Here’s what I’m thinking: Tessa’s little found family 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 frankly J is just Bad At It.
V’s driver is also pretty hard to use if you don’t understand 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 as it only “teleport objecting into your hands” leads you to conclude he 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 sandbox, or maybe Ten Doggos isn’t his technique, and Tessa frankenstein’s 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 have 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.
But 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 ⸢Std::Regenerate⸥ works.
When Tessa wires it up to her laptop, she sees that registers as a malformed core, as if everything had been 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 — and a biological computer is still a computer.)
While this is happening, Cyn starts ramping up for the destruction of earth, but 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, being the most reliable volunteer for Tessa’s experiments, had his core scooped out, his driver scanned and decompiled onto Tessa’s computer. Like this, she discovers that his function isn’t just retrieval.
Rather, its true function is bringing 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.
Anyway, with N’s ability to repair disassembled cores and Tessa having previously done partial scans of Cyn’s driver to study it, the tinker returns to her mechanical tumor extracted from her skull. If it was a black box, what was its function? Could she write a driver for it? She’s trying to cobble together a weapon for facing Cyn, but is met with failure after failure.
What if she could create something stronger than a worker? But she always hated how JCJ turned drones into weapons. She wouldn’t make a drone into her tool. But remotely piloting a frame has too much lag, she couldn’t even keep up with V in spars.
At the Gala, Cyn declares her war against humanity, and the Elliott manor becomes the throne from which she observes her coming conquest. Tessa stalks the battlegrounds where JCJ’s solvers try over and over to fight Cyn and continually lose — she becomes like a vulture, hunting for the best drivers among the fallen.
This doesn’t escape Cyn’s notice. Her old pet project gone rogue taunts her — are you so afraid to look at me, auntie? Are you going to tell me to go back in the basement? Tessa flees every overture — her weapon isn’t ready yet.
Maybe out of some lingering fondness, Tessa’s hideaway endure where so many of humanity’s strongholds falter. Drones and humans alike flock to her — she becomes a figure of hope in the apocalypse, and everyone is praying for her weapon’s fruition.
As the deathtoll climbs, maybe Cyn loses patience, maybe Tessa can’t bring herself to watch more die, but she has to make a move.
It’s time for all their training and preparation to pay off. Returning to the manor where they grew up, Tessa, J, V, and N are ready to use the power of friendship and hard work— just kidding, they’re here to cheat.
Cyn was the strongest, more virulent solver of earth. No amount of time could have caught any of them up to her level. So it’s disappointingly soon when her corruption-tendrils knock the gun out of Tessa’s hands and the sword out of J’s. Cyn finds herself immediately victorious.
And the lingering fondness is explicit — Cyn binds herself to runtime assertion that she would not destroy Tessa’s drones if they stand down and join her.
When Tessa tells them to stop fighting, they comply, 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—finally—Tessa tells N to use the contingency. Cyn warns him that she doesn’t want to discard Tessa’s pets, but if— yet 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 reveals 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 had experimentally reanimated with Transhuman Lobotomy. No, Tessa had sworn a run-time assertion whichs reduced the size of her special core (i.e. sacrificing all the black boxes she’d subsumed during testing) in order to place her own black box into a deactivated state—thus would it remain undetected to Cyn—but with a special dead man’s switch trap which activates it upon her death.
As her body bleeds out, her brief brain death is quickly overwritten and reinvigorated by electrical signals from her driver.
All this happens at the same time as Cyn initializing her sandbox. Tessa’s body shambles back 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. Cyn isn’t, so she can resist Lobotomy.
But it’s still checkmate, because T shouted a signal, and her three drones leap into action again. Now there’s five different things for Cyn to worry about.
The way this fight ends could have been Cyn trying to remove Tessa, or Tessa trying to destroy Cyn.
But instead Cyn’s driver targets herself, 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 have started to figure out how to operate Tessa’s driver herself, reversing the attempted hijacking. If Tessa could have done anything to preserve Cyn, then this Cynessa fusion would be able to do it, whichever half willed it.
But as this fusion takes place, knowledge is shared. Cyn was operating on instinct, but Tessa has the full context, the knowledge of what Cyn is. The left hand, a tool for the AbsoluteSovler to devour worlds. And where’s the fun in that? Cyn wouldn’t mind the total destruction of humanity, but what’s better than destroying the world? The promise of more worlds to destroy.
Tessa’s function let her reincarnate, and she’d certainly spent all the time in her bunker studying and exploiting its effects. Could she reincarnate Cyn?
"We should do this again sometime. Wink."
So in those moments, Tessa agreed to use her understanding of her function, of Cyn’s function, and of black boxes in general to trigger the formation of a peripheral device influences by both their drivers — this is the origin of Cyn’s threads.
To outsiders, it looks like Tessa defeat Cyn and bound her into the threads. She gets rewards and commendations — she is the savior of humanity — and 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 it’s not the foremost concern, now that the threat is gone.
Tessa decides to continue her research in Cabin Fever Labs on Copper-9. For their own sake, she opts not to take her drones with her (except the old T frame). Not to a planet the (might) be destroyed.
She told JCJ she was studying Cyn’s threads in hopes of finding a way to destroy or exploit them. She told Cyn she’d fulfill her end of the bargain. She told J it was too dangerous, however it played out.
Secretly, of course, this also serves as Tessa fulfilling her pact with 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.)
Tessa is old, at this point — she saved Earth as a young adult, spent years touring the world and studying under the company’s top minds, and it’s not a short trip from the Sol system all the way to Copper-9. There’s something nostalgic about the T frame. It hasn’t aged at all from when her younger self threw it together.
She hadn’t had much cause to even boot it up. So its most recent memory files are old, old news. T is who Tessa was. And becoming T was an indulgence for escape — so why would she suppress that naïve consciousness? T had instinctive reactions computed from T’s subset of her memories, and Tessa let them reign free. She could be a passenger, almost voyeur-esque, as T scrambled to understand and define herself.
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. (Tessa always needed a project to fix up.)
She learns that #017 fails the tests 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.
This all piques T’s interest. A puzzle to be solved, a puzzle that makes itself harder to solve as she cracks it.
When T 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, separated from her master, 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.
Meanwhile, back at Cabin Fever, the escape of one of the subjects — Tessa’s frustration at (losing) her rogue clone — prompts them to accelerate their plans. There were too many test subjects, really, and it was time to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Thus, Tessa proposes the Culling Games Sorting Algorithm.
The plans had been in the works for a while there had been an outbreak of powerful zombies in a urban center—maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe it’s a “coincidence”. But the humans use their Science™ machines to throw up a big ass firewall to contain them all, turning the region 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 Labs: whoever purges the most corruption in the exclusion zone gets to walk free. No more Science™, no more tests, no more subject numbers.
Obviously most are pretty stoked at this prospect.
So the humans fly them 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? Yeah, 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 at risk of getting 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 Tessa was here to study Cyn’s thread — the true purpose of the sorting algorithm was an acceleration of the “left hand/right hand”–cycle. If they found a viable left hand, could it serve a host for containing Cyn’s threads? If they found a new right hand, could it destroy the left hand and Cyn along with it?