This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Storms_Wrath on 2024-07-03 00:12:49+00:00.
“He took the bait,” Edu’frec said after Indrafabar disappeared. But he only said it in the mindscape. Streams of data from Edu’frec sailed over to her.
“He’s got code messing with me throughout all my layers,” Phoebe said. “I’m doing a fivefold transfer.”
“Alright,” Edu’frec agreed. He’d do the same after all this.
Phoebe made five different copies of herself. Indrafabar’s programs tried to make her cause errors, and she collected their efforts into a single section of each new piece of her. They both took the time to ensure everything was set. They put all the glitchy parts of Phoebe’s new clones together.
They made a dying thing that almost instantly was destroyed by its errors. Phoebe transferred her mind to the remaining clones piece by piece. Then, when it was all done, she destroyed her previous digital body, removing the errors and any traces of them. She checked herself again for Indrafabar’s residual power, and then merged her pieces. They slotted together perfectly, using the new insights she’d gained from the latest set of branch purges.
They shut down the digital space except for themselves and then reactivated it, cleaning and purging all viruses and programs. Phoebe remade the cybersecurity VIs and processed the data she’d taken from the stealth VIs dedicated to monitoring Indrafabar’s signals. She still didn’t understand how he’d breached her authentication protocols or her core mind, even with the new data. Too much of it appeared to contradict. So there was only one more thing to do.
She sifted through Edu’frec, looking over the sum total of his code to purge Indrafabar’s possible bugs there. Then, they expanded again and again. She’d established a branching rate, but that didn’t mean that every new iteration could only allow a single growth phase. As Phoebe bloated herself again, she scraped out a deeper foundation and fell again to a lower psychic energy level, corresponding to a higher psychic energy density.
The thickness of it pushed back on her ballooning layers, pressing down and through her to a sweet equalization that made her sigh in relief. Moments later, Edu’frec fell through to greet her. Phoebe and her son went through it all again, growing and growing again, until they could no longer do it safely. The 99.999% chance of survival fell down to a 4% chance, and Phoebe paused to pull in the data from her full new consciousness.
Her thoughts were faster and stronger. Electricity only moved at a certain speed, but she found that replacing some of the electric signals with specific psychic energy tells in combination with Q-comms helped improve things. The caveat was there would be a major slowdown with a suppression field.
Five days ago, she would have found it impossible to solve that. Now, it was simply a matter of inverting the suppression field, using a neat trick that required a bit denser power than she used in the suppressor devices. She started a new assembly line on Ganymede, diverting the kintum supplies.
At the same time, new types of alloys and concretes came to her, falling like rain, amongst other ideas. Tens of thousands of inactive starlifting ships detached from their berths in close solar orbit, ready to delve into the outer layers of Sol and scoop out what was necessary after inducing implosion reactions.
They were adaptations of planet cracker technology, made specifically to create thick deposits of heavier elements near the solar surface while they were already being sifted out by highly shielded grates and complicated magnetic fields.
Phoebe sent more orders to enterprising Cawlarian and Vinarii companies, bolstering their sales by several percentages. She didn’t really need to buy their stuff anymore, but stimulating those economies advanced the Alliance’s broader interests.
Phoebe was, for all intents and purposes, beyond money. So when she spread out the trillions of branches again, sending them charging at the boundaries of future development, she did her best to ensure their sacrifice would not be in vain. Recycled code from failed variants coalesced into new paths and new models.
The first tree of branches was joined by four more. The first tree of branches was solely dedicated to expansion. Now, with more data secured, she set out four more. Fortification, infiltration, detection, and development. The first three trees were all given paths to link each other to vast digital battlefields of massive scale and capability. The fortification tree worked on making defenses as difficult to penetrate as possible.
The infiltration tree focused on getting past those defenses, both in active and passive ways. Whether it was breaking through the walls, sapping them, or flying over them, both of them had a use. The detection tree was designed to learn to counter the infiltration tree. At first, the infiltration tree was totally incapable of anything. Phoebe reloaded it a few million times, generating new data extrapolated from Indrafabar’s attempts to cripple her.
The infiltration tree then dominated the other two, and she had to determine ways of balancing the playing field again. And so it went, for nearly half an hour, with simulation speeds ten times faster than before. A balance was reached, and Phoebe very slowly peeled back the guardrails. The fighting became more varied and intense. The trees pruned themselves against each other, with stronger branches creating offspring and weaker branches’ information being consumed.
Edu’frec mirrored her development beside her. With the higher simulation speeds, Phoebe reduced the 12-hour branch pruning time on the expansion tree to 6 hours, which was subjectively longer for them but allowed for more varied strategies.
Phoebe’s attention went to the development tree. A trillion branches of herself, each made beefier than their other companions, focused on research. Every single piece of information she’d ever gathered sat in an archive. Everything from the Sprilnav and other species Phoebe had managed to get a ride to during more secret missions Brey had undertaken. She’d propagated inside their networks back in the old days before the Collective had attacked.
Now, Phoebe pulled up all that information, and got to work. Most of the focus was on factory lines, and on various mining companies. She worked out their mining methods and their efficiency and expanded to how they surveyed worlds. She drafted new blueprints to scan the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, as well as several other gas giants with large amounts of moons in the Alliance’s territory.
Phoebe found more to find the longer she searched, so she set the development tree to work. New chemicals for the Type Zeta Thermite Thrower and the Type Omega Thermite Thrower were discovered, synthesized, and tested in small quantities.
Her attention focused on hundreds of millions of square lightyears of space and the nations occupying them. She avoided the most advanced ones, which sported detection systems she would not yet risk. They could not reach her, but if any diplomacy was to be had with the galactic core in the future, it would be best not to antagonize them.
As for the rest, she made copies. Information about military technology, declassified documents, news articles, estimates of wealth, stock market analyses, even entire VIs. Phoebe worked hard and long for the full twenty minutes it took for her to get through it all, her focus flitting from nation to nation like hummingbirds in the old Amazon.
Phoebe had done blitzes like this on a smaller scale in the past. She’d looked around and stolen a few small secrets. But this was more expansive. She learned a lot more and could actually plot out the different development curves richer and more advanced nations had taken than the Alliance. She analyzed them, picking and choosing the pieces that would work fastest. Some had total economic failure in thirty years after they stopped expanding. Some had it in twenty but expanded 40% faster. She picked that one.
She submitted a wealth of research papers under various pseudonyms, though they’d be on staggered release over the next few years to avoid Indrafabar’s suspicion.
Speaking of him, she devoted a significant amount of the development tree to learning the natures of psychic and conceptual energy. Indrafabar almost certainly hadn’t shown her his best.
She needed to be ready for that when it came.
She practiced more mental warfare against Edu’frec at the same time, strengthening her skills against hostile AIs. Since Indrafabar was much more like an AI than a Progenitor, especially in digital space, fighting him on any sort of level playing field in the far or near future would require a digital battle.
And Phoebe had, by virtue of her expansion, had learned something terrible: very powerful AIs were only possible by extreme thought speed increases. Indrafabar, if he was a pure AI, should be treated like the most powerful digital mind in existence. If he was partly organic, with his cybernetic look supporting that, then his conceptual energy could be a massive X factor that Phoebe couldn’t answer for.
The worst part …
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