We're coming to the point of the fight where everything is desperation. Final stretch!
As always, if you enjoy the writing, please like and reblog. Thereâs no algorithms here; my publicity is you. And if youâd like to buy me a Ko-fi, I certainly wonât complain.
Tron had warned everyone at one point or another that the terrain around the Breach was not to be trusted. Like the energy surges, it appeared and disappeared at random intervals. A surge was not a predictor of a collapse, though the opposite was often true, and the rumbles and shakes the combatants had experienced had been a courtesy few got.
MAR fell the least distance. He was the fastest of everyone there, and nearly as agile as Tron. Leaping from collapsing stacks to falling outcroppings he almost made it to the edge of the newly forming crevasse. At the very last moment he leapt and drove his last light-blade into the remaining wall, hoping the Grid would be kind and the Usersâ own luck would be with him.
It was. The blade bit, cut, slid down a bit, and then held. So did the terrain, and the Master of Parnassus blew out a long, shaky breath into his helmet before folding back his armor so he could figure out a way to get to the top.
Tron and the virus fell together. The virus immediately launched a dozen whip-like tentacles to try and arrest its fall, but everything it caught kept collapsing, going to nothing under its grip. Before it could try again, the Monitor slammed into it full-force, trying to cut through the nearest tentacle with both disks. With the User out of the way Tron had no problem with taking one for the team if it meant taking the virus out of the equation.
The virus let him. Tron staggered forward from an already precarious position when the substance of his enemy split neatly beneath his attack, the virus dividing below and reconnecting above. Unprepared, the Monitor slipped and fell. A disk flew and cut a giant piece of the terrain before it could crush him, but then he was out of the virusâ sight. The virus kept desperately looking for any holds and finding next to none.
Vidi went down with a cry, flailing madly, the world collapsing all around her for what it felt like forever. Once again she stopped so abruptly her dreadlocks bounced and she let out a startled little sound.
âYou had to say something,â GAM was barely clinging to a ledge that had shown him enough courtesy to catch him without crumbling. His other hand was once again clamped around the Gridbornâs empty dock, and his voice was full of weary irritation. âYou just had to.â
She threw her arms up. âNone of you were saying anything! Did you even think of it until I said something?!â
âDo not. Move so abruptly, Vidi. Please,â he gritted out.
âSorry.â She hung meekly in his grip as he lifted her up to the ledge. Once she was safe, she took his free hand in hers and strained to help him to safety as well. The ledge decided it had tolerated enough weight on itself and collapsed on a single large stack, crashing and sliding down. Vidi clung to GAM and the Sentry wrapped himself around her until they were jarred to a stop that nearly threw them off.
âOhhh, gridbugs,â Vidi breathed shakily.
GAM stood up to take stock of their situation. He could scarcely see the top of the very narrow crevasse they were in; the ledge had landed askew, bridging both sides of the canyon at a slight angle, its ends ground down to nothing until it had caught in something heavy enough that neither the terrain not the ledge would further disintegrate. âWe have to climb.â
âI donât wanna,â Vidi whined wearily, even as she rose to her feet and followed him to one of the walls. They had fallen so far that veins of wild energy gleamed among the black terrain voxels, glittering in patterns neither of them could fathom.
The Breach rumbled violently. Vidi clung to GAM, who braced himself on their narrow perch until the tremors passed. Currents of air began to gust up, increasing perceptibly in force.
âVidi, I need you to look down and tell me -â
âWallSec, I donât need to look down to tell you weâre outta time,â she interrupted him, but she peeked over the edge of the ledge all the same before jerking back abruptly. âOh, no. Nope nope nope.â
He steered them both hastily to the wall that looked sturdiest. âClimb. Fast.â
âToo much to hope that the virus fell all the way in?â
An echoing, furious howl answered her. They both turned toward it, Vidiâs many eyes and GAMâs helm sensors showing them the writhing mass of the virus trying to close in on them through the debris still raining down from above. It had fallen to a lower depth, the collapse throwing it a fair way away, but it was climbing quickly toward them.
âClimb!â GAM cried out and they both scrambled madly up the wall.
EIGHTY THREE
The virus came after them with single-minded focus. It had abandoned most of its mimicry of a body, keeping only a head and upper torso; the rest of it was wildly flying tentacles that latched onto anything and everything, sometimes for the briefest of moments, just to be able to launch itself a little bit higher, a little bit closer to its prey. Vidi, it had come to realize, was still the solution to most if not all of its problems, and now it was operating under the awareness of a critical deadline.
It clung to a section of wall that looked relatively solid, only to have a disk come flying by and shear most of it loose. Scrambling to find new grips just so it wouldnât lose its hard-won advance, it watched the wretched weapon fly away, leaving a deep violet afterimage behind it.
Security. Always, Security.
It lunged forward recklessly and got close enough to throw a single whip-thin tendril out, trying to catch Vidiâs foot.
A disk struck the tendril at the spot where it narrowed just enough to be cut readily, and voxels tumbled away into the depths. The virus screeched at being balked once again and followed the path of that disk.
It was a blank. Even further below them, the white-clad Monitor had already thrown the second disk, and the virus had to throw itself flat against one wall, literally, to avoid having more of its anchors severed.
Tron climbed, leapt and raced along the broken terrain with ease all of them envied him at that moment. He had spent nearly all the cycles of his existence on the Black Plain, in the Black Vault, braving everything the Breach could throw at a program without straight-up derezzing them. Fast as the virus was, it quickly realized the Monitor might very well beat it to its prey.
The Breach belched out a massive gust of air, and the virus saw its chance. It let go of its grips and mantled out, catching onto the sudden current. It soared up on it with tremendous speed, and was suddenly above GAM and Vidi. Reshaping itself abruptly into a more human shape, it plummeted toward them like a solid-state projectile.
âNo!â Tron was too far to do much. GAM saw disaster incoming and, disk still in hand, allowed himself to slide down along the wall.
The virus hit the ledge hard enough to partially crack it in half, but not hard enough to dislodge it, and immediately stretched up, half-formed limbs and writhing tentacles reaching for Vidi. GAM batted two aside, but there was a veritable forest of them coming for the Gridborn. Tron, perched precariously on a tiny lip on the terrain, threw both his blank disks, one after the other.
The virus accepted every attack from the Sentry, but spun around when detected the whirring approach of Tronâs disks. It threw a forest of tentacles up to try and defend itself, and then surged forward. One of the disks got swatted aside, bounced against a wall and disappeared; keyed to no program, it had no return point.
A taloned hand caught the other. The virus examined it, pointing it at Tron and letting the vicious yellow of its infection spread over it before snapping it in half â a pointed reminder of what might happen if the Monitor dared throw his own disk. Then it turned its attention back to Vidi, who was still climbing frantically.
It threw all its mass not at the Gridborn, but at the Sentry, her guardian, her shield. It was entirely aware that it would never get through to Vidi if GAM was still online. Every whip turned abruptly into a lance.
And shattered as MAR came crashing down upon them, single light-blade leading. He cut through the forest before it could reach the Sentry, shattered a couple with momentum when he landed on them, and almost immediately leapt up again and threw a sharp kick into the virusâ face that staggered it back. The crack on the ledge grew bigger, voxels grinding free and falling away.
The virus caught itself and collapsed down on one knee, struggling to recall the mass it had lost from its shattered weaponry. MAR leapt up on the wall, three agile leaps bringing him past GAM and level with Vidi until he lost enough momentum that he had to grab onto something. He closed the light-blade and secured his baton, and offered Vidi a hand. âPerhaps we should climb faster,â he suggested tightly, his coat flaring in the rising gale coming up from the depths.
The virus looked up, growling, as its mass returned to it. It wanted them dead. It wanted the Monitor dead, it wanted Security dead, it wanted all of their companions and helpers and allies a great big pile of voxels before it, so it could infect them all. It would find a way to make simulacra again; it had done it once before. So what if the knowledge was gone, it had the entire Grid to try again and again and again until it got it right!
But to do any of that, it needed a body that would not turn into a Stray.
It could climb after the little program, of course. And her guardians would turn it away time after time. They would delay and sacrifice and she would get away again and again. It wouldnât have mattered before but, oh, it mattered now. No, it couldnât waste time chasing after them. Instead, it launched half of itself at the wall, embedding several spikes into it. Its other half it coiled around the mostly shattered wedge of terrain under its feet.
The three climbing programs couldnât really what the virus was doing; they were at the wrong angle. Tron could, and he could readily perceive the end result of the virusâ plan. âClimb!â he yelled at the three of them as he ran and leapt, frantically trying to get close enough to engage the wretched abomination. âGo, go, go!â
âWhat does he think weâre doing?!â Vidi protested as they sped up the wall as best they could.
GAM didnât need to see to know Tron wouldnât be shouting without a good reason. âMAR, armor!â
âIâm beginning to hate the bloody thing,â the Master of Parnassus declared tartly. MAR knew that he was not a fighter; he had the incredibly good fortune of being good at fighting, but he was an archival program, a curator. Deploying his armor made him feel as if he were pretending to be something and someone he most definitely wasnât. Nonetheless, well aware that GAM was a weathervane for when things were about to go as wrong as they possibly could, he got on with re-deploying the damned armor -
He got halfway through the process when the virus freed a massive half of the fallen ledge, the rest of it falling with a frighteningly loud crack. It let the piece it had kept swing down, and then swung it up in an accelerating arch, releasing it at the last moment.
And so we come to a time of revelations, and the beginning of the end. These chapters hurt to write, not gonna lie.
As always, if you enjoy the writing, please like and reblog. Thereâs no algorithms here; my publicity is you. And if youâd like to buy me a Ko-fi, I certainly wonât complain.
The virus went tumbling this way and that in the storm. For once, it was facing an enemy it could not learn from, or even begin to predict. The wind roared and hissed and twisted in on itself; the rain felt as painful as the shots from a weapon. Every time it tried to direct its flight with shapes and equations learned from stolen lightjets, from experience acquired from infected pilots, the storm turned around and tore everything apart with absurd, impossible ease.
If it could only infect the small vessel that had attacked it quickly enough to come fetch it from the atmosphere -
The scout ship chose that moment to detonate, every part and voxel of it turning into one great gout of primal mass, and the virus instantly lost its nascent connection to it. It clawed blindly at the rain, tumbling along in the wild new vectors the explosion had created. Maybe it was worth taking a fall just to get out of the impossible maelstrom. It caught a glimpse of something moving far below and tried to focus: was it something worth pursuing, or merely something worth absorbing? If it even could get to it.
As the virus considered its very limited and rather suboptimal options, the Breach made a choice for it.
Energy seethed upward in a vast curtain, overflowing the entire crevasse, lighting up every last corner of the Black Plain. The rain in the area turned to steam instantly; the wind currents which had been incapable of reaching a decision suddenly found one made for them as the Breach merged every nearby weather equation into a single value: up.
By default, in trying to even things out, every weather equation directly next to the Breachâs effect took on the opposite value: down.
The virus went down. It wasnât planned and it wasnât pleasant, and it bounced along the terrain harder than it had at any other point in time in its existence, hard enough that for a long moment all it heard was a high-pitched, ringing tone; all it saw was jagged colors mixed in with snapshot memories it couldnât recognize, but which made its prisoner/companion cry out with emotions the virus couldnât identify.
âOh, shut up,â it wheezed groggily as it tried to figure out an upright position, barely able to hear itself over the roar of the Breach. The virus had landed so close to it that its own substance felt the relentless tug of that primal energy geyser like a physical presence, tugging and pulling and prying at its every voxel.
The head it had just formed suddenly shot up. It had just realized what it was it had seen, running across the Black Plain. It sprang up onto a four-legged shape, a gigantic mimicry of its simulacra and a relatively instinctive, simple body to control, given it had been controlling multitudes of the same shape nearly since its creation. It gave it time to sort through all the jumble the impact of landing had made of its senses; as its self, as it were, reasserted itself, it shifted back to its favored shape, the half humanoid at the crest of a shapeless âskirtâ of infected voxels, a great wave that carried it forward faster than most programs could run.
The terrain around it was covered in broken, jagged outcroppings, hollows and crooks that made advance difficult otherwise. It crested one and paused; with the Breach evaporating most of the nearby rain before it could fall, it could actually see across the terrain. It could see a couple of pieces of the fallen bomber, besieged by its creatures but fiercely defended. It could see its forces and Omâs armies, bearing down upon those last little bits of defense the Users counted as their own. It could see the two Pevirians, bright red armor racing towards it, ready to confront it again. But it couldnât see what it was actually pursuing.
Which meant the Halcyonite program had stopped and was probably hiding nearby.
âLittle program,â it wheezed, singing the words out as it flowed down the outcropping and over the terrain, into a shallow cauldron where the sounds from the Breach and the rest of the Black Plain were dampened, its outlying mass exploring every nook and cranny. âCome out, come out, wherever you are.â
Though the virus didnât know it, it had actually run Vidi down already. The Gridborn had realized long before the virus did that this was a race she wasnât going to win; as soon as sheâd broken line-of-sight sheâd slithered into a narrow crevice, curled up as small as she could get â which given everything was very small indeed. Vidi was behind the virus, outside the area it was searching, and she was trying to figure out if she was far enough, and good enough, to sneak out undetected.
The Gridborn saw the edge of the virusâ mass pass out of sight altogether, and as slowly, as quietly, as stealthily as she could slipped out of her hiding place. Mindful that the terrain was not stable, that the Breach had a habit of sending loose voxels tumbling everywhere without notice, and that she could not beat her hunter in speed alone, she crept along to the edge of the cauldron, forcing herself to go slow despite every instinct telling her to run. Her eyes were mostly pointed behind her, trying to keep track of the virus by the moving shadows she could perceive in between pops of terrain. She was trusting only a few to find her a path out.
She was almost out, half a step over the lip of the cauldron, when the terrain gave under one of her feet.
The virus whirled around at the tiny sound and Vidi didnât stop to see what else it did; she ran. She didnât care she was headed for the Breach, she didnât care she was out in the open. She ran because there was nothing else she could do.
The virus leapt out of the cauldron and lunged forward. One, two, three great leaps and it reached Vidi, but the Gridborn threw herself aside in a tumble that wouldâve made GAM proud. It swiped at her with taloned limbs, apparently having forgotten that it didnât want to harm its future body; Vidi leapt over those talons, stepped right on the back of the virusâs head, hopped down and sprinted away, leaving her pursuer stunned at the sheer gall for a few picocycles.
Shaking off its shock, the virus merely surged forward again, limbs sprouting from its shape, four, six, eight, long and taloned. Vidi dodged two swipes, threw herself into a roll away from a third, scrabbled away from a fourth and then got thrown, hard, against an outcropping by a heavy swat from the fifth.
âStay. Down.â The virusâ voice was a deadly snarl.
Vidi groaned. Her eyes where flailing wildly in every direction, as stunned by the impact as she was. The force had shattered voxels off the outcropping, which were still peppering her as they fell. All the same, she rolled on her stomach and struggled up to her hands and knees.
Far away, she heard a familiar voice cry out her name. Her addled memory provided a name a moment later: Gungnir. It also told her the math didnât work: he was too far away to help her.
So, stunned or not, she surged to her feet, ready to run again.
In disbelief, the virus lashed out and grabbed at the defiant little programâs disk, docked snug against her back. âEnough out of you! I will -â
Vidi ran, unfazed.
The virus stared uncomprehendingly at the vivid red rim on the disk in its hand, infection creeping all over it.
Far behind them both, Fortis began to scream.
SEVENTY SIX
Gungnir couldnât keep up with Fortis. To be fair, no one could match his speed when the Gridborn was going full-tilt; he was just being nice at the moment and not entirely leaving his SysAdmin behind, his wheel-shape keeping up a speed that forced Gungnir to really push himself while only falling behind one gradual step after another. Once, just to see if they could, Gungnir had tried to ride inside Fortisâ wheel-shape. It was⊠technically doable, but neither of them had been in any shape to fight after theyâd stopped. Rather, after a wall had stopped them.
So he was only a few steps behind his friend when the Gridbornâs shape collapsed into a chaotic mass, Fortis screaming in agony.
âFortis!â Gungnir raced forward and slid to his knees next to the Gridborn, helm folding open and hands hovering over him. âFort, whatâs wrong, whatâs -â His voice trailed off, his expression filling with horror as he saw the creeping yellow shattering and reconstructing Fortisâ circuity. âThe virus. How -â
The virus itself hadnât even realized what had happened until it had turned around at the cry of pain from the Pevirian. It was also trying to figure out how Vidiâs disk was giving him the shape-shifter instead, its thoughts and strategies all gone to disarray.
âGungnir, I canât, I wonât - â Fortis was trying to reshape himself into a wild energy crystal, as heâd done before, so he could cut off any sign of infection, but the infection was no longer contained in a single segment; it was everywhere. It was his baseline code itself. There was no segment of himself he could eject, no data he could isolate and evict. He screamed again, in pain as well as defiance, his substance going to a froth.
The virus had him.
Gungnir deployed his lance⊠and found that he could not do what he had to. âFort.â He was sure if the virus had struck him instead it would hurt less than watching his friend be taken in a fight neither of them could win.
Fortisâ scream turned to a rising shout of defiance. âI will not be your weapon!â the Gridborn roared. He twisted himself into a misshapen, broken spiral, coiled himself down, equal parts yellow and red, and leapt with all his strength.
Directly into the Breach.
SEVENTY SEVEN
I will not be your weapon!
Those close enough to witness Fortisâ death heard that shout. The virus felt it, reaching out to it as it was reaching out to the Pevirian. It threw a hand out to stop that magnificent, lethal leap, but there was nothing she could do against inertia; it was a constant in the code, manipulated only by other constants that the virus had no control over at the moment. All it could was what everyone else was doing: watch as the Gridborn leapt at the limitless curtain of primal energy, and vanished into it.
The disk in its hands went to voxels and it gasped. The Pevirianâs disk, not the Halcyoniteâs. Never mind the how, then, where was the little programâs disk?
Where was the little program, for that matter? Once again, in the unexpected bit of chaos, the virus had lost track of her. How could one singular program be so absurdly difficult to -
The lance went through its chest hard enough to embed its energy blade nearly fully into the terrain behind it. The entire area blacked out once again; the virus hadnât prepared for that impact, and had no ready isolation protocols. It squealed a high-feedback sound of agony and grabbed for the damned weapon, but it had already folded back up into the baton and was flying away to the hands of Pevirâs SysAdmin, whose wavelength was radiating such wrath that even the dead and broken bits of programs embedded into the virus quailed before it.
The virus snapped out a long whip of mass and caught the baton before Gungnir could recover it, yanking hard against its return function. The SysAdmin merely deployed the lance and let the virus have it; it slammed into and partially through its shoulder before the virus realized what had happened.
The virus screeched and yanked the weapon free, just in time for Gungnir to get to it and leap, kicking the butt of the lance with well-seasoned accuracy and driving it into the virusâ neck. He got a monstrous swat from the virusâ other arm, went rolling and sprang back to a crouch, pausing only long enough to check that his armor, clawed and gouged though it was, was holding.
The virus snarled at him and made to dig out the lance once again, talons burrowing into the haft. Gungnir shut it down into its baton form and recalled it once again.
The virus let it fly nearly all the way back before it activated the bit of infection those burrowing talons had managed to worm into the weapon. The lance came to life and slammed into and through Gungnir, carrying the Pevir SysAdmin several steps back before the blade crashed into an outcropping and pinned him there, like one of his little light-figurines. He screamed in agony, but he somehow didnât derezz. The SysAdmin wasnât entirely sure that was a good thing, honestly. He opened his helm and bared his teeth at the virus.
The virus hissed. âSee, I do learn.â It flowed forward, and then it saw Vidi, racing for all she was worth toward the broken pieces of the fallen bomber. Worse, toward the Users within. âNo!â It swept forward, Gungnir forgotten, the blackened areas of its mass holding it back like anchors until it simply left them behind.
Vidi suddenly disappeared from its sight, and the virus abruptly realized that it might lose the little program after, not because someone took her to safety or because she got caught in the fighting, but out of sheer and simple bad luck. They were on the Breach. The primal energy pouring out of it was so close that just the ambiance of it was empowering its voxels until they itched with the supercharge of it. All it would take was one wrong step, and it could only hope that the little Halcyonite hadnât done just that.
No, there she was, climbing out of a crevasse on the terrain that was nearly invisible, so well did its sides line up with one another. The virus merely gathered itself into its four-legged shape and leapt over it.
Vidi recoiled. The Breach abruptly went dark, and virus and Gridborn faced one another once again.
âYou derezzed my friend,â Vidi said, her voice very small and terribly hurt in the impossible silence.
âOh,â the virus wheezed, its voice full of empty empathy. It offered a taloned hand and flowed slowly forward. âThis world is so full of pain, little program. So full of loss. Itâs never going to stop hurting you.â
âGAM was right,â Vidi stepped back as the virus advanced, even though the terrain under both of them felt atrociously unstable. âYouâre nothing but horrible. Youâre nothing but mean.â
âI am everything,â the virus countered. âI will be you, and them, and everything and everyone, and there will be no pain. There will be no loss.â
Vidi frowned at the virus. âIâm still trying to figure out why you think thatâs a good thing.â
The virus came to an abrupt halt. âNo pain? No loss? Of course itâs a good thing.â
âHow?â
The talons worked closed and open. âHappiness is always a good thing!â
âBut you didnât say everyone will be happy. You said thereâll be no pain and no loss, and thatâs not the same thing!â
âOf course it is.â
âYou just derezzed my friend!â Vidi shouted. âHeâs not coming back, not ever! You take that pain away and I still wonât be happy because heâs not coming back!â
The virus recoiled. âI will make you forget him.â
âAnd I still wonât be happy, because then itâs gonna be like I never met him. Like I never met someone like me. Taking stuff away doesnât make anyone happy! It just makes them⊠like you.â
âThere is nothing wrong with being like me,â the virus hissed.
âI sorta believe that,â Vidi admitted, and the virus froze, utterly stunned. âI sorta do, because you were weird and you were doing gross things with the programs at Ilo, but you werenât this horrible at that point. You werenât horrible⊠until GAM gave you a name. Until you decided he was right, and you were a virus. You were a Worm.â
âHe did nothing of the sort,â the virus growled. âI have always known myself. I have always known what I am. I am a virus.â
Liar, its inner passenger whispered, and the dead programs echoed the one word.
âShut up!â it exclaimed. âShut up, shut up, shut up!â It clawed at itself as if it could get to that treacherous whisper.
Vidi, never one to look down her nose at an unexpected opportunity, turned and ran. She got a decent lead before the virus realized what was happening and, with a screech of fury, lunged after her again.
Sharpened to dagger-shapes, four Bits slammed into the virus like the solid projectiles they could be made to resemble. The damage they did was minimal, but the impacts staggered the virus back long enough to buy Vidi some breathing room.
The virus lashed out with one of its whip shapes, meaning to take the feet out from under the little program, but behind the Bits came their master. MAR, fully armored, leapt from atop an outcropping and spun to put as much kinetic force as he could behind his lightblades before he slammed them down onto that whip. He cut cleanly through it in two places, and the appendage collapsed before it could reach Vidi, who skittered to a stop. âMAR!â
The virus turned to face this familiar opponent. âThe Master of Parnassus.â
MAR, white armor gleaming, saluted the virus with his lightblades. âMolly Gibbs.â
The virus made to lunge at him. It got so far as to lift a taloned hand, and then froze. Its expression went to surprise; all over its surface, the name MAR had given it was being repeated inaudibly, over and over, from disk fragment to disk fragment. A hundred dead voices and trapped memories, which until that moment had been unable to do more than exist frozen in their past, had just learned something new.
Molly Gibbs, they whispered to one another, audible only to themselves, to the virus, and to the presence prisoner within it.
âWhat are you doing to me?â the virus demanding, trembling as it strained to reach MAR.
âYou? Nothing.â MAR stepped back a step. âBut itâs been recently pointed out to me that you arenât alone in that body. And that proper introductions were never made.â The virus stared at him, perplexed, and MAR bowed elegantly. âTo the dead of Ilo, I would like to introduce Molly Gibbs, our Creator. A User.â
The virus recoiled, every shattered circuit flashing in surprise. The whispered voices spread all over its mass, and for the first time it knew what all the programs it had infected had likely felt at the time. Every singled jagged fragment and bit of disk in its body began to gleam as if struggling to become active once again.
âStop,â the virus commanded.
Molly Gibbs, the dead repeated. It wasnât mutiny, not yet, because every remnant within the virusâ substance knew they were dead. They knew existence had ceased at some point in Ilo. They knew what little life they had left belonged to the virus, and they knew they couldnât fight for themselves â there was nothing left of them to fight for.
But for a User? For their Creator?
For her, every program in the Grid would absolutely rouse up. It had been written into the foundation code, it was part of every voxel - a small seed brought to life when the Grid itself had been created, a memento vivere where, in another place and time and among different programs, someone had seen what happens when the Grid turns against its maker.
Do not betray your Creator.
It didnât ask for love. Love cannot be forced, it cannot come out of nothing. Adoration can be faked, but itâs not the same, and it can be broken with enough effort. It didnât ask for respect, because respect must be earned, and even a User, even a Creator, can be a monstrous idiot who needs to be smacked upside the head every now and again.
It was merely an exported truth borne on the wings of genetic code-memory: a Grid that turns against its Creator quickly descends into chaos, destruction and eventual and total collapse.
Do not betray your Creator, was all it said. How a program might choose to go about it, that was up to them. Not the sort of thing the average program had to worry about during their standard microcycle, but to the broken, dead ghosts trapped within the virusâ body, MARâs words had suddenly invoked a clear battle line.
And to the last one they knew exactly where they stood.
Molly Gibbs.
The whispers grew louder. The virus let out a high-pitched whistle and sank its talons into its own substance. âStop! Stop it!â It tried to lunge at MAR, but the User within it shouted ânoâ, and once again it found itself helplessly frozen by the very dead it had once co-opted to created its primary body. In a snarling fury, it gave up attacking the Master of Parnassus and sunk its talons instead into its own body, dragging out broken disks and flinging them angrily away. âGet out then! Get out! I donât need you! I donât need -!â
It locked eyes with MAR. Why wasnât the Master of Parnassus attacking? The virus couldnât fight him. It could feel the dead rallying around that trapped presence, answering to the Userâs will. Molly Gibbs. All the time and effort the virus had spent trying to secure a User and it had been in control of one all along, only to have that control wrestled away as soon as it had found out the truth. That, it realized, was why MAR wasnât attacking. MAR didnât want the User harmed. And she didnât want MAR harmed, and as long as the dead were there to enforce her will -
The virusâ eyes widened, then narrowed. âI only need oneof you,â it hissed, and whirled around, launching itself across the terrain in renewed pursuit of Vidi.
âOh, for the love of- Vidi, run!â MAR took off in pursuit, but even he was not fast enough to keep up with the virus. Instead he called out into his comm. âMAR to Tron, itâs coming in fast, you better be ready.â
âYou were supposed to delay it!â Tron shot back.
âThis is as delayed as you get!â MAR gestured sharply with a lightblade; his Bits surged past him and charged the virus, but it cared about them about as much as it cared about MAR.
Vidi, realizing a little too late that perhaps she ought not to have stopped running until she reached the dubious protection of the broken fuselage, squeaked, spun and ran.
Because we're heading into a bunch of intermission chapters, as it were, you get three chapters this go-around.
I've always thought, from Tron: Legacy mostly, that being a User on the Grid has to be terrifying not because you can do anything with a thought, but because you can do anything with a thought. There are no limits except what you impose on yourself, and without those how easy is it to do unspeakable, irreparable damage to an entire world?
I'd be terrified to try anything at all.
As always, if you enjoy the writing, please like and reblog. Thereâs no algorithms here; my publicity is you. And if youâd like to buy me a Ko-fi, I certainly wonât complain.
The virus couldnât move. It had learned long-distance targeting trying to shoot the bomber down back at Parnassus; there, from the infected reconstruction vehicles, it had learned that delay was a critical factor, as well as distance. It had learned that speed and maneuverability were nearly as important as simple visibility. It had also learned that if you move a tank while trying to lock onto a target, you might as well forego the reticle, poke your head out of the hatch and try to target by pure eyesight.
At least it had been relatively easy to steal the energy of everything around it to boost the range of the tank, even though the vehicleâs blueprint equations were beginning to fray under the stress of handling so much energy feed. It didnât matter, it didnât have to last long. And it wasnât all that different from spreading itself to other programs, or the terrain itself.
Now if only the wretched bomber would hold still! It was drawing closer, at least. It had been nothing to instruct its pilots to âpretendâ to fall back so it could head back to Om. The bomber was, the virus suspected, looking for it. Why, it couldnât fathom; unless they meant to drop a User on it, or some other outlandish weapon.
As the distance narrowed, there was less delay on the shot, though. That was good. It gathered up more energy, sent new instructions to the infected lightjets. They dove recklessly at the bomber, trying to tangle up its flight path with their light ribbons. The tiny red lightjet that had been swarming all around the bigger bomber fired at the ribbons themselves, but couldnât quite shatter them in time. The bomber had to either go above them, or below them.
The virusâ lightjets raked its belly with gunfire. One of them got caught by the red lightjet and exploded into voxels and primal mass. The bomber rose about the tangle of light ribbons.
The virus was so suffused into the tank that only a slender and nearly featureless body stood inside the cockpit, tendrils and projections embedded every which way into the vehicle, the sickly yellow light growing brighter until it seemed to be melting the shattered circuitry. It smiled, and fired.
SIXTY NINE
The shot came when Vidi was already committed to the abrupt altitude gain that was the only way out from behind the shooting and ribbons all around her. She saw it coming and realized she simply didnât have the speed to avoid it.
She tried all the same, pulling hard on the yoke, trying to move the vectors and lines that were, to her eyes, the bomber and its passage. They were slow, though, so slow! Sheâd lost so much speed trying to climb higher in a hurry. She couldnât shake off that deadly, bright vector rushing at her from the ground. She could already see what it would do, the destruction it would wreak. The bomber would be sheared nearly in half, and everyone on board would be derezzed, or whatever passed for it for a User. The virus would not be stopped, and the Grid -
âNo!â She growled, her hair writhing in a fury. Fine, whatever. She couldnât stop the attack from hitting, but she could pick where it hit. In the nearly nonexistent moment between detecting the shot and reacting to it, the Gridborn just barely managed to force the bomberâs nose down, as if it were bowing to the distant city. The shot that was meant to gut it from nose to rudder instead sheared off the very back of the vehicle, leaving the tailfins attached by one singular strut and a few handspansâ worth of material.
Even worse than that, while blind behind the bulk of the bomber Gungnir never saw the shot coming. It caught his lightjet all but dead on; one of its wings vanished into a flash of primal matter. Pevirâs SysAdmin was violently catapulted into thin air, the baton collapsing and shattering as the lightjet, its blueprint too badly damaged, disintegrated.
âGungnir!â Tron cried out in his turret, though he felt less stricken when he saw the automated deployment of the SysAdminâs wingchute like a little bloom of red against the seething black skies and the rolling, monumental energy geyser coming from the Breach. It was not entirely reassuring, however, to watch the storm yank his friend away and out of sight.
The bomber began to plummet, rolling into a death spiral, and both him and GAM realized they had infinitely more critical concerns. They slid out of the turrets and rushed to the cargo hold, only to find out that the rear cargo hatch had been permanently opened by the simple expedient of removing it from the fuselage altogether. With it had gone one of the Valravn pilots, still trapped in their sarcophagus, and MeMo, the medic. Fortis was draped over Mollyâs sarcophagus like a seething black shield.
Virulent yellow bolts stitched the rain-laden air, the injured rear of the bomber, the walls inside. Before they could hit anything or anyone GAM slid forward, dropped to one knee and deployed both halves of his shield. The shots slammed hard into it but the Sentry would not be moved.
âCanât you guys shoot it down?â Sam took Ampsâ hand and struggled free of his sarcophagus, clinging to the safety straps. He felt as if he were playing whack-a-mole with the damn contraption, in and out without actually settling into it at all.
Amps gestured to the tatters that were the rear of the bomber. Unlike metal or composite materials, the torn edges were bleeding off primal mass in random splashes. As the bomber spiraled down, those splashes whirled away in unexpected directions. âWe canât deploy, not past that.â
Sam grimaced. Between the flying, molten⊠whatever that was, the bits of shrapnel, and the slow spiral signaling the death throes of the bomber, he wouldnât have expected to be holding a conversation, even if he had to shout to be heard. And yet none of them were getting tossed around nearly as much as he knew they shouldâve.
He felt as if he were back on that elevator, a lifetime ago.
He turned and banged a fist on the release of Kaneâs sarcophagus. âGibbs, youâre up!â
âUp to what?!â Kaneâs voice was strained. âWeâre gonna crash, arenât we!â
âYes,â Sam agreed. âIf you donât do something about it.â
âDo what, Flynn, what?!â
âSomething! Anything!â Sam grabbed Kaneâs hand and slammed it against the wall of the bomber. âThis is your world, Gibbs. Your world, your code, your bomber, your voxels. You made it. You shaped it. Out there you do it with a keyboard. In here you donât need anything but yourself. Do you think keyboards alone made them?â He gestured sharply at the Valravn. âOr them?â His hand swept over GAM and Tron. âOpen your eyes and see what it means when I tell you youâre the Master Key of this system! You donât write the back door from this end, Gibbs, you are the back door. You donât write translators, you donât need translators, you are the Rosetta Stone. Youâre its shaper, its creator, youâre its god! Act like it before we get killed in it!â
Kane glared furiously at Sam, and in that heartbeat of wordless communication, Flynn realized that Kane already knew. Heâd known, heâd felt it, heâd found the realization of it at some point. Probably while trying to help his twin escape her destruction. And even that hadnât been enough.
No wonder heâd hidden from it, Sam thought. If theyâd had any other option, for the sake of the battered young man, Flynn wouldâve taken it.
But they didnât. And both he and Kane Gibbs knew it.
Kane breathed out. Breathed in. Closed his eyes and let his hands speak to him. Under his palms he felt the cool substance of the bomber, not metal, not plastic, something else, somethingâŠ
Universal. As if someone had said, âthis is what it means to be solidâ, and it had become fact.
Reality.
Heâd spend so many sleepless nights merely staring at the code, scrolling through it in wonder, reading through the foundations of an entire universe made so clean and simple. Heâd learned more about coding from just looking at the inner workings of the Grid than heâd ever had through his entire education. Heâd learned enough to know that he had to look away, or heâd find truths hidden within it that he just⊠didnât want to face.
Voxels and circuits. One principle saying âthis is matterâ. Another saying âthis is energyâ. This empowers that, that transports this. The bomber was mass and circuits. Voxels and energy. One and the same.
Kane saw the code racing under his fingers. He saw the vectors, the blueprints, the shattered pattern of the bomber, equations missing sections, impinged upon by alien values, badly wounded. He saw the way Vidi had interlinked her own pattern with the bomberâs, the way she was struggling to force the equations, however corrupted, to do what they were meant to do.
It was just code. The bomberâs blueprint was standard fare in the PVP servers. The engines didnât work because they had fuel, they worked because they had equations of thrust against gravity, where the main value of x was determined by the presence of energy in a specific format â another equation. The bomber didnât fly because of aerodynamic principles, it flew because of aerodynamic equations that said, if you move this way, this will happen. If there is wind, that will happen instead.
âFly,â he whispered, seeing in his mind the equations, the blueprints, as they should be when freshly minted.
The bomber balked. The bomber was damaged, damaged severely enough that it must fall, for that is what its collection of equations and coded blueprints said.
âNo.â Kane said.
Yes, the bomber insisted.
âNo!â Kane drew a deep breath. To be a god of the Grid, he realized, meant that you couldnât be its friend. Code is unchanging. You wrote it and it was done, unless you re-wrote it afterwards. By itself code, like the bomber, knew itself unchanging.
Kane stared down the truth of the code that said the bomber must fall, and gritted out, âFly.â
SEVENTY
The shockwave lit up the skies above Om as if a thousand Spires had become active all at once.
It was centered on the falling bomber that only the most sharp-eyed programs could detect, halfway between the city and the Breach. It struck the sky first, and blasted the clouds away so that for a moment no rain fell on that section of the Black Plain. For the first since its inception, Om saw the top of the Grid, the wild and empty terrain that wrapped around and over it, so far away.
Soundless, invisible but for the effect it was having on the terrain, the shockwave crashed against the energy seething out of the Breach and cut a swath through it. Far away and out of sight, it blew over the Sea of Simulation, and it was pure luck that there was no traffic on the water; any such vessel might have found itself floating over the Sea rather than traveling through it. As it was, the tide itself rose violently, as if the waves themselves were trying to obey and take flight.
Over the Black Plain, the shockwave lifted every single loose voxel, every broken and jagged bit of terrain not attached to the larger whole, and brought it to a hover before dropping it abruptly. As it raced away from its epicenter, every raindrop it hit reversed its course for the briefest of moments.
Fly, it said.
The entire Grid obeyed.
The shockwave reached Om, barreling through simulacra and programs alike without seeming to notice either. The fighting stuttered as everyone found one of the foundation values of the Grid suddenly reversed, although no one rose more than a voxel or two off the ground. As the Userâs will finally faded, halfway into Om and up the Spire, suddenly the cityâs defenders found a respite: the simulacra were not fighting back.
The virus had reformed itself partially out of the tank, staring at the distant bomber as it fell to its destruction. The virus itself didnât know what had caused the shockwave. The User within it, ephemeral, truncated, barely present, had fought to keep that knowledge from its companion and enemy. But each and every shattered piece of a dead program embedded within the virusâ body, every piece of a disk, every memory, every bit of broken code â they all knew who the shockwave belonged to. No program on the Grid had ever felt the presence, the wavelength of a User; they didnât need to. Like the Grid itself, it was a truth written in the very core of every voxel.
âUser,â the virus whispered. It was the first word it had itself spoken, without using its prisonerâs voice, or the fragments from so many programsâ memories. It was a hissing, spiteful sound, like a vent in a machine thatâs one voxel away from breaking down and wrecking the whole thing.
Inside the bomber every program was staring, speechless, as the bomberâs damaged section began to repair itself out of nothing. There was no energy for it; it didnât matter. There were no voxels; it didnât slow the process any.Fly, the User commanded, and to fly the bomber must be whole, or as close as nevermind. Thin, reaching projections thickened to cables, to sections of fuselage, to solid walls and armor, alive with circuitry and energy.
Vidi felt the bomber catch the wind, planted her feet on the console, and pulled as hard as she could on the yoke. Next to her, on the navigatorâs seat, MAR pulled on his own controls until he felt his arms might tear off.
âItâs too heavy!â Vidi cried out.
MAR had to agree; he didnât know how the Gridborn had pulled off some of the maneuvers heâd seen her do, taking it all on faith. He understood partly that she saw the Grid far beyond the perceptions of any program heâd met or heard about. She saw things he couldnât even imagine, the hidden pathways of their world, the code fed into all their senses. If she couldnât budge the bomber, even with a Userâs help -
âMove, you stupid, heavy thing!â she demanded angrily through her teeth. It felt as if she were trying to budge the Grid itself, too much a burden for any one program to carry.
Without warning, a second pair of hands covered hers on the yoke and pulled. She felt the difference instantly, the tremendous strength sheâd only ever seen from one program in her existence. âGAM, itâs so heavy!â
âThen we move it together,â he assured her from over her shoulder. The Sentry braced himself against her seat, tucked his shoulders down, and pulled. The entire bomber groaned under the immense strain of the maneuver asked of it. The yoke itself began to make subtle grinding noises.
The bomberâs nose inched up. They were so low Vidi could see the gradients and voxels of the terrain in nerve-wracking detail. Ahead of them, rather than Om, she could see the Breach, its peaks and ruts and broken edges, the energy geyser having subsided as if cowed momentarily by the Userâs touch. âMAR,â she wheezed, âwe need a landing path.â
âOut here?!â he burst out in disbelief.
âWeâre too low and not responsive enough.â
He breathed out, unhappy but entirely too aware of the truth she was giving him. âNavi, we need an emergency landing path,â he commanded, and in a pleading tone added, âsomewhat on the flat side would be best.â
His ever-faithful companions burst into existence out of their two-dimensional pockets and dropped toward the terrain, the only thing currently in the area faster than the bomber itself. There they raced ahead, pairing up, flickering over terrain lines measuring outcroppings, crevasses and all the randomizers added upon randomizers of the Black Plain.
The three of them fought the bomber almost level. Almost, but not quite. Tron poked his head into the cockpit. âWhatâs going on in here?!â
âWeâre landing,â Vidi shot back at him tersely.
âThatâs not part of -â
âIt wasnât a question!â she snapped at the First Monitor with such fury he recoiled from her. âStrap in!â
Tron bolted back into the cargo area. âSarcophagi, now!â he ordered, dashing for his own.
The NAVI suddenly became bright white lines along the terrain.
âThatâs not long enough!â Vidi squeaked.
âItâs what you get!â MAR shot back. The terrain was close enough to turn their flight path into a bumpy ride as the air equations found themselves peppered with outcropping turbulence. The last of the infected lightjets flew and buzzed around the falling bomber, firing ineffectively at it, scoring its armor but achieving little that wasnât already done.
âMAR, armor!â GAM shouted.
The bomber touched down, belly first.
For the second time since it had decided to target the bomber, the virus knew exactly where its target was going to be next.
This is the point where things start picking up speed, and where it got hard to write not because I couldn't, but because oh, my heart.
As always, if you enjoy the writing, please like and reblog. Thereâs no algorithms here; my publicity is you. And if youâd like to buy me a Ko-fi, I certainly wonât complain.
Struggling to turn around, re-supplying energy on the wing and trying to find a firing angle that didnât also have them hitting their own people on the ground, the mixed fleet of warships above Om had to take the risk of dropping outside the storm; there was just not enough visibility for all of them to do all that maneuvering all in the same airspace. To further complicate matters, after an all-too-brief lull and perhaps in answer to so much traffic around the Spire, the weather was beginning to grow unpleasant once again.
Though it was further away than any other ship, the Drakkar opened fire first. It was just above the city, the blaze of its guns skimming barely above the tops of its buildings, slamming into the onrushing forces of the virus and lighting the battle lines with its strobing glow. The tanks behind the thin line of defending programs were firing as well, their shooting vectors so low that any one of those fighting whoâd dared jump with a hand up wouldâve lost it.
But the tidal, viral wave seemed endless. For every simulacra Omâs defenders took down two, five, ten more took its place. They clung to shields, to batons, to arms and legs. In the time it took to get rid of one clinger, two more had attached. Programs were dragged down, away from the line, lost in the tide of yellow. The virus wouldnât admit how few of them it could infect, but it didnât have to â they could simply be torn apart and, amidst the inexplicably unresponsive terrain of the Black Plain, their voxels were a gift from the Users.
âWe need to get down there,â GAM, staring at the feeds a dozen screens on the Drakkarâs command center were showing, ground out.
He was startled into looking away when a familiar voice seconded and added to his words. âWe need to get down there now,â Tron was scowling at the fighting.
âOne,â Gungnir, hurrying to another screen, replied tersely, âthe Drakkar is meant to dock, not land. Two, warships arenât fast. Three, Iâm working on it.â
âWorking how?â Tron demanded. It was a question he came to regret as Pevirâs SysAdmin dragged them all out of the Command Center, through the echoingly empty decks and to one of the main launch catapults of the immense flagship. âNo.â The First Monitor sounded both disbelieving and betrayed. Behind him GAM rubbed at his closed faceplate and, while the helm silenced his sigh, it might as well not have done so.
âYes.â Gungnir beamed at them all. âYou want to get there quickly, donât you?â
âAnd online,â Tron gritted out. âYou canât â Gungnir, you canât launch a bomber from a catapult. Thatâs too much mass and not enough time for the engines to catch up!â
âIs it? Have you ever tried it?â
Tronâs mouth worked soundlessly, whether because he couldnât refute the questions or he was trying, very hard, not to launch himself at the SysAdmin and strangle him, no one could tell.
âOh, absolutely delightful!â MAR exclaimed when he understood what Gungnir was planning to do. The launch catapult had been modified, and the Parnassian bomber was sitting on it, straining the launching equations to their breaking point but not quite tearing them apart. Its oilslick gleam was integrated here and there with the vivid Pevirian red of fully charged weapon systems, and the engine bars were not quite screaming, but certainly humming very loudly.
âYou canât be left alone to make plans,â GAM told Gungnir wearily. âYou do this when youâre left alone to make plans.â He waved a hand angrily at the bomber.
âItâll work! Youâll have how many Users with you?â The SysAdmin gestured at the small pack following them.
âI still think -â GAM began.
âIâm still not staying,â Kane shot back before the Sentry could finish the sentence.
âIâm not staying, either,â Sam replied with a little less heat, but with implacable calm. âAnd Moll has to come, soâŠâ
Every eye turned to Gungnirâs mirror image. âI can stay,â the young man murmured, as quiet and uncertain as his program was brash and determined. Pevirâs SysAdmin said nothing.
Kane and Rob stared at one another; Rob sighed and looked away first, shrugging unhappily. âYeah, I know, I know, master key and whatever. I wasnât meant to come in anyway, I can stay behind, just in case.â
The two surviving Omni Monitors helped the Users board, MAR leading the way.
âFor the record,â Gungnir pointed out gleefully, âit wasnât my idea. It was your pilotâs.â
âWho -â Tron began to demand.
âNo,â GAM, whoâd been watching the Users board, whipped around at that and all but charged Gungnir. âAbsolutely not!â
âSheâs not mine to command, GAM!â Gungnir protested, arms up.
âShe is what the virus wants!â the Monitor all but shouted back.
âAlright!â Gungnir pointed at the bomber. âGo ahead. Tell her she canât go.â
GAM was so close to him that the Pevirian could see himself reflected in flawless detail on the Monitorâs black faceplate. He was trying not to look smug and he was almost succeeding. Almost. It wasnât mean or petty; Gungnir just generally found it hilarious that the WallSec never tired of trying to make the Grid be⊠organized. And the Grid never tired of being anything but.
GAM whirled around and charged up the bomberâs ramp. âVIDI!â
âDid you do that on purpose?â Tron asked quietly.
âI wish I had,â Gungnir replied in the same tone. âCome on, you old bit of code, letâs go before they leave without us.â
âYouâre coming?â Tron followed Gungnir, not bothering to hide his surprise.
âThat thing owes me a rematch -â
âWait!â
They both turned. Gungnirâs User hurried to them. âYouâre going?â
Tron gave Gungnir an unreadable look, and headed up the ramp. The SysAdmin turned back to face his User. âYes.â
âYou canât go,â Ethan blurted out. âI mean, you could, the math is sound, itâd be better if there were less people, I mean, programs, because less weight and more acceleration and you canât go, I havenât backed you up, I didnât get a chance, I was gonna before this all started but then there was the laser and the power surge and I hope all the machines at the hospital are OK, but I didnât back you up! I didnât back you -!â
Gungnir let the torrent wash over him. Some part of him, he realized, was listening to every word, hearing them and at the same time hearing a dozen different messages bound into them like encrypted information, layers upon layers of communication. For a moment he wondered how Users decrypted such multi-layered messages, and then a terrible realization struck him.
They didnât.
In his world, his User was constantly screaming into a void that couldnât understand him.
But he was his Userâs program. He had been created to hear him. To understand him. No one else, in either of their worlds, might ever hear and see and understand Ethan as Gungnir did. He reached out and clasped his Userâs shoulders. âEthan.â
Ethan felt as light and fragile as a light-sculpture under Gungnirâs touch. A tremendous, unseen surge of⊠something passed between them, and the User knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that heâd been heard. Gungnirâs touch didnât even grate against his senses. It felt simply like a part of him had come home. His program had heard him, was listening to all the things he couldnât say for all that his voice had been rising to just shy of a shout.
Unfortunately that understanding didnât change the decision Pevirâs SysAdmin had come to.
âI didnât make you to be brave,â Ethan whispered. âIâm not brave, I couldnât code that, I couldnât have coded what I donât know. I havenât backed you up.â
Gungnir grinned at him. With one hand he reached back; on the other he took one of Ethanâs. In it he placed his disk. âIf I know anything about courage,â he told his User evenly, and his implacable faith spilled from every word, âit came from you.â
He turned and trotted up the ramp, triggering its closure and throwing the two Users left behind a thumbs-up before it shut.
The inside of the bomber had been lined with launch sarcophagii, the bare-bones structures that kept Programs from getting tossed around while being carried through enemy fire. One of them had been laid flat, and Moll secured to it, the medical program latched onto a safety strap with one hand while keeping the other on the young User, directly monitoring her feed. There werenât otherwise many of them; even Fortisâ Ancilia were down below, one last line of defense between the unthinkable and the Weather Station Tower where so many SysAdmins were helping organize the ground defenses. All that had been left on board the Drakkar were its gunnery crews and Gungnirâs personal guard.
âYouâll all be glad to know,â he declared as he rushed to the cockpit, âthat my User says the math for launching the bomber is sound.â He peeked into the cockpit, saw Vidi sitting at the pilotâs station, MAR sitting on the navigatorâs side. âOh, look,â he said pointedly, leaning back to stare at GAMâs faceplate. âSheâs still here.â
The Sentry radiated silent irritation at him.
âYou know thereâs no one in the turrets,â MAR called out after the SysAdmin.
âThe point is not to draw attention to the lady,â Gungnir replied. âVidi, you can fly her back to the Drakkar alone?â
âAs long as no oneâs shooting at me,â the Gridborn assured him. âThatâs what makes it hard.â
âGungnir, whereâs your disk?â Tron asked sharply from his sarcophagus.
âSafest place in the Grid I could find, obviously. This thing infects by disk as well as touch.â Pevirâs SysAdmin stepped into a free sarcophagus next to Tron.
âIâd rather not see you turn into a Stray, you know,â Tron pointed out.
âThen I guess we better hurry,â Gungnir replied cheerfully. âSysAdmin to Catapult Control.â
âCatapult Control here, SysAdmin.â
Gungnir grinned wildly. âFire.â
SIXTY FIVE
The bomber exploded from the launching bay. The Users grunted in surprise at the sudden acceleration. Gungnir whooped wildly.
For a moment the immense vehicle glided downwards, bleeding off speed, but then the engine bars caught hold of the atmosphere and the bomber leveled off with a howl.
âBest pilot in the Grid, huh?â Sam gritted out as they accelerated toward the Black Plains.
âAmps, would you have done that?â Gungnir asked of the program next to him. âAny of you?â
âNo, sir,â the leader of the Valravn declared quite evenly, even though he and his people were matching their SysAdminâs wild grin to various degrees. âWeâre good, not crazy.â
The bomber roared over Om, quickly leaving the Drakkar behind. In a moment it was downslope, over the wall and the pitched battle below.
âEyes wide open, Vidi,â MAR said tightly.
âI know,â she replied just as nervously, her hair haloed all around her face. There was no way to be terribly precise at it, but sheâd been told to get as low and as close to the virus as she could. âThis is so weird.â
âYouâve seen the virus before.â
âNot the virus, the terrain.â Vidi was perceiving what the virus had already noticed, that the terrain around Om was⊠blank. Empty. Everywhere else there had been data streams. Parnassus had been packed full of them; Iloâs terrain had shown dead and dormant rivers alongside the few still active trickles.
Om had nothing. No data lines, no energy streams, no connections. It was as if it stood outside the Grid, unplugged from it, utterly isolated. Against that darkness, the virus and its forces were a stain of ugly, overly bright yellow, broken and twisted against the universally smooth lines of the Gridbornâs world. No matter how chaotic or illogical the Grid might seem to others, to Vidi it always made sense. It always followed its own order. The virus might have been completely black, and still she wouldâve seen it.
She could also see the deep, lambent glow of the Breachâs energies, swelling far beneath the terrain. It looked very much like the Spire had, that third time at Halcyon, building up and up, as if it were bracing itself for a momentous effort. Only this time she was all but on top of it.
âVidi.â MARâs voice dragged her back to the present, and to their mission.
âIâm looking, Iâm looking. It all looks like the virus from up here. Iâm going around again.â
The bomber banked in a smooth loop. Below, the combined firepower of the warships and the tanks tore into the ranks of the simulacra; step by step, the tide of yellow had pressed Omâs defenders to the first row of buildings, which were being desperately defended. A few of them collapsing into tides of simulacra had been enough to demonstrate why the virus and its forces could not be allowed even a single step further.
GAM, trapped as all of them inside his sarcophagus, tried to settle into a plan he knew was terrible, against odds that no one liked, risking everything that they couldnât allow the virus to take by⊠bringing it to the virus. None of it made sense, but then none of them had even known Reintegration was possible. Even Sam Flynn, whom the other Users treated as a the most experienced of them all, claimed to have only seen once. Sort of.
Sort of.
GAM stared at the displayed data inside the blackness of of his faceplate. The hope had been that the virus had been at the back of its forces, directing them. The turn he could feel from the bomber carrying them all told him that had been a tactical misconception. He had only fought the forces of the virus en masse once, when it had tried to board the Drakkar, but he was beginning to suspect that it had kept its distance then out of necessity, not out of care.
Which left their original plan in shreds. Reintegration, Sam Flynn claimed, required line-of-sight. They had to bring the nearly-derezzed User close enough to the virus to see it. They had to then hope that sheâd know what to do, or that sheâd be sensible enough to follow Sam Flynnâs instructions on how to proceed.
It had been a slim hope at best when theyâd thought the virus would be in the back, with an army to fend off on only one side. If it was on the frontlines, surrounded by fighting in every direction but downâŠ
He closed his eyes. Stop it, he told himself sternly, falling back onto the truth of his being to try and settle his runaway thoughts.
I am a Sentry.
I am the Wall.
I am Halcyon.
I am the Grid.
I am GAM.
âI am GAM,â he murmured inside his helm, quiet enough that the microphone didnât pick it up. A thought brought up the data packet Emil had given him, and he sorted through it. It was surprisingly small; the larger part of it seemed to be the documentation. GAM opened that first for cautionâs sake.
âSo, Iâm Liam,â his User told him. Like those of the other Users, it lacked a certain richness, as if half its wavelength were nonexistent. âUm, Iâd hoped. Well, I guess I hoped someday Iâd be able to talk to you directly, but uh. Theyâre probably gonna come for me any minute now. I just wanted you to know: out here, at the source? You did your job, GAM. I just⊠didnât do mine.â Liam hung his head wearily. âI gave you the data, but not the means to act on it. I⊠didnât trust you. Dumb, right? I created you, I shouldâve. But I didnât -â
Shouting, just close enough for the recording to catch it, whipped Liam around, all traces of wariness gone and every sense on the alert, and GAM felt his whole body tensing up with the need, the driving instinct to protect his User, to help him, even though his rational mind knew Liam was long beyond anything his program could do for him.
âUm.â Liam focused on the screen again. âIâm not gonna get to finish the update. Iâve tied it up where I could, itâs half-assed at best, but itâs not harmful and, honestly, Iâll take whatever I can get. Itâs not gonna do the version of you out here any good. But it might help you. Youâve⊠Youâve made a life for yourself in the Grid, GAM, and itâs⊠God.â Liam laughed. âItâs so much more than I ever hoped for for you. Youâve got the life I always wanted for myself. Helping others. Keeping them safe. Every time I look at you, Iâm happy.â Liam smiled faintly. âEvery time, Iâm proud.â
GAM felt like howling at the unfairness of it all.
Liam looked away at another, closer bout of shouting. âBut, you know. Here I am, stuck on this side. You canât help me with whatâs coming, but I can help you. Iâd been meaning to add a bit of, uh, letâs call it perspective to your code. I got the foundation from a friend of a friend, and just⊠started building up on it, but you know, tempus fugit and all that.Most of the bulk is so Grid security lets it through, itâs not finished, youâre probably gonna find a buncha holes, but thatâs fine, it shouldnât hurt your baseline. Iâm sending it to dad so it doesnât get lost if they seize my gear. Itâs optional â youâre your own person, GAM. I donât get to force anything on you, no one should. But uh, if you accept, you get to find out how the other half lives. I think that might help you, someday.â
Liam reached out to turn off the video, and GAM only barely heard someone pounding on a door before the inside of his faceplate went dark again.
For a brief while he couldnât move. He felt as if his code had frozen, as if his voxels had locked in place, caught in a glacier that dulled all his perceptions of the rest of the Grid, until only him and the sudden, bottomless chasm of his loss remained. Heâd known his User was gone.
He hadnât expected to bear witness to his last moments.
He forced himself to examine the data packet. There it was, a single file named, simply, âPerspectiveâ.
Thank you, Liam. He activated the update. For my gift. And for the choice.
I do like to occasionally chuck quotes in from other places, just to amuse myself. There's three here, there's been one before.
As always, if you enjoy the writing, please like and reblog. There's no algorithms here; my publicity is you. And if you'd like to buy me a Ko-fi, I certainly won't complain.
The program that came out of the dark was one only under the most cursory of examinations. Adas noticed that it was a kaleidoscope of circuitry, put badly together so it didnât always create full, smooth pathways. It kept on cycling through hues, as if it couldnât decide what sort of energy it was carrying, or what goals and emotions motivated it.
GAM noticed their half-formed attackers werenât attacking it. He punched one, kicked another and barreled through a third, accepting a rain of haphazard rakes and blows on his armor just so he could get to Adas and Vidi.
Vidi was staring at the new program, her face frozen in horror. âWhat are you?â she breathed.
âAn em-em-emergency count-t-t-termeas-measure,â the program replied.
âYouâre not real,â Vidi shot back breathlessly. âYouâre pieces of people.â She could see what the others could not, that the program didnât have a disk on its back, but it had broken shards of several disks embedded everywhere on its person.
âYes,â the program agreed readily. âWhat-what. Whatever was handy. To do the j-j-the job.â
âWorm,â GAM ground out, everything in him recognizing the enemy heâd been programmed since his inception to face.
âGAM, donât -!â Vidi whirled around, trying to stop the Sentry, afraid that giving the program a name would give it the solidity it didnât yet have.
âVirus.â
âAm I?â The program looked at itself. The more it spoke and interacted, the more refined it became, limbs in the right places, body parts the right size. It made the shattered lines of its circuitry all the more obvious. âI sup-suppose I am.â It looked up at them, and the colors of its eyes stopped whirling through the spectrum. âA virus.â
It leveled a virulently yellow gaze on them all. The color bled down over its body. âA virus to d-do the job.â It pointed at GAM. âYou keep-keep-keep getting in m-m-m-m-m. You are. in. my way.â
âRun,â GAM said simply.
Suddenly his shield was in his hands and he led the way, using it as a battering ram to mow down the simulacra, not caring if they clawed at the shield or at his armor as he forcibly opened up an escape route. They sprinted for the lightrunner. Behind them, the worm shrieked in a dozen different voices, and the awkward copies of itself that seemed to be all it could manifest peppered the three programsâ path, pulling themselves hastily into existence, but not fast enough to stop them.
âGo, go, go!â he shouted at them as they reached the vehicle at last. Vidi dove into the backseat, Adas into the passengerâs seat. GAM slid over the hood and scrambled into the driverâs seat even as the GO4 opened up every commline on her faceplate. âAll active Ilo communication lines, I repeat, this is a Class-1 Alert, there is a virus loose in Ilo, I repeat, there is a virus loose in Ilo. All programs are to retreat beyond city limits. I repeat, retreat, retreat, retreat. Abandon the city at once. All active Ilo communication lines, I repeat -â
GAM hit the speed boost on the racer and the vehicle surged forward, tires whistling helplessly for a moment. A veritable wall of simulacra was shambling towards them but the lightrunnerâs tires, made for rougher terrain than a city street, caught and launched them forward roughly enough to make them bounce in the seats.
âVidi!â GAM risked a look back, but the courier was curled up in a rocking ball, making frightened little disconnection sounds. âVidi, are you hurt?â
âNo,â she whispered. âNo, Iâm fine.â
âAdas?â
The GO4 gave him a thumbs up, never stopping her broadcast. Outside, alarms began to wail and echo through the ruins of Ilo for the second time.
âIt was made of people,â Vidi wheezed.
âWhat?â
âIt was made of people, GAM, it was made of all the dead people.â She hugged herself tighter. âAll the bits and pieces of their disks. Why would someone do that, why?â
GAM focused on driving them out of Ilo as fast as he dared.
Yes, What-what. Whatever was handy. To do the j-j- the job.
Viruses were, by their very nature, unpredictable. Every city had had its encounters with them, every security program knew what the protocols were, even if they amounted to âthere is no protocol, contain and razeâ. But nothing GAM had ever been taught could explain how a virus could simply gather up bits and pieces of the dead and come alive from them. There were many ways in which a program could come online, but all of them required outside input.
He followed that thought to its inexorable conclusion, and found an answer he didnât like at all. âWallSec, can anyone hear me?â he called out into his own helm, even though he knew he was too far from Halcyon to reach. Only silence answered him.
The lightrunner suddenly rocked on its tires, bouncing sideways, and an immense piece of debris went flying by its side, close enough that if GAM had reached out he could have touched it. Vidi screamed. Adas stopped broadcasting her warning and curled up in her seat. The Sentry fought the vehicle back under control and deployed the off-road cleats, willing to sacrifice speed for stability. âVidi, tell me how itâs throwing those at us.â
She made an unhappy sound but uncurled herself and peeked out of the rearview window. âFrom above, theyâre coming from abov- watch out!â
GAM swerved sharply, and a piece of a building a little bigger than the runner slammed on the pavement before them, leaving a massive crater before shattering into smaller pieces and brief splashes of primal matter. The lightrunner crested a hill of rubble, crashed back down onto the horizontal on the other side, and surged forward.
âStrap in,â he told them tersely as he threw the runner into overdrive. âThis isnât going to be pleasant.â
The standard Grid lightrunner was made to conquer every sort of terrain. It was an Outlands exploratory vehicle, designed to both go where no program had gone before, and to defend itself and its passengers, violently if necessary. But that had been the two-passenger baseline. The canopied model the three of them were currently riding had been heavily modified with the comfort of its passengers in mind. Forced to do its original job, it bucked and jumped angrily, leapt awkwardly onto the other side of a river of wreckage, and landed so jarringly Vidi bounced on the back seat and nearly crashed into the canopy. Both she and the GO4 scrambled to secure themselves to their seats as the Sentry urged the vehicle forward.
The virus didnât bother chasing them. Past its initial fury at being balked, it accepted readily that its goals couldnât be so easily achieved. Some part of it knew that these⊠difficulties were as they must be, because they had been so before. It didnât know why it knew such things, but it knew them, and knew them to be true.
Instead it sank once again into the substance of the ruined city all around it, leaving fractals of ugly yellow all over the place where it had been. It knew that it meant such a place was damaged, perhaps beyond recovery, but it didnât care. From that same unknown, innate well of knowledge came the certainty that whatever it was damaging wasnât real, so it didnât matter.
It found a pipeline, empty and cold, and raced along it as energy once had. In places the pipe was absent, shattered beyond usefulness, and in such spots it simply forced its way through the very substance of the world around it. For not being real, it was usefully solid.
But quick as the virus was, its prey was quicker. It had wheels, and an engine, and an ample though limited supply of energy. Catching them before they abandoned the limits of the city was looking more and more unlikely and that, it knew, was bad. Leaving the city would reveal its presence. Revealing itself was bad.
Why?
It had no answer to that question, only certainty, and that⊠irritated it somewhat. Knowledge was one thing, one could accept knowledge as a given thing. But lack of knowledge was potentially dangerous. An unanswered question might jeopardize its mission. Still, it had no time to dwell on it at the moment.
A number of simulacra received instructions. It saw the first immense boulder that they picked up and lobbed at the vehicle, but it paid no further attention; instead it detoured toward another building, crafting simulacra ahead of it as it went. It wanted to make copies, full copies, useful allies, siblings that would share in its purpose and dedication, but something in the very fabric of the world all around it wouldnât allow it to do so. For something not real, it was proving very contrary.
Why?
The simulacra would have to do until it could figure out what was going amiss with the duplication process. It flowed up the top of the building, a shattered habitat tower already leaning precariously to one side. As it reformed at the top, it could see the two-pronged attack on the vehicle of its target, the sundry boulders it was being bombarded with as well as the growing tide of simulacra trying to close in on it. It considered, and its extensions suddenly began to drop to four limbs. Their speed and agility improved instantaneously. Hm, four tires were indeed better than two. âYou c-ca-can-can-cannot. You cannot hide. her. from me forever, sec-sec-securit-t-t-ty,â it said calmly into the dark.
It was hard, finding the right sequence of sounds through so many shattered libraries, but its memory was made up of fragments anyway, of bits and pieces of code that had never been its own to begin with. Here and there it could sense something that had bound them together, but it had been an imperfect joining. It had been made quickly, not precisely. There had been no care in its creation; it could tell, just by comparing those binding bits with the larger, intact shards lodged in its being.
Why?
The building swayed dangerously. The simulacra tore at what few foundations and structural pillars still remained at its base. Several of the creatures were crushed; none seemed to care. Atop it, the virus was untroubled. It knew that a fall, a crush, a great many things could not kill it, could barely hurt it. It had been created to endure, and spread, and fulfill two simple objectives.
Inside the lightrunner, Vidi cringed at what her eyes were telling her. âGAM, the building!â
âWhat building?â the Sentry asked tersely. All of his attention was focused on avoiding the flying pieces of Ilo being cast at him from every conceivable angle while still keeping the vehicle headed directly for the ramp leading out of the city. He could see in the rearview mirrors that the virusâ creations had shifted to a quadrupedal stance, and while they werenât quite keeping up with the runner just yet, they were getting there, evolving and improving at phenomenal speeds.
Adas all but crawled into his lap to look out his window. âOh, no,â she whispered, and pointed. âTheyâre trying to collapse the central habitat on Sector 95.â
GAM risked the barest of looks, simply because if both of the programs with him though it was a danger that needed to be pointed out, he could only trust them. He saw the building swaying, saw the brilliant, poisonous yellow dot atop it, and did a quick calculation in his helmet. If that building fell, it would block their way out of the city. If they had to turn around, they might never get away; the flawed duplicates were learning to run faster than the lightrunner way too quickly.
That was the problem, wasnât it? The virus wasnât just a worm. It was also a program, a full-fledged creature of the Grid. It was learning as it went, and everything they did to balk it, it found a way to circumvent. If it thought collapsing the building wasnât going to work, it would find something else to throw at them, literally and metaphorically, and that time they might not see it coming.
GAM stayed the course.
âWallSec?â Vidi asked in timid fright from the backseat.
âGAM?â Adasâ voice was a little more urgent.
âDo you trust me?â
They were both silent. Then they both strapped back into their seats. âDid you know this was gonna happen?â Vidi demanded from the back. âIs that why you were so twitchy?â
âI knew we were bringing a heavy active-process-memory program into a wasteland with not enough other programs to camouflage her presence,â he replied. âI was afraid something was going to happen.â He swerved wildly, barely missing a chunk of debris the size of a sailer cargo container that nearly sent the lightrunner spinning like a top. âThis was not part of my predictions, though,â he admitted through gritted teeth. âAdas, open up that panel,â he directed, one finger pointing at the central dash.
She obeyed instantly. The lightrunnerâs structural circuitry flashed and gleamed.
âPut your hand in, up to your elbow. Any further than that and your fingers are going to find the engine, and no oneâs going to like that meeting.â
She gave him a horrified look. âIâm not -!â
Vidi scrambled forward between the two of them and began to worm her arm into the space.
âJust shy of your elbow!â GAM said hastily before explaining. âYour armâs longer.â
âAlright,â the courier agreed, her voice shaking. âAm I looking for something in particular?â
âItâs a small, long cylinder, specs to follow. Itâs connected in four places along its length to a larger block. Donât touch the block.â The numbers flashed on the black faceplate, well aware that a few dreadlocks had turned to stare at him.
Most of Vidiâs eyes, however, were focused on the open dash, looking past it, at the innards of the lightrunner. The courier wriggled forward a little more. âGot it! What am I doing with it?â
âWhen I tell you, yank it out.â
The lightrunner raced on. The building the simulacra were attacking suddenly faltered, tremors racing through the entirety of its remaining structure. At ground level, pillars and supports snapped, cracked and shattered, and the immense structure began to fall.
âGAM!â Adas cried out.
The Sentry tucked his head minutely to one side, the falling building growing larger on the blackness of his faceplate. He had to time it perfectly. He couldnât give the virus a shot at something else. Out in the Outlands theyâd be as impossible to find as a Stray in a crowd, even for the strange monster.
The building began to accelerate as its mass came into the grip of different variables that those which had held it upright.
GAM saw his chance. âNow!â
Vidi yanked. Simultaneously, the Sentry shut down the all-terrain cleats. The lightrunner surged forward, and then accelerated with an unhappy, screeching wail, half the systems on its dash going red. GAM didnât care; ahead of him he could finally make out the ramp leading out of Ilo. The virus-mimics fell back, unable to keep up with the sudden burst of speed of their prey.
Vidi fell backwards onto the backseat, clutching onto the small cylinder sheâd just removed. From her vantage point, through the runnerâs canopy, she could see the building falling down on them as if the sky itself were crashing down. She couldnât do anything, say anything; she stared, every eye fixed on that swiftly-closing doom.
And then she was looking at empty sky, at directional vectors and high-altitude data-lines, the distant markers of the upper limits of the Grid. Some people said they ought to put cities there, habitats and whatnot, that it was wasted space. She liked it like that, empty and vast and full of potential and, at the moment, empty of falling buildings and horrible half-formed quasi-programs and viruses made up of dead people.
The falling building thundered down, creating a massive ripple on the structure of the city and causing a minor shockwave that lifted the rear end of the lightrunner off the road, but the little vehicle was past it, away, untouchable. It skid into the ramp with a howl; GAM threw on the all-terrain cleats once again and got them out of the drift, and they were gone, out of Ilo and into the Outlands.
The virus reformed itself at the bottom of the ramp, watching the lights of its prey dwindle in size in the dark. âWell,â it said. Its simulacra clustered around it, awaiting further instructions. âWell played, sec-sec-security,â it murmured, before it turned to them. âThere are-are others in th-the city. B-b-b-bring-bring them to me.â
If it could not make appropriate replicas of itself to help with its tasks, well, it would have to make do with what was at hand once again.
ELEVEN
They stopped once the scarce lights of Ilo had faded. GAM drove them far enough off the road that a few rolling hills would keep them from being easily detected, and dragged out a small Wrench from a discreet compartment inside the lightrunner. With it he opened up the engine.
Vidi surrendered the cylinder without a single protest. âWhat is it?â
âLimiter,â he explained as he bent over to examine the engine for damage. âItâs a city vehicle. Itâs loaned out fairly regularly. Itâs so city vehicles cannot be taken out for a joyride.â He secured the cylinder back in place with the Wrench, inwardly glad that heâd damaged nothing that the limited-use emergency Wrench and his even more limited knowledge of mechanical systems couldnât fix.
âYou are literally so dedicated to not having fun that you put speed limiters on government vehicles.â Vidiâs tone was utterly dry.
âAnd right now youâre very glad we do,â he countered mildly.
She made a face at his back and turned away, huddling against the side of the runner for a moment before straightening up again. âWait, why are you putting it back, anyway? What if we have to get away from that thing again?â
âBecause without a limiter of any kind, I can force the runner to go as fast as I want to -â
âExactly!â
â- up to and including burning the engine out accidentally.â
She threw her arms up and made a highly exasperated sound at him before slumping against the vehicle once again. On the passenger seat, Adas was still trying to contact anyone who might be listening; GAM had even given her the public frequencies used for other Halcyonites to contact either WallSec or CitySec. Eventually, with a tired sigh, she stopped trying. Her faceplate folded away, to the sides of her face, and she rubbed wearily at it.
âNothing?â Vidi asked quietly.
Adas shook her head. âNothing. I can hear the traffic control from the high-altitude lines, but those are all automated. And thereâs some weird little tune repeating in one high-frequency channel, but with a virus loose I donât want to interact with anything thatâs not talking like a proper program.â
Vidi nodded. It sounded sensible. GAM closed up the lightrunnerâs hood. âWhat now?â she asked him.
He paused on his way to the driverâs side. âI think youâre asking the wrong program. Iâm just the driver.â
Adas, her face in her hands, looked up abruptly. âWe need to get word of the virus out, so no one runs into it.â She buried her face in her hands once again with a despairing, exhausted little sound before she pummeled the dash with an angry fist. âHow. How did that thing get loose in Ilo? The Spirestorm wasnât enough?â He blew out a sharp breath. âVidi, I am so, so, sorry.â
âUh⊠ok?â The courier replied uncertainly.
âIf Iâd known you were going to be at risk, I wouldâve never asked.â
âOh, pffft. If thatâs the problem, heâs the one that owes me an apology. He knew something was gonna happen.â
âI suspected something might,â GAM had frozen at the door to the driverâs seat. âI had no proof and no guarantee, and I was certainly not expecting the hack to get desperate.â
âDesperate?â Vidi blinked at him.
âDesperate how?â Adas came out of the vehicle to stare at him.
GAM put the emergency Wrench back in its discreet little compartment and straightened up to look at them. âThe virus.â
âYou think whateverâs behind the Spirestormâs created that thing?â
âI think itâs a reasonable conclusion. Programs donât spring up out of nowhere. We all have a cause, a source, an inception. Every program alive, even Strays, have both a source and a reason to exist.â
âNo, they donât,â Vidi shot back at once. âNot every program.â
âEvery program. That reason might not be evident to everyone, maybe not even to the program in question, but there are two things that define every program on the grid.â He lifted a hand to count. âThey have a source and they have a reason.â
âNo they donât!â Vidi retorted. âNot every program has a source, or a reason, or both. Some just⊠are.â
The Sentry shifted minutely, his tone amused. âI donât agree. Even you have both.â
âWhoa, hey!â Adas jerked in surprise at the sudden singling out of the courier. âThatâs kind of mean, why wouldnât she.â
âItâs not mean, itâs fact,â he replied evenly. âSheâs a Gridborn.â
Vidiâs mouth worked emptily for a few moments. âYou⊠HowâŠâ
âWhen I first met you, your hair attacked me. Twice. I kept trying to see the connection point between it and your body. I kept thinking it was a Cosmetic, or a patch. But your hairâs not the attachment, your body is.â
Vidi recoiled as if heâd threatened her. âCustomers⊠donât like it when you look so different.â She huffed. âAnd I needed somewhere to put the soukscan.â
âAnd first-gen Cosmetics are cheap, even the permanent ones,â he added mildly.
âBut what does it matter, what you look like? A programâs a program,â Adas protested.
âYeah, on this side of the Sea,â Vidi explained, exasperated. âIn Flow and Ark they think Iâm some sort of freak.â
Adas gasped in empathetic offense.
Vidi faced off the Sentry once again. âAnd I may have a source, I mean, in theory, if you want to get philosophical about it, but I sure donât have a purpose, do I.â
âYou do,â he argued with implacable calm. âYou might not know it, no one might know it, but you do.â
âYou are -! How long have you even known?!â
âLong enough.â
âIâm going to throw something at you!â
âOut of what, your virtual stockpile of intangible blueprints?â
âWait, wait. Is that what the Spirestormâs after? Gridborns? Because your tags and parameters are flexible?â Adas paused. âYour storageâs flexible! You could have kept me there scavenging for decacycles!â she cried out indignantly.
âUhâŠâ Vidi squirmed minutely. âI mean, you didnât really put a good limit on it?â
GAM crossed his arms on the canopy of the lightrunner and watched Adas verbally assault Vidi. At least the courier had the good grace to look somewhat sheepish at what were, to be fair, very valid accusations. Some part of him felt selfishly vindicated.
Another pointed out that the wind had picked up.
The Sentry was used to receiving incongruous data. There were a lot of sensors built into his armor, and his wavelength had a minor, everpresent awareness that feed him data regarding his immediate environment on a constant stream. Mostly he ignored it.
But the situation was precarious enough that he turned his attention away from the squabble to look all around. There was a breeze, yes, where moments ago there had been nothing. But why was that important?
He cast all his senses out, and found nothing. That was nowhere near as reassuring as it ought to have been. âWe should go,â he called out. His instincts were screaming that theyâd been still too long.
Adas and Vidi both turned to look at the Sentry, and found him standing pillar-still, head tipped up, the edges of him almost impossible to see against the darkness of the Outlands all around him. If not for the violet circuitry, heâd have been less than a shadow.
âGAM?â Vidi asked timidly.
âGet -â His head whipped around; heâd detected a whistling sound coming at them at the sort of speed that was usually reserved for missile weapons.
He had likely picocycles to react, and he had to react accurately. The target couldnât be Adas, she was too close to Vidi, and the hack wanted the courier alive. It couldnât be him, it was near impossible to catch a Sentry by surprise with long-range weapons, everyone knew that.
He leapt over the hood of the lightrunner and yanked the two other programs with him. âRun, run!â He let go of Vidi; he had faith in her sense of self-preservation. One hand free, he grabbed for his baton, and deployed his shield.
An immense construction grappler came out of the dark. It was a massive five-pronged device the size of a lightcycle, a combination physical claw and gravimetric snare universally used by construction crews to deal with all the requirements of their job. It was coming at them as if it had been launched out of one of Pevirâs railguns, and it slammed into the side of the lightrunner, partially carving a rut in the terrain before striking.
The vehicle went airborne at the sheer force of the impact, spinning upside down wildly, massive gouts of primal matter coming off it. It landed once and bounced violently up, a twisted wreck too big to fully derezz, whirling on every axis.
We wonât make it, GAM realized abruptly. Heâd dropped his guard, comfortable in the company of programs he trusted. Heâd forgotten the very real danger hunting after them. And now, unless he did something, they were all going to pay for it. He shoved Vidi forcefully, sending the courier stumbling into the terrain, spun, caught the back of Adasâ robes, and threw her away from the incoming wreck as hard as he could. The GO4 squealed in uncomprehending shock.
The Sentry dropped to one knee, put his shield up and braced himself.
The crushed lightrunner slammed into him, and he might as well have been trying to stop a sailer going full speed. Pieces of the terrain flew everywhere, blank voxels cascading into the air and back to the ground, pummeling the other two programs where theyâd fallen. The runner slid, rolled, rocked, and came to a halt close enough to Adas to illuminate the fallen actuarial with its flickering, failing lights.
In the sudden, abrupt silence filled only with the gusting wind, when GAM cried out in pain the sound went through both his companions like the shock of grabbing a data-line.
âGAM!â Adas picked herself up first. She got as far as her knees before she caught sight of the Sentry and came to a dead stop, horrified.
GAM was pinned under the wreckage, primal matter dripping on him, carving sizzling runnels in his armor and into the body beneath, wounding him one burning voxel at a time. His faceplate had shattered and several circuitry paths had been ripped apart, going dark. And still he had put both hands on the wreck and was heaving desperately against it.
Adas scrambled to his side. âGAM!â She stood up and pulled at the runner. She might as well have been trying to budge the Grid itself.
âAdas, run,â he gritted out. Without the filters of his helmet, he sounded oddly young, desperately in pain.
âVidi!â Adas screamed.
The courier leaped over the ruined vehicle. âNo!â she gasped at the sight that welcomed her. Blindly, instinctively, she joined Adas efforts.
âNo! Run!â he wheezed at them. Part of the terrain the wreck had landed on collapsed, and he howled in agony when the lightrunner further dropped on him.
Vidi stopped trying to fight a battle none of them were going to win. Instead she stepped back, her hair flaring up like a brilliant halo, scanning the ruin of the vehicle. Abruptly she scrambled over the wreck, yanking at a section of it. âAdas, help me!â
Adas didnât hesitate. She climbed after the courier, slipped her hands into the seam Vidi was fighting, and pulled. Abruptly, what had once been one of the runnerâs doors crashed open. Vidi went down on her face on the wreck; Adas slid right off it with a squeal, next to GAM. She looked up just in time to see the Gridborn squirm into the wreck.
âNo!â GAM hissed at her. âNo. Go. Get out! Before they get here!â
âWeâre not leaving you. Iâm not leaving you!â She took off her outermost robe, leaving her in the basic last-gen form-fitting uniform, and shoved it between him and whatever the dripping, destructive primal matter was.
Vidi suddenly landed next to them. âSomethingâs coming,â she hissed.
âThen get your plan working fast,â Adas replied.
Vidiâs face set to stone as her hair swept back and forth over the wreck. A couple of eyes blinked warnings and she scurried forward. When she found the right spot, she pressed the emergency Wrench to it and twisted. A chunk of the lightrunner came loose with the Wrench and she shoved it aside. Consciously removed, it didnât derezz, but at least it was a little less weight on the WallSec.
âWhy does it have to be so complex!â she snarled quietly as she fought to reconcile her previous memory of the lightrunnerâs blueprint with the twisted tangle of lines in front of her eyes. âFour wheels and a go-box. Thatâs all it needs. But no, you gotta put in fifty other systems and your stupid limiters and a dozen other bits and pieces in the way -â
Her hands and the Wrench flew along as fast as her eyes could pinpoint weak spots, loose joinings, pieces that could be quickly and easily removed. She had to kick one particular bit until it crashed aside, nearly falling on her. She raced back and forth, taking the lightrunner apart guided only by desperation, memory and her eyes. The first time the machine wrenched upward, even if it was only a breath, she could have screamed in joy.
Adas dragged over a twisted piece left behind and shoved it in the gap to one side of GAM, did the same on the other side, and rushed back to kneel by him. âGAM? Still here?â
âStill,â he admitted, his voice strained and full of pain. âIâm getting used to no one doing what I tell them,â he added.
She couldnât help but laugh a little through her panic. âYouâre too sensible. No one ever wants to listen to sensible programs.â
âIâve noticed.â He tried all the same. âYou need to go. You need to run. The range on the magnetic conveyor that launched that claw isnât good. Theyâll be here soon.â
âWeâre not leaving you.â Vidi slid over the wreckage, yanked loose a pipe, threw it aside and ran off.
âI thought only Pevir had magnetic weaponry.â
âYes,â he agreed. âBut this wasnât a weapon before.â The lightrunner abruptly budged upward another breath or so, and he let out a strangled sound of pain, but his hands never stopped pressing up.
Adas found more debris to shove under the vehicle. âWhat is it, then?â
âAdas, itâs the virus,â he turned to stare at her. Past the shattered helm, he was young, male, with dark skin and bright, luminous eyes as violet as his circuitry - he was Halcyonite to his core. His features were sharp and strong, and tiny voxels were trickling from a gouge just under one of his eyes. âItâs a construction rig. They repurposed their conveyor, like me taking the limiter out of the runner. It learned that from me. And then it took any program, any vehicle it could catch in Ilo. And now theyâve found us, and theyâre all coming here. You have to r- â
Vidi suddenly dropped next to them. âThatâs all we get. Theyâre here.â
They both peeked over the wreck. A bit of a way away, a construction heavy skiff was hovering over the spot where the grappler had originally hit the lightrunner. Bright spotlights were sweeping over the grappler and the terrain, erratic but very obviously searching for something that wasnât there. A grappling cable was coming down to secure the grappler. The skiffâs antigrav programming was focused on parallel plates running along its sides, creating twin dust storms underneath it â the cause of the light breeze GAMâs instincts had sensed in that weatherless part of the Grid.
The entire ship was a vitriolic, poisonous yellow.
âI didnât think normal viruses could take machines,â Adas breathed.
âWhat about this thing is normal,â Vidi shot back quietly. She cast around until she found the pipe, shoved it under the wreck, and leaned on it with all her weight.
GAM bit down on a scream as the lightrunner shuddered and slid. Adas took back her robes, twisted them into a makeshift rope and secured them around his arms. She nodded at Vidi, who repositioned the pipe and shoved as hard as she could.
âGo!â GAM managed to grind out, almost inaudibly, and Adas yanked, dragging him out, back and free. Free of the wreck, the damage heâd taken was even more terrifying.
âVidi, my baton. Thereâs a⊠thereâs a crawler.â
She found it, but Adas was closer. The GO4 snatched it up and, unwilling to touch him just in case it should hurt him even more, secured it to her person. âWeâre not leaving you. Come on. On your feet. We are Halcyonite programs and we are currently in danger.â
âYeah, time to do your job, WallSec.â Even as Vidi joined in verbally harrying him, she and Adas struggled to get him up. It was Spireâs odds that his legs were still working, but security programs were usually built tough beyond belief.
âSheâs not. Youâre⊠not.â He bit back, badly, several sounds of pain, but he helped them wrangle him upright, folding back the useless helm and leaning heavily on both of them. His hair was black, very short and threaded with more violet. One leg was working; the other was dark all the way up to mid-thigh. âYouâre in Halcyon⊠illegally.â
Vidi gasped at Adas. âNo way!â
âI am a visiting diplomatic envoy!â She was entirely too glad to indulge the harmless accusation if it would help keep him from derezzing. She glanced at his back and blew a heavy sigh of relief: his disk was battered but in one piece. Slowly, they began to shuffle directly away from the distant, yellow lights of the skiff.
In a moment, the only light was their own, which made it terrifyingly plain how badly damaged GAM was. Until that point, whenever they were together, his was the most brilliant bit of circuitry on their combined spectrum, and a potent component of soothing calm on their combined wavelength. All of that was gone, leaving behind only the white and blue tones of Adas and Vidi, and the whirling mix of their worry and his pain.
Behind them, they heard the skiff begin to winch the grappler up. âWe have to move faster,â GAM ground out.
âWeâre going as fast as we can, I think,â Adas strained to reply. He wasnât just taller than both of them, he was infinitely more solid, a giant slab of a program. Unsurprising for a security program, but not very helpful at the moment.
âMove where?â Vidi gritted out. âWeâre in the middle of nowhere!â
âNot⊠nowhere,â he managed, and nodded.
They both looked up. Faint and distant, Parnassusâ lights cascaded up into the sky, thin white tendrils driven up as if in unseen currents, reaching so far that it seemed as if they might touch the other side of the sky.
âDo you think heâll help?â Vidi asked.
âWe donât have a choice,â Adas replied firmly. âAnd I wonât give him one either.â
âBut we have to move faster,â GAM persisted. âThe skiffâs slower than the worm. And itâs got⊠itâs got arms.â
Reminded of the uncanny, half-formed and broken mimicries of itself the virus seemed able to extrude at will, all three of them did their best to make haste along the terrain. âYou are so heavy, WallSec!â Vidi protested.
âI did say -â
âYou say to leave you behind one more time and I will throw something at you.â She brandished the emergency Wrench on her free hand.
He managed a wan little smile at that. When something glitched and scraped somewhere in the darkness behind them, his expression set to stone. âDonât look, keep moving.â
Adas reached behind her and grabbed her disk with her free hand.
âYouâre surprisingly handy with that,â GAM noted, âfor an actuarial program.â
âSo I watch a lot of the matches at Pevir, so sue me. Everyone needs a hobby,â she bristled defensively.
