[Archive] With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Story Only)

[Mr Zoat]

20th July 2013
21:52 GMT

Kara looks around the arctic panorama. 24 hour sunlight, air temperature a balmy 1o​C and filled with intermittent sleet. Fortunately, my armour is sealed and Kara's robes are hydrophobic.

"Am I going to be shooting at targets again?"

Between my ring and her super senses, we have no difficulty communicating with one another. I scheduled almost all of our previous sessions during dry days… Possibly an oversight on my part, but at the time she was fairly clear about not intending to get into fights.

"No, that was an exercise to help you maintain control of your abilities when under stress. This is about how to actually fight."

"Ah-. Against you?"

"We will be sparring, but I think I'll start you off against something a little easier."

I fabricate… A basic humanoid robot frame, with a kinetic belt to let it fly, and… Basic combat programming. The O.M.A.C.s were probably more intelligent, but we can work up to that. Uh… Ah. Heat-resistant armour panels but leave the joints exposed, add a low-power plasma pulse gun to the head and… Weaker crumbler gauntlets to the hands. Enough to sting, not enough to actually disintegrate her.

And activate.

"You'll be fighting this thing."

"Did you have that in subspace?"

"No, I just built it. I'm not expecting-."

She holds up her right hand in a 'stop' gesture. "Wait a moment. You can just create a robot out of nothing?"

"Not out of nothing. I need ring power, and I'm not a technologist or programmer myself so I'm mostly copying other people's work."

"But you don't need raw materials or parts?"

"That reduces the cost, but no. Why?"

"There's been a few times lately where it might have been nice to have an army of robots."

"Alright. Do you know any A.I. programmers you would trust with programming their brains with the capacity to make the complexity of judgements that they would need? Because the best I could do would be a telepresence system or making them fully intelligent in their own right. And I don't really have time to be the father of a new machine species at the moment."

She frowns thoughtfully. "I could.. do it."

"Really? I thought you were focused on pure maths."

"Yes, but I could adapt the Eradicator program-."

"Noooo."

"Okay, the name's a bit misleading, but they were really just high quality security robots."

"Which need constant oversight and direction and whose evaluation matrix makes them a bit weird about kryptonian societal norms."

"I could change those!"

"You could, except that humans aren't a monoculture. There's no such thing as 'human cultural norms', and from what I remember about their value judgement system they need something in there in order to judge anything."

She exhales, eyes dipping as she thinks it over. "It should still be a solvable problem."

"Feel free to look into it. But this drone has basic combat programming and nothing else."

She nods. "And the dangerous parts are the hands and the face, just like the Operatives."

"It uses far less power, but you should act as if they were dangerous."

"But they're not?"

"A hit wouldn't be. If it could grab you for several minutes it would be, but I'd call it off if that was happening."

She nods. "What should I do?"

"To start with, evade it for a minute and then destroy it." I make a stopwatch construct behind me. "I'll lecture you while you're doing that as an additional distraction."

"Right." She nods, locking her eyes on the robot.

"Activate."

I release the robot and start the clock. It drops a little in the air before activating its kinetic belt, then checks its surroundings. Then it locks onto Kara and charges its plasma gun.

"Is it on easy mode?"

"You heard me say that I'm-" The robot takes a long ranged shot, which Kara effortlessly evades. "-not a programmer, right? There's an adaptive component, so it won't just-" It takes another shot which Kara evades again, and then starts flying towards her with its hands to its sides. "-keep taking long ranged shots forever. If it can't learn quickly enough, I'll make a few more and network-" Three shots in quick succession, and Kara has to actually put a little effort into dodging in the right direction to avoid all three. "-them together."

"Does it know that I only have to survive a minute?"

"Not in any meaningful sense. It will learn that you only attack after a minute, but it's not mentally complex enough to 'know' things. It doesn't have abstract reasoning."

The robot accelerates as Kara backs up. Since she has no particular reason to let it get close enough to punch her until the minute is up, it's going to have to pursue her. I might add a restriction after the first couple of bouts, but that's an intelligent thing to realise.

"One thing you should always-" The robot continues making shots, and-. Ah, it's realised that it can vary the speed at which they move. It tries a trio of faster shots, but all they do is increase Kara's focus. "-do is evaluate where the danger comes from, both to yourself and others. Sometimes, it's best to keep away-" I gesture to her and the robot. "-while in others it's better -or essential- to rush down the target as quickly as possible. If you encountered this robot in the wild you'd be better off attacking it the moment you realised that its weapons weren't dangerous to you, because they are more dangerous to other people."

She glances at the clock behind me, then dodges a cluster of shots the robot times to bracket her at the same time. She's forced to move upwards more, but that's about all it achieved.

"What if it's not obvious?"

"You can provisionally estimate it based on known factors, such as available power supply and any previous examples of weapons from the same villain. You can hold back and test it, for example by throwing things at it to see how it responds. Does it ignore things it doesn't consider threats, or dodge or deflect everything? Can it dodge? What's its peripheral vision like? And depending on what else is going on you might decide that it doesn't matter and just try to avoid getting hit."

Kara nods, watches the time run out and then fires her heat vision at the robot's neck. It melts through, head and body falling towards the arctic ground.

I catch both, and reattach them.

"Good. Again."

 

[Mr Zoat]

20th July 2013
23:35 GMT

Five this time.

Three close the distance and try and engage Kara in close combat.

One a little further back which tries to shoot her with a maximum speed shot while she's distracted.

One even further back which is overseeing the fight and sharing its recordings with the others, allowing them to react to things they can't see.

And they've adapted to her admittedly-basic close quarters skills. Not magically adapted; gaining the ability to reliably predict what the person you are fighting is going to do doesn't somehow negate the difference in strength or speed. But at this point most of Kara's losses have come from them positioning their disruptor fists in such a way that they tag her arms or torso while she focuses on one of the others.

Even more difficulty comes from the fact that Kara is trying to take them 'alive'.

Now, when Kal-El does that, it means that he's going to assess how much damage they can take and then punch them until they reach that point. Without a power ring it isn't often that he's able to 'silver-bullet' people, and Kara's in the same position. So I've been adding in random 'weaknesses'. Sometimes they're vulnerable to their own weapons. Sometimes they have a delay between charging their hands and their face weapon. Sometimes half can use both if the others use neither. Spotting what their 'thing' is makes taking them down easier, but equally… If you're fighting Superman, you're not going to take a doctorate course in radiology mid-fight to learn how his kryptonite vulnerability works. Sometimes doing it the clean way isn't practical.

Perfect is the enemy of good enough and all that.

Kara drops under a volley and then darts left, grabs a robot's thigh (she stopped grabbing their calves after I put a crumbler generator in their feet) and spins, throwing it at the robot on shooting duty. It evades, but she followed her projectile and tries to take it down with a punch to the face-. But the spotter saw where Kara was and relayed it in time for it to move out of the way.

A bolt of heat vision leaps for the spotter's face, but it's learned that's how she responds to its actions and it gets its vambrace in the way-.

While it's blinded, she grabs her initial target by the wrists and slaps its hands together -destroying the crumblers- before hammering it towards the ground.

"I'm going to rule that one as disabled." I transmit the code, and the robot powers down. "If those were actual crumbler gauntlets he'd lose his hands and have a lot of broken bones."

Kara tries to dart randomly to avoid fire, but they're getting good at predicting her 'random'.

"Did that make me lose?"

"In real life, using excessive force doesn't cause you to move to a 'mission failed' screen. You still have to complete the mission, even if you're going to get lectured -or arrested- later. A bunch of alien pirates attack a university, and you hit one so hard that he bursts despite wearing a force field? His dozen friends are still killing, looting and enslaving."

Kara squints her heat vision to 'low power' and starts shooting at their shoulders, arms and hands. Against a normal human those would cause extremely painful injuries, but probably wouldn't disintegrate what they hit. It's also low power enough that Earth-built armour can absorb it for a while, so… A good lesson. You can fight with one hand behind your back to try and keep the people you're fighting alive, but that's going to increase the risk-

The oversight robot has noticed that Kara's vision is distracted by aiming her shots, and powered towards her.

-that you're going to lose.

One robot moves a little awkwardly, exposing its elbow joint to Kara's beams. She focuses, and it jerks as the joint melts.

And if you're dead, then you can't protect anyone.

The robot actually throws its punch before Kara… Hears it? Her eyes widen and she shoots upwards and twists around the fist-. And gets kicked downwards by another robot because they've learned that she flies upwards when she gets startled. Just a normal blow from its leg so she's not 'out', but the kinetic force from the belt means that she effectively just punched herself in the head.

"I'm fine!"

"I'm not Kal-El, Kara. You don't need to reassure me of the patently obvious."

The next heat vision shot is mid-power, aimed at the strongest part of the armour. She loops around as another robot tries shooting her, ducks and counters a charge and… Yes, target disabled. It plummets towards the ground, impacting a little way from the last one.

"Good situational awareness. What's Ak-Var doing with himself these days?"

"Moving duty. Kal's finally stopped keeping an eye on him."

"Why was he doing that? I didn't think his criminal record-."

"No, it wasn't that. Kal wouldn't get fixated-"

"Penguins."

"-on-. What? Oh!"

The robots rapid fire across the volume of air that she's occupying, and unfortunately that involves the shots passing through that area and risking hitting a penguin nesting ground on the land below.

Kara dives for the deck, skims the ground grabbing stones as she goes and blurs as she throws stones to intercept-. Nearly every shot, and since I don't want the R.S.P.B. on my case I'll block that one myself.

Kara's eyes widen in guilt as I make a construct Hululu clutch her chest and fall over, dead.

And then all of the surviving robots shoot her in the back of the head.

"Game."

"Uhhh…"

The still functional robots return to their start point, and I fly towards the dead ones.

"Something else you should realise. B-."

"Innocent people-" She nods. "-will die too. I can't completely stop that happening and I can't let it distract me because if I do more innocent people will die."

"And that's before we get onto 'smart penalties'."

"No."

"No?"

"I think if I started looking for times when letting innocent people die would stop a villain quicker, then I'd start seeing them."

"Fair enough."

She frowns, rubbing the back of her head. "You're not going to argue about it?"

"You clearly understand the idea. If you've decided that you'd rather err on the optimistic side, that's up to you. I can't prove that you're objectively wrong. Just… Bear in mind that you might run into a situation where it's really obvious." I knit the fallen robots back together. "Oh, have you given the name thing any more thought?"

"English is my fourth language. The best I could come up with was 'Superion', and that's only because I saw it on a giant robot T.V. show."

"How about Flamebird?"

She blinks. "Well, it… Doesn't start with an 'S'."

"I might be able to talk Other Kara into taking it-" My ring blinks. "-instead? Excuse me. Yes?"

Alan's face appears.

"Good news?"

"I guess that kinda depends what you were hoping for."

"Batman's taking a holiday and the mind wipes are being reversed?"

"Ahhhh… No. Why don't you..? Come to the Hall of Justice so we can talk this over?"

"I'll be right there."