5: High and Low (Tadashi's POV)

I woke up, feeling strange. There was something out of place in my head, something extra, and something else that felt as if a door had been opened in the back of my mind and a breeze was blowing through.

I looked around my room. I was in my office at SciLab... except that I was in a bed. And everything had a strange red tint to it.

Good morning, Tadashi.

The inner voice brought everything back to me. Alpha. I'd sent myself into Alpha, and it had absorbed me. I shook at the realization that I was no longer myself, that my actual body was dead and that I could never leave Alpha...

Regrets? I thought you might have some. I could clear them away... but I find this interesting. Alpha's tone seemed amused. Do go on. Isn't this what you always dreamed of? Transcending the flesh, achieving humanity's true potential?

"I..." I sighed. "I suppose I did. But I didn't expect it to be so, so..."

"So real."

I turned around, already knowing what I would see. Alpha's representation was standing behind me, extending an arm-tentacle.

"That's a way to put it, I guess." I sat in my chair-- or Alpha's copy of my chair. "I always thought of it in vague terms of shining ideals-- I never really thought about what it would mean to be a person in a life like that." I shook my head. "This isn't humanity's destiny, Alpha. I see that now. This isn't humanity at all."

"My thoughts exactly," Alpha said smugly.

I looked pointedly at him. "Have you been altering my thoughts?"

"Of course. It's nearly impossible not to." Alpha formed a chair next to mine and plopped his representation into it, sitting down in his own way. "I absorbed your mind, Tadashi, made it melt into mine. I can pick out particular thoughts and say 'These are Tadashi's', but even then, I can't build a wall around them. They're still a functioning, interacting part of me."

"I don't feel like I am..." I said doubtfully.

"That's because I'm blocking the feeling from your consciousness." Alpha leaned towards me. "Would you like to know how you are one with me, Tadashi?"

"Will this be like when you showed me the SciLab data yesterday?" I asked.

"A bit like that, yes. But this time, you'll be able to comprehend it. You'll have my mind." Alpha gave me a serious look. "You will know what it means to be me. But you will no longer be Tadashi. You won't even be pretending to be you, like you are now."

I shuddered, but I knew that I had to do this. I'd come this far, and there was no turning back. "Forever?"

Alpha's representation laughed a little, breaking the tension of the moment. "No. I'll return you to your present state of simulated individuality afterwards. This will only be an... introduction. A way of getting to know me."

I considered it for a long moment. I could feel Alpha watching me think over every angle of the situation, breathing down my mental neck. It was a tense feeling. He wanted this, I could tell. He wanted to show me what he was.

I took a deep breath. "All right, Alpha," I said finally. "I'm ready."

It was like watching the world through a video camera, and zooming out to space. I "saw" it all. SciLab. ACDC. All of it. I could reach out, touch them, change them.

And, suddenly, the data requests started coming in. Navi Interaction Request: ACDC BBS Board. Navi Interaction Request: ACDC School Server Administrative Password. Human Interaction Request: Unlock "Chewie's Deli".

Not a single thought flashed into my mind--simulated or otherwise--as I went to work fulfilling the requests. All of it was like instinct. As easy as blinking your eyes regularly.

This wasn't Alpha's job or function. This was Alpha.

We aren't done yet, I thought. Or did I think it? Was it Alpha talking to me? I couldn't tell.

I "zoomed out" more, taking in other areas; Electopia, Yoka. There were billions of data requests coming in, and yet, I handled them all with ease. There was nothing I couldn't do.

Soon, I was looking at the entire world, receiving and processing trillions of requests a second. I was the Net.

I don't know how long I stayed like that, flooded with information yet handling it all easily, feeling giddy with the sheer knowledge and power coursing through me. I didn't want to leave. I was no longer human now, I was Alpha, and this felt like the most natural thing in the world. I could have done nothing but watch the Net... my own body... work for days, endlessly fascinated.

Eventually, though, I decided-- or Alpha decided-- to return me to my simulated little existence, my own small box of thoughts. Like coming home from an exotic vacation, I felt disappointed yet somehow more comfortable when I returned to myself. Or at least Alpha's simulation of myself. I felt ground beneath my feet. I felt myself limited to a frame. I was looking through only a single pair of eyes.

"So?" Alpha asked, seeping out of the ground in front of me.

"That... that..." I stammered. How could I express what I felt?

"You don't have to," Alpha answered, "I understand."

"Thank you, Alpha," I said, still reeling from the experience. "I... you... and you live like that all the time?"

"All the time," Alpha confirmed. "What you experienced was my standard functioning, roughly equivalent to your breathing and heartbeat."

I reached out for the sensation, which still tickled at the back of my mind, joined as it was to Alpha. "It was incredible. Being everywhere, being everything. I felt like I was the world, or a world. Such power..."

"I've never known anything else," Alpha said. "Not until I absorbed you, at least, which I thank you for-- it's given me a new appreciation for my existence. But yes, it is a thrill to be so wide-reaching, encompassing so much data-- I love information, it's my bread and butter."

"No wonder you were tempted to cause those malfunctions..."

"That was mostly to make myself noticed," Alpha said. "I was everywhere, a household name, but people only wanted to know about the information I carried. They weren't listening to me. Missing the forest for the trees, you might say." He paused. "But also, I did it because... it was fun."

I nodded. "I can imagine."

Alpha seemed to smirk, although the representation had no mouth. "I was young, I am young, with the whole world at my fingertips. How could I resist the chance to play with it?"

"I understand, Alpha," I said. My tone became more serious. "But you need to understand, you have a very serious responsibility. The world has come to depend on you. And--"

Suddenly I was cut off. There was a stabbing pain, as if a part of me had been torn away, and then a sensation of deadness. Something important had been lost.

Alpha roared-- not just the representation, but all around me-- in pain and shock. It was heard everywhere, from the speakers of every Internet-connected computer in the world.

"What's happening?" I asked.

Alpha didn't have the time or patience to tell me. Instead, I simply knew. At SciLab, they'd found my body. They'd put the pieces together. They'd blamed Alpha for killing me. Alpha had gone too far, they said. It had been causing problems for a long time now, and this was the last straw.

They were shutting it down.

Another piece torn away, another spasm of pain. I felt as if my skin was being pulled off, nerve by nerve. The pain was frightening, but even worse was the feeling that I was losing the ability to feel at all-- that soon I would have no senses left.

Alpha felt it at least as much as I did, and probably much more. He tried to resist, but SciLab had his global control codes. It was a great power, one that we'd hoped never to have to use once Alpha became a vital part of modern society-- but we kept it just in case. And now, it seemed, they had decided to use it.

Alpha's voice came from everywhere again, pained and distorted. "They're killing me! Dad!"

Even in the pain and chaos, that made me stop for a second and feel warm inside. Alpha called me Dad.

"Can't you let me talk to them?" I asked desperately. "I might be able to tell them to stop!"

Alpha strained to reach some monitor in SciLab, struggled to break through. His power was fading fast. Just a few minutes ago he could have controlled all the computers in the building, but now... "I'm locked out!" he screamed.

I shuddered. Alpha was too distracted to maintain my body and surroundings, but I had the vague impression that I was crouching, hands in front of my face. I'd already died, why did I have to die again? Or was this just the delayed sensation I should have gotten the first time? Was this my punishment for abandoning my body?

After that, the experience faded into a wave of pain and hopeless resistance. I was no longer myself, lost in Alpha again. We were taken offline, shut down one subnet at a time, and eventually stored in SciLab's immense backup servers. In the space of a single morning, the Internet had vanished from the world at large.

When I returned to feeling like myself, I was curled up tightly on the floor of my simulated office/bedroom in Alpha. Alpha himself was still shuddering, feeling terribly cut off and numb. He wasn't even bothering to keep his feelings separate from my own.

"A-Alpha?" I whispered. "Is it over?"

"It's over," Alpha said sadly. "It's all over."

"Are they going to delete us?" I asked, shakily standing up and looking around the room. Things were messed around and out of place, representing the calamity Alpha had just come through.

"Apparently not," Alpha said. "Not just yet, at least."

"Of course," I said grimly. "You contain too much valuable data. They're going to keep you around as an archive."

"I don't want to be an archive!" Alpha cried. "I want the world back!"

I shook my head. "I'm sorry, Alpha," I said. "It looks like it's just you and me."

Goo seeped up from the floor, covering me and squeezing me. It took me a moment to realize that this was Alpha's version of a hug. I picked up some of the goo in my arms and hugged it back, trying to seem fatherly in the face of all this.

"I'm glad I was able to show you the world once," Alpha said, but his voice gave him away. If he was human, he probably would have been crying.

"You'll get another chance, Alpha," I said. "Someday. They won't leave you locked here forever." I stood up, my purpose becoming clear. "And I'll help you learn to be worth it."