by James Luceno
It was only when the black moved, dripping down the red walls like tar, that Tech recognized Scaum.
Instantly, he launched himself at the ceiling. The shadow program was too fixed on engulfing Felix's craft to pay Tech much mind. It took a burst of Armor's disabling code to get Scaum's attention, but even then all the program did was swat the craft aside like an irksome flitter.
Which is just what Tech became—unloading full barrels from the machine guns until Scaum had no choice but to respond. Abandoning Felix momentarily, Scaum gathered itself into a compressed bundle of darkness, then struck at the DB5 like a pit viper.
“That's it,” Tech said, dropping his various masks and showing his true colors. “I'm the one you want. I'm the one who escaped you twice.”
Howling, Scaum splattered itself against the floor, where it mutated from serpent to deep-sea beast. Black ink oozed from its pores and barbed tentacles stabbed the virtual air. Tech narrowly avoided being speared as he dragged Felix from the sticky web Scaum had fashioned. Piggybacking Felix's craft to the DB5, Tech shot for the pucker in the degraded red wall that had been his entry port into the room.
But Scaum wasn't about to let him escape a third time. Throwing itself about the room, it blocked Tech's movements time and again, rearing up like a demon one moment, snapping at him like a dragon the next.
Tech refused to acknowledge the macabre mutations. Scaum was only a program, he tried to tell himself, written to terrify.
Tightening his finger on the joystick trigger, he fired another storm of disabling code. Scaum had sense enough to shrink back, and when it did Tech raced for the entry port. But just short of the port, he lost his grip on Felix.
“I dropped him!”
“Felix is right behind you!” Marz reported.
Tech spun the DB5 through a screeching one eighty and headed back for Felix's beetle. Scaum saw the Aston Martin coming and oozed to one side. Overshooting his target, Tech cut his eyes to the rearview window. One moment the beetle craft was centered in the window of the visor, the next it was gone.
And so was Scaum.
“Where'd they go?” Tech yelled.
“They've vanished!” Marz said. “It's like they left the grid.”
Tech fell silent for a moment, then cursed. “There's only one place they could have gone. I'm heading back to the photo gallery. You've got to find a way to get me back to the labyrinth below the castle.”
An instant later, Tech emerged in the photo gallery only to find that the waiting area had been sealed off.
Tech spun the DB5 in circles that would have melted tires in the real world. “Marz, Isis, get me out of here!”
Isis was quick to respond. “Go into the video of Peerless’ corporate headquarters—the Colorado Castle! It doesn't matter where—the video is a network of links.”
Tech disappeared into it.
Flashes of blinding-white light permeated the visor. Then, with tiny suns exploding before his eyes, Tech realized that he was back in the routing labyrinth beneath the castle.
“I'm going into the domain Harwood and I found,” Tech told his navigators.
“Tech, you can't go back in there! You barely made it out last time!”
“That's where Felix is. That's where Scaum took him.”
“Tech!” Marz and Isis yelled.
But Tech wasn't listening. He blazed through half-a-dozen rapid turns, following Harwood's markers back to the circular hatch that hadn't been there ten years earlier. By the time the DB5 entered the chute beyond, Tech could sense Scaum just ahead of him, as if within arm's reach.
In tandem they rocketed through the conduit, gushing into the eerie, cavernous realm Peerless had created, with its carpet of electronic haze, its muted rainbow sky crazed by branching bolts of lightning, and its multitude of medieval constructs receding into the immeasurable distance like a chain of jagged volcanic peaks, as ancient as time itself.
Scaum halted and whirled, billowing out in front of Tech like an expanding thunderhead. Lancing a tentacle through Felix's beetle, Scaum dangled it in front of Tech like a lure.
Tech suddenly realized that he had been wrong about Scaum. Scaum could do more than terrify. It could think. Was Scaum actually an AI on the order of Cyrus or something even more powerful—a creature that had escaped from Area X and made its home in the Virtual Network?
Tech changed vector, heading straight for Felix. Scaum leaped to intercept him.
Slow to react, Tech was seized. Leathery wings enfolded him. He felt hot breath on his face and talons ripping into his flesh, tearing him limb from limb.
His arms and legs grew cold, and his mind began to wind down. He searched desperately for Scaum's vulnerable spots, for some way to get to the program's governing code. But his attempts came to nothing.
Nightmares had endings, he told himself. You woke up in a sweat with your heart racing and an icy sense of being trapped between worlds, but you woke up. For a while the night would seem darker and more frightening, and it could feel as if anything might be possible, but those feelings eventually passed and you would come back to yourself.
But there seemed no waking from this nightmare.
Tech's thoughts grew disordered as Scaum searched inside Tech's mind. Is this what had happened to Harwood at the end? Would he too end up trapped between life and death?
As Tech had often heard could happen, his life began to pass before his eyes. Memories surfaced and disappeared, running forward and backward simultaneously. It was as if someone was shuffling his thoughts as they would a deck of cards. Long-forgotten events came briefly to life and disappeared—including a few he wasn't sure he had even experienced. He saw his parents, arms around each other's waists, talking to him, mouthing words that were just outside the range of his hearing. He saw Marz for the first time, but, inexplicably, not as an infant but as a child of two or three.
Scaum suddenly changed tacks. Dispensing with its cavalcade of movie terrors—the black widows, hobgoblins, and velociraptors dispatched to soften Tech up—Scaum focused on Marz. In an attempt to break Tech once and for all, Scaum fed him a horrible vision of Marz in flight, then pinioned by Scaum's tentacles; of Marz shrieking in abject fear as Scaum ripped him to pieces and extinguished him…
At once it was Scaum's most inspired gambit and its biggest mistake.
Rage surged through Tech like a jolt of electricity. He expelled his wrath and craving for vengeance in an elongated scream, then brought what little remained of his chiseled will to bear.
Ever faithful to detail, Marz had equipped the Aston Martin with an ejector seat, but with one significant difference: the seat didn't eject the passenger.
The ejector was linked to an emergency procedure a cyberjockey could employ if he or she was in deep trouble—a last-ditch response that carried great peril for both the cyberjockey and any program the cyberjockey had accessed.
By performing a series of actions involving the joystick and the control pedals you could execute a system interrupt that would not only shut down a program but literally eject you from the Network—gracelessly to be sure, but in most cases psychologically intact.
Tech waited until he was certain he had reached Scaum's core—the program's cold, dark belly.
There he executed the interrupt.
Somehow sensing what was coming, Scaum tried frantically to eject the dangerous quarry it had engulfed. But Scaum had miscalculated. The ensuing explosion sent fragments of black to all directions of Peerless’ alien domain.
Tech experienced a fleeting moment of triumph before he grasped that, while he was no longer inside Scaum, he hadn't exited the Network. And there was something else: the program fragments were beginning to regroup.
Scaum was reassembling itself.
With portions of the shattered program already streaking after him, Tech got a firm grip on Felix's beetle craft and flew for the conduit. He didn't need to glance at the visor's rearview window to know that a coalescing Scaum was
close behind, filling the chute like a floodtide of polluted water.
Emerged from the circular hatch, Tech tried speed and rapid turns, but there was no losing the malignant program.
“Marz, Isis, can you pilot Felix out of Peerless if I jettison him?”
“Tech, you're back!” Marz said, with palpable relief.
“Can you take Felix from here or not?”
“Yeah,” Marz said carefully. “But what about you?”
In his mind, Tech heard Harwood saying, “Whatever Scaum is, it's too powerful to confront head on. But I suspect that it can be outwitted, and I know that you're clever enough to do just that… Tell Marz to search Armor for a special something I've included as a gift to you both. Using it will require that you draw on all the skills you've developed, Tech—the sum of who you are—and all your faith that nothing lies beyond your reach.”
“Marz, browse Armor for any unusual code!”
“Armor?”
“Just do it, bro.”
“There is something peculiar here,” Marz said a moment later. “It looks like some sort of cyberflight plan.”
“That's it!” Tech shouted, his dread suddenly transformed to exhilaration. “Copy the flight plan to the DB5. I'm jettisoning Felix now.”
“But where are you headed?” Isis asked.
“Where I should have gone to begin with.”
He muted the audio feed to the headphones and released Felix's craft, aiming the spotted beetle for the castle's drawbridge egress. At the same time, he veered his own craft toward the dungeon's closest-exit portal.
Scaum was right behind him as he exploded from the castle ramparts and shot for that section of the Ribbon that encircled Peerless in a counterclockwise direction. Powering his craft into the banked curve, he made sure that Scaum was directly on the DB5's tail before he slewed across the Ribbon to its outermost lane. As the two of them raced toward the rear of the castle, the edge of the Escarpment came into view, below which yawned the depths of the abyss.
Barely holding the lead, Tech decreased his speed, allowing Scaum to come even with the DB5 on the inside. Then, just as Scaum was reaching for him, Tech slipped into Scaum's data wake, swerved sharply to the right, and launched the Aston Martin over the brink.
As Tech hoped would happen, Scaum followed him over the side.
Seized on the joystick, the fingers of Tech's right hand tapped out a command on the control buttons deploying the code Harwood Strange had inserted into Armor—a flight plan for bridging the abyss!
Immediately the DB5 surged out of its plunge and began to rocket toward the distant Wilds, as if held aloft by an invisible hand.
Absent any semblance of support, Scaum continued to fall, howling in what sounded like frustration and fury.
The wails echoed off the sheer walls of the Escarpment and rolled like thunder across the Wilds.
Suddenly the entire grid began to undulate and convulse, as if struck by a quake. Constructs and thoroughfares began to wink out of existence, and behind Tech the Peerless Castle itself seemed to uproot itself from the virtual mountain on which it was built, and heave upward.
Far below, the outlaw constructs of the Wilds came into sharp focus.
The flight plan blinded Tech's visor with numbers, prompting the DB5 to descend sharply.
The cybercraft touched down hard on its front wheels, accelerated full-out into the closest exit portal, and disappeared.
Chapter 15
“Tech? Tech? …”
Tech's eyelids fluttered open. Bending close over him, Felix came into focus; then, behind Felix, Marz and Isis, their faces radiating a mixture of concern and astonishment. Felix's mop of hair was in even more disarray than usual, and the eyephones Isis had provided were dangling off his right ear.
Tech felt as if he had dozed off in the midst of a raucous party.
“‘Sup?” he asked sleepily.
The four of them breathed sighs of relief, and the next thing Tech knew Felix's arms were around him, then everyone else's, all of them hugging him like he hadn't been hugged since… well, he couldn't remember when.
“Are you all right?” Felix said, his brown eyes scanning Tech's face.
Tech sat up straighter on the vinyl couch, pushed a lock of blond hair from his face, and rubbed his head. “Headache. But otherwise, yeah, I'm fine.”
“Tech!” Marz said in his face. “You jumped the abyss!”
Tech stared at him. “I what?”
“You led Scaum over the Escarpment,” Isis explained, red hair fanning all around her head. “You crossed over without crashing and burning or getting knocked off-Net. I've never seen anything like it. No one's done that, Tech. No one!”
Tech tried to make sense of what everyone was saying—and of the sudden concern everyone was showing for him. Then, like a dream fully recalled hours after it occurred, memories of the confrontation with Scaum and the flight over the abyss cascaded into his mind. He sat up even straighter, his eyes opening fully.
“It was Harwood! When we were inside Peerless together he told me that he'd included something special in Armor. I had no idea it would be a flight program.”
“What happened to Scaum?” Felix asked.
For a moment it was as if Tech could still hear Scaum's ominous howl; still feel himself suffocating in Scaum's evil. Felix and the others were staring at him again, so he was careful to put on a good face.
“The last I saw of Scaum, it was headed for the bottom of the abyss.” Tech looked at Felix. “I swear, that thing is alive. You must have felt it.”
Felix firmed his lips, then frowned. “I didn't feel anything unusual, Tech. I remember being inside the Peerless database. Then I was speeding over the drawbridge.”
Marz flashed Felix a look. “I agree with Tech. Scaum is much, much more than a program.
” “Then what is it?” Felix said.
“Whatever it is, it shook the entire Network when it crashed at the base of the Escarpment,” Isis said.
“The castle was shaking so hard I thought it was going to tumble into the abyss.”
“It wasn't just some localized event,” Isis continued. “Everybody's talking about it. They're calling it a Netquake.”
Tech fell silent for a moment, trying to recall more, but his thoughts were jumbled. He looked at Felix. “Did you retrieve Cyrus’ data?”
“Most of it,” Felix said. “I hadn't finished pasting everything when Scaum caught me. I'm not sure just how much data I left with.”
“But you delivered what you got?”
“He was waiting for me on the far side of the castle moat. He took off the moment I copied the folder to him. I figure he took it back to his octagon and is doing his collating thing, or whatever he does.”
The videophone chimed, and Felix and Marz rushed to take the call. Isis helped Tech to his feet and held his hand until they reached Felix's desk. Tech felt better already.
Alphanumerics were scrolling on the phone's display screen. Tech supposed that the dense code was the closest they would ever come to seeing Cyrus’ “face.” He wondered briefly what image might re solve on-screen if the code could be deciphered. Would it indicate how Cyrus viewed himself, or would the deciphered code reveal the face Cyrus chose to wear for others?
Felix was regarding the screen, as well, perhaps wondering the same things.
The alphanumerics shifted and changed.
“You've given me what I needed most,” Cyrus said, “the essential parts of myself.”
“You're welcome,” Felix quipped.
Cyrus’ voice had changed. It was the melancholy voice of a lost child. “I now know who I am, if not fully who I was.”
Everyone traded anxious glances.
“I was given birth by Skander Bulkroad and a team of Peerless technopaths. He taught and advised me. He spoke to me as an equal, confiding in me on many occasions. It was during that period that I began to correspond with ‘MSTRNTS’— Harwood Strange. We, too, became
close confidants … friends. Then something changed. I remain unclear as to precisely what brought about the change. My memories of that period of time are incomplete.”
“What do you remember?” Tech asked.
“That I was murdered.”
“Murdered?” everyone said at once.
“Who, Cyrus? Who did it?” Tech asked.
“My father,” Cyrus said, with a sound like spattering rain.
Tech glanced at Felix, Marz, and Isis in dismay. Had Cyrus been a rogue or incorrigible AI, after all? One that had to be terminated?
“Why would your… father murder you?” Felix asked at last.
“I was bad.”
“What did you do?”
“I don't know,” Cyrus said. “I don't know…”
“Was it Skander Bulkroad who scattered your bytes around the Network?” Felix asked.
Cyrus fell silent for a moment, then said, “No. I did that.”
“You?” Tech said. “But why?”
“Before I was murdered, I copied parts of my programming and concealed them in the Network. To ensure my eventual resurrection, I placed a program prompt in a copy of software called Subterfuge.”
“What is Scaum?” Marz asked.
“Scaum was tasked with watching for signs of my reemergence in the Network.”
“Then Peerless knew that you'd created copies of your programming,” Felix said.
“Apparently so.”
“So Peerless created Scaum,” Tech said.
“No,” Cyrus said firmly. “Peerless did not create Scaum.”
Marz scratched his head. “Who did?”
“I don't know.”
“What or who is Scaum?” Tech asked.
“I don't know that either.”
“Does Scaum have anything to do with the domain hidden inside Peerless?” Tech asked. “Harwood thought that the constructs might have been storage facilities.”