Aboard the Illustrious Paragon of Devastation

[ASHLIE]

She may have been distracted when the others had formulated their plan but she still heard it and it doesn't take a genius to figure out what a defensive algorithm was doing to the people who went off to sabotage the engines.

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>> Aborting all non-essential sub-routines
>> Accessing Engine Security Protocols
>> Attempting to initiate manual override

[Narrator]

Ashlie's systems tried to get into the defensive algorithms for the Engine room.

And they were shoved back out hard.

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This unit has the defensive situation under control.  Estimate elimination of destructive lifeforms in 6.3299 minutes.

There was a brief pause, and Ashlie could tell that one of the defenses had been eliminated by one of the X-Men by the damage reports that came back.

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Ammendment: 8.1002 minutes.

[ASHLIE]

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I was not asking for permission.

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>> Secondary nodes found
>> Preparing brute-force code-transfer

And then a stream of living code tried to force it's way into one of the defensive units to override the remote-control of the AI.

[Narrator]

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Initiating defensive reroute.  Bypassing and locking control nodes through volunteered systems.

As Ashlie forced her way through the systems, the AI controlling the defenses seemed to be (with help) shunting the functions through other systems, closing off the systems Ashlie was working her way through. There seemed to be some amount of desperation to its actions.

[ASHLIE]

While she tries to not get cut off from the system and establish a connection her frame shudders to life in the real world again and she pulls more cables from the panel, opening up more access points for herself.

[Narrator]

The AIs started desperately trying to keep her out of the systems, at least those systems that were aware of her. At this point, that seemed to be the Engineering defensive subroutine... and the door control routine, which was assisting it.

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Attempting to locate point of origin of anomalous signal.

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Signal appears to be localized.  Hypothosis: Parasites have created traitor routine to destroy us permanently.

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Evidence for hypothosis accepted.  Attempting to jetison ship segment where anomalous signal originates from.

[ASHLIE]

She was somewhat attached to her frame, especially the face she designed for herself. Then again not nearly as much as other autonomous systems seemed to be so there's a (to her) very obvious solution.

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>> Activating Emergency Protocol α-462
>> Opening all ports
>> Data transfer engaged
>> Evacuating Unit 001

If before she had been focusing all her efforts on taking control of something while trying to keep a connection open she now simply left her shell and the entirety of her programming transferred itself into the ship's system and one of the defensive engineering nodes.

[Narrator]

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Attempting to refocus systems to prevent destruction of central core.

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Attempting to localize signal to prevent further system damage.

Other systems in the ship went offline as further systems began joining the effort to neutralize her presence.

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Pursuing anomalous signal.  Rerouting system capability from weapons control.

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Requesting permission to rerout system capability from life support to pursue signal.

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Permission granted.

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System alert: system capability reroute increases risk to bioforms inhabiting this unit by 20%

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Bioforms increase risk to this unit by 60%.  Permission sustained.

[ASHLIE]

When suddenly the signal disconnected and vanished from the system. Along with one of the defensive nodes in the engine room.