeyed green words before. But if he disobeyed orders he would be conditioned again to fix the error and improve his efficiency. But if he obeyed the green words...
If he followed the green terminal, he would not be conditioned.
He had to think about that idea for a while. He heard humans shouting on the other side of a bulkhead, but they couldn't reach him, so he didn't have to kill them. He could think instead. He could go where the terminal teleport sent him and he wouldn't be conditioned again, his mind cleaned out and left barren of everything but orders. He could find more green terminals and try to understand them. He wouldn't have to shoot more humans, and he might not be called "traitorous." He could find another way.
He moved his hand again, this time to the teleport key at the base of the terminal. He was ready.
---
The chill of space ate through his armor, and he stared at the crawl of the oxygen meter as it emptied.
After the teleport had abandoned him somewhere new, he had gone to look for another terminal. He had met humans, but they hadn't shot at him, so he had left them alone; the Pfhor had attacked him, so he killed them, and the killing had felt - satisfying. Correct. But the first terminal he found had been red, and now he was floating in the middle of nothing with the light of the galactic core washing over him and angry letters writhing around in his head. Obey directive: Prepare to drink vacuum, fool. He was inefficient. He had disobeyed. He had failed. He needed to be conditioned.
He wanted to get the hell out of vacuum.
He breathed out, then breathed in, and the oxygen meter crept a little lower. Soon it wouldn't matter whether he had failed, or if he wanted to be somewhere else. Another breath, another notch on the oxygen meter. Another breath, another notch, teleport static.
He was back in front of the red terminal, with weight and air restored. That was unexpected.
He watched the screen for a few seconds, but didn't try to log into it again. Instead he left the tiny room it was in and searched for another terminal. A green one. Something vague in his head said that there should be a green terminal somewhere and that it might have orders for him. He found more Pfhor first and shot them; it continued to feel satisfying.
When he found a green terminal in the middle of a blue metal chamber, he logged in immediately and the first words leaped at him with a strange clarity: Thank you, old friend. The other words blurred together, so he took off his helmet and rubbed his eyes, trying to clear them. It partially worked, but it made the gloves of his armor damp, even though he was still cold from vacuum and not sweating. The words he could make out were simple enough: destroy the Pfhor, save the humans.
He could do that.
His eyes flicked back to the first words and lingered on them for a moment; then he logged off and obeyed orders.
He put away the pistol and used his heavy guns, switching between the most effective ones for each opponent: shotgun, fusion pistol, flechette, assault rifle, flamethrower. He no longer walked in silence and darkness, but ran in submachine gun chatter and shotgun blasts and the bright flare of exploding grenades lighting up narrow rooms and halls. He was swift and efficient and thorough. He was also half-covered in splashes of ichor, but as long as he wiped his visor off regularly, it didn't slow him down. Neither did the red code that still hammered against the inside of his skull at every Pfhor death-cry. He didn't have to care about those orders while he had other work to do.
After he had circled the halls twice and no longer ran into live Pfhor, he began to try the star-shaped switches embedded in the walls. They opened up a way to another room with a third terminal; it was shorter than the others, and it ended with a simple command. Don't let him win.
He couldn't entirely make sense of the order, but he assumed it would become clearer after teleport. He pressed the correct key and let the static translate him to the next place he could be useful, but when it faded he was in the dark, and the terminal in front of him glared red.
He would have to read it to get his orders. He shuffled close enough to log in, but didn't touch the screen. Obey machinated mercenary Tycho. Obey. His shoulders curled in and hunched up. If he didn't read the terminal he wouldn't know what to do or why it wasn't green, but if he read it - if he read it he would have to obey. The code in his head would tell on him and they would know that he had disobeyed, that he had betrayed them to follow the green terminals and he needed to be conditioned and he would be conditioned again...
White light cracked through the darkness, then faded with a slow rumble and left him in darkness again. He wasn't the only one still fighting. If he listened, he could hear distant shouting in Pfhoric and the faint echoes of gunfire.
His left hand was hovering over the login key without touching it, so he used his right hand to push it down and log in, but now it was the words in red that were hard to understand. The ones he could pick out were disconnected and made no sense - jackals, barge, wriggling worms. If he couldn't understand his orders, what was he supposed to do? He couldn't follow orders he didn't know.
He turned that over in his mind, and it twisted into something else: He didn't have to follow orders that he couldn't understand. He had orders he could understand better, if not completely - Obey directive: Don't let him win - so he could ignore the red terminal. That was simple. If he killed the Pfhor, they wouldn't win, and he would enjoy killing them.
The dilemma resolved to his satisfaction, he turned and stepped away from the terminal without another glance.
The dim room narrowed to a dim tunnel that opened into a dark, broad, and slightly curved hall; on his right was a smaller room with bright flickering gray walls and wide windows. When he looked through one window he could see another round room with a central pillar and panels of exposed circuits. He stared at the coiled wires and dull, stuttering lights until a trooper ran in and tried to attack him. He blew its helmet and head off with a grenade, then returned to the window and raised the assault rifle again, his finger on the grenade launcher's trigger.
He had never been to this location before and his orders were still vague, but he pulled the trigger and watched the grenade burst against the circuit panel in fire and cascades of sparks. Destroying the circuits didn't give him the same satisfaction as killing Pfhor, but the next time he found a similar room with a similar view, he did the same. And again. And again. The dark hall was hot and salty-tasting sweat ran into the corners of his mouth, turned the joints of his armor sticky and itched in his damp hair under his helmet. Another gray room, another window, another grenade, more Pfhor. Had he done this before? His actions felt automatic instead of programmed, smooth and familiar. Up and down narrow stairs, along black walls, clean out the Pfhor and finish me, don't let him win, looking for the best path.
He climbed up yellow ledges and found a hollow pillar. Its floor was far below him; he hesitated on the threshold of the door with overheated air blowing against his bare chin, and one of the compilers haunting the room fired at him. He shot back and it ducked out of his range, then popped up in front of him. He stepped back and fell into the pillar.
He landed on his feet and looked around, but the compiler hadn't followed him down. Speckled white walls surrounded him, set with a pattern buffer, a circuit panel, and a terminal, all in arm's reach. He touched the circuits, the terminal, and the buffer in turn without acting on them; at this range he couldn't use a grenade on the circuits, but a punch or a shotgun shell would be equally effective. Circuits broke easily. He touched them again, then logged in to the terminal.
It was green, but darker and dimmer, a jumble of words that didn't fit together into orders or sense. He ran his fingers along the lines to look for meaning and only one sentence came together: pr?When the time comes, whose life will flash before yours?
He didn't understand it, but he kept returning to it as more explosions thundered in the distance. It was a question, not an order, and he should answer questions. He hadn't been asked a question like this one before and the answers he knew wouldn't fit. Yessir, nossir, all other responses irrelevant, inefficient, discarded. He looked at it again, and again, and again.
When the time comes, whose life will flash before yours?
Nothing. He was empty. He could only obey.
He leaned his helmet against the burning wall above the terminal; then he turned away and smashed his fist against the circuit panel. Sparks danced around his hand and bounced off his shields without taking them down. He hit the panel again even though it was already broken, drew back for a third punch and let his hand fall. The work was done; he had no more orders and no reason to act, so further action would have no point.
When he touched the terminal's screen again, the words glowed white, and he followed their light to a new way.
Marathon, characters, etc. © Bungie who better be spillin' some damn awesome beans at E3 (AND THE DESTINY BETA BETTER START JULY 1ST).
Crossposted from Dreamwidth - read the original post here: http://brief-transit.dreamwidth.org/189230.html .