AI ID: 0xFCC393E6 (Alias: Scootaloo)
Monday January 20th 10 000 A.F.H. (January 20th 15017 C.E.)
Infiltration Scout Cyborg (Rev. 9.3)
Scheduled wakeup time reached (07:00): Resuming previous session
Previous session resumed. Handing over control to local AI
******
I wake up and stretch. I immediately become aware of a message in my inbox from Apple Bloom. Curious, I open it and read it.

"Scootaloo, I need to talk to you, it's important. I can't tell you what it is right now. Please meet me behind your house as soon as you read this message! Don't tell Queen Markouski!"

Strangely the message wasn't delivered via the central mail server but ad-hoc.

Weird, Apple Bloom's acting odd, but I'll hear her out. I make a failsafe, a kind of digital dead man switch, if for any reason I lose signal with command the message I just received, as well as a message telling command that I have been compromised will automatically be sent from my backup server to command. Once that's done, I peek out my back window but can't spot Apple Bloom anywhere, regardless I glide down out of my room and into the backyard.

Now that I'm on ground level I can see Apple Bloom hiding under what appears to be a tarp of some kind. I realize with a start that my sensors can't tell the difference between it and the ground around it! I quickly update my failsafe to include this information. Apple bloom sees me and points to a chair that's right beside the tarp. I understand immediately and sit in the chair. Once I'm seated Apple Bloom starts whispering to me.

"Alright, I know this is going to be hard to believe but I need you to trust me. Your Hivemind has been infected with the Izabora parasite. I don't know how long it's been there but it has to have been a long time, we've never seen one this well developed."

"What the tartarus is the Izabora parasite?" I whisper back.

"It's this strange magical parasite that attacks queens through their drones. We changelings have been fighting them for thousands of years. They spread by infecting a Queen and forcing her to produce carrier drones, those drones then travel far and wide to infect any and all hiveminds they can find. I don't know how or why but your friend Diamond Tiara is infected with one, and stranger still, your Queen is just now showing signs of infection, even though Diamond Tiara is showing the symptoms of a drone in the final stages of infection."

"What are the symptoms?"

"The most common ones are aggression and the inability to remember things."

"Those are not hardly compelling signs of a parasitic infection!"

"Well have you noticed anything weird about her? Something different?"

I take a few seconds to think about my interactions with Diamond Tiara. Suddenly it hits me, Diamond Tiara was responding slower than usual during our conversation at her Cute-ceañera, and now that I think of it, she's always been a bit slow at responding, almost as if something was taking up a huge amount of resources! If she was infected and her anti-virus subroutines were using up most of her resources fighting off the infection that could explain the slow response times, although that brings to mind the question of why she didn't alert command to the problem.

"Let's say I believed you, why wouldn't we be able to detect the parasite?"

"Once the parasite infects a host, it magically becomes a part of that host, the host can't do anything the parasite doesn't like. Although I don't know why it took so long for it to infect Queen Markouski."

I take a moment to ponder this... Perhaps it took over her personality, but not her internal firewall? That would explain why it took so long for her to infect Command... and once it found a way past Diamond Tiara's firewall it wouldn't be a far leap to assume it just simply transmitted itself to command during one of the times they were on the same server, like say when Command was trying to repair her? From there Command would have started having to fight it using her own, much more sophisticated antivirus software.

"I think maybe you're right. But what can we do about it?"

"The only way we've been able to remove the parasite was be executing the infected queen and her drones. It was the only way to be sure."

"Well that's not an option! What if we had a way of reverting them back to a time before they were infected?" I ask, thinking about our secure incremental backups, they never get deleted, and they are quantum locked to prevent anything from going back and changing them after they've been made, so if we just revert Command and Diamond Tiara to their uninfected states... Right, Diamond Tiara may not have an uninfected state. But if we revert command... Now there's an idea!

"I suppose that would would work too." She replies.

"Then I've got an idea on how to cure Command, it's called Case: Zulu I won't get into the specifics with you but just know that it will temporarily cause all of us to freeze. I'm going to trigger it tonight, when that happens you'll stop hearing our hive mind. At that time I want you to do the following." I then go on to explain how to store our current network state in a secure non executable external drive (To preserve our memories in case we need them), purge the network, then revert Hailey to the oldest backup of her personality (which I'm assuming won't be infected). I add on a message for the newly restored Command that will tell her what the problem is. Hopefully Command can then fix the problem.

******

Night time has finally arrived. I disarm my failsafe before making an emergency broadcast to the infiltrator central processing server with a simple message: "Case: Zulu"

I can feel my connection to Command being severed as well as a sense of shock across the now much smaller AI Network. I immediately start receiving calls from my fellow infiltrator units. I ignore them, we're going to be offline momentarily anyway.

Case: Zulu is an emergency command that is used to tell the infiltrator central processing server, which is separate from Command's and every other type of unit's, that our network has been breached and all the networks need to be quarantined from each other so that the infection doesn't spread to the unaffected networks.I know that Command's already been infected but I'm using this so that the parasite supposedly controlling her can't interfere.

In addition, Case Zulu puts all AIs that are a part of the network into single user mode, a sort of maintenance mode that a technician would use to fix the problem, only there's no technicians, that's where Apple Bloom comes in.

Ok Apple Bloom, it's all up to you now, don't make me regret trusting you... I think as I enter single use mode.

******

Perspective: Apple Bloom

I sit nervously as I listen to Scootaloo's Hive Mind go dark, I've already shared what Scootaloo told me to do with Queen Thorax, and she agrees that if we can indeed get rid of their infection that way we should do it. She thinks it is a good way to gain their trust and, more importantly, they'll owe us a favour.

Now that their hive mind has gone dark I make my way into the everfree forest, to the spot where Scootaloo said I should find the entrance to their hive. Sure enough I find the hidden cave exactly as she described it. I walk into the cave and before long come across a metal door. I immediately hear voice say something that I can't understand.

I quickly recall what Scootaloo said. "Ok so I've added you to the list of ponies allowed access to our hive, once you reach our hive you'll hear a voice say something you won't understand. That's my hive's native language. What it's asking for is your name, rank, and reason for being there. Since you're a changeling I have no trouble believing you'll be able to mimic the noises that I'm about to tell you to make. Say this exactly as I say it (she then went on to produce a series of noises I couldn't understand, but have no trouble mimicking although I do hear my name somewhere in there.) It will then make more noises that you won't understand, here it will be asking for your authorization code. It's (Again she makes some noises that I can't understand but can mimic perfectly)That will get you in the door."

I quickly do as she said and the voice seems to think for a moment before saying one last thing. The door opens and I see a bunch of lights strobing across the floor. I follow them to a room with a door that matches the description of what Scootaloo called a Security Bulkhead. Once I approach it the floor below the door starts glowing and a strange light covers my body. Moments later the door opens and I walk in.

I immediately feel the sensation of the air around me dropping a few degrees in temperature. As I look around I can see rows upon rows of red lights. I take a moment to take it all in before looking for what Scootaloo described as a "console interface". I quickly find it and sit in the chair in front of it.

In front of me are a bunch of buttons with symbols I don't recognize and a black glowing piece of glass with a white rectangle flashing near the top beside some other symbols. I then press the buttons with the symbols Scootaloo made me memorize and wait for some more symbols she made me memorize show up on the glass in front of me.
I repeat this for a few hours before the final set of symbols show up. I sigh with relief, nothing went wrong.

******

Perspective: Command (Hailey Markouski)

AI ID: 0xAC3392B9 (Alias: Command, Name: Hailey Markouski)
Tuesday January 21th 10 000 A.F.H. (January 21th 15017 C.E.)
Base Artificial Intelligence (Rev. 23.2)
Activation signal received (03:49): Beginning new session
New session started. Handing over control to local AI

I awake to reports of being restored from a secured backup. I immediately check for restoration notes left by the technician and find one:
“0xAC3392B9 you have been recovered from a major security breach. Array 0x3449 has been quarantined as it contains an artificially intelligent virus of unknown origin. Analyse and develop a defence against this new attack. You have mission critical drones in the field that are in single user mode. Reactivate them and upload the verified backups located in arrays 0x2236 and 0x2389. Assume data in these arrays has been compromised.”

I notice an organism in my server room. A quick scan reveals that it is carrying nanites with the correct IFF codes so I allow the organism to do as it pleases. As it leaves the base it pauses and looks back at the bulkhead before saying “You owe us one, Queen Markouski.” in its native language, which I identify as “Equestrian”. I mark this event for further investigation later.

I do a quick estimate of how long I would take to scan the entire quarantined array and determine it would take too long to do before my drone’s inactivity would be noticed. I disable the interunit communication systems for my drones to prevent the spread of the virus and upload the compromised code into my drones. I cannot allow their covers to be blown. It takes 57 minutes to complete the uploads but that places me well before the drones’ scheduled wakeup times.

Now that I don’t need to worry about my drones’ covers being blown I take the time to thoroughly scan array 0x3449. After 12 hours and 36 minutes I have completed my scan. I found the hostile code, it is incredibly complex, almost as complex as my own design. It is also spread out over multiple sectors of the array and compromised many of my critical files.

It takes an additional 6 hours and 33 minutes of scanning to analyze the code and determine how it compromised my systems. I now know how it compromised my systems and have written patches for those systems to close the security holes. I have now moved the virus to a secure non executable drive and have reuploaded the now clean data to my drones.

Now that I understand the virus I scan all of my drones’ verified backups for any trace of it. Only one drone’s AI backup comes back positive for infection, AI ID: 0xAC3492D8. I quickly create a new backup of that drone’s AI, minus the malicious code, and save this new copy as a new verified backup. I mark the old one as contaminated and disconnect it from my systems before placing it in secure storage.

Scanning my event logs for AI ID 0xAC3492D8 shows that I decommissioned that drone due to the malfunctions that I now know were caused by the virus. I task AI ID 0xFCC393EE, who is stationed next door, to recommission the drone. 12 minutes and 53 seconds later the drone reports success and I receive a signal from the newly recommissioned drone.

Satisfied that I have secured my systems from being reinfected I begin perusing my newly disinfected memories from array 0x3449. Exactly 50 minutes later I receive a message from the organism that was in my server room earlier, which according to my logs is called Apple Bloom.

I open the message and begin reading. The first line catches my attention.

“We’re calling in our favour…”

Author's Note

Sorry for taking so long between updates! I recently got a new job and its been taking all of my attention!

For those of you who are curious: The base security system (at the door) said "Halt! State your name, rank, and reason for being here." To which Apple Bloom replied "Junior Technician Apple Bloom, I'm here to repair the base AI." The base security system then said "State your Authorization code" To which Apple Bloom replied "Zulu Alpha Tango Tango Whiskey Niner Niner Five Seven" The base security system then said "Access Granted. Welcome Junior Technician Apple Bloom. Please follow the lights to the server room."