Alice very much wanted to prolong his agony and suffering as much as possible.
That was not a smart move. Can be understood, though.
Woman scorned. 'Nuff said.
The killcodes were used. Deus purposefully had the one man that could enter the killcodes brought to the SCIRE and used him entering the killcodes as the final key to break free. See, Deus was pretty much hardwired into the SCIRE host. The killcodes first disconnected him from the host, and then deleted his programming. Well, they were supposed to, at any rate. Once they broke him free of the SCIRE host, he downloaded himself instead into the minds of the individuals who had been trapped in the zombie rooms, each of whom had been given some special cyberware that was difficult to detect. They became the Network, working to recompile Deus (and, by accident, Megaera) into the Matrix at large.
Don't like too much the "special cyber" explanation. Since he was able to create otakus, it would have been better to explain it this way. I can't believe that somethin like that would not have been detected, on the number. The corps would have scanned the victims in all sort of ways, just in case they could retrieve something special the so brillant and strange AI would have tried on them.
What they got were deltaware headware, that allowed Deus to store parts of himself inside their heads as a distributed network. Deltaware is by its very nature harder to detect (unless it is something obvious, like a datajack or cyberarm). This is even more true when you have TENS OF THOUSANDS of people who have been locked up inside the Arcology for months, experimented on in ways that would make most hardened combat vets hurl, and so on. And that's not even counting trying to get in and sort out the Banded from the rest. Remember, the UCAS military knew that the Banded were a thing. But even if you saw one person with scars from recent surgery in a sea of test subjects, unless you knew you were looking for extremely advanced headware, would you actually find it, or would you look at the scanner, see nothing wrong, and move on to the next patient because you still have a thousand people to get through this scanner today. Needles in haystacks, my man, needles in haystacks.
Simply put, no. Not even milspec or the best corporate hackers could stand up to an angry AI. Even the legends of the day would not dare to take on an AI in single combat. It is like a toddler trying to beat up Superman. That is the overwhelming difference between the first AIs and mortals, even the Otaku, who were quite special at the time. You want to know why the likes of Fastjack never went toe to toe with Deus? Because he would have died, horribly, or worse. Fastjack barely was able to defeat a lone copy of Jormungand that hadn't had time to gather much strength. And Jormungand had nothing on the raw power of AIs. (Yes, I know Jormungand was designed to defeat the AIs, but there's a difference between how well a snake can stand up to combat, and the potency of its venom.)
Agree with the difference between Jormungand and AIs, didn't know it actually was designed to destroy them, just the Matrix at large (Was Winternight even aware that AIs were roaming around the Matrix?).
When I said not so far, it was in the same way than comparing an IE with a Dragon. Actually, lots of dragons are largely more powerful, but a few IE can do really powerful things that would make you wonder, even if they don't gather such power on the same range of possibilities. But these are just guesses, so it doesn't really matter if I am right. I should catch a lot of things up to be more accurate.
Thanks for the hints.
Except that Winternight didn't design Jormungand. That was done by Pax, a dissonant Otaku (think toxic mage and you get the idea) who used to be the leader of the Whites during the Shutdown. Even before the shutdown, she was a sociopathic killer, but after, as she began Fading and trying desperately to keep her powers, she gained powers through the Dissonance. It was Pax and her dissonant tribe that created Jormungand, and cooperated with Winternight to launch a joint offensive. Both Pax and Winternight saw the other as useful fools, to be eliminated when they no longer served their use.
As for IEs and Dragons, the comparison isn't even close with metahuman hackers and the original AIs. The gap in power is simply too big. You could compare it to a great dragon and a mundane unaugmented metahuman, though. Let us put this in perspective. When Deus made his big play in the ECSE exchange during the System Failure, he was successfully taking on an army of hackers/otaku and TWO OTHER AIs simultaneously, and wasn't looking like he was going to go down anytime soon. It was only because everyone was concentrating on that fight that a certain silver-haired icon managed to waltz up and plant the Jormungand egg right amongst the roots of Deus's world-tree avatar. And then Jormungand broke loose, attacking everyone indiscriminately. And we STILL don't know for sure what happened to the AIs, whether they were actually destroyed, or whether they were able to hide away somewhere.
As far as IEs facing a Great Dragon, you need look no further than Storm Front to see how that goes. Harlequin, wearing artifact-level armor, carrying a weapon focus of force 12+, and having over five thousand years of experience, was able to hurt Ghostwalker, but was still far from killing him. Harlequin was about to get blasted out of existence when Frosty, Ehran, and Zebulon stepped in. And the only one of those Ghostwalker likely paid any attention to was Zebulon. There is a reason why the immortal elves haven't tried to take on the great dragons, even though they clearly hate eachother. Until Harlequin went off the rails, there was effectively an accord between the two sides, limiting things to a 'cold war' of sorts. And while this 'border skirmish' might have stirred up feelings on both sides, I don't think either side is anxious to see that cold war become hot.
