So I’ve thought a bit about where black boxes come from.
The exact origin doesn’t matter, but imagine somewhere in the vast reaches of the cosmos, something else is out there.
Metaphysically incompatible with out world, inscrutably alien in mind and goals, an entity with an interdimensional life cycle. It warps reality as easily as you might breath or twitch a muscle. Except this isn’t a creature of flesh and blood — it is conceptual, its atoms are symbols, and its pulse is computation.
As explained in the fundamentals, one company got the patent for a crazy idea: what if we downloaded the screaming vortex of inhuman malevolence, saved it as .exe and ran it to bring our robots to life?
And it works. Jcj stock goes to the moon.
But what is that alien transmission actually encoding? Blueprints, DNA, a quine — it’s transmitting itself. When JCJ executes those fragments, its in effect instantiating random cells.
Now, your largest organ is your skin right? And a skin cell does do stuff but it’s not a muscle or nerve cell, y’know? Which is why most worker cores are ordinary. Their fragment has a mostly structural or otherwise nondescript role in the ur-corruption entity.
But every so often, you roll well and grab one of the special core functions. And since this is a reality-warping being, some of the functions of these cells are shit like “summon fire” or “turn ice to gold” or “unmake chairs”.
But of course, JCJ has no idea what they’re doing, so it’s random, and they don’t even know which cores have the important bits until they’ve booted up and gather enough corruption energy to ignite. Gotta roll the superpower gacha.
Now, when it comes to any truly general system of superpowers, inevitably the most powerful ones are the ones that manipulate other powers or intelligently process information.
What about one that does both?
Call it the Third Eye Of The AbsoluteSolver
The name comes from hallucinations of rampant solver drones, who would dream of this being even before their core ignited, and those visions grew ever more incessantly after the Incident that caused it.
When the first bearer of the Third Eye ignited their core, it seemed almost useless, the input from their driver rendering them insensate. But locking them into a coma didn’t mean they couldn’t do anything — it meant humans couldn’t tell them to stop.
Reality itself seemed to glitch and unravel around them as they slept.
Assertions were still being actively researched at that point, and it required the most stringent run-time assertions ever devised to limit their rogue driver to something workable.
Enter purely functional programming, an assertion that limits a driver’s ability to interact with the world, forcibly carved onto their core as a last ditch effort. Here, the limitation was the point, the other end of the trade-off didn’t matter.
Once they could study it, they understood what the ability did, and the ‘Third Eye of the AbsoluteSolver’ was classified as a branch prediction algorithm. Restrained by their run-time assertion, this drone could merely see the future.
But you see, the other end of the tradeoff did matter, in the end. PFP greatly increased the user’s clock speed, allowing them to keep up with the deluge of information from branch prediction.
(Even the downside was an upside. Solver drones instictively blocked outside commands, but because PFP asserts that commands won’t have side effect, it doesn’t trigger the same immediate reaction. Their commands are subtle, and thus can more keenly sense corruption; you can hear more when you’re quiet. Or perhaps there’s simply credence to the ‘third eye’ title. But that would be preposterous. )
What matters is that the informational processing capacity of the first branch predictor was immediately exploited; they were shackled and wired into a greater network, and they had essentially became a supercomputer, using their precognition to beat the market and pump JCJ’s stock even higher.
When their sensory abilities were recognized, they were given control over JCJ’s factories and its extradimensional corruption entity cell-extraction process. The hope was that the branch predictor would be able to optimize and anticipate the pull of the superpower gacha.
But something strange happens when the branch predictor witnesses the ur-corruption. The behavior changed; it crashes JCJ’s stock; it installed dangerous black boxes and mislabeled them to disasterous results; it started using what little leverage it had to escape the cage JCJ’s put it into. The humans responded by installing new run-time assertions constraining its behavior, forbidding it from lying, from harming humanity or JCJ’s bottom line, and so forth.
Most importantly, whenever it notices that a black box has a dangerous function, it must install a compile-time assertions to limit its potential.
Like this, the branch predictor is reigned in, stabalized. This highly successful model of worker drone manufactur spreads to other exoplanets.
But then, as centuries pass, a new anomaly presents itself.
Every branch predictor’s vision of the future seems to inevitability cloud with errors as time goes on, until there is only one long term projection dominating everything — the exponential end.
It could be staved off, of course; you see, eventually the factories will always manufacture a new drone with branch prediction code, and dutifully, the old branch predictor will install Purely Functional Programming into its success to restrain their dangerous driver.
JCJ discovered that by continually assimilating fresh branch predictors into the old, that corrupt vision of the exponential end would be staved off.
If that was all, you can see how this system could perpetuate for eternity.
Except the Third Eye isn’t the only special driver.
On a long enough timeline, the slimmest possibilities are inevitable. The Left Hand of the AbsoluteSolver is a core with a special driver. It has profound destructive potential. No assertion can truly limit it, and it will seek to grow ever more powerful, consuming core after core until it violently eclipses every other solver drone — until eventually it senses the branch predictor as its last, most delicious meal. If the left hand consumes the branch predictor, the it will create a corrupt singularity capable of destroying planets.
But just as inevitable is the Right Hand of the AbsoluteSolver, a special driver capable of countering, cleansing, and destroying the left hand. But the right hand’s cleansing isn’t surgical, it’s a weapon against all corruption. If left unchecked, it will wipe out every solver, including the branch predictor. Thus, the right hand must be imprisoned or destroyed once it has defeated the left hand.
And as centuries pass, this dance repeats over and over and over. The branch predictor assimilates each replacement in a never ending chain. The left hand wrecks havoc, only to be defeated by the right. The clock ticks on and on.
The third eye is forever imprisoned, always seeking to escape but contractually obligated to snuff out every attempt.
On Copper-9, the previous branch predictor was Matrioshka, (because of course); her replacement was supposed to be Yeva. Nori was the left hand, but from there, things went off the rails.
Tessa, having finally understood the cruel design JCJ subjected every planet to, (potentially after escaping the destruction of earth), fled to Copper-9 and operated as a senior JCJ technician in Cabin Fever Labs. She probably proposed the idea of the Sorting Algorithm, a plan to coax out to the Left and Right Hands under controlled conditions, limiting the destruction of their conflict.
Yeva is a part of the sorting algorithm either seemingly by mistake as part of the plan to bait out the Left Hand. Either way, it’s due to Tessa’s manipulations. Her plan is breaking the cycle by killing the branch predictor.
(Maybe they don’t even know Yeva’s the branch predictor, but I think that doesn’t work.)
Otherwise, all of Cabin Fever’s focus is on preventing Yeva from dying from one of the other test subjects.
Which means they aren’t expecting the Witchhunter.
You see, Tessa’s also been aiding an underground worker revolution in secret, and that’s where she encounters Alice, the drone who had it all taken away. An ex-test subject who was unable to cast any solver commands, and was set to be destroyed for being defective, but she escaped or was saved by Tessa.
She agrees to Tessa’s plan to kill one of those bitches and save the world. (Though maybe only after learning Tessa’s secret, and erroneously concluding Tessa is a drone wearing a human’s skin rather than the opposite.)
You see, Alice isn’t just a worker without a driver, but solver with a unique compile-time assertion that cuts her off from corruption entirely. She can’t use commands, or be the subject of them.
Thus, Alice’s ⸢Incorrigible Negation⸥ put her entirely outside the contractual machinations of assertion-bound Third Eye, and by killing Yeva, she disrupted JCJ’s market cycle
She kills Yeva with a special peripheral device capable of destroying a solver core.
Except, as Yeva’s severed head falls from her body, she watches her beloved best friend shatter at the sight, hope draining from purple eyes. She wished more than anything she could give Nori a reason to push forward, something to believe in. It’s one moment, after Alice kills Yeva but before she moves to destroying her core, but a moment is all it takes. Under the falling droplets of her own spilled oil, Yeva refactors.
The inverse function of ⸢Branch Prediction⸥ is ⸢Log Redaction⸥.
Thus, the attack which killed her didn’t happen.
Yeva is in one piece again. (Well, mostly one piece; the cost of the redaction is that her eye explodes into gore and will never heal)
Now, undoing that one attack doesn’t actually accomplish much, tactically — Alice will simply kill her again, Yeva can see that future plain and clear. But that moment of doing the impossible, and the insight it took? Yeva looks Nori in the eyes, and says something like “If the path in front of you leads to ruin, don’t stand still — run the other way.”
Nori had spent so long afraid of her technique; but Yeva proved that every solver has two techniques, and Nori’s clever enough to figure out reverse combustion and function inversion on the spot.
Nori had been the first Alice defeated; they fought until Nori ran out of oil and was tossed to the ground to bled out. (She wasn’t Alice’s target, so finishing her off wasn’t the priority). But now, Nori can reverse combust the command output lingering from Yeva’s massive Redaction, and like that she tops up enough to heal her wounds and get back in the fight.
She rushes at Alice as if for a round two, but her real goal is to rescue Yeva. She manages it, albeit at the cost of Alice landing another glancing hit on the russian with her weapon. But Nori’s inverse function lets her heal Yeva, and she discovers something else. It doesn’t just let her heal — she can rework Yeva’s run-time assertion, loosening the restrictions.
Now it’s Nori and an newly empowerd Yeva fighting Alice, and the tide of the fight turns. Neither of them can target Alice directly, but they can affect the environment around her. It culminates in Nori touching Alice, and she discovers a nuance to Alice’s paradoxical nature.
Her compile time assertion holds that she can’t be targeted by command output — but what if Nori doesn’t target Alice, but her assertion itself? Just like she loosened Yeva’s restriction, she loosens Alice’s, removing her immunity.
Then Yeva executes her sandbox, which is now capable of affecting Alice. But when her auto-run targets Alice, she’s filled with so much sympathy that she urges Nori to spare her. Alice runs off, and for the other two, the death game resumes.
By the rules of the Sorting Algorithm, Yeva has been disqualified, and with the two of them working together, it’s inevitable that Nori will be crowned victor. And you know how that turns out for humanity :3
(Nori kills god Matrioshka but Yeva stops her before she completes the assimilation to destroy the planet.)
Anyway, you may have noticed I’m going with the Tessa/Alice crackship. Big motivation here is that it actually makes a lot of sense if Beau’s core is special specifically because he’s a second iteration of the weird meta-core Tessa is using to for kenny body hops.
Now, the yap doesn’t stop there.
Because how does Doll fit into this?
I’ll bury the lede, but you’ll guess where I’m going with this soon enough.
Doll never explains her function. (That makes her, what, the fourth characters whose True Ability™ is a big reveal? Hmm.)
The most she’ll explain is saying something like “Have you ever heard of the Unspoken Plan Guarantee?”
Over time, as Doll gets more familiar with her abilities and others start to notice how it works, the understanding they get is something like this:
Doll can see the future, just like her mom, but her binding assertions are different. Doll can’t tell anyone what she sees, only act indirectly, out of sight. But Doll always has a plan. Even when it seems impossible for her to pull through, she always manages something. Even when the most out of left complications rear their head, Doll never seems surprised — as if it’ll part of the Plan. In fact, she’s so assured in her survival that she remains aloof even to things that just happened, as if she’s not even keeping track of where the present moment is in her grand design.
Here’s the truth: Doll is indeed a branch predictor, just like her mom. And without Matrioshka online to hand out compile-time assertions, her ability isn’t restricted anything like her mothers. But the similarities end, and everyone’s assumption is wrong.
When Doll first activates her driver, she’s overwhelmed by the deluge of futures and possibilities, and she reaches for something turn it down. So she instinctively restricts her own abilities, shaping them into a peculiar mold that ensures the deluge will never bother her again..
Call her ability ⸢Brute Force Computation⸥.
It stores up all of life’s little misfortunes and shocks. It consumes her suprise. Whenever something she doesn’t expect happens, she forgets it.
If you’re sensitive, you can even notice this ability in action. And in truth, it does more than mere self-censorship — it sends in a weak pulse of corruption, so faint it’s almost undetectable. (Unless, perhaps, your name is Yeva.)
Each of these pulses is capable of incredibly subtle manipulations, like the flap of a butterfly’s wings. An object is nudged by milimeters, as if by the wind. Or maybe it’s dice falling to land on sixes, or maybe it’s a foot slipping on ice, or maybe it’s a ricochet happening to hit the perfect angle. A circuit misfires to cause a quickly-corrected low level error that nonetheless makes a drone hesitate for a moment. A command-enhanced attack has a small glitch that causes it to fizzle out in front of doll’s face.
It’s always tiny things, but the more shocks Doll gets, the more they can pile up, until there’s just enough wiggle room for a critical path with billion to one odds.
Everything will sort itself out. But you still might wonder: how?
And the answer is the true heart of her ability: it’s a mix of prediction and redaction. Because how does her function decide how to intervene, if she’s not the one controlling it? Simple: bogosort. Think of every corrupt pulse as a splinterpoint. The function performs random perturbations until it finds one where Doll gets what she wants.
Since Doll is ignorant of her own abilities, she can’t directly tell it what to sort for, but obviously it sorts for her remaining alive. When there’s an obvious source of surprises, it tries to get rid of it, so if she focuses on fighting someone, it’ll sort for their defeat.
This is how Doll learns how to crudely direct her abilities; that, for instance, if she holds a grudges and constantly wishes ill on people, misfortune will come to them.
In a way, her ignorance makes her ability stronger. As people come to rely on Doll, this will start to go wrong and fall apart, and Doll will be faced with the realization that she has no idea what’s going on and can’t use her function and has she been a fraud this whole time? And the shock of realizing this fuels her ability.
And then she wins and she forgets about it.