by Russ Linton
“So...I’m here,” M@ti said. “What’s your big plan?”
M@ti took in the collection of faces. Eager, confused, angry, curious, each one had already made up their minds about her based on whatever strange history they’d been taught or beliefs they held.
Clarity spoke first. “Kraken, you haven’t told her anything?”
“There wasn’t time,” he sighed. His tone hardened. “She had her own plans on how to escape the Preserve.”
There came that derisive laugh again. Prime spread his arms in mock surrender. “Your key to bringing down the whole system nearly lost.”
Clarity knelt. She did seem nice, as Deva had said. Kindness radiated in her cautious movements and quiet voice.
“M@ti, you are at the center of coming events—”
“Probabilities,” Hawt Pocket squeaked.
“Thank you,” Clarity said patiently. “Probabilities which indicate the world as we’ve known it is about to change.”
“How?”
“It could be evolutionary. A final confluence between humanity and machine.” She said this with certainty then her eyes went to Kraken. “It could mean the fall of the Collective and the end of AI rule.”
“Could be fucking Armageddon,” Prime grunted.
“Whatever it is, while you guys cycle the power, my swarm’s on the dark side cracking,” Hawt Pocket said. “Never going to grep the winner in standby mode.” His expression had stayed flat, disinterested. M@ti almost suspected him to be a spechead, glassing her through retinal implants.
“How does this have anything to do with me?” M@ti asked.
“You were the source of the Revelation Virus,” Kraken said. “You survived the hunter.”
“Me?” M@ti said. She hadn’t done that. She hadn’t been the one to kill all those people. She’d just tried to exploit the stresses caused by Loadi’s cascading failure. Kraken had been there, surely he knew.
“Maybe it’s that other thrall of yours,” Prime sneered.
“Knuckles?” M@ti’d grown tired of these people making her feel subhuman. Pet names, talking like she wasn’t there. “If you need a punk drummer samurai escape artist, he’s your guy. You need a fucking code ninja, that’s me. But I...”
Her voice died in a hushed whisper. How much did she want to tell them about Loadi? Another crypto speak argument quickly filled her silence.
As they argued, M@ti pulled out Kraken’s tablet and called up the system logs from her encounter with Loadi. The messages were all garbled. Loadi’s nest of logins had been detected and flagged. Oddly, the data showed the Collective reacting to the event, trying to repair the damage before Loadi had even really gone off the rails. That, she didn’t quite get. Some sort of predictive algorithm? When he’d finally gone rogue and multiplied, only her connection showed any clear activity.
The hackers weren’t looking for her. Who they really wanted was Loadi, the source of the virus, a virus which had murdered thousands.
Would they really try to take down the Collective at any cost?
“What’s the plan then?” The one called Lembas finally spoke and the arguments died. He put himself at M@ti’s eye level as she stared into the tablet. Lembas appeared somehow paler than the rest and he squinted his bespectacled icy blue eyes as though even the dim light in the sanctuary bothered him. When she didn’t answer, he directed the next question toward Kraken. “We just send her off to Mordor by herself and let her drop her payload? You know how dumb that would be?”
“Obviously, this thrall doesn’t even have the FAQ for reality,” Daemon spat. “She’s of little use.”
“Little use?” M@ti felt her face flush. Just an expendable thrall.
“No matter. You’ll all be dead, and we’ll pick over the remains, preacher,” Prime said.
“Everyone, please.” Kraken held up his hands, eyes closed in an attempt at concentration.
Clarity didn’t interrupt as the verbal sparring reignited, she just fixed her kind stare on M@ti. With each passing moment, M@ti felt the pressure of her gaze building. Wasn’t this lady some sort of peacemaker? What the hell was she waiting for? Would she want to see the thralls die by the millions to achieve her goals?
A sharp beep cut the argument short. Kraken snatched the tablet from her with trembling hands. Angry red warnings flashed on the screen.
“They’re here!”
Deva had already burst through the door at a dead sprint. Those gathered at the pulpit burst into action. All except Clarity. In the escalating panic, the female hacker had yet to look away and a sudden realization struck M@ti.
Clarity’s calm demeanor came not from steady nerves but from a strange, unshakable faith. She already knew they’d be found. Not as if she’d been the one to rat them out, but from an inscrutable omniscience plumbed from the infinite well of data produced by the Collective every second of every day. M@ti felt the full focus of that mystical certainty on what she would do next.
29
M@ti shouldered through the front door of the church. Her momentum slowed when faced with the pandemonium outside. She’d always tried to convince herself she’d been free, or at least independent. Never had she considered what it meant for everyone to be that way.
Data cables strung from the truck’s antenna like spilled spaghetti. Disciples of Enigma formed ranks by the lowered tailgate which provided easy access. LulzPhreakz lounged on the siderails and perched on the lower antenna struts. It didn’t take long to see the hacker’s different factions at work.
LulzPhreakz worked like a mosh pit, slapping and jabbing each other amid a constant stream of shouted commands. Not even their leader, Hawt Pocket, seemed to be in charge.
The Disciples of Enigma stood behind their quiet leader, absorbed by an assortment of handhelds. M@ti noticed each of them wore glasses with empty frames. Style, not function, or maybe part of their uniform. Strange, but a better choice than a forehead tattoo.
Prime and his New Statement weren’t bothering with any hacks. They mounted captured hovs which had been stripped down to little more than skiffs with roll cages. Drivers plugged into the dashboards and soon glided toward the main road.
Superheated air blasted the street and whipped M@ti’s clothes as the Black Beetle armor dropped into a hover beside the truck.
“Peeps, log off and GTFO like yesterday,” Deva shouted ferociously through the robot’s intercom. “We need this antenna stowed! They’ll have commandeered assault drones by now. You got fifteen minutes before we’re ass deep in military hardware.”
But there was a bigger problem when it came to lowering the truck’s antenna.
“Knuckles!?” M@ti couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing. The wiry drummer clung to the absolute highest rung of the tower just below the antenna array. Specs on, he stared skyward.
Daemon stumbled through the door, his fist closed and clutched to his chest. “We can’t let this holy place fall!” With his free hand, he gestured toward the empty lot beside the church. “You owe the Crimson Mask your very existence!”
M@ti found Kraken and she rushed toward him. Clarity appeared serenely in the church entrance behind him.
“What do we do?” M@ti demanded as she approached Kraken, her eyes flitting between him and Knuckles.
“We leave.”
“Not happening. You better not have had anything to do with putting him up there,” M@ti snarled. Freakishly strong or not, she had a few tokens on the fact a boot to his bits would still bring him down.
Kraken stopped long enough to shake his head in dismay. Before he could respond, Deva’s voice boomed from above. “Either your friend comes down off the tower or we reel in with him attached. Can’t guarantee he won’t get caught in the works, capiche?”
Deva, inside her killer robot, could probably pluck him off and give him a ride. But no, she jetted off into the sky, her full attention on whatever external threat. M@ti thought she heard an explosion in the distance. She grabbed Kraken who’d sta
rted for the truck again.
“What about all them?” M@ti waved in frustration at the hackers surrounding the truck.
“Why don’t you tell me what you see?”
Had he not said it more like a request than a demand, M@ti would’ve told him to fuck off. Maybe if she knew what they were doing, she’d know why Knuckles had gone apeshit. She switched on her display and engaged TrueSight.
What had been a chaotic press of physical bodies became a near seizure-inducing light show. Glowing data streams whipped between the antenna and the hackers. Packets flew like digital shrapnel. LulzPhreakz were unleashing a raucous storm of feedback covering every possible spectrum. Ports were being simultaneously attacked, overloaded, probed, all with the intent of dismantling whatever security lay at the far end through a death of a thousand cuts.
By contrast, Enigma’s disciples maintained a steady, combined stream of raw energy. Their coordinated attack wasn’t senseless destruction like the LulzPhreakz, but more like a high-powered laser beam. She’d never witnessed a hack like that from humans, so similar to the Collective’s red emergency feed.
One of which was burning into the top of the antenna.
At the pinnacle of the shitstorm was Knuckles. He hugged the upper supports, his limbs shaking. The ominous beam of red energy coursed from the sky and irradiated his specs.
“We’ve more than been located, we’ve got their full attention,” M@ti reported to Kraken. “Collective sat feed. I’ve got to get him down from there!”
“Lovely.” Kraken sighed. “You may have a few minutes to save your friend then. Lembas and Hawt Pocket won’t be too quick to surrender this opportunity to test their little theories. Mine though, still involves leaving.” Kraken headed toward the truck, grabbing a member of LulzPhreakz and hurling them to the ground.
M@ti snatched the truck’s connection and logged into the Nexus.
ASCII characters filled her view. Their original, limited-bandwidth text forum still made up the environment. Code from the LulzPhreakz swarmed like gnats. M@ti put up her own defenses to avoid stray attacks. Through a haze of code blocks being hurled like bricks, she spotted an elegant stream of tightly compacted genius.
M@ti fended off a maelstrom of attacks as she pushed closer to the concentrated efforts by Enigma. She kept glancing upward to locate Knuckles, but he wasn't’ there. With every stray attack she warded off, a cloud of ASCII characters would erupt in crude artwork. Tags for the hacker responsible.
“BACKDOOR BITCH!” An audio file screamed alongside the speckled green image of a girl bent over, grasping her ankles.
“For fuck’s sake,” M@ti said.
Several more attacks deflected off her defenses then swarmed away in search of their real prey. She’d become so focused on fighting them off, she nearly stumbled into the Enigma assault.
“Hey,” a voice called. “Not so close.”
M@ti spun. Lembas stood before her. Not the real Lembas, but a handcrafted ASCII avatar which was pretty spot on as far as an assortment of random characters went. His arm jerked upward and gave a stilted wave.
“Wow,” M@ti said, unimpressed.
“What? You expected a loaf of bread?” She looked at him, puzzled. “Never mind.” He sighed heavily and straightened his glasses, a pentagonal-framed collection of zeroes.
“The tunnel though. It’s like...wow.”
M@ti stepped closer and analyzed the stream, setting a script to add it to her own tool set. Compact and sleek, the code altered the Nexus space but functioned on the same fundamental underlying architecture she’d gotten a chance to examine on the tablet. Just the sort of thing which could come in handy later.
“Tunnel is apt but Grond’s more than that. She’s part of an advanced persistent threat package. We’ve been waiting for a chance to try her out.” His blocky face grinned and he reached out to pet the stream. The green characters of his hand blasted apart on an invisible wind. “Fuck.”
M@ti pretended not to notice as Lembas shoved the stump of his hand into his robes. “Why you’d ever want to get a Collective satellite parked overhead on search and destroy is beyond me. Any chance you’re the one that put Knuckles up to this?”
Back on even ground, she was eager for the chance to scatter one of these genetically boosted cryptoanarchist’s ones and zeroes to the cooling fan winds. Wading through the storm had fired her up. She decompiled a stray LulzPhreakz attack with a flick of her wrist to show little hacker boy she meant business.
Lembas whistled in appreciation. Or tried. His lips formed a frozen ‘o’ and M@ti heard static.
“You’ll have to show me how you do that one day. Anyway, pretty sure your friend’s the one who burned our location,” Lembas said, sounding a bit too happy.
Knuckles couldn’t have done anything like that on purpose. From the text only space of the hacker forum, he shouldn’t have been able to get into too much trouble without his own hacking arsenal. Unless, of course, this gathering had never been the target. Maybe they hadn’t been burned, Knuckles had.
“The wiser people outside your little code rave here think we need to evacuate. How long do I have?”
“We won’t bail until our quest is complete.”
“Quest?”
“Infect the core. Exert control over machines as is the natural order. See, we don’t think you need to toss the whole thing into the Crack of Doom, the power can be salvaged.” Lembas’ avatar shuddered closer, the animated walk skipping. “Tell me, why are you here? What’s your quest?”
“No quest.” M@ti eyed the upward arc of the beam where it blasted against a black wall. White hot remnants of code sprayed in all directions. A definite shape had started to form under the constant erosion. “I just need to get to my friend.”
“We’ve punched through!” Lembas’ pixelated face froze in an expression meant to be of command but was closer to constipation. “Ready the worm!” he shouted, though how he’d said ‘worm’ sounded strange to M@ti.
The silvery beam called Grond died and left a glowing afterimage on M@ti’s retinas. She could clearly make out the depression branded into the firewall. Like a piece missing from a puzzle, two serpents entwined around a staff had been blasted into the face of the Collective’s defensive barrier.
Lembas approached, his remaining hand extended. A tiny thing squirmed in his blocky fingers. With two taloned feet and one arched wing, the little dragon hieroglyph strutted around and flexed proudly.
“Cute little bugger, isn’t he? Our little Smaug. He’s going to grant us full admin rights. Aren’t you little buddy?”
“You’re going to need a bigger dragon,” she said.
Lembas followed her gaze. Uncoiling into the deep oblivion was one of the snakes, fluid and monstrous, the second trailing it like an ethereal shadow. Demonic eyes settled on them as the heads swayed hypnotically among the jerky remnants of code.
“Impossible,” whispered Lembas.
Outside, in the real world, Knuckles screamed.
30
Patterns traced the serpent body like lights on wet pavement. The effect hinted at an encrypted pattern M@ti couldn’t decipher. Outside, a bestial, metallic roar sounded, followed by shouting. She felt the heat of Deva’s rockets wash over her. None of it drowned out Knuckles’ scream.
“Start the trucks!” Deva roared. “Our uninvited guests are closing in!”
Explosions sounded, and blast waves rippled past her. Deva’s war cry shrank into the distance, consumed by a deep, leviathan bellow. M@ti tried to drop her connection and couldn’t.
Beside her, the little dragon trembled in Lembas’ hand. Head raised in a minute stretch, the mouth hinged open and the bundle of code belted out an audio file which didn’t sound like any dragon M@ti had ever imagined. It meowed.
“What the hell?”
Lembas gave her a sideways glance. “My cat, Smaug. Err...she was my cat. Look, don’t judge, they’ve been worshiped since Ancient Egypt and accounted for massiv
e chunks of the internet during our founder’s age.”
The online environment had cleared. M@ti could only assume the LulzPhreakz had been dragged away from the truck by Kraken or herded by Deva in her armored suit. Above, the serpents began to uncoil from the staff swaying as if to claim dominion over this curious nook of digital anarchy. Jet black eyes found them, their narrow slits alive with a cold flame.
M@ti wasn’t sure, but as she watched, the two serpents seemed to entwine and become one. Every time her eyes tried to focus, the other would disappear.
“Smaug, ATTACK!” Lembas shouted.
M@ti saw lines of code swirl along the tiny dragon’s body. She caught a few function calls, a handful of variables, and could see the code was having difficulty executing. Outside the Nexus, real Lembas must’ve been having trouble launching his payload.
“No time for performance anxiety, Lembas.”
“Gimme a minute.”
M@ti eyed the descending snake. “You’ve got maybe one second.”
She still hadn’t caught any sign of Knuckles, but his scream outside had been real.
“There!” Lembas cried. “Go get him boy!” The dragon made one sweep with his wings, wobbled his blocky head, and launched straight for the gargantuan snake, becoming a distant glowing nimbus. “You might not want to be here much longer.” Lembas flung his cloak across his face with stop motion grace and logged out.
M@ti stood her ground as the serpent’s mouth crept open. Resolution fragmented the closer it got, a deathly pale gloaming separating the edges of individual scales. Smaug glanced off the armored scales and went in for another pass.
Her. A giant snake. A dragon that thought it was a cat. And no Knuckles.
“Log out,” Kraken shouted from the outside. “We need to stow the array and vacate the area. Even powered off, we don’t need a mast on the truck slowing us down.”
“I’m not leaving him!”