It is the aftermath of the world-wide attack by CHIMERA, and things are pretty tense. The super-hacking attack performed by the second-generation (read: created by A.I.s instead of humans) A.I. known as PROGENY is leaving many people nervous about a possible second attack.
And while people around the world are racing to fix the damage of the first attack and provide a proper solution to the latter, PROGENY is working in plans of its own...
The "PROGENY Research Arc" (currently composed of "A Prime Problem"
, Pest Control: NYC", "Elections And Explosions", "Machine Learning", and "Machine War") are written by Mike 313 CL and are currently located on DeviantArt. It is part of the Coreline Shared Universe.
The arc is now complete at six stories. Please add tropes to this page as you see them!
All stories in this Arc provide the following:
- Continuation Fic: They continue the story arc that started with the world-wide attack on Coreline Operation Endgame.
- Elsewhere Fic: Like other stories such as Avengers Reassembled, they focus on showing the world as it is in the aftermath of CHIMERA's assault and the attempts of other groups of people in figuring out how to fix the damage of the super-hacking attack done by PROGENY and how to prevent a second round of this attack (hence the arc's name).
- Paranoia Fuel: In-Universe, the fear of PROGENY talking over the whole Internet again (and any computers connected to it, including androids' and power armors' mainframes, which has led to heavy restrictions on tech heroes). An important sub-plot in the stories of the arc is preventing this from happening again.
- Shown Their Work: The author, Mike 313, has experience as a sys-admin, and thus he has various characters talk exposition about how CHIMERA works that is (within the limits of the insanity of the universe and its tech hodgepodge) accurate to modern-day network security.
Tropes on "A Prime Problem" include:
- Absurdly Dedicated Worker: Absolutely nothing stops Liberty Prime and its directive to annihilate any Communism it can find.
- American Robot: Liberty Prime is the titular "problem"—and is so American that it literally hurts (what with its "kill all Communists" programming being exploited and all).
- The Cameo: Beetle Bailey is one of the guards at the Army base where Liberty Prime was located. He seriously hopes he won't get the blame for the psychotic giant robot demolishing its way out of the base.
- Hollywood Hacking: PROGENY exaggerates this trope, which is one of the bigger reasons why CHIMERA manages to perform such a crippling first strike. As it's discovered on this arc, not even the more brute-force (and thus accepted as best) measures to prevent hacking (such as keeping computers off any network or surrounding them with a Faraday Cage) were able to stop it (it just figured out a way to covertly transmit hacking code through audio waves and made sure that the non-networked computers' integrated microphones would hear it or have some computers that are infected with the virus and are above a certain technology level self-modify to broadcast the virus hacking into the Faraday Cage and using it as a broadcast antenna).
- Logic Bomb: Attempted on Liberty Prime (first by Captain America giving an override order, then by Penny resetting its GPS locator so it will know that it is located near Boston, not on China as it believes). Neither works (Prime refuses Rogers' order because of his potential affiliation with HYDRA and detecting it is near Boston only makes it believe that it has been invaded by the Chinese and triggers a Godzilla Threshold attack routine that is literally "destroy the city to save it").
- Once Done, Never Forgotten: Captain America: Steve Rogers and the fact that it made Steve Rogers a HYDRA mole through a Cosmic Retcon (lamented by Captain America himself (an Alternate that didn't suffer that, any case)).
- Title Drop: For the challenge jam prompt that the story belonged to, "Rockets' Red Glare": it is the codename for Liberty Prime's Taking You with Me Self-Destruct Sequence.
Tropes on "Pest Control: NYC" include:
- Big Applesauce: The whole story happens on New York City.
- A Day in the Limelight: For Chicago Champions member Yui Ikari, a.k.a. "The Vision", who is visiting to help with the research on the virus.
- Humongous Mecha: Nova Prime used a fragment of the Allspark to try to turn the Proudstar (a huge Autobot ship) into a Supreme. Fortunately, Teletraan-Alpha used his new sentience to defy him.
- Poor Communication Kills: Teletraan has important information, but his corrupted memory means he can't actually tell anyone what it is.
Tropes on "Elections And Explosions" include:
- Affectionate Nickname: Teletraan gets one ("Telly") from Yui.
- Brought Down to Badass: Teletraan's new Zeta android body has several of its features locked down or removed to prevent Teletraan (if gone rogue) from overpowering those trying to stop him.
- David Versus Goliath: The candidates are current President Steven Grant Rogers (a.k.a. "Captain America", racing for a re-election) and newcomer David Xanatos. President Rogers wins, and everybody expects Xanatos to cash in some kind of benefit from the exposure.
- Foregone Conclusion: Out of universe material made it blatantly clear Rogers would win the re-election.
- Election Day Episode: The events occur during Election Day, and the titular explosions end up affecting the voting at New York State (although the possibility of them affecting the final election results is dismissed out of hand because if they are some attempt to sabotage the election, it's so obscenely blatant that the Electoral College would dismiss any results from the State and enable a second voting day if needs be).
- Hero of Another Story: All active Champions (including "Trainer" Korra) are called to help with the bombings alongside other heroes (super and otherwise), and become unavailable to help with the break-in at Wayne Enterprises, leaving Yui, Teletraan and Spider-Kairi to tackle it alone (and they were only available because of the restriction and their research keeping them inside the base).
- Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday: A chain of bombings occur on Election Day, forcing every able-bodied emergency service person and superhero to go and assist.
- Involuntary Group Split: See above on "Hero of Another Story".
- Remote Body: It's reaffirmed that Teletraan's Insecticon body is one of these, so transferring his mind to a new chassis isn't an issue.
- Ship Tease: Between Yui and Teletraan.
- We Need a Distraction: The bombings are a distraction for an attack on Wayne Enterprises.
Tropes on "Machine Learning" include:
Tropes on "Machine War" include:
- Babies Ever After: Yui and Teletraan finally accepting their feelings for each other and create children of their own... literally.
- Grand Finale: For the whole arc.
- Hostile Terraforming: The bad guys' endgame turned out to be to activate the Proudstar and "cyberform" the planet.
- No Honor Among Thieves: It turned out that both PROGENY and its Decepticon allies had plans to destroy each other and take over the plan, and they trigger this on the final battle, making things (just a little bit) easier for the heroes.
- Storming the Castle: The Champions and their allies assault the Proudstar to finally take out PROGENY and the Decepticons.
