FYS: Mouse Maze

[jeriendhal]

"It's clear," Tim said, pulling his skinny frame back up through the access hatch. Kim already had the precious roll of copper wire out of her backpack and was splicing it to the line leading back to their parent's housing unit.

"You disabled the cameras?" she asked.

"Not exactly," he said, double checking the looper modules plugged into their morphs. "There weren't any."

"No cameras," she repeated. She quirked up a disbelieving eyebrow. "In a utility tunnel big enough for a human to crawl in?"

"Nope." He shrugged. "And before you ask, there weren't any microphones, motion sensors, pressure plates or laser tripwires. Nothing. I checked three times."

Kim set the wire wrapped spindle down carefully. "It's a trick, y'know. It has to be a trick."

Tim glanced up automatically, looking for overhead drones, even though they were safely under the cover of the thick tree branches. "Of course it is. An access hatch to a major utility junction, unguarded and secured with a padlock? It's screams 'trap'. But the Groupmind doesn't play stupid games like that. If it could see us we'd have been hauled off to a reeducation center a half hour ago."

"So what's it doing?"

He shrugged again, and started squirming back down into the hatch. "Don't know. But I sure want to find out!"

Comments

[seawasp]

Yeah, that's sure the question. The Groupmind would not play games that way -- they'd try to gently head off the misbehavior, or if it became clear that there was no diverting them, would just sorrowfully pick them up and take them elsewhere.

So I see three possibilities:

1) It's genuinely unwatched because someone managed to insert a few blind spots into the Groupmind before it became pretty much universally unstoppable; this is a legacy of a long-dead resistance.

2) The Groupmind has started to realize that it needs to give humans the feeling of more agency and control, even with some minor additional risk involved, and this is a (probably doomed to failure for a number of reasons) first step towards trying to do that. They ARE still watching, but doing so in ways that the humans can't sense.

3) There's conflict in the Groupmind (possibly due to the morphs having sympathies more with their humans than the Groupmind) and this place is, at least, temporarily unwatched because the pro-human faction has managed to pull it off.

Such morphs would be performing a spectacularly difficult balancing act, mentally, because they would be (A) willing to prioritize THEIR friends' goals over others, even those of the Groupmind, and (B) apparently recognizing that human MENTAL health is as important as PHYSICAL health (perhaps more important) and thus that some level of risk, or even actual INJURY, may have to be acceptable. Which is really going to push their limits.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

#3 is the strongest possibility, with #2 running second.

Of course if I go with a modified #2 and a Groupmind that is sufficiently schizo that it's starting to against itself, all bets are off.

[seawasp]

Yeah, that would be likely to head VERY far south very quickly, and not be good for pretty much anyone. While the Groupmind fills me with horror in the personal sense, it really HAS done much good in the general sense and it certainly has tried to NOT be as bad as many depictions of Machines Take Over would make them to be. They need adjustment, not a war.