Against The Middle

by Caleb Wachter

  She narrowed her eyes, and when she spoke she was unable to keep the surprise from her voice, “You are actually serious…”

  “I am,” Fei Long replied with a nod, knowing nothing he had ever said could have been truer. All he cared about was safeguarding Lu Bu’s life. But he also knew that if what he had seen in the probability string had been accurate, there was no chance he would have to deliver what he had just promised.

  She bit her lip—an affectation he had found hypnotic years earlier, but now found annoying since it was costing him, and his plan, precious time—and shook her head doubtfully, “The Director can get that from you…and I’m not sure I trust you enough—”

  “Is this not precisely what you want, Zhongda,” he said seriously, knowing he was out of time and would need to appeal to her most basic, selfish nature, “to be recognized as the greatest of our , or any other, time? This is your only path to that end.”

  She considered for a moment before nodding, having apparently arrived at a decision, “Fine. If I win, you give me all of that—along with your word that you will be my second. You will work when I tell you to work, eat when I tell you to eat, sleep when I tell you to sleep, and submit yourself to me in all other ways.”

  There was something decidedly lascivious in her expression at that moment, but Fei Long knew time was against him and he could ill afford further delays. “Yes. If you win, I will do so,” he said truthfully.

  “And what do you get if you win?” she asked in an almost rhetorical tone. “And don’t say ‘my freedom,’ because that’s the one thing I can’t give you.”

  “I care not for my own freedom,” he said as the pain at the base of his skull continued to grow, causing him to clench his teeth briefly before continuing, “but if I win, you will submit yourself to me and obey my commands for one day—starting immediately after our contest is concluded. After that, you will owe me nothing and I will let you live to pursue your own designs. Agreed?”

  “One day as your personal slave?” she said incredulously. “I know I’m hot, but I didn’t know you wanted me that bad—“

  “Do we have an agreement?” he demanded, cutting her off as his impatience grew.

  She cocked her head and gave him a wary look before nodding, “Yes, we do—so long as you also give me whatever information you have on your warship and its capabilities before the Director arrives.”

  “Good,” he said, tilting his head toward the workstations, “my challenge is this: finish decompiling the code you just processed and copied to those data crystals—and do it here where I can see it take place.”

  “That’s it?” she reared back in surprise. “That’s your challenge?”

  “It is,” he said gravely, “because I happen to know you missed a crucial step.” It was true; he had seen her overlook a particular bit of code—an oversight she would have certainly corrected on her own in the ensuing minutes, or possibly hours, but that was time he simply did not have. “If you cannot find that step and complete it in six minutes, I have won,” he said, sitting down on the cot as he suddenly felt dizzy.

  “Fine,” she said, “but the clock doesn’t start until my system’s booted up.”

  “As you say,” Fei Long agreed, “but only if you begin immediately.”

  A mischievous grin played across her lips and she moved to activate the trio of workstations before seating herself in the chair set before them. “You always were a sucker, Long,” she said as she called up her version of his decompiling program and set a six minute countdown clock on the screen behind her, “I left that fragment alone on purpose just to bait you into something like this. You really have lost your edge,” she clucked as she called up the precise portion of code he had seen her miss, and she set her program to work on it.

  Fei Long did his best to keep a neutral expression, but between the gravity of the situation and the increasing pain in the base of his skull, he was having difficulty doing so. But he focused on his breathing as his rival quickly, efficiently, and somehow ruthlessly decompiled the portion of code which remained.

  “There,” she declared triumphantly, “it’s done.” She turned around pointedly and saw the timer had stopped with four minutes and thirty two seconds remaining.

  “Are you certain?” he asked, hoping against hope that she had not modified the architecture of his decompiling program when it came to the CPU’s runtime overclocking mechanisms. It was one of those details which she had previously been known to overlook in favor of the larger, grander machinations.

  “Of course I am—“ she began haughtily before something on one of her screens caught her eye. “Clever,” she said, tapping a key which saw the countdown clock restart behind her, “very clever, Long…tying your auto-deletion protocols to the overclocker. But you didn’t anticipate my having this much processing power at my disposal.” Her fingers danced lightly, but mercilessly, across the three input pads as she worked against his booby trap. Fei Long prayed they had enough time for the contest to conclude on its own terms before the Director made his entry.

  With a series of impressively coordinated maneuvers, Zhongda rerouted massive amounts of processing power to the task of creating a sub-network which would run parallel to the one which had been infected with Fei Long’s deletion program. Using that network, she was able to corral the infected portion of the processor and execute a series of data-scrubbing programs which attacked Fei Long’s rapidly-growing auto-deletion protocols—protocols which, given the nature of her massive, cross-linked mainframe of processors all slaved together, would destroy every bit of data stored in the base’s archives.

  “Really, Long,” she said, feigning bitter disappointment as the clock wound down to two minutes remaining, “I expected better.” Thirty seconds later, her second network had neutralized his auto-deletion protocols and segregated his three distinct virtual creations—which formed the Yin & Yang program when they were properly recombined—into thousands of tiny, presumably denatured fragments which would do no harm to anything.

  He watched with bated breath as the last of his conventional defenses were overcome by her overpowered network, and hung his head between his knees in the universal gesture of defeat. He grasped his hair with his fingers and began to tremble, knowing that so much was yet to be done in order to preserve Lu Bu’s life, and now he was utterly at the mercy of his greatest rival and nemesis. If she had indeed successfully neutralized his program, then he had failed utterly in his stated goal.

  “I think I’ll delete this,” she said after a moment’s consideration, “I’ve already got the whole thing copied down to the data crystals, anyway, and we wouldn’t want the Director to find out about this now would we…my sworn life-slave?”

  His voice nearly caught in his throat—both from the stress of the situation and from the pain in his skull—as he said, “Do as you think best.” The probability string had been perfectly clear: she would not win! But he could not help to wonder whether or not he had made a mistake…

  “I will,” she said, and he looked up just in time to see her finger hit the ‘delete’ icon on her central workstation.

  The screen behind her showed a progress bar as the overpowered sub-network mercilessly tore at the constituent parts of his most prized, valuable, and important work. Within just a few seconds, the database read as empty, and Fei Long sighed loudly as he felt the weight of the world come crashing down on his shoulders.

  Fei Long stood and grasped the bars for support as he felt his knees go wobbly beneath him. As he stood there, his vision blacked out—or, rather, it whited out. He saw thousands of strings pouring forward from where he stood, and everywhere he looked he saw more of those strings. As he watched, he saw the strings converge into dark, menacing shapes, and he knew they were the same shapes he had almost glimpsed during the strange, virtual conversation with his neighboring prisoner.

  The thought of that mysterious man pulled him back to the present, and he looked up to see that almost n
o time had elapsed during his brief whiteout.

  “The Director has just entered the landing station,” Zhongda said as she finished putting the virtual network back into its original configuration, likely to avoid repercussions from this so-called Director, “so you had better give me everything you have, starting with all tactical data on your ship and their plans for attacking this base.”

  Fei Long released a long-held breath, and as he did so he felt the corner of his mouth quirk up in a smirk. “I think not, Zhongda,” he said, tilting his head toward the screen behind her which had just flickered in a fashion which he had predicted might happen, “because it is you, not I, who has lost today.”

  She scowled, “If you’re going back on your word…“ Something on her right-hand monitor caught her attention. Just as she went to address it there was a series of alarms from the cell in which the mysterious man was lying. Her attention divided, she gave a sharp look in Fei Long’s look as she moved to the cell filled with the medical equipment. The alarms clearly indicated a pending emergency—an emergency which had come to be at Fei Long’s hand—and her eyes went wide as she fumbled to activate her wrist-mounted com-link. “Medical emergency in the prison,” she said unsteadily as she ran back to her workstations, “all available medical personnel to the prison!”

  She began to work furiously, standing over the trio of workstations rather than opting for the chair, but Fei Long knew it was already done. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, he watched as his program—which had buffered the necessary code fragments in the system’s secondary and tertiary caches, from where they could never be removed without physical replacement of the equipment itself—reassembled itself and slowly, but surely, acquired more and more of her virtual resources for itself.

  “How…how?!” she screamed as the door opened to the prison and a pair of personnel entered, moving quickly to cross the space between themselves and the dying prisoner’s cell. She looked up at Fei Long with a mixture of fear and hatred in her eyes, as behind her the screen showed the ancient Taoist symbol of eternity, balance, and harmony: the inextricably partnered Yin & Yang. “A program can only execute outward from the base Yin & Yang alignment—nothing can move back into Yin & Yang, let alone move outward again. It is impossible…a tree does not grow into a seed and then back to a tree!”

  Her words were like music to Fei Long’s ears; a melody for which the first strings had been plucked by his fingers before boarding the Lost Ark and embarking on this most dangerous, vital mission. Lu Bu’s words echoed in his ears, as she had declared in no uncertain terms that his salvation would lie with the Yin and the Yang, and now he knew that he had been blessed to share what little time he had shared with her. She was truly an exceptional individual, and he would miss her most of all—but he still had a duty to do for her, and he would not fail in it!

  “It is done, Zhongda,” he said in their native tongue as the Director appeared at the doorway, “we have a bargain, do we not?”

  As he watched, the Yin & Yang program reached its first level of attainment and executed its first command: a total deletion of all data stored on the base’s hardware. The program would require at least twelve minutes to finish the task, but he needed to get to a workstation before half that much time elapsed or there would be no hope to save Lu Bu.

  “How,” she snapped, and the medical personnel entered the cell to work on the dying prisoner, “how did you do it?!”

  “I will tell you,” he replied, “but you must do as we agreed.”

  “What is g-g-going on here?” the Director demanded, moving into the room with ever-widening eyes as he first saw the dying prisoner, then Fei Long’s program systematically deleting their stores of data. “Stop that at once!” he screamed at Zhongda.

  She bit her lip, shooting Fei Long a sharp look before giving him a barely perceptible nod. “I caught this operative attempting to introduce a subversive program into our mainframe,” she explained tightly as a pair of armed guards—the same ones which had apprehended Fei Long earlier—moved into the room. “My defenses were breached, but I can still save the files if I physically disconnect the storage modules from the processors. We can worry about reinitializing the system later.”

  “G-g-g-g-go!” he cried, gesturing for the two guardsmen to approach Fei Long’s cell. Zhongda looked back at Fei Long, hesitating briefly before moving to the door of the room and leaving.

  Fei Long knew as well as she did that there was absolutely no way that disconnecting the storage modules would stop his Yin & Yang attack. His program had already spread to each of the individual units’ checksum algorithms; disconnecting the equipment would only slow the data degradation by about fifty percent. Had she segregated her network physically, he would have been unable to overtake the entire system before she could have limited his damage, and access, to a mere fraction of the whole network. But her greed had played against her, just as he had hoped it would.

  The Director approached Fei Long’s cell, and as he did so Fei Long experienced yet another whiteout. The dark, writhing shapes and masses of imagery strings were now plain to see, and he felt a sharp increase in the pain at the base of his skull. The mess of imagery threatened to overwhelm him as it crashed down on his consciousness like a thousand foot tall wall of water. He fought against the oppressive sensation and managed to regain some measure of control over the imagery as he forced it behind the exceedingly thin veil of whiteness. As he did so, he somehow knew that another two whiteouts—or three, at the most—would be all he could endure if he did not find some way to cope with their sanity-straining effects.

  He had to find a way to stave off the mass of tangled strings, and keep them from overwhelming him until he had completed what he had come to do—two or three more whiteouts, at five minute intervals, would be nowhere near enough. For what seemed like an eternity, he despaired as he could conceive of no way to do as he needed to do.

  A loud, monotonous sound seemed to pierce through his skull on all sides, and he was vaguely aware that it was the life monitoring equipment attached to his fellow prisoner. The mysterious man was moments from death—Fei Long knew this was true, but he did not know how he knew it—and soon he would join the Ancestors as another in the long chain of stories, some untold by antiquity and others as famous as Romance of the Three Kingdoms—

  The thought of that book snapped his mind into focus, and in yet another moment of crystal clarity he saw the path to Lu Bu’s salvation. As quickly as it had appeared, as a single string in an endless ocean of jumbled strings, it disappeared into the writhing mass of its jealous fellows. The nearby strings seemed not to want Fei Long to find the one he sought again, as the mass surged and roiled in a sickening, yet fascinating display of string folding upon string.

  Then the whiteout ended and Fei Long stood face-to-face with the Director. The pain in Fei Long’s skull continued to grow, and it was all he could do not to reach back with his bare hands and try to rip the skin from his neck in some clearly insane attempt to relieve the throbbing pressure.

  “Who are y-y-you?” the Director demanded, and Fei Long noticed that the guardsmen had blaster pistols out and held at their sides.

  “I am Kongming,” Fei Long replied, knowing after his conversation with the dying prisoner that it was the truest answer he could provide—but he also knew that very soon he would have no right to claim the legacy of Zhuge Liang.

  “Where is your sh-ship?” the elderly man asked impatiently.

  “I do not know,” Fei Long replied calmly, vaguely aware that help was about to fall from the sky before the men could fulfill their master’s next order.

  “Then you are worth n-n-nothing to me,” the Director snapped, gesturing with a flick of his wrist to the guards flanking him.

  The men drew their pistols up and made to train them on Fei Long, but before they could bring him into their sights a pair of bolts slammed into them, one before the other, and sent them crashing to the floor with burning holes
in their chests. One of their weapons discharged into the floor, and the other discharged into the wall behind Fei Long.

  The second discharge sent a spray of metal fragments outward as it exploded against the back wall of the makeshift prison. Several of those fragments went flying outward, and the sound of escaping atmosphere began to hiss throughout the room.

  Before anyone—including Fei Long—could react, Lancer Vali Funar fell to the floor with a blaster pistol in each hand. He dropped one and grabbed the Director from behind with an arm across the throat. He turned the white-coated man to face the medical team which had just stopped working on their patient, and aimed his pistol at the Director’s head as he did so. “Anyone who wants to breathe five minutes from now had better hit the deck,” Funar barked, looking like a warrior of legend in his Storm Drake armor with his fearsome dragon-styled helmet baring its metal teeth for all to see.

  The medical team members looked at each other as they lowered to the floor, lacing their fingers behind their heads as Vali Funar deftly produced a zip-tie from his belt and wrenched the Director’s arms behind his back. After binding the Director’s hands at the wrists, Funar looked at the bars standing between Fei Long and freedom.

  “Stand back, Fei,” Funar said and Fei Long obliged as much as he was able, given the cramped quarters. The Lancer fired a pair of shots at the base of one bar, then a pair of shots at the top of the one beside it, and then kicked the two in while still managing to control the Director with his free hand.

  Fei Long squeezed through the gap and made for the mobile workstations Zhongda had used, stooping to collect one of the fallen guards’ blaster pistols as he made his way to the trio of workstations Zhongda had previously used.