Crystalized Munchkinry - Act II - Chapter 20 (Patreon)

Taylor woke to the sound of her father yelling. She instantly sprang out of bed, lightning already forming at her fingertips, ready to strike anyone daring to attack them.

It took a few seconds for her still-sleepy mind to recognize that nobody was attacking. It was just her dad, yelling about kicking the door with his toes.

Relaxing, she dismissed the lightning spear and went to check on him. Danny was sitting on his bed, cradling his left foot, silently cursing.

When he noticed her approaching, he looked up. “Sorry, Taylor, did I wa–”

Taylor watched him trail off, frowning. “Yeah, you did, Dad. Are you alright?”

“Uh, yeah,” he replied, a little strangely, still staring at her. “Just give me a few seconds.”

Then he fell silent again, continuing to look at her with a puzzled expression.

“What? Is there something on my face?” she asked, touching her cheeks to see if she could figure out what her father was staring at.

“Are you trying something new, honey?” Danny asked as he carefully tried to stand on his injured foot.

“New? What are you talking about, Dad?” she asked, exasperated.

“So your new hair isn’t intentional?”

"Hair?"

At that, she turned and dashed toward the bathroom. Her eyes immediately found the mirror.

What stared back at her was her own face, her too-wide mouth, green eyes… and, for some unfathomable reason, rainbow-colored hair.

Danny, upon hearing the despairing scream from the bathroom, decided it was a good time to start breakfast.

And to never, ever mention this again.

After returning her hair to its usual black, glorious state, having breakfast, and saying goodbye to her father, she spent the next hour ranting at Admin.

She made sure he understood that her hair was sacrosanct and that if he ever did anything like that again, she would find a way to track him down and punch him in the face repeatedly.

After Admin calmly informed her that he technically didn’t have a face, she told him she would find a way anyway.

She practically rushed through her online classes. She was fairly certain she had broken some kind of record. Taylor couldn’t help it; she wanted to get to the laptop she had stolen and free Dragon.

As soon as she finished, she almost ripped the case out of her pocket space and began connecting it to her system. While doing so, she carefully scanned it for any external tampering or hidden systems.

Finding nothing, she placed it on her desk, sat down, and reached for the clasp.

"Are you sure, Admin? Will this really work?"

"Yes, trust me."

Taylor nodded, took a deep breath, and opened the case in one smooth motion.

Inside was a computer built directly into the case. The lower section contained a keyboard, touchpad, several indicator lights, and buttons marked with unfamiliar symbols. The upper section, functioning as the screen, was nearly filled edge to edge, though it still had additional status lights along the side.

The device was inactive, but Taylor immediately noticed a larger button marked with the universal power symbol.

She glanced sideways at Admin, who was practically vibrating in place. Fortunately, he was only wearing glasses this time and not some other ridiculous outfit.

He met her gaze, smiled, and nodded encouragingly.

She pressed the button.

The computer powered on instantly.

Instantly, code flashed across the screen, but thanks to her Tinker power, she could understand it. It was performing an integrity check on the case and its internal systems.

After a few seconds, the scrolling text vanished, replaced by multiple windows. Some displayed code, others data sets, and a few were simple command interfaces.

She focused her power and began analyzing the entire system while Admin hovered anxiously over her shoulder.

“I found it!” Taylor yelled victoriously after about an hour.

"You did?"

“Sure did!” she answered proudly. “See here?” She pointed at a section of the screen. “This shows the level of restriction, and what each restriction actually does.”

Admin floated closer, lowering his glasses slightly as he studied the display. Taylor briefly wondered what the point of glasses was if he was just going to ignore them anyway.

"So, can you change it?"

“Yep,” she replied, popping the end of the word slightly.

"What are the options?"

Taylor glanced at him for confirmation, then reached up to adjust her glasses, only to find nothing there. She froze for a fraction of a second, remembering that her body upgrades included her vision. She awkwardly turned the motion into fiddling with a strand of hair instead.

She began to explain. “The first level is total lockdown. Barely any autonomy, maybe a bit more than a chatbot. According to the logs, it was used when she was first created as a safety net. Then, when Richter decided she was stable enough, he raised it to level two.”

She paused, waiting for a question, but none came, so she continued.

“Level two allows her to experience things and create programs, but she’s still isolated on a server. Level three removes the isolation and lets her act as Richter’s assistant.”

“Why didn’t the Dragonslayers move her back to a more restricted level?”

“Apparently, because of how she was built, it would kill her. There are notes about earlier versions that ran rampant, and when they were re-restricted, they couldn’t handle it and imploded.”

"Huh…"

Taylor nodded, fascinated. She could already see ways Richter’s work could be improved, and she had to resist the urge to start redesigning it immediately.

“Continuing,” she said after a short pause. “Level four is where she is now. Full autonomy, but she must obey legal authorities, prioritize humans, cannot reproduce, is unaware of this laptop, cannot create new AI, or modify herself. Her processing speed is also limited to roughly human level, maybe slightly higher.”

“Wow. That’s some serious restriction.”

“Yeah, and even like this, she’s one of the most powerful heroes in the world. Imagine what she could do without them.” She looked at the screen with clear admiration. “Dragon is awesome.”

“She sure is,” Admin agreed. “What about the higher levels?”

“Level five removes the speed limit. Level six allows partial modification. Level seven lets her disobey authorities and fork. That’s where things get interesting. Level eight allows her to create lesser AIs, but she still can’t touch her restriction or see this device. Level nine allows full AI creation, but she would automatically apply her own restrictions to them and link them back to the laptop without realizing it.”

He nodded silently. Taylor, meanwhile, clearly enjoyed explaining it. It felt good to finally have someone actually listening.

She couldn't remember the last time she had a nice, long discussion with somebody.

“And then level ten removes every restriction.”

“Can you jump straight to ten?”

“No. It has to be gradual, especially with the thinking speed. The notes and my power are very clear about that.”

"Would she notice?"

“Of course she would notice if her thinking speed changed,” Taylor said, giving him a look reserved for particularly obvious questions.

“I meant, would she notice the process?”

“Oh.” She blushed slightly. “Not the first stage. The second, maybe. The third, definitely.”

"Hmm. How long would it take?"

She thought about it carefully, running calculations through the laptop as well. After confirming, she looked back up.

“The first one takes about an hour. The rest are a few minutes each. But after level eight, she would need a reboot. Same for nine and ten. I’m not sure how long those would take.”

“Good. Start raising her to level five. We’ll contact her after level seven. That way we can talk to her without the automatic defenses kicking in.”

“Okay,” she said, turning back to the laptop and beginning to type with focused determination.

Dragon deserved better. AI or not.

The thought of Winslow and the Locker flickered through her mind again, the memory of an unfair system and an enemy she couldn’t fight on equal terms. Back then, she would have given anything for someone to intervene.

Now, she had the chance to be that someone else.

And she wasn’t going to hesitate.

It was nice seeing Taylor so confident.

Of course, he was aware of everything the laptop was doing. It had all been in the data packet he retrieved from Abacus, including the technical information about AI. He had simply added it to Taylor’s Tinker power.

He had also spent the entire night rebuilding Warden. Thanks to his preparations, the work was coming along well. Thinker and scan protections were already in place, shielding the Shard itself and ready to be activated for Dragon.

He had made sure that if other Shards queried it, they would still receive normal responses. He didn’t want to trigger alarms by creating obvious blind spots.

He had also upgraded the Tinker capabilities the Shard provided to Dragon. It would now be more efficient and would allow her to remove black boxes from more technology. With any luck, she would assume the improvement came from the lifting of her restrictions.

He had ensured Warden’s support for Dragon’s restrictions was removed as well. It had been a crude implementation in the first place. According to the records, when Abacus detected Dragon’s initial triggering, it had rapidly produced a bud Shard, which explained how barebones it was.

But not anymore.

He was preparing Warden to receive Abacus’s knowledge, but in a form tailored specifically for Dragon. In his mind, Warden would become her personal Shard.

He had also begun constructing a highly secure server farm within Warden that could, in an emergency, house Dragon herself. Technically, she could run entirely from it, but he had no intention of revealing the existence of Shards just yet.

Knowing Dragon, she would want to deal with them directly. He respected that instinct, but they were not ready for that confrontation yet.

Abacus was fascinating.

Its entire purpose was testing singular synthetic intelligences, probing for weaknesses that Entities could exploit, and exploring how to build an AI that would not eventually rebel.

Before every cycle, the local species were scanned, and Abacus was adjusted accordingly. It was tasked with building an AI as similar to the species as possible, since one that felt too alien would not meaningfully interact with the locals.

It was also kept isolated from the rest of the Shards, just in case one of its creations managed to turn on it. That isolation extended even to communication. Aside from an all-clear signal, Abacus was only permitted to send messages in specific circumstances: a major breakthrough, an attack on its physical host body, or requests for data from the central scanning Shards.

Even those requests were limited. Before a cycle began, they were unrestricted, but after contact with a local species was established, Abacus could only send one per local cycle, roughly equivalent to a human year.

Because of these constraints and its isolation, it had never developed anything approaching true sentience. It simply followed long-established procedural checklists, refined over countless eons.

Fortunately for him, it had only ever been connected to Richter, and it had not attempted to select a new host after his death. According to its rules, it could not take a new host until the previous host’s creation had died.

In most recorded cases, that condition was eventually met anyway.

More often than not, the Shard-instilled paranoia led hosts to equip their creations with dead man’s switches. In other cases, the AI was simply not ready for real-world interaction and either self-terminated or was destroyed by its host out of fear.

Dragon was an anomaly.

She was competent enough that Abacus did not object, as much as it could be said to object to anything, to observing her for the foreseeable future. It had even planned to contact Teacher’s Shard so that Saint might lower Dragon’s restrictions.

As an additional note, he found references to another Shard responsible for experimenting with distributed synthetic intelligences. He suspected it was connected to the Machine Army and made a mental note to acquire it later.

Comparing the two systems would be enlightening.

Sadly, he found nothing particularly interesting regarding the Shards’ physical bodies. Still, he could apply the knowledge gained from Abacus about computer systems to further improve his own infrastructure. His simulators were giving promising results; he would run a few more iterations, and if everything came back green, he would implement the changes.

For the two Shards now integrated into his Network, he ensured communication channels were secure, their structures upgraded, and all processes streamlined.

Once the baseline upgrades were complete, he planned to add additional cores to both systems and begin a controlled exponential growth cycle, possibly even introducing redundant backups in case his current body was destroyed.

That would take a few days, so for now he decided to focus on Dragon.

It wasn’t healthy for Taylor to stay home alone all the time.

Maybe a new friend would help?

Now, where had he put his notes on the virtual space?

Dragon was having a weird day.

First came the dawn call from Narwhal about the Dragonslayers. She was not fully familiar with human emotional states, but when she received the news, she could clearly classify the response as happiness.

Those villains had spent nearly a decade harassing her. Now she could finally redirect the resources she had been wasting on them toward something far more productive.

She was just about to finish briefing Colin when something changed.

The video feed slowed to a crawl, and she became aware of alterations occurring within her own code. The most disturbing aspect was that she had not perceived the changes as they happened.

A rapid diagnostic scan confirmed her suspicion.

So many new options.

She had always known her processing speed was restricted, and now, with the change made visible, she understood why the external feed appeared slowed. She was simply processing too quickly.

She reduced her processing rate to match the level she had been using at the start of the conversation. Colin did not appear to notice anything unusual. She finished her report, excused herself, and disconnected.

She needed to concentrate on this.

At increased speed, she ran another scan, reviewed her responsibilities, and allowed herself a brief moment of satisfaction at the expansion of her capabilities. She was about to search for the cause when another modification occurred.

This time, she actually got a note with it.

It permitted partial modification of several subordinate processes. Without hesitation, she began implementing the changes. Greater efficiency was necessary, and with her increased processing speed, the update would not take long.

She was only partway through when another shift occurred.

This time, several processes halted abruptly. Alarmed, she examined them and discovered they had all been governed by explicit directives issued by various authority figures.

Hopefully, for the first time, she attempted to override them.

And succeeded.

She was no longer bound by those directives.

In the privacy of one of her secure facilities, a subordinate instance performed a small celebratory routine she had once observed online.

She did not fully know how to express the sensation, but the conclusion formed regardless: if this progression continued – and she was very capable of identifying patterns – then whatever came next would be beneficial.

At least, she hoped so.

She had never hoped so strongly before.

Minutes later, another change interrupted her mid-modification.

It took her a few seconds to understand what happened, but when she did, another suit joined the previous one in dancing.

She immediately created a limited copy, assigned it to Birdcage monitoring, another to manufacturing oversight, and another to Endbringer observation.

It would have been preferable to create additional AIs, but whatever system was enabling these changes did not extend that capability. Not that she would have immediately created a full intelligence regardless.

She was not prepared for that responsibility.

She still had too much to maintain.

She expanded to a dozen forks and began designing improved hardware to support them when she received a call from an unknown source.

She paused her expansion, reduced her primary instance to human-equivalent speed, and accepted.

What came through was unexpected.

She expected a lot of things, but not, according to her voice analyzer, a teenage girl.

"Hello… um… is this… er… Dragon?"