Virtual Immortality

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Your love makes you weak.” Itai muttered. His voice broke into digitization as sparks flew out of his twitching frame.

  The glassy black corridor led to a door outlined in neon violet. It had taken Joey four tries to make it through, and he adored the difficulty. On the other side, the processor node stretched out around a massive amethyst crystal fifty feet tall. It hovered, spinning, over a hole in the floor traced with glowing green circuit lines. Specks of light ran along the grooves, darting over the edge and down into oblivion. The mammoth gemstone rotated counterclockwise, spitting random bolts of violet and pink lightning into slabs of silicon that jutted from the ceiling above.

  All around the hundred square yard room, display panels the size of billboards littered the walls. Clusters of black monoliths rose up from the ground before bending outward at the top where they glittered with controls, forming circular podiums by each display.

  The giant crystal was a manifestation of the actual CPU the node represented. There was no sign of anything out of the ordinary save for a pleasant looking old man near the massive gem with his hands folded behind his back. He looked like a tourist at a museum.

  “Dad?” Joey walked in. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  William Dillon turned with a smile. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  The dark cowboy frowned. “Nice try.”

  Two smoking skull bullets passed through the space where the elder Dillon had just been. Joey spun, freezing as Nina’s ghostly outline crept into the room behind him. She looked worried.

  The old gunslinger smirked again and fired at her. She tumbled out of the way and stood up, out of hiding.

  “Joey? What the hell are you doing?” Her voice trembled as she backed into the wall.

  He kept firing, chasing her to the side as he yelled. “You think I’m that stupid? I have her on comm. I know she’s not here.”

  Nina’s panic changed to the laughter of a deep male voice far beyond anything a human could produce. “Interesting, but ultimately futile.”

  The apparition shifted again, into Nemsky. He raised a hand to the sky and shadows fell on the old gunslinger. Joey leapt away from three APCs, which fell out of thin air above him one after the other, cratering the onyx floor with each impact.

  He reached around to the back of his belt and pulled out a white enamel tanto. Joey smiled at it, and it turned into a golden gun with a gleaming pearl handle. Sighting over it, he smiled.

  “Remember this?” His voice carried a paranormal echo. “Game over.”

  The blast of energy hit Nemsky in the chest and threw him backwards, bouncing him off the crystal and sending him shattering through one of the podiums. Fragments of broken onyx floated up, drawn into the space around the CPU crystal, orbiting it. The smoking body changed into a featureless human shape composed of thousands of black triangles separated by thin blue lines.

  Joey glanced down at the body. Not trusting it, he raised his guns. No sooner had he taken aim than the figure sprang into the air and he found himself looking at Kelly. The child Proscion floated before him in her cute pink dress and shiny shoes.

  “Did you honestly think that I would have left Wantanabe’s back door intact? Humans underestimate us still. How foolish to believe that an AI made to create AIs would be unable to alter itself.” The thunderous voice shrank into the innocent giggle of a little girl. “You couldn’t hurt me, could you?”

  She pulled one of the pink ribbons from her white hair and threw it at him. It grew many times its size and width, binding his arms to his sides. After an unimpressed snort, the old one broke free and aimed again, but he would have been lying if he did not admit to hesitating at least for a second.

  Shinigami screamed like a child as it curled into a ball. Bullets bounced away from an invisible sphere around the cowering girl without harm. Unfolding herself, she giggled and vanished in a cloud of pink sparkles. Before Joey could turn, a severe impact to his back launched him through one of the consoles, exploding it like glass. As the he rolled out of the debris onto the floor, he looked up at the augmented horror that mangled Nina. He whistled some ancient bit of music as his hydraulic hammer fist retracted back into position.

  “Beethoven’s Fifth?” coughed Joey.

  “Perhaps you find this easier to deal with than a child.” The same inhuman voice laughed. “I had hoped to use this shape on your little friend.” The room echoed with Nina’s desperate pleas for Vincent. “I rather looked forward to probing her emotional response. I suspect I’ll have to settle for recording her synaptic response to the sight of your lifeless body dangling from a smoking wire.”

  Joey fired as it approached; bullets ricocheted off him with no effect. He could not tell if Shinigami flat out ignored him, or if this AI had so much power here that the damage he caused was trivial. He scurried to the right as the hammer came down; pulverizing what remained of the podium. The dark cowboy spun away and stood, aiming back at his sister, Katherine. She made a hand gesture that appeared not to do anything.

  “What are you trying to do with that? Make it easier for me to kill you?” Joey fired without a trace of hesitation. “I can’t stand that bitch, and I know this is VR.”

  Caught off guard, the AI appeared to bleed from a graze to the arm. The angry shriek of his sister’s voice melted into a digitized battle cry. The image of Mark Bolt launched a barrage of missiles from its shoulders, sending Joey into one of the huge display screens at the edge of the room. He hit the wall like a rotten tomato, sticking for several seconds before sliding to the ground. On the way down, he crossed his arms to shield his face against the rain of obsidian daggers from the shattered panel overhead.

  Somewhere behind Nina, Joey twitched and moaned; neither were good signs. When she looked, she noticed one of the transformers on the wall glowing like metal just out of a forge.

  “Joey, something’s overloading the transformer right next to you.”

  “He will die.” Itai stomped towards her, raising his claws. “There is only the question of if his death shall be caused by me or by that which made me.”

  Nina feigned as if she wanted to catch his arms again. As he lunged, she dropped and slid on her knees between his legs, sprouting Nano claws and swiping to either side. The cyborg twisted and staggered as it turned to guard its back.

  “What’s the matter, Itai? I thought you wanted Joey? Are you afraid to turn your back on me?” She held her arms in a fighting stance; the edge of her transparent weapons caught the light and gleamed. “If you were a real Mossad agent I might be worried, but you’re just a training sim.”

  Itai growled and ran at her. She leapt straight up, slipping between his closing arms. Palming his metal skull with both hands, she vaulted over and landed behind him as he jammed his vibro blades into the wall. Itai tore them loose amid a shower of liquid from severed tubes. Nina darted toward him, dropping to the ground and bracing her hands on the floor as she sent a kick into the side of the cyborg’s knee. The strike cracked the spot where her claws scored.

  Itai’s arms flailed as he adjusted his balance to reduce stress on the damaged leg. She leapt at his side, but he palmed her chest and shoved. Sliding to a halt a few feet away, she resumed a ready stance.

  “Is this where you try to talk me down, invite me in to be studied, maybe change sides and work for your Division 9?”

  She took a casual step toward him as her arms lowered from a fighting posture. “It’s a thought…” Her speedware kicked on and she slashed twice through his chest before he even perceived the motion. “…that I never considered. You cannot be trusted.”

  With a roar, he grabbed at her throat. She tried to leap away, but his hands closed around her hips. His plan changed; he spun to drill her face first into the wall. In her slow motion world, she severed his thumb with a quick flick of her claws. Centrifugal force yanked her out of his grip, her blades retracted, and she somersaulted to the floor as the cyborg spun and lost his balance.

 
Joey surmised that Katherine’s bizarre gesture represented Shinigami rerouting the power grid to overload the transformer. He ducked two streams of hostile data as he fought the network to send the surge elsewhere. When he looked back up, he found himself staring at a dozen ninja.

  The dark cowboy dodged through the shadow army, killing one or two here and there as a silver snowstorm of shuriken fell around him. Shinigami had spawned rudimentary constructs only barely stronger than a garden-variety troll. One of them was the master AI, but which one?

  Joey figured Shinigami calibrated this attack based on his last confrontation with Itai, before his deck upgrade. “So you data mined from bad Ninja vids? These guys suck.”

  Eventually, only two remained. One laughed before changing its appearance into Shabundo Ghede as the other melted away.

  “Now what, voodoo zombies? Really?” The dark cowboy folded his arms and resumed a casual pose. “Try something original.”

  The sneer on the face of his adversary told Joey that had been the plan, but his sarcasm took the wind out of the AI’s sails. The enraged Shinigami overloaded another transformer as it sent a curtain of wailing souls at him. The ancient gunslinger vanished and reappeared on the other side of the room, shaking his head at the phantasmal smear striking the wall.

  “Wailing souls and smoke is my shtick.” Joey shot him in the back twice, causing a growing white ripple to spread through Ghede’s fancy suit. “I should sue for gimmick infringement.”

  Ghede turned with a roar and took on the appearance of Vincent raising his service weapon. Joey took a graze to the leg, but fell behind the cover of another podium. From the safety of hiding, he defused the second overload.

  “Was that supposed to make me hesitate?” The old one popped up over the console and flung a bladed sphere into Vincent’s forehead. The silver orb spat a stream of virtual blood. “I never even met that guy.”

  Vincent reached up and tore the weapon out; a gush of red painted his face. The wound closed and he crushed the metal ball before tossing it aside. Shinigami walked towards Joey’s hiding place, shrinking into the form of Hayley. Barefoot, grimy, and in a pink shirt, she held the grungy Neko series deck across her chest and smiled at him.

  A faint hiss drew Joey’s eyes to the floor behind him. A one-foot tall blue cartoon mushroom stared at him with huge red eyes and fanged mouth. The dark cowboy’s head tilted to the right as he appraised it with an unimpressed glance. He punted it away and it popped into a cloud of azure smoke when it hit the wall. Two more met a similar fate as the old one rose back to his feet and adjusted the lay of his hat.

  Joey’s real-world face grimaced at the thought of pointing a weapon at her, but the dark one only smiled. “You’re not Hayley.”

  She screamed and cowered behind a console. He hesitated. As much as he knew that it was not her, it felt wrong. At that size, Shinigami could hide inside the podiums and block itself off from view. Joey tilted his head forward and crossed his pistols over his chest. Once the routine loaded, he aimed his guns at the floor and fired a volley into the ground.

  A torrent of smoking skull bullets ripped upwards out of the floor below where the phony girl hid. The childlike scream turned into an inhuman roar as it dove out from its cover. A bloodied little girl stared at Joey with a pouty face before the cat eyes of her deck flared with intense pink light.

  A massive swarm of white anime cats flooded around him, shredding at his legs. Despite their cute appearance, they were still the product of a dangerous AI. The little claws caused a surprising amount of damage to the howling gunslinger as he fought to get free from the bog of claws, fur, and cute demonic-faced cats with zigzag teeth.

  He blinked out of existence and reappeared right behind Hayley. The false girl turned just as he grabbed her by the throat and squeezed. This time rather than a direct attack at the AI, he flooded the node with spoofed security data in an attempt to cause it to recognize Shinigami as a hostile entity. When it realized the pleading stare failed, it expanded into the image of Eldon and punched him in the side of the head, sending him flying.

  Joey’s head was the first point of contact with the ground. He tumbled over and slid on his back into another podium. Eldon pounced, grabbing Joey with both hands and spinning him around as he used his face as a battering ram to shatter through two more terminal objects before throwing him to the side. The cowboy flailed as chunks of data washed over him; a spider web of heat around his mind followed every impact.

  “That’s for makin’ my ass go to the Badlands over and over and over again.” Eldon pulled his rifle off his back as he stared at the black coat lying askew in a sea of broken glass.

  Joey coughed up blood as he wobbled upright. “You got Eldon’s mannerisms all wrong. The word “man” should be in there somewhere. Still not believable.”

  He dusted himself off, sending obsidian flakes clattering to the ground before they vanished. Faux Eldon’s growl fell away to digitization as he opened fire. The old gunslinger leapt behind a podium, avoiding the shot. When the attack stopped, the dark cowboy teleported to the other end of the room with one gun leveled off at Eldon. He loosed a single shot with a report and muzzle blast much greater than any he had yet fired.

  The Magnum soft, version 4.4, magnified the strength of the attack. The recoil made the dark one take a step back upon shooting. Joey did not often use other hacker’s programs, but he was running out of ideas to hurt this godlike thing. Everything he had thrown at Shinigami seemed to do little more than annoy it.

  The fist-sized smoking skull slammed into Eldon’s chest, knocking him over a console. He tumbled and rolled to his feet in a single motion that continued into a backward stagger as yellow sparkling energy crawled across his armor.

  As Eldon drew close to the CPU crystal, little sparks of lightning lapped at him. They did not seem to have an effect, but at that moment, Joey had an epiphany.

  Itai struggled to get his cyborg shell upright. The crack in the right leg had grown from the torque of his attempt to throw Nina, threatening to break off at any moment. He clutched the piping on the walls, and pulled himself back to his feet, favoring the right. Nina dove again, claws extending, just as the robot turned to face the hallway. The clear blades pierced all the way through the thigh of his less damaged leg, causing a spray of lime green fluid.

  A metal palm covered Nina’s face as the AI’s only instinct took over―survival. Fearing a crushed head, she leapt backwards. Itai’s intent was not to grab, he wanted to shove her away. The force of his arm added to her leap and she flew chest-first into the wall upside down, vanishing under a fall of pipes, wires, and liquid.

  That exertion was the last stress the leg could tolerate. The plastisteel skeleton snapped just above the knee, sending him over sideways. The lower part dangled on by artificial muscles alone, flopping about as he tried to move it. With the Nano claws no longer an imminent threat, Itai sensed an opportunity. He clawed at the floor, cyborg fingers warping the metal grating as he dragged himself arm over arm to where Joey lay helpless. His progenitor had become worried and wanted this threat removed.

  The machine slid down the steps into the smoky recess, reaching forward and grabbing a boot. If the steel face had lips, it would have smiled.

  Itai’s attempt to haul Joey into range of one fatal vibro blade failed. The arm fell in half at the elbow with a flash of transparent claws. Nina pounced on his back and drove both pairs into him with the ferocity of a lioness protecting her mate. Hardin’s taunt about number three reverberated in the back of her mind as fear of losing him pulled tears from her eyes and the finesse from her attacks.

  She savaged the cyborg’s back in a flurry of uncoordinated rage. Stabbing, slashing, and raking, she shredded until the mutating voice from the head ceased and the metal body was a twisted ruin of parts. Remembering Nemsky’s fondness for possum, she severed the head from the spine and then stomped on it. The chrome skull bent, silicon dust spewed out, and lightning spider-crawled
across the floor. Nina stared at it until the eyes lost their glow.

  Arms slack in her lap, Nina knelt on the wreckage. Olive green fluid dripped off her claws and soaked her face and chest. She stared at Joey, unsure if she should cry or laugh. Her mounting fear and worry fell away with the distraction of scraping noises from the hallway. She leapt to the stairway, gasping at the sight of dozens of smaller robots shambling up the hallway toward them. Most were class 1 or 2 maintenance bots, far weaker than the combat chassis Itai had inhabited.

  Her claws snapped back into her arms as she took up a shooting position on the steps. She fired as fast as her targeting crosshair could go from one to the next; the massive handgun destroyed each unit with one well-placed round.

  “Come on Joey, whatever you’re gonna do, do it! 14 shots left.”

  Metal skulls exploded one after the next.

  Others continued to climb into the hallway, streaming from the factory floor below.

  Desperation saturated her voice. “Twelve!”

  Her shouting rang clear in Joey’s mind. He looked away from her comm channel image as Eldon tossed a hand grenade. Joey foiled the attack by killing the process thread before the device could go off, leaving an inert metal sphere on the ground at his feet.

  Joey reappeared behind a console, trying to force Eldon closer to the crystal in search of a better shot. He peppered him with a few rounds as he continued to try to destabilize the AI’s program code, though he had a strong feeling now it had no effect. The AI used the massive CPU to repair itself as fast as he could damage it. Taking this thing on inside of a processor node had been a huge tactical blunder. However, Shinigami would not willingly leave this node, and he had to stop it.

  Nina sounded on edge, but in control. “Eight shots left, Joey, come on.”

  Shinigami’s surface glowed for a second before shifting into an apparition of Kenny in his cowboy hat and brown duster coat. It grinned with anticipation, as it knew Joey could not resist a showdown.