Virtual Immortality

by Matthew S. Cox

  Anatoly lurched at Nina with a berserker’s howl. He landed with two fistfuls of steel floor amid a fading cloud of black smoke, and no sign of Nina anywhere. He turned, but saw only Itai rolling out of the way of another barrage from Joey.

  Her spectral outline crept along the wall as she ghosted her location.

  Anatoly turned on Joey as a pair of large support machine guns stretched out from his hands in wireframe before reality slid over them. He fired before they finished rendering, sending wave after wave of corrupt data at him. Joey stopped chasing Itai around the room with gunfire, focusing on defending himself against the general.

  The blast sent him sliding into the wall; a shower of sparking ricochets pounded into an invisible barrier that formed in front of his outstretched fingers. He was not fast enough to block all of the incoming data; however, the deck’s ingress buffer discarded the transmission. It felt like Anatoly’s bullets hit an armored vest, and he gasped for breath.

  Itai and Nemsky moved to attack him at the same time, sensing his latency. Anatoly stalled as wispy black claws tore through him from behind. Nina faded into view with her hands wrist-deep in his back. Fragments of his chest drifted into the air and broke apart into texture patterns and pixels. While Nemsky screamed, Itai leapt at Joey. The virtual spy grabbed the dark cowboy by his shoulders and slammed a knee into his gut. The hit launched him down the hallway where he slid into a collapse of glowing tubes.

  Nemsky spun on his heels, catching Nina in the side of the face with a back handed slap that sent her spinning headfirst into the wall, chased by a cascade of evil laughter. Her avatar blurred as her deck tried to sort out the salvo of code he sent into it. The gleam in Nemsky’s eyes from the violent act toward a woman made her angrier.

  Sprawled on the ground, she glared up at him. The ribbons of blacklight, her wings, increased in size. She shoved her hands into the steel grid as if it were water. Rods of ebon glass sprang up around Nemsky, spearing through his virtual body and into the ceiling above. Pixelated light flew from his wounds as the simulated Russian general’s programming almost imploded with Nina’s attempt to delete it. The skin over Nemsky’s face flashed red with sub-dermal light as the AI raced to rewrite what she just erased.

  Nina growled, forcing more energy into the shadow tendrils. They expanded, lifting and tearing the general open as they grew. The wailing distracted Itai from Joey’s effort to get out from under the collapse of pipes, and the faux-Israeli shot her a look before vanishing and appearing over her. Itai grabbed her by the hair and peeled her out of the ground. As her hands came free, the shadow tendrils slid away from Nemsky; he fell on his chest with a heavy clank.

  The dark cowboy’s growl filled the hallway. The glimmering tubes exploded away from the now-standing gunslinger. He raised a hand and sent a torrent of spinning bladed orbs and black smoke at him.

  “Boy!” He called out in an echoing phantasmal voice.

  Itai whirled at the sound, losing his grip on Nina as she faded away. The barrage of spheres drilled him into the wall like a rag doll. The cowboy kept his impassive sneer and forced more and more orbs into Itai. Joey’s deck initiated thousands of connection attempts per second, each with a tiny fragment of viral code embedded within. Accepted or declined, the attempts slipped bits of virus in; the hostile program reassembled itself inside.

  Patches of light ripped through Itai’s skin as the attack overwhelmed its communication routines. The AI was unable to scan all of the incoming data, and much of it made it into the main part of his program. Itai slumped into the wall as a wireframe skeleton showed through in places where the image mask faltered. The false Israeli’s head wobbled back and forth so fast it blurred.

  Joey’s attention focused on Itai, allowing Nemsky an opening. The big Russian wrapped his arms around the dark cowboy from behind and squeezed. Joey felt the wires in his brain heat up as the tremendous force circled him.

  A spray of smoky tendrils burst out of the Russian. Nina came out of nowhere and sank her claws once more into his back. She ripped him away from Joey, throwing him sidelong into the wall at the other end of the corridor. As Nemsky flew, she plunged her hands into the ground. He smashed into the pipes with an explosion of multicolored light and sparks, just as a sea of writhing black tentacles engulfed him. The general grabbed at the black, squirming like a moth in a spider’s web.

  Itai forced himself to stand, staggering forward as Joey tried to regain the ability to breathe. Itai glanced at the general in a compromising position, and reappeared next to Nina, where he spun into a wicked kick to the side of her head. She sailed into the ceiling like a dart, bouncing off the roof and settling back into her usual hover. Her avatar flashed into a human silhouette of static for a moment. The tendrils wrapping Nemsky began to unravel, but they would hold for a few seconds more.

  Joey spun, firing a torrent of smoking skulls that chased Itai around in a sprinting circle. The AI was faster this time, and Joey only succeeded in damaging the environment. Itai turned on Joey and blurred into a streak of light that drove a forearm into his chest.

  The dark cowboy smashed to the ground, sliding backwards and trenching a gouge in the steel floor. The virtual grating buckled, crumpling against Joey’s back as if he had slid through the icing of a cake. Damage to the virtual environment looked severe, but the Nishihama deck had filtered it into a harmless lag spike.

  A sniper rifle phased into Itai’s grasp as he took aim at Joey’s twitching avatar. He wanted to move, but the ground would not release him. The old gunslinger’s eyes became slits as Itai’s finger curled about the trigger. He knew he could not avoid the shot, whatever Itai had done had locked his I/O channel wide open for a few seconds. The file catalog spread open in Joey’s vision and he invoked Turtle 1.8. A dome shaped shield of green light hexagons formed just as Itai’s rifle spat a beam of yellow.

  As he fired at Joey, Nina bowled into him, slicing at Itai’s back in a feline frenzy of desperation. She aimed for the holes Joey’s last attack created, reaching inside him, grabbing and snapping pieces of wireframe. Itai bellowed with surprise as his program code spiraled into an almost unrecoverable state of corruption. Large portions of his body ceased existing while others became transparent.

  The shot glanced away from Joey’s force field; the Turtle soft absorbed the incoming data and became corrupt; deleted by his deck a second later. His avatar melted into a black miasma, which flowed into a standing position before resuming its usual appearance. Itai spun on Nina and grabbed her by the throat. Squeezing for just a second, he flung her into the wall. She crashed into the pipes, bending but not breaking them. Itai’s eyes glowed; her own black tendril wings wrapped around her arms, legs, and neck, tying her to the wall.

  Nemsky loosed a howl of anger, at last overpowering the black mass. He thrust his arm at Joey, and powerful lamps illuminated him from behind. Turning, the dark cowboy dove to the ground to avoid a corporate armored personnel carrier. The eight-wheeled monster passed over him without harm and smashed into the wall. Seconds after impact, it reverted to a wireframe model and disappeared, leaving only smashed pipes in its wake.

  Nina squirmed, but could not get loose of the force that held her to the wall; with genuine fear, she screamed at Joey. He made a few clawing motions in midair, attempting to isolate and kill the program thread that immobilized her. Itai had forced her deck into an endless loop; it ignored any input she attempted to send it. Joey triggered a memory reset. She became a Nina-shaped outline of bright white static for a second and reappeared with her wings back to normal. Stunned from the reboot, she clanked into the metal grating on all fours.

  Joey dove to the right, dodging a large sparking electrical component Nemsky had torn from the wall and hurled. The part exploded into glimmering fragments that flowed over the wall and vanished.

  Itai spun, sensing Nina’s approach. He caught her again by the throat as she leapt. Her long black claws fell just short of his face as he held her aloft on an
elongating arm.

  His eyes glowed with black light, casting his face in violet as he built up energy for a deadly attack. Several ebon knives formed in Nina’s hand and flew into Itai’s chest. The attack seemed to cause a small amount of damage, but did not deter his buildup.

  Nemsky zoomed at Joey with a horrendous roar. The cowboy sidestepped with ease, giving the Russian a smirk as if he did not have time to deal with him at that moment. Unable to stop, Anatoly wedged himself headfirst into the wall with a dull metallic thud.

  “Itai!” Joey lifted his arms as if summoning up some sort of ancient, forsaken power as he yelled.

  The AI did not look, assuming Joey was just trying to distract him from an easy kill.

  A wave of phantasmal faces traced in glowing white energy crushed Itai off his feet. Joey shook with anger at the sight of Nina’s imminent death, and pushed the Nishihama to the edge of its capabilities. He feared the Black ICE would kill her. Itai’s use of it meant her deck was in bad shape. Knowing her brain was wired to a doll’s power supply terrified him even more. The AI underestimated his opponent’s strength. Surrounded by white flames, Itai came to a halt, embedded in a new crater in the wall. Steel and virtual cinderblocks warped like quicksand around the impact point. He flickered between the image of a man and a wireframe model; the attack had done enough damage to where the network attempted to remove him as a garbage file.

  Nina slumped forward and sank her talons into the wall to avoid falling over. Gasping for breath, her face went from desperation to anger as she clenched her fist. Gloss onyx blades sprang from behind Itai, knocking him out of the hole. The AI rolled onto the ground like a log, still on fire. His voice scrambled into little more than a distorted, digitized warble as he stood with all the grace of a drunken infantryman. Itai eyed Joey’s gun, holding his hands up. An instant later, his body blurred into a smear of color and rocketed off down the corridor.

  “Let him go. D9’s network team has this whole place surrounded. If he tries to go out into the GlobeNet, he’s fucked.” Nina coughed up black blood.

  Nemsky rushed again, bellowing. They leapt out to either side. As the general ran headfirst into the wall for the second time, Joey summoned a Russian flag in his hands and waved it at him as if taunting a bull.

  Anatoly growled. His next attack took the form of a rocket launcher. It went high, but the explosion knocked Joey chest-first to the floor. Nemsky advanced, but the imminent follow up stopped as Nina shredded into his side. She ducked his flailing arm, and gouged her hand into his abdomen. Hot blood gushed over her claws, an instant later becoming a spray of data fragments.

  White light shone from Nemsky’s eyes and a wail of agony flooded the hallway. Before Nina could tear her hand out of him, smoking skull bullets lanced through the upper part of the chest. Anatoly staggered back, straining to pull Nina’s hands out of him. The old gunslinger leveled off one silver revolver at Nemsky’s head.

  Old lips curled into an evil smile. “Struggle, little mouse.”

  Boom.

  The bullet passed through the Russian’s cheek, sucking him backwards through the hole into a long tube of flesh colored data. The body reassembled itself, lying on the ground face down.

  They exchanged a glance.

  “Well, I’m awake!” The dark cowboy gurgled in as close to a humorous tone as he could.

  She leaned on the wall. “We can track Itai down later, let’s go get his dad.”

  Nina swayed on her feet; her wings appeared wilted, her suit ripped in places.

  The cowboy’s mouth opened to speak, but he vanished with the sudden metallic clank of an APC drilling him into the wall. Bars, pipes, and tubes fell from above and bounced off the armored vehicle before rolling to a halt around it. The transport all but filled the corridor, and Joey’s avatar was somewhere between it and the wall.

  Nemsky pushed himself up with a low growl, his body reforming in a scintillating patchwork. Nina was gone. He staggered to the front of the APC, with a reverberating insane laugh. He put one hand on it, took a breath, and pushed it to the side with a horrendous squealing sound as four-foot tall tires stuttered over the metal floor. The dark cowboy lay mashed into a divot in the wall that matched his silhouette. Joey seemed dazed, but not too battered.

  “Too late, friend. Guardian angel ran like little girl.” Anatoly grabbed Joey by the neck.

  Ten points of black pierced through Nemsky’s chest with a squish that left the big man motionless. The white haired cowboy glanced at the diaphanous claws before meeting the general’s stare.

  “Funny thing about black cats.” The dark one’s voice, thick and gritty, rolled through a growing sneer. “It’s bad luck to cross them, and you never see them coming.”

  He lifted both guns up to the disbelieving face, putting the barrels right in front of his nose. Anatoly’s head detonated into a rain of blood and gore that morphed into glowing specks and text as it flew. The body melted into a substance that flowed like sand through Nina’s fingers, seeping into the ground. Random echoes of Nemsky’s protesting wails grew progressively more distorted until silence followed the last visible bits into oblivion.

  Nina’s talons shrank to normal hands. She pulled Joey out of the hole and into an embrace; shuddering for a moment before regaining her composure.

  “You okay?” His appearance changed into his normal self.

  “My deck’s almost trashed; I don’t think I’d be much help in there. You?”

  He grinned. “Looks worse than it is. Proscion’s deck is doing just fine; this thing’s a monster.”

  Nina looked down the hall. “Something’s coming.”

  “I see nothing.” Joey shrugged.

  “No, outside. Shinigami must have figured out where we are. Go, I’ll deal with it.” The ebon angel turned and vanished as she logged out, leaving Joey alone in cyberspace.

  Just the way he liked it.

  crid smoke obscured her vision and the scent of burnt electronics soured her throat. Wisps of it seeped upward from ventilation ports on the Netwraith, filling the small sunken room with a thick haze. Nina waved her arm, creating whorls in the grey fumes. The distant sound of particle beams and ballistic weapons continued, muted by the presence of the building around them. Joey slumped against the wall behind her in the deepest corner of the room. His consciousness elsewhere, no sign of the urgency with which he must be racing through the net showed. She ejected the M3 plug from the back of her neck via mental command and stretched the soreness from the virtual beating out of her body.

  Clanking footsteps reminded her why she logged out. She moved to the small stairway, facing a hallway thick with smoke. On thermal, a humanoid outline of cold blue approached through the roiling grey, holding a huge cylinder over its head.

  Not waiting to see what it was planning, she drew her sidearm and put two shots into the object it carried. With a screeching hiss, the canister rocketed backwards. The bullet holes became thrust ports as compressed gas dragged the cyborg down the hallway in a jangling screech of tumbling metal. A thunderous crash followed as the cylinder bounced deeper into the facility. An eight-foot skeletal silhouette fought its way clear of a debris pile, pushing broken pipes and beams away. It lacked armor plating and still had several external wires and hoses hanging off it as though it had just torn itself free of an assembly bay.

  Guess Shinigami’s getting desperate.

  Luminous green eyes in its plastisteel skull narrowed as it focused on her. She fired, landing nine shots in rapid succession into its chest as it charged. The slugs did little damage to the endoskeleton, though some components flew into fragments and a dark liquid oozed down its legs by the time it burst out of the end of the smoke and moved to attack.

  The cyborg swatted at her, intending to dismiss the little woman that blocked it from its desired target. Nina dropped her gun and grabbed the incoming arm with both hands at the wrist, stopping the punch cold an inch away from her chest. The cyborg’s eyes whirred wide wi
th confusion, and then narrowed as it realized what she was. Vibro blades sprang out of its knuckles, sliding forward in slow motion to her boosted reflexes. Nina shoved back on the arm as hard as her body would allow.

  The tips of the blades hung a half inch from her sternum, still in space as she flung the metal fist away at the same speed the claws extended. When they clicked and locked, she tossed the arm upward and leaned to the side to avoid a downward slash from the other hand. The blades passed through heavy overhead pipes with a click―as easily as if they had been made of thin plastic.

  “Well, that was unexpected. I guess we both had a little surprise in store.” The voice belonged to Itai.

  “So what’s your game, Itai? What are you up to?”

  She ducked a few more attacks before maneuvering behind him and landing a kick into his back that drilled him into the opposite wall.

  “Just doing what I’m paid to do.” He pushed himself out of the dent with a wrenching scrape.

  Nina kept herself between him and Joey. “You’re a program, you can’t get paid.”

  He turned, throwing a section of pipe at her sideways. “Tell that to Warner.”

  She caught it, but the momentum knocked her off her feet. As cyborg Itai stomped at her, she used it like a quarterstaff and swept his legs out from under him. She stood, spun her new weapon, and jammed the end down at his head. He caught it in one hand, crimping it.

  “Bullshit, I know Warner isn’t involved.”

  “At least I’m my own entity, not a slave. Your body is nothing more than a shackle on your mind, keeping you at the end of the government’s leash.”

  She jumped a kick aimed for her leg. He continued it into a maneuver that brought him upright, and ran for the alcove where Joey hid. Nina whirled the other way, shouting, and smashed the pipe flat across his chest as hard as she could. The metal bent around the cyborg like a rubber paddle as the impact lifted it off its feet and sent the flailing body careening into the same dented wall. Nina tossed the now-useless scrap to the side.