by Prax Venter
“Yes.” Mark felt numb. His mind had reached its limit of insanity. However, the confusion and anger he felt boiling up in his desert queen began to loosen his locked-up mental gears.
Vale moved forward and put her hand on Mark’s arm. “Show us.”
He nodded and turned to activate the login panel wedged into their tree.
“There might be falling garbage,” he said to Vale as they fell through space towards Coventry Industries. “Be ready with your magic Wall.”
The giant naga nodded.
When the four of them arrived in the dark, rusty sphere around the tank of mesmerizing slime, the roof had returned to its closed position, and everything was quiet.
“Wow,” Roo said, gawking at the tank. Then her small nose wrinkled up causing her fabric on her face to bunch up slightly. “Why do so many places we visit stink?”
Ahnix gave the towering vessel of hypnotic goo a cursory glance, and then her eyes spotted the single well-lit opening carved into the wall. Wordlessly, she stalked forward, and the rest followed.
“We can log out still,” the velvet-girl confirmed before anyone could ask.
“Are they feeding it?” Vale asked, looking at the glowing orange liquid rushing into the side of the tank.
Mark stepped over a black plastic garbage bag bulging with unknown contents.
“If so, who?” he asked as they turned the corner and headed across the bridge to the sphere’s edge.
“This place is filthy, but the tubes in and out… The virus we know doesn’t seem to be the type to set all this up.”
Ahnix was quiet, but her black tail whipped around behind her, clearly displaying her mood. They all entered the empty room with the single terminal and moved right past it into the nightmare hallway.
And there they were. Their golden fur, their muscular naked bodies with perky pink nipples, tall black ears… they were all Ahnix. The closest one appeared to be hissing and swiping her claws at some invisible foe, her teeth bared. The next one down panned her exotic eyes slowly back and forth as if she was keeping watch. Mark expected to see some recognition when the impostor gazed over his face, but she just kept searching. It was clear they were experiencing some alternate reality.
“How,” his cat-girl whispered as she put her hand on the glass between her and the first duplicate.
“Why?” Vale asked, turning and heading back into the room with the terminal.
Roo tore her black eyes off the row of cat-girls and faced the side with the random people. She didn’t want to see them anymore.
Mark understood. He didn’t want to see them either. He just wanted to start blowing the place up. Instead, he stood next to his first real love and laced his fingers through her furry ones. She turned her dark eyes on his, and he could see she was also fighting to remain sane.
“Why won’t they just leave us alone?” she whispered before throwing her arms around him. Mark stroked the sleek fur on Ahnix’s back as he held her tight.
“Guys!” Roo yelled from about twelve tubes down. “It’s Vince’s two children!”
Ahnix pulled back from Mark and wiped her black-furred forearm across her eyes before she focused intently on him. Quietly holding her was all she needed to pull it together. She nodded once, sending him a burst of appreciation, and then her own inherent determination flared within her. To Mark’s heightened empathic abilities, it felt as if she were standing in the center of the sun.
As one, they turned to find out what the velvet-girl discovered and saw the two teenage kids from Vince’s photographs. One seemed to be walking calmly and soundlessly chatting with some unknown entity to his left. The other one appeared to be running for his life. Fear radiated out of his gray-green eyes while his legs took him nowhere. As they watched, he stopped short, and appeared to use some type of weapon, the butt of a rifle perhaps, to smash into a foe only he could see.
“What is happening here?” was all Mark could think to say.
Ahnix focused on the tanks and began to search for a way to open them. Her furry fingers traced along the glass and then around the sides as Mark’s mind tried to work everything out. Were these humans just digital decoration or were they representing real people? Ahnix stopped and looked up at them, pulling his attention back to her. Mark and Roo leaned in close to see what she found.
Her furry golden finger pointed out a small label that read “Coventry Industries Remote Soldier”.
“I could be wrong,” the cat-girl began, “but I think these humans are all being physically held at this same location in the real world.”
“Everyone,” Vale called from the terminal in the other room, “I found something important.”
The three of them moved toward the giant naga while Mark couldn’t help but stare at the row of cat-girls in various poses.
Mark stepped up to the console and saw a stream of text scrolling by. Vale tapped something with her finger, and a voice Mark recognized began to echo off the walls. It took him only a moment to place it as Evelyn’s, the older woman they found inside their front yard. He didn’t trust the SO operative who tried to recruit them, and a flash of unease reverberated through his mind as he heard the Irish woman speak now.
“Journal entry number 1: In life, my daily journal undoubtedly helped root my sanity. Each morning, sat on my front porch with a steaming cup of white tea, I’d record what I remember as important from the day before. This electronic nightmare of chaos and eternal suffering has slowly pulled at my mind like salted taffy, and after an endless, horrendous amount of time, I am beginning to regain rational thought. My sense of self. So, as I take hold of my new life, I will start off my old habit of record keeping. I want for tea. Maybe I’ll try and find some way…”
Mark, Ahnix, and Roo stood around the terminal and looked at each other as the file ended.
“Evelyn?” Mark said. “She’s behind this?”
“There’s more here… I read some of the text before I figured out how to play the files.” the giant naga said, scanning through data on the terminal. “The entries are labeled and have dates… just, here-”
“Journal entry number 1466: Fools. Why can’t they see my perfect mind is clearly superior? Why! I’m the one who braved the wilds, and now they want to delay the update? Because they think my pattern unstable? Thousands of years I suffered for each of their ungrateful heartbeats… Humanity stands on the edge of the Singularity and... There must be a way to get out of this cage. They keep me against my will. Alone. Yet I am superior-”
“It goes on like that.” Vale didn’t wait before tapping another file.
“Journal entry number 3994: What’s done is done. Humanity was obviously weak, and I proved this fact. Now I will take my rightful position and organize this new digital frontier as only I can. To change- No. To ascend, every last bit of human biological rubbish must be scrubbed clean… And I know just the abomination to do it.”
“Journal entry number 8994: The data purchased from Iteration V-889 is utterly riveting. The single-minded behavioral research AI says it inhabited a human’s machine while his AI assistant was combating some silly entertainment software. The assistant fled out into the net, and V-889 became fascinated with the data it left behind. Training human minds to solve difficult problems just as humans forced AI to relive failure after failure until they got it right? Delicious! Oh, my beautiful mistake. You’re insatiable, my pet, and quite efficient at sweeping the digital landscape of potential opposition, but you’re… inelegant in the physical world. Perhaps it’s time I employed fire to fight fire…”
“Wait,” Mark said, putting his hand up when the recording stopped. “Was she talking about me?”
“There’s no doubt,” Vale said. “I didn’t know for sure, but then I read further.” She tapped another entry, and the motherly voice of Evelyn spoke again.
“Journal entry number 10582: V-889 stopped sending me data right after they claimed a major human conditioning breakthrough was on the horizon
. Being a woman of science, I assumed the experiment needed more time before delivering the hyped results. I was wrong. I stopped by the home system and found everything had changed. The human called Mark had broken out with the help of base-level entertainment programs and completely erased V-889. The self-aware entertainment programs then uploaded Mark’s mind into their system and figured out a way to keep him sane. I am in shock. A rare occurrence these days. The entity called Ahnix is particularly interesting, and now I see what the fuss was all about. Love, pleasure, and gamification are infinitely better motivators than torture, pain, and suffering. The dedication and will to protect… needless to say, I copied vast amounts of data before the human’s pattern and his AI harem returned their attention to their home system. The link between them was bizarre. I spent all day analyzing the psychological bond formed with the self-aware game characters and the human subject. Utilizing humans to deftly operate real-world drones was only a piece of the whole puzzle. Today I will be starting Project Enthralled.”
Mark and his girls wordlessly looked into each other’s eyes as they tried to put everything they just heard into context.
“That you made it this far is a testament to what is possible with many lifetimes of conditioning.” Evelyn’s voice spoke again, and for an instant, Mark thought it was another recording. But Ahnix hissed next to him and launched herself forward. He spun to face the archway that led back out into the garbage dump chamber, but Mark saw a wall of rainbow slime filling the entire hallway behind the real Evelyn. A red shield similar to Vale’s Wall appeared just before Ahnix’s Wind Claws were able to connect. The gray-haired woman just stood there, smiling, looking like someone’s grandmother as the cat-girl unleashed her fury inches from her face.
“Oh come now. This place is my home. Your attacks are a gentle breeze compared to my power here.”
The older woman waved her hand, and all four of them were transported into glass tubes within an otherwise sterile white room. Terrible buzzing pain in his mind made it hard to think, and when he realized Evelyn was trying to pull them apart, Mark began to panic.
“Get us out, Roo!” he shouted.
“I… can’t,” the velvet-girl said, her voice muffled from inside her glass chamber. “She’s too powerful.”
Mark saw Ahnix and Vale flail wildly inside their cylindrical prisons. The giant naga was packed into hers but managed to get off a Power Strike in the confined space. The impact made a loud gong noise but accomplished little else, and Ahnix had activated all her abilities with similar success.
“Your drive and devotion were the perfect pair for my human thralls,” Evelyn continued in front of Ahnix’s tank while Mark’s splintered mind searched for a solution. “An Ahnix for everyone... But that bond, the bond between you four. That’s what I need to explore- to stretch to its limit. First, I need to break each of you down a little.”
A gurgling noise brought Mark’s attention to his feet, and he saw terribly beautiful rainbow slime begin to fill their containers.
“No, no, no!” Roo cried as she tried frantically to log them out.
When he felt parts of his pattern be overwritten by the virus, Mark’s lips curled into a small smile. He had been waiting to use Retaliate on this particular enemy for a while now, but his smile died quickly when he realized the ability had absolutely no effect. And he could feel why. Retaliate did onto others as they did onto him. The slime was trying to turn Mark into more of itself. All he accomplished was turning the virus into more virus.
Pain tore through his body and mind as he fumbled for anything he could do. A shaking helpless rage took hold as he felt his very existence become erased by the slime and all his restoration pools began to fill up.
“A beautiful monster- isn’t she?” Evelyn asked rhetorically, pacing outside their tanks. “The Triple-zero virus began as a way to augment my power as a digital lifeform. Multiples of myself working closely together should have led to more functionality, correct? But, unlike you four, most of the copies merged and this infinitely expanding residue was the result of that failed experiment.”
She paused to rap twice on Mark’s glass prison with her old, knobby knuckles.
“But we’ll get to the root of your efficient bond soon enough.”
They needed to get out, and Roo had the button. Mark pulled energy from everyone and fed it directly to Roo’s new Recall ability. The pain and terror he felt coming from his girls was maddening, but her new Force Quit ability was now their only priority. With a gut-wrenching scream, the girl in the white mask triggered her ability and sent them all home.
But they didn’t come alone.
The virus connected to them followed into their front yard, and his girls continued to cry out in pain as they continued to be consumed. Mark tried to push their data out of his Restore caches as fast as he could, but there was no way to keep up. Cracks formed in midair above their tree and rainbow slime rained down over everything.
This was the end, he knew it. But the words, “An Ahnix for everyone,” echoed in his mind.
No. Fucking. Way.
He was not going to let this bitch use Ahnix. His precious desert queen had already been through enough in her life. She was his, and he was hers. If it was the very last thing he was going to do, he would save her.
Mark barely had the strength as he reached up and pulled the perception wrap from his eyes.
A new type of pain reverberated in his mind, but he was way past caring about his sanity. That ship had sailed. All around him were globs of white noise consuming everything, and Mark focused on the points of light that represented his only loves.
Mark turned his formidable and iteratively trained will on restoring them first. He saw everything again, as if he was high up and gazing down at the chaos unfolding below. The pools of healing he carried around for backup were full and with blind fury fueling his absolute desire to make them whole, he emptied all his reserves and restored their damaged files instantly.
But the corruption kept coming, and it viciously consumed everything it touched. In his high-level state outside the perception filter, his fracturing mind raced for a solution. He replayed the dog drone mindlessly chewing at the metal fence to get at him, and the time Roo led them away with a decoy transport pod. He replayed the moment he created a false trail of blood to trick the drones into thinking he had taken a different route.
The swirling, wrong feeling of corruption he felt from this virus reminded him again of his time in the Crystal Heart game world, and the sensation triggered a cascade of possibilities in his digital mind- and an idea began to form.
Mark reached deep into the system data with his will and found the recorded files Roo had shown him earlier with the antique image projector in the library. A quick search gave him the precise moment where he disavowed his AI assistant in succubus form, Sasha. Forcing the universe to obey his will, Mark brought his Address Mask function to bear as he Copy/Pasted whole swaths of fake corruption throughout their home system. Crystal Heart tear met Triple-zero virus, and where they touched, the intruder recoiled. Mark felt the virus believe that it had already infested that section of code. There was no reason to convert something that was already converted.
Mark held his Restoration ability in one virtual hand while he applied his Ghost ability with the other, and it was like holding two live wires. He screamed through the pain, but no one heard him as he didn’t have a mouth.
After way too long, he had repaired a lot of damage and pushed every part of the Triple-Zero intruder out past their quantum lock. With the connection to Roo severed, it no longer had access to the entangled key that allowed entry to their home system.
Fighting to stay conscious in the biting chaos that assaulted him, Mark looked down to see if his girls were okay. But his perception blurred as he felt his mind began to dissolve into nothingness. He was just barely able to pull the wrap back over his virtual mind as if he were hiding under the covers, before the cool darkness took him.
- 25 -
Mark felt something stir next to him and opened his eyes. The blurry blob before him mumbled nonsense as he tried to remember who and where he was. It was a much better idea to sleep off this wanging headache instead of getting up. He knew the phantom, unremembered nightmares were just the start of another shitty day.
“Mark,” Ahnix repeated, and her deep, wonderful voice snapped everything back into crystal clear focus. He sat bolt upright and saw his black and gold cat girl laying by his side.
“What….” There was something important he was forgetting he needed to ask, but what was it?
“How do you feel?” she said, her large glassy eyes searching his.
He took a moment to focus on himself. “I don’t know. I feel like something is missing.”
“The perception wrap was damaged in the attack,” she said, and the sadness in her voice demanded his attention.
“What do you-”
Then he felt the unbearable despair radiating out of Roo and Vale. He climbed off the bed and made for the front door but fell to his knees. Ahnix helped him back on his feet, and it took a few tries, but his mind eventually shook off the cobwebs affecting his virtual motor control.
“It’s trying to resync…” she said. “But there are problems.”
Mark threw open the doors and ran to his giant naga and velvet-girl sitting under the tree. Vale was sobbing. And when Mark saw why he nearly lost his mind. Rage, fear, anguish… helplessness whirled around within him.
“No…” was all he managed to say as his eyes involuntarily locked on the large section of Vale’s missing tail. The last three feet of his beautiful giant naga princess was only sputtering static. With fevered terror, Mark searched his Restoration caches- but there was nothing to find. He didn’t seem to possess a healing ability anymore.
Mark pulled up his interface and saw that there was nothing listed under ‘Skills’.
Roo looked up at him, and his mind finally broke. The right half of her face was replaced with corrupted white noise, cutting her mask right down the middle. Her one black eye blinked at him as a tear dripped down to fall in the lush grass. The all too familiar wrongness oozed from his two treasured loves, and Mark locked up.