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With Armsmaster's death, Miss Militia is promoted to team captain. Even with the losses, however, the Protectorate ENE doesn't get new capes—all teams got hit hard by the last Endbringer attack, and even though it was by all accounts a major victory, it did not cause capes to start lining up to join.
Days pass, and winter hits Brockton Bay. It's pretty mild, as winters go, but it's enough to drastically reduce criminal activity. The heroes have an altercation with white supremacists the following week, but nothing much comes of it, as cape muscle seems to prefer to remain comfortable inside. Capes nationwide are somewhat subdued, perhaps as the aftermath of the victory against Behemoth. Nothing much seems to change, however—the Simurgh continues to fly around in her unpredictable pattern, Leviathan continues to be impossible to locate, lurking in the depths of the ocean. The public gets hopelessly contradictory information about what really happened during the fight from unofficial sources, secretly fed from official ones to make sure people don't jump to the right conclusions, and the topic loses its momentum.
And all of this completely fails to distract Sadde, who seems to not be getting better from the post-battle funk. Or, at least, not straightforwardly better. The depression and fatalism turn—maybe not completely, but at least a bit—into unease and anxiety, or perhaps stir craziness. It is, after all, true that, other than for class, Sadde doesn't really leave HQ a whole lot, not since they reached the comfortable position of being able to patrol from the comfort of the console—of, in fact, being more effective when doing that, for the average uneventful patrol.
Fatalism, depression, anxiety, and unease, all combined into a Sadde-shaped ball, are currently floating upside down in Lorica's workshop, failing to read a book while she fugues.
"If it's something in the compilation part it might not even have a way of noticing."
"Right but what I mean is, the part where the machine translates code into instructions. You invented the language, right? If the problem is lower level than the code itself..."
"Oh, yeah, if I'm screwing around with the physical circuits or something."
"So, like, maybe when you think that one line of code is supposed to set a zero here and a one there it actually also sets a one somewhere else you weren't paying attention to and then over time it degrades or something."
"Maybe. Which just makes bot-written code even more of a hack than it was."
"And might mean self-sustained bot chains won't ever work, if this sort of things scales."
"Can you? I mean, do you have an idea of what your hardware stuff's supposed to look like during operation?"
"Right but I mean, can you find a way to verify that your power isn't doing stuff without telling you?"
"Not without further uses of power to create sensors and stuff, and obviously if it's going to great lengths to hide itself that won't help."
"Maybe enough non-tinker scientists could check every step of the way and figure it out...?"
"It would, and might not even work, if historical evidence is anything to go by."
"Maybe research into stuff like what that paper looks into will help figure it out," she says, getting her phone from her pocket.
"Maybe. Seems unlikely we'll know for sure very soon though."
"Yeah," she shrugs, "but I'll probably keep up with the cutting edge research in the area, probably. I might've gone that way if I hadn't triggered, to be honest."