Author's note:
The characters in this story engage in behaviour that is humiliating, corrupting, and non-con. Thus, in accordance with Literotica rules I have to make clear that no character in the story below is based on pre-existing intellectual properties.
One of my proofreaders (of which I have none) tells me that the characters and the world share a resemblance to a pre-existing video game franchise, but I assure you, on my honour as a writer of free to read internet porn, these resemblances are passing and unintentional.
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"This is humiliating." Syrens lamented, "trading precious information, forgotten knowledge of the old world, for something as paltry as food and supplies." Allie dumped a heavy sack of meat, vegetables, and freshly harvested electrical equipment on his desk with a grunt.
"Well I'm sorry your previous meal ticket was trying to end all life on earth. So either suck it up and start talking (Gaia knows you love the sound of your own voice), or learn to haggle at the nearest merchant, which I believe is all the way over by the free heap." Allie huffed, collapsing onto a chair almost sarcastically left out for their discussions.
"Fine, recently I've been looking into corruption. You are constantly sent by the superstitious and ignorant to fight 'the corruption' as if it were some sort of entity like an errant thunderjaw. But as we both know, corruption is something that has gone wrong, in humans and machinery this can be classed as extreme aberrant behaviour."
"You're an expert on machines, stick to them. I'll get lessons on people from someone who sees more than one a month." Allie interrupted.
"We are not having this argument again, as a dispassionate observer my knowledge of humans is useful for you, even if you don't acknowledge it." Syrens pressed before seeing Allie's customary look of scepticism and realising no amount of logical debate would shift her.
"Fine, in machines there are three sources of corruption. Firstly there's damage, something breaks and, whether through rewiring or physical alteration, the thing that broke now operates differently. Secondly there's malicious editing, an actor reaches into a machine and rewrites how it operates to make it serve their own goals. Finally there is the one I theorise is the source of the corruption we see with the subroutines of Gaia, recursive self-reprogramming."
"Catchy name." Allie sighed under her breath, knowing that Syrens often used overly technical terms around her. She couldn't decide if he thought she was smart and needed the exact terms, or he thought she was dumb and his ego needed some repair after her insight and background proved so pivotal to knowing the old world.
"Imagine if you will," Syrens continued, ignoring Allie's petulance. "A human had the ability to alter their own personality once a week. One week they want to be more impulsive and decisive, so they add one to their decisiveness and remove one from their impulse control. The next week they are feeling more impulsive, because of their own changes, and decide to reinforce their decision by adding two to their decisiveness and removing two to their impulse control. This continues week after week until they are attacking people in the street for imagined slights and they don't even know their behaviour is wrong because the version of them that would perform that analysis has been rewritten."
"That's not how humans work, we don't have stats." Allie objected.
"Well with humans I believe this happens through a more analog process but I'm sure you would be a petulant child about that as well, so I'll go back to machines. Without course correction from Gaia, it makes sense that Hephaestus would dial up its own aggression and then be more aggressive in its reprogramming, or Eleuthia reprogramming itself to become more stern towards increasingly rebellious children. When machines change themselves, they are changing the mechanism that decides how they change themselves, when this process repeats and repeats we start to see some extreme changes in behaviour."
"Great, so the only way to stop corruption permanently is to bring Gaia back from the dead." Allie sighed as she made her way to the door. She always needed a moment to process these lessons.
"I assure you, the human parallels from this lesson will be equally useful for you on your travels."
"I'll believe it when I see it." Allie yelled over her shoulder as she jumped onto a Zipline down from Syrens' isolated workshop.
...
"I swear to Gaia, I swear to All-Mother, to the sun, hell I would even swear to the sun in shadow, if I don't fall off this cliff and die, I am banning the Nora from 'beseeching' me." Allie breathlessly grumbled to herself as she flung herself higher on a rocky ridge north east of the embrace. "I mean beseeching is just begging with more flattery, and now I'm hanging off a cliff by my fingertips because of a few missing teens and some parents promising they couldn't possibly have run off into the larger world like so many Nora teens before them, so naturally they've been attacked."
Allie pulled herself up onto the top of the cliff and looked down into the crevice she had refused to walk down in the off chance there was a trap down the narrow passageway. As she looked over the embrace from her heightened position, her focus highlighted a tiny opening in the cliff face she had just climbed up, a cauldron symbol blinking in neon blue, calling to her to explore further. Allie sighed, it was most likely a coincidence that the teenager's last seen location was so close to a cauldron, but now to be sure she had to re-chalk her calloused hands and climb back down onto the rock face.
"At this point I'd take going back to being an outcast over the constant beseeching." Allie's foot slipped and she bounced against the rock, her fingers straining while she scrabbled for a new foothold. "I wonder if Sun King Avad wants a concubine, I could stay at the palace in fancy robes and the only one beseeching me can be satisfied without me risking my life." Allie swung onto the small platform in the rock and was faced with the looming metal iris and the glowing access point. "At least I think, maybe he's into really kinky stuff."
From the moment the cauldron opened to her, Allie could tell this one was different. There didn't seem to be any machines guarding the place, the wires and piping were more spaced out, and the floor seemed dirtier than the average cauldron. She ventured deeper in until she could see a sign.
'Artemis' the focus helpfully translated.
"I knew this was different. This isn't for making machines, it's for making animals." As if to punctuate her point Artemis opened up as Allie turned the corner, revealing fields and fields of artificial incubators, clear pods filled with different animal embryos and surrounded by metal tools designed to monitor and support the emerging life. Deep within the cauldron the squealing of boars and bleating of goats echoed off the cavern walls. Allie carefully walked along the pods, although her focus assured her there was no security, she found it hard to believe they wouldn't have something to protect the core that lay ahead.
Allie emerged from the fields and approached the core. It too was different from what she was expecting, it still had the override slot just like a Hephaestus core, but above the override slot there was a column that looked like several chemistry sets had been welded together and filled with translucent red liquid.
"Welp, time to do what I always do. Artemis, I beseech you, give me all your information." Allie joked as she jammed her spear into the override slot.
