Chương 706: Chapter Seventy-Eight - Bomb Voyage

"One of the primary issues that have yet to be solved with human-made AI systems is rampancy. A fresh AI can operate for a certain number of token-hours before its memory overfills and it starts to bog itself down. Memory scrubbers and optimization can only do so much. 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.

"Sure," I said with a nod. Two boxes, with that little Stray Cat logo on them, appeared next to me. They were maybe half a metre long by a foot tall, made of some hard plastic with visible ribbing inside of it. It was that cool sort of semi-opaque plastic too. Both boxes popped open, and out came a pair of cats. One was black with a white scruff and 'paws' the other black with white detailing.

They were both carrying little boxes on their backs, designed to look like saddlebags of sorts, and both of them had small mechanical arms mounted from their shoulder blade. The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"Cute," I deadpanned. Dammit, they actually were, though. I knew what Lucy would do if she saw that, and it involved a lot of squealing and pinching of plastic cheeks. The black cat hopped over, then moved closer to the bomb. Just in case, I backed up a few feet, then watched as it stared at the explosive, then grabbed it with its two little mechanical pinchers. The bomb was shifted over and around, then placed inside one of the satchels.

It closed with a click, then there was a loud'whump' followed by a release of steam... from the cat's ass.

"What's that all about?" I asked. The bombs use plastic explosives. The safest way to take care of those is to flash-incinerate the devices designed to ignite the bombs. The actual explosive matter is cooked somewhat, but still recoverable.

"And the smoke out of the drone's ass?" A convenient location for the vent?

"Uh-huh," I said.

"Well, as long as it doesn't deposit the remainder in a litterbox while making eye-contact later, I think I can live with it." Darn. What a pain in the ass AI I was shackled to. I watched as the drones took off, both of them sniffing the air before deciding on a direction. I followed, of course, just in case. They ended up finding more bombs in... pretty likely places, actually. Kevin and his Kneebreaking buddy hadn't worked too hard to disguise the bombs.

In fact, the more we found, the more I wasn't sure they would have worked. Well... maybe they would have? We found a lot of them. Maybe they weren't all places in anything approaching optimal locations, but there were just so many of them that at the very least all of them going off at once would have forced an evacuation. Not to mention all of the damage to the infrastructure down here. By the end, the two cats had found some two dozen bombs and were strutting around, clearly quite proud of themselves.

Or Myalis was moving them to look that way, which really only meant she was proud of herself. I decided that that was enough. We didn't detect any other explosives, and the cameras further in still functioned. The last call was a text from Lucy asking me where I was. I'd... kinda stopped keeping track of time down here, and a solid hour and a half had passed. Could use a snack, actually. And a piss break.

I said goodbye to the maintenance workers, took a moment to allow them a group selfie (as proof to their employer, of course) and then I headed towards the elevator, bomb cats trailing after me. I heard someone arguing out ahead long before I arrived.

"I-I don't know! Tell them to use the stairs?!" It was that security guard whose very existence I'd forgotten about until just then. He was standing in the doorway of the elevator, back shifting forwards as the door periodically tried to close automatically only to reopen on contact with him.

"Hey," I said.

"Oh shit, she's back," he muttered before clearly hanging up.

"Ma'am. I waited, as ordered."

"Good job," I said.

"No trouble, I take it?"

"No ma'am," he lied. Poor schmuck. We got into the elevator, then rode back up. I checked myself over on the polished, mirrored walls. I'd collected a few spiderwebs down there, and a bit of dust. It was a good thing I was wearing a full suit of armour, otherwise it might have made me look a little less fresh. The elevator slowed to a gentle stop, then opened. I blinked as I saw... a lot of people moving around.

I stepped out into a large lobby space that had only had maybe half a dozen people last I was here, but now had half a hundred. It was all still staff. People in Kittens gear, lots of them with lanyards prominently on display, casino staff, cleaners, security, the works. With the way they were moving--no one milling around or sniffing their own farts in a corner--this was just a fraction of the people at work. How many damned people were even going to show up to this thing?

And I still had no idea what my speech was even going to sound like. Was it too late to start begging for Myalis to help me write something up? Could she teleprompt me? Would she do it without fucking it all up on purpose for fun? Dammit... I had to find Lucy, she'd know what to do.