Chapter Seventy-Eight – Bomb Voyage

Chapter Seventy-Eight – Bomb Voyage

“One of the primary issues that have yet to be solved with human-made AI systems is rampancy.

The solution is either significantly larger memory storage–which won’t solve the issue, only prolong the time until rampancy–or better encoding for memory scrubbing–which leads to other issues.”

–AI Digest, 2029

***

“Okay… if I were a bomb made by a fucking moron, where would I be?” I muttered to myself as I squinted through the poorly lit maintenance corridors.

Kevin and… Kneebreaker? Kneeduster? The other fuckwit. They’d come around here, gone a decent ways in, then returned.

The maintenance crew–now volunteers because I’d legit just asked politely and they said that there was a clause in their contract that made working with a samurai count as overtime pay–had helped me trace the two morons to about here.

The large water main was just behind me, currently going through a flush so that the crew could check inside it for bombs, but we kinda figured that was unlikely. The best place for an explosive would be up against some of the more important structural pillars.

Which was as good a place to start as any.

I moved over to the nearest, then glanced up to an old camera screwed to the wall above. “That working?”

Barely. It was hacked into through a backdoor that should have been patched nearly a decade ago, but this one was never updated from its factory default specs.

“Wild,” I said. “So, no footage of our two pals?”

No. though there are faint signs of a hack. They definitely came out of here. This is the footage I can recover.

Myalis opened a small screen before me. It showed a twenty-three second long video, taken from the camera just above me, showing a hatch atop the water main popping open and clunking to the side, then a hand holding something came out and… nothing.

“Okay,” I said. “That didn’t trigger anything?”

Only enough that Vanguard Grasshopper’s companion was able to notice.

“I’m surprised that you didn’t,” I said.

Hmph. You’ve clearly never had to have a conversation with Bybyt.

“Grasshopper’s AI?” I asked.

The AI makes their Vanguard look tame with regards to normalcy.

“What, did it go rampant or something?” I asked.

If it did, they came out the other side suffering from a new kind of sanity.

I shook my head, then started to look around. It didn’t take long to find the first bomb. It looked like a brick of something plastic-y with half of an old-school cellphone jammed into it. There had been some effort to cover things, mostly by wrapping it all in electrical tape, but it was still very… hodgepodge. It looked like a kid’s craft project or something.

Kneeling down next to it, I scanned the explosive over, then hesitantly reached out to grab it, only to pause. “What’s the likelihood that this goes off?”

Low to moderate.

“And that it can harm me if it does?”

Low to moderate.

“Right. Maybe best not to, then. Got any ideas on how to disarm these safely? I figure a few bombs going off down here would ruin the party up above.” And Lucy was above. I wouldn’t fuck around if it meant maybe collapsing the floor from out under her.

I could give you a small device that you could place the bombs into for safe disposal. Maybe you’d like a bomb-sniffer as well, to find the rest?

“Not a bad idea,” I said. “Could we shove both of them into a cat drone?”

Certainly. One of the better use-cases for a drone.

Yeah. Using them for combat cut into my points earning, but for something like this? It was damned-near perfect. “Two of them, then. Call it a two-hundred point budget, for both? Is that doable?”

I can do that. It’ll mean cheaping out on a few things, but the bomb-disposal system and sniffer will be fine.