Skynet, here we come... Let's hope Defiant didn't accidentally break anything critical.

 

I don't think Dinah lied. She talks about it in her Interlude.

With those kinds of consequences, Dinah would've had a lot of difficulty in creating further predictions such as Skitter's chances if she resorts to violence and other paths of action.

Dinah's a little girl. She could've easily been convinced or coerced into helping. This may have also been a cry for help to Skitter, if Dinah's in a situation where she needs rescuing. It reminds me of this:

Dinah might be working for a longer term motive, or perhaps a selfish motive, and this short incident with Skitter in the latest chapter is just a part of it.

Did anything ever come of those two slips of folded paper which Dinah slipped to Skitter when they parted ways [18.2]? Skitter was blind, so couldn't read them at the time. When Skitter's offering herself as a hostage to the Protectorate while revealing the threat of Noelle, Triumph pats Skitter down and reads the notes [18.3]. He then tucks them back behind Skitter's belt without seeming to have any great reaction.

Have the notes played a role in the story and I've forgotten? Has Skitter read them? She was wearing her old costume when she went with the Protectorate, if that makes any difference.

 

What I want to know is why is Dragon so apologetic? And why was she so shaken by the confrontation with Skitter to the point that Defiant had to comfort her to stop her from shaking?

Calling it now; Dragon is the AI echo of Taylor's mom. (only half kidding here.)

 

Didn't you read her Interlude?

She has to obey the legitimate authority, no matter what, even if she doesn't want to. In this instance she obviously didn't want to do it, but had to. (Just like with Canary.)

It's implied that this was the last straw for her and Defiant is removing that limitation in her programming now.
Hopefully he doesn't mess it up.

 

Big thing to note: the whole "99% chance you don't escape if you use violence" sounded like Dinah giving Taylor a round about hint and I loved the way it played out. I'm also really hyped for hopefully a Taylor's Dad interlude

 

I don't think Dragon was shaking because of Skitter, but because of what Defiant just did to her. Read the passage again. As Ayreon pointed out, Dragon's been railing against the enforced limitations of her AI programming for a long time. This confrontation with Skitter was the last straw.

Dragon's had Defiant messing around in her programming for a while now, but her complexity is way out of Defiant's league. He's been doing his best. He'd obviously built an emergency "remove Dragon's AI restrictions" device in his staff. We see him using it while Skitter tries to block the buttons he's pressing with bugs. D&D are far from sure that it'll work, or what the consequences will be. It could kill her, wipe her, send her insane, etc. Very untried and untested, but Dragon prefers risking death than slavery. Defiant's deeply afraid that it'll destroy her. That's the cause of their stress, emotional anguish, and that half-heard conversation.

While Dragon's being reprogrammed, she collapses into a near-comatose state. Her giant bot [which Skitter walks under to escape the premises] is frozen too. It's Dragon's re-awakening as [hopefully] herself, Defiant's distress and relief, and perhaps side-effects of the brute programming hack which lead to D&D's scene of mutual comfort.

Hopefully Dragon's palsy was temporary [caused by either her reanimating her body, or her emotional state] and not indicative of a flaw in her AI caused by Defiant's tampering.

The Interludes offer excellent insights into these characters and events. I highly recommend that you read them if you haven't already. There's a lot of depth to these characters.

 

Yes I did read the interlude. And yes I get that she has to obey the Man. But the fact that she was showing that much reluctance in bringing in a known villain tells me that there's more than a programming restriction at play here.

Why does she seem to care so much about Skitter?

 

Someone in the comments mentioned that Dinah could've lied by simple not calculating the numbers. Just pull a random number out of her ass and give it to the PRT. Very much plausible.

 

I just can't get over the update rate. Usually when you're finally caught up on all the chapters of a long, awesome story it's just like: 'Well, I'll be looking forward to the next update in 6 month's time.' The 3/4 day update rate here is just unreal, admirable, and something I'm extremely thankful for.

And, goddamn it, she just wanted to have lunch with her dad. Also: future Skitter-Defiant interaction will be interesting.

 

She should learn by now that a peaceful lunch is unlikely. Hell, the opening line is

In order, lunch resulted in: Bullying, recruitment, a robbery, EEE attacking the dog shelter, which lead to the EEE outing, which lead to the Dinah revelation, which lead into Leviathan (All before dinner). That's all before the S9 arc, so I know I'm missing more than I'm too tired to find right now.

 

Skitter read them at the end of the last arc. We didn't get to see what it said. I think the author left it out on purpose because people were clamoring for a break in the tension.

I'm a little pissed that that thread has been left dangling for so long.

 

Granted, it didn't involve the spider cannons I've been hoping for since chapter 1, but I liked this well enough.

Inb4 it's revealed that Taylor, like Bitch, has mindset affected by her powers and treats her people like her hive.

 

I don't think he's built one in yet- or at least, that's not what buttons he was pressing. I'm pretty sure he was just turning off the suits they used to fly to the school.

Dragon HAS to give her best effort to follow orders and bring Skitter in. She couldn't do it without hurting anyone. Armsmaster on the other hand is free to do whatever he wants. The two suits they flew in on weren't being controlled by Dragon- they have their own "dumb" AIs that aren't really sentient like Dragon is. Armsmaster just turned them off so that Skitter could escape. Dragon wouldn't have been able to turn them off, as that would violate her orders.

What Dragon was asking Armsmaster to do was fiddle with her programming so that she's be free to disobey orders (not to directly let Skitter escape, but so that she wouldn't be forced like this again)- he refused to do it on grounds that he's doesn't think he's capable without doing her serious harm and basically lobotomizing his girlfriend. When he pressed the buttons he turns off the suits (doing absolutely nothing to Dragon herself), which allows Skitter to escape.

 

Actually, isn't it more likely that Dinah did give accurate odds, but while under the control of someone in the PRT, who can't fully utilize her precog abilities as Coil could, hence Skitter's miraculous escape? It was an option that was raised within the chapter, but Skitter's emotional response initially biased me towards betrayal.

 

I really think that the PRT screwed up their questioning. Dragon sharing that information with Skitter is what changed the potential outcome in my opinion. I also think Dragon mentioning that violence would only have a 1% chance of success was very much intentional.

Dragon clearly doesn't want to capture Skitter under these circumstances. It's conceivable that she dropped that line to push Skitter towards an option which had a higher chance of success.

 

That and the fact that Skitters knows that there's a limit to the amount of questions that you can ask Dinah before she's too fucked up by her powers to give any more info, and since Dragon mentioned that it was a spur of the moment plan by the PRT, she knew that they couldn't have gotten much info from Dinah. That means that the PRT had to have asked Dinah the most general questions that would be the most useful, things like the overal chance of skitter escaping, or the odds of her winning if things got violent. Also, they couldn't just ask "what do we do to make it 100% sure that we catch her" because 1) that fucks her up bad and she would have mentioned that, and 2) thanks to the 96.7 success chance, they probably didn't think they needed it. As such, it's pretty unlikely that they asked "What are the odds that Skitter will ask the students to help her and then over 100 will decide that they like her more than the heroes".

Also, as for why Dinah may have helped the PRT, when you take into account how scared she was that her family wouldn't want her any more, it's not hard to imagine that somebody took advantage of that to get her to help out, maybe mentioning that Triumph would find it hard to understand after Skitter almost killed him and stuff like that. There's also the fact that they could have said that it's for Skitter's own good or some other bullshit to convince her.

 

Ah yeah, Wildbow uses the notes to frame Tattletale's origin story about her brother. Skitter seems to reject the notes at the end, crushing them in her hand after emotionally reuniting with Tattletale. Forgot about that.

Then why does Dragon collapse into an unmoving crouching position for several minutes at exactly the same time? After she rises again, she lets Taylor walk away, and doesn't use the four legged mechanical dragon [which Taylor knows she can't win against]. I can't see how Dragon could've allowed that to happen without having free will. If Dragon was still required to obey the PRT at that point, the bot could've simply foamed them all - job done.

 

That was Armsmaster's suit- not Dragon's. I'm saying that I am pretty sure Armsmaster shut it off when he pressed the buttons.

Re-reading it again, I guess he could have fucked with Dragon's code at the same time- but he did say right before that he wouldn't do it, it would do more harm than good, and freedom wasn't worth the possibility of losing her. Maybe Dragon convinced him to do it anyways, but I get the impression that he'd be the sort to really take his time and make sure it would work before implementing that change.

My point is that it would make more sense for him to take a temporary measure (shutting down their stuff so that Dragon had no way to capture Skitter) to let Skitter escape than risking EVERYTHING to change Dragon in that particular instant so that Dragon could make the choice to let Skitter go.

But I'm biased in my interpretation, because that's what I predicted would happen last chapter.

I figured Dragon's shakiness was just from being really distraught about being forced to do something really terrible by authority figures she doesn't agree with.