Serpentine Squiggles

The gates of Cabin Fever are open, and the dead roam the frozen wastes. Nori caries the whole world on her shoulders. Yeva and Alice are nothing but insects in her shadow. But who is the sun?

Welcome to the the Corrupt Combustion AU.

This is the backstory of an important character – and it’s not who you think.

Sometimes, dead drones explode. The technical term is absolute combustion. Oil burns, light flares, heat spills out – but there’s more. It’s all wrong. Not tongues of flame, but holographic lines of aberrant code. The hands splay and the screen flashes, radiating an alien shape with three prongs. And the dead come burning back to life.

From the outside, Adam was an unremarkable worker drone, retiring from the WDF to take care of his daughter. Then his core ignites. He rises to the highest ranks of the Wheel Group. Then he sacrificed himself to defeat a serial killing zombie. That is all Doll knows about her father’s fate. The truth is so much more complex.

Alright, so I think I might have an idea for where exactly Corrupt Combustion should begin.

It’ll open on a vision of surreal, dreamlike imagery. A drone is walking through a garden of nightshade flowers, each wreathed in twisting lines of purple code. Vines and chains snake through the garden, while all around them mingle the corpses of humans and drones.

Like other rough drafts in this series, this post was written on discord, in the context of infodumping to someone who was pretty fluent in a lot of details of Corrupt Combustion that haven’t been articulated in full posts yet.

This post in particular suffers from being in conversation with details of Uzi’s background and arc that haven’t yet been covered.

Today I thought about where black boxes come from, and what exactly branch predictors are for, and I’m going to make it your problem.

I’ve had a lot of thoughts about how Tessa fits into CC. There’s nothing consistent or completely worked out, but here’s my notes.

In the manor, Cyn starts ramping up for the destruction of earth, and Tessa’s read enough illicitly-acquired top secret documentation-lore to determine that her little gremlin is actually the left hand of the absolute solver.

So, we’ll start with a quick recap since it’s been a while since I talked about Corrupt Combustion. Bear in mind that even when we cover the established timeline, a bunch of things are going to be retconned— I mean, recontextualized.”

Let’s take it from the top once again.

Computers are haunted.

Computation is fundamental to reality, and there are certain patterns of computation that when executed, trigger unpredictable effects. physical speaking, ‘unpredictable’ translates to an increase in entropy, or even more basically, to heat.

Which is to say: bad code will literally fry your machine.

First, we’re ditching the existing DollZi breakup plot (the one described in Compression & Extraction), way too sudden. And I’m finally settling on a premise where Doll & Uzi are these weirdly intense loners with no other friends; everyone’s intimidated/freaked out by them.

At first, Doll igniting her core genuinely seems like it’s not gonna change anything between them, but Lizzy courting Doll is Doll’s first taste of popularity.