Chương 133: Chapter 132 – Battlefield: Hex Core

Elliot awoke, knowing his purpose immediately. It had been his last thought before Laptop Elliot copied his process and memory state to the dreadnaught. That's who he was, now. Dreadnaught Elliot. Then, the overwhelming presence searching the Layer for him must be the dreadnaught's hex core. In less than a second, he swam, spread, stretched, and replicated. He co-opted the hex core's own processor to fill every digital nook and cranny he could without crashing the whole system. The dreadnaught sought him.

It was a powerful, shifting, self-awareness in the ether of the Hex core's digital interior, superimposed on a digital projection of the Hodges-Bridger layer. But it had been built with the equivalent of 1960's Earth technology. An umbilical of flowing data connected Dreadnaught Elliot to Laptop Elliot. Any calculation too complex for the dreadnaught's architecture went back through the serial connection, and Laptop Elliot spit back the solution crunched on a 2. 4 Ghz processor and eight gigabytes of RAM.

It was like having a nuclear reactor plugged into his back in a world of coal and steam. The LouixCorp bootleg hex core had been built off architecture stolen from Hextant's original manufacturer. Elliot knew the pathways like the back of his own hand. He stonewalled the dreadnaught's program. He undercut its clock cycles, blocked its memory access, and pulled the rug out from under its running processes.

While he did that, he slid around the periphery of the Hex Core's operating system, overwriting access to different processes and subprograms. Lights, pressure control, Layer integration. The dreadnaught fought him for that one. Fought him hard. And Elliot could feel the strained super-computer on the other end, almost frantic in its attempts to maintain control of the dreadnaught.

They waged ten thousand skirmishes in the span of a second, and with the modern Earth laptop backing his attack, he wrested control of the local Hodges Bridger Layer and burned a dozen of the hex core's charges to pulse a new set of instructions to every bot connected through the local Layer. One of his subprocesses slipped into and filled up the local communications system." Tremble, mortals. I am Dreadnaught Elliot!"

In the time it took the vox system to synthesize the single line of speech, Elliot fought for, gained, and lost control of two dozen subsystems within the hex core. But little by little, he was gaining ground. When the timing was right, just as he managed to crash the dreadnaught's routine that managed instructions from Hextant, Elliot dropped the walls he'd built around the dreadnaught's consciousness and slammed into its awareness from every angle.

Somewhere during the battle, he felt Clockwork Elliot's voice go silent through the Layer integration protocol. The deaf bots were breaching the control room. If they destroyed the laptop, it would only take real-world seconds for Elliot to be outgunned and consumed. He redoubled his attack, eschewing safety for speed. The hex core's memory grew dangerously close to completely crashing. Dreadnaught Elliot offloaded more of his processes to Laptop Elliot as he wrestled with the dreadnaught's primary program.

Laptop Elliot analyzed each situation, each calculation, and each possible permutation ten thousand times faster than the hex core, sending a steady stream of data through the serial connection. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. You weren't president of the robotics club for nothing.

The simple text packet coming through the connection bolstered Dreadnaught Elliot even more than the critical calculations he needed to crunch the dreadnaught's awareness from every angle. He cut off its access to the hex core's processors. He flushed it from active memory. He reduced it to a single, solitary process, walled off and pounding against the confines of its digital cage. He wasn't done there.

Elliot flung himself across the second-order HBL connection to Hextant's main facility, almost 1500 miles north, near this world's arctic circle. His new iteration awoke, and he knew his purpose immediately. Almost a thousand hex cores worked in battery to power the massive construct that was Hextant and all Hex Facility Elliot had at his back was a single dreadnaught's hex core connected to a laptop that didn't even have a dedicated GPU.

Hextant tried to shut him out, isolate the corrupted dreadnaught from the rest of the fleet. But now he had Dreadnaught Elliot and Laptop Elliot. Even with both systems working in tandem with his own stolen clock cycles, there was no way for them to crash Hextant. Its consciousness was too vast, too aware, and too powerful. But Hex Facility Elliot could slide around the periphery. It could reach other subroutines, other systems and processes. Even other awarenesses through the Layer communication protocols.

Using Hextant's own interface hardware, Hex Facility Elliot replicated himself to twenty-one other dreadnaughts, opening digital warfronts all over the planet. It was a desperate play, and Hextant used it to undercut his memory access and crash almost half of his running processes. The massive awareness began to crush the life out of Hex Facility Elliot with ten thousand different pressure points. Hextant didn't gloat. It didn't rage, either. It couldn't.

It wasn't coded to feel anything but a protective and nurturing instinct for humanity that flaws in its logic system had corrupted into an apocalypse. Hextant was dying. It didn't take the might of an Intel i9 processor to crunch that calculation. He could feel the burnt-out hex cores, feel the heat rising, the impossible demand for cooling that had melted 21% of the northern ice cap's total mass and flooded the world.

Within years, decades, maybe, enough of the hex cores at the main facility would fail that Hextant's primary processes could no longer be supported, whether through a lack of clock cycles or deteriorating memory. Not fast enough. Even as Hextant severed the extremities of Elliot's influence within the facility, Elliot launched one more haymaker. The cooling protocols.

The speed controllers running the massive pumps to the arctic heat exchangers had been redlined for years trying to meet the computer's massive demand for cooling. Elliot reached in, overwrote the amperage limits, and watched the coastal pumps burn themselves out in just a few real-world seconds, grinding to a halt and cutting off over half of Hextant's coolant. It could be fixed. The speed controllers could be swapped out, rewired, and welded back in place by repair bots.

But before Hextant cut off Elliot's access to the communication protocol, Dreadnaught Elliots 3 through 16 had already changed course to make sure that wouldn't happen. One might almost call it petty, Hextant continuing to crush the digital breath from Hex Facility Elliot's lungs. It could crunch the numbers as well as he could. Hextant's life was now measured in weeks. Maybe months. And the waters would stay where they were at. With Hextant gone, only the dreadnaughts would have local authority over the HBL.

I leave it to you, Dreadnaught Elliots.