After the nightshade incident and the core collapse, after the evacuation of cabin fever and the formation of the wheel group, it was years of grinding survival. The weather had turned brutally cold, radiation got bad enough to skyrocket the base rate of corruption, which only worsened the real problem: Copper-9 was festering with zombie processes, and the Wheel Group barely had the training and organization competence to scrape out some sort of stability.
But they had , and they had Yeva, so they did manage it.
And then, of course, the disassembly drones arrived. It piled more tombs in the mausoleums, but disassemblers are Ring 1 threats; there were zombies more fearsome (few, admittedly, but still). Once the initial shock wore off, the disassembly drones faded into the noise of Wheel Group operations.
Notably, between the scarcity of resources, the insinct-programming innate to their models, and (some suspect) a consequence of how JCJenson specified the mission incentives meant that squads of disassembly drones would spend as much time competing and feuding with each other as hunting zombies and solvers.
Add a few more years to the fire, and then that, too, will change. Slowly, at first. The skirmishes grow rarer, the attacks more surgical. Then the first report of joint squad missions are filed, dismissed as error or baseless speculation, filed again, and finally taken seriously. Yeva deduces it first: the disassembly drones aren’t just cooperating, they’re coordinated. Almost as if mirroring the Wheel Group itself — for the Wheel Group is only as effective as it is because of the administration of Yeva herself.
So, in short? Someone, or something, had whipped the disassembly drones into a collective hierarchy. By the beginning of Corrupt Combustion’s plot (i.e. Nori’s Average Tuesday), the Wheel Group still doesn’t have much more than conjecture.
But let’s dispense with the mystery.
There’s some details i haven’t pinned down yet about the leader — i think I was torn between this mysterious leader being “SD-C” or instead breaking from the alphabetical scheme entirely, calling them SD-_ or something.
But this was more than just a leader — specifically, they were the one responsible for unlocking the full potential of the “disaster drones” — J, N, and V — jailbreaking the innate function normally disabled for murder drones.
Moreover, SD-C was J’s boss; she was picked specifically to be the successor. Because you see, during the present of Corrupt Combustion, SD-C isn’t around anymore. (Cryptic clue: the timing is exact; the Fearsome Rootkit incident is precisely the last time J receives any orders from SD-C.)
The opening arcs of CC, then, are J carrying out the plan of her boss. The Anonymous Group, the capture of #048, and of course, the thing I’m actually making this post to talk about.
Now, their plans would certainly have improved odds of success if they had more than three drones with access to their innate functions, but SD-C couldn’t easily replicate the feat of jailbreaking on other disassemblers. Eventually SD-C gave up and pursued other plans.
With her boss out of the picture, J was even less confident in the disassembly drones’ odds of success, so she’s desperate for any edge she can get. This is what leads to her experimenting with violating warranties and corrupting her fellow disassemblers. Her methodology involves splicing multiple cores together into amalgamates with access to glitched states.
This was a sidenote in the Uzi retcon: the first core splices are squad RIP, who were among the casualties to Yeva & Nori in fearsome rootkit. Spliced with workers, abortive results.
The second set of splices are squad HUG, coerced into volunteering at J’s insistence, and spliced with FML, who had died to a group of cadets in Alice’s warpath to the corpse spire. (This is a new plot point; I don’t think i’ve talked about before.)
(HUG actually has huge plot significance, and the fate of that core splice is a big reveal in the Nameless & the Dead arc, which incidentally will pay off the weird I’ve cryptically introduced.)
So, you might notice we’re slowly working through the timeline. The next poorly-performing squad that J strongly suggests should sign themselves up for her “optimizations” is squad SEA. But she’s a merciful manager, so she gives them one last mission to prove themselves before she’ll have no choice but to take matters into her own hands.
This mission is the retrieval of a solver the anon group is desperate to recruit: Sofi, the oil manipulation user.
They fuck up the mission, what did you expect? Sofi is considered a semi ring 1 blackhat by the Wheel Group, and TBH that’s lowballing it.
S gets captured, and E & A leave her for dead. Thus, E & A become core splices #8 & #9. I think the idea here was that J splices each with a solver user, but that raises the question of whether this means the splices have access to the solver victim’s innate function, or E & A’s actual (formerly suppressed) functions. Or both somehow. Whichever i go with, point is: these were the most successful of J’s core splices.
A, if memory serves, has something like that trojan power you suggested.
Last time I discussed this, I hadn’t yet figured E out, but a few months ago I had a possible idea.
Essentially, E’s driver could blueprint manipulation and repair. This means that, theoretically, E is capable of healing others to a degree no one else in the setting can match (blueprint damage tends to be a career ender), and she is even capable of upgrades. of course, she’s evil, so instead we get robot!Mahito.
(Though she would have some neat flavor: she pretends to be a healer, and it’s not even as if she doesn’t heal people. After all, you don’t reset back to your blueprint immediately, so if she sabotages it after she’s done healing, you won’t notice until later on, and you’ll have no choice but to come in for another checkup. This could be an excellent source of income for J’s operation, which I’m sure will please miss investment.)
But I’ve beaten around the bush long enough, haven’t I?
The next thing that happens in the timeline after (which ended with Sofi’s death to Cyn followed by S’s recruitment by teacher and Beau) would probably be some down time that shows S getting acquainted with life in Outpost-3, forming relationships with Beau and maybe even Uzi, gaining a bit of security and easing out of her anxious spirals.
But the next real plot point is the advancement placement exam, a tournament arc in which the cadets fight each other for the opportunity to be promoted to Ring 2. This would be a good place to show off some of the depth of the power system, but like all shounen tournament arcs, it get interrupted.
A couple of things happen (for once Uzi has actual plot relevance, sort of), but notably, N and V attack the exams. Doll gets yet another moment the spotlight keeping N occupied (with some cute interactions, of course).
But the real ramification of the attack is that it gives J opportunity to sneak in and kidnap S. She’s taken away just as (hopefully) the reader was getting invested in watching her grow and heal.
In the end, S doesn’t escape the same fate as the rest of her squad, though the reader might be left in suspense for a few arcs. I’m not sure, but I think the next time we hear from S would be in the event you’ve all been waiting for: the citadel incident.
You wouldn’t recognize her when she shows up; besides her appearance, adorned with so many more spikes and barbs, she behaves differently too. If anything, her arc of gaining confidence was completed off screen, except this new S is ruthless, unstable, driven by little other than hatred.
S has become core splice #10, J’s magnum opus after so many failed attempts. Like the rest of her squad, she was spliced with a solver core. whose core?
Sofi’s.
The Anonymous Group was desperate for her driver, after all.
S would be our window into the true horror of what being a core splice means. Because it isn’t S, really, it’s S and Sofi. Sofi hates the Wheel Group for killing her and her love; hates J and the Anonymous Group for doing this to her; but most of all, she hates S. Not because she’s to blame, but because she’s too useless to blame for anything.
But S does contribute one thing, besides a body: purpose. It had been so nice, living with the drones of outpost-3. So easy. While S relaxed and played with her new “friends”, those very same drones were killing her teammates. how many disassembly drones were dead because she was slacking — no, betraying them? She had failed them, failed her mission.
Maybe Beau had said something that stuck with her. Why does he try so hard to save drones? Why is he so reluctant to use violent force? We’re not so different, he says. When I see a drone in pain, sometimes I swear I feel that pain too. How could I stand to do nothing in the face of that? How could I stand to add to it?
Beau wants to be the next savior drone, the next Nori. He probably had to learn, at some point, that he needs to draw a line. He can’t save everyone, can’t apply mercy everywhere. So he draws the line with the tip of his transformed sword-arm; on one side, the innocent, on the other, the unrepentant monsters, the errors to purge, the problems the solve.
S’s brief stint as a Wheel Group ally, if anything, made the line sharper for him. If she could do it, they all could do it — but instead they choose to persist in the slaughter of hundreds.
But S has a different perspective. She knows what it’s like to be a disassembler, the mission that gives them purpose. She understands the pain of her teammates and her boss in the way Beau can’t. The agony of failure — how could she stand to add to that, fail them further?
If Beau will be the savior of workers, then S will be the savior of the disassemblers; they could be binary inversions of each other.
Or maybe her — their — perspective is simpler still. Sofi lived a hard life in the ice beyond the safety of any colony, and her last moments were at the tender ministrations of the queen of corruption. so much pain — how can she stand to let any of this go on? Every drone taken offline is a bit more cycle of pain that’ll never be computed. She’s just taken Beau’s ideals of mercy to the final conclusion.
Or maybe it’s not fatalism or antinatalism that motivates her, but hope. Triss told her what their true goals were: Subject #048 is the key to a world beyond corruption. What does Beau or the Wheel Group he serve have to offer that compares? The never-ending grind of the survival? A while loop of suffering?
Anyway Oil Manipulation goes crazy as a innate function. Not sure if I’d looking forward to writing the Beau–S showdown more than the Beau–V rematch — but it all depends on the Citadel Incident being more than notes in a margin. Hahaha.