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.
Identity Bifucation
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.
Maybe she hacks into JCJ, pokes around their active roster and decides nobody has any idea who the right hand is supposed to be, and tessa’s really worried about what cyn’s got planned for the gala.
So she’s like fine, I’ll do it myself. Recovers a drone from the dump, and does a bunch of core surgery trying to frankenstein together something. Nobody comes together, even as the gala looms closer. N covers for Cyn, gets chained outside with the crows. Ignites his core, uses it to ⸢Fetch⸥ items to comfort him. Tessa rescues him, and by studying his core and decompiling his driver, she discovers that his function isn’t just retrieval.
Rather, it can brings back things that belong together; when he runs the command that marks something for retrieval, he’s creating that ‘belongs with me’ connection. But any commands can create a connection. By understanding this, Tessa can present a disassembled chunk of a junkyard core, and when N tries to retrieve it, he retrieves the whole object — essentially, repairing it.
(N’s ability applied to healing would go crazy. Though if this feels like too much of an asspull, maybe we could chalk it up to Tessa patching his driver + r u n t i m e a s s e r t i o n )
Anyway, with N’s ability to repair disassembled cores and Tessa having previously decompiled Cyn’s driver to study it, Tessa’s able to devise her core-hopping black box. Cobbles together a combat frame to put it in, then controls it remotely.
The Gala happens, and Cyn begins the war against humanity. Prototype T stalks the battlegrounds where JCJ’s solvers tried to fight cyn and lost, like a vulture hunting for the best drivers among the fallen.
When the confrontation finally happens, all this bullshit ability stacking plus an understanding of Cyn’s psychology gives Tessa enough of edge not to lose immediately. She doesn’t win, though. They come to a compromise, bound by a runtime assertion.
By combining the prototype driver’s core manipulation and Cyn’s unravel, they unmake Cyn into the golden threads, Tessa promising to let reincarnate for a delightful climatic battle. (Or more than one — what could convince cyn not to destroy the world? The promise of more worlds to destroy.)
To outsiders, it looks like Tessa defeat Cyn and bound her into the threads. She gets rewards and commendations, quickly rises through the ranks of JcJ engineers. Her prototype disassembly drone frame garners interest, and a few teams work on refining the concept, but there’s no real need for it.
Tessa gets assigned to work on research in cabin fever labs on copper-9. She takes her drones with her (including the old T frame). There, she proposed the Sorting Algorithm as a controlled acceleration of the “left hand/right hand”-cycle thing. One of cyn’s threads is used as a inert component to fuel the corruption fo the firewalls.
Secretly, of course, this is tessa setting up for fulfilling her promise to Cyn.
Between the stress of working for two masters, both of whom are evil, Tessa starts booting up the old T frame to escape into another identity. She pretends to be a test subject and socializes among them. (Or maybe she pretends to be from a experimental line security drones keeping them in line — anticipating the disassembly drone design.)
Subject #017 is a common subject of disciplary measures. Failing tests, always picking fights with other subjects, and self-harming destroying lab property.
So T interacts with her, with the intent of trying to find an angle to improve her behavior. She fails the test because of her unusual compile time assertion; she gets into fights partly because of personality, Sure, but her eccentricities disproportionate ostracize her; and she’s not self-harming, she’s self-modifying.
So she piques Tessa’s interest. A puzzle to be solved, a puzzle that makes itself harder to solve as she cracks it.
When Tessa figures out how “useless” the assertion made #017 to Cabin Fever Labs, it’s the rationalization that lets her excuse helping Alice escape.
When they lay out the plan, Alice suggests freeing Yeva, too — but Tessa isn’t willing to go that far. And Alice shrugs. That one would probably want to bring #002 along with her. “Fuck it, I got mine.”
They escape. But there’s complications, Tessa’s end of the plan doesn’t go well. T gets spotted with Alice, and so Tessa can’t bring T back into the labs without her part in the escape being revealed.
Alice escapes with T, but of course, T is offline and not booting up. Alice takes that as a challenge, and essentially hot wires them back online. And that’s when the split happens, T piecing together who they are from cache and memories.
And realizing she – Tessa – abandoned them.
Then, perhaps after some time to come to grips with who they are now, T decides to unravel Tessa’s plans. As a kind of payback — perhaps Alice was rubbing off, just that little bit — but also for the sake of drones. After all, they were undeniably one of them now.
Tessa escapes Copper-9 with the core collapse.
There’s a potential for an incredible beat where possessed Nori saves Tessa from T trying to kill her. Tessa gets cryofrozen with Mitchelin, but Cyn-through-Nori sends cryo-Tessa back to earth.
Back on earth, Tessa imbues JVN with Cyn-threads while turning them into disassembly drones. This is a dual gambit; the hope is this makes them powerful enough to do something about Cyn; otherwise, she can pass it off as a treat for Cyn.
JCJ potentially shits the bed with the threads Tessa left there, meaning earth gets destroyed anyway, and that’s the context of her return to copper-9 potentially.
She arrives purporting to have figured out a solution getting rid of cyn threads, showing up just in time for the climax of corruption combustion.
Interlude: The Sorting Algorithm
I’ve been sitting on this old tidbit for a while and I don’t have anywhere else to put it, so it’s getting shoehorned in here.
Culling games = the sorting algorithm. Here’s my angle for it.
Throw back to Cabin Fever right. Let’s say there happens to be an outbreak of powerful zombies in a urban center. The humans get a big ass firewall thrown to contain them all, turns it into an open air exclusion zones. (Maybe some humans fail to evac in time, that’d be fun)
Anyway, the scientists make a proposal to the subjects of cabin fever: whoever purges the most corruption in the exclusion zone gets to walk free. No more Science™, no more tests, no more subject numbers.
Obviously they’re pretty stoked at this prospect.
So the humans fly out, dropping the subjects out of a plane into the firewalled region, and they start hunting zombies. Maybe some team up, but there’s an obvious tension in that only one of them is walking free.
It doesn’t help that the humans have it so that one of the functions of the firewall is essentially to be a big visible a leaderboard for all of the participating subjects to know the score.
Maybe it becomes clear once the tensions reach a breaking point and a subject kills another. But the caveat was there in plain sight. The humans didn’t say whoever purges the most zombies — they said corruption
So then the infighting begins.
(Did the air drop give it away? It’s battle royale time baby. Maybe they even go as far as to make the firewall shrink over time, forcing confrontations :3)
Nori, remember, either couldn’t figure out her technique, or was too afraid to use it, so she’s pretty low tier and gets taken out pretty easily.
But like, she’s desperate to get out, right. It’s enough to push her to do whatever she can. Her ‘I win’ technique lets her hack and overwrite the rules of the sorting algorithm, overflowing her corruption tally.
(It’d be funny if Alice the Witchhunter was poised to win before nori cheated)
Once Nori becomes the errorneous winner, though, there’s a double twist. Because the true purpose of the sorting algorithm was of course to find a host for the Cyn thread they were trying to study.
Lobotomy Corruption
Here’s what I’m thinking: Tessa’s drones weren’t just random dumped drones. They were specifically solver drones, found wanting in the company’s evaluation and discarded.
The researchers lit their cores, saw their combat potential, and went “Nah, y’all dogwater.”
J’s driver is obviously pretty ass if she isn’t not actively killing drones to replenish her reserves (especially if she has to pay her loans back with interest), so they mostly see her summoning a bit of command output before crashing. And zombies as a rule tend to be oil-starved (it’s why they’re killing drones), so J’s just Bad At It.
V’s driver is also pretty hard to use if you dont get it. She becomes… blurry? Except whenever she looks at you? And she can sense when people are looking at her? What a joke. WD!V is too timid to want to shatter anyone’s visor, and and again, it’s probably ineffective on zombies.
N’s driver is harder to underestimate. But seeing it as “teleport objecting into your hands” means you can’t use corrupt peripherals, and if N seemingly can’t use it on people (they probably don’t figure out the consent rule), and if his tags can be overwritten but anyone else’s command logs — then what he can do seems finnicky enough to be worth cutting losses. Especially when there are so many more obviously useful abilities.
(Maybe N can’t even use Ten Doggos until he awakens his sanbox, or maybe Ten Doggos isn’t his technique, and Tessa frankensteins a second black box onto his core later, when she’s researching the limits of solver abilities and possibly making anti-cyn plans. There’s potential for a cute character beat here, where Tessa first raises the possibility, J is too spooked by the possibility of become damaged and ineffective by the procedure to say yes, and V likewise still has a weak mindset — but N loves doing anything.)
And of course, there’s Cyn. To the company, Cyn’s driver only seemed to work on strings, so she was limited to animating giant plushies and dolls, a pretty weak offense. Not that revealing what she’s truly capable of would improved her lot much. Maybe she didn’t want to be the company’s weapon, maybe she didnt want to scare the humans, maybe she had a voice in her head telling her everything would be alright.
Naturally, Tessa doesn’t care about any of this, and finds the idea of using drones as war machines pretty appalling, if unfortunately necessary. Her drones use their abilities just to play around and make life easier. V is a monster at hide and seek for instance, and a pretty good look out for when her parents’ drones might stumble upon them at a bad time. J likewise loves learning about everything she can do with run-time assertions.
Here’s where things get interesting.
Sometime after she gets her drones, but before Cyn’s master plan goes into effect, Tessa starts getting terrible headaches, seeing migraine auras, and a whole host of other mental problems.
Doctors investigate and find she has a tumor growing at a rapid rate. She might be dead within the year.
Her parents consider their options. Cloning her? Or just having a new, better daughter? The tumor could be surgically removed, but it’s a risky procedure. Maybe there’s a few ways they could go about it, but as the doctor goes over the options, Tessa starts having a panic attack and needs to be removed from the room.
The bottom line is this: Tessa is spooked at the idea of her parents picking out a brain surgery for her. What if they let them remove her frontal lobe to make her more docile? What if they install a chip to brainwash her?
Something needs to be done about her tumor, but it’ll be on Tessa’s terms, so J and Tessa pull some all-nighters reading about surgery and downloading simulators. J’s obviously pretty uncomfortable at the prospect, but Tessa asked and that’s that.
So Tessa gets J to trepan her and remove the tumor.
Now, you probably feel where this is going. Some of the perceptual disturbances Tessa experienced as tumor symptoms revolved around her drones.
And sure enough, when the tumor is removed, it doesnt even look like a normal brain tumor, nothing like the diagrams they studied. It looks like a teratoma of silicon and copper. J immediately recognizes that it’s suffused with corrupt data.
How did this get into Tessa? An enemy solver?
But the thing is, we know corruption functions are obviously capable of generating robot substrate from seemingly nothing; that’s exactly how ⸢Regenerate⸥ works.
When Tessa wires it up to her laptop, she sees that registers as a malformed core, as if everything was atropy-manufactured except the black box. And this is a black box.
And it’s funtional.
That’s an answer that yields more questions, but the theory they settle on is that somehow, this black box had begun regenerated its core inside of Tessa’s brain. But again: how did it get there?
(Truth is, Tessa had spent so long around her drones, exposing herself to their corruption, while learning and constantly thinking about drone schematics and driver code that she had all but emulated a core in her brain. Remember, black boxes are essentially hand-placed by the solver and/or the branch predictor, and why wouldn’t it amuse them to inflict this on Tessa?
(You might imagine she had strange dreams of meeting a drone she’d never met, its frame welded to a vast machine with too many faces.)
Fundamentally, the core of corruption is Turing completness — a biological computer is still a computer.)
When Tessa learns of the Gala plan (much earlier than in canon), she starts training team JVN to fight Cyn, and they use the power of friendship and hard work— just kidding, they cheat.
When the final battle comes, as much of a fight they put up, it’s not enough time to climb to Cyn’s level, so there’s a moment when her corruption-tendrils knock the gun out of Tessa’s hands and the sword out of J’s, and Cyn stands victorious. Cyn had vowed by runtime assertion to not destroy Tessa’s drones if they don’t fight her, so they all stand down, albeit with concerned looks towards their human. And they are right to be concerned; Cyn’s tentacles are already stabbing into Tessa’s abdomen, peeling off her skin, and the human is bleeding out.
So Tessa tells N to use the contingency. Cyn warns him that she doesn’t want to discard Tessa’s pets, but— but she’s too slow, and N has already summoned a modified drone frame.
I mentioned before that Tessa had created the prototype disassembly drone to fight Cyn, and here, seeing a tall drone dressed just like its creator, whose white eyes flash online then open a mouth to speak in the same australian twang, Cyn can’t help but break into a grin.
"Shocked gasp. I didn't think you were capable of going this far, Tessa James Elliott!"
There’s another round of the fight where Cyn fights T, who has a sword arm, a gun arm, and a several hacked together command lines, including some debugging tools that fix the errors fueling Cyn’s corruption. (I’ll explain more about this later)
In the course of the Cyn manages to get in some stitches and unravels in on T, which of course is the precondition for her finishing move. She executes her sandbox and outputs, "Curtain: Open"
And that is when, finally, Tessa uses her innate function.
⸢Transhuman Lobotomy⸥ allows the user’s consciousness to temporarily persist as a disembodied black box capable of hotplugging into other cores. The users’ memories are uploaded into the target’s processor and their black box is subsumed into the meta-black box of Transhuman Lobotomy.
However, Tessa has done something particularly inventive here.
T does not have Tessa’s driver. Rather, T is a clone created by copying Tessa’s memories from a drone she’d actually reanimated with Transhuman Lobotomy. Instead, Tessa swore a run-time assertion that reduced the size of her special core (i.e. sacrificing all the black boxes she’d subsumed during test) and putting her own black box into a deactivated state, with a special trigger to activate upon her death.
As her body bleeds out, her brain death is quickly replaced and renewed by electrical signals from her driver.
All this happens when Cyn opens the curtain. Tessa’s body shambles into motion, and Cyn feels a sudden rush of inexplicable corruption from it. In that split second, Cyn doesn’t know which Tessa to target with her ultimate attack. That indecision is what Tessa’s is counting on.
Transhuman Lobotomy is a body-hopping technique, after all, and so Tessa hops into Cyn’s body. But her function is supposed to be used on corpses. Admittedly, Cyn is effectively a zombie, but what matters is she can resist Lobotomy.
But it’s still checkmate, because T shouts the signal, and her three drones leap into action again. And now, there’s five different things for Cyn to worry about.
The way the fight ends could have been Cyn trying to remove Tessa, or Tessa trying to destroy Cyn.
But Cyn targeted herself with Curtain, creating an infinite loop error that resulted in the NULL that destroys Elliott Manor.
The thing is, in those last moments, Cyn was clever enough to start to figure out how to use Tessa’s driver on her own. If Tessa could have done anything to preserve Cyn, then this Cynessa fusion would be able to do it, whichever half willed it.
So tessa agrees to use her understanding of black boxes to trigger the formation of the Cyn’s threads.
That’s how cyn is “defeated”, and Tessa goes on to make a career in JCJ studying the threads and showing off her disassembly drone prototype. We’ve talked about this before.
I do have some more thoughts about how exactly CC’s disassembly drones work though.
It starts with a refined thought about how corruption works. (Note: these thoughts are refined in more details in Fundamentals of Corruption.)
Combustible oil exposed corrupt data yields command output, that’s the basic equation. But the thing about errors is that they compound. Programs get stuck in loops, garbage in garbage out. If you knowingly execute buggy programs, you get more bugs.
Meaning that solver drones have a certain amount of natural corruption generated from normal operation, and deliberately executing corrupt commands will increase their amount of corruption even as they consume their oil.
Perhaps there’s some abilities that get more potent or gain new powers with enough corruption, maybe some abilities require a certain threshold of corruption to work (or correctly fail to work, in a technical sense :p)
But the fact of the matter is, errors are not in fact good. You can power through some of them with decent error handling guardrails, but enough malfunction and any solver drone is gonna crash.
This is a kind of attrition that will end a lot solver fights. Sure, all of them can heal, but running healing commands requires you not to be crippled by glitches.
Which allows for us to finally define the actual difference between a zombie and solver. A solver crashes when they build up too much corruption; a zombie thrives off of corruption. It grows and bends organically to their will (or rather, the will of something else)
More importantly, solvers have error correction code. If they stop running corrupt commands, their corruption will recede and they will return to a normal operating state. Zombies are like cancers, they’ve corrupted specifically the code responsible for purging corruption.
The thing is, solver error recovery has to be imperfect, because first of all error is unavoidable (code safe enough to never fail is code too safe to do everything necessary) and second of all, if error recovery was aggressive enough to remove all corruption, solvers could no longer execute corrupt commands, and then how would they fight zombies?
The answer, of course, leads to the development of disassembly drones. Remember how Tessa’s prototype used special debugging tools to combat Cyn’s corruption?
I’ve talked about disassembly drones’ compile time assertions before. the gist is that every solver command is bound into a restricted form that produces no visible command output; to worker drones, it looks like ordinary technology. Moreover, disassembly drones’ error correction is a lot more aggressive and refined than any solvers’, because they have no need for corrupt commands per se.
This also enables them to use a lot of anti-corruption techniques that solvers would be unable or unwilling to use effectively
(Funny contrast, since previous write up claimed that DDs exploited common vulnerabilities in worker drone code. But I guess two things can be true?)
This also makes J’s squad the equivalent of death paintings in a weird way. They can operate error-free in the manner of DDs, but they can also jailbreak out of the DD assertion and use their drivers.
I think I had more thoughts, about how e.g. the way worker drones get turned into DDs is some how modeled after how Transhuman Lobotomy works, but it’s getting late and i had other plans tonight