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Save Point: The Siege-Mistress

Secure Interactive Interface, Level 150

Her final argument with the master program is very different from anything one might expect, neither heroic virtual-space battle or rationalizing tactical dispute. The program, as was originally coded, carefully fell just short of an intelligence in its own right and was sufficient to maintain a large and unthinkably secret hidden research program, but time has worn on it, despite all careful maintenance and repairs carried out by the heart mantas and other autonomous units. The limits designed to prevent it from inconveniently developing a mind of its own have also prevented it from evolving in the same way its own machine tools have.

Like all good secure systems, its default response to everything is to say no, then to force the end user to persuade it to say yes. The whole process is deeply bureaucratic and deliberately designed to be as time consuming as possible to try and deflect anyone who might be able to misuse it.

So she leans on it, letting the improvised co-processing cluster that is formed by her self-evolving nanites and various implants do its best to try and automatically mislead the system and smooth the way, subverting minor functions as it goes along, acting in expression of her own intent that is unlimited by hardware constraints. She already has a consciousness, after all.

The critical first hurdle, persuading the system that she is a valid member of the Azatlani Defense Force, is easily accomplished and all the right prompts appear immediately. Advanced personnel were often bought back in as consultants or trainers, or re-assigned to special projects, so it's not too hard to get herself listed as back in active service. Her rank markings flicker unnecessarily as they are validated and found to be correct, if slightly outdated.

By going a little sideways and establishing herself in its worldview as having been part of the Eye of Re remote sensing project, additional options open up. Now for the tricky bit.

What she has to do here to win is to pull rank, in the sense that there is in fact no-one else left in all existence who is currently a member of the Azatlani Defence Force, which makes her the single highest ranking soldier left. The hard part will be getting the master program to acknowledge this fact as the truth, the minor detail that it actually is being mostly irrelevant to the system.

Every single time that she manages to increase her effective rank, the master program insists on full-body scanning her again to confirm her identity. It takes longer and longer each time as the scanner goes into ever greater levels of detail with every cycle. She'd be worried about radiation if that sort of thing was really a risk to her anymore.

It occurs to her to wonder whether her flame powers also cover radiation. Does it make her more or less resistant to being toasted? She certainly has no intention of deliberately testing it.

She exploits official chains of command, assumption of temporary powers, emergency provisions and everything else she can remember from the military law of a culture that's been dead for over seven thousand years. She reports everyone on her squad dead (they are, so passing biometrics is a breeze) promotes herself to its leader, declares all the other squads dead (describing a complex but plausible series of events at Kalikshutra which matches the seismic records from the nuclear engagement at the time) then claims that the entire leadership is also dead, citing her presence in the continuity redoubt in Azatlan City with several civilians as proof that she was chosen to be the sole survivor in a pressing crisis situation (this is conveniently retroactive and explains why she would be in charge of a major engagement occurring on foreign soil).

~*~

She takes a breather several hours in, unwraps a small block of crumbly stuff that is technically food from its crinkly waterproof plastic wrapping, and gnaws on it carefully, casually viewing the very partial rank of displays which are meant to show the views from all the security cameras in the facility. Getting this access was what made her decide to stop, in fact, because it means she can now see a large part of what they were up to in here and get an idea of the overall layout.

There may be fantastic secrets hidden somewhere around the place, but she's damned if she can identify any from the cameras. There are rooms and corridors, boxes, benches with various items on them and in short everything you'd expect in a military base, but nothing that screams out as being far beyond top secret. She was kind of hoping for some sethura technology, that would've closed the circle nicely, but none is apparent and this lot seems to be entirely home grown.

She can't really take much with her, anyway, and despite its advanced temptations the base needs to be gone before it falls into the wrong hands, those being pretty much anyone. Because she's not entirely above worldly interests, she does download a selection of data containing specifications for stuff that might come in handy later, most of which is regrettably dependent on the availability of a whole range of other materials that haven't been reinvented yet. The records she copies are selected in firm order of restrictedness, the most exclusive hidden content first, hoping to answer some of the questions that always stood out for her.

Likewise the last few years of the base personnel records, morning briefings and so forth. She'd really like to know what happened. What did they do after they realized Azatlan was destroyed? Why was the building spared from 'the terrible thing' but none of the people? Was it something to do with the quantum-entangled communications system they were working on?

The virtual cluster formed by her implants, the nanites throughout her body and nervous system, has a monumental storage capacity by current standards, but is nowhere near enough. When you consider the stored backups of her body plan written redundantly into every bone, the thousands of years of memory deeply and variably compressed but still unwilling to be thrown away, and the sheer number of mental snapshots and other things she's saved at full resolution over the years, it's already pretty close to full, in fact.

She's relieved to find that she values her own memories far more than all this ancient junk, and that she fully intends to delete most of it once she's browsed it to find any significant moments in the dross. With unlimited storage come increasingly large and wasteful files, so she is able to copy almost all the text she can find, but only selected images and none of the videos. A lot of the non-essential files are dreadfully degraded anyway, originally stored at one-to-one with human vision but now no more detailed than a grainy television picture, so she's not really losing that much. It appears plain text is the winner over more geologic timeframes.

~*~

The last part is the most hair-raising, which is why she stopped and took a breather while things were still only at the level of impersonating an officer. Above a certain height, the air gets thin and there are fewer ranks, but very well-defended.

She knows she guessed it about right when, at the rank after next, two auto-cannons slide down out of the ceiling to cover her. The subsequent and extremely slow scan, at quite ludicrous levels of detail, isolates and detects the sethura-made pneuma arrayed about her heart, then highlights them on-screen and demands an explanation.

Lying through her teeth she calls on a vague memory of a heavily classified department of foreign technology retrieval, the true and actual purpose of which was to steal anything the Rama Empire might accidentally discover that they'd somehow missed. The pneuma are items 'retrieved' from the enemy and repurposed due to a lack of ready-to-hand medical supplies, and were provided for her use due to being absolutely essential personnel after she was injured in battle. See, here is the interface that runs them. They have no processing power of their own, no wireless connection and cannot be subverted to do nasty things like blackmailing an officer in the Defense Force to try and obtain restricted access, or anything like that.

She watches her own heart beating and breathes carefully, remaining calm so as to avoid showing any signs of fear, as the master program systematically tricks itself into thinking that she is not a threat. Because it cannot read or even identify sethurani it detects nothing amiss, and is forced to make judgment on input and output alone, and because she has given it full access, it is unaware that there is anything to hide. It has just enough intelligence and not quite enough imagination to realize how far she has led it down the garden path.

After a worryingly long interval, there is an unnecessarily cheerful chirp of acknowledgment and the guns realign themselves vertically to slide back into the roof. Success.

She refreshes the rank markings on her thighs, and watches as they update to a new symbol that looks like a small stylized castle tower with crenellated parapet, atop a single downward-pointing chevron. Inside the rectangular space formed by the outline of the tower, there is a stylized sun shape encircling a crescent moon, like the prominences of a solar eclipse.

It seems that she's finally achieved one of her early half-held dreams, field promotion to the rank of Siege-Mistress. And after only a mere seven thousand years of playing time!

" Dâyâ, if you could be here, you'd be so very proud of me."

~*~

The Azatlani dual-rank military system, when depicted on paper, resembles a tree, starting with two fixed ranks for the new inductees, like a trunk, then expanding suddenly into a wide spray of individual branches for various specialities, ultimately converging again near the top back into a limited number of fixed ranks, and finally to a single point for the high command.

So Siege-Mistress was always on her skills tree somewhere, way up near the top, but it was never a somewhere she really expected to reach herself. Her 'special skills' lent themselves more to the outer lines, when decisive intervention was required in remote places and soft companionship was then essential in the night to hold everything together.

The Siege-Master and Siege-Mistress ranks are something akin to the modern-day rank of Field General, effectively the point above which you just keep adding progressively more stars and bars whilst becoming ever more distant from the actual scene of the fighting. It comes with the right to command the defense of a major fortified position, once a regional castle, hence the name. More importantly, it also comes with the right to conclude that defense, by retreating after denying that position to the enemy and destroying it.

As an additional technical perk, it also lets you change or modify your own rank markings, in case you need to pretend to be a civilian or lower ranking officer, to avoid getting shot at while making your retreat if it all goes wrong. (She's gotten rather attached to her 'Whore of War' combo after all this time and would like 'em back).

She's not exactly certain of the procedure, but there's a briefing document for almost everything, which includes in this case how to go about ordering the destruction of a facility, along with some paperwork to be filled out first (it's not like this might happen in an urgent situation, right?) and a list of significant penalties associated with frivolous misuse of this questionable privilege.

Many of these are hazardous to life, limb and bank account. Cleo sneers genteelly like a wealthy aristocrat confronted with an unfeasible restaurant bill and, much as with that august personage, signs off on it without even looking twice and then gets ready to run.

It is time to destruct things. Are you absolutely sure that you really, definitely, totally and without a shadow of a doubt or a hint of reservation want to blow this place up? If so, please press yes.

YES! NO!

MAYBE?