Manifestations

by David M Henley

  He was just curious where the data was going, and had no idea that he’d broken a tripwire, but in the empty corner a thing appeared. A dark, non-reflective blob of an undefined visual profile, no avatar, and no record of its existence.

  ‘Oh, kutz,’ Zach cursed softly.

  ‘What is it?’ Bronwyn looked around. ‘Eww. What’s it doing?’

  ‘Syphon,’ he whispered.

  The blob shivered and the room gasped. Some of the dancers flashed out immediately, leaving the rest to watch it bloat and distort. On the code level, Zach could see it was still sucking in data from those around it, but it was also starting to harden into an avatar. Something this way comes.

  ‘Come on, Bron. We’d better get you out of here,’ Zach said.

  ‘Why? What is happening?’ The rest of the crowd were fading out, each of them dropping danger flags on the site to draw the attention of the weavers.

  ‘It’s a hakka trap. I don’t know how long it has been here, but it’s illegally collecting data from people’s streams.’

  ‘Is that bad?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. And now its master is on the way. We have to go. Hit your eject button.’

  ‘How do I do that?’

  She was hyperventilating. She couldn’t take her eyes off the monster growing in the corner as it changed colour to red and began twisting in ugly circles.

  ‘Concentrate, Bron. Go to the dressing room if it helps.’

  ‘It’s not working,’ she cried.

  Musashi gritted his teeth and loaded an eject button that he handed to her. All she had to do was imagine her own, but this would be faster. ‘Now press it. It will trigger your demersion.’

  She pushed the red button and her avatar was gone instantly. Gone and safe. Zach turned around to see what the syphon was doing before he ordered his own evacuation. The thing had firmed into a segmented flea-like creature with spikes all over its body. The syphon saw him and opened dozens of orifices ringed with spittle and showing wet teeth. The mouths roared and its spit sprayed onto him, burning through his armour.

  Zach hit eject ... Nothing happened. The syphon swelled and gawped and shot grappling teeth into him, dragging him towards it.

  ‘Oh, kutz.’

  It was an angry red now, body panting and pumping with the enthusiasm of killing. Through its front mouth an eroding voice boiled through the teeth. ‘You’re not going anywhere, squirt. It’s time you learnt not to touch other people’s things.’

  Musashi pushed at his ejector to no avail; he was dragged closer until the teeth could reach him and began tearing into his avatar. He took his katana from his belt and stabbed at it, but the blade bounced off the hard skin, jarring out of his hold.

  He swore again and again, reminding himself it wasn’t real and the pain was surrogate only, but he was so mentally connected to his avatar that he felt it happening as if to his real body. He was screaming as if it was real. The syphon creature chomped into Musashi, slicing through his armour and pulping the flesh beneath.

  With the last of his control Zach threw every flag and tag at the thing that he could, but they dissolved. No one was coming to help him. He heard a soft laugh as his head was engulfed in the main maw.

  ‘Now you will feel the wrath of Dungeon.’

  Zach watched as his stream was dissected, his past and connections severed, his recorded life macerated before his eyes. The damage clawed up to his head. He saw a smile of fangs in the dark, then another set and another until the blackness was nearly defeated by bloodstained teeth. All at once the smiles took bites at him and his visual stream went haywire. He no longer saw what was there. He saw what the hakka wanted him to see.

  It was a nightmare of black and red; subliminal flashes of horror, death, torture, rape, the distinct degradation of distortion on flesh; and the screams, the shouts, the dark voices that moaned, cawed and crazed over the top of the graphic horror. The nightmare changed, human bodies exploding, the pains of horses and animals being slaughtered; high-pitched ear-splitting whistles as emaciated and diseased faces lost their flesh and were defiled before his eyes.

  Even when he went catatonic, the assault didn’t stop.

  ~ * ~

  He woke on a street. A pattern of tiles was under his face. His avatar had been reconstituted into a chewed-up mess whose only possible movement was to ooze. The rear end of the beast pushed foul excrement upon him before flying up into the sky.

  Zach pulled his viewpoint away from his avatar, now floating a few feet above his body. He looked at himself. Musashi, dead. He’d died in games before, but not like this. His mind could still see the sensory torture; recalling the visions made him want to vomit. His avatar bubbled. He couldn’t think and lay as a pile of blood and filth.

  His stream was gone. All his memories, his recordings and history were twisted or deleted. He didn’t recognise himself or where he was.

  The eject still wasn’t working. Maybe the hakka had put a scramble into his helmet somehow. Something that interfered with his control. He focused on the load space: if he could just imagine the endless grey and start a reset...

  In a blink, Musashi was standing again. His helmet had reset and his last backup was restored. Everything was in place as it should be. As he had been before he took Bron in. Where was she? How long had he been immersed? Surely she should have alerted somebody by now. He should have been pulled out ages ago.

  He felt sick. That was his first experience with a real hakka. As much as he had heard there were dangers on the Weave, he’d never thought of them seriously. He had always thought he could just eject from trouble, but Dungeon had held onto him, taken his sensory input and ...

  Zach looked over Musashi, his proud petulant stance, his sword that outshone all lights. He didn’t deserve that sword, or that armour. He was just a pathetic boy who had been chewed up and spat out by the first hakka he had come across.

  He stripped his avatar of its gauntlets and breastplates, the leg guards and weapons dropping to the ground. Let somebody else have them. They were no use to him. Musashi was just a boy. A weak boy standing in his underwear. Alone. Alone. Alone. You are worthless, Musashi.

  He imagined another him circling Musashi with a rod, beating him with words and a stick until the welts started to break open. Zach lifted his arm and pushed the beaten thing away, sending it to oblivion in a million pieces.

  Zach looked around him. He should have sent a broadcast alarm, but what did it matter now? Dungeon could do it all over again and it would not matter.

  The street was empty save for himself. He was in a geographical representation. A place with low flat buildings set in straight lines. It was odd to see an empty space on the Weave, he wasn’t really sure what it meant.

  He walked forward, checking every intersection and finding no one. No streams had passed through here for months. Perhaps it was abandoned. Zach checked the info and saw he was in one of the STOC relocation towns, Sector 261 of Omskya. From the passive data sent by the omnipoles, transport, medical, education and administration, all functions were normal, indicating the town was populated and working at peak efficiency.

  So where is everybody?

  Before he could answer the question he began to fade as he began to demerse, returning to his body. He could smell vomit, and taste blood and bitterness in his mouth.

  Zach blinked and saw Tom’s concerned face frowning over him. ‘Zach, are you okay?’

  ‘I’m okay. What happened? Why didn’t anyone wake me earlier?’

  ‘Well, when Bronwyn was ejected she leapt up and banged her head. She knocked herself out and only just came to.’

  ‘Oh ...’

  ‘I found her on the floor when I came to check on you. What happened in there, Zach?’

  ‘It’s my fault, Tom. It’s all my fault. I touched something I shouldn’t have. A hakka came for me.’

  ‘And you couldn’t eject?’

  ‘They stoppe
d me.’

  ‘I didn’t know they could do that. You seem okay though, right? Mister Lizney is coming right away, he’ll be here any minute.’

  ‘I’m fine, Tom.’

  ‘Let’s get you cleaned up at least.’ Zach looked down and saw where the smell of vomit was coming from.

  ‘Is Bron okay?’

  ‘She’ll be fine. But you owe her an apology.’

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry, Tom. I’m so sorry.’ He couldn’t keep the tears from forming.

  ~ * ~

  Zach lay in bed unable to sleep. He wasn’t used to sleeping when it was light outside. More than that, he couldn’t stop the images of his recent experience repeating in his head. When he closed his eyes he saw them more clearly and even when he felt like sleeping he snapped awake as a scene of black and blood came back to him.

  He didn’t notice when one of the older boys from the orphanage tiptoed in and knelt by his bed, until he asked, ‘Hey, Zach, are you sleeping?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Mister Lizney is here to see you.’

  ‘He is?’ Zach had never known his teacher to go outside of his unit.

  ‘Yeah. Strange guy for a teacher, Zach. Totally cryppy. Should I say you’re awake?’

  ‘Yeah. Thanks, Garth.’

  ‘You want him to come in here, or can you get up?’ Garth asked him.

  ‘I ...’ Zach tried to rise, but his body felt like glass and his head turned against him.

  ‘Okay. Wipe your eyes.’ Zach didn’t realise he had still been crying, even though both his cheeks were wet and cooling. He hadn’t noticed. When he blinked, horrors were behind his eyelids. He tried to shake them off, but they wouldn’t move.

  A hand patted him and he turned. Mister Lizney was sitting by him on the bed. Before he knew it, he had flung himself at his teacher and didn’t bother to hold back the tears. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’

  Lizney wasn’t used to such contact and the attack of affection caught him unprepared. But he’d seen what other people did and he put his arms around the boy and patted him.

  Zach repeated he was sorry and begged for it to stop. ‘Please. I won’t do it again. Please.’

  Miles patted and shushed him. There would be plenty of time later to ask for the boy’s account, so while he was waiting for the emotional outpouring to end he tried to find out what had happened, though Zach’s stream had been dismantled somehow and there was no record of his time on the Weave this evening.

  Mister Lizney acquired permission from Bronwyn Zucker and the two guardians before accessing her stream, as was proper with juniors. He watched as Zach led her through orientation and then took her to a dance visualisation in the fabula. It was there that something appeared and Zach ejected her.

  ‘Oh, my boy, what did you find?’ he asked gently. Zach pushed his head further into his chest.

  Something that could take a stream to pieces and stop a person from ejecting. What kind of hakka would do such a thing? And what else had the hakka done to turn the boy into such a mess?

  ‘May I access your stream?’ Lizney asked. Zach nodded, but Lizney had to prompt him again to make him give over permissions. There wasn’t much to see anyway. The stream was a backup from before the night’s dive and jumped straight to the town where Zach had been spat out. Those streets ... with their identical capsule housing. Lizney knew this place. He remembered its homogeneity well. Except for the image of his student punishing the body of his old avatar, the streets were empty.

  He sent a broadcast to Zach’s teachers letting them know what had happened and that they should let him know if they observed anything out of the ordinary, or if Zach let slip any information about what had happened to him.

  ~ * ~

  ‘Excuse me,’ the Colonel said, bumping the pilot’s arm as he clambered from the back to the front seat for a better view. The peninsula was just coming into visual range. With his enhanced eyesight, he could just make out the dark blemish that was being called the ‘beast of Busan’.

  Pinter looked at his pilot, Airman Quintan Crozier. The file said he was male, but he was slight and feminine, with hair coloured an unnatural bronze sitting in a high bouffant that tickled the ceiling of the squib. He was young, thirty-three — they were all going to seem young to him from now on, he reminded himself.

  ‘Are you a good pilot, Crozier?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  ‘A good little Serviceman, or a man who can get the job done?’

  ‘Sir?’ The airman looked at him sideways and caught the Colonel in a half-smile.

  ‘Fly me in closer. I want to take a look at this thing.’

  ‘We are approaching the restricted area, sir.’

  ‘Yes. But we can get closer, can’t we?’

  ‘I can’t do that, sir.’

  ‘Don’t be modest, airman. I’ve read your file. You’re top class.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. Then you must also know that I have already been held back for insubordination.’

  ‘Twice, in fact. Yes, I read that. But it’s not insubordination if a superior tells you to do it,’ Pinter said with a grin.

  ‘Sir, we are scheduled to land in three minutes.’

  ‘Yes, but they can’t start the welcome ceremony without me, now, can they? I want to take a good look at this thing.’ He shook the pilot’s shoulder. ‘Relax. You’re following orders. I outrank everyone on the ground.’

  ‘Sir, yes, sir.’ Quintan smiled.

  ‘Call me Colonel.’

  Colonel, he said to himself. Until now it had been practically an honorary rank, which he hadn’t taken seriously. The last time he was an active Serviceman he had only been a Captain. How would history have been different if he had been a Colonel the last time he was thirty? Maybe the wars wouldn’t have drawn out for so long.

  The squib flew on towards Busan — where Busan used to be. There was now almost nothing left of the city. The hard lines of the larger structures could still be made out underneath the undulating black hills. A tendril the length of a street bulged up and swung out towards the sea; Crozier avoided it easily.

  ‘Can it see us?’ Pinter asked.

  ‘It doesn’t seem to.’

  ‘So, it’s blind?’

  ‘Hard to say. This is the closest I’ve gotten.’

  ‘It really is enormous. Have you ever seen anything that big?’

  ‘Nothing living, sir.’

  ‘Do you think it is an animal of some sort?’ Pinter asked.

  ‘What else can move like that? No plant that I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘Yes, but there’s never been an animal that covers a thousand square kilometres before either. How could any one creature be this big? Fly us over the top.’

  ‘Sure thing, Colonel.’

  They swung up high before levelling out to cruise over the inky landscape. From above, the Colonel could see where the creature sank into the ocean, a clear change from black to turquoise showing its edge. Below the water, the same exploratory tentacles probed about. Feeling?

  What sort of thing are you? he asked. The leading theory was that it was an old unrecorded nano-weapon that had somehow been reactivated. It was possible. It had happened before, though not with such spectacular results.

  From above, Pinter could see open spaces in the black mass, and every park and tree remained uncoated, creating pockets of green scattered throughout the city.

  ‘Nobody mentioned that,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The trees. It’s not touching them.’

  Quintan nodded.

  Pinter’s mind tried to find comparisons for what he was seeing. It was dark and massive like a lava plain, but seemingly alive and moving a hundred tendrils around like a sea urchin in a rock pool. It was black and sheeny like crude oil, but it could direct its movements and control its form. So far the researchers had turned up very little that it could be compared to.

&
nbsp; ‘What would you say that looks like? A sea anemone?’

  ‘It reminds me a bit of a snail, at least the tentacles do,’ the pilot answered.

  ‘The largest snail in the world is only a metre long, including the shell. How big would you say one of those arms are?’ he asked.

  ‘They can get pretty long. I’ve seen them stretch a couple of hundred metres.’

  ‘Phenomenal. Take me around the edge of it. Slowly.’