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Singing Basket
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>"Projected time until this world becomes uninhabital?"
"Worst case scenario, somewhere in the next two hundred years. Best case, three to four thousand years. Plenty of time by your scale, but a dangerously small amount of time by my scale."
>"Has anyone made it inside the tower yet?"
"Technically yes. One user lead a group of five others in a blitzkrieg attempt at the tower. He succeeded at getting a foot in the door. A shame the rest of him did not make it. The next closest attempt was one who lead a sizable legion, believing that large numbers would guarantee success. I learned that day that large numbers guarantee napalm."
>"Let me play devil's advocate for a moment, here. Do we have any reason or evidence to support this belief? Can we afford to spend all our time and resources on getting there, and assuming a miracle is waiting? If this would is dying, it almost strikes me as irresponsible not to try and take some other direct action to help or evacuate the population. "
"I do not know for certain. But my explicit purpose is not to save a dying world, it is to raise users so that they may attempt to reach the top of the tower. For all I know, there could be some supremely bored individual with cake, confetti, and a little party hat waiting to congratulate someone on their success. Either way, our job is unchanged."
>"Sydney, what do you use to communicate with the rest of your networks? If we to, say, put you in a Faraday cage, would administrators still be able to send and receive messages?"
"If what you see were my main body, the answer would be yes. However, this is a projection that is anchored to your position. I am currently hardwired into the larger Psychopomp systems and have a direct connection to the netsphere, through which all communication is handled. If your goal were to remove me from the system, and thus prevent the Safeguards from using that connection, you would have to break into the main structure, find me, and rip me out by hand."
>"How about if I head for the other side of the planet, where the Safeguard are presumably less active, launch there, and orbit around to the L1 point?"
"Off the top of my glowing core section, the first problem would the use of anti-orbit weaponry, such as large ballistic missiles. Or even anti-air weaponry, if the safe-guards can respond fast enough. Attempting stealth in orbit is functionally impossible, as many of the sensors can easily ping out your location. If you were to say, loop around the planet first, you would have the benefit of losing whatever tracking method they use and find a sneaky approach. For further advice, I recommend the book 'Space Flight and Submarines: An Approach to Stealth' by Herald van Blitzen. If you feel space combat is a risk, I also recommend 'Anything is a weapon once you strap a rocket to it.' by W. Massachusets."
"But how do you intend to make a spaceship? Pure dusting is, as you surmised, a risky endeavor. That method is inefficient, and small mistakes are easy to make. With complicated machinery like this, any mistake can easily turn fatal."
>"I could take over the infrastructure used to make those hunter-robots."
"...one moment please, while I search for relevant information."
"..."
"..."
"...I'm afraid I don't have relevant information, as that idea is insane and has never been attempted before."
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