re_alignment | [Video] - Bugs bugs bugs, but they glow, so it's like Christmas spirit?

[The video comes on to Jetfire frowning thoughtfully at one of his hands, held up and... apparently crawling with pinpoints of moving lights. He shakes it, and there's a veritable cloud of winking lights exploding in all directions.

Some of them fly past the screen close enough to reveal they're tiny, dragonfly-like metal bugs. That glow.]

There was an accident, and the thirty of these that I had contained in my lab and were developing were let out. It seems their replication matrix is working, because they're certainly not thirty any longer.

I apologise if they are a... er, nuisance.

I am rather sure I can hazard a guess from a few cycles of observing that the replication matrix is working correctly though, since while they've become more as a response to the greater space available outside of the lab, I believe they're not replicating completely out of hand.

[He shakes his helm slowly, dislodging a crowd tiny bugs that has landed on his helm and nasal ridge.]

Hopefully they'll... spread outside of Haven soon.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

They ought to. Given the limited space they had available before, they might simply be drawing on previous experience, and given that that is one of a smaller area available, it will probably just take them a bit to adjust to the fact that their new "cage" is a lot larger than the Haven is.

Right.

So how did you build those things anyway.

{Pausing, jetfire considers... Well, he doesn't need to be specific, even if he has to be careful to not slip up. After a moment, he shrugs.]

A theoretical programmed framework which I used my own repair nanites to realise to give them the possibility of basic replication and repair abilities. With resources, I'd have done it in some other way, however.

[Given that it'd taken a lot of time to wipe his own imprint and specifics from the nanites.]

[In other words, the bugs were worth studying and reverse engineering. Blackarachnia just.. smirks. It looks like Jetfire just handed her a new pet project.]

That's a lot a work for such annoying bugs.

I wouldn't do anything without doing it thoroughly, especially something that could arguably be called drones and would possess limited sentience, however limited it actually is.

[It'd probably take a good while to reverse-engineer... especially since it's all based around another reality's cybertronian (and not "upgraded", either, but "old-style"), but with patient work...]

[For something this interesting, Blackarachnia can deal with how long it will take. Especially if they might be useful later.]

And just how limited is it?

Very. [There's a brief, rather dry smile.] They're extremely small, after all, and even with our technology there are limits to what can fit, especially as I did allow for some space for avoidance-adaption, so they could naturally learn to avoid what would be dangerous for them.

... That would be all the intuitive self-teaching they're capable of, and that still won't give them an infinite amount of behaviour or situations to adapt to.

[With a few upgrades and some new programing, she might be able to take what she manages to reverse engineer and create something more useful than what he made.

...This is going to be one of those projects that is going to take her a very long time to do.]

Simple, but effective.

I find that's the best, especially with something as potentially sensitive as this was, yes. I didn't want to over-complicate things, or risk additional vectors of behaviour I couldn't account for.

[Basically, he'd done everything as carefully as possible to avoid something like a ravenous swarm of teeny tiny bugs aggressively seeking out their sustenance.]

Smart. So now what are you going to do with them? Just let them go around the planet or use them for something else?

[The ravenous bugs sound like a nice weapon if she can figure out a way to control them properly. And a good targeting system. Otherwise, the entire project would be worth scrap.

Of course, this all depended on how well her programing skilled messed with older programing.]

They were intended as being part of a potential, future cybertronian eco-system, even if that is not my area of expertise, so I'm not going to use them for anything. Hopefully they'll disperse over the planet as they should, and that ought to be that.

I will, of course, attempt to keep an optic on them to be sure nothing goes wrong.

[Video] - Bugs bugs bugs, but they glow, so it's like Christmas spirit?

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