Book 5. Chapter 45: The Silver Bullet
“A virus.” I said, pointing at the schematic designs superimposed by the HUD. “If Feathers are just near impossible to kill in the real world, how about we attack outside the physical world?”
We’d been combing over for any possible weak point or shortcut built into Feathers, and come up with nothing. Wrath even brought out some schematics for the protofeathers, the more expensive ones, considering future generations were cheaper and less powerful.
Only real difference was alloy composition in addition to power ratio. Protofeathers just had higher quality materials, and that meant better means of making maximum effective use of a power cell.
Gods, even the power cells couldn’t be put into a supercritical position unless the Feather deliberately removed all the overrides and safeties.
Wrath looked over the outline, the virtual cursor jumping from section to section as she studied the internal Feather architecture. A red marker appeared around the head, zooming in on what looked like a set of parallel memory bars all stuck together. “The latest generation cybersecurity default protocols are heavily insulated against breach ever since the early era of the protofeather war. If this direction had merit, it would have seen further use into later moments of that time period.”
Relinquished had a Feather problem, so when she made Feathers to hunt down Feathers, only made sense they’d been equipped for the job. They settled the fights the traditional way from the records we had - by beating each other up with guns, blades and insults. No mention of digital warfare anywhere. Other than that final fight over the digital sea where the last two protofeathers wiped each other out in some way.
The protofeather rebellion was long over, but the safeguards were still there. Avalis knew he was going to be fighting a Feather, so he'd brought out the whole package from retirement.
“How impossible are we talking about?” I asked.
“These cybersecurity systems were authored by Abdication, the same protofeather that designed the digital countermeasures for a human soul attack.”