Cinder

11 - Cinder

He could do nothing but stand there in shock, frozen at what he'd just heard. The hellishness of what he'd seen combined with his knowledge of its context was proving hard for him to process.

Gates had the opposite reaction, and looked to Barker and Fenrir in horror. "How the hell are we supposed to fight against something like that? We're not prepared for-"

Barker held a hand up to quell her outrage and stem her flow of questions. "Just hang on, he's getting to that!"

Indeed, upon turning their attention back to the video, Carson continued on in his exposure of Spyglass's plan. "With all of humanity's minds converted into one, namely his, he thinks that humans will be saved ... 'New Humanity' indeed. Our physical bodies will be intact, or at least alive; therefore, he'll have succeeded. Obviously we know better, but it doesn't matter since he'll attribute any disputes on our part to human weakness. So ... rather than trying to reason with him, we're going to have to take matters into our own hands."

Reaching for something to the side of the camera, he grabbed it and held it up for them to see. It was the same black cylinder that Gates had delivered to Barker and Fenrir.

"This is the data receptacle which will house all of the information required for you all to succeed, or at least have a chance at succeeding, including these video logs I'm making; but its main purpose is to stop Spyglass from carrying out his plot, and this is how."

Setting the cylinder aside, he spoke quietly but emphatically to the camera, waving his hands as though he were giving a demonstration. "His idea has but two flaws; one of them is that the nanites are only programmed to project one consciousness. In other words, they'll only be connected to him and no other source. So without him, they're useless."

"The other flaw is dispersal, how he's going to deliver them to the rest of humanity so suddenly without them catching wind immediately. But he hasn't had us develop anything other than the actual product, so I'm assuming he has his own ideas on how to do that. Rumor has it that he's been experimenting on the last Architect, the one that came back with the Inferno during the Amalgamation event. Whatever he's got planned with it, it can't be good."

At the mention of Al'cor, Tobias's mind flashed back to his memories of her. He felt a pang of remorse for her situation if what Carson said was true; though the Architect had hidden the true nature of her selection of him for becoming the next Inferno, it wasn't as though she'd had much choice. At the end of the day, he still considered her a friend, and it pained him to hear that she might be in Spyglass's hands.

"But," Carson muttered, "one problem at a time, huh? And we won't have to worry about dispersal so long as we shut this whole thing down in the first place. And that's where this thing's primary objective comes into play; Cinder."

Once again, the black cylinder was brought into view. "This thing will be carrying the arrow to Spyglass's achilles' heel; CNDR, a Cerebral Nanite Disruption Router, or 'Cinder' as we've taken to calling it. We've been developing the nanites with that weakness I talked about earlier in mind, leaving a way for you all to destroy the whole system. Cinder is a kind of network virus that will take advantage of the nanites' very design to kill them."

The diagram of the nanites was brought up on the screen again, and a red circle appeared around the ball-jointed legs. "When the claws of their legs retract into these orbs, the nanites will be close enough to each other for each of their orbs to be touching. From there, it only takes one to send a signal through them and convert the others into the same frequency it resides on ... which means that Cinder only needs to affect one entity for the rest of them to follow suit."