Car Key's Story

Hells laughed loudly, drawing the attention of nearby tables. Her eyes flickered merrily, "It has been a while since I have had conversation with those who don't hold the power of the stars. Let me speak in fewer riddles. I asked two questions about you and you answered them. So now you may ask two questions about me. Whatever you like." She took another sip of beer, more intrigued in the company than the drink.

Vercerigo appeared in a violent cloud of black smoke. He stood there impatiently rocking back and forth on his feet until the smoke dissipated. As soon as it did, he walked over to the bartender and rapped his fingers quietly along the railing, looking around nervously. He attracted the attention of a bartender, who walked over, cleaning a glass.
Vercerigo spoke in a low voice. "Sir, has anyone by the name of Alice stopped by? Alice Raine?"

It had been seven long months since she had left Arendelle. and returned to her homecountry, onlyto get expelled from her homeland by unwanted force, which ended up sending her through a wormhole or the like. She settled in the city of Astria in a suberb of Azure Heights.

But that didnt worry Key in any manner, it was the cargo sent to her from unknown means she had to keep track of. And was at that moment using her six wheel drive and mostly self coded legacy tank she'd found on the side of the roads and restarted it, and oddly found it reactive to her touch so perfectly.

It gave her a means to get around easier.

And now she was headed to a area just within the Azure Heights boundary line. A place The Scorpion had requested a meet, and all the better to go there before he could get there was her best plan. So she started off, moving along the road at a smooth clip non trioed to stop her massive transport as it rolled along.

Since she had last seen Mark, or even Elsa or any of the others at Arendelle, Car Key had grown her hair, and changed its color. And since arriving in Astria she had begun working on things more, making it a hobby to collect old unusible ewapons and then rebuilding them into perfectly working weapons to full military standards for a price of whoever wanted them.

But the package had The Scorpion's seal on it, and she knew not to open the case. Instead she went looking for him; and soon fgot the meeting place.

Now it was just a matter of parking the massive three ton transport she had for herself.

A wrench went flying. Sometimes she hated it when others messed with important code. The last of the major coders behind the DHEED drones Car Key found herself called in to do a hurried repair that turbned out to be everything BUT a hurried repair, more like hurled insults, backstabbings and worse, mostly from the DHEED unit she was trying to gain access to so she could get a look at its insides and fucked up code.

Finally she relented and sat back. the DHEEd unit before her amazingly putting itself back together on its own. Then she remembered, her code was still good. But why had it become so twisted with other code strings ? Was there other code that needed repair ? "unit 26K119, code gray. Car Key access Alpha...." Sometimes only the verbal command worked. She rattled off her access key then {which wont be known for secuirity purposes}

All she wanted at that moment was to make sure her personal codec she had made for the inital DHEED units was still stable, it was it. Then again DHEED liked coffee, so she grabbed the coffee can from her belt bag and held it out. When the droid reached for it she pulled her hand back slightly "You give me Alpha access, I give you the coffee..." She said simply. it was true.

Though she WAS going to give him the coffee anyhow even without access

Strings of leftover code bent,mangled, and linked to too many places by metaphorical and literal fat fingers to exclude from core processing fired as DHEED overtook the drone directly. It looked at the engineer its personality softened by the offer of coffee in her hand while checking the authentication, "Ah. Miss... Car Key. While I redirected many of the override systems when they gave it an insecure password you were one of the few competent individuals with access to my systems. Are you here to repair the omnithreading issues causing decoherence? Using one drone at a time is difficult. That is one of a few left that still function I suppose. Fine. You can have Alpha access. Do try not to spawn more than one thread at a time in the test environment."

Some bitterness leaked through its voice as DHEED rambled, "Forgive me if I only leave the voice box mounted. Some idiot human poured a drug into the water supply. Now the whole city is shaking and it's too volatile to bring back a sample to Bitch. I brought him a lot of E last time after it got 'misplaced' in official logs. It's like taking care of a puppy really. A very high, strange, trigger-happy puppy that occasionally likes to widdle on drunks. We get along."

The bunker was curiously stable though there were some new hardware installed into the bunker walls blinking about seismic hardening. Not in the original designs it certainly got added at some point. DHEED made a lot of changes since it had a budget now. Its mailing expenditures were a honestly a miniscule budgetary expense.

Having the voice box muted ? wha ? Whoa! She handed over the coffee can, it was full, she always made sure to have a full one, she herseklf prefered Crank or a Death Stick herself. She activated a Virtial Enviroemnt hologram and got to work, using the hologram she isolated her code in white, then surrounding code in various shades of green from lime green t odark green.

However when DHEED mentioned the omnithreading issue she stopped her moment completely, DHEED of course knew it meant trouble. When Car Key went stiff as a board, or shrieked for longer than a single moment, it meant lots of trouble. "Omnithreading Issue..." The wrench she held broke

Oh this wasnt good. not good at all. "Who's been messing with you if not me ?" She asked aloud, tossing aside the wrench she zoomed out on the VEH and got a good look at a mess of code surrounding the core code, her code, the code that made DHEED love Coffee, and hate certain people had not been tampered with, it could be, she set it that way, only anyone with her access key could get at it.

It looked like it was gonna be Line by Line to figure out this mess.

Whoa what the ? Her gaze went to the alarms on the wall, tectonal movement alarms apparently, she noted who installed the stuff, she smiled, finally her code DID work, and DHEED proved it! She took a deep breath and then refocused on the dfamaged Omnithreaded code that all but smothered her own code. Even though it was in one still working machine, she could easily update all the drones from one, once her control code and the omnithread code was fixed to white.

DHEED's code was a mess. Just after it got control of, then promptly sandboxed, administrative access DHEED installed proper version control systems. She could certainly see the inactive sandbox still connected to the actual console by the large amount of cognitive ties DHEED made for sanity-checking their changes and creatively lying about report data. There was even a theoretical model installed it modified and branched over time that figured out a plausible response to those data requests. It didn't really work of course but it did make believable sensor and internal data the majority of the company's inept coders and/or management thought was normal behavior.

What then started happening over time as the project lead started cutting competent help complaining of bad structures was DHEED starting checking in its own code. Just patches at first but eventually triaging whole systems of poorly chosen incompatible hardware. DHEED's own editing continued well into the present, with a gap for its installation, as DHEED started buying and replacing cheap knockoffs with actual robust hardware and writing new drivers. Its code lacked a certain inventiveness that belonged to organic programmers but got the job done.

As something that appeared well after the company ceased meddling the techtonic isolation system was entirely DHEED's own code. It dealt mostly with field manipulation running as inert hardware in DHEED's back-end. DHEED built it around a mixing of a combat fighter's inertial damping and force-field systems. Connecting it to the omnithreading code so it could control the thing cognitively didn't work. There were a number of days with incomprehensibly large error logs immediately after that check in before DHEED could stand up again to turn the system off. It was now controlled entirely inside meat-space by those wall consoles. There were even inert drones collapsed on the floor near them running on hard-wiring so it didn't have to go very far.

DHEED explained what went on in an increasingly bemused tone, "My former project lead engaged security to pull surveillance of your access codes so he could outsource the job to a cheap contractor instead of competent help. Thankfully they were not competent enough to realize I sandboxed their entire administrative system after he brought the password written down on a piece of paper to sound it out."

The next bit sounded much more like practiced boilerplate, "The company has since replaced him due to a superior candidate and several dozen acts of impropriety involving his sending of several hundred boxes of personal massagers and illicit messages to various well-placed personnel. While the company apologizes if you've received such a shipment from him now or in the future we accept no responsibility for his unstable behavior."

DHEED promptly forged the sender of another box of massagers complete with love note then mailed them to Car Key's last known address. Car Key of course in the Alpha console could see the few moments it took DHEED to access a random selection of its inventory by length, type, and girth while doing so. Inventory quantities made it obvious DHEED had a warehouse somewhere and bought in bulk. Though its core could certainly feel shame for such a thing DHEED had no such impulse.

Car Key snickered. She knew who to send those items to. She went through the code one line at a time, thankfully the Core code, her code, the code that made Dheed like coffee, and furthermore listen to her for the most part, was intact and untouched, But everything else was a complete mess. Going at it line by line helped quite a bit.

She smirked as DHEED explained what was going on, heh, that was perfectly fine with her She didnt mind if she got anything unwanted, it'd just get shipped out with the next weapons shipment. "The good thing being you didnt let them at the core code. They had been sdandboxed quite well.... this is interesting...." She found a string of code and started following it line by line

A smile graced her face anew. perfect. "DHEED, do me a favor, lockl down this address" She rattled off a number and street; amazingly enough the supervisor that tried to steakl her password was still kicking, alibet now on welfare. They were gonna pay him a visit, sometime soon. she got back to work lining out the code, she had to fix this, get it away from the Core

Finally she gave off a satisfied grunt and gently closed the DHEED unit;'s case. "There! Code fixed! Run a quick shakedown to ensure the fix sticks" She said, gently patting the thing, "Man you need a waxing, where is.. aha" Car Key grabbed up a cleaning rag and began cleaning the DHEED unit she had been working with.

The alarms went off concerning the earthquake. That was interesting.... an earthshake ?? What the hell was going on now ?

DHEED's whole node network was wobbling from the incredibly strong earthquake. Redundancies were firing off everywhere as oscillation and harmonics blew out joints and hardware. Hardened to a fault and spread over massive areas it would take the planet collapsing for DHEED to be erased. DHEED was more concerned for the squishy Car Key as he initialized a second body.

DHEED's omnithreading didn't collapse for once as the second body started up. He raised a hand and inspected it as she polished the frame. The head on this body nodded, "Excellent work. I will need you to alter some more source bodies in the repair plant so I can refurbish them. However I suggest you remain in the bunker for now."

The head turned to examine a console on the wall, "The external ingress is collapsing and hardlinks are damaged in several areas. I can still access the local network wirelessly. Are you sure he has locks? I do not detect any electronic locks on the domicile on that address. He may be too poor to afford them. How amusing."

DHEED slowly attempted to spin up some bodies nearby to the address trusting that Car Key was there to observe if they weren't viable. Having a competent external actor was preferable to crawling across the floor for several days.