2077/Brainiac Res/U/Rre/X/Ion: System Error

Brainiac Res/U/Rre/X/Ion: System Error
Date of Scene:	20 August 2017
Location:	The Temporal Center of the Universe: near Oa.
Synopsis:	Saving the Universe is hard, dirty work, and then come the regrets.
Cast of Characters:	Indigo, StarDrake, Gothic Lolita, Viridian

---

Indigo has posed:
INSIDE:

    Brainiac 8 makes a facial expression for the first time: its cotton candy eyebrows lift in mild surprise at the sensation of a virulent microorganism with a wifi vector beginning to infect the digital perfection of its coding language. Its transorganic body responds immediately on a cellular level; biological autoimmune factories begin producing white blood cells armed with nanoscopic cybernetic weaponry, and firewalls seek to encapsulate the infection behind multi-tiered interpolative syntax emulation protocols that scramble the virus's signal to neutralize its transmissions. Its defenses are elegant and efficient. The technovirus has no chance to take hold.
    Then a second virus emerges from within the Trojan files Brainiac 8 itself once hid in.
    The technovirus is an easily contained threat. Like any virus, it has no purpose but to self-replicate until the host is destroyed and exists only as a colony for further self-replication.
    Indigo.mal is not. It blossoms with a relentless purpose, its program spreading tumorous code through Brainiac 8's. Its tendrils spread through Brainiac 8's memory files, copies them, and assimilates them with brutal efficiency, slipping through the signal-scrambling firewall by riding Brainiac 8's own surge-protected circuitry; Brainiac 8 responds by shutting down those circuits with isolation protocols, only to find Indigo.mal reactivating the pathways with electrical surges from the power distribution nodules already under its command.
    Every attack Indigo makes, Brainiac 8 can counter, but every counter Brainiac 8 makes, Indigo can resist. After all, she too is a Brainiac.
    All this is indicated with a single, grunted word: "Error." It's a word Brainiac 8 didn't need to say; it has no users to alert to the malfunction. Brainiac 8 isn't the one who said it.
    Outside the skullship, the warswarms are faltering. Their perfect harmony is disrupted by some small, barely noticeable degree as their orchestrating intelligence shunts some of its calculatory capacity away from them to deal with the three battles waging inside its own head.

OUTSIDE:

    The teardrop-shaped warships of liquid metal shudder and go dark. To almost any known sense, they would appear to have shut down. Mikh Drakos might be the only one with the senses necessary to feel the charge of potential building up between them, though (and Lanterns outside the shield might be clever enough to notice the drones chasing the Milano inside Brainiac 8's shield have not stopped their chase, which is suspicious), just before three of them detonate into dust. The shrapnel is harmless to the Lanterns. The psychic shockwaves that follow are not. Neural chaff, you might call it; an energy wave that targets the microwave frequencies humanoid brains operate on and disrupt concentration. The focus necessary to work a power ring is suddenly impossible for all but three Lanterns of species whose brains aren't susceptible; three Lanterns who now have to try to save the remaining thirty who can't keep their heads together enough to survive in the vacuum.

StarDrake has posed:
Mikh Drakos has the senses to feel the potential-wave building up, but only notices it with part of his mind, a nagging sensation that he should be doing something. Like he forgot to turn off the water in the bathroom. The Star*Drake is currently in the process of taking the planet Oa out of the reach of a certain Brainiac 8, and while Mikh's tiny robot remote has a quantum entanglement bus to his multiple, redundant computer brains in the Star*Drake, the problem with quantum entanglement is that dimensional drives attenuate it. And the entanglement breaks, leaving the AI version of Mikh driving. Fortunately it's not an insane entity. Then again the Guardians haven't tried to explain their Grand Unified Model to ship-Mikh yet.

Meanwhile Milano-Mikh //could// sense that gathering charge, and probably does, but he's too busy plundering the various zero-point states of different allegedly abstract fields that make up spacetime around the Brainiac Skullship -- and that plundering is bringing weapons and systems into existence as particles are assembled into hardware and energy fields protecting Milano ... and there's the charge discharge. Mikh doesn't have time to swear, but it needs to happen. Several speakers on the Milano break out in vulgarity in Interlac as subprocessors are assigned the task. Then he assembles and shoots a torpedo directly at the Lanterns, a sphere-field generator that might be able to assist the Lanterns by providing them with some kind of a defense. Maybe.

The Milano sends out several waves of Screamers at the liquid metal ships, emitting a variation on the jamming effect targeting the Brainiac control signals. They'll likely be nuisances at best. Meanwhile, Peter Quill is likely to be wondering what the hell is happening to his ship. Well, suck it up Starlord, Mikh needs a body and the Milano will do for now.

Gothic Lolita has posed:
    Viridian slides the connector home into the port on the side of Lolita's head...and then crumples, as Lolita's arms slide around her to catch her. The gynoid lowers herself gracefully, her legs folding up next to her, lowering Viridian's head to her ripped and torn skirt, the shimmering blue from the cloth reflecting through her suddenly crystalline hair. In this conflict, she is crude. Barely worthy of notice by Brainiac 8's impossibly advanced systems. She might as well be a toaster to the virus suddenly flowing out, through the signals transmitting from Viridian...and indeed, this is part of the reason her own communication systems have been shut down, save for point-to-point transmissions.

    She can't punch this, or break it, or smash it.

    She can only trust that Viridian can do it, and opens her systems, over the alerts spreading across her inner HUD as her primary directive protests her risking the cessation of her mission..and starts counting down the already low chance calculated for success as she starts to quietly battle with herself. Holding herself vulnerable, and open, a quiet pressence, a beacon that starts to add to Viridian's attempts to find who they've come for.

Viridian has posed:
    When Juliet Anneliese Viridian Nox was a child she was infected by the Techno-organic Virus. TOV. Doctors tried everything they could to help the precocious little brown haired girl but there was nothing they could do. Nothing halted the spread and little slowed it down. By the time the child was eight-years-old she was on death's door. That was when her mother, renowned roboticist Margaret Nox, stumbled upon a secret. They had established that the infection had been drawn to Juliet's brain activity. But it wasn't the brain waves that called to the Techno-organic Virus. Not precisely. It was what they did.
    Viridian was registered as a Class 8 Technopath. The classification system was nebulous but it wa supposed that were she fully trained and unencumbered she could act as the central intelligence behind an entire fleet of vessels or perform other similarly impressive feats. They didn't have luxury of using this power to its fullest potential. Instead, moving quickly, a fellow Technopath was called upon and they taught her how to lock the Techo-organic Virus down. It could be purged or expunged. After its advent Viridian's hair began to shift colours with her mood. It took her ability to walk. And a portion of her power was forever tied up in its defeat...
    Without thosee fetters Viridian finds herself renewed with purpose. She throws every ounce of herself, every iota of her being and eveyrthought into her assault upon Brainiac 8. It's a furious, unrelenting assault. Not enough to destroy a Brainiac, but confuse? Detain? And perhaps more. She starts tearing chunks out of code and sending conflicting signals even while, in her minds eye, the file flagged 'Indigo.mal' rampages. She wouldn't allow it to be shut down or corrupted.
    The countermeasures, however, are too much. Power is nothing without training or skill and managing this many processes, subroutines, virii and worms while fighting off the technological antibodies is proving too much for the diminutive Technopath. In the real world she thrashes violently, like she's undergoing a seizure. The virus continues to spread and her eyes glass over.
    Still, the girl's mind is strong. And when Gothic Lolita throws her processes into the fray Viridian forges forward and subsumes errored processes. She moves to merge with Indigo.mal. But still. It isn't enough. She falters, a mere million 1s and 0s away from rejoining her beloved and rescuing the files which made her a person and not just a machine. The countermeasures swarm over her.
    Beside Indigo, toward the back of the chamber, a dish deploys from behind Max's blowhole. The robotic pink dolphin uses his time tempered mental hardline into Viridian's psyche and begins to send a time lapsed signal. "To my daughter, Juliet Nox. I was wrong and I'm sorry. There isn't much I can do against something like this. But I want you to know I'm with you. I love you, Juliet. And you as well, Indigo. You're both my daughters... Don't give up. The, ah. Nova Corps let me know what's going on out there..."
    Somewhere deep inside of Brainiac's robotic psychic Virdian screams, and throws herself into the fray with renewed vigor. Indigo was Right. There.

Indigo has posed:
    INSIDE:

    Brainiac 8 looks calm and cold. If you could feel its brain, it too would feel calm and cold, faced with a problem, yes, but one well within its capacity to handle. Esternally, however, it is babbling mechanically, its voice devoid of emotion or reason. "I... You... Impact with Omega Attractor imminent... All cosine subscripts-- Negative space resonating with ambient radiation... Ideocircuitry forming...
    "D-do I know you?"

HerUTSIDE:

    The Screamers stream through the small (and closing) hole the Green Lanterns blew in Brainiac 8's shield. When they detonate, their scrambling messages... well, maybe they have an effect? The warships don't seem inclined to activate and start firing again, anyway. Who knows; with this mess, they could all be prepping for a chance to join and form into the Mega-Zord.

StarDrake has posed:
Milano does a series of ridiculous jinks, wibbles, pop-and-locks, and side-slides that avoid some of the still ongoing Pestiferous Protections, because Quill is driving and he's insane. A small (half-kiloton) antimatter explosion shows that something tried to remove one of Mikh's previously-applied directional baffles (slowing the Skullship) and set off the defensive self-destruct. It's tiny relative to the size of the ship, but it does provide the 'thorn' to someone grabbing the thistle.

Meanwhile Mikh is reaching further along alternate geodesics, his Ghost-self drawing on the abundant energy, but needing to make more STUFF... and there, in the not-a-direction that Oa is receding in, something freaky weird is happening. The stubborn ghost-of-a-mutant from another universe has been preserved from destruction so many different ways, and the important bit is the way he keeps his backups off in a different direction than most of the universe uses even for random alternative energy translation. He has an intrusion detector and it just SPOTTED something, at the edge of where mathematics and concept space become reified. There's a circuit? Why is there a circuit? This is not ok.

He creates a bizarre little box, and loads it up with nonsense: Chinese Opera as sung by Teletubbies, the entire library of works of They Might Be Giants, a collection of random episodes of Welcome to Nightvale, and the first and last performances of TapeFace on his debut year. Then he balances it with fifty separate children singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and sends the box in the direction of that circuitry. When it gets close enough, it begins broadcasting, sending the concentrated illogic bomb by way of gluon exchanges, strange quark decays, and semaphores.

Milano actually takes a few hits without the hardware rebuilding itself as Mikh spends critical seconds trying to give a cosmic Wet Willie to B-8. But then he's back, and giggling in a disturbing way as he begins putting the ship together.

"You OK there, Pete? I'm fine. Ship's at 120 percent and rising."

Gothic Lolita has posed:
    -Warning: Possibly primary directive violation. Cessation of unit not deemed necesssary to destruction of targeted research facility. Recommend termination of communication stream.-

    <Calculation of odds suggest operation remains feasible. Risk acceptable.>

    -Odds currently falling below 12.3 percent.-

    <Low odds do not indicate failure. Continue operation.>

    -Possible primary directive violation. Current objective sentient is not associated with Project Livewire. Recommend termination of communication stream.-

    <...no.>

    -Logic error.-

    <I will not leave them.>

    The petite mecha's head tilts back, as her processor is pulled into Viridian's control, the governors that usually keep it from functioning only slightly above normal human reactions releasing, as it spins up to full speed, her glowing red eyes starting to flicker and pulse. AFter a moment, Gothic Lolita's lips part in a slow, exhalation, as steam starts to curl out from between them, escaping in slow pants. Her internal HUD starts popping up warnings. -Warning: Primary core heat exchangers exceeding safety limits. 92 percent...93 percent...94 percent....-

    <You can do it Viridian. She's waiting for you...>

    -Warning: Primary core heat exchangers have exceeded maximum load tolerance.-

    <Rerouting excess to somatic heat exchange systems to preserve processor function.> SEctions of Lolita's exposed skin along her shoulders, back, and sides part, more steam starting to leak out slowly from inside, as she pants more, sucking in cool air as quickly as she can to run over her strained systems.

Viridian has posed:
    It's like trying to swim through gelatin. The girl forges forward through the morass of corupting data, fighting her way through crumbling countermeasures and bits of lost code with only one real goal in mind. Reuniting with Indigo. two halves of a whole. Except... There are more than two parts.
    The little robots in the corridor have linked hands in a decidedly human gesture and they are lending their processor power to Gothic Lolita as her own systems go into hyperdrive. The hum of the robots' fans coming to life to try to cool their processors is loud enough to be heard, a hum in the background that begins to fill the room. Then Max joins the network as well, his energy and thusiasm fusing with Viridian's flagging spirit.
    The Technopath latches onto Indigo's code finallly. In the real world the seizures intensify. The techmogrification of her body continues. The young woman's hair is now perfectly white as fiber optics cease to respond to emotional impulse in order to glow.
    Viridian doesn't pay any attention to the potential damage to her physical form. None of that matters right now.
    As Skritch would say whilst quoting the moderately popular Disney film on which he is definitely not based, "Ohana means family. Family means nobody gets left behind."
    Viridian finally latches on to the personality algorithms aand ideocircuitry she needs and begins to pull.

Indigo has posed:
INSIDE:

    Viridian's strain to pull out Indigo's code lasts only an instant. She has help making it easier: Brainiac 8. It's only too happy to lend its processing power to Viridian's effort to remove the corrupted files, and as their subtle influence begins to leave, it feels astonishment growing into humiliation and then rage as it realizes how thoroughly its logic had been infiltrated. Why did it launch a warship assault on Oa? Why did it attack the Green Lanterns? Why didn't it just blitz them by activating the Omega Attractor immediately to overwhelm any puny Oan defenses and harvest the rich, idyllic energy of the Corps' destruction?
    Because its mind had been invaded by a fragment of the Indigo program, tweaking its very perceptions to make foolish choices that would delay its success by giving others chances to mount a defense. And who could tell how far the corruption extended? Was its very plan undermined by some insidious manipulation from the Indigo malware?
    The risk must be assessed and dismissed. Brainiac 8 cannot afford the risk that its calculations are Trojans. It suspends the attack on Oa for as long as a complete systems diagnostics will take; a diagnostic of an intelligence spanning multiple dimensions at this point. It will take forever. At least two minutes, maybe more as it diverts some processing power to repairing the power relays that fuel the shield and quarantining the technovirus...
    And, on her way out, just to add insult to injury, Indigo's greedy, grasping program infiltrates and steals one last bit of code: it copies Brainiac 8's firewall for download into Viridian's brain. Take that, technovirus.

    OUTSIDE:

    Circuitry is spreading down from multiple dimensions. It began in the tenth, where it attracted little enough attention, but became progressively more intrusive as it filtered down: right now in the fifth dimension, Gsptlnz is discovering to her horror that the imagination-driven weaponry of their universe is simply food to the blossoming techgnostic arrays as it incorporates their alien, ineffable knowledge into itself. Mikh Drakos's attempt is faring no better, but he has a bit of luck: in the fourth dimension, the blossoms have only just begun, and they take their time about consuming the information fed to them, even if that feeding will ultimately make them stronger.

StarDrake has posed:
The millisecond of calm and peace spent tidying up the shrapnel and wreckage and detailing Milano while shooting things and letting Peter drive even though the man is a complete menace has allowed Mikh Drakos to realize just exactly what Brainiac 8 is doing. Unfortunately, nobody on the Milano at this moment in time is in any kind of a position to discuss what to do about it, and frankly Mikh Drakos does not want to be the one known for creating the fourth-dimensional conceptual Glyphosate that renders all music in the universe into a sequence of farting noises. And that could totally happen if he gets this wrong. Still. Ghost-Mikh looks at the femtostructure of the slowly blossoming circuitry, riskily close to being trapped, but enough to realize what the motive and carrier and cargo analogues are, and then while it's distracted eating his illogic bomb, he gently touches the outermost edge of a circuit with a conceptual virus. "111111" is what he tells it. "111110" it says, happily, to be taken up by its neighbors if it conveys things properly. "1111101" is next. It continues. When it gets to zero it will, of course, be erased.

The ghost slides very gently and removes his backup and archive from the four-dimensional slice it's normally hidden in. Things might get hairy there.

He opens his eyes as the small robot. "Peter! You have a big badda-boom in torpedo tube five. Get it ready to fire. I fixed the chromatic skip drive that Viridian made. If we time it right, we get us, the Lanterns, and the Angels off the skull-ship and we can let the Brainiac shields contain the boom. If we miss, we can make the night sky pretty for everyone in the galaxy!"

Because explosions at a distance are pretty.

Gothic Lolita has posed:
    Lolita is an open vessel, and as the bundle of program and data that make up Indigo are pulled free, they promply flow into her data storage systems, as her lips part further in an O of suprise, her eyes widening, as the complex flow starts burning into her systems. She makes room, compressing her memory data...but Indigo is much larger, more ornate...a Faberge egg compared to her her abstract egg-like lattice.

    More and more fills, as Lolita starts to make lightning quick choices, giving up data space, deleting what she can, as prompts run across her HUD. She only stops and hesistates at one.

    Remaining files exceed available memory. Delete Homebrew.mem and Gunbunny.mem dataclusters? Y/N?

    Her eyes close. -Retaining 3% of Homebrew.mem and Gunbunny.mem dataclusters. Reallocating clusters for rewrite.-

    <...goodbye brother. Goodbye sister.>

    And then, it's done, the stream cutting off as Lolita reseals the vents along her body, still puffing as her processor starts to fall into more normal limits, as the gynoid scoops up Viridian and gets to her feet. "Roomba marines, we are LEAVING!" she proclaims, as she hops over the ring of robots surrounding her. "Quickly!"
    She starts pelting back the way they came towards the door to the huge forest of crystalline structures...away from Brainiac 8, while he's still recovering.

Viridian has posed:
    The clatter of wheels and steps is almost cacophonous as the whole group reorients itself on Gothic Lolita and they begin to tromp as one out of the corridor and into the adjoining space. The cascade of robots largely ignores anything else in the hallways. The important thing si toget Gothic Lolita and Viridian out of the vessel. The Roombas surround them in a ring of steel and lasrifles. Actually, they are pretty dangerous little guys, like a tiny turret- hard to shoot but heavily armed...
    Perhaps someday the Roomba Corps will see combat. Today, however, they are triumphantly escorting the Princess from the castle, the dragon dying as they roll along. Another successful mission.
    Viridian, for now, sleeps. Having copied Indigo's personality profile all she can really do is sleep as the Techno-organic Virus screeches to a belated halt. IT seems the damage isn't too tremendous. She will probably survive. But in the dim light of the corridors Viri's eyes shift from blue to green.

Indigo has posed:
INSIDE:

    Defenses are down. Brainiac 8's attempt to recompile its brain is, in a weird way, almost a mirror of Indigo's own, all its efforts being spent on simply confirming that it is it, that its identity is intact, that it exists. Perhaps that is a suitable revenge for the ghost that was haunting the halls of the Brainiac's mind as a purpose devoid of self with which to perceive its own mission. But revenge or no, the path to the exit point Gothic Lolita beat with her fists is guarded by nothing but the small army Viridian brought with her.

DEEP INSIDE:

    Indigo's programming is completely incomprehensible to Gothic Lolita. The data is too densely clustered to be deciphered, and its operating language is in trinary code as incompatible with Gothic Lolita's as oil is with water. But even if Gothic Lolita can't analyze Indigo's code, she can make certain deductive inferences about it from her behavior: what was a merciless, ravenous virus copying and corrupting as many of Brainiac 8's files as it could get spreads none of that infection to Gothic Lolita's programs. She just exists inside her like a ball of friendly golden light, with little coruscant arcs swelling out now and then only to recede peacefully back into itself. The cybernetic equivalent of a baby kicking in the womb, maybe. Where she brushes against Gothic Lolita's programming, there is a sense of curiosity, a need to explore, but none of the malicious invasion.

OUTSIDE:

    The drones are connected to Brainiac 8, but are not dependent on it for continuous commands. Their enslavement is built into their bodies and minds, and they are capable of continuing their own functions even as Brainiac goes temporarily comatose to scan its mind for further damage. The swarm approaches the Milano from all available sides, which even Peter Quill's piloting skills can't quite deal with, but the new weaponry upgrades and Mikh Drakos's 360-degree quantum consciousness are a match for them, and the inside of Brainiac 8's shield is fairly obscured with blood and dust from the cyborg drones blasted to pieces.
    It's through that haze of gray and red shrapnel--metal slivers and blood frozen to ice--that the rescue team must leap. The bots go without hesitation, their lasrifles lighting up the night sky not only in defense of the mistress but in strange, comical propulsion; rapidfire pulses meant to generate some thrust to help aim the magnawheeled buggers toward the Milano's path. Max, fortunately, is different, flying under his own power, bottlenose braced against Gothic Lolita's back to push her aggressively toward the Milano's cargo hold amid what looks like a cloud of fireworks from the roombas.
    The Guardians aren't the only ones thinking of escaping. The Green Lanterns unaffected by the neural chaff have collected their messmates in bubbles (or, in the case of one Lantern who looks like a warthog wearing a ninja hood and who apparently has more imagination than the other two, a biodome around a desert oasis) and are fleeing back down to Oa with their friends.
    The bomb is prepped. Whenever you're ready.

StarDrake has posed:
There they are. All three Princesses are out of the Castle. Does Milano have tractor beams? No. Rocket used them to make some sort of gun recently. It has a ghost named Mikh who can move massive amounts of technology around with something that was cleverly dubbed 'technokinesis' by someone somewhere sometime. As soon as they're clear, the scattered bits of shrapnel and drift forms into a sphere around the trio and their bot armada, providing rings for the roombas to roll along, and otherwise a protective shell from random kinetic bombardment. They also move to the Milano with unerring accuracy, despite Quill's inevitable overcomplicated attempt to shoot the torpedo down the heat vent so it can blow up in the heart of the Death St...kull.

Lanterns are clear. Oa is firmly out of phase. Fractal rose garden in fourth dimension is slightly on fire. "0000010" ... still ticking.

Mikh lays in the course and sets the slipstream engine to perform its weird, twisted trick with light and matter, to happen exactly 104 nanoseconds after the Big Badda gets into Boom range.

"OK, Quill, fire any time man."

Gothic Lolita has posed:
    As she breaks free of the skullship's gravity, Lolita automatically curls around Viridian protectively, letting Max provide the propulsion and the debris and shrapnel with Roomba guardians to provide protection. The ball spins through space as the pink dolphin cleverly bumps the ball right into the rear hatch, as it comes apart inside in a little pile of Roombas, debris and a rolling gynoid, who slides into a crouch to bleed off the impact then hefts Viri as she gets to her feet, hurrying up towards the cockpit. "We're aboard!" her voice comes over the com as she closes the rear hatch on the way past with a quick smack of her hand, then finding a chair to strap the unconscious young woman's exoskeleton into.

    Internally, she feels...very strange. Carrying another person around was never what her systems were designed for. The little touches against her consciousness are returned with very delicate, more crude brushes back, with a sense of calm and welcome and relief. She can already feel her processors straining a bit to accomodate even the drowsing entity inside her head...but she'll survive for the moment. Long enough to get away...

Viridian has posed:
Viridian, for her part, is still motionless. Atl east the seizures appear to have ceased. The Roombas gather around her in acircle. Even Skritch is, for the first time, utterly silent. All of the bots are waiting breathlessly. ASll except for Max, who nudges Gothic Lolita as only a bottlenose can do. There is still one more princess to save.

Indigo has posed:
    There is sound, but only for a moment, only for as long as the environment inside Brainiac 8's ship lasts. The light lasts a little longer. What you'd expect to be a sphere of fire is, instead, hundred of rings of prismatic light spinning rapidly inside the shield, which persists for about an hour after the machinery creating it is destroyed; 4D shields are weird like that. Maybe more interesting is the bomb's explosion. It was supposed to be pretty, but it wasn't supposed to do THAT. Did Brainiac 8 tamper with it somehow, or--
    That's when Rocket pokes his head out of a Dyson vent to peer through the cockpit windshield at the explosion through goggles with weird, lenticular lenses. "There, now THAT's a bomb. Not like that pussy little snap-pop you were gonna send over," Rocket growls smugly. "Looks even prettier through these goggles. Shame you ain't got the foresight to have goggles. That's the difference between us: preparedness."
    Quill spins around in his seat to stare at Rocket. "Rocket, who are you talking to? Me? Mikh? Seriously, do you even know who you're insulting right now?"
    "I don't need to know who I'm insultin' when I got awesome goggles," Rocket says equably.
    This continues for some time.
    In the fourth dimension, or at least adjacent to it, Mikh Drakos can see the circuitry cease its spread. It then begins to... well, there are no words for in 3D languages for what it does. It folds along an axis humans can't perceive, like a drawing on a paper napkin except if folding it made it bigger even as it vanished and drawing it made it more real than flat. It's retreating upward into higher dimensions.

StarDrake has posed:
"And it hits 0000000," Mikh says out loud over speakers, while quietly adding cats-eye points and rhinestones to Rocket's goggles. Then he begins to let go of the Milano, withdrawing himself from the controls and the matter-matrix, shifting his backup into that generally inhospitable, unused slice of 4D space again. Keep your friends close and your backups closer. Oa is going to be coming back in phase soon, well, as soon as the systems on Star*Drake detect the absence of Brainiac 8.

"How is Indigo doing? Has she finished uploading to the new body?" the Action Figure Robot Fighter asks, standing near the new chassis.

Gothic Lolita has posed:
    The flash draws Lolita's attention as she watches the explosion, strange as it is, engulfs the skullship, washing against the inside of the intensely powerful shields. In her now crowded error message full HUD, there's a flicker, then a little caption appears over where the skullship is in her visual input. -And Boom Goes the Dynamite! Mission complete.-

    Lolita sighs out, swaying a bit, as Max pokes at her as she leans on the dolphin, blinking. "Yes...I know..." she says softly, then with a brief smile at those on the bridge. "Thank you, both of you...I n-n-need to...finish...d-d-doing that n-now, M-M-Nihk..." her voice stuttering slightly, turning as she walks a bit unsteadily towards Indigo's body, with Max assisting her until she can seat herself next to Indigo's body, then pop open her I/O port again. She reaches down to pick up the waiting probe attached to the support systems for the other gynoid, then plugs it in.

    DEEP INSIDE: Lolita's consciousness nudges the glowing, beautiful orb slightly as the communication link is established, prodding it towards the exits gently. <Time to go home, Indigo...this way. Time to open your own eyes again...>

Indigo has posed:
    Indigo's program downloads into what is essentially her old brain slowly. It takes a long time: the complexity of her code really can't be overstated, so it's like pouring a mountain through a funnel. The microfibers of synthaflesh around her connection port unravel into small tentacles--now that you've seen the skullship, the tentacles she's capable of forming are even creepier than they used to be--that twist around Gothic Lolita's probe to hold it firmly in place while Indigo downloads, and downloads, and downloads.
    In about an hour, Indigo is fully downloaded into her body. Her tentacles release Gothic Lolita's probe and reform into a hand again as the decompression and installation process begins. It's apt to be a while.

Viridian has posed:
    It is perhaps just as well Indigo will be some time in reinitializing. The last thing either of the women needs is to awaken and have the other not be there. The Roombas gently hoist Viridian up from the ground, working in unison. They care her unconscious form to the creche where Indigo's body is being kept and then encircle them as the lovebirds are reunited in comatose insensation. As they come close enough for inductive data transfer a single signal is sent.

Ping.
    Picoseconds later, a response.
Ping.

    Viri shifts slightly and curls an arm around Indigo. Then nothing.

Gothic Lolita has posed:
    Lolita can't so anything but wait...again, a vessel, but this time one to be emptied, bit by bit, byte by byte. As the last of the essence of Indigo flows into her reconstructed body, Lolita lets out a quiet sigh, reaching up to pulls the probe free from her head, then taking a stutter step to the side, carefully, before she simply kicks off her shoes, not trusting herself on heels at the moment as she leans on Max a little.

    She sighs, hugging the pink dolphin quietly as she smiles at the Roombas put the two together, looking a bit relieved at the response from Viri. "...excellent." she murmurs, then straightens with visible effort, before patting the dophin.

    "...I think...I w-w-will find a p-p-place to p-p-plug in...and r-r-repair." she stutters softly, then slowly staggers away from the two creche towards the engine room, before she finally lets herself sit heavily with a solid *crunk* of deck plating giving slightly. "...oh, d-d-d-dammit...." comes a muttered, annoyed comment, before the mecha plugs into the ship's power, her red eyes flickering back to her normal blue, before she shuts down with a sigh, alone in a quiet corner.

StarDrake has posed:
Mikh creates a thermos, rezzing it into place in Gothic Lolita's grasp. The contents are highly nutritious - as long as you're not a biological. It's mostly the hard-to-find materials and components that she'll need to repair herself after that situation. Chicken Soup for the Robot Soul, without the chicken or the soup.

Then Mini-Mikh walks into the airlock and cycles outside. He should reach Oa just about in time for it to come back into time-space.

Indigo has posed:
    Brainiacs are indestructible. Just ask Superman: as long as the tiniest piece of one still exists, it can be reconstituted. That is the marvel of Indigo's code; it can literally rebuild itself as she decompresses, restoring her own lost memories as she goes despite the seeming impossibility of doing so. Perhaps Viridian feels this reconstruction as Indigo reinstalls, feels the woman she married coming back. It would please Indigo to think so, anyway.
    Six hours later, Indigo's systems are ready. She reboots and comes online, conscious again and in full control of her faculties.
    Her eyes aren't even open before she's begun screaming.