The
Uprising
by Wriness
Chikaya
Chapter 5 - The Elements
"I've never wanted anything so bad."
Sharp implements littered the ashen wreckage. Never before had Bob seen such a mass of shrapnel in one place at one time, especially in Mainframe. It wasn't like the viruses even, to leave a mess of this magnitude.
Most of the tiny, slummy sector had been destroyed in a terrorist effort to destroy the Command.Com. Bob couldn't understand their reasoning; but he understood the damage. An instinct had driven him here, and now he rooted through garbage to find a clue of some sort.
Black ash fell like snow, carpeting the pile of debris. He dug deeper, carefully, avoiding the pieces of shredded and shattered glass, the twisted metal, the chunks of sharp, heavy stone.
Lifting away a mangled piece of metal, his eye caught something familiar, covered in ash and soot. He blew gently at the ash, not certain of what it was, not wanting to touch it. He leaned in closer, the small, circular object glinting dully. Flattening himself on his belly, he reached out with a shield box, the tiny grabber extending from the box and picking up the object. Bob pulled himself to his feet and examined the object in the light.
"Oh, User!" Bob breathed. The object he held in his hand was a scratched, dirty, broken icon. A viral icon.
Bob closed the shield box, tossed it once in the air, and clipped it to his belt. He grabbed his zipboard; this was something Dot needed to know; that and the Principal Office's laboratory and testing equipment would be useful for figuring out which virus had infected this icon. Bob had his suspicions, but his training called for certainty.
His zipboard carried him swiftly off.
-
Dot twiddled her thumbs, leaned forward over top of the control panel. The office was under lockdown, not one CPU had had the opportunity to get inside. This was probably to Dot's benefit; a fair amount of the terrorists in Mainframe were influential binomes; CPUs were no exception.
She tapped her fingernails on the panel noisily. Being under lockdown was so boring.
She eyed the doorway. Maybe if she could....
"No," Dot reprimanded herself out loud. She had promised Bob that she would stay and she would stay.
But the door was so tempting.
-
The CPU turned around swiftly at the sound of beeping. All he saw was a humming blur as a dark, cloaked figure on a zipboard sped away from the Principal Office. He cocked an eyebrow at the blur, then resumed eating his lunch.
-
Dot buzzed through the city for the first time in at least a minute. It felt exhilarating to feel the wind against her face, to watch the buildings, her buildings, fly by. To see the world again, after the darkness of being alone.
She felt her heart twist inside.
-
Bob slammed his fist against the marble wall of the main hallway. Where was Dot? Where could she be? Here, he held in his hand, one, count one, viral icon, containing the code none other than that which was not supposed to be.
He pounded his fist on the wall again. Of all times to break a promise, why now?
-
Dot's heart raced. A few binomes had taken a liking to her, and were following in a car. There was no way she was going to outrun them... oh, how she wished she'd listened to Bob now.
She made a tight left turn around a building and hid behind the corner, peering cautiously around to see if possibly they had seen her. The grin on the binome's face that had taken the wheel was positively venomous.
Dot's eyes widened a fraction before she zipped off again, thinking over in her head the schematics of Mainframe she had studied day after day at the Principal Office. A bridge here, an underpass there, take this left turn here and she's --
"OMIUSER!" Dot squeaked as she nearly ran into a pillar. She dodged right, just enough for the zipboard to slip out from under her...
-
Bob rumbled through Mainframe like a hamster on a hamster wheel, going around and around in wider and wider circles until he spotted a tiny green speck in the distance.
"YES!" he cheered, but not for long, as Bob was privy to a perfect view of said green speck plummeting towards the streets of Mainframe at breakneck speed.
"NO!" he yelled, and floored the gas in the old beater he called a car. He just hoped he'd make it there in time.
-
Dot crossed her fingers and prayed, half-resigned to her fate. The wind singing in her ears, she was surprised to find herself landing in Bob's backseat!
"Wh-wh- .. wha?" Dot blinked her eyes open, not totally believing she had survived.
Bob crawled over the seat and clung to her, holding her head to his chest. She was shaking; out of shock, and out of fear; fear of what, Bob was soon about to find out.
"There she is!" came the shout from the green car above them. Both heads in the old beater turned upwards, and Bob did a quick mental calculation of how long it would take to reach them.
Likely not enough time to lose them; the old car may have been pretty, but it was anything but fast.
Bob crawled over the seat and the car roared to life. He floored the gas and concentrated willfully on what he needed and wanted.. a desperate plea for help, yes, help for him, and help for his love.
The green car gained steadily on them until Bob saw it fit to stop suddenly around a corner. Dot was puzzled, too puzzled to speak, but still obeyed Bob when he asked her to give him her hand.
To her surprise, he grabbed her firmly by the forearm and swung her over the side of the car so that she dangled in midair. Her eyes rolling wildly about in her head, she squeaked out a question: "What the hell are you doing?!"
"Do you love me?" was his response.
Wondering what this had to do with the subject in question, the green car with seemingly random binomes in hot pursuit of their old beater, and now Bob's throwing her off the edge, she stammered out an answer. "Yes - I - uh I don't - Uh I don't know, Bob - Er.."
Bob glanced at the green car, now nearly upon them. "Do you love me?" he asked this time, more urgently. "Y-yes?" Dot answered, not certain as to whether or not this was the answer he was looking for. "I --" Bob cut her off. "Then live!" he declared, and with that, thrust her from the car and let go of her arm.
-
Dot fell again, this time falling from within herself. She felt her personalities shift, her soul shift from her body, and wondered somehow if perhaps this was what it was like to be deleted. At least, until she caught herself in another back seat. This time, inside a vehicle with the word 'ship' crudely scrawled along one panel.
"... Mouse?!" Dot gaped, shaken.
"Hun, I think yah need tah put a little more thought inta when and where tah break a promise."
Dot pressed herself into the back seat of Mouse's ship and shivered.
--
Several cycles had passed. Dot had remained huddled on the couch inside the egg-shaped room at the Principal Office, nearly catatonic the entire time. Bob had watched silently from another chair, but felt a tugging at him to examine the icon specimen. He withdrew slowly from the room, unclipping the protective shield box from his belt as he left.
His boots clacked on the floor and he wondered how Dot could stand it here. So quiet, so lonely. Maybe that's why her job nearly drove her insane on some days.
Bob placed the icon from the box on a tray cartridge and slammed the cartridge into a piece of the Principal Office's diagnostic equipment. He tapped a few keys on the panel in the darkened room, the glow from the screen dully illuminating his face.
The date of initialization wasn't anything to gape at, but the approximate date of viral infection sure was. Bob scrolled through the code three or four times just to make sure he had it right. According to its initialization strings, they had been modified probably about a minute and a half ago.
Not terribly long after strange things began happening to Dot.
Bob blew a breath between pursed lips and drew his hair across over his forehead in dismay. He clacked a few more commands at the terminal and the screen scrolled to something else entirely. A closer look at a dissection of the initialization strings, and the commands used to modify them.
The viral code was a little messy, thrown together half out of habit and half out of over-confidence. Bob squinted at the screen and scrolled through a little bit until his eyes bugged out...
"Oh my User," he breathed.. "This is not good. This is .. not .. good at all..."
---
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