Meanwhile, at Catgirl industries....
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
Quote:The subject was waiting in the test chamber like a caged jaguar. There was that same air of grace to her, a brutal finesse, of predatory savagery to her movements as she stalked beneath the observation lights.________________________________
Liquid reflections flowed across her lacquered armour as she strode, steel feet tack-tacking across the deck. Ice-blue eyes stared at their target with a hardness born from the coldest, deepest ice beneath a glacier across a rust-red anti-glare stripes on her cheeks. Red hair brushed off her shoulder.
Sparks of light glinted off of marbled steel blades mounted to the subject’s forearms. They could split a bullet head on, slice a human being in half, or drive hard through battlesteel plate.
That, was a weapon. The android test-dummy in the chamber with her, didn’t stand a chance
Cathy swallowed the feeling in her gullet that the safety glass sealing her away from the wouldn’t keep her safe if this particular big cat decided to make a brake for it.
“Status, Cortana,” she demanded, keeping her tone hushed.
“All sensors recording. We will have the data to solve this mystery for certain,”
Cathy grinned. She brushed against a touchscreen control, opening a channel.
“You may attack when ready, Jet,”
The subject nodded, easing herself down into a fighting stance. The other catgirls in the room with Cathy started whispering, taking bets amongst themselves as to what would happen next. The cyber was staring at her target, which was completely incapable of comprehending the mortal danger it was in.
Data readouts tracked powerflow through the subjects body as she began to move, signals in her actuators spiking as she stepped forward.
With a bark she struck out, seeming to tag the dummy. It staggered backwards with the force, righting itself automatically within seconds. Inputs from the test dummy came alive, recording power and vibrations resonating through it’s frame.
Some of the catgirl’s ‘ooh’d’ and ‘ah’d’.... that’d been lightning quick. It’d been a blur of metal.
“I blinked,” someone complained.
“The energy isn’t dying out,” Cortana said, musing within herself. “It’s amplifying,”
The subject carried her momentum from the first attack, using it to turn herself around towards the back of the target dummy. It didn’t care.
“Hah!” she barked, driving her fist forward into it’s spine.
The dummy burst apart, shattering like tempered glass.
The catgirls yelped. Cathy jumped, a chunk of it’s arm smacking into the glass wall in front of her with a thump, spattering it with oil. The torso dropped inert in front of the subject, spitting sparks and bleeding hydraulic oil at her feet.
The head rolled across the floor leaving a trail of fluids before coming to a rest against the far wall, sightless eyes staring up at the overhead lights. Both arms and one leg had been sprung clean off the target, the other hanging loose by a twisted hose.
“Did you get that?” the subject asked.
“Yes, thank you Jet,” Cortana answered her.
The subject seemed to tense up a little, the lose air of danger surrounding her fading away as her own self controls cut back in. The catgirls started giggling among each other, trading credits and gadgets, while revelling in that post-horror-film catharsis.
The initial results came up onscreen for Cathy’s benefit. A hundred accelerometer and electromagnetic sensors on both the subject, and the target.
She could see the initial impulse build inside Jet’s body.
The impact of the first strike.
The vibration ringing through the dummy’s body, like a bell that’d just been hammered,
And then.
“Was zur holle?” Cathy hissed “Program error?”
“Not that I can tell,” Cortana answered her. “The sensors check out.”
“Then why is it gaining strength? Why is the amplitude increasing with no input energy?”
“I do not know,” Cortana responded, sounding just as confused. “I thought I eliminated handwavium effects. Maybe if I had more data, I could draw a conclusion.”
Cathy opened another channel, “Jet, how long can you stay here?
Jet smirked. “How many bots you got?”
-----
"Cathy: final entry of the 'Panzerkunst' experiment series. Our working theory that the same quantum effects governing rogue waves developing in the open ocean apply to these vibration techniques has been proven false. We have stopped working on the project, we have run out of test dummies. Maybe we should just accept that it doesn't make sense for us, that this really is just an effect of handwavium, as Jet believes.
Attempts by an exocomp programmed with the recorded data to replicate the result using glass beads as the target initially seemed successful. However, it became clear that the exocomp was cheating and using it’s IR laser, then deleting its logs to hide this fact. It appears, how to cheat may be the only thing learned from Jet.
We are submitting the results of our analysis to Fenspace at large, in the hopes that someone shall be able to make sense of them.”
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?