by Ian Whates
He checked his weapon and cursed. The power was pretty much drained; he'd fired for too long. Projectile should still work and presumably the grenades - both of which were mechanical functions - but sonic and energy were denied him until he could recharge. He flicked the dial to projectile and fired an aimless round down the corridor, just to be certain. It worked. At least that was something.
Blood seeped from the gash in his leg but it was only a flesh wound. It would sting rather than disable. His ears were ringing from the force of the explosion, but that would fade with time, he hoped.
Having hauled himself to his feet, Leyton headed back to the conference room, conscious of how quiet everything was beyond the buzzing inside his own head. You'd never know there was a small war being fought in the building. The silence started to bother him. By now he ought to have heard the sounds from any other gun battle, at least on this floor, which meant Kethi and Mya's little skirmish must have ended; favourably, he hoped.
Evidently not. The two KI security men were lying dead. A pair of ULAW troopers now crouched in the open double doorway of the conference room, weapons raised, each covering an approach to the room. Pure luck that neither of them had been looking directly at him when he peeked around the corner. There was no point in hesitating, no telling who or what was inside that room. He stood flush against the wall, holding the gun two handed before him, pointed towards the ceiling. In his mind he held the image of the two soldiers, fixing their positions. Then he spun round, swivelling on his left foot, bringing his body round the corner and his arms level, firing twice in quick succession.
He was running before the two bodies hit the ground, leaping through the doorway, gun at the ready... to find himself staring down the muzzle of Mya's gun. Benson stood to one side, covering Kyle and the others. A further ULAW trooper stepped forward from behind the door, automatic weapon levelled. There was no sign of Kethi.
"Hello, Jim," said Benson. "We've been expecting you."
Malcolm considered it to be something of an anti-climax when all the avatars vanished again. Except for Tanya and the grinning man at the bar, of course.
Tanya tutted. "Repeating himself already? I'd have expected a bit more."
"Why is he here at all?" Malcolm asked. "I mean, if this is a virus, why a visible manifestation in Virtuality?
"To taunt us, to show us how clever they are," Philip suggested.
"Yeah," Tanya agreed. "My guess is that they're showing us how they got the virus into the system."
"A Trojan horse," Philip muttered.
"Clever bastards. They sneaked it in wrapped inside an avatar, like sugar-coating a pill." Tanya said.
Malcolm suspected she hadn't understood his son's ancient historical reference. They were all three on their feet by now. Tanya stepped forward, to interpose herself between Philip and the stranger, as though anything in this pseudo-physical world was likely to help if a virus was busy wreaking havoc on the files that sustained them. Not that the stranger had made any overtly threatening move. Not yet, at any rate; just that smile.
Malcolm didn't doubt for a second that they were in trouble, though. He let part of his consciousness slip away, spreading out through the vast computer network of Home in search of a countermeasure while keeping the main focus here. Doing this took practice, skills Philip hadn't yet learned.
Should he urge Philip to dissolve his focus and flee to the furthest corners of every system on Home? No, that wasn't an answer. They were clearly up against a sophisticated weapon. If it found its way into the files supporting Philip, hiding would be redundant.
The man stood up. Tall, tanned, golden-haired - an angel without wings. He took a step towards them and, as he did so, the world altered. The walls and ceiling around them slowly faded away. The tables, the chairs, their drinks, all the accoutrements of a bar remained, but the building that should have contained them was gone. Not just this building either; they stood on a vast, flat, featureless plain with not a single significant structure in sight.
"Has it taken out the whole of Virtuality?" Philip said.
"A good chunk of it," Malcolm replied.
"That's some virus."
"Yeah, a nasty one," Tanya agreed. "This is already getting messy and loud and it'll have every geek and hacker involved in Virtuality out for the blood of whoever sent it, but I suppose if you've got enough clout that's not a problem. You must have pissed somebody off royally, lover of mine."
Philip gave her a sour smile, doubtless wishing that he had been her lover.
The grinning man took another step forward and everything else that hadn't already vanished did - the furniture, the drinks, the ornamental hat stand that had stood sentry by the door, gone like the buildings - leaving just the four of them.
"I would suggest we run," Tanya murmured, "But somehow I don't think there'd be much point."
"Besides," Philip added, "I get the feeling that's exactly what Smiley here wants us to do."
Their nemesis had paused after those first two steps, as if inviting them to react. Now that they hadn't, he stepped forward again.
"Screw this!" Tanya said at the first sign of renewed movement, and she whipped out a gun. Before she could fire, however, what remained of the world came apart at the seams. Literally. The ground beneath their feet started to shake and convulse, cracking and separating as if a violent earthquake had hit this corner of Virtuality. Malcolm struggled to stay on his feet as a vast fissure opened, with him on one side and Philip and Tanya on the other. It didn't end there. More convulsions sent him sprawling to his hands and knees and continued to eat away at the patch of ground around him. He found himself kneeling on a small irregular rectangle of concrete, surrounded by an abyss on all sides. Philip and Tanya were on another: Tanya still on her feet and Philip in the process of regaining his. Around them stretched a whole vista of cracks and broken ground.
"Don't give up, either of you," Tanya urged. "The AIs will be onto this by now, hunting the bastard down, working relentlessly to identify the unique coding sequence that constitutes the virus. It doesn't matter how clever this thing is, how many variants it transforms into or where versions of it have been hidden, once they identify that coding they'll find all the caches and erase every scrap of it."
All well and good, if the AIs were to be trusted, but Malcolm wasn't so sure about that. What if the AIs chose to turn a blind eye? Ultimately, those vast inscrutable brains were connected to ULAW, and who was to say that this virus wasn't as well? Nor did he buy the idea that what they were being subjected to here in Virtuality was mere window dressing, an act of bravado. It seemed a hell of a lot of trouble to go to merely to twist the knife. After all, if the virus succeeded they would all soon be dead.
Then he had it - the reason for this. Those responsible weren't doing it for their benefit at all but for his, at least primarily. A warning, to emphasise that if they wanted to they could come into Virtuality and finish him off whenever they chose, just as they were about to put an end to his son. Philip was the target here. As his father, Malcolm was little more than an incidental bystander, but one that those responsible for the virus were keen to impress.
Ahead of them, the ground seemed to gather, fractured segments of concrete pulling together and rising in a tall wave, a ground-borne parody of a tsunami. Riding the crest of this wave was the avatar, the virus' vector. It had adopted a splay-legged stance, like a surfer, and rode the rippling swell of concrete towards the island on which Philip and Tanya waited.
Tanya still had her gun in hand, and presumably the avatar simply made too tempting a target. She fired. The vector didn't simply disappear as any normal avatar might have done. Instead, it melted, face first. Its eyes slipped downward, the mouth drooped into the sullenest of frowns, the right eye dropping beneath the corner of its lips while the nose slipped sideways. Its clothing too began to lose definition. Like thickly applied paint sliding off a non-absorbent surface, all the colours ran together. Then the body started
to open, from the crown of the head downward, splits appeared in the image, and the skin peeled open in three segments, as if this were a seed pod about to release its spore.
The analogy struck Malcolm as particularly apt once the black mist started to rise from the vector's shattered torso; a mass of roiling darkness that rose in a billowing cloud and immediately started to spread.
"Oh, come on," Tanya said. "Black is evil. We get it. At least be original"
They weren't trying to be original. If Malcolm's theory was right and all this was primarily to make a point, overt symbology was hardly a surprise.
"Nice shooting," Philip observed, "but I'm not exactly convinced it's worked in our favour."
"Thanks for the constructive criticism. All I'm trying to do is hold this thing at bay long enough for the AIs to do their stuff."
Part of Malcolm was elsewhere, trying to attract the attention of human, AI or whoever was monitoring Virtuality. He might not entirely trust them, but a drowning man clutches at anything. Mind you, it seemed unlikely that anyone paying attention could possibly not be aware of such massive disruption. Malcolm was also searching for some form of countermeasure they could employ in their own defence.
Tanya still held her gun and now fired into the seething mass of black. Perhaps this had some effect. Perhaps it destroyed some small segment of darkness. It was difficult to tell with there being so much of the stuff.
"Shit!" Tanya exclaimed. "How do I fight shadows?"
There was a defence against this, there was always a defence.
Malcolm had to find some way of stopping this. He scoured every circuit and memory storage he could access, determined to copy, clone and grab any defensive mechanism he found and drag it back to their besieged refuge. Yet almost all those he encountered were passive defences - barriers, buffers, firewalls - programmes designed to repel intrusion, and he Philip and Tanya were way beyond that. The virus was already inside. What he really needed were aggressors, hounds and hunters, programs that would relentlessly seek and destroy; but they proved to be more sophisticated, less easily reached and hacked. He found only one, a generic countermeasure, which he brought back with him, knowing even as he did so that it would never be enough.
Tanya fired again, with similarly ambiguous results. The black smoke had them surrounded and proceeded to close in. It did so slowly, as if to prolong their suffering. Malcolm couldn't help but wonder whether this was co-ordinated with the virus's attack on the files storing their actual essence. Did the proximity of the smoke signal the imminent destruction of those precious files?
Tendrils of darkness suddenly reached forward, wrapping around Tanya. She waved her arms, as if attempting to beat it away, and kicked her legs, but to no avail.
"Hell!" was all she said as the blackness rolled over her. The single useful program Malcolm had found manifested as a compact, transparent gun. It looked to be made of plastic. A child's toy, a water pistol to combat a forest fire.
Philip had joined in, cursing and trying to pull Tanya out of the gathering black cloud, but there was nowhere to go. As yet, the smoke had ignored Malcolm. He didn't know whether to feel relieved or guilty. It seemed to validate the theory that he wasn't in any real danger this time around.
As the blackness reached her neck and left only her face visible, Tanya's legs stopped kicking and her arms ceased their frantic jerking. She gave up, or perhaps her limbs no longer responded, Malcolm couldn't be sure.
She looked at Philip, her face a caricature of anguish. "I'm sorry," she said.
Philip bent down to kiss her lips.
"Philip!" Malcolm warned
Philip looked across at him as his face lifted from Tanya's. "What does it matter, Dad? What does anything matter anymore?"
The 'Dad' mattered. That sort of thing always mattered. Tanya's blonde hair began to darken as the black coating closed about her head and finally her face. It seemed to have gained substance, losing much of its ethereal nature. Something about the way it flowed reminded Malcolm of mercury: negative mercury, black instead of silver. For an instant Tanya stood there, a glistening ebony version of the person they'd come to know, and then she disappeared, imploding as her avatar died, the blackness losing concentration and reverting to thick, oily smoke.
Malcolm raised his pistol, the only frail defence they had, but as he was about to shoot, he realised that he cared far less about his own survival than his son's. "Here." He called. "You have this," and he tossed the gun across to Philip.
He watched as Philip caught the gun, turned it towards the floor in front of him and squeezed the trigger.
"You don't seriously think this is going to work, do you?"
"No," Malcolm admitted, "but I've been wrong before."
Philip raised the gun and squeezed. A jet of liquid squirted out, bubbling and steaming like acid where it struck the smoke. It didn't matter. They were surrounded by far too much of the stuff for the token attempt at retaliation to make any difference.
Philip looked frustrated, furious, and anguished. He stared at his father, imploring. "I've died once, isn't that enough for anyone? What more do they want from me?"
"Dissipate!" Malcolm urged, "flee to the farthest corners of Virtuality."
Philip shook his head. "No, the virus has found me. I can feel it breaking down my structure, attacking the files that define me. Dissipating won't help."
Malcolm heard the words but had no further answers, could offer no comfort. The last thing he wanted to do was witness his son die again. He couldn't face that. Almost he stepped forward, to throw himself from his rocky plinth and into the chasm that surrounded him. He had no idea how terminal such a step would be but couldn't quite bring himself do it in any case. At the end of the day, he wanted to live, even in the face of his son's demise. The fact shamed him, but it was true.
He turned away, refusing to look at Philip, refusing to look at anything.
Behind him, he could hear Philip cursing as if from a great distance, a dwindling voice that he shut out, not bearing to listen. "Hope you choke on me, you black scum, hope I corrupt you beyond..." And then it stopped.
The silence that followed lasted an eternity. Once time resumed its sluggish course, Malcolm turned his perceptions outward again, opened his eyes... and found himself standing in that same corner of Virtuality, alone. Around him, the ground remained shattered, like some vast limestone plain in which the passage of time and water had combined to produce a fractured pavement. Philip, the back smoke, even the melted avatar that had concealed it, were gone.
The virus had done its job, killed its target and then either withdrawn or disassembled. Malcolm had been spared - not a target, not a threat, a mere irrelevance. Not worth killing. Unlike his son.
Malcolm wanted to cry, wanted to rail against cruel fate that had done this to him again, but wasn't certain his transhuman emotions were capable of such depth. He searched inside himself for the despair he knew had to be there, but found only emptiness.
After a while the world began to heal. No cataclysmic shaking or rumblings; the vast cracks in the ground simply disappeared, to leave unblemished concrete. The landscape started to fill up again immediately, as Virtuality set about repairing itself. The process didn't take long. Malcolm watched entire buildings materialise out of thin air, as sections of the program rebooted, returning to an earlier, undamaged state. The world soon began to look whole again, ready to move on as if recent events had never happened and no one at all had died here today.
At any other time Malcolm would have been fascinated to watch this happening in front of him, but not today. It seemed as if Virtuality and the minds behind it were trying to deny that Philip had ever existed.
Procrastination had never been something Malcolm advocated. He knew what he had to do. He'd been putting this off, afraid of what he might find, but no longer. Quick as thought, he sped through Virtuality, sped through the network of systems supporting this ethereal world. He wasn't circumspect, no
longer caring whether he left a back trail or not - far too late to worry about bolting that particular stable door. Now that he'd committed to looking, he had to know.
Cath was waiting for him, in the small sparse pocket of existence where he had taken Philip to be copied, where their clones were stored.
He stared at her, wanting to hope.
"I'm sorry, Malcolm," she said.
Not that he needed the words. He knew the answer as soon as he saw her face. He'd failed. For all his cunning and all his effort, the virus had found its way here too.
Philip was dead.
Lara came to with the memory of blackness still clinging to her skin - burning, suffocating - though the sensation vanished almost immediately. The knowledge that she'd failed didn't, though. Shit! Despite all her best efforts, Philip Kaufman was dead. She might not have actually seen him die, but the situation she'd left could only end one way.
She'd always had a bit of a crush on Philip, ever since she first joined the project and started working with him. She never said a word, of course, would never have done anything about it, especially not after she met Jenner and, besides, Philip hardly noticed her.
In Virtuality, though, it was different. There she could be everything she'd ever dreamed of being but wouldn't dare to be out here. She was going to miss Tanya; so confident, so brazen, so sensual. Dancing at Bubbles had been one of the most exhilarating moments of her life. She knew as soon as they hit the dance floor that Tanya had Philip Kaufman totally in her thrall, this man who barely even knew Lara Chinen existed. The sense of achievement, of power, had been intoxicating. Despite the frustrating way fate had cut that encounter short, she'd found the experience liberating, and afterwards had complete confidence in the Tanya persona, with no qualms about throwing herself into the role. Catherine subsequently assigning her to work beside Philip and Malcolm here in reality was a wonderful twist, while being entirely logical. She was the best at what she did and this ensured the cabal remained as tight as possible.
