My memory flashed to the graveyard. Those goons had been burying someone like me on my same quest, but that person had lost. I bet Julio was taking a dirt nap as well in one of those lovely graves. At least we’d all be together in the end, it seemed.
The proxy's face switched back to a slight smile and brightened a bit. "Why you fell for this meeting is beyond me! I couldn't believe you thought that logging in as Rimer and checking his schedule would be a viable tactic! That was a dummy Rimer account, where everything is routed through me. The instant you jacked, I was monitoring, ready to plant any seed I could. But when I realized you were trying to be clever, boy! What an easy snag!"
Yup. He was laughing at me again. I was beginning to really hate this guy. I couldn't quite tell what he wanted to do to me here, though. I looked around and noticed that the mag train was entirely empty, and we were still moving.
The Proxy seemed to read my thoughts. "So, what do we do with the strong one? The one that almost got away. The one that almost was successful in exposing and bringing down the infamous Rimer virus."
He paused for a few seconds, then said "We do nothing. The virus will run its full course and you will be eradicated. We don't actually know how strong it is but we do know that it evolves at an alarming rate and will eventually overcome you. I'm just here so you can have some closure in your life." He breathed in heavily and then exhaled. I continued to watch him, waiting for my opportunity.
The Proxy glanced to the side and leaned forward a bit. "I do have to tell you something in confidence though, and since your life’s final path has been predetermined, I don't think it will cause any problems."
My grip on the gun lessened slightly. I was interested and said, with false bravado, "Lay it on me."
"Not everybody is as weak as they may seem. Some of us have been able to transfer out of the physical world, like Rimer, and integrate into the network. Not as smoothly as Rimer, but it has happened. I'd like to show you something." The Proxy's face seemed to change and shift right before my eyes. I stupidly blinked several times, ensuring this wasn't a dream. The face continued to bubble, move and shift. The complexion changed, the eye color morphed, the nose profile grew and shrank, and even the ears had a new position on the head. I studied the face until it became clear to me: this was the face of Tony.
"You see, the virus acts as a mobile Shift component, enabling me to rearrange my genetic code almost on the fly," The Proxy said but it sounded like Tony's voice. "I selected the Proxy because of his easily forgettable face and his lackluster accomplishments in life. Nobody will remember him and I can slip in and out of this face in mere minutes." He finished his sentence with a shrug. I couldn't believe I was looking at the guy that I had just started to trust. Knowing that he had embraced the virus didn't sit too well with me either. Finally, it was just downright creepy that he could Shift his face on the fly. As a man recently given over to vigilantism, I had allowed my cynicism in humanity to flower. I’d felt betrayed by Cal, but I’d always trusted him. Tony had never fully clicked with me, however. I guess in my gut, I’d always known why.
My hand tightened on the pistol grip. I had one question for him. One more question before I blew his gray matter onto the wall of the mag train. Integration within the Persistence network? Hah.
"Answer me this, my friend. Was Rimer ever real?" The Proxy chortled. "Of course he was! He just figured out a way to eternal life without a physical body. Who wouldn't want that?"
I had my snarky comment ready. "I guess you don't." I whipped the pistol out from by backside and unloaded into the Proxy. The entire clip rang throughout the mag train. He wasn't going anywhere after I was done, that was for sure.
To my surprise, no blood exited the Proxy in ropy strands. No brain matter sprayed the wall behind him. Holes existed where the bullets plunged through the soft flesh and exited, lodging themselves in the mag train wall. His face looked like powder-burned Swiss cheese, but there wasn't any blood. Blue lights visible through the holes spasmed and quickly faded to black from within his body. A contorted voice sounded out as only the part of his lips that remained moved, "I'll see you in Persistence." The last of the visible blue lights in his head finally darkened and the body of the Proxy slumped back into the seat.
The mag train announced the last stop of the route. As I exited the train, I wondered if what he was saying actually could occur. Eternal life via the Persistence network. I did just watch a guy's face change completely to another guy's face, so it seemed like anything was possible now. I figured I’d better get my thoughts in order and get back on Persistence. Someone might be waiting for me.
I didn't waste any time. I left the mag train quickly and broke into a sprint. My shoes hammered at the ground as I zipped through the station and up the stairs into the city. I scanned the area and noticed I didn't have far to go in order to get home. I needed to jack into Persistence. My data jack had been tingling since I’d put holes in the Proxy, or Tony, or whatever it was. I thought it was just adrenaline, but the needles of intrusion felt as though they were pressing on my brain.
I kept on sprinting, the cool air hitting my face and whipping through my hair. I didn't notice anyone, I just ran. Down one street, up a next. Two blocks here, four there. The tingle would get stronger and weaker, almost as though I had data traffic flowing through me. Sometimes the load was high, other times it was low. I had to get home.
I pushed my door open, recoiling slightly at the thud it made against the side wall. Locking it shut with a *thunk*, and laying my pistol out on table, I made my way to my office. Catbot occupied my chair and gave an annoyed mew as I picked her up and moved her. Sorry catbot, no time for games.
Chapter 16
The woman in the satin dress greeted me again, "Hello Rimer." She blew me another kiss, although this was less sensual and more matronly. I skipped the sequence and was faced with Persistence, completely and utterly devoid of color and sound aside from a few neon-colored data streams zipping by.
The interesting thing about a unified network is that most people don't really care if you know where they are jacking in from. In fact, most don’t even consider others knowing their physical location to be a concern. That data was available for all to see, should one be interested. I had a hunch that if the Proxy was right, I could connect to him, physically. I paused for a second, debating internally.
A blip appeared in front of me reading:
U CME FIIIIND ME 1st.
Fair enough. Being part of a rebel group, you pick up a few things here and there. One thing I had learned was the ability to quickly build a small, near-unidentifiable tracer. I quickly hacked up a no-frills trace and ran it against the message that Tony sent me. He didn't provide any sort of callback for me to reply to, however messages of this nature can always be followed to the source. All you need is a little know-how. Almost instantly, I found him on Persistence. Calling up Sputnik, I had it transfer my virtual location straight to him. After a quick, albeit nauseating experience of being plunged through the network at an overly high velocity, I appeared as myself next to the large, ugly demon, plucked straight from my dream.
The demon turned to me, laughed, and morphed into Tony. "What do you think? It won't take long to find another body to inhabit. My program has evolved to where the transition only takes mere seconds. I could even occupy you, should I so desire." He smirked as he spoke, the smile even more shit-eating than it was on the mag train.
"Take me to the original Rimer. Now." I kept my cool as I spoke, making my intentions clear. Data streams swirled around us, other visual representations of people popping in and out of view. "As you wish," he said.
He closed his flaming eyes closed, as though to execute some command and again we were flying through the network. We stopped in front of a massive construct: a wall that stretched across one’s entire field of vision. It we
nt on forever in all directions. It was everywhere and everything. A single, miniscule door permeated its being directly in front of us. Data streams plowed into the wall and exploded into colorful streamers of virtual dust.
"Pretty good security here," I said as I pointed towards a quickly moving stream that slammed into the wall. "Not just good, the best," Tony responded. "Most of these streams are attacks to break into this area. Nobody has ever been successful. Nobody. This wall represents acres of hardware that are interconnected and built to block anything coming in. Nobody knows where the hardware exists in the outerworld. We aim to keep it that way. Rimer spends all of his time jacked in. Rumor has it that he lives within our hardware fields, tucked far away from civilization, safe from physical attack.”
I watched a few more streams meet their demise and then followed Tony through the door. On the other side, it was like a virtual city for data. Buildings scaled towards the infinite with hatches that opened and closed as data went into them. Roadways of data fed the buildings that appeared and disappeared as data travelled along. Everything had its own dynamic path, but it was completely organized. It was as if these constructs were arranging and storing the data somewhere. I began to wonder at the purpose of this mess, and then it suddenly hit me. It was spidering the network, but at an enormous scale. Scanning, searching, collecting, cataloguing. Rimer was trying to collect and store every piece of data that had ever existed in Persistence. Big data at its finest.
Tony decided to give me a short walking tour as we made our way through some specialized data-free zones. "This is only one project. Rimer has many that he keeps locked away in his proverbial brain. What you are seeing now is in fact the creation of a mirrored image of Persistence. That is, a complete replication of the entire Persistence network and its data. Should Persistence go down, we could reproduce all of it in a heartbeat and be back to normal. Now, why do you think would someone want this?"
I cut in to answer his rhetorical question. "Because you plan on bringing down the network...to wipe everything and restore. But then, when it comes back up, you will be in charge."
Tony nodded in approval. Bringing down the network for a short time and wiping everything could provide Rimer temporary access to anyone jacked in. The time frame would be small, but long enough to probe any users, infect them, and the restore the network so they are dropped right back where they were, only a few milliseconds behind.
"Here we are. The man behind it all,” Tony said, as he gestured with his arms in front of him.
I looked around and responded, "Where? I don't see anyone." Tony chuckled. He then pointed to a tiny blip of light that pulsed in front me. I squinted. Something tingled on the back of my head and suddenly a voice boomed in my brain. "Welcome to my home. I am Rimer."
I spoke aloud, just for the sake of it. "Hey, how’s it going?" He didn't seem to notice my sarcasm. He curtly congratulated me on my journey and apologized for my impending slow, agonizing death. And with that, he left my brain. The pulsing light in front me vanished.
The realization hit immediately as Rimer disconnected from my head. Tony had said something interesting. The wall was built on hardware that nobody has ever seen. There wasn't a place on Earth that the government hadn't visited, recorded, and tucked away in its database. Rimer's hardware wasn't on land. It wasn't even physical hardware. He was using his infected for the processing power to keep the wall up. He was planning on harnessing people to be his computers, and those currently with blue lights were what, a beta test?
Tony perked up after "Rimer" left. "Well, you’d best be on your way, the virus should be nearing full course for you. I suspect convulsing, coughing up blood, all that good stuff! You might be strong, but not as strong as you need to be. I'll walk you out." Tony started heading towards the door through the no-data zone, blithely gesturing for me to follow.
Everything finally clicked. The virus was working against Rimer at the same time it was working for him. It was killing his victims off before he can gather enough processing power out of them. The virus was changing too rapidly. Some beings like Tony could handle the transition from the Shift component of the virus and blockade themselves from letting it control and subsequently kill them completely. Instead of fighting this, Rimer asks them join him. That conversation I just had with Rimer must've been my test to see if I'm worth the effort.
I’d guessed that I had failed and that they wouldn’t show me how to protect myself. Friendly hosts, indeed.
"Are you going to follow me?" asked Tony. I decided to gamble. I didn't respond back, instead I attempted to jack into my friend Tony. The virus made me susceptible to being hacked into, why wouldn’t it work the other way around? I lobbed Sputnik at his retreating head and watched in horror as pincers protruded in shiny anticipation en route.
It worked. Oh my did it work. I was jacked into Tony. I could hear his thoughts, see what data streams he was on and ultimately, have complete control over his brain. But instead of anything useful, I attacked. I transferred as many signals as I could to him through our connection. I would overload him with data, burn out his processing units and turn him into a brainless, gibbering pile of flesh. With the direct link, nothing fancy was needed. No constructs, no guile, just pure brute strength. Tony began to twist and contort. His face wrinkled and compressed, and then began to stretch, mouth gaping wide open. He was being killed this time, and he knew it. As I sent my last assault, I disconnected from him to avoid being pulled into the swirling vortex of data streams and madness.
His virtual self began to glitch and flicker, dataset breaking down. The binary code that made up his Persistence ident being chopped up, overwritten, and deleted. Finally, he simply exploded in a similar fashion to those data streams that blasted the wall, his face frozen in a contorted shriek of pain. Scraps of Tony floated away from the blast zone like confetti flying through the air. Part of clutching, staticky arm landed on me and I brushed it hurriedly off, feeling revulsion at its touch.
I shook off the experience and headed towards the wall, attempting to touch it. Right as I did, I was immediately jacked into a laborer working out in a plantation somewhere in the world. He didn't seem to notice me at all and kept working, running a machine that refined some sort of grain, wheat maybe? I felt as though I were actually him, the laborer. I could feel the wind working its way through the wheat in the fields, first parting them and then coursing over me. I could smell the dirt in the field, hell, I could see the field. I’m sure that if I had wanted to, I could take his arm and shove it directly into that machine without any quarrel from him. The sheer power I had gave me the shivers.
I disconnected and touched another part of the wall. Again, I had connected to someone, this time a business man. A blue light flickered in the guy's vision and I could hear his thoughts: "please don't kill me". That was odd, the laborer had no inkling that I was even there. I wondered if this one was a little bit more special. Maybe he was like me, a wrangler of data flows.
I disconnected again, returning back to the wall. It really was made of people. People that I didn't even think could be infected, like the laborers. Those that probably jacked in once in a blue moon to check things back home. Adults, children, anybody. It didn’t matter. As long as you had a connection, you were a part of the wall. And they felt that something was wrong, and on some level they were probably afraid. They had no idea that they were contributing to the downfall of humanity. The handover of Persistence to a private entity.
I did what any crazy person, trapped in a madman’s scheme, would do. I started breaking the connections. I'd jack in, disconnect them from the wall, and disconnect myself. I then got smart and automated the process. Sputnik flickered in and out of existence as it flitted along the wall. Little holes began to form. At first, they were very small but then would melt into other holes to create larger breaks. The bigger holes would then connect to other big holes to create full out broken links, partitioning the wall. It was break
ing down, and quickly. Data stream attacks started entering through the cracks. I didn't know what the streams were doing exactly but the hatches that had allowed the data into the buildings began to stick. Some data streams would stop as soon as they reached a hole in the wall, and instead would work their way towards the edges and bind themselves to it. In a way, they looked like some sort of parasite biting into a victim. Instead of sucking blood, they were filling themselves with electricity, with data. The streams became comically engorged and the wall grew even dimmer, the holes widened exponentially. The roadways stopped appearing. Less and less data was getting backed up.
Rimer's project was falling apart before my virtual eyes.
"STOP!" A voice shouted. "STOP STOP STOP!!!!!" Dozens of light particles swarmed around me. The particles then formed the shape of a human being. The shape scrambled to repair the wall, forming copies of itself, trying to re-establish connections. Not fast enough. As the attacks blasted through the wall, larger and larger gaps began to appear. The wall was being destroyed, undoing Rimer’s work.
"You don't know what you've committed yourself to. What you’ve done." The Rimer-shape pulsed as it spoke. "You don't understand, you don't get it at all!" He started to yell more frantically. For once, it was my turn to smirk. I let the Rimer lightshow continue. "All these disconnections, it will be too unstable in Persistence. If Persistence goes down because of that and there isn't a backup, there truly will be total chaos. You have doomed the outerworld! You’ve doomed us all and for what. Some abstract notion of patriotism?"
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