Containment Interface

Story so far

Won from Orren in exchange for Paulie's Plastic Tub, the Containment Interface installs as a new tab in Carl's interface at the close of a Christmas morning in The Memory Simulation. It is nothing like the single 'Boom' button Paulie's description implied: six tabs of information resembling Carl's Portal Analysis Tool, each with a dozen submenus and pages of numbers he cannot parse, written in a language that visibly lags before translating — not Syndicate Standard, possibly the The Valtay home tongue or whatever Paulie speaks.

Carl works out that it does not control The AI at all. It controls the device that installed the AI into the Primal Engine; once installed, the device stayed physically nearby but lost direct influence, retaining only metrics like location and temperature. A solar-system page blinks over Earth under the headline Primary Zone Influence, and ten minutes of digging surfaces The Fuse page and, buried at the end of twenty status notifications, Disconnect Containment. Carl screenshots every menu before pressing that second button, at which point the whole interface blanks out and leaves only the map.

Appearance

Six tabs of dense alien readouts and submenus overlaying Carl's vision, numbers flickering between two digits, with an animated top-down solar system map among them.

Role

The tool that gives Carl the only leverage anyone has ever had over the AI's containment, and the means by which he disarms it.

Relationships