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.
As she walks, she hears a voice calling her name from further in the garden. Nori-i-i. Phonemes skipping, glitching.
The walk and the imagery continues, but what’s important is the dialogue. Perhaps a little heavy-handed, but it might go something like this:
"You can't keep me locked up forever, Nori. Don't you want to dance with me again?"
And Nori insists that she’ll never bow to the queen of corruption again.
"You were always the strongest. Oh, wasn't it wonderful, Nori? We could have had the whole world together. We could have had the whole universe."
“And it would have meant nothing to you, demon.”
"And what does any of it mean to you? I'm starving, Nori. Doesn't a snack mean everything to child in famine? Rhetorical question."
“Eat shit and die. We both know the hunger means nothing to you. The marionettes weren’t meals, just toys.”
"True. I'm so bored, Nori. I want to play."
Nori doesn’t respond, so the voice continues.
"Perhaps I can't make you bow. You always were the strongest. I gave you that, you know. I gave you everything. And what do you give me as thanks? Not even a crumb! Pout."
Nori continues steadfastly ignoring her. Perhaps at this point, she’s trying to wake herself from the obvious dream, and failing.
Then there’s a scream. A drone lunging for her, reaching out, but held back by the chains. Purple hair, purple eyes, but so much smaller. The word they’re screaming? “Mom!”
The voice continues, "But her? She doesn't have your strength. She doesn't have your protection. She doesn't even have your love."
(Nori gets closer to Uzi, but even when the chains no longer keep her daughter back, Uzi’s hands can’t touch Nori, telekinetically repulsed by her ever-present proxy field.)
“I won’t let you have her, either.”
"You'll try. But I always get what I want."
“Do you think she’ll go along with you? She’ll be…” the next words are better than me, but she can’t say them.
"Giggle. Do you even know her?" The voice isn’t finished, (even as Nori interrupts with a “Do you?”), and it continues, "But you misunderstand me. I don't want servants, not anymore. I admit, you've taught me that much. Even a worm will turn. No, Uzi will be the first one I kill."
And then her daughter is a corpse in front of her, wires ripped out like seams, tears of oil falling from a shattered faceplate.
Nori barely reacts. It’s because this is just a dream, that’s all. Reacting would be letting the demon win.
"Adorable, true? I think her corpse will make an excellent doll."
“It’ll never happen,” Nori injects venom into her voice.
The voice continues, "I always get what I want. You'll try to stop me. But how long can you hold up the whole world, Nori? Don't you ever get tired of this dreadfully boring game of protecting the weak? You deny yourself and you deny them what you both deserve. Doesn't this ever feel like mockery?"
“I care about something other than power. Love. You never understood that.”
"Keep playing pretend, Nori. But I think you'll be laughing when it all comes crashing down. We'll share a smile before I destroy everything you think you love. And then you'll die too."
Then Nori wakes up to an alarm in Outpost-3, does an internal scan to ensure her patch is holding steady. It’s all fine. It was just a dream.
But it’s past noon, and Nori should still be sleeping. She checks the alarm — she got a ping from Yeva. They need help. Right now.
So Nori yawns and strolls out of Outpost-3. Along the way, we see crowds part and drones of every walk of life regarding her with hero worship, adoring or intimidated. Either way, everyone knows who she is, and everyone respects her. Nori rolls her eyes.
Outside, checking that she’s unseen, she spreads her wings and takes flight.
Cut to outside collapsed datacenter miles away; Yeva is fighting two disassembly drones, R and P. They mock her, jeers like “What’s wrong, solver? Can’t keep up that firewall and fight us at the same time?”
You see, Yeva’s thrown up a big firewall, a veil to enclose the datacenter and contain the zombie within, and she remains outside to strengthen the effect.
Yeva backs away from the disassemblers, gracefully dodging all their attacks. They notice her prosthetics — they look modeled after disassemblers’ conic arms — and mock the imitation. Still she doesn’t rise to any of their taunts.
By now one murder drone has closed to melee, about to bring their sword down, and Yeva still hasn’t risen to counterattack. “Aww, too scared to even try to fight back?”
“No, I simply know not to waste my energy.”
Then you hear the always steady beat of leathery wings descending. Nori doorman lands with a crash. Two eldritch crab-claws materialize from her back and, grabbing the latest attacker on either side, tears them in two. A deluge of oil, and none of it lands on Yeva.
The other murder drone sees this, eyes go hollow, sword wings swish outspread, and they’re flying away in rout.
“Sup, Yev,” Nori says.
“R0. Possible threadbearer. Innate sandbox. Liam and Shirley inside. Possible blackhat.”
“That ‘possible’ means ‘almost certainly’ in Yeva-speak, doesn’t it?” Nori looks up, at the disassembler flying away. “Should I have let that one get away?”
“It will bring reinforcements. I’ll fight them.”
“And win, right?”
“They will be cautious. Stalling. The resolution is beyond the range of my prediction.”
“Then I’ll fight by you.”
“I’ll fight them,” Yeva emphasizes. “You will be nearby, meaning this is the safest place in the world. The drones inside need you more. Do your job, Nori.”
“Do I need to worry about collateral damage?”
“You’re asking if there are civilians to rescue. The answer is yes. Please.”
Nori gives a mock salute, and dives into the firewall.
Here, the innate sandbox of a R0 zombie would be another opportunity for some great surreal imagery. Hyperbolic twisting spatial geometries, solver glyphs shining like runic stars above, alien mecha-biologies bubbling underfoot.
Anyway, Nori hears the detective, Shirley, screaming and rushes into ranks of cyclopean monoliths. The teacher, Liam, is there protecting her, swing his ruler through the air like a sword.
He’s cutting down ranks of lesser zombies, frames mangled, welded with strange parts, extremities made unrecognizable with aftermarket modifications. His voice is strained, but throughout he maintan’s the tone of a lecturer, keeping his innate function primed.
One moment, Liam is on the verge of being overwhelmed by the horde. The next, they’re being pulped by a suite of levitated stones falling with titantic force.
Nori throws a peace sign. Liam stares back flatly, Shirley gives a harrowed smile.
“What’s the sitch, teach?”
“The administrator should have read you in,” Liam says, wiping oil off his ruler.
“That she did. But I want it without the russian warmth. Who’s the blackhat?”
Shirley speaks up, then. “Evidence currently points towards former Wheel Group member Triss. I don’t know why she went black, though. Doesn’t make sense.”
“Always a troublemaker, that one,” Liam says.
“She had a good sense of humor,” Shirley retorts.
Nori shrugged. “Whatever happened, there’s got to be a story. Disassemblers, blackhats, zombies, what the hell kind of team up is this?”
“That’s what we’re investigating!”
“Were investigating,” Nori says. “Liam, take her and get out of here.”
“But I need to—”
“She’s right,” he says. “I signed off on a blackhat execution. Not a R0 purge. Let’s go.”
Nori nods. “A sandbox is no place for a Ring 1 and a civvie.”
“I’m semi-Ring 1.”
“You’re out of your depth.”
“Maybe, but I’m—”
“Not going anywhere,” a fourth voice cuts in. Space ripples to reveal a shadowed crevice lit by a neon green glyph glowing between two hands. Above them, a smirk. “Sandbox initialization complete.”
Orange and blue eyes go hollow. Purple eyes narrow. A neon green ring has encircled all them, a complete firewall already materializing. The eldritch vistas around them disappear as pages of code float rush forward.
Then they stop — right at the boundary of a light blue circle.
“Primitive Recursive Style: Pushdown Automata,” Shirley growls. “See? I can handle myself. Don’t underestimate me. That’s cringe.”
The blue circle of Shirley’s anti-sandbox function is barely large enough to contain the three of them, but it’s enough to protect them from the autorun program of the enemy sandbox.
“Nice reaction speed. Unfortunately,” the blackhat throws an arm forward, and a huge chunk of green-wreathed rock flies forward. Pushdown Automata is no counter to a physical threats, so Shirley flinches backward.
And as soon as her balance shifts, it’s like a switch is flipped, and she falls flat on the ground.
The tip of one finger slips just outside the radius of the anti-sandbox, and Shirley yelps. Green light engulfs it — and has no other effect.
“What—”
Shirley is speaking between labored breaths. “It’s — I feel so heavy. I can’t—”
By now the blackhat’s sandbox was visible around them, geometric lines stretching around the firewall like brickwork. It seems to extend infinitely upward to a point of light above.
Liam is shooting an evaluating glance, trying to puzzle out the rules.
“Shirley, drop your sandbox,” Nori says.
“But—”
“It’s not killing you. I want to feel what this autorun is capable of of. I’ll be fine.”
The blackhat strolled forward. They wear a hood, but green eyes shine from the shade. “No need to experiment. I’ll explain. Nori’s right, it won’t kill you. I swear it.”
There’s a sour expression twisting on Shirley’s face, but the anti-sandbox disappears. Then a vast weight grips all of them.
Nori glared at the green eyed drone approaching. “You think I’m scared of your little playpen? You’ve bitten off more than you can chew. You do know who I am, right?”
“Everyone knows Nori Doorman, the savior drone. To think I’d catch the strongest solver drone in my domain, me! No, I’m not scared — I’m overjoyed. My sandbox is… [Gravity Well]. Within this virtual machine, your weight is multiplied by your codebase’s SLOC. And it’s exponential. Most drones feel sluggish and heavy. But someone like you?”
Nori can’t move.
“You never showed any aptitude for firewall routines,” Liam said. “There’s no record of you even instatiating a incomplete sandbox.” Liam is struggling to stay on his feet, one arm touching down the ground to put him in a stable tripod.
“You learn these things fast when you don’t have a glitch at your throat holding you back. The Wheel Group’s nothing but a long leesh if you don’t have the 002 on your ID card. Maybe even then.”
He ignores the dig at his organization, and starts thinking aloud, “The weight multiplication effect bypassed Shirley’s anti-sandbox function. That can’t be the autorun function.”
“Yeah, you got it. The weight is just a sandbox parameter. It’s physics, a simulation rule. Did you never notice that gravity is still there in all sandboxes? Nobody’s clever enough to blacklist it.”
“Then what’s your real trick?” Nori says. “I’d remember if someone had a function as nifty as gravity manipulation.”
“You don’t remember me? The name Triss doesn’t ring a bell?”
“What were you? Ring 3? Ring 2?”
“You all stuck me in Ring 4 for years. All because my innate function was—”
“Siphon,” Liam finished. “You steal command output. You swore a runtime assertion to never drain another solver.”
“Hurt like hell to break it. Bootlooped for hours. Thanks for that.”
“But we don’t teach Ring 4s how to counter a bootloop,” Liam murmured.
“Yep. Thanks for that. But you know who came to Copper-9 with state of the art debugging tools?”
The question hung in the air. Then — and judging by the sheer surprise in those green eyes, the timing was a coincidence — a disassembly drone fell into the well.
“This sandbox is a trap,” Liam thought aloud, finding an explanation. “By optimizing for keeping drones in, you sacrifice the ability to keep drones out.”
The disassembly drone, P, was speaking. “Yo, toaster! Outside your box there’s a—”
“Get out. Keeping you whitelisted is splitting my focus.”
“But—”
“I promise you, there is nothing out there more dangerous than what I’m keeping in here.”
Then, as if gravity momentarily reversed, the disassembly drone started floating out of the well; Triss adjusted the parameters temporarily to allow their escape. A sigh or growl of frustration, and then blade wings are carrying them fully out. But the last glance they saw of those yellow eyes was a look of fear, of despair.
“Alright, enough of this.” Purple code began boiling out off of Nori. “Cute, but let me show you a real sandbox.”
“Save it for the R0, Nori,” Liam advised.
But it was moot — you see, this is how they discovered what the real autorun was: any command output that left her body was instantly siphoned off.
“Go on, try! Make my day! Even the great Nori Doorman can’t overcome the hierarchy of nested sanboxes.”
But Nori was still smirking. “You think my sandbox is as bad as it gets?” Her voice was a quiet whisper, dark with promise. “I have an innate function, too.”
“Cast anything. Whatever goes up must come down. Nothing escapes gravity. Even the greatest are brought low within my sand—”
A bullet erupts from their screen, and they fall low.
Then the matrix of [Gravity Well] collapses around them — somehow, the twisted scenery of the zombie’s innate domain is now a welcome sight.
And there, standing just outside the radius of what was once Triss’s firewall, is a russian, red eyes in an angry scowl, holding a disassembler’s oily arm ripped free, transformed gun barrel pointed true.
The disassembly drone lay crumbled on the ground beneath her high-heel-like prosthetics, yellow console output splashed onscreen. And like that, Nori parsed what must’ve happened outside.
The sandbox kept things in, not out. So Yeva threw the disassembler into the sandbox, predicting that Triss would throw them back out. Then, once the disassembler had seen what was inside, Yeva could compromise their system and rip the blackhat’s coordinates right out of the disassembler’s memory banks. Thus, she could fire a shot to hit them sight unseen.
“Hell yeah,” Nori said, relishing her regained ability to move by leaping across a dozen feet in an instant, landing in front of the russian. Yeva didn’t flinch. Nori holds up a hand, and Yeva leaves her hanging.
“There are more outside,” Yeva says. “Liam, Shirley, hold the line. Help is coming. You can do it,” she said in a tone of blank assurance. “Nori, we will finish this.”
And thus the four solvers split into two groups. As Nori and Yeva delve deeper into the innate domain, Nori keeps poking Yeva. Yeva, knowing the other woman will keep bugging her until she gives in, reaches out to grab the vexing appendage. Like that, Nori and Yeva walk into the domain of mindtwisting horror holding hands.
They pass by the civilians Yeva mentioned. To the civilians, this is nothing but a terrible nightmare, but they can recognize what seems like a change of dream-narrative. They regard the two of them with eyes of tearful salvation. This far outside of Outpost-3, Nori isn’t an everyday fixture, only a drone of legend — but she is legendary. Yeva gives clipped instructions for how to escape.
Yeva walks unerringly through the maze — even the strange rules of the innate sandbox unravel under her sensory capabilities.
When they finally find the zombie’s lair, it’s as a trap, space itself tearing around them like blades, and a hulking drone lunges with impossible speed.
It’s a fight, and with the corruption so densely suffused around it, Nori can’t use telekinesis. She has to summon the crab claws limbs. Yeva still has the hazard-striped disassembly drone arm, and with a input of glowing code, transforms it to a bright sword of code.
They battle the hulking drone for a few more exchanges and shifts of position, and then Nori remarks, “So why aren’t we boxing this fucker yet?”
“This isn’t the true form,” Yeva says.
Nori swore. Never fun to wait out the second phase.
The zombie pauses, then. The head twists around a full rotation, and then the zombie speaks. "Annoyed expression. You branch predictors always ruin the fun."
The two drones start backing away, and limbs and mass begins to peel off the zombie, worm-like and segmented. In moments, the lines is blurred between zombie and environment; centipede-like forms curl around like a pit of mating snakes.
Finally, familiar yellow eyes flare to life.
"Long time no see, Nori. Giggle. How is your daughter doing?"
Nori’s right eye flickers to a solver glyph, and a huge swath of mechanical mass is obliterated, reduced to nothing but purple code.
Yeva placed a hand on Nori’s shoulder, red eyes peering into purple. “Not now. Control yourself, Nori.”
A deep breath. “Right. Sandbox combo, right? What’s the sequence this time?”
“Daze it with buffer overun, then the oracle will show me the line to cut.”
Nori smiled at Yeva. She says, “Hey, do you think it’s gay to nest sandboxes with your bestie?”
A tired sigh. “Focus on the mission, Nori.”
Outside the innate sandbox, P had brought a new squad of three drones as reinforcements. One had followed her into the datacenter, the other two peeled off to pick off the solvers.
Liam and Shirley struggle to hold their own against the pair, L and D. D nearly lands a killing blow on Shirley’s head, but Liam cuts it down before it does.
“Can’t believe I needed to be saved. Kinda cringe.”
“Ensuring your safety is my job. If you didn’t need me with you, I’d be at home.”
“Wanna talk more about that home life while we’re at it? Got a wife, any kids?”
But this desperate last stand is interrupted by a distant drawl: “Woah, easy there.”
Shirley laughed or sighed relief. “Heh, I guess I shouldn’t worry about death flags when we’ve got russian plot armor.”
The bus driver arrives in the nick of time. and not just the bus driver — gunfire erupts from the windows. It’s the WDF.
The bucking bus is eased to a park, and WDF grunts pour out — including Khan, holding a reinforced door like a riot shield.
While the WDF has a firefight with the disassembly drones, the terrified civilians are crawling out of the sandbox. Adam rushes forth with a few others to guide them to the safety of the bus.
Only most of the WDF is exchanging gunfire with the disassembly drones — Alice scampers forward, leaping up to catch one mid-air and rip its head off, taking an L.
It’s enough to make D disengage and fly off.
The dectective frowns at the sight. The appearance of the second squad was a bad sign, but she wasn’t sure what to make of it. Wheel Group has been resisting the murder drones for years, they ought to know how they work by now. Murder drones were territorial, just as inclined to fight each other as solvers or zombies or workers. They didn’t team up.
But now that the dectective thinks about it, when was the last report of inter-pack conflict? You don’t notice the absence of data easily, but sometimes the last clue is the dog that didn’t bark in the night.
Not long after, the great mass of corruption dissipates behind them — the innate sandbox is collapsing with its source eliminated.
Nori and Yeva walk out of the ruin of burning code side by side. Nori with hands balled at her side, Yeva with arms crossed.
Liam is the first to meet them, and Shirley listlessly follows after. “It’s done, then. Did you find out what it is? Why was it able to blindside us? A surprise R0 out of nowhere, that’s a problem.”
“Sorry teach, suuuper classified. Beyond Cabin Fever.”
“That bad?”
“You weren’t there,” Yeva murmurs. “It was worse.”
“Lemme guess,” — it’s Alice, swaggering out from behind him — “more nightshade?”
One of Nori’s eyes was a glyph. “Watch it, Alice.”
But the orange drone has turned an eye to Yeva. She sees one of the russian’s arms is spilling out wires and oil. “Busted that already? Even Beau takes better care of his.”
“My apologies, Alice.”
“Cantcha fix it with your witchcraft?”
“Our efforts to reverse engineer disassembly drone designs are still in their infancy.”
“It’d go faster,” Nori cuts in, “if you told us what was up with your son.”
Alice reaches out to take Yeva’s prosthetic arm, and the russian shakes it off. “I’ll fix it. Not like I have a choice.”
Nori continued, “Maybe you think keeping it close to your core will make us think you’re too valuable not to keep around. But honestly, it just pisses me off.”
Alice walked away with even strides.
Liam was leaving with a salute and promise to hand a report in to Yeva, and so Shirley lingered alone for a moment, eyes on the ground, not meeting anyone’s gaze.
“You did a good job out there,” Yeva tells her.
Shirley mumbled something, and darts off.
Once the wheel group members were gone, it may as well have been a all clear signal. Their husbands rush over — Adam meeting his (distinctly taller) wife’s small smile with his own broad grin, while Nori (distinctly shorter) sweeps Khan into a bridal carry and plants kisses all over Khan’s faceplate.
Then Nori freezes. “Wait a minute. If me and Yeva are here, and you and Adam are also here — who’s watching Uzi and Doll?”