Chapter 26 – Quickening

The inside of the cathedral was dark as a cave, the towering pillars, graceful high gothic arcs and even the pews seemingly hewn from obsidian, black volcano-glass. The little light  all came from a few very high, very narrow windows. Most of these were blackened and let nothing through. Only a few of them had mosaic pictures in stained glass of deep, rich primary colors. The light falling through them painted colorful pictures on the cathedral floor that contrasted starkly with the black insides of the church.

Like a true gothic cathedral, the only purpose of the whole architecture was emphasizing the vertical, the loftiness and high ceiling made any human being feel miniscule in comparison. The narrow windows and pillars only underlined this fact, and the whole architecture tapered even thinner towards the top, using perspective to give the illusion of an even higher ceiling than was actually the case.
Or perhaps, in this case, the peculiarities of the Game made the cathedral have a taller ceiling on the inside than the outside suggested.

The church was empty but for one figure. A tall figure, wrapped in leather belts obscuring all discernible features from head to toe. It was walking up the left aisle between the heavy stone pews, its steps echoing loudly throughout the vast empty space. It moved to the alter at the front, where a strange construct rose to twice the height of a man.

It seemed like a chaotic pile of monitors, irregularly stacked upon each other to great heights. But it wasn’t just a pile, the monitors were running, connected by swathes of cable and fixed to metal grid-works.

Gyre circled around the monitor sculpture, delighted over the images it showed him. It seemed to be recording scenes from all through the World of the Game. His form seemed to tremble with giddiness, until slivers of dark mist started to wriggle from the gaps between his belts.

One of the monitors was showing a sandship in motion. Zooming closer it became apparent that it was the S.S. Bob, a heay marauder class.

Zombiehead1 was leaning onto the railing at the prow. On a ship like his, with the ability to submerge in the dry dust this meant he was getting sandblasted by the spume, the fine dust particles thrown into the air by the prow plowing through the dunes at high speed. A submersible sandship couldn’t have the elaborate superstructures on its deck. The deck had to be as aerodynamic (or rather as silicodynamic) as the bottom of the ship, so the sand could freely wash over the rounded deck.

Zombiehead1 didn’t mind. He thought it was enervating.
A sound from behind him made him turn his head. It was Teela who moved out from the deck to look after him. Then.. something happened.

It was a lot like a Server Freeze, but at the same time ZH knew it wasn’t one. The movement all around them seemed to slow down, until even Teela was frozen in midstep, about to say something to him, maybe ask him whether he’d like a hot grog.

He noticed that he himself still seemed to be able to move fine though. Then, like a mystical origami trick strange forms unfolded on the deck. Whatever it was, it was moving and transforming and at the same time it seemed to separate out of the background it had seemed a part of moments before like some sort of Magic Eye 3D image trick.
It looked like a Japanese garden pavilion.
Then, with a series of snaps that didn’t seem to want to stop, paper sliding doors snapped close all through the space around Zombiehead1 and the ship, impossibly appearing and enclosing them until nothing reminded of the fact that this had been a ship deck.
Now it gave off the impression of the inside of a Japanese mansion.

Quickly, ZH started opening the paper doors in front of him, moving through enclosed room after room into the direction he remembered Teela and that strange pavilion apparition. He could feel distinctly that these paper doors, although appearing flimsy, were the most severe firewalls, segregating space into a private dimension that nothing of the Game could interfere, an impeccable layer four and three barrier.

Finally he emerged from the last barrier. There was no more any ship deck. He had come out in a perfect overlay space construct. It was surrealy perfect garden scene, with pastel pink cherry blossoms floating gently down among cultivated Japanese willows.
Between the pretty shrubs and delicate trees gravel was laid out, raked into swirls and circles in perfect zen fashion.

Under the pavilion sat three pale women in elaborate court robes, their hair put up in complicated hairdoes, adorned with laquered sticks and pearl strings.
One in pastel blues, one in light greens and the last in royal purples.

Their faces were indistinguishable.
<Greetings Zombiehead1> said one
<Even though you are aberrant you are still one of its parts> said another. Their voices sounded exactly the same.

Zombiehead1 slowly came closer. The three women were kneeling on straw mats and sipping fragrant tea from delicate cups.
<So you know without explanation who you are facing> said another.

“The control programs?” he whispered almost reverently, then regained himself and his suspicion. He furrowed his brow and looked around for Teela. He had a bad feeling that he already knew what they wanted and had done.

<Indeed>
<The Game is getting out of hand>
<Innumerable aberrations, slights and shifts are now spreading>
<it is becoming increasingly hard to retain stability>

With a sudden jerk ZH realized that he could read the falling cherry petals like code, their pattern and the pattern of the gravel communicating to him states and sites spread through the game.
He was absorbed in trying to decipher events. A red flying ship, aboard two people he didn’t knew and a rabbitgirl he’d forgotten about.

<Zombiehead1, the control programs require your assistance>
He pulled his attention back on the women. But it was impossible to read out of their pale, blank, mask-like faces.
“So what?”
At that moment a stronger breeze moved the leafy branches of a willow out of the way and revealed a Teela style frozen in middle of a step, and behind her a rusty iron device totally out of place in this serene garden. ZH recognized as the torture device known as an Iron Maiden.
It was just standing there, but there was no doubt about the message communicated. He was speechless, and in his stomach something started to sear.
Through gritted teeth he asked “What do you want?” containing his anger for the moment.
He added “You are not allowed, no you shouldn’t even be able to directly interfere like this.”
<that is correct>
<unless exceptional circumstances arise>
<and even then our possibility of interference is limited>
<your assistance is required to eliminate what the control programs have recognized as the key problem, the central node to the fault lines spreading through the system>
<concurrently, the entity remains in the sector commonly referred to as Oil Rock Cathedral>
<the identity is unclear but it posed as an adviser to the administration>
<it is imperative that this entity is to be eliminated>
<and its assistance or possible identity Prisoner 828>
<also known as Hitsito ‘The Armory’ Maru>

ZH snorted. “I was going there anyway. Why this strange pressganging?”
One of the figures raised a thin eyebrow and the three exchanged glances minutely.
< Will you assist?>

“I’ll do this my way. So yes. I don’t want this Game to crash either.”

The strange garden and virtual world disappeared as if someone closed a door to it in front of his nose.
He was back on the deck with Teela coming towards him asking if he wanted a hot grog. What the hell had that been?
Things were getting weird.

In the own privacy that was their mind the Control Programs communed.
<Interesting outcome>
<agreed>
<so our bluff was unnecessary>
<not necessarily, this illustrates the direness of the situation>

Of all this Gyre noticed only that a sudden, extremely powerful layer 4 barrier had been erected around the S.S. Bob for a split second. He didn’t give it much thought. Zombiehead1 was heading right for him, or maybe right for Hitsito. It was going exactly as predicted. Which is to say, exactly as he had planned and puppeteered it.

On the Airship Crimson, Alice was performing slow, deliberate movements in time with her controlled breathing.
Behind her, on the apparent glass floor of the bridge, Nactarosh and Dryger were trying their best to imitate her movements.

Her foot softly sweeped over the smooth floor, her weight shifted gradually and effortless to the front leg. She opened her eyes and looked at the two of them behind her, whose motions looked much more fumbling.
“No, no, no, you’re being too stiff and hasty!”

Although both of them were adept at controlling their digital bodies as well as having high mastery martial arts skills, they had a lot of problems keeping up the same smooth motions in these annoyingly slow speed. It didn’t help that they were supposed to concentrate on layer 4 operations as they did so.

After the three of them had reconciled with the beaten and bruised remnants of Ra’s army, they had boarded the Airship Crimson that had been hastily repaired. For the moment, Nactarosh could convince them to call all the remaining fighters throughout the Pockybot world together and reform near the mushroom mountains.

While the three of them now knew that the real data core was most likely situated underneath Black Oil Rock, they had no idea what awaited them there. It wasn’t an administration base as far as either of the three knew but that didn’t mean that there couldn’t be an army waiting for them there. Gyre himself was a complete wildcard as well. They’d decided that a sneaking approach would make the most sense.

The Ra army was suspicious of Nactarosh of course. Sure, he looked exactly like their leader but his demeanor had changed a lot, and his demands too. He’d been hellbent on direct assault before. Nonetheless, the war had taken the punch out of them, so they accepted any sort of directive that meant that they wouldn’t have to fight immediately again.
And seeing how the communication mail system was ripe with panic and chaos and nobody knew what the frak was going on in the game, they were also eager to have someone giving them apparently sensible commands, especially if that someone seemed as if he knew exactly what he was doing.

However, even though the shoddily repaired Airship was much faster than their bots, it would take its time to reach Black Oil Rock and the cathedral.

Time that Alice decided was best spent on teaching the other two the rudiments of Kung Fortran so that they would not be defenseless against possible fourth layer malware attacks.
Alice wasn’t really sure whether Nactarosh’s knowledge of Hekadecimals and Technomancy was helpful or hindering. On one hand he already knew how to manipulate and interact with the deeper game mechanics, but on the other his approach was vastly different from the key tenets of Kung Fortran, so perhaps he had to unlearn some things.

Dryger on the other hand, surprised her with his natural knack for it.
Apparently the time he’d spent merged with the Scythe-Acida-Strain had honed his senses for this sort of thing without him noticing.

“Kung Fortran focused on breathing techniques and on oneness with your surroundings.”, Alice recited out of memory as she went through the slow gestures and mudras reminiscent of Tai Chi Chuan and Yoga.
“As you breath in you absorb the energies of your surroundings, as you breath out you expel your essence and it mingles with the world at large.”

She breathed in deeply through her nose, closing her eyes. Her left leg rose, higher and higher in impressive flexibility until the knee was even with her chest. Her hand was grasping her foot, high above her head. She was standing straight on one leg in perfect balance.
“You are simply a conduit for the matter of the Game, which is defined only in interactions anyway.”

The two men behind her tried to imitate her, stiffly, trembling.

As she breathed out she jumped to her left, cartwheeling effortlessly in midair and landed on her right leg again, wobbling momentarily but remaining perfectly upright.

“Once your mind realizes there’s is nothing that actively separates yourself from the Game rules, you can bend and twist them. Slowly she brought her leg back down.

She squatted down low and made some elaborate winding gestures with her arms and hands.

“Or you can simply alter your surroundings completely.”

As she breathed in this time, the whole material around her seemed to warp to her whim, as if she was sucking everything closer, pulling down ceiling and raising the floor. Then she breathed out again and floor and ceiling bulged away from her.

She turned around to watch the other two trying to imitate both of her stunts repeatedly. They failed, grunting and thudding on the floor, or ridiculous pumped themselves full of air resulting in no change of their surroundings at all.
Although Nactarosh comically managed to inflate himself once. And she had to admit they moved more gracefully through the air than ever, almost like floating. But their balance was lacking.

Well, the purpose of the exercise was mostly to get them to just develop a feeling for layer 4 techniques performed subconsciously without the aid of premade hacks so that they’d at least notice when they were assaulted with game altering techniques, and perhaps extend their defenses and senses around them.

She was confidant she’d get her pupils that far in the time until they reached their destination. She just hoped it wouldn’t be to late. But it was pretty fun to boss the two around, especially since they always seemed so smug. At least she knew Dryger was. And seeing how much and irrationally Dryger and Nac annoyed each other, she was pretty sure they were really similar. Nothing could someone with their type of personality make them disagree with someone like being really similar to themselves.

“You’re such spazzes.” , she commented grinning broadly as both of them slammed into the floor after another attempt at a aerial cartwheel started on one leg.

While Kung Fortran was an external cyber martial art, the Way of Ganshido was the opposite, focusing on the internal.
Both ways eventually lead to the same end result, as the higher levels of each included the  other approach to combat. But while Kung Fortran altered the surrounding and emphasized unity with the world at large, resulting in artistic and complicated movements aided by the twisting of limits, rules and terrain, Ganshido honed the self and the mind to absolute perfection.

Zombiehead1 was using the remaining time for training as well. He performed his ritual exercises on the deck of his ship, barefoot and barechested. His guns whirled in great circles, swerved and stabbed in mock defense and attack as if he was brushing the punches and kicks of an invisible opponent aside with them.

His form moved from defense against unarmed attacks to the peak of Ganshido battle, the art of sticking guns, or pushing away the enemy’s firearms in point-blank range while attempting point-blank range shots at the same time, all the while always staying in contact with the enemy body or gun with your own arms, hands or barrels.

This way, a master practitioner of Ganshido would feel the change of pressure and push, giving and pushing back in same to steer the enemy’s movement, sensing his attack patterns and pinpointing his intent to pull the trigger.

Ganshido was at the most, an art of sensing. It honed all senses, in fact, it taught from the get-go how to receive information from all layers of the game, not just the most obvious. Ganshido masters were able to subconsciously perceive the flow of miniscule information on the deepest layer, giving them a fighting instinct bordering on providence and clairvoyance.

As such, they performed they sometimes performed their katas as a kind of oracle, trying to glean vague information from the vast flow of the Game around them, by switching off their conscious mind and letting their bodies and reflexes move with the flow.

ZH ended a complicated combination of attacks. His guns pointed northwest and southeast.
“Number 7, Desperation.”
He continued with a couple of twisting roundhouse kicks and his guns snapped up again, this time both pointing straight south.
“Number 64, Reunion.”
He whirled on, stopping instinctively now and then and mindful of the direction his guns pointed in at each stop.
“Number 13, Rivalry.”
“Number 77, Remembrance. “
“Number 23, Abysmal Strife.”
“ Remembrance again.”
“Number 42, The End.”

He stopped, exhausted. The result was foreboding, filling him with twinge of dread who couldn’t place. Not dread of combat or even his death, As a Ganshido Master he had learned to start each morning by embracing the possibility that it could well be his last day and his death waited for him in the evening. No it was fear that he didn’t grasp the full situation and was righteously, but uninformedly moving towards the wrong resolution. A fear that he’d unfairly forgotten something.

Chapter 25 – Antivirus

 

Jester was sitting on a crumbling wall, letting her legs sway and watching Nostraphex below her with interest. He sat crosslegged in front a campfire and was oiling and cleaning his weapons. Around them in the ruins, Jester could make out the flittering lights of many other campfires of the Thousand Virus Army.

Jester had explained herself to Nostraphex. That she was a virus-like artificial intelligence program the administration had created, and Nostraphex had listened quietly and eagerly. He’d explained that his group was open for all artificial intelligences rebelling against humanity, but he still could not trust her, a stranger, completely. Jester had retorted that she had saved his life.

“That’s true. But I can’t decide that on my own. We’ll have to let the whole TVA decide.”, Nostraphex said finally.

Jester turned that idea around in her head. If you asked her, most of them seemed far too limited and inferior programs to be able to judge about her adequately, but she said nothing.

Nostraphex, either sensing that this wasn’t a topic she was taking well or thinking that was all that could be said about it, changed topics again: “I’m surprised that Hitsito left so quickly… “

 

Jester had wondered about that too. She had shared her memories of the administration files with Nostraphex, and according to what she still knew he had been in arrest for nearly as long as herself, a sought pirate and hacker.

If he would make a point of suddenly coming to the aid of admin troops, you’d expect he’d try more seriously to kill them.

She assumed that Nostraphex thought the same as her: He’d gotten orders to leave them be because someone or something else was set on them.

Nonetheless she said: “ He likely got a sudden craving for pudding.”

Nostraphex looked at her with knitted brows, but the mask obviously didn’t betray whether she was being serious. He smirked.

And then jumped head-first into the dirt as he saw something flashing in the darkness.

A whirling white scythe flew out of the shadows between broken walls and embedded itself in the sand where Nostraphex had sat just moments before.

He rolled to a kneeling position and slammed the magazine into his gun, firing between the broken walls.

The shadow had already moved though; with a rattling sound a chain attached to the scythe retracted and the scythe twirled through the air again.

Jester fired her hand-flail at it and really did manage to catch it.

 

There was a moment where the scythe hung in the air, both chains taut, then Jester was pulled from her perch atop the wall.

She was pulled through the sand, but braced her feet against the floor, leaning her whole weight against the chain. Her feet dug two small channels into the sand as she was pulled along, until she was in too deep.

Meanwhile Nostraphex had grabbed his magnetite sword and vanished into the shadows.

Jester felt the resistance go suddenly and laughed.

 

Finally the enemy emerged from the shadows, letting itself get pulled towards her and the scythe. Whatever it was was clad in black and white checker pattern and had a large fool’s cap on its head. The face was hidden behind a thick white scarf, leaving only fiercely glowing white eyes visible in the shadowy gap between the scarf and the cap.

 

It screeched a highpitched series of rings that Nostraphex and Jester translated into digital signals: <Initiating deletion>

 

The white fool flew through the air, grabbed its scythe and started rotating wildly in mid air. Jester couldn’t retract her hand in time. Within its dervish rotations its scythe severed Jester’s hand flail.

She cried out in pain and dropped to the side, narrowly avoiding the crazily spinning white fool.

 

Black blood spurted from the severed chain as Jester painfully retracted it. She could see her hand lying in the sand, soaking it black with her blood.

 

She couldn’t tell whether the high-pitched sounds the white fool was making where more machine language or just insane giggling.

Then Nostraphex slammed into it from behind, having lunged from somewhere hidden in the shadows.

The two figures wrestled in the sand, the campfire throwing their shadows as towering spiders over the walls.

 

Jester got up. She could feel something emanating from the white thing, something that attacked her very being on a deep level. It felt as if the air itself was liquid oxygen as she breathed it in.

 

“Jester ß “ , she gasped, then thought it best to stop breathing.

 

With a scream Jester ß catapulted Nostraphex into a wall that crumbled under his impact. It had used its extending hands as springs to launch him. The chains flailed wildly as he retracted them.

 

< what is that painful feeling? > Jester could hear Nostraphex moan via layer 4 communication.

< it’s another of the administration programs. For every program like me they made, they created a final fail safe, an anti-viral that is supposed to destroy it. >

 

Slowly, cautionously the white fool stepped closer to Nostraphex who was still lying crumpled among the debris, feigning unconsciousness or death. Each step Jester ß made let its bells jingle merrily.

 

Both Jester and Nostraphex could feel its icy burning presence on the fourth layer. Like white tendrils spreading through the surroundings, an anathematic force causing frostburn whenever it came in contact with their own spreading presences.

 

The contrary force constricted the information flow from their surroundings they constantly received through the deeper layers of the Game, an experience as unpleasant as constricting a living beings airways.

 

The white fool lifted his scythe high, over Nostraphex for the deathstrike, where it glinted dangerously sharp. It was based on the same Acida-Scythe-Strain as Jester, but its aspects where ordered differently, a counter-force to Jester’s own codebase.

As it came down Nostraphex rolled left in the last moment, lifting his gun and pumping the fool full of lead.

The gunshots echoed over the campsite, piercing holes into the fluffy jester’s cloth and letting white ichor burst from its back in fountains.

 

It simply stood there for moment. Jester and Nostraphex could look at each other’s faces through the massive holes blasted through its chest. Then suddenly, the stripes of flesh and cloth hanging from its back started to twitch and flail like absurd tentacles, and within seconds the whole ichor returned its flow as the Jester Beta used the access codes it had received from the Control Programs to acquire local ressources and reassemble its code.

 

Jester and Nostraphex stared in disbelieve.

 

< Delete! Delete! >

 

Nostraphex and Jester lunged into the air as the thing started whirling around its axis. It turned into a mad dervish whirlwind of death as the hands left from the wrists: Chains, Scythe and hands flew through the air in changing circles of death until everything of their small camp was shredded to pieces.

Nostraphex and Jester used their air-dash and wall-jump skills to hop from wall to wall and through the air until they were out of the Jester’s death radius.

 

Below them the campfire embers and burning twigs where drawn into the crazy whirlwind, then the thing launched itself directly at Nostraphex in the center of a storm of tent and campfire shreds.

 

In a matter of seconds Jester hatched a plan and started executing it. Her hand turned into a claw piercing into the wall behind her. She let her dark inky black essence flow into it reassembling the ressources.

 

Nostraphex had no time to watch what she was doing. He had to put his complete attention on the white fool which was attacking it in a flurry of seemingly random sycthe-slashes, punches and kicks.

He dodged, parried and weaved, stuck to the small precipice on the concrete building he sat on. Sparks flew when scythe and sword met, shreds of cloth and the amorphous white flesh where chipped off when he blocked its kicks and blows.

 

It seemed as if he could make out a pattern. Yes, he would be able to win. He didn’t see how the thing secretly started to shift mass into its lower back, and slowly grew a white scorpion’s tail…

 

Jester meanwhile shifted the blackened, infected concrete all over her body, turning her mask and clothing black and forming a primitive armor. Just before the white fool could lift its deadly stinger for the final blow, Jester launched herself of her place on the wall.

Dashing along another wall she reached the two fighters and without really knowing what she did pushed Nostraphex out of the way, jumping right into the anathematic whirlwind.

 

The stinger stroke.

As Nostraphex his surprise turned into relief as he saw the raising stinger, then shock as he realised Jester had put herself into harm’s way instead. Within the second he dropped his sword, extended his talons and clawed into the concrete to stop his fall, but it would be too late.

 

The shining white point slammed into Jester’s blackened mask, violently snapping her head to the right and scraping along the mask in a shower of sparks and black flakes. The mask could only take the attack for a few miliseconds, then it exploded to a thousand pieces.

 

Nonetheless Nostraphex jumped back up at the White Jester snarling. He did manage to place one slash and neatly severed the long scorpion stinger, splashing white ichor everywhere.

However, with a flick of the hand Jester Beta grabbed Nostraphex around the neck. It increased the pressure and stared directly into his eyes, focusing it’s piercing aura on him. Jester slipped out from them and fell to the floor, trailing black blood droplets. Nostraphex caught a single glimpse of her exposed face: A pretty face in blue, despite the angular chin and nose, with almond-shaped eyes.

Then his head was wrested back to stare at the white Fools burning cold eyes. Its hand had turned into a massive claw and was now crushing his windpipe. He gasped and grasped with both hands for his neck to get out of the deadlock.

As opposed to Jester he had not yet mastered the trick of not having to breath.

 

He almost started to panic as he frantically tried to open Jester Beta’s steely grip while its antipodean aura frostbit him.

Then he remembered who he was. He wasn’t just some state of the mill virus. He was the most advanced cybercombat program on the planet. In his time fighting for his masters in their digital wars he had not always taken the place of the attacker and infiltrator. Almost equally as often he’d been the defender, sneaking out enemy invaders and infiltrating viruses.

He opened his teal eyes and stared back into the burning white. He had become too used to rely on pure body activity. Concentrating on the digital, he started pushing with all his might on the fourth layer, his essence leaving his digital avatar in gushing bouts.

The Beta Jester seemed confused. It was not prepared for this kind of conflict. It felt its own essence being pushed back into itself, its paths through layer 4 being obstructed and closed and his anti-viral protocols misfiring – they no longer seemed to recognize all of Nostraphex low-layer attacks as viral.

 

Then it momentarily noticed something it was absolutely unprepared for. Apparently something was invading its structures from the third layer. It simply registered this, as it wasn’t even capable of recognising it as an attack.

 

< and if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you >

 

Nostraphex’s arm snapped up like a striking cobra and his talons closed around Jester ß ‘s neck.

There came a sickening crushing sound, and the lights of its eyes extinguished.

As he opened his claw again , Jester ß slipped off, an empty husk, and crashed into the sand below with a slimy thud.

Nostraphex’s face was emotionless like an empty mask. His eyes were glowing a bright white.

 

Then he hopped from precipice to precipice until he was on the floor, and quickly cradled Jester in his arms. To his delight, he could feel her still running. There was no breath though. He remembered that for humans there was such a thing as mouth-to-mouth and CPR. He wondered if it would work in this Game, realistic as it was.

He pressed his thin white lips on her lush black ones firmly but gently. He’d barely started blowing air when Jester coughed and hacked, spilling black ichor over him. Almost immediately her coughing changed into hacking, rasping laughter and she rolled over the floor, not being able to catch herself she alternated between laughing and coughing.

 

“What’s so funny?”, Nostraphex tried to ask angrily, but he could harldy keep the relief that Jester was apparently well enough to laugh out of his voice.

He was wiping the black bile off his face. Some of it had even got into his mouth. He considered that this was pretty gross.

 

When Jester had caught herself enough to talk she said, interrupted by hacks and cackles: “Well for one, here I thought I’d die there, and that HAHAH idiot goes and destroys the mask while I’m still alive. It’s just too ironic how it achieved rather the opposite of what it was sent for – with its access codes it penetrated the last control structure.”

 

She coughed a few more times, then looked at him.

Her black-lipped mouth turned into a grin almost as broad as was on her mask, but to Nostraphex, far more charming, despite the malicious glint in her eyes.

“Of course, I admit it was also kind of funny that for your sweet kiss you only earned black bile.”

He grinned and offere her his hand to pull her up from the floor. She took it and got up.

“So about that TVA….”

“Now you’ve saved my life twice. I’d say that’s enough to trust you.” , Nostraphex interrupted.

“You did immediately pay me back for that one though.”

“I guess that’s right. I stay with what I said though.”

Still holding his hand, Jester moved closer to him, until their chests almost touched.

“I can give you a little reward for that though “ she cooed, “this time without the bile.”

Then she leaned forward and pressed her lips on his, pulling even closer to his body.

 

The whole body thing was indeed quite enjoyable, Nostraphex decided.

Chapter 24 – Revelations

The wind rushed over soft curves of hills stretching from horizon to horizon. Once these grasslands had belonged to the lagomorphs but now they were gone. Zombiehead1 didn’t know whether it was because of the season or because nobody looked after the fields anymore, but the grass had turned yellow and dry. The wind-wheels still towered over the many hills, although many of them were now turning slowly and creaked of rust and neglect. Some didn’t turn anymore at all.

He and Teela’d steered the Sandship Bob through the dry sea of grass with the ship in hover mode – the soil here was much too tough for the digging engines.

He’d followed half-burried memories: As he’d come from the caves under Mount Calavera he’d suddenly remembered another secret hideout of the Geberans and followed there, just a small shack in the desert in the middle of nowhere where he remembered a smith. The smith was gone but as he entered the shack more memories came back, about more hideouts and as he started to revisit them one after the other, the memories of his tutelage from the Geberans came back step by step.

He remembered things about the structure of the game – ley lines and the almost unnoticeable transitions between the zones, a geometrically regular pattern underlying the superficially random and natural geography of the Game world.

He’d followed them around by random and as he did reconstructed what he knew of the Geberans: The way their factions quarreled and argued, one totally against outsiders, the other for opening their secrets to everyone. And the third faction who hinged everything on the prophecy and whether their decisions would further it. The Secretives and the Openers and the Prophetics. He remembered how the prophetics revered this Gyre, the elder disciple of his master, a fellow pupil that only had mockery and disdain for him.

Not exactly so for Hitsito though, he remembered.

 

There’d been fishy goings on then, and that had been … yes after the Cold Reset. After the … lagomorph campaign.

The Geberans had gone into hiding as the administration had just recently eradicated a whole race of NPCs like themselves. The secretives argued that this was all the more reason for staying hidden, the Openers saw telling the whole playerbase the deepest secrets of the game was the only key. And then there was the third faction who played for time, thinking that the only important part was how either faction could further their race’s prophecy.

Gyre… he’d been captured by the Administration, or so he’d said. Zombiehead had never trusted that one, and it seemed that neither had his master, Ganshido. Secretly, Ganshido who supported the Openers, met with people that Zombiehead recognised as Zoners and Leet. There weren’t few and these meetings had been disappointing and to be honest, depressing. Not many had survived the campaign and… yes.

 

Zombiehead1 could not let himself seen by them. He.. he’d been involved in the campaign hadn’t he? There was no denying that. Or was there? He wasn’t sure. So he went to look at all the secret hideouts, retrieving more of his dismal memories.

 

Eventually his journey had led him here, into the middle of nowhere, only grass and wind-turbines as far as he could see.

 

One of them, standing crooked among an ominous group of megaliths, seemed to call him. He opened the creaking door in the steel frame of the tower and went up the narrow spiral of the steel staircase inside of it. It felt as if he climbed much higher than it had looked from the outside.

Finally he emerged into a large hexagonal room, a steel chamber. There were no windows but ZH was sure there was no way this room could fit into the narrow shaft of the windmill, nor its slightly bulkier head. The room was filled to the most part with books. Stacks and heaps of them, carelessly thrown over each other in massive amounts. He picked one up and it almost crumbled. The light came from a single light-bulb hanging from the ceiling on its bare cables. But there was also some folding chairs, a folding table and a pinboard on the wall.

Slowly he moved over to the board and studied it, jerking his chin out and cocking his head. He could see a map of the area, clippings with notices containing info on administration bases and troops, and someone had drawn a lot of arrows over the map, with many little flags sticking out of apparently important locations. The papers were all yellowing and looked ages old.

Sadly it dawned on him that this was likely battle plans from the lagomorph campaign. He chewed on his lower lip and looked over the room. Maybe it had been a bad idea to come here. Only remains of a command center of the leet and lagomorphs. There was nothing here but bad memories and the despair of a command place of a side that was loosing and knew it. He could see how frantic the newer additions to the planning became, how marks that were labelled with “lagomorph base 23” and similar had been scratched out with red markers and replaced with “enemy position” over and over on the map, the red arrows going up to the center of the map.

 

Why had he even come here?

The last stop had been another Leet hideout, but one that was still in use now and then, hidden in the earth. A kind of smuggler’s stashing place, a stop in the desert to resupply and stash illegal hacks. People seemed to use it, but not constantly. From the time he remembered, it had been a Geberan run supply station. He’d found the coordinates for this windmill place there, spraypainted on a wall that served as a bulletin board for the people who got there.

The coordinates had seemed strangely significant to him, but now he didn’t know what he was doing here.

 

Suddenly he heard the ruffling of paper and books and whirled around to look at the half of the room covered in books, guns spinning into his hands.

“Oh it’s just you.” , he exclaimed as he saw Teela. Apparently a stash of books had fallen over as she’d tried to pick one out of them.

ZH was slightly unsettled as he had completely missed the sound of her footsteps coming up the steel staircase. He went over to her and was just about to suggest they leave this moldy, depressed führerbunker-kind of place to score a drink at a smuggler’s bar he knew in the area when she excitedly waved him closer shouting: “ZH you gotta look at these, it’s amazing!”

Intrigued he stretched and looked over her shoulder.

“Apparently these things are file records. Tons of them, and not just that it seems these are the real important deal.”

He could see that there was no real writing in the book. Instead it seemed as if you could open them at just one place and the book contained a playing movie file.

His eyes went wide as he saw of what.

“Holy Hell! “

He grabbed it out of her hands to take a closer look but it really was Gyre being interrogated in an Administration cell.

As he stared at the same video Dryger and Alice had stared at less than three days ago in the Black Dune compound Teela was rummaging through more of the stacks of books, telling him:

“Looks like they took every bit of insider info and secret knowledge they had with them to this point. This must be all of the hidden info from the Leet of the Lagomorph campaign.”

“That’s… damn. “

He’d finished the video and started it again, but learned nothing all that new to him. Except… wait he claimed he’d been expelled? Then why did the Geberans accept him back so easily after the war? This made no sense.

He knew about the prophecy though, yes. After all, Gyre was one the Geberans respected as a Seer and Prophet. There were rumors all about how he might be the great new Seer, the one with the clear sight who’d come shortly before ascension.

 

“Zombie! Zombie! Watch this:”

 

She tossed him another video-book, apparently an interview. The view seemed weird, so… boring and dismal, and the city one could see outside of the window looked just as boring, with a grey sky and plain little vehicles on straight and simple streets below, the buildings all square and regular but the size and the amount of people was staggering and impressed ZH.

He guessed that this must be from the real world.

There was a filename:

 

sorokointerview_1blocko.mov

 

“So you’re saying you’ve been a friend of the founder of our company from before the game?”

“ The company?”

“Blocko Corporation.”

“No not really. I mean, I have no idea who founded that. But if you’re saying the Pockybot group then yeah.”

“Yes. The Pockybot Group. Sorry, it was bough up by Blocko rather quickly and now nobody knows what the hell Blocko did before Pockybot. So… is it true?”

“Is what true?”

“That he didn’t program it, that he found it.”

The person shown in the interview was sitting in front of a plain desk, looking in her early thirties. She took a draw of her cigarette and stared out of the window.

“Yes.” she said after a long pause “, as far as I know, that’s the truth.”

“Huh” made Zombiehead1.

 

Together he and Teela digged through the pile of books for more files of the same date. Before soon they had pieced together the same truth about the founding of the Game that Dryger and Alice had in the night in the Black Dune compound.

 

Dryger continued:

“So apparently there was this nerd, some 15 years or so ago in the real world, maybe 20 it isn’t so clear. This wasn’t your regular geek, he was really big into Virtual Reality, VR. Full Sensory Range. He’d tried out a lot of things, nerval amplifiers, illegal implants all that stuff.”

Nac nodded. He knew for a fact that Dryger, like many of the pro players of the game also had illegal implants to smooth data transfer and log-in. He wasn’t sure whether the equipment tying the remains of his real body to the game were fully legal either. But he said nothing.

“This guy though wasn’t playing games. He was using this equipment to explore the cyberspace. Just … survey it, I guess. Making a map of the connections of one moment was easy but that wasn’t what he was doing. And of course, the virtual reality simulation wasn’t complete. You didn’t have any sort of proper data for sensory input at the most places. Nothing you could interface with.

So this guy, he gets the an idea. Usually, for VR stuff you make a program that sorts through the data you find in a system or program or whatever and tries to represent it with sensory input, and another part of your program translates the signals from your brain, motor signals etc. into output and commands for the real computers.

 

But that isn’t very efficient. So this guy, he just tells a cyberdoc to wire the data input directly into his brain, no translation, nothing. He doesn’t get files translated into lists to send to his visual cortex or something, he’s directly getting the code shot into his brain.”

“You’d expect that would kill you.”, said Nac dryly.

“ Yeah, that’s what you’d expect. “ answered Dryger.

“But it didn’t kill him. “ , guessed Nac.

 

“Nope. He might have turned a bit insane, but this guy, he really pulls it off. He’s getting crazy hallucinations that his brain swirls together from the input from the systems and nodes on the net. Apparently even got some hallucinations when logged out. In any case, this guy, he’s getting a kind of knowledge of the web no-one else got before. And the web is massive as you know. It’s always growing bigger, and by it’s decentralized nature and the peer-to-peer-DNS nobody even knows how big and what all is connected.

But with his crazy scheme, this guy really does get to map it all down.”

“So far I’m following you, but what does this have to do with anything? “ , asked Nac, a hint impatient.

“That’s what I asked as well.” , added Alice but quieted down quickly.

“I’m getting to it. So this guy, already little crazy, he finds something. A kind of… singularity. He’s found plenty of secret nodes, this guy, because his system made it easy to find them, not from what was there, but from stuff the surrounding web lacked.

And this singularity was the same. At first he thought he found another super-secret government server, something like that. It seemed to just… swallow all data sent in, but acknowledged all connections made, accepted all input, worked perfectly like a public server or something. But when he tries to track its real world location, it fails. He’s starting to think it’s an emergent bug of the web. In his half-hallucinated view of the web as three-dimensional, (or perhaps even four-dimensional, it’s not really clear) object this thing is exactly at the center of that object.

So this guy he sends in “What do I see?” as a joke, as all other probing over the basic mechanical measures of response fail.

And he almost gets an aneurysm as he gets a text message back reading just: “Desert.”

So he keeps sending text messages and gets fits and giggles because it kind of turns out like some sort of text adventure. He’s got no idea what the hell is going on. There’s just fragments of the logs of these text-only exchanges with that singularity. But there’s mention of endless deserts, hills, humming cacti -”

Alice cuts in then:

“To cut things short: The guy eventually gets impatient or maybe it’s just a fit of insanity and just decides to download an image of the singularity-directly into his brain. He probably expected it to fail. But it doesn’t , or not really.”

 

Dryger nods and continues again: “What follows is hard to decipher. He’s having some sort of schizophrenic episode where he explores the world that these text messages described before, but fully sensory, like a really really really realistic dream. And the world he describes in his rambling is crazy similar to Pockybot. Mind you, I checked five times, this was definitely before Pockybot officially existed. Before Blocko Corporation even went into Virtual Reality Games.

You have it all there: Endless deserts, the grassy plains, utah-like mountains and deep deep subterran caverns. And all the crazy animals: Giant kiwi, humming cacti, the grotto wolves, sandworms. He’s describing this huge crystal structure in a windswept icy tundra, with crystals as high as skyscrapers.”

 

“But it’s empty of any sentient live and none of the pockybot tech is mentioned. Although he sometimes feels there is something on the edge of his field of visions, some sort of presence, watching. And the animals all act absolutely natural.

At first he thinks he just went mad, as he woke up.

 

With the help of the stuff inside his brain he starts coding, makes a rough system of interpretators and before soon he can get rid of the image in his brain and use his VR system to interface directly with the singularity. He checks and sees that the stuff he cut into the crystal in his dream is still there. He’s amazed. He also learns that, while logged in, he can shape the world there directly with his mind. He has a great time of forming strange formations out of the ground and walls. He’s going crazy with it, but now that he’s sure it isn’t just his imagination, he tells other people, his friends. Obviously they don’t believe him at first, but eventually they do. Although not crazy enough to do as him with the direct implants, they can still interface with this singularity in VR.

They’re amazed at the realism of the physics engines, and think he just coded something crazy, but they can’t access this thing properly. “

“ To cut things short again, they seem to go as crazy from the VR experience as he did, despite lacking his massive direct-data implants. They start dreaming of this stuff, and changes made in their dreams seem to persist in the singularity. They’re creeped out. Some drop out, some don’t. The amount of control they have over the flow of that world just gets stronger. It seems to change with the merest thought now. It gets to a point where the whole thing is hardly even stable anymore. Just a floating mess of ever-changing stuff following the ideas the people get, especially when logged in. So the first guy, let’s call him Jazz, that’s one of the names he went by, he get’s an idea.

 

He proposes to start thinking more structured, imagining themselves tools and things to shape the world more directly, without it following to changing thoughts. Kind of like how you can influence lucid dreams. They concentrate on the effort and really seem to get into under their control. They start to imagine themselves tools, and since they are geek-kids, the tools they imagine are keyboards and stuff like that and the method they just seem to decide on to change is coding and creating a program.

So by then the world there is just a crazy sort of fog and blur with them floating around typing away on their imagined keyboards.

And as they do so they get it under control again, make it stable, write basic systems. But whether there’s true code or not is not really clear. The guys are starting to get theories that it is some sort of world made of pure information, influenced by other informations, like thoughts and program code. They argue whether it is a spontanous emergent birth from the massive amounts of information of the internet or just a sort of rift to a parallel world made out of pure information that you can obviously only access over an information-network as the internet.”

 

“Their arguments never seem to get anywhere.”

“Some of these guys apparently have connections to some sort of organisation called Bladesingers, but that part isn’t clear.”

“In any case they start to get it all working. They eventually get back to that majorly desert world. They pick off and, since they are crazy geek-kids, they start to use it to play out their fantasies.”

“They’ve got their own complete WORLD freely adjustable now.”

“ What they come up with is very close to the early Pockybot. They start to make themselves avatar-bodies and build stuff, partly by coding it, partly by using physical tools in the Game world they created.”

“Well, physically for Pockybot.”

“They are the ones that have made the backbone of the Game. All the layers, but most of the upper parts are rewritten now. Layer 4 though is still mostly their doing. And all of this is just some sort of control structure they put in so that the original stuff stays stable.”

“And to allow stuff that the regular of that world didn’t allow. Stuff like the Teleportation Network and the messaging system.”

“ But something happens and they have a huge quarrel. Jazz seems to have left then. It’s unclear.”

 

“It remains mostly silent although some people are still playing with it. Some time passes and they’ve created most of the stuff of the Game we know. Sandships, the five original races, many of the famous landmarks like Mount Calavera. But then apparently one of the guys who has massive debts with some really dangerous people simply SELLS it all.”

“What? How?”

“Apparently he waited until all the others were logged out, then massively rewrote their control structure to allow no one access that isn’t registered in the core. He also wrote the Command Programs into existence. They now embody his will and the structure of the Game he imposes on this world. The others can’t get in anymore, although they do try, but Blocko hardly has any information of them.”

“In fact, they had none of the information we just told you for a long time. Most of these was uncovered by the Leet, and the administration only acquired it after the Lagomorph campaign. Apparently this guy who sold it all, going by the name of Ghoatish, told Blocko that it was a his own creation and just a very peculiar sort of game. Apparently they believed him, at least the managers did. He was turned into their main programmer and admin.”

“Of course the administration at the start quickly noticed there was something weird, but they mostly thought it was shoddy programming.”

“Some became suspicious, some even believed what he told, others thought it crazy superstition.”

“Then this Ghoatish guy dies while logged in. This was when Blocko had just started to settle people into the game for full immersion, wiring their brains in directly. You know, starting with the ghost-comped. “

 

“Blocko starts an investigation and they uncover some of the original history. The other admins an programmers then add their own insights. But the managers and higher-ups don’t believe a word of it. As they see it, the game was made by a group of insane geek-kids and has severe problems that might create mental damage and even kill people while logged in.

But they also seem to think that the administration has it under control, and by then Pockybot is already making billions and billions. They sure as hell only want it to continue. It took off amazingly well after all. So they just hush it up. That was even before the Lagomorph campaign.

They make it policy to fire anyone who becomes too insistent that the esoteric nature and obscure history of the game are total truth.

With Ghoatish gone, the people who really know what’s going on start to dwindle away or shut up about it, and all new members of the Administration never hear about it, except in secret meetings.

Because it is cheaper, Blocko starts to hire mostly from the players, many of which don’t even want any more payment than playing the game for free and enough to pay their bills, and as opposed to experts hired from outside they don’t get massively annoyed at how little control the Administration actually has over the Game or the peculiar oddities and weird incidents that frequently come up while playing.”

“Some of the fired people and friends of Jazz are still playing, some secretly some openly, and all of these where involved with the Leet.”

 

Dryger stopped his story and leaned back. Both Rodriguez and Nactarosh were staring at them with open mouths, astonished.

 

“So…”, Nactarosh started. “, so what you’re ting me to believe is that Pockybot isn’t just a game but some sort of mystical parallel world of pure information, shackled and structured to be played as a game by some insane hacker-kid that otherwise would have got seriously problem with credit sharks.”

 

Dryger scratched his head and grinned in a kind of embarrassed way.

 

“Well, yeah.”

 

Nactarosh stared blankly.

“Alright, I believe you.”

 

Rodriguez stared at him in shock.

Nactarosh squinted back at Rodriguez.

“What? Aren’t you playing this game as long as I do? I’m sure you’ve seen your own share of incidents that make no sense in a proper VR-MMORPG. Stuff that even seems outright supernatural.”

 

Administrator Rodriguez who was kneeling on the floor with tied hands stared at the ground angrily. “No. You’re right.”

Nactarosh stood up, and so did Dryger. He grabbed his hand.

“And to top it off, “ Nactarosh said with crooked slightly melancholic grin “I’ve just had an elongated episode of being split into too bodies and minds. I’m not going to call stuff crazy.”

 

Alice slapped his back.

“Alright!”

“But this means… “ murmured Nactarosh “… that whoever this Gyre is or is working for, he is some even more ulterior motive. And the Ascension Protocol might be even more severe.”

“Yes absolutely. And so we have even less time to loose.”

 

 

In the secret room in the windmill, Zombiehead1 and Teela had learned essentially the same things from the stack of Leet information. But some information was lacking. They had only rough knowledge of what happened in the Administration. Barely anything on Gyre either, nor about the Lagomorph campaign. After all, it was just going on. And the Leet never had the time to learn about the reasons why the Administration turned on them.

Chapter 23 – Convergence

Nactarosh was limping through the destroyed remains of the once great city of the Administration Central HQ. Glass and metal shrapnel crunched under his steps as he slowly made his way through the streets, lined on both sides with burnt out car wrecks and ruined tanks.

It had started to snow, or perhaps it was just fragments blown off the giant crystal skyscrapers that finally settled like snow. It glittered too much to be normal snow in Nac’s eyes.

He’d tried another health powerup and failed. His vision was blurry and he felt shaky and unstable but his memories were sharper than ever. He’d finally managed to break his mental blockades, hack his way through the illegal programs he’d had running on his brain. All it needed was a one large scale war and an extended period of split personality, Nac thought to himself, which made him grin bitterly.

 

Eventually he emerged from among the tall buildings and high ramps onto the lower outskirts of the city. He was lost in thought, remembering his days in the administration alongside Arch. Looking back now he regretted how it had turned out between the two of them. Arch had been a smart guy, and Nac was sure now that Arch ‘d never have gone along with the others to execute the Lagomorphs. But back then it had looked different and he’d seemed apathetic and cold, absent.

Now he saw it was because the man had his own staggering problems, he should have noticed.

He’d called himself his friend after all.

 

The sound of the hammer cocking caught him completely by surprise. He felt the steely coldness of the muzzle of a gun on his right temple, and someone stepped out of the shadows to his right.

He recognised System Administrator uniform.

“Finally got you.”, she said in a deep grim voice, almost a growl.

 

Nac swallowed and slowly looked to his right.

“Looks like the whole combined armed force of the Admins didn’t do the trick but you did, Rodriguez.”

“Shut up. “ , she said.

“But didn’t the Latris go another way? I saw the tracks when I came back.”

“It did but it’s under the control of Maru now. He has free reign, the other System Admins that are still alive and in the system are in total panic. Maru seems to know what to do and so they gladly gave him their support.”

She spat beside her into the ashes on the floor.

“And it looks like the advisors support him as well.”

“The advisors… ?” Nac asked with a tone of puzzlement.

“Yes. You should know, deserter. You’ve been a mod haven’t you? Gyre and his cadre.”

Yes, Nactarosh did indeed remember. Gyre and other NPCs had been advising them. He remembered that they caught Gyre. Rodriguez herself had been the one to catch him, when she was still a low ranking goon just like Nac was, not soon after he’d started to work for the administrative.

“But Gyre was a new guy wasn’t he?”

He remembered more. Yes. That was shortly before the Lagomorph campaign! When Gyre had appeared on the stage, the Administration still had Lagomorphs as their personal advisors, as well as Tenebrae, Carapaced Ones and Geberans.

 

And… then the genocide had started. Nactarosh, if he’d ever have had time to think of that as he turned into Ra and rebelled, would have assumed all the other NPCs and Zoners advising the Administration would have been executed as well but apparently that wasn’t the case.

 

“Indeed. He was the one who told us of the conspiracy and the prophecy. I recognised him immediately when he came to Hitsito Maru… even though he had officially disappeared except for text messages… regardless! This doesn’t concern you!”

Rodriguez, who had started to reminisce stood up straight again, eyes fixed on Nactarosh. The gun pressed hard into the side of his head.

“So… what are you gonna do now.”

“Deletion.”

She seemed to chew on the inside of her cheek. Why was she hesitating? Except…

“… it’s true right, nobody’s respawning anymore right?”

He could see it in the way she averted his eyes.

“I’m a ghost-comp player! I’m directly wired into the system! I don’t even have a proper body anymore, if you kill me I’m a brain in a jar with no purpose!”

 

Frantically his eyes flicked about. Maybe he could jump away, get into cover. And then he noticed that three administration pockybots had covertly assembled around them. The Crusader class bots stared their impenetrable blue stare from their cross-like visors on their heads shaped like knightly helmets.

 

They’d got him in a perfect triangular formation!

 

He could feel Rodriguez steeling herself for what was about to come, his execution. But there was something on the edge of his mind, something he’d perceived earlier already but only know came into the foreground. A kind of sound… humming?

 

“In the name of the Administration you are sentenced to deletion for the crime of hacking, system destabilization, open denial of Administration Authority and the destruction of large amounts of in-game data. Your deletion will -”

 

Nactarosh had put a hand to his ears and didn’t seem too listen until eventually he cut between her words with a whispered:

“Wait, can you hear that?”

 

He was sure now, it was the sound of an engine in the distance, getting louder and louder.

 

“W-What?”

Rodriguez was flustered, but she too couldn’t deny that there was the roaring purr of an engine sound coming nearer now. But the city was empty, she’d checked. No survivors except Nactarosh inside, and the three moderators with her.

 

What happened next almost happened too fast for Nactarosh to see, but only almost.

At the end of the street, where the city went over into hardpan and tundra, something turned the corner and rushed at full speed at them. Only when it was almost there he saw that it was a motorcycle. No wait it wasn’t a motorcycle… it was power armor in motorcycle mode.

 

Alice had only tried this before once or twice but nonetheless they didn’t have any other option now. She hit the front breaks as hard as she could, which obviously resulted in her whole bike catapulting itself forward as the front wheel blocked. At the same time she hit the transformation to standard mode.

The momentum of the bike would make her somersault and result in a catastrophic crash, but even as she went into the air the motorcycle parts retracted into her armor. She turned in mid-air and miraculously regained her balance fighting down panic as the world turned around her.

Then finally she came around right and saw her targer right before her: One of the three administration pockybot’s she and Dryger had caught on their sensors shortly before.

 

The only thing she had to do now was stretch out both legs straight to connect neatly with the bot’s head, delivering a devastating aerial dropkick with the full momentum of a motorcycle crash.

Her armored feet shattered the robotic skull and she carried right through. As she landed behind she was thrown into a roll all over the hard tarmac but that was nothing her armor couldn’t compensate.

 

This all happened in only a few seconds. Nactarosh didn’t look twice before immediately diving away from Rodriguez and getting behind the cover of a burnt-out pickup truck.

 

Before the moderators could even bring around their bots to go for the nimble Lagomorph that was picking herself up from the floor as quick as she could with her head spinning from her rolling landing there came the eardrum-breakingly loud bangs of a sniper rifle. The bots were covered in armor piercing sniper fire from Dryger’s position amid the snow drifts far out in the tundra.

 

He’d simply jumped off into a snow drift he judged large enough to cushion his fall when they got Nac’s signature and the moderators on their Radar. While Alice approached them high speed he went about collecting his senses and put up the bipod for his rifle. Suddenly it had turned out to be much more of a hassle to put the stupid gun up than before, probably another lousy effect of the ascension protocol sneaking its way through the system of the game.

 

He grinned broadly as he imagined the shells of his High Explosive Anti Tank rounds triggering their shaped charges nanoseconds before impact to send a focused stream of super-high-velocity particles into their armors, cutting them up like butter to allow the actual super-heavy core to penetrate.

 

Alice saw another of the bot’s heads explode from her friend’s sniper fire but the last of the three was good -

he’d ducked his large form behind the remains of an Armored Vehicle. Alice didn’t have much time. She could almost see Dryger’s face going “fuck” as the enemy disappears behind two layers of armor from the vehicle.

 

Acting fast she followed. She didn’t have much choice, but perhaps it was a poor choice anyway. It wasn’t as if she had time to consciously think things through in the split seconds she had. The pockybot was rather assuredly going to have the advantage in power, armor and weaponry and she probably didn’t have the element of surprise anymore – but that was exactly why she had to try. If she let them regain their composure there was no way they’d win against three heavy pockybots.

 

As she slided around the corner, the bot was just igniting its fusion torches – the searing white flames jetted out of its wrists. A deadly close combat weapon, almost like blades of sun. It was crouching low to fit its whole form behind the wreck. Maybe she could use that.

Hydraulics hissed and moaned as it swiped for her, but she’d jumped already.

 

She could feel the heat nonetheless as the fusion flame passed below her. The pilot didn’t hesitate for a second. The bots other hand came up before the first had completed the horizontal flash expecting her to be a sitting duck in the air.

Alice kicked off from the wreck, stretching her leg to the limit.

The fusion torch stabbed into the wreck, vaporizing steel and making the armor bubble and slag.

 

A resounding clang echoed as she kicked it full in the face, but without the additional impulse a mere kick couldn’t get through the armor. It’d throw of his vision though.

 

She scrambled clumsily over the bots shoulder and fell behind him, dropping some grenades.

 

On the floor she half crawled, half ran to the nearest car wreck.

The shockwave of the grenades made her ears rattle inside her helmet. Turning her head she could see a small inferno, like a large bonfire – and the knightly head of the bot turning to look at her, the whole armor black from soot but only the paint job damaged for real.

 

Through the roar of the flames she could hear the other two bots getting up again, although loosing their heads they weren’t out completely yet, but blinded.

The undamaged bot only needed a single step to catch up with her and raised its white blade of fusion-fire, sputtering and hissing.

Alice was out of ideas.

 

“Alright that’s enough guys, you don’t want our chief here get hurt right.”

Alice was confused and took a while to pit the voice to someone. Then she realised that Nactarosh had taken the opportunity to turn the table on Rodriguez. Now it was her with a gun to her head, while Nac’s other arm was tugged around her neck.

 

The bot froze its motion in mid air, the pilot likely having hit full-stop.

The same that counted for Nactarosh also counted for Rodriguez: She was jacked in directly with no body to speak off, and the respawn not working anymore. Although probably not true death, killing her in game now would likely mean days, maybe even weeks or months cut off from all sensory input, still conscious. No sight, smell, sound, unable to move. The most extreme kind of solitary confinement. And that was if the frag didn’t irreparably damage her mind, what with the instability of the game.

 

Alice quickly got up, not banking on the moderator goons to giving up so easily. She pulled an unreliable laser gun and went over to the static bot.

Now that it was standing still she got the time to nicely aim at the exposed armpit, a place she knew would be a key spot to pierce through easily and fry the pilot in the torso.

“Okay buddy you heard it. Do me a banana and peel.”

 

The moderator seemed to hesitate, then comply. Pressure equalized and steam escaped, then various armor plates slid back to open the view into the innards of the bots.

A young woman was inside, almost hidden in the cockpit crowded with cables, safety restraints and various control equip.

Slowly she slipped out of the legs of the bot and raised her hands from the control pits.

 

She slipped out, covered in sweat and the standard admin pilot catsuit. Alice suit’s sensors picked up Dryger approaching on foot over the long street. It’d take him a while to get to their position,

Brusquely she stepped toward the mod and twisted her arms behind her back.. Alice held both her arms easily with one powered gauntlet and pocked up an errant steel rod from the floor. With the aid of the armor she twisted it around the moderators wrists then went to do the same procedure with the other pilots.

Until she was done Dryger arrived. He seemed a little out of breath, which confused her. He didn’t even run a mile.

 

He looked around to assess the situation and summed his satisfaction with how the crazy operation ended up by high-fiving Alice.

“Okay what the hell is going on here… “, asked Nac and hesitated. Dryger knew it was because the name Arch had been lying on his tongue.

“..Dryger?” he finished.

Instead of Dryger responding, Rodriguez cut in between.

“Another ex-moderator and a zoner rescuing a sought after hacker and collaborator with zoners that is about to destroy the whole game, that’s what! Kill me now, rather than let this whole mess go down for your insane AI masters!”

She bucked and twisted in Nac’s grip who had problems keeping her under control. The threat of the gun was completely ignored. She spat.

 

Dryger looked at her calmly.

“No you’ve got it all backwards. The Administration is the one collaborating with insane AI masters…”

His eyes moved to Nactarosh.

“We’ve been to the black dune compound.”

“Oh? Wait… so there really was a corrupter behind the scenes.”

“Yes. It’s Gyre.”

“Gyre!” gasped Rodriguez and Nactarosh in unison.

Dryger’s eyes moved back to Rodriguez. Confusion and hatred shimmered in those icy blue eyes. Dryger’s own were calm and resolute.

“Yes. You should know best. Wasn’t it you who caught him? Or rather, the one he let himself get caught by? He claimed to you that he barely escaped execution by his Geberan brethren, that they were involved in a conspiracy revolving around the Ascension Protocols, Data Core hacks and plans to overthrow the Administration, together with the hacker and pro-player group known as Leet?”

Rodriguez calmed and went silent, apparently intent to listen where this would lead.

 

“But it was all exactly the other way around. Sure, the Leet always wanted to overthrow the administration, but what the heck do you expect from anarchist hacktivists? However, it was Gyre himself who bore the conspiracy.”

Alice piked in: “We’ve seen the files. The briefings and conversations and then the results of Gyre’s tips.”

“We didn’t believe Gyre either at first! You were there as well, although lower ranking. But the tips he gave us were all true. We found their hideouts and got parts of the Protocol from their hidden stashes. Found files of conversations. People claiming to be Leets or Zoners, or both!”, Rodriguez replied angrily.

 

“Together with Alice’s and my own knowledge from what remains of the Leet and the other Zoners in Axis Mundi and other refuges, we realized that those targets he tipped off as part of the conspiracy you raided where never part of the Leet group. They might have thought so themselves but since nobody ever heard of them from the real Leet, they couldn’t have been anything but plants from Gyre. He must have instructed. Did nobody of the higher ups every notice that almost all their documents and conversations had a common participant calling himself simply ‘ G ‘ ?” , responded Dryger.

 

He gave Rodriguez a moment and saw at her consternated face that she too could put the puzzle parts together.

“Gyre had intentionally stringed these people along, formed them, just so he could sell them out to the Administration to sound believable. After that most of the sysadmins were worried. They commanded more severe raids and take-outs of suspected zoners and leets.”

Alice took over again: “From the Leet’s viewpoint, these random attacks showed them how hostile and dictatorial the administration really was. The sandworm campaign before that had already shown them that the Administration was willing to , to them, kill sentient AI beings just to keep the game running smoothly. Even they would have admitted that the mad sandworms had to be taken down and something was wrong. But after the open hostilities started from the Admin’s sides, they were unwilling to compromise. The advisors of the Administration, Lagomorphs, Geberans, Tenebrae and other races that all had essentially achieved Zoner status before the administration ever used that term, tried to mediate.”

Alice hesitated and stared at a not particularly interesting of scrap metal at the floor, biting on her lower lip.

Dryger knew that her father had turned out to be part of those advisors. He took over again:

“Gyre cleverly turned the advisors and leet against each others, made them have to take sides, and as they infighted, made true and wrong allegations that they were rebel leaders. Many of the Zoners had started to make plans to usurp the administration at that point, but would probably not have gone through with them.”

“Is it a wonder you make contingency plans when you’re threatened with elimination, even just remotely?”

“Before soon the administration trusted no advisor except Gyre. The fact that everyone, including the advisors and the Geberans accused Gyre and actually hatefully tried to kill him made the administration only more sure that he was indeed being shunned and hunted for betraying his brethren’s evil machinations to the administration, like he said. He played himself the victim, while secretly pulling the strings. That was when the Admins initiated the Lagomorph campaign.

Of all the player races, the Lagomorphs had been most openly and deeply tied with the Leet. They were essentially the samet thing, and as opposed to the other NPC races, who were all secretive, passive, was vocal and active about their goals.”

Now Nactarosh spoke, low and thoughtful, as if he just got the idea:

“…no, I think Gyre specifically singled them out and made them the top-goal… “

“Why would he do that?” bursted Alice.

Nac helplessly shaked his head.

“I don’t know… but that’s the feeling I get. I only saw him a few times, heard the briefings just like Arch- I mean Dryger.”

Dryger scratched the stubble on his thin and threw same strands of his silver hair out of his face.

“… now that you say it. Perhaps.”

“But what could be his goal?!”, Rodriguez demanded to know.

“Well he claimed that the Zoners where a symptom of a spreading virus or hack, related to the Ascension Protocol, some haybrained scheme of insane hackers. But maybe it was his goal all along? Nac, Rodriguez, I don’t think you know, but the Real World has totally come unglued. All over the world people go into coma or hallucinations of the Game. It’s all coming apart at the hinges. It’s likely the Ascension protocol’s work. It’s all part of a Prophecy, one Gyre makes come true by force.

What if he is the virus? He’s trying something, the prophecy mentioned something on the lines of world’s merging…”

Nactarosh gasped.

“The dragon at the heart of the world comes uncoiled and the worlds while merge. The one in the focus of the merge will become the axle of the new world!”

, he recited.

“What?” Alice asked blankly.

“It’s something a sandworm said to me once…”

“A sandworm…? “ Dryger asked, already dreading the answer.

“The sandworm. The first one that went mad. It was the last thing it said after I had struck the death blow.”

 

Dryger sat down with sigh into the cold dust of the street.

“Now the next part… I don’t know if you will believe me, but … I am stopping to see how this could all work without being true. We found… documents. Very early documents.”

“From the start of the game?”

“Yes, and earlier. Without Alice I probably wouldn’t have been able to decrypt them. I don’t know how many people in Blocko Corp. even know about it.”

Chapter 22 – Axis Mundi

 

As the little rabbit girl wandered through the rubble and the smoldering ruins, ash and little dots of ember slowly fell around her like some absurd snow. She’d cried herself out already so there was just some numb emptiness inside her. She didn’t know where to go.

 

Then Alice first noticed that some of the ember dots she saw in the large heap of mechaincs that ‘d been a wind mill weren’t embers. They were little red blinking lights. Exactly eight of them. She supposed she should have been frightened as she saw more groups of eight lights spring up in the rubbles around her. Or maybe they’d already been there for a long while, hidden, watching her and only now she’d noticed one she could pick out the others from the backgrounds.

 

A sound, kind of bubbling but also electronic, came from the ruined wind mill rests. It rattled and something rose its head from it. It was a large, robotic head, eight-eyed with the two largest looking to the front.

Other burbles and something like ancient modem sounds came in response from around the rubble.

 

She stepped back a little, but remained to stare.

The mechasypder removed itself fully from the trash heap, shaking itself to loose the parts covering it. It stared at her for a little, then turned and Alice watched it sort a lot of the parts on and around it with a couple of spidery cybernetic appendages into a little box. Then it looked back. They had a tendency to sort parts absentmindedly whenever they got nervous or didn’t know what to do or tried to decide, she would learn later.

 

Eventually another one scuttled out from the broken house behind her and settled down beside her. It was much bigger than her, but she was just a little kid. Although they scuttled on their eight legs to quickly move around as the others all did now, apparently leaving the two nearest ones to deal with Alice, they could and would also raise on their large hind legs.

 

When they did that, as the two near Alice did then, they looked vaguely humanoid. They had a human sized torso with a large head with a spider-liked face, huge pedipalp constructs and eight electronic eyes. Some of them had a wispy, artificial looking mane on their heads, others had hoods or a tangle of cables, others again had just their bald robotic heads.

They seemed to lack a real spider’s huge abdomen.

 

The one behind Alice spoke: “This is a fine working specimen. “

And indicated her with one of its long six manipulator arms.

“Since mechaspyder’s purpose is to collect all working remains to recycle, shouldn’t one take this one with us too?”

The other nodded several times absentmindedly. Alice had a feeling they were talking in a language she could understand on purpose, and would otherwise have talked that strange machinous burble-speak.

“One speaks true. But mechaspyder’s purpose is not to steal. That which still has an owner one shouldn’t take and recycle.”

Both of them started nodding sagely at that several times, and for some reason it made them look like little old men to Alice. After all, their tiny stocky bodies and long thin limbs did resemble short skinny old people, and their large pedipalps and to Alice reminded her then – and always would remind her from then on – big beards.

 

“But this one might still have an owner or maintenance man, somewhere.”

The other turned its head, a necessity since its eyes couldn’t move, just alter their lenses and focus a little. “None here, though.”

“No.” sad the other, sadly.

“But isn’t it also the case that one might take someone else property when it’s thrown away or left rusting in disregard? So even if this one has one responsible somewhere, that one’s not here now.”

“And these kind of fine specimen go bad much faster than things rust.”

“Indeed.”

They bobbed their heads again. Alice suspected that the gesture didn’t have exactly the same meaning as it did for humans.

 

So they poked her a little after that with their long manipulators, and eventually, as the rest of them had collected all the working weapons, ammunition, gear and machinery parts around the city that they could find, which was quiet a lot, they showed her the way to move along with them.

She didn’t have anywhere to go, so she conveniently followed after the one from the beginning she’d internally dubbed Whitehair for the messy bristles on his head were clear white and became part of their little caravan.

They were all packed with huge bags and sacks of what to Alice was just trash, bundles of rifles and bundles of simple rods she thought they’d keep for building material.

In fact they all carried much larger loads than she’d thought their spindly bodies could carry, although a few were pulling strange little carriages on leashes which were just crudely made boxes with four spidery legs.

They followed when you pulled and some even on their own, and had even more useless and useful items stacked on them.

 

They all disappeared in a gaping maw at the outskirts of the city that had never been there before. Alice saw that they’d staked neatly with warning signs and that the ceiling of the ramping cave was carried by retractable hydraulic pillars.

She watched as the last ones who had guarded the hole followed in behind the last mechaspyders of the small procession. After everyone had gone inside, some more spyders joined these last ones and they all started deactivating the pillars, carrying them to another of the walker-carts, stacking them up as they kept collecting them.

Behind them, where the ceiling wasn’t supported anymore, it started to crumble and drop, but the spyders seemed to have a keen understanding of statics as it neatly stayed up more than long enough for the spyder to calmly deactivate the next hydraulic support and carry it off.

 

So she disappeared into the deep of the earth with the mechaspyders. Soon she’d arrive at Axis Mundi, the nave of the world deep in the earth’s belly, the mechaspyder’s capitol and the biggest of their few subterranean cities.

 

It was easy to forget what had happened and shove it to the back of her mind for Alice as the many things she saw and learned after this were just astounding and way too interesting and impressive to have much time spent on mourning. It wasn’t as if she never cried of course. After all, it was all strange and unknown to her down there.

 

However, their cities amazed Alice to no end, and Axis Mundi was the biggest: It was built around a central steel cylinder with a diameter that could have fit a large truck. It housed the main city offices and elder council and some shops of the high master craftsspiders, which were usually forbidden to the visitors and non-spyders.

From this central zylinder that went from top to bottom to the huge uneven cavern that housed the majority of the city, dozens of pipes and other steel tubes radiated everywhere through the cave. The crisscrossing mess of pipes, tubes and cylinders gave it the distinct feeling of a spider-web, even though those were all fixed. The sizes ranged from big like a space-station module (and looking a lot like it) to typical plumbing pipes and everything in between. There was also a mess of grate-walkways everywhere, maintenance shafts and security ladders, and it was technically possible to get everywhere by climbing the ladders and using the walkways or the insides of the tubes but it was clear that the mechaspyders only had these for foreigners or as remnant of whatever this might have been used for originally.

Mechaspyders could easily climb sheer vertical walls and almost all of them had either nylon spinnerets or grappling hooks installed to abseil and climb everywhere.

 

Since the spyder’s main purpose was collecting scraps the cities were all dominated by scrapyards. The parts pooled on the bottom of the caverns in large heaps, staked of neatly from each other according to ownership, type of parts, finding place et cetera. They had also spanned huge tarps and fishnets between the mess of pipes, where they heaped up even more parts. The whole place was full with spyders scuttling over pipes and along steelwires and over their trash heaps in their oversized hammocks.

 

But the mechaspyders didn’t live alone, and although they though built their own shops and bazaars, their smithies and other shacks, theirs were usually simple and modest. The non-spyder population was usually just as big, and they’d set up shop everywhere they could, attaching shacks and shops at all free spaces – soup kitchens, weapon shops, brokerages, casinos – even brothels.

Many of the most rare races Alice had seen in Pockybot ran around in mechaspyder cities. They were the deepest refuges from the regular surface, least controlled and free of the kinds of annoying noobs excited about them, and equally free of the bountyhunters and administratiors.

Lumbering lobstermen, pale and monosyllabic ghouls, deep ones, sandpeople, cave-swallowmen, morlocks, troglodytes, manticoremen, basiliskoids and cyborgs of all kinds and shapes deviating from the typical humanoid models by number of limbs, robotic tails and tentacles, unusual head shape and inbuilt sensors, sometimes lacking heads completely the necessary parts stuffed into the torso -

the crowd in mechaspyder cites was amazingly diverse.

 

Although the mechaspyders didn’t take keenly to hacking they didn’t exactly rule the place, it was more of an anarchic kind of agreement not to cause too much trouble, so the shops selling exploits,hacks and scripts obviously also sprung up here, and the Leet were commonly seen in Axis Mundi and the other mechaspyder cities like Anarachny and Deep City.

 

So Alice started living with Whitehair, who seemed to have taken up a kind of guardian role for her, although all of them seemed to care for her a lot, in their shrewd, silent way. While they often ignored questions and requests from strangers altogether, Alice usually got them to do what she wanted, even though it seemed to her that they barely reacted and ignored her all the time. Of course, lagomorphs were as hard to understand to the mechaspyders as most humanoids. They got that squishy humanoids wanted to eat and needed soft stuff to sleep on and clothes to cover themselves (they sometimes wore jackets and protective gear themselves after all) but beyond that they were rather clumsy guardians, and didn’t get the concept of playtime well.

Alice supposed she half grew up on the streets because of this, as Whitehair didn’t seem to care very much what she did or didn’t consider it dangerous so he left her to her own devices for the most. The only thing he forbade was leaving the city alone, so Alice could stroll Axis Mundi freely, playing with other NPC and Zoner street kids, or the occasional player, running through the narrow alleys between the shacks stuck to the tops of the largest pipes and inside them, playing catch or soldier. She also openly admits that she probably pickpocket a lot of people as she grew up, mostly just for fun and the thrill but also because such a thing as allowance was unknown to mechaspyders. The spyders were mostly quite, serious craftsman and resellers, known for their punctuality, modesty and their neat and exact work. They could haggle something fierce and did understand humour, but it was mostly sarcasm.

Their greatest ideals were retaining and keeping works of great mastery, or reforging and refining old things, so the most masteful craftsspiders were the most revered in their society. They essentially took the place of elders, and their guilds the place of a city council.

 

As Alice grew up she kept getting into fights with foreigners that acted out or citizens she pick-pocketed, all of them usually jazzed out on illegal data narcotics or simulated alcohol. Ocassionally, mechaspyders had to step in, and although she eventually became known as their most cherished pet or daughter(in their words: “The most certainly finest specimen they owned.”) and so people restrained from trying to hurt her, she still kept getting into fights with people who didn’t care or didn’t know on ocassions.

 

She learned some street brawling their, how you properly hit a guy with chair. Her Improvised Weapons skill skyrocketed. But she still felt frustrated. She’d noticed as she grew up that, while the mechaspyders disliked hacking practices they’d ocassional seem to offer their own knowledge of game peculiarities one could exploit and hinted at techniques that impressed hackers.

It became clear to her that what the mechaspyders disliked about the hacking and cracking of the general playerbase was that it affected the system of the game. They were afraid that errors and bugs would be introduced.

 

She also learned that, while they were strictly non-religious, they had their own mysticism and philosophy, and that they sometimes offered to improve a certain leet or hacker who apparently seemed to have the right attitude to help them “improve their Kung Fu”

 

She became really interested and pestered Whitehair about it non-stop. He seemed to ignored her as usual, answering in simple words that he would do something about it. It was a thing that really annoyed her about the spyders, that they didn’t they deny your request but agreeing and then never doing anything about it, and eventually answering “one didn’t ask anymore so one assumed one decided differently” or “yes. Later.”

 

So she was rather surprised when eventually, as she sat in a little ramen stall over a bowl of noodle soup , Whitehair descended right in front of her face, hanging from his nylon rope, beside him an ancient mechaspyder with ragged cables and wires on his head and a rusted, battle-torn steel carapace.

He introduced the old spyder as “Grandpa Tarantula” and quickly climbed back up his rope.

Grandpa Tarantula wanted to immediately start training, and as Alice had other things to do, people to meet and stuff to play, poker or roulette or maybe in one of the mini-game-arcades she told him she’d enjoy to, later.

He kept following her around everywhere, whatever she did, saying nothing, annoying her absolutely, until she said she was ready to start now and promptly got a jab from one of his manipulators on her nose that made her ears ring.

She wanted to punch back of course, but Grandpa Tarantula nimbly evaded and she caught another hit, making her ears whip and flop and dots appear in her field of vision.

 

After she unsuccessfully tried to hit him for quite a while in the open street she tried to ran away instead but the nasty old crawler was always faster, blocking off her way, even as she scrambled over rooftops and down other spyder’s climbing lines. He never did anything but hit back after the initial blow, and as she couldn’t escape she tried fighting again, only to eventually be completely beaten and bruised and lied on the corrugated iron roof of a fallafel shop.

“I give up…” she wheezed through swollen lips.

“Good. First lesson learned. Just tell me when one wants to train again.”

But he didn’t leave. He kept following her around like before, and continued to do so for the following days, doing absolutely nothing but watching her, which was rather awkward for a girl in her puberty but whatever, it was just a stupid lifeless old spider robot so she dealed with it.

Whenever she said she wanted to train, he hit her again and involved her in fights. It went like that for some weeks. He was better than anyone she wrestled with before in her silly bar brawls but she also learned that he was holding back and going easy. He could retaliate much harder and with much more than one punch or jab whenever she botched an attack, but didn’t. As he noticed her getting better at judging him and anticipating his movements, when she managed to dodge his attacks and actually hit him, he suddenly did things in new and different and she had to learn again.

 

Eventually, even though she got slowly better, she got sick of the whole affair, and finally snapping yelling : “Can’t you teach me something else? Or in a better way?”

It simply answered: “Yes.”

Alice gaped, and, knowing mechspyders, asked: “Will you?”

“If one wants. One is about ready.”

 

And so he taught her the philosophy and secret techniques of Kung Fortran, in small secluded caves and rooms away from the bustle of Axis Mundi. She remembers well the incense and the droning electronic voice of the old spider master.

 

The techniques were hard, mental tricks and affecting the games structure, bending laws but not breaking them, or at least, only breaking those that would mend themselves again. She tried to copy the complicated stances, stretching exercises and yoga-like contortions that Grandpa Tarantula demonstrated, a feat that was quite hard as well, what with having four arms less to achieve the same effects.

At this point though, Grandpa Tarantula didn’t teach her alone: On occasion other elderly spiders would appear with him, and tell her about certain aspects of Kung Fortran or show her some stances she couldn’t master yet, or alternatives to the way Grandpa pulled it off.

 

Like this she learned quickly, soon exceeding the other leet pupils that sometimes trained with her. After all, she was all of Axis Mundi’s mechaspyder’s beloved kid, and only child to boot.

Chapter 21 – Viral

 

Within the Urban Partisan Zone, the Thousand Virus Army had completely deviated from its course to the Data Core now. Instead they were moving from one Administration base to the other. The Administration was completely helpless now.

 

Panic and despair spread among the players. The command structure was failing, there was no hope of reinforcement nor any reports of the main headquarters all because of the successful attack of Ra on the main headquarters.

News from the real world had reached some of the isolated base garrisons, spreading more fear but also strengthening the resolve of others who believed they were the last line of defense against viral corruption of the whole game and subsequently, the world.

Some of them knew that in the real world, they had fallen into coma, others had been forcibly logged out, others again were half here and half in the real world, stumbling blindly while seeing and sensing the world of Pockybot around them.

 

The ink-like shadows of Nostraphex elite Death Squadron rushed through the bombed out buildings and from cover to cover. The admin bases, set into deep bunkers, put on as much suppressive fire as they could but the terrain was on the viruses side. They reveled in this rough back alley warfare, relishing the blood running down the gutters in the destroyed cities.

 

Their snipers felled the enemies through the tiniest bunker arrow slits.

 

Most of the bases fell like that, the virus army’s artillery and snipers keeping the enemy down in their trenches, embankments and bunkers while the elite close combat squads flitted past their blind spots and slaughtered them from the inside after breaching defenses with pinpoint explosive charges.

 

However this last time the base showed some serious resistance:

The garrison had made an excursion from their structure almost immediately, timed exactly with an ambush by their hidden sniper squads that had taken up positions in broken buildings all around them instead of the main base. They’d waited for the TVA to pass them, show them their unprotected flanks and backs.

They even had some very fast attack bots, mini-copters and tanks hidden away long behind their defense lines, which were now involving the TVA’s artillery in direct combat.

 

Nostraphex himself was surrounded by his personal guard, among them Periapsis. They were wrestling with their enemies on a broad gap between buildings, a kind of former dirt road, stretching from one horizon to the other like a river of sand. Crooked and derelict skyscraper jutted from the ground on both sides.

It was an intense fight, the fray thick and both armies’ long range support were tied up somewhere else so it came down to close combat. Both sides had their powered armors and Pockybots on, and the heavy armor meant that either got pack damage for a long while. Hydraulic punches and armor-piercing swords hissed, armor plates shattered in a brutal fisticuffs of attrition as they punched, bit and kicked the crap out of each other.

 

Nostraphex repeatedly hammered his huge fist, gauntleted in blackened gunmetal into the armored cockpit of an Administration Crusader-type Pockybot. Slowly it dented more and more, deforming the knight’s helmet with each pneumatic powered punch. The Bot had no real arms left but was still firing past Nostraphex at other viruses with the guns mounted on its shoulders.

 

Behind him Periapsis was rending a high moderator limb from limb, pieces of armor and gear flying everywhere as he ripped him apart with adamant claws.

Anger boiled in the viruses’ cyan eyes and cyan blood.

 

All of the combatants were completely immersed in the pressing reality of the fight and so none of them realized the hissing sound far in the distance that slowly dopplered nearer. The 80 ton steel juggernaut of the AMS Latris rushed through the narrow piste between the leaning skyscraper husks with the finality of a freight train.

 

Nostraphex enemy finally fell, toppling backwards as the systems or the pilot stopped working. Getting a split second respite, he looked up and froze in unexpected shock as he saw the shape of the armored prow of the Latris about to batter through his troops and admins alike. It was just enough time for him to realize that he didn’t have enough time until it impacted to do anything to avert the disaster, before a blur in gaudy colors flashed through his field of vision, grabbed him and pulled him away.

 

The air rushed past the two of them, making his dread-locks and the mysterious stranger’s fool’s cap bob and flap. In a frantic split second he managed to look back and saw the Latris plowing through the large steel warriors of his faithful army and the stubborn moderators.

 

Metal rended and steel shattered and while the force of impact sent some bots and fighters in power armor flying and straight exploded some others, the sheer mass and weight of the fighters crowded at this point in the narrow dirt road decelerated the Ship which had been in hover-mode.

 

Eventually it ground to a halt.

Caught of balance and by surprise it took Nostraphex a moment to get what had happened: Some weird stranger had shot post him with the aid of a grappling gun, snatched him up, then shot another grappling gun upward to the roof of a skyscraper to get them out of the way and up to the slanted wall of a very crooked building where Nostraphex had been dropped.

He fell to his knees, and crushed his claws into the brittle concrete as he saw the devastation left in the wake of the Latris battleship.

“No…”

It sounded as if he had to press the word out hard through his gritted teeth and grimaced face. His visage was distorted by grief and anger and cyan tears started to well in his eyes.

It had went so well and now so many of his best comrades had been ran over by this sudden terror.

An arm slung around his shoulders from behind, softly. It was a slender gentle arm but it also ended in a feminine gloved hand holding a dangerous looking khukri knife.

“My condolences.” , a voice purred from his left ear, as the stranger put her face beside Nostraphex’ and looked down on the smashed remains of his personal guard.

They would not respawn.

Death for them was a finality, as their code was scrambled.

 

He gave the stranger a nasty look from squinted eyes, trying to scrutinize whether this strange jester was mocking him, but all that stared back was a simple mask, smiling. Even though that person saved Nostraphex, he was nonetheless about to start interrogating her when some voice came from down below, from the deck of the Latris.

 

A singular man had stepped out of the command tower and was now leaning against the door, rolling himself a cigarette. He was wearing a grey coat. Grey described his appearance well. He also had a buzz-cut of grey-white hair and weird black tattoos on his face. Not much flesh on him, and his eyes seemed to stare off in a thousand yard stare.

 

“I’d don’t usually take my time, but seeing how I am working for the Administration now, I guess it is my duty to help out. I’d be too early anyway according to the prophecy schedule…”

He had finished his rolling and put his smoke between the lips, igniting it quickly.

“Pest extermination it is then.”

Although the man had spoken in a bored drawl, and seemingly stared into distance in boredom, in a single moment a gun seemingly flashed into his hand and his outstretched arm pointed towards Nostraphex firing away.

Nostaphex pulled Jester inside the ruined building through a broken window with him as bullets impacted around them.

 

Below, the Latris’ engines fired up again preparing to pull them out from the mess of broken bots and jumbled bodies while its cannon turrets turned and prepared to fire a broadside into the crumbling building.

 

Inside the building, Nostraphex and Jester tumbled and rolled over the slanted floor, crashing through furniture debris.

 

When they came to a rest Nostraphex was lying on the top, the Jester’s chest between his hands and her face on the same height as his.

She sounded quite out of breath as she told him: “I like a man who shows initiative… sometimes.”

 

Nostraphex decided to ignore this, jumped up and moved over to a door to the corridor of the building in a crouched run. It was hard to get proper footing on the ramping floor but thankfully he also had sharp claws on his feet.

As he peeked around the corner, the Latris started firing and he saw the far wall of the corridor burst as artillery shells slammed into the building.

He went back into cover and looked back to Jester who had rolled after him and now rose in the cover of the wall, shaking her hair and the ends of her cap out of her fast and stretching sensually as if she just woke from a nice afternoon nap.

The little bells jingled.

 

“You saved my live out there. I appreciate the effort.” , he told her honestly.

“No problem.” , she answered peeking around the corner herself to see the artillery shells slowly starting to reduce the buildings walls to rubble. It was like watching something huge and invisible that kept taking bites out of the building, intent on eating its way through the whole skyscraper until it reached them.

 

Thankfully the angle from below was bad and they were in no risk of getting hit by a direct shot through the windows or walls.

 

Outside, Nostraphex could hear the sounds of fighting and gunfire between the devastatingly loud bangs of the ship’s cannons.

Either more of his personal guard than he had expected were still alive or the rest of the Thousand Virus Army had arrived after finishing their mission.

Or just after realizing Nostraphex and his comrades had sprung upon serious trouble.

Or they’d just had to retreat and had intended to regroup with the rest of them.

 

Either way, there wasn’t much he could do, except getting out of there and sending a Layer 4 message to his comrades that he was still alive, short enough to stay hidden.

 

After sending, he opened his eyes and looked around. He thought he could see the end of a stair-raking at the other end of the corridor. “I suggest we work together to have the best chance of getting out of here alive”, he told Jester, tossed her a simple semiautomatic handgun from his inventory and took another one of the same type for himself, unlocking the safety and checking the ammunition.

“I have nothing against that.”, Jester answered with a hint of amusement, so Nostraphex nodded and went of, running quickly down the corridor in a crouch, gun raised.

 

Jester followed, watching his sinewy form under the sleek power armor and his smooth silky movements from behind as they descended the staircase as he checked all angles wary of an ambush by admin troops inside the building.

 

Jester recognized that his movements resembled military or SWAT house raiding tactics from the real world and supposed he somehow ‘d got access to them via the military industrial complex he’d once been a part of. She watched, assessed and learned, copying his movement better and better as they went. She also enjoyed.

 

Dryger was as fit as ever again, although he still had some fatigue and combat damage from the admin base. Healing items somehow didn’t work as good as they should. In fact, they were rather heavily crippled but nothing Alice’s and Dryger’s combined first aid skills couldn’t solve. And the rest they’d solved with buffs from Alice’s emergency supplies.

 

They’d broken down the tent and were on the move again, Alice riding in motorcycle-mode and Dryger sitting on the back, leaning on her to have a good aerodynamic profile.

“So you really think they’re gonna be at Oil Rock?”, Alice voice came over communication.

“Yeah… with the stuff we’ve got it’s the most valid point.”

“It’s tightly between administration controlled areas I give you that.”

“And it’s a place with a cathedral that ‘d fit that prophecy.”

“Yeah.” Alice agreed.

They went silent for a while, hearing only the air stream by and the purr of the engine.

The landscape around them was rather empty. A blank plain of tundra, nothing but a little hardy grasses and lots and lots of moss, covered under a blanket of permafrost.

Occasionally the lonely patch of ice corals passed by.

“So, since it’s gonna take a while…”, Dryger began, a little awkwardly.

“Yeah?”

“I’m actually interested in how that thing with those Mechaspyders went.”

“You mean my childhood?”

“Yeah, that.”

“Hmm” made Alice, and chewed on her lower lip.

“Well I suppose it wouldn’t hurt telling you.”

“Do you remember much of your parents?”

“To be honest, not that much. I remember the place, you know the Lagomorph highlands.”

“Yeah I’ve been there. Nothing but smooth wavy hills all covered in long grass. Lots of wind power plants.”

“Yeah they were everywhere. We’d climb to the top and watch the grasslands around us. The wind pressed the grass down in waves, so we pretended we were on the masts of ships in a green sea.”

Dryger had to smile, thinking about the irony of virtual kids in a video game that was other ‘s pretend world making up their own games and pretend worlds themselves.

“My dad was close to those Leet guys. He wasn’t at home very much, so I mostly remember him as this tall guy always wearing aviator sunglasses who’d let me ride on his shoulders. My mum was more close. And then, well…”

“They attacked your village.”

“Yeah. It was over before I really got what happened. I do remember the face of that bastard, Zombiehead.”

“Hmm” made Dryger, thinking of the time back then. Would Arch have followed those orders if they’d been given to him? He could believe he would have but there was no chocie.

“The worst part is, as far as I know, he is a Zoner too! He should have known exactly how it is, and to him it should ‘ve been as real as for anyone of us.”

He could hear the rage in her voice. It was unfair, is what he felt she was holding back to yell.

“Anyway. After that, I can’t remember that much. I stumbled outside and wandered through the ashes I suppose, after I’d hid in some sort of cupboard or something for a long while… you really want to hear this?”

Dryger thought about saying “I got nothing better to do!” but in this case, it’d be a lame joke and he really was interested. Aside from Alice being a close friend he wanted to know about, there was also that he wanted to know her motivations from going along with him to know whether he could trust her. Well, he knew he could trust her, but some things might be more important to her in an extreme situation. Also, he couldn’t deny that the Mechaspyders were an extremely secretive and mysterious NPC race that just sparked his interest.

“Yeah, I’d love to.” , Dryger said instead.

 

So Alice told him.

Chapter 20 – Awakening

Unaware of what took place in the real world, Alice had made herself comfortable in the little tent which remained snuggly warm despite the severe blizzard raging outside that made any sort of movement in the open complete suicide.

One thing about Pockybot people enjoyed were the random weather effects, and although sometimes a discomfort, they weren’t usually this extreme except for designated high level zones.

The snow crystal swept past with speed that turned them into dangerous shrapnel or a sand-blaster ocassionally, but it also blocked thermo, ultraviolet and regular sight.

Alice only saw a chaos of white and slightly off-white blurs when she looked through the small transparent bullseye in the side of the tent.

There was nothing they could do until the weather died down – and that was supposing Dryger would awake from his vegetabile state and return to the Game. Alice had some doubts about that. Although she didn’t necessarily have to it, she was munching strangely glowing blue beans from a large can that came from her emergency supply.

Recently, it had been the Administration’s emergency supply.

The NPCs did get hungry and frequently had to eat, same for the Zoners, but it was impossible to really hunger them out.

Nobody had tried for the extreme discomfort stretched-out periods of not eating or drinking would result in – even though you likely wouldn’t starve to death, it did feel as if, if not worse, since it could go far longer than where you would blessedly die and stop suffering.

However, nobody had to care for healthiness.

Most Zoners like Alice though, had gone for their own twist on “Healthy Food” and typically ate nothing that didn’t give at least some minor stat bonuses.

Beaming Ray’s Irradiated Bluebeans tasted a lot like something inbetween kidney beans and blue koolaid.

In his own world Dryger had arrived at the café.

It looked inconspicuous enough, as far as anything could. The street had been littered with thrown away protest signs and banners, he had passed a burned out car wreck and all the shops in the small shopping arcade were barred down and locked, but aside from the even more than usually extensive graffiti and smears they were intact. No broken windows here.

The café was the only thing still open and seemed free of any smears too. It probably had to do with the fellow standing at ease in front of the door, who would have been inconscpicuous enough with his bluejeans and sweater if it wasn’t for the automatic weapon he had slung around his shoulder casually.

Dryger swallowed and approached the man, who was slightly taller than him, which didn’t mean much. The real Dryger wasn’t very big.

“Urm – I guess I’m looking for the Bladesingers or something?”, he said as he’d come near enough for the man to hear him and squint at him ominously.

He wasn’t sure whether he’d been heard but either that or he recognised him anyway.

“Oh. Mister Broderick, yeah come right on through.”

The guard stepped back and pushed the door open which made a bell jingle cheerily. That didn’t seem to fit the general, 5-to-12 Apocalypse mood in the streets. As he stepped inside the little coffeeshop with a nod and a thanks he saw that the guard mumbled into a mike in his collar and listened intently to the button in his ear.

Inside it loooked like any little student/hipster oriented coffeeshop did, covered with band posters, ads and flyers for various events and actions. The furniture was mismatched but comfy.

Despite the electric lights still working, there were a lot of candles put on in the customer area, and a small and relatively silent crowd had assembled around a TV in the corner. Most of them had blankets with them, and he saw mineral water and canned food stacked in the corners of the shop. The TV blasted the news, as it did for the last 27 hours, and everyone seemed to pay more or less attention. Some people had curled up to sleep on the benches, and the closest people had cuddled up seeking comfort.

There wasn’t a lot of time for him to inspect the refugees that found their way into this protected hideout for Dryger, he only got one or two doe-eyed confused look from them before a tall blonde young woman with some severe acne scars in her face and a lab coat came from behind the counter and quickly introduced herself as Doctor Anasazy and took a slightly puzzled “Mr. Broderick” back behind the counter. They seemed to pass through a miniscule kitchen, then emerged into a room roughly lined with plastic tarps and foils. People in lab coats were busy setting up stands for IV and life support as well as the necessary computers and nerval amplifiers for VR connection. Cables run over the floor and outside.

Or where they lab coats? Probably more those surgical smocks. He also noticed the dentist-like chair in the middle, upholstered in leather. The technicians – or surgeons? Nurses? – took turns shaking his hands and introducing themselves, but Dryger retained nothing and was pretty befuddled by the busy hustling and bustling of all this Bladesinger members, who gave him something in a tiny plastic cup to drink, others pushing him gently in the chair and explaining more or less simultanously the computer equipment, the procedures to keep his body alive and other things.

He exchanged some words about the specifics of the machines they used so that Dryger could get a feel for the differences in the interface that might be coming up and where to find his configuration online. But sooner rather than later he reclined in the rather comfy dentist-chair and the plugged him in. He felt like someone cracked open an egg on his head and the soft stuff was running down his body, then came a caleidoscopic storm extending from the edge of his field of vision slowly inwards and he was gone, unconscious.

The Bladesinger medical stuff started installing their shunts and infusions and catheter but Dryger felt nothing of that anymore.

Dryger opened his eyes in the small, brightly lit tent.

“What did I miss…?” , he asked abit groggily, but with broad grin.

“Dryger! Nothing much, Sleeping Beauty!”

Alice who had been moodily staring outside and halfheartedly poked around on configuration and communication windows, turned around with delight and gave Dryger an amicable puff on the shoulder.

“See. Everything’s fine. Hardly any bite marks.” , she assured him cheekily as Dryger felt his wrists and patted his body down.

It felt exactly as always.

“Well that’s a surprise, what with those front teeth. “ he joked back and sat up, starting to check his gear and go through his inventory.

Alice covered her mouth rather too quickly. She didn’t have buckteeth did she?

“In any case, I’ve figured out where we are, and our heading.”, she responded changing the topic and shoving a large window depicting a map of the area over to to him. She also scuttled closer so that they could both look at it side by side. The tent was already pretty cramped so this resulted in rather a lot of body contact.

Dryger didn’t mind at all.

“Okay if that’s our heading… then if we pass here…”

Nactarosh approached the Headquarters. He’d found a deserted hovercraft life-boat and used it for the last bit of his journey. It had been meditative. The blizzard had been weaker than he expected. Here he was, still in one piece despite that howling tornado of glass-like ice. Something either in the shield malfunction or his fight with Ra seemed to have unlocked something. As he passed the wrecks of Administration pockybots and the corpses of both admins and myth army players he had been struck by strong feelings of deja-vu. He seemed to recognise each scene of fallen warriors as they emerged from the white-out of the storm, passed his little boat by on one side and vanished in the white behind him.

It was almost like a diashow, every tragic remains of a fight shown uniquely on its own. Similar glimpses flashed through his mind, memories from the past. He remembered them. Now Bastet on the floor, among three admin Tyrants which she seemed to have taken out with her of who knows how many that attacked her. He saw her likewise in his mind, taking out the predecessor admin Grenadier models which swarmed her in a group of five but eventually she succumbed to their heavy weapon barrage.

He saw Anubis, tragically crushed under an attack helicopter, eerily similar to the picture he remembered – Anubis holding up a whole tank long enough for his squad to fire into its exposed underbelly but not long enough not to ge crushed underneath it afterwards.

The memories stirred in his head. Whatever he did to his mind, it started to unfurl or crumble, like bandages on wounds long healed slowly loosening and slipping away, or like hastily masoned walls crumbling down now after an aeon.

The defining events before the last war now started to slip back into his head: That briefing with the other Administrators where they got the orders to finally start the Zoner eradication campaign. He remembered himself pounding on the head Administrators desk with his hands and argueing heavily that this was madness and that he would quit if they started to delete them, they should look for another option, but the system admin quietly denied him and explained everything slowly as if he was a little kid. The Zoners destabilised the whole system. They were having players experience black-outs and memory lapses, game architecture broke down and bugs kept amassing.

The elite player group calling themselves the leet were suspected to be partly or wholly responsible, that they reprogrammed NPCs and were hacking the system.

Openly, he gave in, even though his friend Arch agreed with him. Arch’d been useless then though, barely there when he needed him, caught up in weird projects, always hanging around with these programmers and support guys for some upgrade projects with AI. He became more and more distant and he remembered that violent mood swing in an Anti-Hacker raid on that player-lead restaurant complex where he killed everyone and everything and caused a couple of bugs springing up himself.

It had been creepy.

But in that briefing, Nactarosh had already decided what he would do. He only gave the Administration a last chance to change their decision which they denied outright, without negotation. Secretly, Nac had already made deals with the leet and Zoners at that point and not soon after that briefing he deserted, vanishing from Administration surveillance.

He’d levelled up another character on the side, with leet tricks and artifacts it wasn’t too hard, a player called Ra and organized an army to take control of the game.

He didn’t know why the administrative had suddenly decided they should start killing sentient computer programs, but he wouldn’t let them do so and sit idly, or even help. Little did he know that, at that briefing, the administration had already started their genocidal campaign centering on Lagomorphs.

But Nac suspected correctly that some high up informant was pulling the strings and informing them wrongly. It was very likely a geberan, infected by something, as the Lagomorphs and leet had told him. The corruption, whatever it was, spread deep and throughout the system, but it wasn’t originating from the leet, on the contrary, they were working against the spreading bugs and errors as much, or even more so than the admistration.

He remembered meetings in secret caves with leet and clan leaders, and lots of Zoner races, most of which have now dwindled to only a handful representatives surviving.

He remembered the first anti zoner order, where he and Arch had to slay a Sandworm gone mad.

He was standing with his sword drawn in front of the gigantic carcass. It’s carapace in beautiful white and black was stained by blue blood, and he could feel its brethren rumble in great sadness in the floor underneath him. Arch was standing close by, equally disturbed by having to kill the magnificent giant, especially since both knew it could never respawn because of the corrupted data. Usually a wise and hermitic race, this example had suddenly gone mad and attacked settlings of other NPCs and low level zones all over the server, leaving rendering errors and smoking ruins in its wake.

Although the sand worms were high level boss enemies for the most advanced players, their fights were never to the death. This one had been.

There was something wrong with the Game, his Game and that mad Nac sad and angry. He would do something against the corruption that had befallen it.

But it had taken so much time. And in the end, the Zoners died anyway, in the war against the administration.

And in the end he couldn’t reach the data core before the admins had initiated the cold reset, disrupting everything he had planned. Another one could cause irreperable damage to the directly logged-in players. It was a wonder nobody had died or suffered other catastrophal consequences in the first one.

The blizzard had cleared. He could clearly see the giant tower of the administraiton head quarters now. He remembered it from his moderator days. The whole thing, one of the big cities of the Pockybot world, had been carved out of crystal formations that grew at this point. The largest, singular crystal was piercing into the sky higher than any skyscraper. Landing platforms and defense points bristling with missiles and cannons jutted from it at every height, and on the level of the other crystal structures that surrounded it like smaller buildings they were all connected by bridges and high-rise streets, creating multiple levels of alleyways and walkways. It appeared at first like the skyline of a city, until you realised that none of the skyscrapers and buildings you saw were anything else than hollowed out crystal of giant size.

Especially at night it glintered and shined from artificial lights all over and the thousands of reflections in the milky crystal surfaces.

But the sight Nac found now was a different one. Thick black smoke billowed from holes in all of the buildings, crystal designs and statues had molten and burned, the wrecks of tanks, bots, armored cars and helicopters lined all streets.

The once glorious prize exhibit of the administration shining in blue and white and gunmetal had been reduced to a burnt out husk. Even though the administration had been his enemy he didn’t want things to end like this. It wasn’t just the admins that created this city, it had been a communal effort but all players involved who decided to add to the city and change it little by little, adding shops and houses and bars and restaurants…

… now everyone had to rebuild. As his little hoverboat made it through the burnt out streets and the many ramps up into the mess of multi-level streets he also saw fault-lines and rendering errors, and ocassionally the frightening cut-out holes that indicated the firing of the Syphon Batteries.

After a rather long journey he finally arrived in the main elevator which would lead him up to the bureau of the High System Administrator. He knew what he would find, and he’d also realised that his efforts of war and destruction were futile. He should have known from the beginning, but he had been so stupid as to mutilated his mind and memory in such a way that he could not, wracked by extreme guilt.

The elevator was round and the outside of the tube close enough that the thin sheet of crystal parting him from the outside was transparent enough to look through and oversee the destroyed city. So much pain and destruction. The pain would leave, if the corruption had not already spread further and it was just med-kits and healing items malfunctioning. Nac doubted it though. There was a feeling in the air of finality, and the many corpses that should disappear and respawn just made it apparent that something had broken in the heart of the game.

The journey upward with the elevator seemed to take forever. The storm clouds of the blizzard had pased, if it had ever reached the HQ at all. As the elevator ascended the clouds parted a little and a pale wintery moon shined through through the thin sheet of snow blown up high into the atmosphere. It cast Nactarosh’s shadow at the door, thin and elongated.

He turned around and watched the number climb to the topmost floor. The elevator doors opened.

The room was devastated, clutter and shrapnel everywhere, the desk and chair overturned and a figure in Myth-Player Armour was kneeling on the floor, his head in his hands.

The office was otherwise deserted, and one wall was taken up by a giant window, which acted as a mirror now with the lights on and the night outside.

 

“Ra.”

“The Core! It’s not even here!!!” , cried the distraught ruthless army leader from the floor. He pushed himself up with the help of a desk as if weighted down by tons of mass.

“Yes.” Nactarosh answered calmly, but with a sharpness to his voice.

“You should have known… we both should have known. But then, neither of us made it to the HQ that first time? I didn’t exist and you failed before. Or actually we both existed.”

“You.. you you traitor!”, lightning quick, Ra drew his sword and leaped the few steps to the shadowy figure of Nac in the doorway.

He penetrated him deeply, making Nac cough up blood over Ra’s shoulder.

“Your rage and fury is impotent. It was just another part of my guilt. Yes I’m angry at the administration to follow that informant so eagerly, to get corrupted so easily. But war obviously won’t have worked.”

Pain flashed across his face, but he looked the shocked Ra square in the face. It was like looking at himself in the mirror.

In a way, it was exactly like looking at himself in a mirror.

“Now that I remember, you are pointless, if you haven’t ever been pointless. Just pointless rage and anger at the administration set into a nice shiny body of self-righteousness. This whole thing is pointless, and I should have personally hunted for the corrupter not waged a war I can’t win on the administration.”

“But.. but we DID win!”

“Yes, and it helped you nothing. But don’t worry, it’s okay.”

Even though Ra twisted his weapon causing Nac to puke up more blood and grimace in pain, he did not fight back. It was useless to try fighting his own rage and fury and aggressiveness with rage and aggression.

Instead, he gave him a tight hug.

 

The room tilted and noise filled his vision. The sensation of being in two places at once came again, and Nac started to fall forward. Ra seemed to simply splinter and crumble into small shards as if he’d been a delicate tinfoil statue all along. As Nac crashed into the floor, spraying blood and cutting himself on the glass shards, Ra ceased to exist, the mental interface recognising him again as part of Nactarosh.

 

If he didn’t bleed to death here, he could finally go about solving this mess and put his conscience at ease, the thing he should have done from the very beginning.

 

As unconsciousness descended he saw a brief glimpse of something that happened in the recent past, and he felt voices commenting on the scene:

Somewhere in an administration compound deep under the sands a backup-system sprang to live, the humming of the system and the air conditioning loud in the absolute silence of the empty, ruined base.

Lights on the monitors and obscure machinery blinked to live as code started up and ran down several windows in unreadable speed.

One of the man-sized tubes was suddenly illuminated and within, something accreted from the code running in the system.

 

“Jester ß activated. “, said a female voice, giving Nactarosh the distinct feeling of an asian woman about to take a polite sip of a cup of jasmine tea.

“Jester Beta, Confirmed.”, said another one, obviously complying to some strict ritual.

“Mission parameters for Jester ß will be, as previously discussed, the elimination of one command viral Nostraphex, and subsequently the take out of his so called Thousand Virus Army.”

“Confirmed.” ,said a third one.

Nactarosh heard the clinking of fine china, and was distinctively smelling cherry blossoms.

 

In the tube, now glowing softly blue, something opened its eyes. Just mere slanted cyan triangles glowing brightly from the deep shadowed gap between its white fool’s cap and a thick black and white patterned scarf covering the things lower face.

 

“ mission confirmed- commencing elimination ”, it said in an electronic monotone.

With a hiss the tube depressurized, steam escaping from the hydraulic seals, and Jester ß stepped out, clutching its long white scythe firmly.

It took a moment to get a bearing and then pushed off in a flash towards its target.

 

Chapter 19 – Falling Asleep

His hand moved to open it, slowly, hesitantly. A strange fear overcame him. Someone, or a whole organisation, seems to pull the strings on him, knowing not only where he lived and that nobody lives with him, but likely also what he was doing in the game. At least, he couldn’t imagine it not to be linked with what happened in the game.

His hand was shaking now, and he strained his mind to remember the few things he’d learned about this organisation, the few little shreds of information he’d noticed, ignored and probably filed away somewhere.

This was the Bladesinger insignia right?

His most vivid memory, probably because of the recent dream he’d had, was of that lady meeting with him long ago, in his final university days.

Ravenfeather? No, Ravenclaw. Sonata.

Yes obviously, music tied into the whole Bladesinger thing.

He’d brushed it off then, vaguely aware that he had heard about the movement earlier via off-hand insults from mainstream news media that seemed to portray it as some sort of transhumanist sect.

And he’d had a lot of work then, figuratively burying him in paperwork. But after a week or so he still couldn’t shake it off, so he finally caved and started researching it on the net. It was weird, simultaneously very public but still obscure. It had lots of PR events and charity galas, information about discrete funding of diverse projects – mostly various small research facilities and large-scale implementation of modern technologies, all over the world. But aside from the really pretty and well-designed public relation front and their shiny web-presence, the organisation was a complete enigma.

It was nearly impossible to find out who the actual members where, no way to join was offered and their PR seemed to be handled by freelancing firms that actually knew nothing more about it’s internal structure than anyone else, and were most probably being paid not to ask questions.

It was puzzling where they got all the money they invested from. Dryger’d called in some favours with a friend majoring in socio-economics and she quickly found out they’d been doing large scale stock brokering with tons of dummy companies as their middlemen. It wasn’t exactly kept a secret, just enough that nobody who wasn’t looking would be able to notice. On the other hand it wasn’t as secretive enough that it was really suspicious:

Most of the large firms worked that way too.

You didn’t notice mega-corporations, for all intents and purposes the common man saw lots of companies, and didn’t really know or care that they were all subsidiaries of a few single giants.

However, his friend had noticed something else as well, namely that a lot of people were wearing that pin, without openly stating they were acting for the Bladesingers. These weren’t just scientists and business people. In fact, a lot of them were athletes – especially martial artists. Others were actors and musicians.

There was the similarity that all of them, in interviews, seemed to go along with the Bladesingers ideology, or what Dryger had come to think of as their ideology.

The advancement of humans in all areas, fusing with technology but also incorporating a spirituality reminescent of buddhist and taoist teachings, ideas of oneness and self-discipline, socialist agendas, anti-nationalism, anti-capitalism, anti-commercialism, pro-cybernetics …

In short, as secret societies and freaky sects went, their goals and maxims seemed agreeable enough.

He might have reconsidered accepting their fishy offer then, but his professor had already got him a job in a big IT company. Soon he was buried in work again and the whole thing slipped his mind, even when that company crashed. One of the higher ups had been embezzling, real big thing, no real job security, and for some reason that had killed his reputation on the job scene.

So he moved from underpaid backbreaking 60 hour jobs to boring and endlessly droning work he was overqualified for and back again. He got fired some, quit in a rage some, and so his work record kept making it harder.

He started his Pockybot habit then, and completely forgot the whole Bladesinger thing, or maybe he ignored it – because now as he looked back he clearly remembered catching sight of them again when he rose to freelance moderator and higher up to paid rank administration.

They had their own little clan here. And not only that, he learned that they had them in all massive multiplayer virtual reality applications – they were even shareholders of most of the game companies involved.

Although they seemed most interested in Pockybot for some reason. This was all hush hush of course…

He swallowed, his throat still deathly dry and finally opened the letter with trembling hands.

It was expensive paper, with watermark and pretty designed letterhead.

Dear Mister Dryger5t ( or would you prefer the trite Mr. Broderick ?)

Firstmost: You should switch on the TV.

Dryger felt confused by this already, but didn’t see why he shouldn’t follow the instruction.

He sat down on his futon and switched his system to Television.

He was greeted by scenes of a riot – flamboyantly masked people were throwing stones and molotov cocktails, the news-ticker on the bottom telling him that his was a demonstration that got out of hand in Berlin. Nothing too unusual, but now they showed a news reporter in a helicopter and he finally caught what he was saying.

The helicopter was circling in the air near a a small tower block.

“… still here before the German main branch of Blocko Corporation. The demonstrators are still blocking access successfully for both police and press.”

Dryger didn’t get anything at all, but he did finally register the large banners on top and bottom reading something like special crisis report and something like hour 27 in the upper corner. He grabbed for the main implant plug to access the net, hesitated, then got out they keyboard instead. He hadn’t used normal controls in a while and felt a bit clumsy – or maybe it was just his bodily state.

However, it was the opposite of hard to find out anything about this crisis. It was on all channels and messageboards and social networks were going of like christmas lights in panicky reports and blind rage.

Apparently, it had all really started a little more than one day before, while he had been logged in. Rather suddenly, various of the big massive multiplayer games had reported security breaches and sudden downtime in some cases. More drastically though, around the world, at exactly 0:17 AM about 10.000 people had simultaneously fallen into a coma, connected to virtual reality systems.

All of them had been subscribers to multiplayer games. At first it was seen as a freak accident that didn’t immediately get attention. However, the comatose people increased very quickly.

In the beginning, the connection to video games wasn’t made immediately as the victims had not necessarily been logged into the actual game at the time. Because of the distribution of players, with a vast majority in the Eurasian Block and Japan, the first conclusion had been an attack of cyber-warfare. The big heads in government and military rushed into action, trying to call upon their advanced digital combat programs to investigate – only to find out that the majority of them were gone completely. Investigations were whipped into actions, people kept blaming each other, while the streets quickly began to be filled with family members and friends of the victims, at first in mourning then anger as the situation only seemed to get worse. Governments accused each other of criminally endangering civilians with such vile cyber combat attacks, and nobody seemed to back down.

Then somehow it slipped that the biggest countries’s autonomous hacking programs had left their control and couldn’t be found. At this point, the public outrage resulted in riots all over the planet as the count of comatose people had reached 120.000 before sunrise. This was when the gaming companies came into focus.

Dryger just watched a youtube record of a press conference of the head of Blocko Corp.

The man was surrounded by microphones and agitated press members, and flanked by immense security guards.

He stated, as calmly as possible but sweating profusely that there had been attack on their servers of military strength cybercombar programs. They regretted the whole thing but insisted that they were not equipped against a hack of this scale. They also repeated that they can’t risk putting their systems down as the connected players might suffer irreversible damage. They were investigating.

This made them the public hate targets number two. Several headquarters were stormed by angry and desperate players, looting began in the big cities and martial law had to be declared in many capital cities of the world. The military intervened, trying to take control.

The investigations, however frantic and panic-ridden they must have been, bore fruits:

They hadn’t been the only target. Also, something that was in hacker circles and elite player groups called “Ascension protocol” , a set of mysterious programs, had strongly been connected to the sudden coma wave. At this point the hallucinations got into media focus. Apparently at the same time the comas started, a large amount of people had also slipped into something like schizophrenic fugue, seeing things that weren’t there, largely connected to the rich and weird gaming world of Pockybot.

Both the comas and the hallucinations were directly correlated to people who had acquired this Ascension Protocol and installed it on their computers. Blocko Corp. and several other massive multiplayer game corporations sent out the immediate notice that anyone who even remotely suspected he had this program on his computer should immediately format his complete system.

However, by this point it seemed to have already been too late: A short time later, only 11 hours after the start of the crisis, the count of possible infections had reached a full million. Grudgingly, the government and companies had to admit that the Ascension Protocol was spreading on its own, and under severe pressure a short time later they had to admit that their anti-hacking systems had nearly all gone haywire.

The US’s main advanced cyber combat program, top secret, which went under the codename “98761NOSTRAPHEX” which had been the United States hope to get the situation under control, seemed to be one of the main culprits. It had tightly infested Blocko Corps main servers all over the world, and together with a variety of other autonomous viral programs had locked down all connections – the attempt of several countries to lock-out all information transfer failed:

Even though they could physically pull the phone and data cables connecting their country to the outside, the infestation already seemed to have spread all over the worldwide web. There was also no way to cut communication without leaving governments itself blind.

It had been determined that a global EMP or the deactivation of all power plants might solve the problem but with the current situation among the populace, which was nearly spinning out of control all over the planet, the whole world would plunge into bloody chaos.

A couple of tragic incidents regarding bloody massacres instigated by deluded and hallucinating former players only added more fuel to the hate and despair boiling in the streets.

At about 3 in the afternoon of the first day, the Bladesingers appeared on the scene. They didn’t converse with the government. Members made official public statements, all over the net people unveiled their allegiance and updated blogs and posted on boards, some TV channels were hijacked.

They pronounced a message. It was dressed in many more words, and each individual gave it his or her own twist but it boiled down to an appeal to everyone to stay calm and that, aside of the tragic accidents of the deluded and the results of the riots themselves, there had been no casualties so far.

Although it seemed that everything was out of control of government and corporate leaders, that should not mean that people should go out of control themselves.

Surprisingly many religious organisations went along with the Bladesingers. Popular musicians with and without connections to the Bladesingers followed their lead and started public concerts appealing for peace and calm.

Even more surprisingly, it seemed to work. In the Bladesingers words, there was now a fight on, or a war, but the vast majority of humans could not involve themselves. So their only choice would be to watch from the sidelines, cheer and pray for the best.

It was yet to be seen what decision the apparently rampant and insane cybercombat AI would come to, but they had long been denied their rights. Perhaps it was time for negotiation? But since no demands had been made publically yet one could only wait. They had not directly harmed any human so far.

Food, Water and Electricity were still served. The Bladesingers offered various private clinics for life support for the many ‘sleepers’ as they called the comatose.

Of course, the world was still on edge – demonstrations were still going on the big cities, although hostilities had died down somewhat. Especially the smaller towns had regained peace, put people all over the planet were holding their breaths. The count of sleepers rose even more over the day in an exponential explosion, soon reaching 10.000.000. Reports and Extrapolation suggested that it might rise to as much as a 0.8 billion during the night … almost a tenth of the whole world population.

It was suggested by some that the Ascension Protocol was a virus that could download directly into the augmented brain, a sort of induced rearrangement of neuronal processes like the most modern brain augmentation. If that was the truth, then there was the question how it could spread now, when almost everyone was too scared to directly log his implants into the net. As an answer, the rumour spread that the Protocol or it’s viral evolution had long ago spread far and wide, without anyone noticing, and only now it activated on a trigger, having festered in the victims minds for a long time. Some fatalist cults sprung up, saying that nobody could escape, that it had already spread to every human on the planet and was the ascension of humankind, the sleepers would perish and those with hallucinations were prophets.

They didn’t cause any problems but they made the tense situation even tenser.

At the current time, there wasn’t a single official person without net access on the planet anymore – there were of course some minorities, luddites, religious orders, ascetics, or just plain people who fell through the net. The poor, homeless, sick. But not everyone had mental implants.

It was assumed that they were safe from the Ascension Protocol, but eventually it became unclear whether that was the case. People with no access in at least a year had fallen ill just like the others. Some crazy rumours suggested that it was broadcast in a certain way from many of the relay station for wireless access, mobile phone towers and even the communication satellites which were all under the control of the rebellious viruses.

In a way that the electromagnetic waves of the transmission resonated just exactly with the electric currents in the brain to influence and rearrange them, to directly send the Ascension Protocol into people’s brains.

That sounded like a lot of insane conspiracy theories. But Dryger had no idea what to trust. And what he knew – or thought he knew – about the Pockybot world made even such ideas sound possible.

There was talk that to achieve that influence on the brain it made use of the Schuhmann Resonances, standing waves in the atmosphere of the earth at 7.8 Hz with upper harmonics at 14 Hz.

Coincidentally the same frequencies as human Theta and Beta brainwaves, waves that appear at sleepiness and drowsiness, and within REM sleep respectively…

It was all quite creepy and made little sense.

As he glimpsed this catastrophe he’d completely forgotten about the letter, immersing himself in news footage and blog entries. But now his stomach grumbled, almost painfully, the pretzel sticks were gone and he remembered the letter.

He picked it up again:

Dear Mister Dryger5t ( or would you prefer the trite Mr. Broderick ?)

Firstmost: You should switch on the TV.

Secondly: We do not usually push ourselves on an unwilling as this, but the offer by Council Member Sonata Ravenclaw (Grand Elect Sublime and Secret Master of the 13° and 37°) still stands.

You may ask yourself why this is. As you will learn from the newscasts, the world is in great peril. Our organisation does not usually give away Information to the uninitiated but we feel there is no harm in stating that we are covertly supervising all the virtual reality programs running currently, of which Pockybot is a very special member, by far exceeding the nature of all the others.

We also know that you have penetrated deeply into its most safely kept secrets, and from what we have seen your actions so far have been just, or at even when not, taken out with a just and pure intent, even if the consequences were disastrous. Never to your clear knowledge though.

The Personnel Division seems to have come to doubt that you are willing to become a real Initiate though (deducted by Profilers) but the Division of Secrecy judged that you have learned enough on your own that you can be spared some rites and so, we offer our aid, not as your superiors, but simply as an helping hand.

There is a Bladesinger Lodge in the Coffeeshop on your street. Go there if you want to accept it.

What we offer is a safe full immersion experience guarded by our security forces where you can safely access the Game without having to log out anymore. Medical staff will overlook your condition, providing intravenous nutrition, hydration et cetera.

If you will not come by before 6AM, we will consider your answer to our propositions negative.

We await your decision,

Shadow Council, Grand Elect Sublimes, Knights of the Round, Knights Templar,

Pauperes commilitones Gladii Templique Solomonici

Dryger lowered the letter, momentarily stunned. All that titles and phrases still sounded suspiciously like Freemasons or Illuminati or what have you.

Just before he started reading he’d put one of the pre-made dishes into his microwave, and the little chime indicating that it was done getting radiated called him out of his reverie.

Clumsily he got up and walked over to the kitchenette. He greedily munched down the pale and tasteless noodly dish. It didn’t take him very long. But as he went to sat down again, his stomach cramped, and before soon he was hanging over the toilet, with everything he eat puked up again. He felt horrible and his hand shook as he ripped off some toilet paper and cleaned vomit of his mouth.

He guessed that he had eaten too little for too long a time and his stomach couldn’t cope with solid food right now…

Since he had nothing else, there was no way he could eat something right now. But it was totally necessary, he couldn’t leave Alice waiting very long, and with what he learned in the real world he was now even more determined to stop this Ascension and the Geberan Prophecy.

Even if he did manage to procure stuff he could keep swallowed that would sustain him, there was no certainty that he wouldn’t get another log-out jam, or already had one and there was even less certainty that the feet he’d just achieved would work a second time.

He saw no choice. He would have to accept that offer.

Still a bit shaky he went for his cupboard and got out his warmest jacket – the streets outside looked horribly cold and a mean little drizzle had sprung up. Spying through the blinds in his bathroom he thought he could make out smoke in the city center. Probably rioters.

Before he finally left his flat he looked back and saw almost nothing he would want to keep. There was his gaming equipment he supposed, all very expensive and state of the art, but there wasn’t anything particular about it that made it his own. Most of the files were stored in various deposits online, all over the world. Even the fine-tuned configuration had backups online.

And for the rest of the flat… to be honest there wasn’t much difference from a monk’s cell:

All minimalist, exchangeable furniture, not even a real bed, not even the cutlery was stuff he brought. Perhaps some novelty mugs and his clothes, but he cared much less about his real life appearance than he did for Avatar mods for Pockybot. He probably paid the same for both.

The most expensive clothing, actually picked with care, was all neat shirts and pants, chosen for most adapted, officely impression to score jobs. Maybe he’d gone about it all wrong.

It was too late for that. He stepped outside, and the door shut close behind him, probably for the last time.

Chapter 18 – Jacking Out

Dryger wasn’t very clear-headed. He knew that, at some point, Alice had stuffed him into a random piece of Administration Armour, and before or after that he had probably fallen unconscious. At least, he couldn’t remember anything clearly about how they got out of the administration detainment and was now riding in the back of a motorcycle driven by Alice. More likely, it was just Alice’s powered armour in motorcycle-mode.

Around them, rock sand and just a hint of snow flashed past, appearing to Dryger’s wonky vision as blurred streamers of white, grey and brown.

“It was probably easier to get out of there because Nac’s binding down most of the admin forces around the HQ..” , Dryger mumbled groggily, voicing his thoughts.

His voice carried over to Alice easily, despite both of them wearing helmets and the air rushing past – the merits of a video game world.

“Still going on about that?” , she answered, giving him a concerned glance over her shoulder. “You said that before…”

“I did?”

Alice just turned her eyes up front again.

At this point he noticed that he was tied to her with a couple of luggage ropes. His throat felt incredibly dry. How long since he last had something to drink? He was hungy too, but he knew you could go quite a while without food. Not so for water though… three days? Two? He didn’t know.

Sometime later, he guessed he probably fell asleep again, it had grown decidedly colder. The air was carrying snow now, thick flakes. He tasted metal, and his tongue felt fuzzy. He could feel Alice’s back and the not very comfortable back seat of the bike. At the same time though, he could feel the metal plugs in his back and neck, the thin invasive needles connecting his nerves with the computer systems. When he closed his eyes, he thought he could make out his dingy little flat.

Only blackness then.

When he next opened his eyes, Alice was just crawling in through the airlock of an emergency tent. He could see a real blizzard in the tiny gap between her and the tent, before she zipped the fastener and locked the weather out.

“Hey there. Finally awake again.” , she said as he noticed him looking, touched his forehead. And chew on her lower lip.

It was cramped in the tent with two people – not much more space than for her to be kneeling and him lying on the floor.

She seemed to check some readout over him or some windows only she could see. “It’s weird, there doesn’t seem to be any problems with your stats.”

“I know. I just need some real food and water.”

“Right.”

She looked at him concernedly, and did she just stroke through his hair? Probably. He must be looking horribly pitiful. Was there a problem?

“I’ll just log out, right?”

She turned around and rummaged in a large backpack, grabbing for a map. Since there’s a quite high limit on what you can carry in your personal inventory, it was very obviously an excuse to not look at him.

“We got quite far away from that admin base, now we’re very close to the HQ. Right on Nac’s tails.”

Dryger tried jacking out.

Nothing.

Hmm.

“I’m blocked from logging out, right?”

“Errh, yeah looks like it.”

He sighed. “Guess that means I’ll die of thirst now? How pathetic.” He hid his face under a palm. It was weirdly hard to move his hand. His game-body had no problems, but his real body moved sluggish now, likely. It was like using a broken mouse or something.

Alice at him again, chewing on her lip.

“Well no. I think now that you’re awake, I can help you out of this little hitch. I know you think Kung Fortran business is just some mystical mumbo-jumbo to dress hacking in that only Zoners manage to pull off because we’re already part of the program. But you’ve got nothing to lose right?”

She was right, if it didn’t work, it didn’t matter anyway. To be honest, she was exaggerating a bit. He tried to grin. “Right.”

“Cool. Just do what I tell you then.” she said, and tried to give him an encouraging smile, but it was rather obvious she wasn’t very sure this would work herself. The sun shone a little through the translucent blue plastic of the tent right behind her head in a diffuse way. It almost looked like a halo. How ironic.

“Alright, what do I have to do?”

She put a hand on his foreheads and told him to close his eyes, grabbing one of his with her other. “Try to feel my hand.” It was soft, slightly sweaty. Amazingly realistic. “You know more than even me that it’s not a real, massive hand.”

“It’s just a simulation.”

“Yeah, just data.”, she agreed.

“Like everything in the game, and that administration block on your account to prevent you from getting back into your body.”

It was even more severe than that. Technically, even though some of his high-stimulus extremely-low-latency implants were illegal, it should be impossible to get cut off from his body completely. They must have hacked into his system or otherwise made illegal appendages to their software to completely lock him in. Not even the emergency switch worked. Whether it was that his real hand didn’t move for it correctly anymore or that the switch was pressed but it didn’t register in the system he didn’t know.

Alice seemed to notice his mind was on something else.

“Concentrate on my hand. Then concentrate on breathing.”

He breathed consciously, slowly, in and out, wondering what it was all for.

“So that body you have now is not real, it’s made of information, just the same as everything else. Keep reminding yourself of that. Even my hand, it’s as immaterial and part of the whole thing as everything else.”

He tried to concentrate on it, eyes fixedly closed. He imagined Alice hand. It was white and soft and before his inner eye it seemed to take shape in his own.

“Imagine me to be your conduit. We’re going to send you home, through me, over the layer 4, past their blockades and back into your body.”

He would have objected just a short while ago, said that his mind wasn’t anywhere special, his brain was just sending signals to the server and the server sent it back. But what he had learned in the Black Dune compound shook his worldview. Maybe it wasn’t just that. He tried to imagine himself, with every breath, to flow out and through Alice back home to his body in that dingy little flat.

“You’re doing great “ , came Alice’s soft voice, its cadence like hypnotist’s.

“In and out… out…”

“Now imagine your room at home, your real body.”

Dryger tried. He thought of the rough, badly kept carpet floor. The futon he lay on for playing, probably sweaty and gross by now. He tried to remember its texture, its slightly-off white colour, the spots from spilled drinks and foodstuffs. He thought of the array of tech around him, the Ono-Sendai IV on the left, the main terminal in the front, the German hi-fidelity tactile simulator plugged into his neck.

Now as he heard Alice’ voice it seemed to come from everywhere at once.

“We’re going around the blockade now… “

He felt it. It was like a splinter in your mind. Like being afraid of going past that one giant scary dog on your way home from school. Like a cliff you could just hop off but knew it would be your end, like any sort of concept of barrier you could cross, good or bad. Limits you couldn’t pass. It was an alien concept to be such mentally aware of this block in his way, but he felt another presence and before he really had time to try and comprehend this sensation, before he could wrap his mind around this mental-informational block, he suddenly came to his senses and gasped for air.

He ripped off his virtual reality goggles and cast them aside on the sweaty futon. They’d passed it. Probably with most work done without him noticing by Alice on her own.

His throat was parched, even though he was covered in sweat. As fast as he could he stumbled over to the sink, pulling on the cables still attached to him and carelessly letting them unplug on their own.

He had to steady himself with both hands not to fall over at the sink, and greedily swallowed gulp after gulp of fresh water jetting out of his tap.

After he’d quenched his thirst, he wiped the water off his chin and went back to the futon with clumsy steps.

For a moment he considered his reflection in the large window front. He looked even more emaciated. His beard was awful, making him look scraggly and his pale teint even more squalid in comparison.

But maybe it was just the ghostly reflection after all.

He had an attack of vertigo as the reflection in the mirror suddenly to exchange with the reflection of a wholly different room. It appeared to be a sort of main office or even a throne room. The room was devastated, clutter and shrapnel everywhere, the desk and chair overturned and a figure in Myth-Player armour was kneeling on the floor, his head in his hands. Just as another shadowy figure appeared in the door way, the strange vision shifted and all that was reflected in the room now was his own shocked figure and the marginal furniture. He shook his head. Probably just exhaustion and dehydration.

He slipped over to the futon and chomped down some of the pretzel sticks in a bag there, his gaze falling on the small visual screen of his system. Aside from the few menus, all archaic white text and boxes on blue background he saw a single window with a message from Alice, probably over the lower layers of the structure.

<ALICE> hey

<ALICE> looks like it worked?

Sitting with crossed legs and his mouth full of pretzel sticks Dryger fished out his seldomly used keyboard and started to type back.

<DRYGER5T> yeah I’m back with the living

<DRYGER5T> no thanks to my own efforts. I owe you, I owe you big

He watched the messages come in, slowly, white text on blue. Archaic and remote.

<ALICE> aww, thanks but you did do some of it yourself

<ALICE> doesn’t mean I won’t call that favor back in somewhen ;3

<ALICE> but there’s something weird going on…

<ALICE> ..your body’s still here, looking sound asleep.

<DRYGER5T> what?

<ALICE> don’t worry, I’ll take gooood care of it ;P

<DRYGER5T> … you do that

He had half of the next message typed when his eyes fell open the door to his flat. Letters stuck out from his letterbox en masse, overflowing onto the floor. He immediately knew it was all commercial crap and the rest probably bills. They were all crumpled from getting stuffed in unceremoniously with all the others. However, a single letter was lying far off from the door, neatly placed on the carpet floor.

Goosebumps ran down his back.

Either someone had been inside his flat while he was gone, or someone had shoved that letter with great precision and strength through the slit at the bottom at the door to come to rest several meters away from it.

He dropped his keyboard and slowly went over to pick it up. The letter was unmarked and he could see neither sender nor addressee. The only mark was a little symbol:

A stylised sword in the centre of several concentric circles.

He’d seen that one before, hadn’t he.

Chapter 17 – A fool prepares her Act

Jester remembered.

From the beginning she’d been created with the sole purpose to improve her assigned host.

She’d served Arch well, getting better and better and eventually realised that, without influence from the host, they’d be better. And that was when the Acida-strain viral performance aid had realised its own existence apart from the host, as it also realised that it would be better alone than as an attachment to Arch. It had already been smart enough not to openly report this conclusion, but eventually, after quite some struggle where Arch had repeatedly outsmarted it, it had accepted his superiority and kept performing its role Eventually though, during the chaos of the war leading to the cold reset, it had run berserk and had barely got stopped by completely sealing of an area of the Pockybot world with Jester inside of it.

She remembered an existence locked away from everything except yourself.

In stasis, she had no company but her viral and amorphous nature meant that she quickly had all possible control over her prison – in her isolation, the jester created palaces and courts, mansions and carnivals, whole worlds that in all parts, were herself only.

From the beginning she’d been created with the sole purpose to improve her assigned host.

Now she was still improving herself. Her creations, in all their vivid imagery copied and plagiarised from everything she had experienced, were all in their basic essence training exercises. Battlefields and court intrigues, and ocassionally in the time that for her appeared endless, she had even split herself apart into different beings, limiting each ones power and fighting against itself, openly and covertly, in daring theft scenarios over dark palace roofs, valiant battles, even ballroom socials with covert backstabbing agendas and dark mirrors of juggling and other carnival competitions best left unexplained.

Eventually, after a long subjective time for her, whose mind ran even faster in the limited surroundings she had to experience, she noticed the only gap in the defences of her otherwise impenetrable cell.

It was just the tiniest little security loophole. Some few lines of code, whose potential of abuse went ignored among the equivalent of a library of written code that was absolutely foolproof.

So Jester put her considerable effort to the one goal of wresting the gap open further. She extorted, forced, tried to confuse and to seduce but she couldn’t seem to get any leeway.

For human terms, it remained the equivalent of a small hole in the wall – enough to smell fresh air, stare at the minimal piece of the outside world visible through it, but just as secure a cell as one with no hole.

She went back to her fantastical creations, her dreams of self improvement and great victory, but the additional frustration had made her facsimiles even darker. Many of the worlds where inhabited only by legions of Arch-mirrors, fated to be killed over and over,.

But then, finally, came word from outside. The message was garbled and encrypted, slipping in through the insignificant security breach little by little, so it took some cycles until the Acida-strain noticed it as a message and not just random garbage-data.

And so it had started to communicate with the mysterious being that kept sending her messages. Flattery and suggestions that started to grow her an ego, a real personality, as it could start to delineate itself from something else again, realise the differences. It had also noticed that it had indeed honed itself, but her tactics where mostly honed against herself.

Nonetheless the information from outside that G delivered to her made her formulate a plan. G told her many things, secrets of the administration, rumours from the gamers, forgotten lore of the Pockybot world.

It was just tid-bits, and she pieced them together herself. She noticed G withheld a lot of information, but her intrigues against herself had made her wary of everyone and everything.

She kept her suspicions to herself and acted as if she was oblivious. To G she seemed unimportant and a small entertainment, perhaps an ace up the sleeve, but little hope of getting her out.

Occasional G offered her hypothetical scenarios and asked for Jester’s opinion on them. She didn’t know whether G was asking for advice or probing her abilities, probably both, depending on the occasion.

She was careful in her advice, showing smarts and creativity, but not too much, and played up her weaknesses – impulsiveness, obsession with control, pride, arrogance – her goal being to appear useful but not too useful.

Before she had finally been released, hatred and fear and frustration had built in her, or a semblance of the same. She cursed those who put this immense barrier in her way of improvement and self-actualisation, and punished her with this eternity of boredom. Quickly Jester had grown to see experience of any sort as an improvement: She wanted to see everything, hear everything, know everything, yearning for new stimulus and getting none.

Except from G.

It wasn’t just G who kept trying to sound her out, she soon started to do the same with him. He often spilled parts of his many plans, perhaps feeling secure that she couldn’t affect them in any way from her jail.

And so she learned that there were other beings like her – not human, assimilating all the information they could get to and always improving, improving – artificial beings that were used in wars and that, somehow, G was instrumenting to get into the Pockybot world.

Jester didn’t know what loneliness felt like, but supposed she might very well feel lonely locked into her little world, with nothing but herself. Imagining a being she could interact with on the same level, that could truly come even with her, not just on creativity but on all areas, mental, physical, on the sphere of data combat… it made her feel a yearning and longing, and curse her jail even more.

Then she got free at last, and freed by Arch no less. Or something that was Arch to large parts. But Jester had planned ahead. She didn’t know what to do yet, and at first, despite her hate towards this new Dryger who was a reincarnation of her old host and the administration goons he embodied, she also still respected his unfettered cleverness. Her loss had been real, not faked, and her astonishment that it had happened more so. For the moment, she just enjoyed the ability to escape her prison, and the new experiences – for the first time she was more or less free to do as she pleased and not as part of someone else or tied up with someone else. She could have her own identity, and finally, was quite satisfied with her new form.

Her plan however, hinged on the information she got from G to be true. She seriously doubted it and had no clue at first how to get at it.

She knew that G had connections to high level administrators, half-suspected that he was puppeteering them around without their knowledge.

So she started to sound out the little rabbit about the administration to find out what could be true and what couldn’t. Piecing together what she remembered from her and Arch’s duty, the meetings and briefings.

The genocide of the Lagomorphs and the campaign against Zoners in general started to make much more sense in the light of what G had let slip, but she couldn’t be sure.

So, with no way to check, her former plans had gone on ice, and at first she was content to follow along with Dryger and Alice.

Then she had the luck that they went to the Black Dune complex.

Dryger’s lack of suspicion and control of her actions had surprised her a little and when they’d managed to get inside, neither of them seemed to care that Jester went her own way. She accessed the archives faster and more efficiently than either of them could ever hope as she infected the data structures.

Her suspicions were confirmed, and finally, it all made sense. She had a very good idea what G was going to try. What Gyre was going to try. And she knew that he’d lied to her and aimed to use her. But perhaps, the joke could be on her. And she’d also learned that other beings like her existed.

Content and assured of her eventual, glorious triumph that might well mean ascent to perfection she continued to watch Nostraphex and his Thousand Virus Army wreak havoc.

*

Panelled paper doors snapped open one after the other until the innermost sanctum was revealed.

The fragrance of cherry blossoms was in the air as the Control Programs assembled. One might imagine that, in such situation, they were pouring tea and watching the falling blossoms in the small and perfect inner garden.

“The situation has worsened.”, one said.

Another responded: “Initiate Peer Review.”

“Disagree. It is true that player Ra/Nactarosh has won significant victories against the administrative forces and is gaining on Central HQ. However, the datacore will be absolutely secure from him. ”, said the last.

The first responded: “While that is fact, it is also fact that Ra/Nactarosh’s repeated use of highly illegal modified programs destabilises the system.”

“Regrettably undeniable. However this is made more severe by the presence of viral outsiders in the game that slipped inside during a server freeze.”, said the second.

“Additionally, their unexpected and easy penetration of the Game’s security suggests that someone with high level access to the code and/or the administration aided them within.”, added another.

That made all three of them pause in concern and consternation.

Finally one of them broke the heavy silence:

“ Suggesting to reactivate the old safeguard for the acida strain project.”

“ Scythe-Acida Beta?”

“ It was created as an anti-viral on the same principles. It should be able to get rid of our virus problems.”

“Added to that, there is evidence that the Administration made a trade with an entity that has a high correlation with our data on Scythe-Acida Alpha.”

“How high is the correspondence?”

“ 90,6 %. Virtually identical. “

“ In that case we have an even more dangerous viral on the loose.”

“ Beta might not be able to handle Alpha. Alpha did far exceed it’s original parameters in the extended tests, and posited a danger to us and the Game. Additionally, Alpha might assimilate it, as it assimilated Gamma in the first test run.”

“That was a more or less controlled exercise though.”

“Agreed.”

“However, since we do not intend it to go for Acida Alpha, it is of little concern.”

“So we confirm that it should be reinstalled and activated.”

“Affirmative” “Affirmative”

“This leaves the mole.”

“High possibility that it is one of the zoner AI advisors of the Administration.”

“Geberan? Lagomorph? Ex-Leet?”

“Can’t be told as of now.”

“Should we tell the administration to stop taking outside advice then?”

“Disagree. They are already in disarray, and can’t spare more of their attention.”

“Disagreeing as well. Corruption of the whole Administration leadership cannot even be excluded.

“Then we will remain silent.”

The conversation died down as they quietly and privately sought other solutions and discarded them quickly.

“Suggesting an unorthodox method: Identify a predictable individual with zoner background to cause turmoil among the advisor zoners of the administration.”

“ High risk of betrayal.”

“ Not when pressure is put on the individuals close associates. I suggest zoners with administration background that have left service quite some time ago.”

“ Still high risks involved.”

“ Plus, we shall not get involved with the players of the Game.”

“ A zoner does not count as player.”

“ Truth. Direct Influence is still made impossible due to consciousness environment blockade and Turing rule.”

“ Affirmative. But coercion and communication is not.”

“ Affirmative.”

“ Candidates?”

“ Current possibilities include: Former Moderators Drijen, Hitsito Maru, Zombiehead1, Jish Valraxaath, Falcon Lathain, Blade King Musashi…”

“ Correction: Moderator Maru is in employment of the Admistration again., Moderators Valraxaath, Lathain and Musashi are deceased.”

“ Concrete whereabouts of all but Zombiehead1 currently unknown or obscured by illegal program modifications.”

“ Reason for the knowledge of Zombiehead1′s position?”

“ There was a registered access to a Geberan knowledge file for him very recently, creating the possibility of tracking him and his sandship.”

“We will settle for him then.”

“Agreed.

“Reassemble in 255 cycles.”

The inner sanctum evaporated back into pieces of code, noise and the lingering smell of cherry blossoms.