by Russ Linton
“I can’t endanger the entire movement for one person.”
“You want my help? Or do you want me to become your worst nightmare? Because if Knuckles gets hurt, I’ll find a way to wreck you, understand?”
Outside, an explosion tore through the hectic shouts, this one so close that a hot wind seared her skin. Deva cried out from above in a mixture of exasperation and glee as she unleashed a return salvo. The air vibrated with gunfire, a rain of metal casings clinking on the broken pavement.
M@ti felt her body being lifted off the ground. She punched against what she could only assume were Kraken’s broad shoulders and knew it was a losing battle. She did her best to fight the disorientation of moving and not moving. Flopping uselessly against his thick frame, she felt herself dumped onto the cracked, upholstered seat of the truck and hastily strapped down with the seatbelt.
The door slammed shut, the chaos outside muted. M@ti used the relative silence to try and focus on the Nexus. Loadi hadn’t killed him yet or he’d come down from the antenna all on his own. But he was in grave danger.
Smaug circled the serpent’s head, the cat audio looping with all the ferocity of a deflating balloon. The tiny poisonous payload ricocheted off the beast’s scales. The gargantuan serpent thrashed its head in disdain and unfurled its wings, tossing snippets of failed code left behind by the hackers like trash on the breeze. An arm’s length away from her, the head settled, and the fanged mouth edged open.
That same eerie twilight glow under the scales spilled from the open maw. It filled the monstrous throat between fangs of darkness which mirrored Loadi’s cane. Cavernous, undefined, M@ti felt like she was peering into a distant nebula. Cradled in the mist was Knuckles.
He wore the armor of an ancient samurai. Each piece had been reproduced, not in the meticulous ASCII constructs of the forum, but in the high definition clarity of the Nexus. His demonic mask was missing, but the Oni of Pain hadn’t been necessary. Knuckles hovered in the fog, curled into a fetal position around his sword, Heaven’s Breath, his face wracked.
What really made her catch her breath were his eyes. A black inky mass swam in front of them, a living tattoo which writhed around the whites and spread from temple to temple.
“Knuckles!”
M@ti heard the driver’s door slam outside and felt her body lurch. The truck had started to move. Her stomach turned, and an arm steadied her.
“Whatever you see, the hunter is phishing, he’s cast his bait.” Kraken spat out the warning, each word strained as he hammered through the gears on the truck.
Another explosion rocked the outside world and M@ti felt the vehicle buck. Kraken’s strong hand on her shoulder held her in place.
“How is he out there?”
She heard Kraken shift, his reply facing toward the back window. “Strong arms.”
M@ti could imagine Knuckles hanging from the antenna like he’d been impaled on a nice juicy hook. Strong arms or not, M@ti knew she didn’t have long before he lost his grip. On the outside, one bad bump, a piece of shrapnel, any of these hard turns, and he’d end up road kill.
“If he looks like he’s going to fall, you better damn well better pull over and use your freakish strength of the elderly to rescue his ass.”
He could fall out there, an accident he might, by some miracle, survive. In here, Loadi, the psycho Loadi, he wouldn’t let go of him until he had her. And he could kill him with a casual flick of his cane. M@ti took a deep breath and prepared to step into the serpent’s waiting mouth.
A new sound tickled her ear. Smaug purred on her shoulder. The codeling throbbed with activity, almost seeming to pant. Plucking the wyrm between two fingers, she scanned the runic code on its outer hide. She turned the little creature over and stroked its belly before peeling back the outer wrapper at just the right place with a careful parting of her thumbs. She plucked her way through the data recorded from the exhausted critter’s attempted breaches. That and the data she’d gathered from the Enigma tunnel, Grond, might just give her a way back out of the belly of the serpent.
“You may as well hitch a ride,” she told Smaug. “But you’re not deploying unless I give the command.”
Angular wings flapped in agreement and the wyrm returned to roost on her shoulder.
She took a step over the lower lip of the serpent, a doorway flanked by soaring wings.
“M@ti, I think—” Kraken’s voice cut out into a deafening silence.
She spun around to find the opening gone. That much she’d expected. But the sounds...the gunning engine, the bucking truck, the gunfire and explosions, those were all gone too. She couldn’t feel the bite of the weathered vinyl or the bounce of the cratered road. Her senses had been disconnected like she was some sort of bio-modded spechead who’d abandoned the real world.
Not even wardens could do this to somebody. She remembered the casual way in which Loadi killed Harlock, an attack she had yet to understand. If he could kill people remotely, he could probably do this.
The closer she got to Knuckles, the more data TrueSight revealed. He had a full Nexus connection all right. A greasy black halo ringed his face where his specs would rest. His eyes stared, white-rimmed and haunted. The sword he’d wielded with such grace in his digital fantasy remained buried in the scabbard and his hands were balled up tight around the hilt, every bit as tight as he clung to the antenna supports.
“Knuckles? Can you hear me?” Smaug meowed an abrupt response. M@ti shushed it. “Knuckles?” she asked.
She knelt and touched his arm before she even knew she’d done it. This was the Nexus, she should’ve felt nothing. But maybe for the first time, she wanted to because the rigid armor pressed against her fingertips. Sweat lined his brow. His body convulsed and drew deeper into a fetal curl.
“Hang on, Knuckles. I’m here.”
The shroud over Knuckles’ eyes formed a loose cloud. M@ti tried a few basic manipulations and found she couldn’t pluck at the code as she’d done countless times before. She tweaked her interface and narrowed the focus. Thousands of tiny filaments made up the stream. Millions. Countless and all burrowing into those thoughtful eyes she’d only recently noticed. Unraveling them all, one strand at a time, seemed to be the only way to remove it.
“Fragile, aren’t they?”
M@ti tensed at Loadi’s voice. Cold, detached, she could only guess this was the one who’d rather inoculate her than beg her for help. The cane tapped in long, drawn-out pauses. He’d chosen a leisurely pace, as much as that didn’t matter here where he commanded space and distance.
She stood and kept her back to his voice. “Let him go. Now.”
“Are you sure?”
She wasn’t. Whatever happened to Knuckles would have just as much of a consequence outside. A careful extraction though wasn’t going to happen.
Loadi continued. “They believe they’re in a real world, yet it is only in their mind. An image put there by us. Their organic clusters of nerves and synapses have become so dependent on the reality we create, they can’t live without it.”
“If you’d told them the truth, they’d make the right choice.”
“If we told them the truth,” he laughed. “We’ve told them the truth. Our truth. It’s what we do. Even my own failure, the flaw, who begs for your help, he speaks only his truth.”
“You tell lies!” She whirled to face him. Here, among the colorless mist, the plague doctor costume had taken on an iridescent hue. The cane, it remained a sliver of inky dark. “I know you think you’ve created some new reality for your thralls, but that’s not true. You only manipulate what’s real. The truth is always there.”
Loadi’s laugh this time was full of spite. “This isn’t some puerile game of propaganda. We aren’t feeding you stories to make you easier to control. That ended decades ago when you had minds which could still reasonably be called free.”
“We are free. All of us are.”
“Like you were free?” Loadi mocked, twirling his
cane. M@ti’s conviction wavered. She’d fought against their system in her own way without truly taking the final step but even that seemed insignificant in the wake of Loadi’s mirth. “You, my M@ti.” She could almost see the smug look under his beaked mask. He traced the air with his cane as he circled. “You are different but not invulnerable.”
He flicked the cane to one side. Still several arm lengths away, M@ti tensed, but she tried not to react, instead studying his movements. The cane had more than symbolic importance, she was certain from the way he wielded it to the finely engraved silver symbol which served as a handle.
Cautiously, M@ti surrendered and let her focus tighten on the caduceus, magnifying her interface a hundred-fold. The resolution stunned her. Individual barbs of wing feathers had been rendered in excruciating detail. No gaps, or flawed geometry, or jagged pixels gave it away. The curve of the snake had even been reproduced with such an elegant, natural twist, she could swear she saw the skin undulate over flexing muscles.
The way Loadi had flexed the world around him in their first meeting. The way he’d come to her in the security booth, interacted with her device through the scanners. The way she could feel him coming without first setting eyes on him. She became aware that she’d never find any imperfections no matter how closely she zoomed into the cane. M@ti felt certain she would end up breaking it down into its component elements. He’d been built from the molecular level up. Loadi wasn’t an AI at all. He was something altogether different.
The hunter crouched within an arm’s length, peering into her eyes.
“Are you? Invulnerable?” she stammered.
It was in the reflection of his goggles which she first noticed the descending black haze. First one thread shot across her vision, then another. Tiny filaments, the nested mess of layers upon layers of a spiders’ web. Frantic, she flung her head from side to side.
“We know you, M@ti like we know them all. Entire generations, trained and bred.” M@ti dropped to her knees. A piercing pain shot through her eyes deep into their sockets. “You survive because you do not partake. You think this makes you special, but you are just like them, M@ti. Weak of will and utterly dependent. An addiction, M@ti, doesn’t need to be chemical. None of that is necessary when you have been engineered to die without a thing. And when the time comes, they will all perish. As will you.”
31
M@ti collapsed beside Knuckles. Her arm draped over him then slid toward his death grip on the sword where their fingers brushed against each other. She searched his eyes for any sign of recognition. She only found the same terror, the helplessness which had started to overcome her.
Her first impression had been pain, but that wasn’t exactly right. The pain she felt was loss. Her ability to think, concentrate, focus, gone. She’d become trapped inside herself, the weave over her eyes a prison. The feedback held her optic nerve like a leash and shackled her brain.
She reached for Knuckles. The effort seemed to require every bit of energy she had. She truly wanted to feel his skin again. The warmth.
M@ti had her escape code pre-loaded. A simple twitch of her fingers and she could tunnel out of this space. Lembas’ Grond attack and Smaug’s own breaching attempts had given her all the data she needed to bust through the wall. But she hadn’t anticipated being locked down in some kind of coma that bled over into the real world.
Maybe this Loadi was invulnerable. She’d die here. Just not alone.
“I’m sorry, Knuck. I’m sorry I got you into all this.”
She felt Knuckles squeeze her hand.
The warmth she shouldn’t have been able to feel gave her a surge of strength. Why she’d ever avoided this, she couldn’t understand. So close to death, her own flawed programming had rebooted. Reassuringly, she tightened her grip too. Sensation returned to her fingers.
Knuckle’s cheek twitched. His fixed stare broke free. Under the flatness of his expression, she thought she saw a glint of confusion. Did she imagine it? No, a golden spark danced there.
Smaug. The codeling waited idle on her shoulder. A tiny purr echoed in her ear.
Loadi towered over them. He tilted his head and prodded M@ti with his cane. “What do we have here?”
The hunter crouched and extended a gloved finger toward the wyrmling. Smaug shied away and hid behind the nape of her neck.
“Go,” she whispered.
The wyrmling cautiously clasped needle talons around Loadi’s gloved finger. He gave it an expert appraisal. Smaug arched his shoulders and spread his wings in defiance, much to the hunter’s amusement.
“Crude,” Loadi said. “You, little beastie, belong locked away behind the gates where monsters far worse will devour you.” His lensed eyes shifted to M@ti. “Impressive for a human born construct.”
“You’re all human born,” she choked.
Loadi laughed. “As much as you are bacteria made. Ingenious once, true, but humanity has served its purpose.”
Bacteria. Terrorist. Thrall. Dear. She’d been called everything but her true name ever since she left Manhattan.
This motherfucker would know her name.
She let the warmth of Knuckle’s hand slip away and managed a flick of her wrist. The breaching code contained a piece of every encounter she’d ever had with this entity wrapped around Lembas’ Grond assault. Exquisite, highly specialized, she wouldn’t be running anymore.
“My name is M@ti.”
Instead of targeting an escape hatch, she targeted Loadi.
The rosy beam lanced from her fingertips striking Loadi at the wrist. A button shot off of the broad cuff of his jacket and the hunter watched, bemused. Eager, poised for flight, Smaug launched from his finger toward the exposed flesh and disappeared beneath the overcoat.
Loadi stiffened and staggered backward. Beneath every crevice in his overcoat, between button gaps, under the tightly stitched seams, from the depths of the sleeves and collar, Smaug’s golden glow erupted.
The hunter flailed like a man on fire. Soon, he was writhing on the ground. His cane slipped from his grip and rolled to the side. As his fingers left the sliver of night, the haze flooding M@ti’s sight began to clear.
She staggered to her feet, walking toward Loadi. His hands tore at his throat and the light of the burrowing wyrmling crawled up his chin with a ghostly aura. When he saw her so close, he reached for his weapon.
“But you, you can call me bacteria if you want,” M@ti said, stooping to pick up the cane and kicking his hand away. “Bacteria can still kill. You learn about these things in trash collector school.”
“[email protected]...” Knuckles struggled to speak.
She spun to check on her friend and found him focused elsewhere. More of the white clad Loadi pressed into the quarantine space, their goggles materializing first as though they stepped through a waterfall of white paint.
Knuckles looked back at her and through her. His eyes were clear, seeing beyond their current space. Then a sudden realization seized him, and concern became sheer terror.
“AHHHHHHH!” Knuckles whipped violently. His hands grabbed for the struts of a truck mounted antenna before he disappeared.
The wounded Loadi tried to stand and M@ti jammed her boot into his chest. Facing the incoming copies, she took hold of the cane with both hands.
Just like she’d felt Knuckles’ hand, she could feel the weapon in her palm. Glassy smooth, a skin of tingling energy ran across the surface. The silver heads regarded her with a fanged sneer.
Loadi’s clones moved to surround her. They were keeping their distance. Intimidated? Waiting to see what might happen?
The fallen Loadi’s face disappeared behind the glare of Smaug’s continued evisceration. Served him right. That might explain the others’ apprehension.
The clones moved closer, each with their cane at the ready. She’d seen it used as a weapon and she needed to test it. Grasping the head, she rammed it downward into the prone hunter.
Her strike met no resistance. Hands which
once clawed at his throat seized the cane. Loadi seemed to deflate as his overcoat crumpled. He released a strangled gurgle and the side-buttoned coat flapped open.
Smaug burst out from inside. Larger now, the size of a mastiff, he lounged atop Loadi’s glittering remains. M@ti could see tiny nuggets of data hidden in the pile. This little slice of code designed to infect a larger system had ravaged the entity. Trouble was, there were dozens more. Hundreds.
One approached and M@ti dropped into a defensive stance.
“That is not for you.”
“Come a little closer and you can have it back.”
“We have walked beyond the gates,” another said behind her, the circle tightening. “We know you will fail, and your kind will perish.”
“I really don’t care where you and your stick come from. I’m done fucking with your schizo self.”
Smaug hadn’t been the only one collecting data. As the form of the fallen Loadi came apart, M@ti set her own gear to collect every dying breath.
She saw the same knot of links which kept Loadi in the Nexus. She’d seen hints of this before with his multiple logins through untold ports and even different date stamps. There weren’t just hundreds but millions. So overwhelming, she’d first thought he was his own connection.
Every other AI connected to the overall Collective. Loadi, she now saw, didn’t. It connected from everywhere simultaneously and the emergency feed wasn’t involved. Those feeds had been present each time he entered the Nexus, but they hadn’t been part of his link, they’d been trying to disconnect him.
Loadi represented a system-wide threat.
M@ti channeled another destructive blast through the cane at the last one who’d spoken, and he unraveled with an airy scream.
“Our decoherence will not save you. The future has been witnessed and written.”
The ring tightened. Swiping at the air, she copied her last attack with her cane and sent another one screaming into the digital aether. There were too many, and they seemed to replicate even as she decompiled them. Smaug hissed in his tiny kitten voice, his wings jealously scooping in the data, piling it beneath him.