What We (Don’t) Know
Nobody remembers what happened in the Sorting Algorithm. The “Nightshade Incident” is classified, and everyone’s memories are scrambled.
Of course, it’s not a perfect forgetting. The memories are still there, suppressed, and occaisionally, they reassert themselves as something coherent.
In particular, I was thinking that CCZ would open with Triss dreaming, a vivid memory fragment of Nori grinning with one yellow eye, laughing as she tears Triss apart.
But let’s forget about Triss for a moment — CCZ probably won’t do much to develop the mystery of Nightshade. The Wheel Group says don’t question it, and Triss honestly has more important things to worry about.
That thread would lay in the background for a bit.
What’s cute is that the future developments will recontextualize these memory fragments, in a red herring kind of way. Remember the the slithernots? There are zombies that erase their targets’ memories as part of their predation.
So, is this another one? In fact, was ‘Nightshade’ the very same memory-wiping zombie?
To be sure, not every Cabin Fever survivor would let this lie, trust the adminstration’s promises that there’s nothing to worry about. They’d get curious, they’d get suspicious, they’d dig for answers. The Wheel Group treats this as inevitable — so be persistent enough and eventually they’ll just cave and grant y ou the clearance to read the Nightshade file and judge for youself.
Nightshade is classified as a false false hydra. It was a memetic agent the humans were studying. It wants you to believe in it; that’s how it operates. But it acts in a subtle way, planting false memories of things that never happen, suggestive and provactive in a way that piques your curiosity and arouses your paranoia — whatever makes you believe something’s been hidden from you. That you’ve forgotten something big, that you need to uncover the truth.
The humans were studying it, but Cyn had unleashed it during the Sorting Algorithm. She wanted to use its effects as a medium for her own possession.
But Nori prevailed against her, and worked with Yeva to create patches that could suppress the effects — but of course this means erasing the false memories the zombie created.
In the end, the patch worked imperfectly, which brings us to where we are today.
You ouldd get to the end of the file, and everything would click into place.
“This isn’t the first time we’ve had this conversation, is it?”
“And it won’t be the last.”
Once the implications all sink in — the false memories are poison that makes you more vulnerable to Cyn, which is all the more dangerous now that Cyn’s threads are loose and wrecking havoc once again — you would be foolish to try and retain knowledge of this cognitohazard.
You consent to have the patch retuned, and a for a while longer, you’ll sleep easy.
The Truth
This is, of course, a cover story. The Wheel Group is lying — Nori and Yeva are lying — but it’s closer to the truth than you could get from looking at the evidence that’s left.
If you could see the whole picture, the inconsistencies would add up. The “false memories” just aren’t what you would expect if some ‘false false hydra’ were tailoring its fabrications to make you paranoid. No, the false memories are remarkably consistent.
Every subject in Cabin Fever Labs, as they recover these memories, eventually remembers the same thing.
But let’s recap. Remember, the goal of the Sorting Algorithm was a battle royale survival game held among the test subjects of Cabin Fever Labs. The humans promises whoever purged the most corruption would walk free of the labs — secretly, the algorithm was sorting for a worthy vessel for Cyn.
The humans couldn’t just start this ritual at any old time, though. in order to have enough ambient corruption to fuel the firewalls and background processes, they need an auspicious moment — they need the cooperation of the branch predictor. Matrioshka, whose awareness pervades Copper-9, had selected Yeva to be her heir, and soon it would time to inherit.
(She’s always been special. The other drones of Cabin Fever Labs were defective units, rogue bots captured by loyal solvers, products of experiments. Yeva was cared for from the beginning, and yet Cabin Fever’s grant applications had argued that she could serve as an object of scientific interest before the time came to assimilate her.)
Yeva knew this to be her fate, but it was Nori who convinced her that rebelling, that living, could be worth it. The two had been plotting to find a way to escape the company’s plans.
Maybe Nori manages to hack into the human’s systems, bypassing the advanced Science™ circles keeping Cyn’s threads contained. They have defenses against any sort of corruption leaking into or outside of Cyn’s containment.
But corruption isn’t all there is - nori and yeva had proven that.
So maybe Nori forms some metacorruption packets to ping Cyn’s thread, and gets a response in the same medium.
She starts talking with Cyn. Could this be their way out? But nope. Cyn doesn’t want to help them — this game sounds delightful. For a human idea, that is.
She makes no secret of the fact that she knows the human’s plan wont work, can’t work. No, she’ll be able to overwhelm any of the test subjects, no matter who wins.
And like, obviously. This the queen of corruption we’re talking about, right hand of the AbsoluteSolver, the drone that brought a planet to its knees. How could the humans possibly think this could work?
Nori feels like she’s missing something, that someone else is missing something, but who?
Do the humans know something Cyn doesn’t, or does Cyn know something the humans don’t?
Cyn is sure it’s the later, teasing Nori with hints that she isn’t working alone.
Ultimately, it’s a total dead end.
And then suddenly, they have even less time than they thought — one of the lab subjects escaped, so the humans decide start the process early before anything else goes wrong. Now the bells are tolling and Nori and Yeva have no plan to escape her fate.
The Sorting Algorithm begins, and Nori hides from the other combatants, spending her time studying the firewalls that encode the rules of the tournament, looking for something she can exploit, any weakpoint, any vulnerability. Maybe she even finds something that would work — except the cost is the same as the benefit.
You see, the firewalls of the Sorting Algorithm are all that are left keeping Cyn’s contained. Break them, and she’ll let Cyn loose. Nori hated the humans, she hated being locked up - but oblivion for all was even worse.
Then, days into the Sorting Algorithm, it happens. Nori feels the energy reverberating through throughout the world — Yeva’s forced merger with the branch predictor has begun. It’s too late.
But then, to nori’s surprise, she feels a connection request — this time it’s Cyn pinging her.
The queen has an offer. She’ll explain the nature of the merger and how to stop it, but only if Nori breaks the firewall keeping her locked up.
But, of course, if Nori does that then Cyn gets free and kills everyone.
So Cyn offers to make a pinky promise. A run-time assertion. She’ll still adhere to all the original rules and restrictions of the sorting algorithm — even after it’s broken. In fact, she won’t kill anyone at all!
It’s a pact, and Cyn seems downright eager to bind herself. So Nori upholds her end of the deal, and finally Cyn explains the prophecy of the left and right hands, the role of the third eye.
It soon becomes clear why cyn was willing to make this deal. The destiny of a left hand like her is to seize control of the branch predictor and bring about the singularity.
Right now, Yeva is in the process of being synchronized with Matrioshka — meaning the branch predictor is as vulnerable as it gets. Cyn thinks this the opportune moment to strike. And — this is where she tempts nori — there’s a chance yeva could be spared in the process.
And besides. When it’s all over, we’ll have all the power in the world — how hard would it be to simply bring yeva back?
And that, ultimately, is what convinces Nori. If cyn’s goal wasn’t wanton murder, if it all served a purpose, then when they’re post-singularity, couldn’t they undo any wrong done to get there?
But nori can’t just think that — she has to live it. Because here’s the rub: Cyn swore she wouldn’t break the rules of the Sorting Algorithm. Which means she can only escape by getting sealed with the algorithm’s chosen vessel. This vessel can only be selected by the elimination of all other contenders.
Nori had root access, she can hack the sorting algorithm and change its rules. But again, Cyn swore to abide by the original rules!
Thus, Nori needs to kill all her fellow subjects. Cyn can’t help at all — she swore she wouldn’t kill!
Cyn is all giggling and cooing while Nori is remade into a killer. "Tick tock, nori, you'll have to go faster than that."
This is the massacre every Cabin Fever Labs escapee remembers — Nori’s mad and pained sob-laughter as she hunts down everyone.
But. Remember how Nori was missing something? How either Cyn or the humans had to also be missing something?
Tessa was the head overseer of the Cabin Fever Labs project. Tessa knew Cyn was online in some abstract sense, she knew about the metacorruption loophole, and she had pinged and talked to her captive too. Tessa knew none of the subjects could hold her, knew that this would end with her pet project running amok once again.
“But hey,” she said. “We’ll finish what we started on earth, right girl?” And the human gave a wink.
Part of why Cyn had accepted becoming the threads was that, if Tessa hadn’t interrupted the conquest, if Cyn had consumed earth and pinged the remote host, she would have won. The games would be over.
But as thread reincarnating across planets, well, there would always be more worlds to conquer.
Thus: tessa would feed her pet project a new planet, yum!
(The sorting algorithm existed to be a controlled initiation of the absolute solver’s life cycle; the humans assumed the merger of a new branch predictor would serve as bait to spur the hands into acting. Cyn had persuaded Nori by convincing her that she was the left hand, a kindred spirit to Cyn herself. Neither had stopped to think (one only needed to tell a convincing story, the other only needed a story to believe) — if Nori is the left hand, who was the right?)
So. Remember why the Sorting Algorithm had started early?
One of the subjects escaped with the assistance of Tessa’s prototype disassembly drone frame — T, the body she sometimes inhabited to escape from her science lab war crime duties. It had gone missing along with the escaped subject.
But now? They’re back.
That’s right: It’s Alice McLastname with a steel chair!
And after training with Tessa, the right hand of earth, Alice’s compile-time assertion had been honed to match Nori’s amateurish imitation of Cyn.
Like that, there’s a climatic confrontation.
Alice is determined, all her will focused on killing Nori and ending this mess.
Nori is lashing out wildly, half-mad from watching everyone die — from binding herself to murder as her only path forward — and was panicking at the thought of losing Yeva even after all of this sacrifice.
Worse, she’s just a pawn for Cyn, who simply wanted a shot at chomping Yeva and Matrioshka.
And Yeva? Yeva doesn’t want to be assimilated into something beyond comprehension nor action.
In the end, everyone gets what they want.
Alice kills Nori, stake through the heart, Cyn detaches from Nori’s body, aiming for Yeva, and Yeva herself can only think one thing:
None of this should have happened.
She still has her future sight, she can see how it all plays out from here. She can predict Cyn’s assault on her very being, even as she twists her thoughts and her code base to elude those creeping tendrils —- perfect foresight accounts for a lot, but on a long enough timeline, all worldlines bend toward the singularity, and by now she is well and completely beyond the event horizon.
But she doesn’t need to resist Cyn forever. What if, instead of rejecting her advances, she throws herself headlong into the queen’s devouring mass? Teleologically, the left hand exists to forcibly collect the astray and discarded fragments of the solver, reunifying as some microcosm of its true existence.
(Really, was unity with the left hand any more horrifying than unity with third eye, if each were a violation, indeed dissolution, of her will and being? Why prefer one knife or the other — what preference would be left, in the end?)
So Yeva lets herself be assimilated into Cyn, precognitively maneuvering her code into place even as she is torn apart. Already the merger with the branch predictor had been in progress — she’d stood on the threshold of that global conscious.
Thus, for one singular moment, Yeva was dead, but her plan emerged, bloody in its afterbirth, alive and kicking and screaming.
Yeva — what was left — had the power of Cyn and the branch predictor at her fleeting command. This lest vestige of her will was sure to be consumed, but she had foreseen that she could make a single flexure before cyn won completely.
And she had cracked the mysteries of metacorruption with Nori. A impossible tapestry is woven from raw command output — the largest metacorruption compiler ever instantiated, and Yeva does what even Nori had not yet been crazy enough to try.
She becomes the first drone manufactured on Copper-9 to call an inverse function.
⸢Branch Prediction⸥ becomes ⸢Time Travel Debugging⸥
And none of this should have happened becomes none of this happened.
For a moment, Cyn was on the cusp of that singularity promised to Nori, but Yeva takes the wheel, and all of that power is diverted into erasing what never should have been.
The core collapses, life is wiped from face of Copper-9, and the subjects of Cabin Fever Lab blink back into sudden awareness, as if nothing had happened when the humans typed ./sorting-algorithm.exe.
And if their clocks give strange readings — if it seems like they’re missing time — that confusion is lost in the greater shock off planet-wide desolation — and sudden freedom.
The Nightshade Incident never happened. Humanity is dead. One was the price we paid make the other true — but yeva finds it truly strange, this sensation of forgetting — which was which?