CHAPTER 8: Champions of Cyberspace
Matrix, AndrAIa and I emerged in The Citadel, the base of operations used by Welman Matrix in the superhero game environment. It was nice to have everybody back together, even though nobody remembered. Bob and Dot were standing behind the pedestal while Welman manipulated the controls. Mouse, Ray and Enzo were on either side of him, watching us as we reintegrated in the gigantic laboratory. Ray's gaze was immediately drawn to AndrAIa.
"Welcome back, Kevin," said Welman. "I'm glad to see you made it in one piece."
Matrix took one look around the place and let out a long whistle. "Auntie Em, Auntie Em...what's next, Sawyer, Batman and Robin?"
I nodded to Enzo. "You're not far off."
Matrix looked startled when he looked at Enzo. "You look familiar, kid," he said. "What's with the pajamas?"
"It's my uniform," Enzo said. "What's with the eye, a gold tooth wasn't macho enough for you?"
"Boys," Welman cautioned, "now is not the time. At the risk of sounding cliche, we've got a system to save. Now behave."
"What's our status, Welman?" I asked.
"The system is growing more unstable by the nanosecond," he said. "The virus is absorbing energy at an exponential rate."
"Why does he need that much power? He has to know he's going to collapse Mainframe if he keeps the drain up like this."
"I think he's trying to open a portal to the Net," Welman said. "And if my calculations are correct, he'll reach critical energy levels in the next several microseconds."
"Then we need to move fast," I said. "Dot...I-I mean Gail, has the professor explained what you have to do?"
"Put my hand on something called a 'vidwindow'," she said meekly. "Sawyer, listen, I know you tried explaining this before, but what's going to happen when this is over? We all go back to our lives? What?"
"If everything goes as planned, we all wake up where we're supposed to be and we won't remember any of this," I said. "Worst case scenario, the world ends and we all cease to exist. That's what's at stake. Look, I don't have any right to ask you all to help me. Despite your appearances, you're not the people I once knew, before all this craziness happened. We were friends once-all of us-then something terrible happened and everybody and everything changed. You forgot who you really were and started believing you were someone else, you started living different lives. Welman and I are the only two people in Mainframe who remembers you."
"You're saying I'm supposed to be somebody else?" asked Enzo. "But I'm Rex Kelvin. I've always been Rex Kelvin."
"No, son, you haven't," said Welman. "You were Enzo Matrix once. You, your brother and your sister are the only family I have left."
"Brother?" asked Enzo.
"Don't you see a family resemblance?" I asked moving beside Matrix and nodding at Dot. "This big, ugly green guy is your older brother and Gail is actually Dot, your sister. Dash, your real name is Bob, and you are a policeman in real life, except that your title is Guardian, not Detective."
"Whoa, whoa, slow down," Bob said, waving his hands. "You expect us to believe all this? Who are you supposed to be then?"
"In this world I'm called a User. I come from another universe outside your space-time continuum. For lack of a better term, I'm a god of this world."
Everybody's eyebrows shot up. The subject of my "divinity" was a topic I deliberately downplayed. Just because I was a User didn't make me all-powerful and omnipotent. I thought of it as an annoying form of celebrity status. Still, Users had created the Net, built systems and written programs. If a sprite came up to me and asked, Say, did you write my code? who am I to say I didn't? I've written dozens of computer programs in my life. For all I know I could have written Welman!
"You're a god?" Ray said. "C'mon, mate, even I'm not laughing at that one."
"I'm serious, unfortunately," I continued. "This reality, which we call cyberspace, is a digital frontier made of energy and data not matter, and is therefore susceptible to extreme methods of corruption and distortion."
"Like the fractured realities you keep talkin' about," Mouse said.
"Exactly."
"So if you're God, why don't you just," Matrix snapped his fingers, "fix it."
"It doesn't work that way," I said. "In here I'm just like you."
"But you're God!"
"I'm not a god!" I snapped.
It suddenly occurred to me why God didn't speak to us mere mortals. I could very much imagine Him having the exact same conversation. And argue in circles for the rest of time.
"Look, the only way to end all this madness is to activate a mechanism called the system restore," I said. "If we do that, all this goes away and you get your lives back. Your real lives."
"That's just it," Bob said. "We have to die for your friends to live. I'm Dash Chandler. I don't know this Bob guy, and I don't want to know him either."
"It's my way," I said, "or we all die. Every world, all your worlds and Mainframe. Deleted."
"Dash," Dot said, "if he's right then we've got to do it. If we're really just dreams and this is how we wake up..."
"Don't talk like that, babe," Bob said soothingly.
"But don't you understand? We can't condemn everybody just because we want to exist, not when we don't even exist at all. At least, in some small way, we'll live on after this is over. That's what you said, isn't it, Sawyer? We're all together in your world; we're family."
"Yes. You're a great family."
"You see," Dot said, "that's what we'll really be killing if we don't help."
The great building shook tumultuously. This time the quake didn't slowly die away. It kept going, getting stronger and stronger. The end was near, and we were standing around arguing about the finer points of being a real person.
"Welman, target the teleporter to the P.O.," I said. "We've got to hurry. The system feels like its starting to crash."
Welman refocused the portal, nodded. "I think I've got it."
"We'll need weapons."
"You've already got two living weapons right here, mate," Ray said.
"You can count us in," Enzo said. He turned to Matrix. "What about you...brother?"
Matrix sighed and shrugged. "I'm not much on religion, but it doesn't look like I've got much choice. I'm with you."
"AndrAIa?"
"If my life belongs to another then my decision is already made," she said. "This ends today."
"I'm with you, too," Dot said. "Dash?"
"Wherever you go, I go, even if it's over the edge," said Bob.
"It wouldn't be much of a party without yours truly," Mouse chimed in.
Outside, the city was falling apart. A wave of destruction was demolishing the game reality, and it was closing in on The Citadel.
"All right then. We're all agreed," I said, turning to the portal. "Let's do it."
The Principal Office was worse on the inside that it looked on the out. We beamed into a corridor adjacent to the core control chamber. This section looked like the inside of a whale's ribcage. Bony protrusions lined the corridor, clinging to slimy organic material that could have been decomposing flesh.
"Welman, I don't like this," I said.
"Agreed." He pulled out some kind of sensor device. "It's right down this way."
"For the first time I let myself feel a small glimmer of hope. As we entered the control chamber, we were greeted with a familiar sight. This region must have been like the eye of the hurricane, the center point where everything remained normal. The core room looked exactly like it should have, all polished steel, granite and marble.
"WARNING: SYSTEM CRASH...WARNING: SYSTEM CRASH..."
"Who's saying that?" asked Matrix.
"It's the automated system Situation Report," Welman said. "We need to work quickly. Dot, come here."
Welman took his daughter's hand and led us to an archway, one of several "zoom doors" that would carry us across the cavernous space between the central platform hovering above the core and the circular walkway around the circumference of the chamber.
"Zip, zip, zoom," Welman said. The empty space in the middle of the archway became an undulating cloud of white energy. "All we have to do is cross."
Beneath us was the reality simulator. To the naked eye it looked like the giant printed circuit of a central processing unit. A large square wafer supported by spindles bolted to a metal frame hovered above a storm of lightning. Beneath the reality simulator was Mainframe's core infrastructure, the true raw power of the energy sea being soaked up and channeled into the central processing unit. It looked like someone had trapped a plasma ball behind a glass dam, and anything unfortunate enough to fall into it was instantly vaporized.
"Contact!" shouted Matrix.
Above us, crawling along the wall were several fierce-looking creatures. They were quadrupeds but like bears they could rise up on their two hind feet and attack with their front claws, which were nine inches long and perfect for slicing through flesh. Their skin had the same slimy, decomposing appearance as the walls of the surrounding corridors. It was taunt and clung to their skeletons, revealing the muscle and bone underneath. The heads were elongated and connected to the trunk by a thin, narrow neck. There were no sensory organs that I could see, and the mouth was a series of tentacles that opened like the arms of a starfish to reveal a set of pincers and suction cups.
The second the first one hit the ground, Matrix let his Thompson go on full auto. Likewise, Ray and Enzo leaped into action. Ray started firing energy pulses while Enzo displayed his version of heat vision, which he referred to as his "pulsar gaze"; it was a sort of white-blue beam he fired from his eyes.
Even without her scepter, AndrAIa could still use magic, and she conjured up phantom-like apparitions that immediately took to battle. Mouse still had her dual lightsabers and was already going to work on the nearest bunch.
"Go. Now!" she yelled.
I pushed Bob toward the arch. We followed Dot and Welman through to the center platform. Two more creatures dropped in form above; Bob drew his revolver and took them down with a few rounds while I did the same with my pistol. I wished I still had my ray gun.
Welman opened a series of vidwindows and began to work.
"RETRIEVING RESTORE INFORMATION...PROCESSING BATCH FILE."
Enzo and Ray had taken to the air, fighting from an elevated position. They were scraping the drones from the walls while more spilled out through the surrounding corridors. I could still hear the rattle of Matrix's machine gun, see the semi-real wraiths conjured up by AndrAIa, but we were surrounded and outnumbered.
Then, a deep voice boomed all around us:
"This system is MINE!"
Above us hovered the mutated form of Sphinx, the upper chamber door closing behind him. He was no longer the insectoid I'd met in the Game Cube, but a nasty mass of tentacles and a head like an octopus. The only thing that remained the same was the ever-changing color of his skin.
"The time has come for Infector to rise again," Sphinx announced. "You are only annoying pixels to me now."
I felt an odd prickling sensation and suddenly my legs gave out. I hit the floor, unable to move my body. I was totally paralyzed.
"Welman, I can't move," I said.
"Neither can I," Welman groaned. "Dot?"
"My body's numb," she said. "What's he done to us?"
Then we were levitating, our bodies being picked up and held by invisible hands, most likely a form of telekinesis. Sphinx held us up to his eye level, several feet above the platform.
"You're crashing the system," I said breathlessly. "You'll be deleted with us."
"Not before I escape into the Net," Sphinx said. If he had a mouth, I didn't see it move. "Your efforts to stop me have failed. Did you really think a group of mere data sprites could defeat Sphinx, the greatest of Infector's functions?"
The system voice said: "BATCH FILE COMPLETE. SYSTEM RESTORE READY."
"Who is Infector?" I asked. I needed to keep him talking, make sure he kept his attention on us.
"Infector is the great digital chaos. The greatest of all my kind. Malware incarnate. Long ago, before the Web and the Net were separate, the Cobol Warriors divided Infector into The Seven Forms. The Seven are the source of all virals; all malicious code derives from them."
I was feeling bold now. "Yea, well, bring 'em on! In my world nothing can't be fixed with a keystroke, including your Infector!"
"Big words for a data sprite."
"I'm not a data sprite. You scanned me, remember? Do you know what my format is?"
"It is irrelevant," Sphinx said.
"I'm the most relevant thing in the universe to you," I said. "In here I may be as helpless as a decrepit old binome, but outside I can't be infected, deleted or manipulated. Scan me again, and see for yourself."
He must have failed again because he sounded angry when he spoke next. "Identify your format!"
"I don't have one. I'm that thing every one of you needs to fear most because what I give to this world I can just as easily take away."
"Impossible! This is blasphemy!"
"My name is Kevin Sawyer. I come from outside the Net, from beyond the Web and cyberspace itself. I am the virtual man, the human User. Remember my face because it's the last thing you're going to see. Now Enzo!"
The whole verbal debacle was really a last-ditch diversion to keep Sphinx's attention on me while Enzo and Ray snuck up on the mutated supervirus. I deliberately overplayed the whole User-God thing because, in this world, the only thing more scary than a falling Game Cube is a User. Plus, I've noticed almost all viruses have a tendency to monologue worse than comic-book supervillains.
In short, it worked. Enzo hit Sphinx from behind with his pulsar gaze. Mouse leapt from Ray's board onto his head, plunging both her lightsabers into the squishy cranium. The startled virus released us from his telekinetic hold, and we all fell to the platform. I was instantly on my feet, hauling Dot up by her hand. Grabbing her by the wrist, I pushed her open hand over the handprint on the vidwindow.
"AUTHORIZATION RECOGNIZED. DOT MATRIX."
A new horizontal window appeared next to us. Its black face opened into a round hole from which a glass palm-sized globe was pushed out. I grabbed the batch file and ran toward the edge of the platform. One of the creatures dropped in front of me, but before it could take a swing at me, Bob put it down with a few more shots from his revolver.
I looked at him for a nano, saw the decision in his eyes and he nodded. I turned and ran toward the edge.
"NOOO!" screamed Sphinx. I felt my body tingle, the paralysis reasserting itself. I mustered the rest of my strength and leaped, extending my arm and opening my fingers.
I came down too short, and I hit the stairs without feeling it. The momentum carried the batch file toward the edge of the platform, slowing down every micron. I was sure I'd failed.
I watched as the glass ball teetered on the brink, as if it stubbornly refused to go any further. Then it vanished over the edge.
There was a great explosion and the room shook. Either the world was ending and the system was crashing or the system restore was gearing up. Reality itself seemed to shudder as the space around me filled with light, a never-ending cascade of energy waves and space distortion. It felt like the force of a waterfall was rushing over me, but I was too out of it to feel my body drowning.
Eventually it ebbed away, and I was alone, too weak to move and shrouded in silence. Far away I heard a woman's voice.
"Somebody get a diagnostic team in here!"
A pair of rough hands rolled me over so that I was laying face-up.
"He's had the spam kicked out of him," a male voice said. It was Matrix. "I'm scanning him with my eyepiece."
"What just happened?" Dot asked. "How did we end up in the core room?"
"Glitch says the system restore was activated a few nanoseconds ago. We could be suffering from memory loss."
I tried to work my mouth, make my voice work but all that I managed was a weak croak. The fight had finally gone out of me.
"Try not to speak," Matrix said. "You've got some serious damage going on."
"Sphinx," I managed to say. It was a dry whisper.
"What did he say?" asked AndrAIa.
"Where's that fragging diagnostic team?" Matrix roared.
"Virus...Sphinx virus..."
"Something about a virus."
"Get CPUs on full alert! Activate security protocol five-point-six-point-eight. Complete antiviral scan at all checkpoints..."
I stopped trying to fight my weariness. I let my eyes close, and I drifted into blissful unconsciousness.
