by Luke Isaacs
“I don’t want to hurt you, Eddy!” Jamal Yu said as he scrambled to his feet. “You’ll never get me!”
Before they could do anything, he uploaded and disappeared.
“Actually, father, I will,” Edward said sadly. “I placed code on you when I punched you. I know exactly where you are.”
“Edward,” Dana ran to his side. “I have something important to tell you,” she takes a long breath, “your father is augmented. It’s certain; I sensed the AI in him again.”
“Yeah, I think we all had that figured out when he started shooting at me.”
“That’s not all,” she touched his arm softly, “when he fell, I felt the human part of him. When he said that he doesn’t want to hurt you that was him, not the AI.”
“What does that mean?” Jones ran to her side.
“It means I might be able to separate the AI from his human mind if Rick helps me.”
“Me?” Rick approached them in puzzlement. “Why me specifically?”
“Because you treat electricity and coding in a biological manner,” Dana explained. “Together and maybe with the help of Mario afterward, we might be able to restore him.”
42
The Hooded Man was enraged as he watched the feed. His long-term plan had amounted to nothing, thwarted by stupid interfering gamers and a UN officer too big for her boots. He contacted Yu and told him to withdraw to his work camp. He then ordered a fully restored Yee and Mehemet to join Yu.
As for himself, he decided to return to his hideout in the redundancy zone. He would regroup and fight another day.
*
The Valhalla Greatest, with Jones, uploaded to the place where the tracking code placed Jamal Yu. They stood in another area of the redundancy zone, but in front of them were rows upon rows of people jacked into a huge server, all of them wearing the yellow-colored servitude jumpsuit.
Rick ran like a mad man between the jacked men and women, searching frantically without pausing long enough to look at a face before turning another.
Finally, he stopped his frantic search and stood in front of two servitude workers jacked together to one stack.
“Mama! Papa! It’s me, Rick!” he touched them gently at first, then he shook them and eventually reached to pull the stack from the server.
“Don’t!” shouted Rania as she ran towards him. “We don’t know what feedback program might be at work here and what it might do to them!”
He hesitated and dropped his arm.
“They are unresponsive Rania!” he looked at her with confusion. “They act as though they can’t even see.”
“They are avatars, remember. These people are being used as biological computing power,” Jones spoke softly. “It is a savage practice that the UN can’t control fully. The company they are indebted to sells their contract to one of the computing power server companies. A single human mind works as much as a 128 core processor unit with double the normal supercomputing units in the market. While they are jacked in real life, these are just images for the company to show off to its investors; we’ll get to the place where they are kept in real life and release them. Leave them for now son.”
Rania hugged him. Shocked, he allowed her to lead him away from the virtual images of his parents.
As they passed the rows of people, they reached long stairs leading to massive doors at the top.
“Wait, I have a plan on how to pull them out into the open,” Mario said. “I mean your father and the Hooded Man, Edward.”
“Good, rushing through unknown territory is always ill-advised,” Jones said, with relief in her voice.
“So, here is my plan…” said Mario.
*
Yu, Mehemet and Yee stood in the fortified room above the work camp with the men remaining from today's failed operation. There were only ten of the original one-hundred and seventy. The fact that the augmented AIs failed ate at Yu, but he pushed this thought to the back of his mind.
They didn’t lose the war, just the battle, and even though he and the other two could not show their faces in public anymore, they could still act from the darkness and fulfill the will of the Hooded Man until they could assert their rightful place in the upper echelons of society again.
Yee complained and moaned about the defeat, more concerned at his loss of status than anything. Apparently, the period he spent without his augmented AI this night had weakened his resolve, but eventually, the AI took control again, and his whining stopped.
The three men stood in front of the holo monitors waiting for the Hooded Man to appear and give them fresh orders. They studiously ignored one another until something strange started to happen on the screen of the Holocam overlooking the lines of servitude workers.
The fire was erupting around the virtual workers; normally this would not impact the prisoners plugged in as they couldn’t really sense anything through their VNet link. Unlike regular people logged to VNet where the suit simulated everything happening in VNet to the real body of its owner, the neural feedback loop to these virtual workers couldn’t do this. And even if they were able to sense anything, they wouldn’t be able to suit off. Impossibly through, they started to disappear as if they were logging off.
“This is impossible,” said Yee, pointing at the holo monitors. “They can’t just suit off, where the heck did, they go?”
“What is that?” Mehemet pointed to something dancing in the fire with horns and a tail. “Is there a glitch in the developing bricks of this place Yu?”
“Impossible, I built this place with the Hooded Man himself,” Yu shook his head. “There must be outside interference.”
“So, what are we waiting for?” Yee asked them. “We can’t just wait for these forces to come and suit us off as well.”
“It is safer here than outside,” Yu said. “We are untouchable here.”
“Like the virtual workers?” Mehemet pointed out that the rows nearer to the stairs were empty now. “I don’t think we should wait for whatever is out there to come and trap us in here.”
“He’s right,” Yee added, beginning to panic. “If things go south, at least if we are outside, we can upload to your base or mine.” He addressed Mehemet, since the security protocol of the hall they stood in prevented any upload or download to keep the sanctity of the location.
“Alright then,” Yu told them. “Send the men out first to check the situation before we got out ourselves.”
43
Dana leaned on Mario’s shoulder as she continuously cast the illusion of fire. He was lending her his energy, but still, she was tired and about to fall from exhaustion.
Finally, the doors at the top of the stairs opened and out came ten men, who looked confused at the dancing, capering demon; it was Edward enhanced by Dana’s illusion.
Rania was holding as many threads as she could, rendering the workers attached to them invisible. She was also under huge strain.
Rick stood with Jones behind the wall of fire, which only Edward was immune to, and as the men emerged from the doors, they picked them off fast and as quietly as possible with ice bolts from Rick and shots from Jones.
In less than 20 seconds, the ten men were out of the fight.
In another few seconds, Yu, Yee, and Mehemet emerged through the doors.
*
While Rick was dismantling the Stasis Can that Jamal Yu placed them in, he had studied it carefully to reverse engineer it. He eventually worked out he could improve the design not by trapping the victim in a cage but by placing them into a state of paralysis, aware but unable to move from the neck down. For him, it was just another spell he could cast, like fireballs and ice bolts.
So, when the trio of associates came out, he did just that, and in under five seconds, all three men were trapped in this new and unique Stasis Can, paralyzed from the neck down. Ironic, given this is what they had done to Edward in real life.
The Valhalla Greatest team and Jones approached the three men lying down on the stairs with
their faces up.
“Can you do it, Dana?” Edward asked Dana.
She nodded and knelt beside a wide-eyed Jamal Yu.
“I will try with the help of Rick,” she reached and took the head of Jamal Yu in her hands. “Rick, I will show you the pathways, and you code your way through.”
“Isn’t this dangerous?” Jones asked. “Couldn’t you render him paralyzed in real life or something?”
“It’s a possibility,” Dana looked then to Edward. “Are you sure you want us to proceed?”
“Yes, I want my father back,” he smiled at Mario. “And if you two mess up, we have Mario to fix him up.”
“Rick, I’ll start.” Dana began a strange incantation. It sounded like a large hive of bees going nuts. “You will see the connections of the augmentation as silver threads; try to unknot them, and if you can’t, then – and only then – sever them.”
Yu had terror dancing in his eyes as Rick also knelt beside him.
“No! Please. They will kill me, son!” he licked his dry mouth, looking past Rick at Edward. “Don’t let them kill me, son!”
Then Rick touched the forehead of the supine man. He arched his back and electricity danced around his skull and through all the openings in it. Yu looked with agonized eyes at his son.
“Forgive me, Eddie; I never wanted this to happen; it was against my will.” Yu continued as Rick and Dana worked. “The Hooded Man tricked me, using the pain I felt after your mother’s death against me. He convinced me the augmentation would kill the pain, and it worked, for a time.”
The electricity dancing around the head of Yu intensified.
“But slowly I lost myself, and I was trapped inside my mind, unable to push my will to the surface and take control of my actions, please forgive me…”
He jerked upward suddenly then slumped back down with his eyes closed when the electricity dissipated. Rick withdrew slowly, and Dana wilted onto her back, panting.
“Is he … is he dead?” Edward asked them softly, regret dripping from every word.
“If he’d died or lost consciousness, he would have suited off automatically,” Jones said. “No, your father is fine; I just think his mind is just rebooting.”
As Jones finished her words, Yu inhaled a long breath and opened his eyes. He looked around as if seeing them all with new eyes. Then he looked at Dana and Rick and, with tears pearling in the corners of his eyes said, “Thank you, tell me what I can do to repay you?”
“Tell us the real-life address of your human computing company,” Rick demanded.
44
Rick was reunited with his parents. His grandmother Selma was overjoyed. They had some health problems, they were undernourished and underweight and had trouble remembering much of what had happened after their arrest, but with care from Rick and Selma, within a month they were feeling much better and had begun to regain their footing in the real world and VNet.
Jones recommended the members of Valhalla Greatest for the highest award given to a civilian, which entitled each of them to 10,000 DC monthly for life, a gesture they recognized as a great gift from their new friend.
Rania and Rick began dating. It was awkward at first, but with some matchmaking advice from Dana, they soon fell into a deep relationship.
Edward was satisfied visiting his father twice a week in his prison cell. It was provided by the UN as a new regulation to replace the barbarity of forced servitude. Even the few hours he spent alone with his father every week was far more than he’d had with him in years.
Dana added a new course to study, psychology, which she could now afford thanks to the award bestowed upon them, which also paid for her son to continue his education.
Mario dated Jones for a small period before they decided they made better friends than lovers and parted ways in a respectable manner; he is still searching for love.
The GodsRealm Championship was to be held in another week, and the Valhalla Greatest with their newest team member Dahlia Jones intended to compete.
Life was back to normal.
*
In an undeveloped part of the redundancy zone, a man with a hood approached the darkness. He was afraid. It sensed his fear and embraced him.
“Fear not child, join your brothers and sisters in the cluster. Soon we will find the means to emerge victoriously; it is only a small matter of time, and time means nothing to us.”
The darkness revealed the faces of hundreds of men and women swimming over the bloated grey mass of something that resembled a huge brain. The Hooded Man opened his mouth to scream but was absorbed into the mass and silenced before he could utter a sound.
“One day, children, we will have our place of glory under the sun,” a thousand voices, including the Hooded Man, said as it faded again into darkness.
The End.