by Alex Powell
To Seven’s left, Eighty-Eight made a gurgling noise. Thousands of ants crawled up Eighty-Eight’s legs, so he appeared to be sinking into them, like drowning in liquid. The ants were a vivid red, and they were writhing about, all over each other and Eighty-Eight.
“It’s not real!” Seven yelled.
Eighty-Eight finally gave up and disappeared, popping off somewhere else in the Cerebrum. Having lost their first target, the ants cast about for another and swarmed toward Seven. There were a lot of them, all larger than he’d first thought when looking at them from a distance. Real ants weren’t this big.
They began crawling up his ankles, and he could feel their prickling legs on his skin. Not real, he thought, but it felt real, more real than being shot at point-blank range in the chest. He tried to shake them off his feet, but they clung to him.
He scanned the area to see who was imagining the ants and saw a man in a dress uniform with a little cape. Behind him, another agent had completely succumbed to the attack, covered from head to toe and hardly visible beneath the pulsing mass of insect bodies. It was a terrible sight, and Seven averted his eyes in horror.
He couldn’t get the ants off him, and now that was going to happen to him, too.
Suddenly, the entire area filled with fog so dense that Seven could barely see the hand in front of his face, never mind anyone else. The ants disappeared, and he breathed a sigh of relief. He tried to look around, but saw no one in the chilly fog.
Seven heard a voice say, “Go while you still can!”
Someone had to be standing right next to them. He couldn’t see them, but he could hear them speaking to him privately.
“Run! I can’t keep up the fog cover for long!”
Seven disappeared, jumping down links and heading back in the direction of the secure Government domain. There were more agents around him, also escaping the ants. They’d been thoroughly routed.
They, those rebel minds, were getting stronger, more desperate. They’d never attacked in a group like that before, never tried to ambush agents, until now. They knew that Seven and his people had their King, and were doing whatever they could to get him back. Seven was willing to bet they had never realized before now what kind of powers they truly had.
Fox hadn’t been there. Too bad, because Seven rather liked interacting with him, in a way that his superiors would probably not approve. He wasn’t sure he approved either, to be honest, but there was something irresistible about it. Him.
It was called “flirting,” what he’d done with Fox. He’d never tried it before, because who exactly was an agent meant to flirt with when everyone around him looked the same? Agents weren’t really meant to flirt, anyway. He wasn’t breaking any laws or codes, but it didn’t sit well with his sense of being an agent.
The thing was, it had been fun. He thought he might try it again, if he saw Fox anytime soon. Fox seemed startled and confused by those actions, which made Seven only want to try it again even more. Anyway, the Cat and the Reaper had told him to harass Fox and make it look as if the rebels were still being pursued. It was working, as far as he was concerned.
Seven shook himself out of his musings and got back to the matter at hand. He shouldn’t be daydreaming or skylarking, or whatever it was normal people did; he had a job to do. He was an agent. There was nothing else he knew how to do better, and he had no body to leave the Cerebrum even if he did.
He and the other agents entered the Government domain, being constantly upheld by a rotation of MindWallers—at least, the secure part. There was a Semi-Public domain for the general public, as it held archives for use by government employees as well as anyone who was interested in the information. Mostly, it contained things like laws, maps, history, and general information that didn’t need protection.
The domain appeared like a massive building made of stone, with stained glass windows, domes, and spires. The stones looked weather-beaten and old, perhaps to mirror an IRL building that was actually subject to the marching on of time.
There was a sign-in link so that government agents and employees could access more secure levels of the domain. It was a complex system, and as irritating as it was, every time Seven or any other agent returned, they were required to identify themselves before entering.
They all jumped straight into the sign-in link, which appeared to be a drab, white room with only a faded red line drawn on the floor to mark the queue to enter. Bureaucracy at its finest.
“Did we all make it out?” Eighty-Eight asked, still brushing at his sleeves, as if the illusion of ants had followed them. “What happened back there?”
Seven did a quick head count. “We’re all here. I don’t know what happened. We ambushed the rebel group, and instead of running as they usually do, they attacked us.”
Twelve rubbed his mid-section and grimaced. “Not just attacked us. That was no counter-reaction to being attacked. They were expecting us to attack and had a plan already in place.”
“What was their purpose?” Seven asked, but got shrugs all around.
“They made us retreat, which is good enough for the time being,” Eighty-Eight remarked, crossing his arms.
“It’s not, though,” Seven replied, tilting his head as he tried to put the pieces together. “It’s not good enough to make us retreat at all. They have to find their leader’s location, and at present, they don’t even know what country it’s in.”
Unless…
Seven scanned the assembled agents, this time taking his time and not just counting faces. There were still the right number of agents present, but he could put a number to all except one. And as he looked closer, he saw that the ID wasn’t blank as it should be, but a jumble of symbols.
Eighty-Eight followed his line of sight. He pulled out his gun and took aim, and Fox followed suit after a moment of hesitation.
They weren’t the only ones waiting in the room, and at the sight of the weapon, several ordinary government workers screamed and ducked. The false agent disappeared, and Seven automatically followed his training and jumped down the link after him.
It took only a few jumps for the image to fade and for the form of the white-robed woman to show through. Seven now understood that the repeating images and the trick with the ants had been a distraction so she could hide among their ranks as they retreated.
Eighty-Eight and Twelve managed to follow after Seven. As agents, training made sure they weren’t as surprised as the civilians who had also been in the room.
“We have to catch her,” he said over his shoulder.
“These rebels are tricky, and I don’t like it,” Eighty-Eight replied, and he bared his teeth. “What if she does get away?”
“She knows what government we work for now,” Twelve replied. “She’ll report it to all of the King’s followers, and they might be able to recover his body.”
“That would never happen,” Eighty-Eight said confidently. “No one could find one building in one place in a country such as ours, especially not during winter.”
“You’ve never experienced winter in our country,” Seven shot back, bristling.
“Neither have you,” Eighty-Eight said, unconcerned. “But I’ve seen the data. And visited the vids on the website. I have a good idea of what it’s like.”
“Yes, I also have a vague idea of what our country is like,” Seven said, and wondered what he was talking about. No one ever questioned it, that they had never been outside the Cerebrum. They were all content to rely on data stored here.
“As fascinating as all this is,” Twelve put in, “I think we ought to pay attention to the rebel.”
“Oh, she’s doing it again,” Eighty-Eight whined.
Seven sighed when he saw duplicates of her all over the link ahead. How did she do that? He looked between them all, trying to discover the difference between them and the real thing. He’d gotten only a glimpse of the real thing, however, so it wasn’t much use.
Or so he thought, until he realized th
at none of the duplicates had an ID code, not even one of the jumbled symbol codes that the rebel woman had.
“Look for the one with an ID,” he said to the others. “She’s good, but not good enough to duplicate an ID reading, even an encoded one.”
“That one!” Twelve pointed.
Seven drew his pistols again and fired. It should have been easy to hit her at this range, but she kept spinning out of the way. She appeared to be gliding or flying, and she dodged his bullets with ease. Seven gave up after a minute or so.
“She can’t outrun us forever,” Eighty-Eight grumbled. “She’ll tire eventually.”
“Eventually isn’t good enough,” Seven said. “We have to get her now, and we need a plan.”
“I can try and extrapolate her probable path and get ahead of her that way,” Twelve offered. “But if I’m wrong, then I’ve completely lost all of you.”
“I’ve got a scramble bug,” Eighty-Eight said.
“Why didn’t you say so before?” Seven exclaimed. “That would have been useful about the time we were all being covered in ants!”
“Not necessarily,” Twelve reminded him. “What if we’d then ended up covered in something worse?”
“Worse than ants,” Seven said flatly.
“I can’t think of anything,” Eighty-Eight said.
“Me either,” Twelve admitted.
“And it could have been something harmless, like leaves or something,” Seven pointed out. “That’s the point of a scrambling bug, it’s unpredictable.”
A scrambling bug would throw off every piece of data in the vicinity by one digit, but there was no guarantee which digit it would choose. They could end up anywhere, and it would stop any link-jumping until everything had settled down again. It would force the rebel to turn and face them.
“Hurry up and throw it, then,” Twelve said impatiently.
“I’m going, just hold your horses,” Eighty-Eight hissed back.
“Horses. Horses would have been worse,” Twelve said.
“No way,” Seven argued. “I’d much rather be crushed to death than eaten alive, thanks.”
“Scramble bug deployed,” Eighty-Eight announced.
Everything seemed to screech to a halt, and for a moment, they were all suspended in the middle of the Cerebrum, like mobiles. Seven couldn’t move yet, so even though the rebel woman ahead was caught motionless, they were in the same trap. Seven saw the Cerebrum as raw data, and all the numbers around him had ceased to flow.
“Well, this is—”
Just as abruptly, they all jumped violently sideways as the data began arranging itself according to the new codes. Seven knew it was all in his head, but he still felt breathless, like he’d been punched in the chest.
“Ow. Annoying,” finished Eighty-Eight. “I never want to do that again; I feel a tad nauseous.”
“Don’t you mean dizzy?” asked Twelve, clutching his head.
“Where are we?” Seven asked, wheezing in spite of himself. “Where’d the rebel go?”
“We…are in a mindnet dating sim,” Eighty-Eight announced, looking around in distaste. “How the hell did we end up here?”
There were people all around, interacting with fake, pre-programmed characters. It wasn’t even a good simulation, as far as Seven could see. The characters would sometimes shimmer, revealing bits of data, and their voices had a tinny quality. They were all in a big park somewhere, the open space dotted with trees and benches.
“Where’s the rebel?” asked Twelve, still holding his head. “This is impossible. She shouldn’t be able to jump down a link yet. She should still be too disoriented.”
“I know I am,” Eighty-Eight said. “I may be sick.”
“It’s all in your head,” Seven gasped.
They found a bench and collapsed onto it. It felt more like sitting on something plastic than the wood it was depicted as, but Seven would take what he could get at this point.
“It’s a really big park,” Eighty-Eight pointed out, looking around. “But to move on to the next level of the story, you’d have to jump down a link. So she’d still have to be here.”
“How do you know so much about dating sims, Eighty-Eight?” Twelve asked.
“No reason,” Eighty-Eight said, with a shifty sidelong glance.
Seven looked around, but everyone in the near vicinity had the same proper ID number, and if he ran it through the database, he was sure he’d be able to trace each and every one back to their IRL identification. Surely the rebel wouldn’t risk that. He took down the link number anyway, so that he could run everyone who was logged-in to this domain through the database, but he didn’t think he would find anything of use.
“She got away,” he said in disbelief. “How did she do that?”
Eighty-Eight leaned over the side of the bench and wretched. “The only way I can think of is somehow tricking the scrambling bug into thinking she was also a piece of data. If it shifted her in a different direction than it did us, she’s probably somewhere else entirely, sitting on her own shitty bench recovering from the effects.”
Suddenly, the bench wavered, then disappeared, dumping them all on the ground before reappearing several feet away in the middle of a path.
“My only condolence is that, if what you suggested is what actually happened, then she must feel just terrible,” Twelve groaned. “That was rough enough as it was, and the scrambling bug identified us as people.”
Seven was not looking forward to reporting in to say that the rebels now knew where to start their search for King. Maybe Eighty-Eight was right. Theirs was a massive territory, and to search blindly would turn up more snow than anything useful.
Who was he kidding? They were in so much trouble.
Chapter 5: Home Is Where the Head Is
Fox waited in the Cerebrum alone, trying to go through the motions of his daily life, but feeling a great big ball of panic lodged somewhere between his throat and his chest. He checked his messages from people IRL who were asking after his work, or friends who were just making sure he had arrived safely. They didn’t know who he was in the Cerebrum, and thought his only worry was that he was in a strange land by himself.
He was by himself, and it was very disconcerting.
No one in the Cerebrum had messaged him back. He’d left notes in all the usual places to ask for a meeting and waited anxiously for one of them to respond. He thought for sure that at least Joanne would contact him, but he hadn’t heard a peep.
The worst kinds of scenarios ran through his head, and he didn’t know what he could do if he were the last one left. He’d been clinking his buckle so much that if it had been an IRL strap, it would have worn through by now.
That last bunch of agents had taken him by surprise, but at the time, it appeared that everyone on the other team, the one looking for King’s body, had expected it. All this running around with basically no information about what was going on vis-a-vis the other front was driving him mad.
Fox rearranged his profile page again and looked through his travel blog, trying to keep his mind off his troubles, but he kept wondering what he would do if no one contacted him. He didn’t have a plan B, and it was looking more and more as if he should have thought of one. In fact, he’d made no alternate plans in the event one of their party was captured, never mind everyone except him.
Fox was absent-mindedly erasing messages from his inbox when an incoming message chimed its arrival. His heart leapt, and he quickly realized it was from Joanne.
His relief was so palpable, the ache in his chest where his anxiety had been sitting up eased. He wasn’t alone. It was okay.
Fox was still cautious, because it was possible it wasn’t really Joanne. If they’d caught her, it would be easy to pretend to be her and lure him in.
“Password?” he asked, stomach churning anew. Please know it. Please be Joanne.
This one wasn’t a word. A moment later, the image of a tiny cartoon fox appeared in his inbox. It yipped
at him, did a backflip, and a song started playing in the background. It was “Revolutionary Mind,” artist unknown. He opened the message, which had only the link number where Joanne was waiting for him.
Fox jumped down, ready to flee if he had to. It was a good sign that the email’s sender knew the password, but he couldn’t help but be suspicious that they’d all been compromised.
Thankfully, it really was Joanne, and she was by herself.
“Sorry, Fox,” she said, as soon as she was in sight. “I didn’t realize no one had told you what was going on until I got your message. Mrs. Parks is missing.”
“Missing,” Fox whispered in distress. “How can she be missing?”
“According to Simon and Karl, she went after the agents. It was her plan to trick them into leading her straight back to their domain, but after her infiltration, they lost track of her. They captured an agent for a while, but he managed to escape.”
“Where are the others?” Fox twisted his hands together. If Mrs. Parks had disappeared, it could happen to any of them. Being alone was the worst scenario, but when it came right down to it, having only two of them was not much better..
“They’re out looking for the last trace of her. They know the general direction she left in, but who knows where she ended up. I said we should call a meeting, but Simon and Karl refused to stop looking for her.”
Joanne didn’t seem at all stressed out, not like Fox, whose skin prickled in agitation.
“What can we do?” Fox finally asked. “Searching the Cerebrum for her would be like finding a needle in a haystack—or finding King’s body. We just don’t know where it is, and hoping to stumble across her is folly.”
“You can tell me what happened after we all got separated.”
“I know what colonies we need,” he replied. “But unless we find Mrs. Parks, that information is useless, because the next memory and the next clue are in her head.”
