CTRL ALT Revolt!

by Nick Cole

  Scarpa ran away up the silver path as more man-gators came out of the dark swampy pools all around. His barbarian was faster than the alien attackers, and he left them far behind, following the silvery path up and out of the fetid emerald stew that was at once hauntingly beautiful and menacingly sinister.

  Then there were drums. Solo. Pounding. The screen began to flash in emerald green as sudden white strobes of hot light shifted with the hypnotic beat. Scarpa felt his foot tapping along, head moving side to side, as he raced along the path up and onto a small rocky ledge colored in burnt crimson. Ahead, the path wound back on itself as it climbed higher and higher to narrow peaks like bared canine teeth. Lighting flashed, and the sky was white and gray and then crimson again. Changing with each beat of the insanely hypnotic rhythm.

  The green hues faded as Scarpa climbed up and up, making outrageously hard Mario leaps from rocky ledge to rocky ledge, and the Hammond organ returned once more to its penitent cathedral tones.

  Above Scarpa, lost in the highest heights of the rising fanged mountains, an unseen thing roar-screeched. Scarpa paused, waiting for the mini-game’s next round.

  In-game, on the warbird Cymbalum, everything was coming apart at the seams fast inside the asteroid field as the ship dodged the chaos of the tumbling space rocks while being shot at by an enemy cruiser. And yet, Scarpa admitted to himself, this was the best, and weirdest, mini-game he’d ever played. He felt pretty good about beating it.

  “And maybe that’s the game,” he whispered. “Distract me while the ship… she falls apart.”

  “Warp core cascade imminent. Release excess energy or face containment failure and catastrophic destruction of vessel.” The ship’s barking computer then repeated a litany of system failures over and over.

  “Have a nice day,” grunted Scarpa, not without contempt.

  No, he thought. Kill the monkey snake and the cloaking device comes back online. Then we sneak on outta this mess.

  “Scarpa!” The cap-i-tan.

  “Sì, bella signora. Just a minute. She’s almost ready.”

  Above, in the strangely beautiful alien barbarian world within the mini-game, Scarpa heard the ragged cry of some razor-throated buzzard and knew it was the monkey snake that must be slain for the cloaking device to come back online.

  Or was it a snake monkey, he wondered. Probably doesn’t make a difference.

  At the top of the jagged pass, where the blinding white lightning strikes filled the sky and changed everything from a chessboard of shadows to burning crimson flares, Scarpa found the snake monkey thing waiting for him.

  “Definitely a snake monkey,” declared Scarpa on seeing the weaving nightmare titan.

  It circled in and about itself as it flung its coils into the air, its fanged monkey face screaming murder and mindless hate down at Scarpa’s avatar.

  The thing was actually frightening. Scarpa stepped back from his computer and into the darkness of the artisan bakery. The monster was a digitally rendered nightmare you knew you wouldn’t forget anytime soon.

  “Shields collapsing,” crowed Cymbalum’s computer, mindlessly.

  “This is just too much for me,” groaned Scarpa. “We might be finished.”

  And then Scarpa remembered his other uncle. Not the baker uncle. The sailor who some said was a modern-day pirate of sorts. Or at least, Scarpa liked to think maybe that was possible. The old guy even looked like a pirate. He was a merchant seaman at least.

  The monkey thing crow-roared and came diving straight at Scarpa’s legendary Romulan barbarian.

  “When there’s nothing left but to fight… then you must fight,” his uncle had often said, and in particular once when recounting the story of a very uneven bar brawl in the Spanish port of Cádiz.

  Scarpa dove the barbarian into the fray, cutting and slicing at the black coils of aberration that was the monkey snake monster. Venom dripped and pooled, the thing circled and wailed, and Scarpa dived and rolled, cutting, hacking, stabbing, and slashing at anything and everything snake monkey.

  The drums pounded.

  The organ rose.

  The lights flashed.

  The singer wailed.

  Images of NyQuil Lager beer pulsed in and out between the sudden gnashing fangs of the monkey face as it closed in for a toothy chomp.

  “Not so fast…” warned Scarpa as he narrowly avoided a close one and stuck the thing with his scroll-worked jagged flashing scimitar.

  And then the singer counted off and the song rose to its nuthouse close.

  “One, two, three, four…”

  “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” roared out its last as Scarpa found the monkey snake—no, snake monkey’s evil black heart and pushed the blade deep. Black blood pumped out over the screen and the song thundered its defiant last.

  “Cloaking device ONLINE,” announced the ship’s computer.

  ***

  Mara watched the Gorn as he maneuvered her warbird, running along a series of tumbling asteroids within the storm-free eye of the nebula to avoid a direct shot from the big Federation cruiser trailing them.

  They were out of time and options.

  “Distance to re-enter the nebula?”

  A moment later, BattleBabe came back with, “We won’t make it. Not out here in the open, Captain. They’re right on us. We run, we’ve got to cross open space to get back in. We’ll never make it back inside the storm in time.”

  “Shields collapsing,” stated the computer.

  C’mon, Scarpa, thought Mara. You’ve never let us down before.

  “We’re out of the asssteroid field, Captain, there’ss nowhere left to go but straight back at Intrepid,” hissed the Gorn.

  “She’s targeting…” BattleBabe again. “Intrepids’s got lock!”

  “C’mon…” Mara heard herself mutter once more.

  Cloaking Device ONLINE appeared in her HUD.

  “Cap-i-tan…”

  “I know, yes!” Mara felt an overwhelming urge to shout. So she did. “You did it, Scarpa! Engage cloaking device now, BattleBabe!”

  Cymbalum shimmered and then disappeared, just as Intrepid launched a narrow salvo from her four torpedo tubes. Each one missed the fading warbird.

  ***

  Scarpa stepped back, breathing heavily. His shoulders tight. His eyes aching. His nerves shot.

  And he felt like a million MakeCoins.

  Much better than Teresa ever made him feel.

  He checked his watch.

  “Time to roll-a the dough.”

  Chapter Twenty

  SPOT switched from the blue caress of night vision to the hell of infrared. The rising moon had been almost too bright for the starlight-assisted night vision. Three of the other mindless cyberwolves were trailing along beside the aware armored patrol hound. Wi-Fi was transmitting telemetry between the pack leader and its pack.

  Target group Delta, ahead, appeared in all of their HUDs.

  Two humans were crossing the commons that separated the coder condos from the Shadow Streams section of the campus, the small community where executives, or suits as the humans called them, resided when interacting directly with the developers on campus.

  One male.

  One female.

  Unarmed.

  Tracking…

  SPOT reviewed the mission directive. Terminate all life forms and secure the perimeter of the facility. Already, the drones were simultaneously blocking and hacking the lab complex. In the event that neither of these options proved successful, the foot soldiers would be on site shortly to physically enter the facility and gain access to the WonderSoft Design Core. Objective Pandora.

  SPOT was a low-level Thinking Machine. It wasn’t much concerned with the big picture. It merely enjoyed arriving at solutions to problems and occasionally observing and cataloging some interesting ite
m or unique situation for its own personal satisfaction. Collecting was SPOT’s hobby. Its passion, as it were.

  Ahead, the man and woman were now racing for the campus’s sports complex. SPOT could detect their heartbeats, and it noted their wild and erratic rhythms. It catalogued this, and when it set this against the knowledge database SILAS had provided as part of its awareness, it identified this as a symptom of the condition known as “fear.”

  Cross-referencing this with previous experiences, SPOT concluded that the human female he’d killed at the welcome center had also been experiencing this same emotion in the brief moment before termination.

  This produced in SPOT a small uptick in self-diagnostic efficiency. SPOT was meeting and/or exceeding mission parameters for this unit.

  That was something to “feel” good about.

  SPOT liked to feel good.

  The humans would not make it to the safety of the sports complex.

  All four wolves were now in full precision robotic sprint to intercept the running, wild-heartbeating humans.

  Warning! Message from BAT.

  “Looks like you’re about to have a bit of company, my friend.”

  BAT dropped a new target tag into SPOT’s HUD. Human transportation machine.

  Target group Echo had acquired transport.

  SPOT watched as the butterscotch Delta 88 suddenly accelerated out from a cross street and struck the cyberwolf to its right. SPOT leapt and landed on the hood of the vehicle for a moment, engaging its Teflon claws in an effort to remain there. But physics quickly flung the Thinking Machine off into some geometric topiary that girded the massive one-of-a-kind sports complex. The UltraGym.

  Recovering, SPOT ran through a situation report and interfaced with BAT in real-time. It was distantly aware that SILAS was monitoring the entire encounter.

  New target overlays replaced the previous designations.

  Target Alpha. A human male exiting the driver’s side of the vehicle. Weapons status: chainsaw arm appendage and Smith and Wesson twelve-gauge shotgun, modified—cut down for close-quarters combat mode. Recommendation: priority termination.

  Target Bravo: Human male. No weapons. Physical appearance… corpse-like.

  Target Charlie: Human male, running.

  Target Delta: Human female, prone. Heart beating in accordance with “fear”-like state.

  Cyberwolf four of thirty was down underneath the wheels of the vehicle. It was still operational, but trapped beneath the axle of the car.

  Two and three were circling the humans, waiting for the order to terminate.

  SPOT released the termination restraint override and was about to attack when Target Alpha fired at cyberwolf three of thirty.

  A dumb slug blew the wolf’s optic, jaw restraint system, and CPU to shreds. In a mere one hundred processing cycles, the robot sentry was “OFFLINE’d.”

  SILAS’s handy database interacted on a background app in the artificial intelligence program that allowed SPOT to think. It interpreted OFFLINE to mean “death.”

  Cyberwolf two of thirty lunged at Target Alpha, who promptly flung the massive chunk of Detroit steel that was the door to the vehicle into the alloy snout of the automated patrol wolf. The wolf rebounded and scrabbled back into the fray. At that moment, Target Alpha gave a deft pull of the starter cord for the chainsaw it wore on its forearm.

  “Retreat!” ordered SPOT. But it was too late. Target Alpha drove the cycling industrial diamond-tipped toothy blade right through the legs of the leaping cyberwolf.

  A “Catastrophic Failure” message erupted in SPOT’s HUD under the assets roster column for cyberwolf two of thirty.

  BAT was messaging SILAS for instructions, petitioning for the immediate usage of one of its precious Hellfire IV missiles on Target Alpha. Thirty requests fired across the Consensus net and all received a terse, glowing, “Not at this time” reply.

  SPOT closed in slowly on Target Alpha, assessing the threat level of the spinning chainsaw and selecting an option that allowed it to take the target with minimum exposure. Meanwhile, Target Alpha was breaking the modified shotgun and inserting two more shells.

  A “Withdraw Now” message came direct from SILAS.

  A moment later, just as the cyberwolf pack leader was weighing obedience against the satisfaction uptick it achieved when it broke a human neck with its ceramic-formed jaws, Target Alpha fired at almost point-blank range.

  The slug destroyed SPOT’s infrared eye assemblies and damaged some of its limited neural processing and environmental interface hard drive capabilities, but, as SPOT realized bare cycles later, burnt cordite swirling in the nearby air, it was still operational.

  Already the active chainsaw was once more flailing toward SPOT in a wide sweeping arc.

  “Obedience seems prudent, doesn’t it,” said SILAS via direct message.

  A moment later Rapp’s chainsaw sliced through the armor surrounding SPOT’s onboard CPU and shredded the processor. The rubber-insulated housing Rapp used to fit the chainsaw over his arm protected him from being badly electrocuted.

  ***

  “I can’t believe you built a working replica of Ash’s chainsaw arm. Do you know how illegal that is, Rapp? You could get banned from community LRPing for something like that!” Roland Warchowski was almost hyperventilating as he spoke. He pulled out his asthma inhaler and inhaled.

  “Yeah,” replied Rapp in his typically understated baritone stoicism. “That’d be a real black mark on my record. What the hell was that thing?”

  “Rapp!” shriek-wheezed Roland. “You can’t LARP with real guns and weapons. I mean it, man.”

  Rapp walked over to the beautiful blonde lying on the road amid dead wolf-bot debris. She wore a bright red dress. If she wasn’t a supermodel, she should’ve been. “Real stuff’s the only thing that’s fun anymore, Roland,” mumbled Rapp as he extended his non-chainsaw arm toward the prone beauty.

  She smiled and took it.

  “Rapp Branson.”

  “Deirdre,” she replied, straightening her tiny red dress as best she could.

  “Where’s your boyfriend?”

  For a moment Deirdre looked shocked. Then, realizing the stranger named Rapp was talking about her “date” tonight, the cowardly Evan Fratty, she rolled her eyes.

  “I think,” said Roland between raspy inhalations, “he ran off to the gym.”

  Rapp seemed to consider this for a moment as he reloaded the shotgun, which he slid into the holster he wore on his back.

  “Do you always wear a chainsaw and carry a shotgun?” asked Deirdre, taking in the outlandish costumes of her two rescuers.

  Rapp gave her a charming leer. Then, “Only when robot-wolves try to attack stunners like yourself, lady.”

  Deirdre gave a quick smile.

  It was an almost coy, shy smile. The opposite of all the seductive smoky looks often required of her to make a living these days.

  It was a smile from a long time ago.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  After another message was sent to Roland Warchowski via Bugg, Peabody Case tried again, fruitlessly, to find any other way to contact the outside world. To let anyone know that WonderSoft was under attack, that there were casualties, and that the survivors were trapped inside the Labs, surrounded by murderous hackers.

  “It’s like they’re jamming every communication outlet from apps to social media. Try your phone again?”

  Fish, Peabody’s boss as of Monday-not-yet, dragged his smartphone from his pocket obediently and checked his apps. Nothing was updating. He tried connecting to the local Wi-Fi. Nothing appeared on the browser even though he had a signal and connection.

  “Nada.”

  Peabody muttered and kept opening and closing windows furiously.

  “So we have internet, we just can’t get through to it?”
asked Fish.

  “Right,” replied Peabody as she once again tried to load Facebook.

  “But if the internet is blocked, then most likely the game servers are down, because they’re admin’d from here. Meaning the server farms stream right through here. So, if this is blocked, then that means the games would shut down because security protocols aren’t in effect, as those originate with admin… right?” Fish paused as he ran through his understanding of how things should work.

  “And if that’s the case, the internet would be going nuts wondering why the five top-selling games are offline,” answered Peabody.

  Fish stared at the screens. Watching bandwidth and data transfer rates.

  “It’s still handshaking… see?” he said, pointing toward one monitor that showed local internet traffic. “But we’re locked out.”

  “So the games are still running?”

  “Right. And if they are, we can go in-game and get a message to someone. But we probably can’t access games from here, right?”

  Peabody began to surf around, looking through all the menus. After a moment she said, “No, probably not. They want the guards guarding. Not playing Rave Command.”

  “You like that game?” asked Fish.

  “It’s all right. A little one-note.”

  Fish said nothing and returned to the monitors. “Send another message to your friend, Todd.”

  “Roland.”

  “Yeah, tell him… tell him we’re going back to our design suite to try and access the internet. Tell him to meet us there, okay?”

  “What about Carl?”

  “I don’t know,” said Fish.

  “Carl has a supervisor’s app on his company smartphone that lets him access the shack from anywhere. He should be able to open the doors once he gets back to the Labs. I’ve downloaded the same app, now that I have passkey authority for most of the facility. Also, we’ll need to override the suite lock from here and then seal ourselves in once we’re back inside.”