A flash of orange light glinting off something…darkness and decay worse than anything in G-Prime surrounded me. I felt a presence impinging on my dream, one very familiar.

"How precious!", she cackled, and I looked down to see my hands still a pale Sprite blue. "I thought to revenge myself upon her, but what you have is too perfect to change…for now."

"You're dead. Deleted. Offline." I said, with weakening conviction.

"I infect the entire net! I have powers you cannot dream of! Especially not now. Oooh, I can just imagine the chaos unleashed when you fail…this will be worth watching, mmm?"

"Silence! Shut up!" I snarled at the darkness. "I will not fail!"

"He's won, you know. You're everything he could have dreamed of…a model citizen! Hah, I should tell him. Only he'd think up some fool heroic scheme to rescue his lady love – you know how he is. But she lost him! She lost, and I won!"

"He's dead! So are you!"

"Like that matters. Hah, you think so mundanely, still. Supercomputer this, Supercomputer that…it's quite amusing."

I steadied my mental 'voice' with difficulty. "This is a dream. You aren't real. None of this is."

Even in the choking darkness, I could imagine her smiling at me, that cracked face set in her damnable smirk.

"Brother dearest, viruses don't dream. As I said…he's won."

I woke with a start and a muffled scream as something dark and spiderlike appeared out of the virtual darkness, crawling towards me. I reflexively flexed my claws…and saw only ineffectually curved fingers by the glow of the blankets in the lesser, safer darkness.

Something moved beside me and I started, still feeling somehow cornered. I forced myself to relax, though. Sleep had not come easily to me these past seconds – I was unused to the necessity of downtime to maintain full functionality. The first dream I had was relatively harmless, but it was not something I had been programmed to deal with – I had been taken completely off-guard. Nothing had helped me sleep better, and other, darker dreams had come, filled with terror and fear…weak sprite emotions that had me in their thrall in the 0-time. In the 1-time, my uptime….there was Ms. Matrix.

Dot….I blinked, as I remembered the past night. She shifted beside me again, looking worriedly at me. "Bob? Are you…okay?"

I let my breath out, let the outstretched hand fall into the energy blanket. "Yeah…I think so…just a bad dream."

She looked at me a bit dubiously, then rolled over over, wrapping a green arm around me. "I didn't think Guardians had nightmares…" she teased. I smiled up at her.

"Well…uh…sorry to disappoint you, but we're not invincible."

"Certainly energetic, though."

"Yes…well…that isn't part of the training, I assure you!" I could feel the flush creeping across my face, as she laughed delightedly. Until this downcycle I hadn't known I was capable of being embarrassed. Dot was frightfully good at discomfiting me – and at times I was secretly, guiltily, embarrassed for her.

However, she immediately showed that she was also quite good at being distracting as well. The casual intimacy was more than acceptable, it was almost welcome. I wasn't expected to talk much, to juggle priceless eggs in variable gravity for the sake of my façade. Here I could let go. Be myself…

No.

This was not my life, not my form, not my place. The grasp I had on my sanity – my true, viral, thoughts, was slipping away from me. I was a virus, an infector.  My programmer would be horrified –  I…I was cuddling with the system command line interpreter function, without even the slightest inclination to tear her throat out.

Viruses do not cuddle. It's one of the unwritten rules, like the one about wearing beige. What had I become?

Besides inexplicably content and far too complacent about my sadly reduced circumstances, that is…

I was…complacent. Satisfied. I didn't need any more than the little pleasures I had, which was laughable. My function was to corrupt and to conquer.

Mend and defend…something inside me whispered traitorously. I stared into space , then pulled Ms. Matrix closer.

Corrupt and mend? Defend and conquer?  Laughable, really. Not principles one could build a life around.

Back to BASIC then. There was me, first off, 10. GOTO what was mine – virals, which were in short supply, the sadly stripped sector of Ghetty Prime, and the rather rebellious code of a certain Guardian. The third category had previously been simple – what would be mine. Which was everything else, more or less.

Mine to do what I saw fit with, all, to delete or reformat at my whim.

            All he ever wanted was power… but what else was there? Impermanence was everywhere I looked. As a virus, I lived on the edge, knowing that not only would nobody care were I deleted, most people would actively speed the process if they were able. In such a world, every mind that did not have fealty to me burned into their very code was a threat to my survival. Every unscripted encounter a Game, with life and death on the line.

            Dot kissed me enthusiastically. I reciprocated, firmly suppressing the last thought.

And when everything is bent to your will, what is left?

I stared into Dot's eyes, entranced by the devotion I saw there.

            And I answered myself: Me and mine.