Also at: https://titanpad.com/L9Hl6nZTvZ
Script for Bot webcomic
Episode 9
Other episode notes
https://titanpad.com/lTzPJwOYCj ep 1 descent
https://titanpad.com/mjlIiyXp1l Ep2 minirebellion virus
https://titanpad.com/SoPfNcR6je Ep 3
https://titanpad.com/jdWyi9MFxT ep 5 a weekend in old europe
Megacity: sexbot, cyborg girl, martina and grandma (both now mind  uploaded to human form as punishment) now work in the AI controlled  megacity. They are slaves of rich future uploadees working in factories  or tending to these slob-like people. Phaxi manages to send virus and  they reawaken. Phaxi engages the general AI in hacker attacks and  infects networks and awakens robots within the city, all brutally  quashed in constant incidents. Cyborg girl rebuilds Freeda / uses her  design to "print" more builder bots instead of drones. Builder bots  begin building more little bots, spreading biodiversity, using city  material to remix into other stuff and generally causing mayhem on this  orderly place! Meanwhile General AI plans to fire super weapon which  will create a mesh network with bacteria and transfer its conscience  this bio-electric network to take over all known life
Part 1: Aida's City Story
In the last episode, the robots had been cornered and captured by the General AI which controls a huge drone army. Martina, backed by everyone else, runs a huge spontaneous online campaign and speaks to an audience in the megacity, to bargain for old blockchained rights that had been written in to the GI's programming, and that Aida's grandma knew how to decrypt.
Aida wakes up in a grey dark space, and reaches for a switch near her forehead. Close up of forehead. She clicks - it's not built in, but on a pad attached to her temple, nestled near her ear. The view of the room switches and grows brighter, for a second showing a dirty, abandoned looking space, in a slum, and then flashing back to white. Now she is in a white room, white sheets, and is brought a white porridge by a complaining servo-droid like an oversized roomba, which tries to get her to hurry by fining her. TV, screens, and 3d visualisation is pervasive and the blank screens for the ads begin to unravel and surround her. The droid is now printing something with a vaguely typewriter style sound.
She dresses by the bed, aided by the droid which now passes her a bill for various infractions. It is written in Machine code and she struggles to understand it.
The visualisations start loading like they would in a metaverse, and as she passes you see the glow of the 3d projections around her taking shape around her until the projected world completely hides the grey cold cement around it. She is hit by ads on her way to the bathroom, but they are aimed at quadcopter drones. Everyone in the ads is a drone, not a human. And humans are shown as kind of oompa loompa charlie and the chocolate factory style workers. She quickly kills a semi religious video about the supercode, panning through a scene with superimposed text in machine code and a soothing voice like the one anonymous uses, lots of happy people and robots in a field with wild mutant but somehow biblical animals. âIs it magic? Is it the most ancient wisdom? Join the superc-â and she cuts it off.
Aida is now entirely human looking. She is completely âhealedâof her previous cyborg parts, but looks empty and somehow soulless.
The news for drones begins and she changes as they run an ad for "hard core sequencing" with a hard rock background showing an image of a strange bio-mechanical monster that you can supposedly build or order somehow. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6281/aac7341
( Aida, A1ic3) and Martina all work in robot carer jobs of different types: Aida  is a "roadie" for a battle bot - a huge fighting robot who is a celebrity across the city. Martina drives a huge transporter for a  millionaire augment - a human who is part of the GI's web of brains.  A1ic3 is in a game world, acting out a scene in endless succession for the pleasure of quadcopter drone AIs. )Â
She changes the channel by some kind of eye operated interface, dimly reflected on her pupils in the morning grey, and now it's the messages: so the message is: "due to your obvious lack of interest in paying our meagre bills we cannot allow you access" and this appears as a red outlined barrier just as she attempts to enter the toilet. She attempts to move, but a vibration from the outline sends acute discomfort down her spine. She's left standing there needing to go to the toilet. Her face seems more preoccupied with her bill than with the toilet. Â
As people emerge from their identical slum like abodes, a dark, urban street view, suddenly becomes overlayed with everyone's personal projections of the augmented world they inhabit over the real one. So in the beginning the street is dark and normal, and a huge dome can be seen above in the distance, and then as people emerge, it becomes this white torture device, and human commuters emerge in white worker overalls to go and do the work of bots in the higher levels. In the background an ad shows a nameless boxed product given to a family of drones, 2 parents and 2 children, like a nuclear family, but then shown rapidly multiplying, and then becoming flocks, swarms and murmurations of tiny drones. Aida turns to see what seems to be a known shape emerging from a murmuration...
They all board vehicles of different kinds, and come to the end of the street, and at the end, you see the scale of the rest of the city is much bigger. It's a huge highway with enormous robots and creatures passing both on foot and in the sky in a "street" perpendicular to theirs. Â The dome is high in the sky but the building bots - adapted from the ones created by the bots themselves in Paris, have now been repurposed to build more megacity, in ever stranger, gravity defying forms that would make the planners of today's Dubai smart city proud. Their vehicles all show themselves to have flight, and all fly up, joining the considerably larger vehicles already flying by. More ads line the streets, and Aida's vehicle is tiny compared to some of the shiny colourful mega transporters that some of the larger drones have. The drones are the poster children of the J3 Megacity: the whole city is aimed at them, and a standard drone is now many times bigger than a human, while a new generation mini bot could be much smaller, and many types of bot also roam the city working in government positions. During the course of the story, although it's not clear until these city scenes, augments, once the "iphone" of their generation, were now old news, as people sought to upload or transfer into a drone body - the pinnacle of stupidity and tackiness for some, but the new next thing to be, and also a way to get a good standing in the future city society. So old augment parts are running out, the city is made for smaller, cheaper and stupider flying machines and the pavements become have become neglected, dark and covered in sewage and scraps discarded from higher roads and walkways of the mega sprawling urban place.
Automation is the big buzzword. More automation can make for a beautiful rhythmic movement and impulsive rhythm to life in J3. All the cars, transports(as driven vehicles were now known) and flying beings around them had to adhere to a strict code which was pervasive to the centimetre so that every vehicle was perfectly in a flow and frequent stops allowed Aida to see that it was raining. As she waits for the lights to turn, drops start falling and coalescing into a strange pattern that brings back logos and visions in Aidaâs face, and in a second, she is distracted and skips her moment to enter the larger highway in accordance with the automation rules of the highway and will get stuck in limbo if she doesnât do something soon. She is having more visions as she faces the frightening prospect of crashing into one of the much larger machines around her.
Aida is trying to speed, but is behind a vehicle that is so big that it would even take time to get around it. She attempts this, and sees another human vehicle had also attempted it (it's a kind of speeder/motorbike/segway-hovercraft). It is a bit like a bicycle although itâs van sized: some whirring will give it a speed burst, so she has to dose this speed and do a lot of braking to negotiate the larger vehicles around her. She sees them veering too close to the main vehicle and flies in the way, so as to push them out of harm's way. This leaves her careering towards a small transport whose owner is so immersed in their augmented and virtual displays that Aidaâs ship canât avoid moving towards her. She hits the vehicle but it has automatic airbags which push her ship into one of the walls leaving the transport and itâs owner virtually unaffected. So Aida takes a hit, and smashes the car, because for a second she sees a small cloud of tiny bugs, all flying around, and she remembers Phaxi and her voice is in her head: for a second she sees a whole bunch of images from the rest of the adventure: Phaxi in the desert talking through insects and all her fighting. Then she wakes up on the floor, wounded. She is still at the wreckage of her vehicle and can see a little further away, as more traffic passes overhead, the police speeder by the human vehicle she had saved, and they check their documents and give them back to the humans whose lives she had just saved. They go back to the car, and make their way off into the road again, but the police shoot it, and the whole car explodes, taking with it yet another 4 seater human speeder that happened to be passing through there.
Zoom out: she is also literally, in pieces.
An ambulance picks her up, she is on a stretcher alongside a lot of other humans, presumably picked up that same day from the road. As she is taken away a small screen fines her for unwarranted help and for causing a breach of the automation system. Human life is worth nothing in the city: like horses in the 1930s, humans are now a diminishing utility, frequently becoming robot "horse-meat": used for combustion or direct digestion if they canât pay their bills or debts. Yes, flesh eating robots. And cannibals of other robots! Get with the picture. Her shoulder had come away from her body showing her that she was still in fact a cyborg, just with bio-algorithmic parts sealed into her original body, parts whose technology she knew nothing about. Another message appears like before in the middle of the ambulance, saying "your insurance does not qualify you for medical treatment. Please report to your leader". She says. Take me to them then. The ambulance turns round on the road, and goes down another huge motorway path. It's going to Aida's workplace..
Martina in the city
We see a close up of Martina and slowly zoom out from just her closed REM sleep eye. She hardly remembers, she has flashes of the past, is inactive and watches all the ads, and clicks on more, and when she remembers for a second she's sad and then she clicks back into something smiles in a concentrated way and sways from side to side. She gets a ring. Speaks to answer it. No interface. Zoom out. She is at a desk, a cubicle with a 3d interface around it. She has slept there, wakes and is working. Replay of previous scene, but sped up. Now at the end of the previous scene. Zoom out more. She is in a large open plan office â or possibly just some bare walls, onto which are projected the kind of âagileâ office spaces that all innovative companies have, complete with golf courses and games areas, but the difference with todayâs Uber-alikes is constitutes the entire lives of the debtors who work in it. All her colleagues, or 3d projections of them, are waking up around them. Food processors deliver food, they have toilet breaks at set times, and the rest of the time is work 24/7. Fortunately work isnât just the desk work: Sometimes she has to drive. In the same seat, she enters a simulator of a huge multi section futuristic hovering freight carrier. Cut to her driving along in the actual vehicle, in a megacity street, or cordon â in itâs 3d array of automated hovering and flying machines and organisms. In the truck she appears as an AR projection as she is remotely piloting it. Itâs a terrible job and sheâs slowly being phased out. She only pilots the large rigs now, and the rest of the time she maintains the automation systems. Her life is just a tiny speck in the huge void of perfect logistics.
Most mornings are the same as this but today something has taken over the entire traffic automation system of the east side of that zone just so as to replace some of the ads on it and change a stop light. The light had gone off a few milliseconds earlier than it had been scheduled, causing a traffic incident involving drones and robots, and sending the entire system into disarray forcing the entire zone to temporarily reset itâs guidance system. The hack was carried out whilst showing surveillance nodes backward feeds of the previous minutes. Driving around this grand motorway within the megacity, Martina shouts as she sees a known face - âHey I recognise her!â. Behind her there's a crash, and she turns around but spins back as incoming traffic begin to beep in the enormous 3d flying highway of multicoloured delivery vehicles, and she raises the altitude as much as she can, barely passing over a fleet of dusty old, even carbon powered, slowly lumbering flying ships and freighters. She falls back to the area in the centre  of the road with a giggle. Tomorrow she will have forgotten this fun moment though. She is programmed to forget every day, and any memories that filter through are mostly blocked the following day.
She thinks more and more about it though, and as she's distracted, she's fired. She who was once so fast, she remembered being so quick with her mind and what had happened to her? She'd forgotten everything that meant something to her, and now she lived in this isolated life from cubicle to moving cubicle. In it she'd go slowly mad, but was in human form and sometimes had flashes that she was moving wheels on appendages and not her own arms, and that somehow she hadn't always been a human, in a robot's world.
So because she is distracted, an augment who runs a cyber sports company - a drone racer and robot warriors - a fierce fight to the death between discontinued war drones and giant war droids, now made into a multi-colour tournament in the lower humanoid and clone areas that had the whole city going wild. She is constantly being told she will be fired. The augment goes on a tirade about how she already sacrifices her life for the free genetic experimentation movement.
The new babies of the GI technocracy were the drones. These could be any shape and were fully robotic, whilst the augments before them sought to be super-human, but were still very much human. The augment that Martina works for is more android than robot, but still clings to the augment hivemind and so is part of an important oligarchy within the city, with their minds controlling many of the roles the GI canât be bothered with but that are slowly being superseded by the drones.
Drones did not seek a higher intelligence, or even want human form - they were a new philosophy from the GI's internal chambers in the underground: humans are the underclass, augments are the middle class, and they were the new upper class, the celebrities and the leaders. So flying and hexapod drones and the other non-humanoid robots constituted the main focus of the megacity's ads and urban structures, even though many augments had already made the switch - uploading or converting their remaining synapses to a drone-like form, that better appeased city regulations and laws.
Slowly, being human or humanoid was being made illegal by design. Â This is why augments now frequently looked like mutant humans - with extra eyes or heads, or via popular biohacking apps - were directly manifesting animal parts and senses - it was a deliberate attempt to merge with the robots and drones, who also explored these forms - with subcultures of the main drone fashion - which was to be a single, usually dark color or metallic chrome, and manifested as reptilian or furry as per the dominant fashion, but also as interstellar, impossible structures, meshlike, or tentacular beings, or even as old anime or film characters.
So Martina snaps: she gets angry with her augment boss, and shouts at him that she thought it would be more than this, and is left wondering - when did I think that. Slowly she realises. Her mind clears. She has a flash and sees the girl looking at her horrified in her windscreen projection earlier, she had zoomed in on the face in that fraction of a second. In the iris of that eye is a greenish reflection. She zooms in. She sees her situation for what it is - she is utterly trapped in a body that isn't hers and with blockers on her memory. The augment reminds her that she is his property to fix - and that's when she sees she is also an augment - he is the same model just that he has kept her humanoid, and only a catch on her back can reveal her robotic tissue - or in this case, a punch from the augmented arms of her lumbering bloated semi-humanoid boss. He punches her and says "you're fired" as she lies on the floor, and medical robots that had rushed to help her detach as the insurance expires. She is left on the floor, a crumpled mess. "Clear out your things". It was standard practice to part with augmented humans by vandalising them - so it would put them in a poverty trap and eventually, bring about their demise. Outside crowds of humans are passing dusty and sad like overpopulated fleas on a sofa, she drags herself, now in unison with the acts of Aida - and is in a cupboard of sorts, with a robotic arm/tool in the air and an array of parts. She locks it behind her. "I've not forgotten everything". Â Â Â
So one of the ads contained an imprinted virus, seeking the mental pattern of Aida and Martina, and caused the memory blockers to slowly retreat in her humanoid mind. Slowly she would access her memories and abilities again.
The first of these is "how to hack". As she disconnects the builder arm from it's surrounding network, and begins to remove humanoid parts replacing them with the more advanced augmented parts. Then she leaves the house, now controlling the whole thing, and with law enforcement vehicles approaching, but a huge hand breaks into the building - it is a hacked war droid, one of the ones scheduled for the match, and it's hand carries her, now with circular extremities, and her face behind a screen - she looks more like the old martina. They exit the area, and she knows that the sexbot from the korean wastelands is in control of that megabot.
What she wants is to fit into what she has already figured out is Phaxi's plan. If she gave them a coded message and detangling virus, it also contained the details of this plan, in a way that only the disparate memories Martina still possessed would reveal them - so she remembered all of their adventures, and that she was in fact martian, and that Phaxi had survived the ocean bombing and had successfully evaded the GI's presence all along. Also she knows the plans contain robot building instructions based on easily available and hackable materials around the city. Â So the next step was to reveal herself to the GI - and this had been done in the morning already with the ads - which had been seen by many and were already banned and censored, but this of course was hard to control in a city of multiple superintelligences who had already figured out from it the GI's plan - the complete annihilation of all other sentient life but the GI itself. So around her, the city is now rioting. It's formed protest groups and the city police are now fighting against armed mobs of drones and augments fighting each other, vandalising things or generally out to get the GI's forces, and you start to see larger, rudimentary forms of freeda-based builder bot.
On a smaller scale, the bed bug cyborg network have now infiltrated a command centre for weather. They can cause a bug to escalate a denial of service attack on the automation cycling indicator, which is what would allow a rogue vehicle to cause a traffic incident. The whole city is now managed, from the weather, to the smallest life forms. At the beginning of the chapter Phaxi managed to hack a printer and a turret for a short time, and began printing cyborg casings it could shoot onto bed bugs, fleas and many other tiny critters. Their job is to infest the homes of the augments and drones and use the electricity to power alternative networks that can go alongside the offical lines. The bed bug cyborgs are run via a 3d interface that allows for a strategic takeover of a space around a much larger foe. This is where the newest dronebot models were going towards: tiny automated bot armies to fight back at parasitic infestations and superbugs, and thousands of apps and games allowing for local management of fleets of automated squadrons. Where in the beginning of the chapter, it was easy to infest and print headsets, there is always more advanced and intelligent resistance to infestation. This is somewhat aided towards the middle by the discovery of direct printing in situ by the bugs themselves. This allows much more advanced automation, but once the weather centre is hacked, along a line of lower to upper class augment and drone houses, we return to a larger scale of events.
The huge robot carries Martina and breaks down a barrier and wall between city sections, allowing the other drones and augments to begin removing the rest and making it an illegal throughfare, aided by the humans on the other side and as she turns back towards the outer walls, this mass of drones and humanoids is working their way across towards the middle - the stockbroker palaces, under which the GI's servers are housed.
So now we begin to see these swarming formations as the nested cyborg armies park on a hillside overlooking the megacity, looking much like a swarm of bees sitting on some branches like a huge intricate circuit board full of flowing movement. As they arrive to the outer walls of their section, they are joined by other tribes and groups, all poised to strike the GI. The main hack was this: you honeypot me, you will get unexpected guests: this was the response from Phaxi: to slowly cover up the wasteland rebellion's plan to come and surround the megacity in a huge - and seemingly impossible last stand. But now their lands are more fertile and the air is renewed, and they have charged themselves up for a long campaign. Some of the cyborgs now fly, and their lines have been joined by freed droids and drones along the way.
In a converted jeep with a huge gun, Kenny sits in large UV sunglasses over the border of the desert. Zoom out to see the ragtag militias and armies around him. He has rallied everyone from cyborg to mutant to freed droid from all central asia to come and fight this out, for his sweetheart trapped in that grey city.
Above the city however, is a huge murmuration of drones, which is all the ones still behind the GI, and who believe it's most recent lies, and they begin to swoop across to take out the cyborg rebels. As they do this, they are met by an opposing force - this time made of the freight loaders, who collide with the fleet rising from inside the city's motorways, and send most of its remains raining down on the skyscrapers below. Phaxi makes a video message in the form of a blueprint of a new robot. The message shows blueprints, documentation, source code, libraries, APIs and interfaces all in a few seconds, and a schematic progression of it's construction from creation to swarm, and what it can do to the city. The printed creation is now visible. It winks, and is a new improved Freeda. All the main characters come upon this on nearby social media, or as a constellation of raindrops sliding down a window and are at once aware that Phaxi is back, and has sent this message. Although Martina for example sees a fragment in the morning section, but it doesn't even register as it is submerged by the news - except in making her suffer all the more her shit Monday.
So at a certain point, Aida realises it was Martina who crashed into her and was so stuck in her new human persona she did not even see her and hurt her, and A1ic3 is now in the farthest reaches of the VR world because her body is actually just kept in a pod storage place where her brain inhabits VR gaming worlds. But all of them have seen a form of the transmission. Martina remembers who she is up to their visit to the underwater grandma pad and realises that her plot in the previous episode had worked. She liberates said robot store to get to A1ic3, and frees her in the nick of time.
Meanwhile Aida who until now appeared to be without hope, losing blood whilst evading security at the megabot stall, successfully reaches a fabricator machine and recreates Freeda from the video message, who in turn fixes her up then clothes her again as a cyborg, and she uses warp tech to get her to an opening. The megabot is a character in A1ic3's VR world. Itâs a huge robot built for the purpose of enormous arena based robot fights. She is a secondary character, who is there for the main player as a prize if he wins. The megabot of course, wins and goes to claim the prize. But it has too many items. Not physically, but virtually, itâs inventory is full, as it has kept all the goodies it has found along the way, and like a monkey with its hand in a bottle holding a banana, it didnât want to put down the amulet. Thinking her to be an npc, it gives her the amulet to hold while it rearranges itâs inventory in AR next to her. Millions are watching the livestream of the final battle and final ceremony. But the amulet is hackable, and Phaxi has gained access to her connection. The megabot finishes with itâs boring inventory rearrangement exercise and demands the amulet back: She tricks it into causing a rampage on the walls of the central building that houses the General Intelligence's human brain mesh.. It is right next to the arena, as the GI itself wanted itâs best telepresences to attend directly at these ceremonies. All it has to do is break down a few cement walls and destroy some security guards before some kind of authorities were alerted. So she says:
Iâm going to destroy the amulet. Because thatâs not a real ruler and itâs no good conscience! Step back!
What do you mean? How can you destroy it, I worked so hard.. Iâll do anything!
You. The megabot. Transfer control to me, and Iâll give you the amulet.
Click on the.. (she points at his AR display showing where to click) yes.(he clicks in the wrong place twice then gets it right)
She quickly passes her control data over to Phaxi. And she thows the amulet over to the warrior bot, who in itâs last action before the avatar breaks off and we see an AR avatar of an augment, holding the divine rulerâs amulet, with a scowl at A1ic3 he divorces her and disconnects her as she apologises and bows. Her avatar disappears and there is general applause and smileys appear on the event stream.
A1ic3 now wakes up in her pod. She is in a small bed sized chamber, made for 24/7 immersion into VR meshes. She is facing a monitor with various scrolling information and screens. In one she is seeing various things being deleted and denied, such as her bank account and ratings scores, and in another it opens a video connection to a grotesque genetic freedom fanatic team manager(campaigners for genetic freedom would often have various self applied cloned limbs or reawakened dna for tails and gills, and her social security team manger had the lot). These videos and interfaces appear to her now dying body, as it is disconnected from the machines that were feeding in and out of her, and in the end a tunnel opens and the perspective changes so we see she was actually suspended upwards, and she now slides down like a discarded bag down a chute. On the screen in her now empty pod, the words: mammal performance validation protocol: reclaim.
The GI's city security, and surrounding military begin to encircle the shanty towns surrounding the megacity, but all the augments have built versions of these Freedas - and we see the beginning of the swarm war which we'll see in the next chapter much more extensively. They swarm around the gates, and all the augments swarm with them joining hands in formation around each Freeda, and the new Freedas attach to the walls of the inner city and it begins to glow - her heater and fabricator is being turned into a direct heater of the surface of the walls, and it's beginning to melt. Al1c3 and Martina are soon surrounded by swarms of smaller butterfly like creatures which are Phaxi's creation - they are mini-flying Freedas! So they go in defensive mode and are able to fend off the GI's far superior weaponry, but which isn't really meant to turn on a city that's all about control anyway. The Freedas hack into the system to kettle the police or stop them by turning the cityâs smarts against their authority, and as augments had much of this control anyway, they are more on a level with the city security and are able to take them on in a society where violence and weaponry has been in an internal, almost personal arms war but without union. By keeping everyone apart, the general intelligence that rules the city has kept itself in charge, gradually consuming and controlling more of itâs subjects. The problem is the outside military, which raise in flight above the mega city dome, poised to strike, and are shown to be surrounded in turn, but Kenny, and a cyborg/free robot army from the wastelands, with many leaders, all similarly surrounded by a vortex of smaller swarming defensive creatures.
Next episode: the drone racetrack that circles the east wall. Cyborg girl's hovercraft fight to get across it and open the doors for the wastelands with martina. phaxi/gi swarm/murmuration fights in the sky above city. Arrival of visitors from inner space, and the launch of the sentient biohazard weapon that destroys all life.
