Server Extant

Morghain had relieved the DM from Kyle. Kyle met her and PRod in the under-glow of a hologramatic signage, twisting tsunami wave, that broke, crested with Japanese-style twists of foam, endlessly and lasciviously over and over the voluptuously nubile body of a Japanese sea goddess. The kanji under the glowing holo indicated it was some sort of commercial, either for beer or for naked chicks that liked to swim. The long street glowed around them, it’s negative space squeezed out by intestinal-looking pipes that bulged from the walls like industrial veins. It was a good spot to meet quietly.

‘Could you talk to him?’ asked Kyle, without preamble.

‘No,’ said Morghain, ‘that is, I did, but it was no use. Also, he just bombed Motor’s press event.’

‘How?’

‘Blew it up. I dunno how they got though screening. Anyway, he fired off a challenge, right to motors face. He says hes going to the tournament.’

‘Oh shit. That’s suicide.’

‘Yes it absolutely is.’

’Why would he do that? Unless he wants to go out in a blaze of glory.. as Carnivous.

‘Maybe he thinks he can win’, suggested PRod. ’He is crazy, after all.’

‘I told PRod about the suit’ said Morghain.

‘Why?’ demanded Kyle. He hadn’t liked seeing PRod trot up behind Morghain. PRod was a dick who thought he was allot funnier than he was.

‘He can help us, Kyle.’

‘Yeah come on dude’, said PRod, apparently sincerely, ‘if you’re right, your brother might really get hurt. Or die. I’ll help.’

‘I got to talk to him,’ said Kyle.

‘They were in the clan hall,’ said Morghain, ‘but I doubt they still are. They’ll be already getting ready to leave. The tournament in three hours.’

‘Fuck!’ I just need to hold him, in some way that doesn’t kill him. If I’m right-’

‘-and we don’t know that you are,’ Morghain interjected.

Kyle found the clutching fear he’d been evading catch at his heart. He remembered a day of perfect pale autumn sky, eleven years ago. The day the world fell off it’s axis and never really recovered. He remembered the voice of the policeman, floating from the kitchen, as he’s sat on the living room couch, ’What kind of assholes does that, where his kids can find his body?’ He remembered his brother, silent sitting in front of the TV in the center of the room. He’d said nothing that day, he hadn’t said much, since. It had been Kyle’s job to look after his brother, after that, and he hadn’t. He’d been too busy, in his own world, self-pitying and self-absorbed. Now the truth was almost too painful. It had been his job, and hadn’t done it.

Kyle breathed hard swallowing the feeling. It became less sharp, but it didn’t go away.

‘We have to assume it,’ he said steadily. ‘I just need to get him unplugged from that thing until I can figure out what’s going on. If it’s a false alarm, no harm. Except he’ll be pissed.’

‘Leon might be a pasty agoraphobic nailed into his room,’ said Morghain, ‘but Carnivous is a tank. How do we immobilize a kingpin Id, plus a bunch of his friends? Who are also tanks.’

‘Okay, let’s start there’ said Kyle, ‘What exists in Kys-1 that could do it?’

‘Nothing. Without killing him. He’ll never agree to arrest.’

‘Well..’ said PRod, ‘there’s the imploders.’

‘What are they?’

‘They’re cells for high density prisoners or hostages, under the city. Basically cavities with walls made out of explosives, like a giant shaped charge. If the prisoner tries to bust out, they detonate and the vector force concentrates on the cell. Instant death, even for a kingpin.’

‘How are prisoners put in?’

‘By link. There’s on on the roof of the cell. A bad guy is lured into a high cap, it’s activated, and then immediately deactivated when the target falls through.’

‘Will the Block let us use one?’

‘Oh,’ said Morghain, thinking of the almost sexual hatred the council had for Carnivous and the other clan leaders, ‘I think very much indeed.’

‘But we can’t force him into the link,’ said Kyle, ‘he’ll have to be tricked.’

‘And that won’t be easy’ said Morghain. ‘You don’t get to be a kingpin by falling for shit. And your brother has an instinct. He’s like a very paranoid wolf.’

‘Then he has to be provoked’ said PRod. ‘We need an emotional lever. Get him so pissed he loses judgment, forgets everything, except getting at you. What would make him react like that?’

‘I dunno,’ said Kyle. ‘I suppose anything that exposes him as Leon. That punctures his illusion of Knet godhood. That exposes Carnivous.’

‘So? You’re his brother’ said Morghain. ‘What could we use?’

‘I think I know,’ said Kyle, reluctantly, ‘but how do we get his attention?’

‘There’s MESTO’s channel,’ suggested PRod. ’He can put out a stream. The dude’s got like a million subs. We’ll bill it as a one-on-one interview about the ‘real’ Carnivous, as told by his actual R1 brother. The straight shit, blah blah. As soon as it launches, Carnivous will get wind of it. He’ll be forced to act.’

‘I’ll get onto the council and get the linking output to an imploder cell,’ said Morghain, ‘you go to MESTSO and get him to rig a highcap. Use my password to get linking plates from the citdef if you need them, but I’m pretty sure he has some already.’

‘Right’ said PRod. He and Kyle ran for MESTO’s place, Morghain for the Block.

* * *

In the floodlit hold of a P-Fed carrier, a hundred P-Fed Soldiers waited for the drop. The big hull had thumped six times, and the terrifying flicker of threatened annihilation had distorted their VR feeds. The GPCs were over-gating, a process by which they skipped several sever extents at once. This procedure carried a risk of ‘Error 2377’ (transferal validation loss), also known as a ‘blinkout’.

In the Knet engine, matter and energy was conserved as it moved across servers as rigorously as it was maintained inside, because Knet’s bedrock principles banned the arbitrary creation of object clones, energies or AI systems, except as precursor material, ready for evolution by accretion, process or mod. To ensure this, as an objects was transported from one field extents to the next, it had to be completely erased from the origin server and the information validated and entered into the physical inventory of the next server. This meant that, for the split instant between erasure and entry, it did not exist on either server, but rather, in a buffer preserved for traffic. Normally, that wasn’t a problem. However, the more complex the transfer, the more perilous. More information meant a greater the chance of error. If a mismatch occurred, the Knet engine, with its characteristic ruthlessness, resolved the problem by simply dumping the data, rather than entering corrupt or incomplete inventory into the new server’s simulation. This was the dreaded ‘blinkout’, and was the only way Knet mass and energy could be deleted arbitrarily, without being devolved, converted or expended on process.

Since the danger of ‘blinking out’ increased with transfer complexity, tension was high in the hold. There were few moving objects as large and complicated as a P-Fed carrier, packed with player Ids and vehicles. Increasing the danger was the practice of ‘over-gating’, hitting the server extents hard enough to skip several at a time. This meant cascading the copy-replace cycles, further increasing the chance of the cat not getting out of Schrodinger’s box.

‘Why the fuck are they over-gating?’ fretted a P-Fedder in articulated gun exoskeleton. ‘They want the element of surprise or something? Everyone knows we’re going to Gigantua.’

Most of the troopers in the hold had been playing up their Ids for months, the idea of just ceasing to exist because of the operational incompetence of the battle managers infuriated them. Plus they’d miss the whole war.

‘Yeah,’ agreed another.

Gigantua promised to be epic. Gigantua was a vast, eighty tetra-iota super server. The surface was thick with procedural cim forests and predatory A.I organisms that had long evolved out of control of their original modders. There were no cities, but hundreds of castle forts, towering out of the thick canopy, ringed with defenses and shield walls. These mini city-states were at war with one another but would join to repel any invader that appeared in their skies. Today, the P-Fed force would supposedly be attacking a cluster of five, called The Brothers, with opportunistic raids as events developed. They were planning to crash drop into the jungle and assault on foot. Numerous weak spots, secret doors and tunnels, were known to have been bought from traitors, although the information could just as easily be a trap as a cheat. It promised to be a knock-down, wall assaulting, pitbull-brawling, hand-to-hand bloodfest, in the hearts of booby-trapped fortresses and monster-filled wilderness, with awesome loot and opportunities for top kek abounding, the finest sort of fun. It was Friday night, Motor’s killers had junk food in easy reach, drinks and drugs, even a pissing jar (in case going A.F.K was impossible in the fury), and a long night of carnage was beckoning, bleeding into the small hours of Saturday morning, sleepless, hallucinogenic and adrenalinized. And it could all be ended instantly, by a fucking blinkout on the way to the fight.

‘Why did we jump so far? And whats with this weird pattern?’ demanded someone deeper in the hold. ‘Gigantua isn’t that far outside the frontier. We’ve gated like, six times, with two overs. Are we lost or something?’

‘I’m beginning to think we’re not going to Gigantua’ said the first trooper.

The others seemed to preoccupied by their thoughts to reply. The big ship thumped again and the light flickered as the carrier crossed another invisible border.

* * *

In Kys-1, there was also a sense of the weekend beginning. This was in ill-defined but commonly recognized phenomena called the ‘surge’, a sense of expectant energy. The streets seemed fuller, there was the subtle, rising on energy, a sense of possibility, as millions of idle netziens logged on at the end of the work week, to join the ones unemployed anyway, and asked the question, what shall we do?’

MESTO usually ran a stream, but tonight he’d been pressed into service by Morghain. Once the situation had been explained to him, MESTO, fast on the uptake, as usual, had set up the supercap link and keyed it to the exit-point provided by the Block. He’d modeled the floor of his laborium in minutes, baked in the illusion of reflection and specularity from a render POV of the entrance door, and projected it as a holo, creating an illusory double floor a few inches above the real surface, high enough to conceal the link platform. The link was now primed to transfer anyone who stepped onto it to the imploder cell beneath the Block, and the holo floor concealed it, to a casual glance. Standing at the door, Morghain could see imperfections in the illusion, the ‘floor’ reflections did not move when one’s point of view shifted. A skilled deathmatcher would probably spot it. They would just have to hope that Carnivous would be too enraged to notice, would be too hot to get his hands on his traitor brother to hesitate.

MESTO’s stream would normally began at 9:20. He had no particular schedule, and would run a group chat, sometimes with other kultura and modders of note, sometimes with other popular hosts. His topics ranged from the petty to the sublime, politics, art and gossip. Morghain knew he’d have twenty thousand viewers in the first few seconds of the stream and the number would explode, as the topic became known. Kyle was to be interviewed, and reveal himself to be the brother of Kys-1’s most notorious clan boss. This was sent out by notification ten minutes before commencement.

‘What are you going to tell me about Carnivous?’ asked MESTO, actually intrigued. ‘I didn’t even know he was your brother. Why’d you never tell anyone?’

‘Would you admit to it?’ asked Kyle, knowing that was not the real answer. ‘Point is, I got plenty on him that he won’t want on Knet.’

‘C’mon, give me a taste.’

‘His name for one. It’s Leon.’

‘That’s not incriminating.’

‘Trust me. Just having the people know his real name will drive him nuts. And there’s allot more.’

‘Leon will find it psychologically intolerable to have the facade of his carefully constructed online persona degraded’ explained PRod, who was an expert in the art of pissing people off, ‘we’re hoping he’ll react irrationally. His only thought will to be to get here as fast as possible.’

‘And kill us all,’ said MESTO, as if beginning to see a flaw in the plan.

’Don’t worry, interjected Morghain, ‘as soon as he touches the the floor, I’ll activate. My hand will be right on the button. And he’ll be linked directly to the imploder cell and trapped.’

’And that’ll give me enough time to go around to his R1 apartment, pry the door off it’s hinges and choke him out, ’said Kyle. ‘Then I’ll pull the plug on his death suit-’

’Alleged death suit,’ said Morghain.

‘-and smash it.’

’Why don’t you just call the cops? Asked MESTO.

‘And tell them what?’ demanded Kyle. ‘Can you imagine trying to get someone at a police station to understand all this? We don’t have time!’

‘Yes’ said Morghain, ‘if the cops get a report of someone being suicidal, they go around and do a site check, which means knocking on doors and talking to the person in question. If he or she doesn’t seem a danger to themselves, they can’t enter by force to detain the person. You need to go and apply for an apprehended self-harm order from the court, and they probably wouldn’t issue it until a social worker talks to- ’

‘Look,’ interrupted Kyle, impatiently, ‘the tournament is in three hours. If my brother shows up at Motor’s stadium he’s a dead man. I have to put him on ice, until I can get to him in the R1. My brother has a physique like an orangutan with AIDS, he won’t put up much of a fight.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure of that, Kyle’ cautioned Morghain. ‘You’ll be fighting Carnivous, if only in Leon’s body, and Carnivous fights for keeps. I would be careful. You don’t know what he’s capable of.’

‘Come on, Morghain.’

‘I’m serious, Kyle. Don’t take it lightly.’

‘Alright fine! Just buy me time. I’ll deal with my brother.’

‘Alright’ said MESTO. ‘Well, this is all crazy, but I dig the karma of saving someone’s actual, no-shit life for real. So I guess it all comes down to whether you can hit that link faster than Carnivous can get across the floor and murder us.’

‘I’ll get him’ said Morghain.

* * *

Carnivous and several of the other kingpins, including Cubist, Lopslide, Hammerziet, FCC, exited a shaft and climbed to street level. There was no speaking, as if each were locked in their own realization as to what they were embarking. A vibration of adrenalin sang a song on their nerves, a simple refrain, this is a mistake. But they were doing it. Only Carnivous seemed entirely calm.

They began to move through the narrow streets, towards the secret hangar that housed their ship.

‘Carnivous’ said Cubist, sharply. ‘Look’ Something in his tone made the kingpin turn immediately. Cubist was holding up a screen icon. ‘They say MESTO is going to be interviewing your brother. You have a brother?’

‘What?’ for once, Carnivous’ digitally deadened voice was unable to hide himself. He sounded shocked.

‘MESTO says he’s going to be live-streaming your brother, Kyle.’ said Cubist. ‘I didn’t know Kyle was your brother.’

The stream came online and immediately visible was MESTO’s laborium. Sitting with him was Kyle.

‘Hey everybody,’ said MESTO. ‘A bit of a weird one today. I got Kyle with me, who allot of you will know as a player long associated with Morghain and allot of the big clan figures here on Extant. We’re gonna talk. Now, not many people on Knet know this, but Kyle is actually Carnivous’ R1 brother. Is that right?’

‘Yep,’ said Kyle, sitting with MESTO in the little video feed window.

’That douche is your brother?’ demanded Lopslide. ‘Actually, that makes sense. I always wondered why you let that link-sitting fuck hang around with us.’

Carnivous seemed struck immobile. The others were looking at him in consternation.

‘Now I thought this’d be topical,’ continued MESTO, ‘because, as we all know, Carnivous has been very much in the public eye lately, what with his generous decision to start a war on our behalf.’

‘Kyle..’ whispered Carnivous. The weak and hated part of Carnivous, the meat-thing ‘Leon’, felt a warm, horrible blush, a terror, roll up its body like hot poison. Carnivous felt his world begin to tip, the immanence of a vast, unspoken peril. Carnivous. Leon.

’So is your brother a real R1 baddass?’ asked MESTO. ‘I personally envision a six foot four playboy billionaire inventor who fights crime. Is that accurate?’

‘Ha ha’ said Kyle. ‘Not even remotely. In fact, I once saw Corey Allens hold his head in a toilet, and Cory is six inches shorter than him and has asthma.’

Carnivous made a noise, almost like a hiss, a feedback of static charged with such an accelerative note of rage that his fellow kingpins involuntarily stepped back. None of them had seen him in this unguarded state.

‘For a start,’ said Kyle, lightly, ‘his real name is Leon.’

‘KY-L-E!’ roared Carnivous and was gone, darting through the streets like a murderous projectile, towards MESTO’s laborium.

‘This I gotta see!’ said Cubist, gleefully. He, Hammerziet, ECG and Lopslide took off in pursuit.

* * *

In the long, curving street outside MESTO’s laborium, one of the spies was speaking to several shimmering forms that stood behind him in the gloom. He and the other had been ordered off surveillance of the council and told to report to a certain place to guide certain individuals through the city to a certain location. He had brought them here.

‘That’s MESTO’s place’ the spy was whispering, pointing to the tall bulb-like building. ’I dunno who else is in there, but I know he is because he’s doing a stream right now.’

‘We’re in place for MESTO,’ reported the shimmering form, apparently to a comm.

‘Do it’ came the reply.

* * *

‘So tell me,’ said MESTO. ‘Where did you guys go to school?’

‘Well-’ said Kyle.

There was a bang as the lower door was blown in and swift feet on the stairs.

‘Already?’ Thought Morghain. Her finger twitched to the link activator, her eyes were fixed on the door. So shocked was she to see several shimmering outline-figures burst into the room, instead of the expected kingpins, that she nearly hit the activator by mistake, jerking her hand back just in time. She could see that the intruders were camouflaged with clone-shields, their surface textures mapped and stitched in real time with the input of uni-direction cameras built into their Ids, recording the environment and played it on their skins like video wallpaper. It gave them a crude form of invisibility, a see-through quality. It made it hard to make out the style of their Ids, but her skilled gamer’s eye instantly read that their outlines were not those of Kysairons.

‘Down!’ yelled Morghain. She’d already hit the floor by instinct, her brain catching up, an instant later, to shout a warning. Kyle dived behind the clutter of machinery and half-developed projects that crowded the laborium.

Exposed to the door, and lacking the twitch-fast instincts of his gamer friends, MESTO was too slow.

‘What the f-!’ he managed to protest as the shapes opened fire, tearing his weird body apart in a dismembering spray of glowing blood.

‘He went down fast for a boss’ said one of the attackers.

‘All his prop in skin! Sucker!’ laughed another. ‘Let’s find that big chick and bullet-rape her. She looks thick.’

‘No time. Grab his token, set the charge and-’ said the lead, and Morgain and Kyle leapt at them from the shadows for the room. Morghain’s chainsword nearly de-torsoed the lead, he blocked it just in time with his projectile weapon in a shower of sparks, Kyle sliced the arm of another as he raised his weapon, and kicked the legs out from under a third, sending his body tumbling helplessly down the stairs. As the Ids were struck, their camo mods flickered and they were briefly revealed as techno-helmeted figures in black power armor.

The attackers racked their projectile weapons and swept out chainswords and power gauntlets.

‘Double up!’ Morgain yelled to Kyle, and, quick as thought, he grabbed onto her back. Morghain leapt, straight upward, fifteen meters, caught the upper window ledge and flipped through it.

‘Holy shit you can jump’ said Kyle.

‘Fuck, she tricked us into swapping out to melee!’ cursed one of the attackers.

‘Come on, let’s go!’ The leader pulled a round sphere from his kit and activated a timer on it. He threw it into the laborium, where it rolled and came to a rest near the shredded body of MESTO.

Outside, Morghain and Kyle leaned into the shadow of a roof ledge and watched the shimmery outlines of the intruders burst back out into the street. They piled into a nondescript ovaloid vehicle which pulled up, with a single roach piloting it, and began to accelerate away.

‘Fuck!’ said Kyle, and pointed. A massive shape stepped smoothly out from the shadows, a great war hammer arcing effortlessly in his hands. It struck the vehicle dead on and crushed it like a technological egg shell. The assassins were catapulted out of its windshield or crushed between the hammer and the wreckage.

‘Hammerziet’ said Kyle.

The survivors rolled to their feet, opening fire. They were cut and blasted to pieces almost instantly by new forms that emerged behind Hammerziet, silhouetted against the dim glow of the street. They strode over the corpses and made for the open door of MESTO’s laborium. Kyle saw the distinctive horns amid the purposeful shapes and knew his brother was here.

‘Fuck fuck fuck!’ whispered Kyle, ’The trigger!’ On the floor below them, they could see the switch, ready to activate the links hidden in the floor. In another moment, Carnivous and his enforcers would be coming up the stairs. On the other side of the room, Kyle could see the dull-metal sphere, its timing counting down. Five.. four.. three..

On instinct, Morghain dropped from her perch and fell into the room.

As she did, Carnivous stepped onto the floor of the Laborium like a horned god of violence. His eyes locked with Morghain’s just as she grabbed the switch. ’Morghain-’ he whispered, in a tone so filled with murderous promise that she felt genuinely chilled.

She hit the link. Carnivous and his companions vanished.

‘Morghain!’ yelled Kyle, and the bomb exploded.

Several blocks away, PRod felt the thump and saw the fireball roll up above the serpentine street tops, trailing a wave of flickering, white specks that he realized were birds. It was quite beautiful.

He ran back to the site and found Morghain lying in rubble on the far side of the street, staring at MESTO’s burning laborium, painted, head-to-toe, with glowing blood. Kyle was kneeling next to her.

‘What happened?’ Asked PRod.

‘I’ll tell you what fucking happened, MESTO just got no-shit assassinated!’ yelled Morghain. ’I got knocked straight to red. I dunno what that thing was, but it bit like a badger.’

‘She was right on it when it blew,’ fretted Kyle, ‘I got it too but not- Morghain, sorry, I should have jumped down-’

‘It’s okay Kyle. I regen 350per. I’ll be alright.’

‘Did you get Carnivous?’ asked PRod.’

‘We got them’ said Morghain. ‘They’re in the trap.’

‘Thanks’ said Kyle. ‘I’ll never forget this.’

‘It’s cool Kyle, go. Talk to your brother.’

‘Thanks,’ said Kyle, again and was gone.

‘Help me up,’ said Morghain to PRod. ‘My Id’s wonked.’

Though Morghain was, herself, as a living human, somewhere out there in the R1, in no physical pain, her Id was injured to the point of impaired function. She tried to stand, her player control feeling drunken and unresponsive. She couldn’t remain upright and fell.

In Knet, a bedrock mechanic of the Ksource engine impaired all ‘living’ creatures, Id or A.I, and all machines or modded devices, with increasing levels of dysfunction as they incurred damage. To create this effect, increasing levels of stochastic noise was randomly introduced into their processes. The degree, like most things in the Knet, was logarithmic. On amber health, the effect was noticeable, on orange, and inconvenience, on red, impairing, on near death, crippling. After a very big hit, it was temporarily worse, a ‘dazing’ effect that fell off after a few seconds.

PRod tried to help Morghain, but his Id did not have the strength to shift her near-kingpin body.

‘Fuck, how much do you weigh?’

‘That’s a very impolite question, PRod’ said Morghain. ‘Six and a half, if you must know.’

’Million vertexes? Jeeze.

‘I’m getting control back. I think I can manage-’ Morghain got unsteadily up. ‘Cover the street, in case there’s more of them.’

‘That’s what I’m good at,’ said PRod, ‘fighting off waves of attackers.’

‘Maybe you can get your Dawnbot to help.’

‘Who were those guys?’

‘Dudes in heavy Ids’ replied Morghain, testing her balance. ‘Clone-shielded, so it was hard to see more than their outline. Motor’s assassins, but I don’t think they were P-Fed. We better tell the- what’s that?’

PRod and Morghain listened. Now, all across the city, they could hear a sudden popping, rumbling, a sussurus of gunfire unusual to the normal sound of the anarchic city.

‘There’s something going on’ said PRod, uneasily. ‘Is this happening all over?’

As they listened, moved by some new unease, in the lee of the burning structure, they saw thin blue lines go silently up into the sky over Kys.

‘Those are links,’ said Morghain.

* * *

Assassinations and attempted assassinations were now going on all over the city. The two spies (one now pulped by Hammerziet’s weapon, the other still at large), were only a small part of it. As it would later transpire, however, it was not P-Fed fighters emerging from the shadows of preplanned safe houses to eliminate the names on Ganze’s list, but an expert third party, infiltration and elimination experts called FullyNinja.

FN’s services weren’t cheap, and there weren’t many entities they trusted to honor debts. Motor’s organization was one. The objective of the attacks was to cripple the city’s leadership by tagging anyone of prominence around which the citizen defenders could rally. To maintain secrecy, no part of the infiltration force knew of any other part, until they received instructions to link up. In addition to their own weapons, they had been equipped with devices only the accreting power of P-Fed could produce. These were the supercompressed masses they were using for trigger and suicide bombs, such as the one that had blown Morghain out the side of her lover’s tower.

On a street of ten thousand glowing signs, fluttering through the slow air like butterflies, the killers got to work. Stephiop Remaxer and famed modder Axle Prendender was gunned down by clone-shielded figures, his glowing blood lit by verdant aquamarines and blues under the golden swarm. Unsuspecting clusters of arguing or laughing clan fighters and rankers were blown up by bombs thrown from passing cars. People of note found themselves suddenly surrounded and fighting for their lives against half-visible, chainsword-wielding attackers. A wave of unease swept through the city. Links became suddenly visible, stabbing up from locations deep within the strip. Now there was a chattering a popping of guns, and occasional, reverberating crack-boom, as if of some powerful explosive going off. A warning siren sounded from the Block, wailing eerily and, just as abruptly, stopping, leaving a silence more unsettling than the alarm itself. The city was becoming a twitching animal, angry, looking to attack. There was a clatter in the street, as black-carapaced Kysairons fighters ran by, in mobs, the city’s restless antibodies. The call went out, shut down the links! Conspiracy theories proliferated, dozens of channels were opened and queries besieged the city’s leadership, but there were no answers from the Block.

* * *

‘Don’t touch the walls’ said Kyle, to the Kysairon kingpins standing in the middle of a cage if super-dense material. There was no apparent door in it. In the ceiling above the cage was the inverted link they had fallen out of, now deactivated. ‘If you try to bust through the bars, the explosive cavity around us will trigger.’

Imprisoned in the cage were Cubist, Lopslide, Hammerziet ECG and Carnivous. Unlike the others, who had had a great deal to say about the situation, Carnivous had done nothing, since his capture, but stand implacably still, staring at his brother.

With Kyle was a small delegation from the council. The Fat Controller, some other flunkies and two peacekeepers. Behind them was a panel with three switches on it and a telporting surface in the floor, the only exit to the chamber.

‘Traitor!’ said Cubist.

‘Shut up!’ yelled Kyle, ‘I’m not here to talk to you jackasses and if you don’t zip it I’m going to punch that button and blow up the whole fucking lot of you.’

The Fat Controller spoke. ‘Carnivous, Lopslide, Cubist, Enemy Crab God and Hammerziet, you and several others of notorious reputation have been named and arraigned by special order of the council. Due to you’re persistent efforts to undermine the duly-elected representatives of this server and your refusal to abate your provocations against neighboring neutral powers-’

‘You dirty shit-fucker!’ yelled Lopslide, ‘Apologies in advance,’ he added, ‘if you actually are a member of the coprohpiliac community.’

‘-you have been legally confined,’ continued the Fat Controller, ‘until such time as this present crisis has passed. Under the emergency powers-’

‘You can tell us if you are,’ said Cubist, ‘we’re open-minded.’

‘-voted to me in session five hundred and thirty three, security council presiding in co-chair with the internal threat committee, the committee for public welfare and-’

‘You do seem to jerk off a lot on the toilet,’ said Lopslide. ‘According to your live feed.’

‘You want me to push that button?’ demanded The Fat Controller. He continued. ‘With the committee for mental health and safety voting non-bindingly. There, it’s done. You’ll sit here until we’ve cleaned up your mess and fixed things with Motor. Good day to you, sirs.’

‘Okay President Browndick’ said Lopslide, as The Fat Controller and his minions turned to the teleporting plate, stepped on it and vanished.

Kyle remained, staring at his impassive brother and his fellow kingpins, seething in their booby-trapped prison.

‘Making common cause with the Block, against your friends’ said Lopslide, shaking his head, in apparent sorrow. ‘A new low for you, Kyle.’

’Ja, agreed Hammerziet, ‘For a dude with a hot girlfriend, Kyle, you’re sehr beta.’

‘Shut- wait, how do you know about my girlfriend?’ demanded Kyle.

‘We’ve been watching you have sex with her,’ said Cubist. ‘On your Pervis account.’

‘What?’

‘I’ve been making witty comments in the stream’ said Lopslide. ‘Under the name Suckmywillywonka1313. ’Fucker her in the ass.’ That was one of mine.’

‘How-’

‘You’re not very imaginative, Kyle’ said Lopslide. ’For example, your Knet logon is ‘Kyle.’ So we figured your Pervis login would be the same as your Typher account, which we also broke into.’

‘See,’ continued Cubist, ‘you’re the kind of dummy that uses the same insecure but easy-to-remember password on his throw-aways because he forgets there’s information in them that might let someone into his more important accounts. Info that can be used to build up a profile for associative password testing, for example. And once we got into your Zaph account-’

’You got into my fucking Zaph account? You rat dicks- why have you been breaking into my shit?’

‘We don’t like you’ explained Cubist.

‘I- okay- just shut up! Leon! Leon, listen to me-’

‘Who’s Leon?’ asked Lopslide.

‘Shut up!’ Kyle tried to block out the others, focusing on his silent brother. ‘Leon, listen, you have to come back to reality. I know what you did. This isn’t the answer, Leon. You have things to live for!’

Carnivous stood, immobile and indifferent, staring at Kyle, through the bars.

‘I guess he doesn’t talk to traitors,’ said Cubist.

‘What’s this all about, Kyle?’ asked ECG, his voice sympathetic, ‘You’re very upset and we can see that your vagina is all sore and puffy. If you let us out, we’ll give you hugs and kisses, and shoulders to cry on and won’t kill you at all.’

’Do you know about his ‘motivator’?’ Kyle demanded.

‘His what?’

‘Leon made a pain feedback suit, that uses electric shocks to correspond to Knet damage inflicted on his Id.’

‘Holy shit!’ said Cubist. ‘Pain feedback? So, like, if he gets hit, it inflicts, like, proportional pain, to the corresponding part of his physical body?’

‘Yes!’

’Oh..’said Cubist, as if putting something together in his head. ‘So that’s why-’

’That’s a crazy idea,’ said Lopslide. ‘Why has no one thought of that?’

‘He’s been using it for a year,’ continued Kyle, ’but this is the thing; I believe he built it with a terminal function. If ‘Carnivous’ gets tagged, the suit will direct mains current though his real body, electrocuting him to death.’

‘No.. fucking.. way..’ Lopslide sounded awed.

‘Yes!’ said Kyle, desperately, ‘so you have to-’

‘That’s the most kick-ass thing I’ve ever heard!’ yelled Cubist.

‘It’s not kick-ass, you fucking teenager!’ yelled Kyle.

‘I dunno, Kyle,’ said Hammerziet, ‘it seems pretty stärke.’

‘Yeah! Go out in a blaze of glory, right?’ said Lopslide, ’Zap, no tomorrow! Knet for life!’

Kyle felt the bloodlessness of his argument as he stared into the indifferent mask of his brother’s motionless alter ego. He spurred his brain like a tired horse, trying to find the words that would work, trying to rise above the level of the empty platitude, to find some talisman of kin and memory, some point of contact to draw Leon off this downward track. How could they have so little hold on each other? What was wrong? What was wrong with all of them, the perpetually bored children of an indifferent and simulated pseudo-reality?

‘He’s my brother-’ he said, helplessly, feeling the terrible weakness of his argument.

‘What are you gonna do, cry?’ mocked Hammerziet.

‘Fag’ said Lopslide.

Abandoning persuasion, Kyle pulled off his headset. His digital body became blank-faced, as the mocap scanner stopped interpreting his facial movements and his arms fell by his side. Then his Id shrugged, took a step, turning half-sideways to stare at the wall, movements characteristic of a body rig in the process of removal from its physical operator. Then it went as immobile as Carnivous’.

‘Tsk. Now he goes A.F.K’ said Hammerziet.

‘So what do we do?’ asked Cubist. ‘Just sit here like idiots?’

* * *

Kyle abandoned his VR gear on the living room floor without bothering to log out. He bolted down the apartment block stairs and piled into his car. Remembering something, leapt back out, ran back up the stairs, now panting heavily, rummaged in the laundry until he found a claw hammer and returned to his vehicle. He pulled out and drove, as wildly as he dared, to his brother’s condemned housing complex, his slab dinging constantly to notify him that one camera after another had noted his excessive speed and fined him.

* * *

In the street below the burning laborium, Morghain was assessing the damage to herself when something new happened. The city came alive with a great, crackling wave of gunfire, sending little tracer-like streaks of light arching high into the sky.

‘Holy shit!’ yelled PRod, over the noise, and pointed. Little silver shapes could be seen, high up. All across the city of the Kysairons, flashes of yellow light began to send up streamers of fire. Shells falling into gravity had an advantage but there were many powerful guns in the strip. Some of the little shapes far above flared and began to split apart. One burst in a tiny, slow fireball. Tiny objects, just glitters because they were smaller pixel resolution than the 4000line display of Morghain’s expensive VR headset, expanded from the glow. She realized, with wonder, that her was seeing the bodies of P-Fed soldiers and war machines blasted out into space.

The link columns were now glimmering and flashing.

‘Morghain!’ said PRod, suddenly, and pointed. In the wreckage of the smashed car. Glimmering on the bodies that lay about it, they saw the tell-tale shine of tokens. The density value of the dead FN assassins. Morghain, estimated their value. The assassins had been in main fighting Ids, not roach skins or suicide bomber throwaways. The tokens would not be worthless. They wouldn’t accrete her much, dense as she was, but she needed a health hit.

‘Come on,’ she said, and lurched towards the bodies to claim their tokens. As she did, she saw her health cool a little, from red to orange. She felt the impairment lessen, to only a slight wobble in responsiveness. Morghain reflected on how effective the simple game mechanic of random noise impairment was, in giving the feeling of injury to a player control, and she wondered what kind of real agony she’d have experienced from that blast in Carnivous’ pain rig. Despite herself, she felt a dark fascination at the idea. Total immersion.

As they considered what to do next, additional dire developments developed.

* * *

Kyle arrived at Leon’s building, parked his car in a towing zone, and ran up the fire stairs, where he immediately met Mr Bags On His Shoes and three confederates, squatting on the second story landing and smoking something out of a glass pipe.

‘I told you not to come back here!’ said Bags On His Shoes.

‘No you didn’t’ said Kyle.

The man leapt to his feet and aimed a clumsy punch at the air about a foot to the right of Kyle’s head. Kyle ran past him and bolted up the stairwell, Bags On His Feet and his friends, feral specimens in dirty street wear, came in lurching pursuit.

Kyle ran to his brothers cell and found, to his shock, that there was no need for the hammer he was carrying. Leon’s door stood open, its nails pried loose from within. The apartment was occupied by nothing more than electrical clutter, refuse, and a bad smell. Leon was gone.

Kyle had little chance to process the significance of this development. A second later the block’s scabby defenders caught up with him and tried to grapple. One was kicking him in the leg as hard as he could, another trying to get his arm around his neck, the third trying to grab his right wrist while punching him with his left. For a moment, the ungainly, panting, cursing animal staggered back and forwards on its multiple legs, then Kyle lost his footing and they pinned him down.

‘Throw him out! Throw him out!’ chanted Bags On His Shoes.

They managed to haul Kyle back to the stairwell and, with a coordinated heave, sent him thumping and tumbling painfully down the stairs to the first floor landing

.

‘I’m calling the cops, you fucking Madmax trash!’ yelled Kyle, rolling in the papers and garbage at the bottom.

‘Go ahead!’ said Mr Bags On His Shoes, ‘Your brother told us all about you!’

Kyle wondered what Leon had told them. Probably that he was a pedophile wanted for jizzing in the city’s water supply. If he did call the cops he’s just have the same problem in explaining the situation and he didn’t have time to be filing missing person reports anyway. Bruised and desperate, he staggered out the front and looked up at the blank walls of the decaying complex.

’Leon! He yelled, ‘Leee-oooon!!!’ The indifferent concrete sent his echo back.

‘We called the cops!’ yelled one of Bags On His Shoes friends, holding up a glass pipe. ‘We told them you sold us drugs!’

Cursing, Kyle reentered his car and reversed out, trying to find the ramp for the freeway.

* * *

In the cell, the kingpins were discussing their options. Despite their inquiries and demands, Carnivous stood immobile, arms crossed, staring at the equally immobile Kyle. It was ridiculous.

‘He’s right that we can’t bust out,’ said Cubist, ‘the bars are too dense. The imploder would trigger before we could get to the plate.’

‘Then get someone to come get us!’ said Lopslide. ‘I can’t believe this shit.’

’I’m trying, said ECG. ‘There’s something going on in the city. Some sort of assassination spree. Dax said a bunch of people have been whacked.’

‘And we’re stuck in here!’ despaired Cubist. ’I’ve got tons of people I want to assassinate.’

‘No, I think it’s some sort of attack. He says there are links opening up in the city. The clans are calling rankers. Something is going down.’

Suddenly, a deep rumble could be heard, reverberating down to their prison.

‘Whassat?’ said Lopslide.

* * *

Kyle got back to his apartment to find Gillian standing in the living room, holding up his gamer headset and body cap.

‘Kyle, whats this?’ she asked, ‘I thought we- are you ok?’

Kyle looked down at his bruised body and torn shirt. ‘I got thrown down some stairs’ he said. ‘Never mind. Sorry, I need to use the rig, it’s an emergency.’

‘You were supposed to join me at the cafe with my parents and my sister,’ said Gillian, ‘I called you, like, ten times. You agreed-’

‘Gillian, I got an emergency!’

‘You said you were going to give up Knet, Kyle!’

‘I am! I will!’

‘Are you relapsing? Have you been going back on secretly? While I’m at work?’

‘No!’

‘Listen to yourself! It’s an ’emergency!’ Knet is an emergency?’

‘I don’t have time to explain this!’

‘Kyle, you have a problem-’

‘For fuck sake, Gillian, you’re the problem right now! Just give me the headset-’

‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Gillian quietly. ’I’m the problem?’

‘Well.. Nothing.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing!’

‘If you have something to say, say it!’

‘Well.. It’s not like you were that committed to this thing.’

‘What thing?’ asked Gillian.

‘It’s like you said, I mean.. it’s just a business arrangement, right? So, you know, I thought we might just.. take it easy. On the relationship. I mean, is it really so bad being on the GI? A baby seems like a big hassle. I was thinking, if we don’t have it, we don’t even need your parent’s money.’ There was a long silence. ‘You said it yourself, it’s no big deal, either way.’

Gillian’s face distorted with fury, an instant to quickly for Kyle to take warning, and she punched him hard in the face. Yelling in pain and covering his head from the blows she rained on him with the VR headset, Kyle fell back, trying to ward off her feet as she kicked him in the knees and shins. ‘You! Fucking! Worthless! Cock! Sucker!’ Gillian was yelling with each blow. Kyle managed to throw her back and get to his feet. His left eye was watering in pain, and he was winded from a kick to the solar plexus. Gillian was panting, her face flushed.

‘Gillian, what the fuck!’

She threw the battered headset at him. He was ready this time and ducked it, but it crashed against the wall with a noise that augured not well for its continuing functionality. Gillian turned and strode out.

‘Gillian!’ yelled Kyle. He pursued, but she was already half way down the stairwell. ’Gillian!’he heard the building’s front door slam and was gone. Cursing, he returned to the apartment.

As the door swung behind him, a dirty sneaker-clad foot put itself in the gap, preventing it from closing.

In his living room, Kyle struggled to reconnect the tangled player set. His head was killing him, his eye swelling shut. When he reactivated the rig, the view was flickering and blurred, the left eye dropping in and out of electronic corruption. Gillian had knocked something loose.

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK’ said Kyle.

So absorbed was he, that he never saw the ragged, cave-pale figure of his brother, wasted and blinking in the unfamiliar light of the world, creep up behind him. He smelt the poverty-filth and the sourness of an unwashed body, a second too late. Leon hit Kyle in the back of the head, not with any improvised weapon or object, but a bare-fist sucker punch, breaking two of his knuckles and not feeling it. It was a blow as efficient as it was unsparing, as if Carnivous’ murderous will was animating the wasted limbs of Leon’s body. Kyle went down, collapsing amongst the tangle of his VR gear. He didn’t feel his brother pull off his headset and player controller. He was vaguely able to protest as he was secured to the wall radiator by a the cable of a bike lock around his neck.

Dimly, Kyle saw his brother put on Kyle’s own gaming headset, and activate the controller.

* * *

In the imploder cell, the captive Kingpins had watched in fascination as Kyle’s stationary Id had come suddenly back to life, jerked and thrashed around, made a series of muffled statements and thumping noises, culminating in what sounded like ‘What the fuck, Gillian!’ become stationary again, twitched again, then after a long pause, began to move with purpose, as if someone was reconnecting the motion tracker and controller. The slack face began to move, the brow twitched down in a scowl, the mouth turned hard and grim.

‘You having a stroke, Kyle?’ asked Lopslide.

‘I’m not Kyle,’ said Kyle’s Id. It hit the release panel on the wall and the cage bars were retracted into the floor, the Kysairons were free. Kyle’s Id pointed at Carnivous’ body.

‘Take my body’ it ordered, in a cold, clipped tone that, even without the distorter, was utterly familiar. ‘Get to the charger. We’re going to the tournament.’

‘Holy shit,’ said Cubist, in awe.

’You hacked Kyle’s Id?’ asked Hammerziet. ‘How is that possible?’

‘No questions!’ snapped Carnivous. ‘Get me to the ship.’

With glee, the Kysairon kingpins seized Carnivous’ immobile form and lifted it like a piece of furniture. Wasting no time on conversation, they swiftly bore it to the chamber’s teleporter plate and vanished. Once the Kysairon heavies had escaped with his body, Leon waited a few seconds to make sue they were clear, then flipped open the safety to the imploder trigger.

‘Goodbye, Kyle,’ said Leon, and hit the button. The imploder detonated on the empty cell, Kyle’s high-poly Id absorbing the full force. It stopped existing.

* * *

In his trashed apartment, Kyle was groping his way back to consciousness. He was learning that, unlike in the movies, a real-life concussion was not something you just shrugged off. It felt like a broad shard of broken glass was bisecting his brain, sharpening to migraine-bright agony when he moved his head even a little. His eye was welling shut from Gillian’s blows and his ribs ached. The bike lock cable was hard against his throat, half-choking, securing him to the pipe of the radiator.

‘Leon..’ he croaked.

Leon ignored him. As Kyle watched, helplessly, Leon dropped Kyle’s gamer set, with contempt, onto the floor. He left the room briefly and returned with a dirty canvass duffel bag. Out of the bag came the deadly pain rig, the customized player control, the heavy-cabled capacitor blocks for storing charge. Even in his dazed state, Kyle was fascinated and horrified by the thing. Leon looked like a homeless vagrant, wasted and wild-haired, begrimed as a sewer rat, but his creation was immaculate, a piece of technological art. The complex wiring of its electrode system branched from feeder cables into an elegant tracery, stitched into the surface of a black mesh body suit, like an exterior circulatory system.

Leon attached the capacitors to the wall mains and the switches along the control block flipped. A tracery of LED lights blinked on along the main distributor points of the suit. He donned his black headset and disappeared. Kyle saw his fingers flickering expertly across the controller handset and knew Leon was logging back into Knet.

Kyle heard his brother’s muffled voice through the visor.

‘Come on,’ he said, but not to Kyle.

* * *

The Kingpins were halfway to the entrance of the Block when Carnivous returned to life. He ignored their cheers and demands for explanation.

‘Come on,’ he said and they ran, through the empty chambers, towards the boolean gate.

* * *

PRod and Morghain were moving, as fast as they were able, along the curving streets, trying to find someone who knew what was going on. Morghain could now manage a decent run.

‘Look!’ yelled PRod, pointing to the dark regions of sky to the right of the main action, ’there’s more of them!

New V-shaped patterns of the little golden birds were becoming visible, emerging from the deeper sky.

‘They’re dumping their shock troops now’ said Morghain, who was watching the columns of blue light flash, and gauging the throughput.

‘They’re using the city network’ said PRod, ‘Someone gave them codes to change their in-outs. Now they can link to those carriers and just beam fighters down. Holy fuck that’s bad.’

‘Who would give them the access to CitDef?’ said Morghain.

’Who do you think? Asked PRod.