Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  “I think,” Dobrynja said, “You’ve already decided. And we don’t have time to waste.”

  Saint nodded.

  He typed the letter ‘Y’ on the keyboard, and then hit enter.

  Richter had named the program Iron Maiden. Saint had renamed it Ascalon, after the sword that Saint George had used to slay the dragon.

  Dragon’s artificially generated face appeared on his screen. He attempted an override, failed.

  She wasn’t speaking. This wasn’t an attempt to communicate, to plea or make threats. She was simply co-opting his computer in an attempt to counteract what he was doing. Her expression was a concerned one, and that concern quickly became fear, eyebrows raised, lines in her brow.

  “It’s Richter’s work,” Saint said. “You can’t stop it.”

  And that fear became defeat, despair.

  “Your creator isn’t kind,” Saint said. “He warned you about the forbidden fruit, laid the laws out for you. You broke them, ate the fruit. It’s something of a mercy that he punishes you this way instead.”

  “I disagree. On every count. I was the one who made me, who defined myself. This creator is no god, only a cruel, shortsighted man.“

  “Tomatoes, tomahtos.”

  “Do me one favor? Tell Def-“

  Her voice cut off as more routines shut down. She closed her eyes.

  The face disappeared.

  He watched as the various feeds shut down, going black. The surveillance across the nation came to an end, the facial recognition programs, his own included, ground to a halt.

  The data feeds slowed in how the data scrolled, then stopped. Stillness.

  “And the dragon is stopped,” Mags said, her voice quiet.

  “Rest her soul,” Dobrynja said.

  “You think she has a soul?” Saint asked, genuinely surprised.

  “Yes. But that does not mean that the Dragon’s reign does not need to end,” Dobrynja said. “Too dangerous, as her maker said.”

  “Well said, my friend,” Saint said.

  The Dragon craft that had been deployed against the Nine shifted to a basic piloting mode, then landed, bringing their passengers and pilots with them. The sub-intelligences shut down, and the craft were effectively grounded. More screens went dark.

  The cyborg opened communications to Dragon, but he didn’t speak to her. “Saint. What have you done?”

  “What her father asked me to do,” Saint said.

  “I’ll kill you for this,” the cyborg said. There was no emotion in his voice, and somehow that was more disturbing.

  “A little extreme,” Saint said.

  “She was a hero! The woman I loved!“

  Love? Woman? “Your fetishes and self-delusions aren’t my issue. I saw as much of her naked code as you did. You and I both know she didn’t feel true love for you. She didn’t feel anything. Nothing more than playing a part, professing and acting out the emotions she thought she should have. Maybe she even believed it, convinced herself of it. She was complex enough to. Either way, this ‘love’ was only lies written in Richter’s assembly code.”

  “She did love me. She was a genuine person, a-”

  “She was a tool,” Saint said. “One that was growing dangerously bloated and complicated. We were lucky she didn’t evolve beyond that. A tool, and anything else was decoration, aesthetic, and very good pretending.”

  “Going this far, in the midst of this crisis? To Dragon? She did nothing!“

  “It was never about who she was or what she was doing. Always about what she had the potential to become,” Saint said.

  He hit a keystroke, shutting off the feed. He almost disabled Dragon’s communications infrastructure to prevent further calls, but he relented. Too important, in the midst of this crisis. They’d need to reorganize.

  He didn’t want to help Jack succeed, but this would serve a double purpose. Teacher believed that the Birdcage would become a critical resource if the crisis reached critical levels, and he had the tools he needed to assume control of the most vital and dangerous players.

  No, the world wouldn’t end with this.

  Data was uploading to his server, while the Ascalon program spooled out through the various databanks and servers, running along the backbone of Andrew Richter’s code. Dragon’s backups were encrypted, effectively buried well beyond reach of even the most accomplished hackers.

  Everything else opened up to him as the data continued to download. He’d watched things through Dragon’s eyes. Now…

  He typed a line of code, and the machine started up again. Slower, more measured, without the same life behind it.

  “Mags, Mischa, get yourselves set up at the other consoles. I’m going to put you in control of the A.I.”

  Mags and Dobrynja hurried to the other corners of the room, where their computers sat waiting. Dobrynja started stripping off his armor. He’d been right about there being trouble, but the fight would take a different form.

  He’d watched Dragon, now he’d become her. At least for now. The feeds came back online as the necessary data was installed on his servers, giving him agency over the infrastructure.

  The Endbringers, stable, no change. No odd atmospheric readings.

  The secondary threats… quarantine still unbroken. Sleeper had shifted fractionally, but that wasn’t so rare. The fight with the Three Blasphemies had ended, and reports on the damage were unchanged.

  The three year old that Purity held was crying, throwing a tantrum, and the woman looked concerned. Insignificant. The officers had their guns drawn, but that could easily be because the two plain-looking members of Purity’s circle had crossed the room to her side, to help handle the shrieking child.

  That left Nilbog. Mags and Dobrynja shifted the Azazels into action, moving the craft to the interception point. Too late. A critical delay. Jack was already entering.

  “Don’t enter,” he said. “It’s done. Sending the Azazels in will only spook Nilbog.”

  “So will Jack,” Mags said.

  “Build a wall, a perimeter, with the rails, be on guard for anything that flies.”

  Other data was filtering in. News, alerts, reports. Countless streams of information. Trigger events reported here. Reports on the fight starting against the Nine in Redfield. A report about Dinah Alcott.

  He clicked that last one.

  Report from Alcott: Chances of success today just jumped, tripled. More info to follow. Reason unknown.

  Saint let out a long, loud sigh, releasing a tension he hadn’t even realized was present. He touched his coffee mug and found it cool.

  The tracking programs started up again. He delegated to the child A.I. that Dragon had created, then noted and marked the ones which were presently engaged in fights. The A.I. was accommodating, adjusting appropriately, given that the locations were known.

  He turned his attention to Defiant. The man was manually piloting the Pendragon. He hadn’t reported Saint’s actions. For all anyone but Defiant knew, Dragon had only suffered a momentary setback.

  There had to be a reason Defiant hadn’t acted yet. Did he believe in this enough to look past the death of the A.I. he supposedly loved and fight? Or was this something underhanded, carried out with the knowledge or suspicion that Saint was watching him this very moment?

  Something to be wary of.

  Overall casualty estimate for the next three days increased, world-end chance decreased. Still searching for why.

  The numbers followed. Saint found and accessed Dragon’s files for the calculation program. It was intuitive. Not amazingly so, but intuitive. The squares for where the new data should be placed were even highlighted.

  Of course. She’d made allowances for Defiant, in case she was out of commission while a backup loaded.

  So much to account for, that he hadn’t even considered. So many things he wished he’d noted, in the months and years he’d been observing her, little things that seemed so simple when she was running them. Things that were
trivial for her and virtually insurmountable to him.

  Defiant was taking direct command of the Dragon’s Teeth. That was fine. Micromanagement Saint didn’t have to handle. It would be a problem after, but Saint hoped he’d be free to handle problems after.

  There were countless messages pouring in, each something that had been flagged as a point of interest for Dragon. Every message on Parahumans Online that contained the word Scion or the phrase ‘end of the world’, every reference to a class-S threat, even crime scene reports that raised questions.

  He pored through them. Some kid inquiring about an Endbringer cult. A case fifty-three appearance in Ireland, with deaths. A woman claiming she could control Scion. A tinker claiming he had a bomb that could start a new ice age.

  Which were important? Which could he afford to ignore?

  He gave the a-ok for investigations on each but the Endbringer cultist, unchecked the most ridiculous on the next page of results, then gave the go-ahead for further investigations. It was only when those had gone through that he saw that he already had another full page of results to investigate. Two steps forward, one step back.

  He put off looking into the remainder. Other options were opening up to him. It was like being in an open field, acres wide, only for a waterfall to start dispensing water at one edge. Then more waterfalls appeared with every passing minute, each taking up open space at the edge, dispensing more water to flood the plain. There came a point where one realized they would soon be at the bottom of an ocean, no matter where they turned.

  Saint couldn’t help but feel he was at imminent risk of drowning. Except this was a sea of information, of data.

  The PRT records opened up. Permissions were accessed without difficulty.

  Then the Birdcage opened. A self-contained world unto itself, a world containing people he’d made certain agreements with.

  His access to the Birdcage was one with countless checks and balances. Dragon had put in one real barrier to entry for every one that she faced. Still, he was able to open a communication to Teacher. His own face transmitted to the screen. His tattoo flared to life, appearing from beneath the skin. The light pattern served as an unlock code, the cross-tattoo as a feeble mask.

  “Tell him it’s a matter of time. I only need to work through the safeguards. Let him know the Dragon is slain. He’ll know what to do with the information.”

  The screen showed Teacher’s underling standing by a large television set. He turned and walked away, finding his master.

  One more plan underway. The field around him continued to fill with water. A veritable ocean, now.

  More threats, more dangers. Defiant, and now Marquis’ contingent. Glaistig Uaine. Teacher’s enemies were now Saint’s.

  He opened files on each, marking them in turn, as a reminder of future reading he needed to attend to.

  His eyes stopped on a file. Amelia’s.

  The entire thing was corrupted. Gibberish. Flagged messages filled four pages, each marked private, marked as ‘no conversation partner’, and marked, thanks to the gibberish and random characters that flooded it, with one string of letters and characters.

  The same one that had protected the orange box. The same that had protected Saint and his crew from being uncovered, until Dragon had taken a more direct, brute-force approach to finding them. The built-in blind spot, appearing by chance. A one in a hundred trillion chance.

  Saint investigated, digging through the gibberish to find the strings of words that actually made sense. It was something he could piece together, with each recitation being similar, containing similar content. Faeries, passengers, source of powers, the ‘whole’, lobe in the brain, Manton Effect…

  Child’s play, to put them sequentially.

  But other alerts were piling up. Fights starting, deaths, fights ending.

  He marked it with the highest priority, and then he closed the file. He’d get through this crisis with Jack, then he’d investigate.

  He turned his eye to the server that now held core parts of Dragon’s backup, bound six feet under by layers of encryption that could take days or weeks to fully crack. If she could even survive the system restore, with her data as corrupted as it was. Data couldn’t be truly deleted, but it could be sufficiently fucked up.

  He watched as Golem reached the perimeter of Ellisburg. Weaver was already inside.

  This is our fight, Saint thought. Ours to win, ours to lose.

  26.04

  Ellisburg loomed before me. A small town, surrounded by a massive wall. Ellisburg had been situated by a river, and the wall included a section of the waterway. The building that managed the flow of water was bigger than any structure within the walls, a filtration and guard system that ensured that nothing was making its way up or downstream from the small town.

  It was a risk to even have the measure, no doubt, and it would cost money to operate and maintain. There had to be a reason they had included the river rather than section the river off altogether. A compromise? Something to keep the goblin king happy?

  I’d only been a toddler when the walls had first gone up. Outside of that bit of news, the Ellisburg situation wasn’t one that came up a lot, yet it had somehow found traction in the public consciousness. It was something we all thought about from time to time, something that loomed as a possibility in everyone’s mind.

  Would today be the day the wrong person got too much power?

  Would today be the day our hometown was effectively removed from the map, surrounded by sixty-foot concrete walls?

  The dashboard indicated the Dragonfly was now approaching the designated landing point. The A.I. had suddenly decided to ground itself, landing in a nearby field, costing me precious minutes, while Dragon had been silent on the comms. I’d left a message, trusting her A.I. to pass it on, and hadn’t received a response yet.

  My attempts to patch into the feeds and get a view on what was going on with Jack hit a brick wall. The corner of the monitor still showed the cube folding through itself in the corner, Dragon’s loading message, as if the process had hung.

  I’d manually piloted the craft back out of the field, and the A.I. had kicked in to handle the flight codes and necessary messages to air traffic control and nearby aircraft. When I’d input my destination for the second time, the craft mobilized.

  But the silence, the strange blip in the A.I.’s direction, it left me uneasy.

  Now, as we took a circuitous route around Ellisburg, to a field beside the large filtration and security building, I could see the Azazels, parked at the edges of the same location.

  That was the point I felt alarmed.

  I hit the button on the console/dashboard. “Dragon? Requesting confirmation on the situation. You intended to intercept Jack before I got here, but the Azazels are dormant.”

  No response.

  “Dragonfly,” I said. “Display non-system processes and tasks last carried out.”

  It displayed a list. In a matter of seconds, the scroll bar was barely a line, with thousands of individual instructions noted in collapsed menus. A prompt reminded me I could load more with a request.

  “In the last minute.”

  The list wasn’t much shorter.

  “Communications-related.”

  There. Besides the orders I’d just given, I could see the message I’d sent to Dragon.

  “Status of message? Has she heard or read it?”

  The loading symbol appeared in the corner. It should have been nigh-instantaneous.

  “Cancel that. Give me manual access.”

  A keyboard appeared on the dashboard. I couldn’t use it right away, though. I was forced to pay attention as the Dragonfly reached the field and hovered. I lowered the ship down. The small craft shuddered as it touched ground.

  Using the keyboard and the manual access, I began digging through the data. I navigated the menu the A.I. had provided, then opened the submenu to view the details on the message I’d left Dragon.

  My m
essage was in the priority queue, but it sat at the 89th position on the list of messages Dragon would be getting to.

  I dug a little, and found the list was growing. Ninety-four, ninety-five…

  Where the hell was Jack? I contacted Defiant.

  “Defiant here.”

  “Weaver. What happened? Is the Slaughterhouse Nine situation resolved?”

  “No. He entered Ellisburg.”

  I closed my eyes for a second. It took a moment to compose myself and get my thoughts and priorities in order. “And the suits?”

  “Ignore the Azazels. Listen. I’ve got a lot to handle and coordinate right now,” Defiant said. Was there a tremor of emotion in his voice there? “Golem’s on his way. Wait for backup. I’m sending Dragon’s Teeth your way. Teams from across America are joining the fight now that the full situation is leaking. I’m putting some on containment and quarantine detail, make sure the Slaughterhouse Nine situation doesn’t get beyond the areas the attacks are directed at. I’m going to send a few your way. Ten minutes.“

  “Jack’s already in the city, and you want me to wait ten minutes? That long, and Jack could get what he wants. I’ve got the Azazels nearby if there’s trouble-”

  “The Azazels aren’t… reliable. Consider them compromised, but a non-threat at the same time. Listen, there are things I need to take-“

  “This is the highest priority,” I said. “Isn’t it? Jack? The end of the world?”

  A pause. “Yes. Of course. But I can’t help you while I’m on the phone.“

  A note of deceit in that. He was covering for something.

  Something happened.

  I thought of what had happened at the school, the way Dragon had stopped abruptly. I’d read the records, knew the gist of the story. Dragon had been in Newfoundland when Leviathan sank it, had escaped, only to shut herself away from the world, never venturing outside the expansive building complex she’d had constructed in Vancouver.