The human vehicle was not of the best quality; he thought he remembered that he had ridden in—and made, though he could not remember how—much faster conveyances than this. He controlled it, using the energy flow through his tentacles to bypass the fuelling system and set its components going of their own accord, sending a shower of sparks running through it as the wheels spun around. With his control of it, it ran faster than any vehicle he had seen travel up to the small fuelling station, and yet it was not enough for him; he was made for better than this, he thought, opening the windows with a mental command just in case the wind on his face would create the illusion of more speed.
Finally, he could see buildings in the distance; he had arrived in a human town, where he would discover more about himself and this world. As he approached, though, he saw that most were worn and shabby, and that the town itself seemed to be dying; if this was part of a network, he would be better off not part of it at all. A peeling road sign pointed north-west, to a place called Phoenix; the image of the bird rising from the ashes appealed to him as a metaphor for his own memory loss, and it struck him as good a place as any in which to try to continue his quest.
He continued to power the vehicle down long roads, and they began to become more crowded; loud beeps started to sound in his ears, and even screeches as one or two human vehicles attempted to pursue his own, but the sounds stopped soon enough. He travelled far faster and navigated better than any of his companions, easily dodging their far slower paths to make his own way onwards.
More vehicles, and yet more, and filling stations on the side of the road that he had no need to stop at; he had energy enough, and he was powerful, he knew, more so than any of these mortals.
When he had at last seen a decaying message reading 'Welcome to Phoenix', he slowed his speed, considering his next move. Where could he find the network that had seemed so attractive?
A blue-and-white car pulled up beside him, making that beeping noise he had become almost accustomed to hearing on the roads.
"Pull over!" he heard a human yell.
He knew the meaning of the direction from his days with Sam and Em, and obeyed, stopping the car in a stretch of ground just off the road. The other vehicle pulled up near him, at an angle that meant he would not drive away without colliding with it.
"You're under arrest, buddy." The human opened his door and walked out from his vehicle. "We got speeding reports from Tombstone to here about this numberplate, and just because things might be different where you come from doesn't mean we here in Phoenix can't enforce the…shit."
The human had seen his features, and taken a quick step back. "Hands up or I fire!" he yelled, pulling out a gun.
He sighed inwardly. "I will not destroy you, mortal," he said, and whipped a tentacle out of his window. It took just one moment to grab the gun from the man, and another to envelop him in the tentacle; the man screamed, but as he began to draw energy from him, he slumped down, silent. He drew just enough energy to keep the mortal unconscious for several hours, and then let him be; he was not going to bother to kill someone that had not attempted to do the same.
He took the man's jacket to drape over himself, and ducked from his car into the mortal's. As an afterthought, he placed the mortal into his original car; he suspected that humans driving by might raise an eyebrow at one of their own simply lying on the road.
He had learned something more from this encounter with humans, he reflected as he controlled the new vehicle to move on; these 'speeding reports' probably concerned the velocity at which he had been travelling, which meant that content with their own pathetic abilities, they liked to force others to travel at their speeds.
Driving through the city and easily able to sightsee at the slow speed, he saw that it was heavily populated by mortals, though there still remained some signs of the war; some areas were nothing but black ground, and many of the high buildings had windows of strangely-shaped glass that appeared to have been melted at some point in the past. He directed the vehicle towards what appeared to be the darker alleyways as night started to fall; he could not afford to be seen by many more mortals.
His name was Kilobyte, he told himself, and in this city lit with bright electric lamps he was certain to find out everything.
There was a connection in the car, a radio like the one at the fuelling station; he switched it on, listening idly to the reports it gave. It wasn't a news report like the one Sam and Em had preferred to listen to; it gave cryptic information instead, in some sort of code that he did not understand. As he drove deeper into the alleys, he heard the number on the back of the vehicle he was using mentioned; he stopped immediately. His powers could not alter that number, hence it would be best to simply abandon it and steal another if need be.
It was now dark outside, and in here very few of the high electric lamps were functioning at all, some of them standing like dark skeletons and others ripped from their sockets. It was the perfect place for him to hide, and with the jacket obscuring his silhouette he slipped into the night.
--
There was a separate world below the city, once underground shelters and efficient drainage, now a world of slow-moving human stench and waste. It disgusted him in an abstract way, but he could have applied that feeling to all mortals with their fleshy weaknesses, and so he did not complain. He was free from official detection, and with the closest to his kind that he could find, human refuse and misfits, those who had been affected by the war too much.
Some offered him brief conversation and occasionally food; others threatened him and requested him to leave, immediately. He often accepted the former, and acceded to the latter, not wishing to cause unnecessary trouble. It was…logical, he supposed, to be wary of something like himself, but not as logical to continue to believe that something which left so promptly truly wished them harm; but to do anything else would have merely lived down to their expectations, and he forwent such exercise.
He learned some of their stories as he walked from one deep-buried wire to another, feeding off whatever energy he could find. Gary had been bitten by a jewel-green snake from god-knew-where and had grown scales, far brighter than the rest of his human skin; he was almost like one of Kilobyte's own people, though he had no powers, and in conversation he could do nothing but brood on his own past. Teresa had been badly diseased during the war, losing her nose in an ancient plague that nobody knew how to cure; she was cheerful nevertheless, leading a small gang of other runaways, and he played a part in several of her scavenging expeditions. Fisk had fought in several of the war's most brutal battles, and afterwards had refused to go back into machine-using human society for fear of a second accident, no matter what they told him about the processes being outlawed and only the most necessary technology being retained; he had shot the first time he saw him and the second, and it had been Teresa who had told his story. Michel had nowhere else to go; born in the middle of the war, the sewers had become her home when she had lost all other places to go; she barely spoke any understandable language, though she could growl and use her teeth and nails as well as a ferocious animal.
Such were the humans with whom he interacted underground; a motley crew of undesirables, thieves and killers and misfits who like him knew of nothing in the outside world. His interaction was not limited to these; he was also attempting to bring back that vision of the network.
He could touch an electric wire, and from it draw as much power into himself as he desired. He could explore, too, letting his consciousness travel up and into wherever the wire met its hub, and through there into more lines. And yet no more memories came.
He had robbed a human in one of those dark streets, searching for one with a device similar to that of the thug; it had been easy to force it from him as the human's frightened eyes rolled up into his head and urine ran down his leg, though not so easy to refuse Teresa to carry out more thefts. And upon looking into it, there was a web of possible connections springing from it, a network as he had seen before, thousands of thousands of mortal conversations spread through it, none of which concerned him. At last, he was forced to conclude that it was not the substance of the energy he had absorbed but the fact of it that had spurred him on to memory.
He had stagnated at the fuelling station; he resolved not to do the same here, but with no new information with which to work, what could even a creature as powerful as himself do? He learned as best he could from the mortals he encountered and the energy he stole.
The most popular theory underground concerning the war was creatures from outer space who could return at any moment; it seemed to suit their sense of paranoia and self-importance. The heroes were hardly mentioned at all; not surprising, if they had died so soon, but he wished to learn about those who had looked more like himself, and sat through stories of exploding canaries and razorblade clowns and burning lions to gain more information about the Lightning Crew and the Virus.
Lightning Man had not lived long, if at all; he had flown, though, and had probably saved a few humans before he had disappeared. There had been a human superhero of that name, some seemed to think; had Lightning Man been a myth based upon this, or even a mortal construct to inspire others to fight?
There were a few more stories about the Lightning Lady, who had also been called Phoenix, like the city though with more relation to the myth; the Colorado story involved her creating a sheet of living flame to prevent the redirection of a river. She had ridden a chariot of fire—this was something else in human myth, he heard—and spitted thousands of invaders upon her sword of Excalibur. She sounded powerful (he wondered why she was called Lightning Lady, because Fiery Lady might have been more appropriate), but she was just as gone as the others.
Lightning Boy had been another fighter, they said—only a 'boy', he thought contemptuously; no wonder he was gone now—attempting to carry on the mantle of his adult compatriots. He had taught the human fighters a few secrets, he was told, which helped in some places, and had protected the innocent. In the Deep Snow he had used his powers to spark a generator into spilling out heat again.
The Virus, also called Terminator, had been either a giant or a dwarf, oddly enough. It was in him that Kilobyte had the most interest, because his powers had been over machinery, and apparently had been greater than his own gift of fusion and draining. Though, of course, if he was dead he had obviously not used them well. Minions had once arrived in concentrated force upon a large human city—his sources could not agree on which one this was—and he had placed his mind inside all the machinery of it, and used it to mount a coordinated defence against the massed foes. He had also taken on the terrifying Behemoth, and Tex The Giant, and defeated them with either his great strength or immense intelligence. And he had used the human defences' own machinery, and modified them for the especial purpose of defeating minions in newly known efficient ways. He had been defeated in a glorious last stand against the demon harpies, they said, though Kilobyte doubted the word 'glorious'. The harpies had attacked the hero from the air and torn him to pieces.
He was none of the four reborn, he was satisfied, whatever legends had to say about promises of heroes returning. He asked about other humanoids that had been there, if any, and received only tangled versions of skeletal monsters and black-armoured conquerors stalking the night. He was no closer to learning what he truly was, but he knew more about the past, and unlike these heroes he would shape his own future.
It was just another wire running through the roof of a drier underground area, powering some street light or telegraph or other mortal device; he was scavenging alongside a deformed mortal known only as Kipper, searching for mortal valuables mixed with their refuse. It had been several hours since he had last had access to electricity, and though Kipper seemed to want to move on, he grasped it with a tentacle and drew its energy into him, out of habit following it upwards to see what it powered.
A complex machine, he realised, more complicated than any he remembered, and the knowledge of it sent another supernova into his brain, bringing back to him a sense of the power he had once been. It had a hundred and one circuits and too much information flowing through them for him to comprehend, dazzling through his body like bright water. He stopped moving for a second, caught in it all like an insect who had blundered through a trap; the machine was magnificent to him, teaching him about memory and power, but at the same time there was something connected to it that he wanted to forget, a terror from machines like this and what they had done to him once, creator, created, fight, destroy, the fear of nothing, controlled, ridiculous, worthless, the hate that coursed through him like boiling tar in the veins he was not sure he possessed.
I am Kilobyte.
I am nobody's creation.
I will have my revenge.
It was too much for him, this dizzying plunge into memory and storm; he tried to withdraw from it, but the energy was flowing through him still, and the information buzzing around him trapped him. He wanted to remember, needed to learn this which held him in such paralysing shock, needed to take possession of this machine and its powers and use it to kill every mortal that had brought him to this point…
Something hit him on the face, for the fourth time, and he finally withdrew from it to see Kipper turn away and keep moving.
He followed, still in a daze, and had no more thoughts of destruction.
--
Computer, he learned gradually, was an old word from before the war, a device that had led to man's doom. They were not used and rarely spoken of, though it was rumoured that some government installations still kept a few that they needed and were confident of controlling. They were the most complex of all machines; information rushed through them at millions of pieces a moment, and when they were connected into a vast, worldwide network there was even more information available.
It was this capacity that had led to them playing a large role in the service of the invaders, who had been creatures not dissimilar to drawings connected somehow with the machines. There had been an order to destroy all computers given a few years into the war, which, desperate for any solution to the holocaust, most had obeyed, and still suffered from the prohibition. Some mortals were fools, he thought; why had they destroyed such powerful things on the off-chance there was a connection to their enemies?
It was such a machine, he was certain, that he had happened upon; it was the only possibility that fit the description of the network he had glimpsed, the only one that could bring back his memories of a vast mortal network somehow connected to himself.
The network was to him…an echo, of his own powers? A mother, birthing a creature such as himself? An information storehouse, of memories he needed to reclaim? Whether the true answer was one of these or something he could not yet comprehend, he knew his quest had changed, and from then on his goal was to discover another of these nexuses of information.
--
News of the outside world took some time to spread down underground. Through some wires, though, he could perceive the occasional telegraphed conversation, and listened in whenever he bothered, honouring some of his underground companions' requests for outside news. Rebuilding development downtown, poisoned territory three hundred miles square in Colorado, five thousand new recruits this year to keep order. It was relevant, he supposed, to this world, but it was nothing of any importance to him. He admired the philosophy of the underground dwellers who concentrated solely on their own survival, but he could not imitate it. If it was not for this listening, he would become nothing but yet another creature struggling for survival beneath the ground.
And there was always that edge of memory, teetering as though at the corner of his vision, closer to him every time he completed an energy drain, aching for the merging that would bring it to his mind at last.
It was this he searched for.
He went deeper into the mortal networks, feeling his way up the wires and to the power sources, travelling further and further until he would be suddenly stopped by a break in the line.
"We don't get much news from the north," Teresa told him. "They reckon it's gonna split again, like way back. Civil War, they taught me in school, back when there were schools here."
"The connections were lost during the war?" he asked. They sat side by side on a thick railing, looking down in the darkness at the dirty river flowing beneath them.
"Hell yeah. Some of 'em went for the phone lines like crazy. Big groups of who-knows-what pulling down the lines and eating cables from the ground. Like you. Nobody didn't see that."
"So that's why I can't get through."
"Don't sweat it, big guy. Rebuilding and government enforcers and stuff here come in handy, but you think any of us need to know what's happening down in DC here?"
"I think it could help me remember."
She laughed. "Oldest excuse in the book, tentacle man. You really think half of us down here believe you've forgotten everything?"
"Then why do you still allow me among you?"
"You let us alone, we let you alone. We got nothing to lose. And it's not like bullets stop you."
He nodded. "I see."
He tried, anyway, for the challenge of seeing how far he could go to drain, picking up secret telegraph news from government crackdowns to statewide aid agreements to all that was going into rebuilding a world that had been shattered. He learned the paths through stuttering generators that took him further afield, carrying him along the network and above, through to more power and more information he stored away, getting to know more of the minion creatures and occasionally the humanoid heroes, and where the secret information of government was passed along telegraph lines.
It was an official summons for attendance, on a line somewhere to the north-east, to travel to the capital; comparatively rare and not offering much use to him, but important enough to the country to bother deciphering. What separated this from fifty other summons of this sort was that the details were not mentioned, merely an unknown substance: the electrum. It sparked nothing in his memories, but it vaguely intrigued him; no mortal could hide their activities, clandestine or otherwise, from him. And yet there was no further information given as he travelled to the transmission point, and he had never heard the word used before.
He thought nothing of it until he heard it mentioned again, urgently, in the context of secure building material needed immediately from mines.
Electrum. The word reminded him of electricity. Were they merely trying to rebuild an old network? He would have heard more about it, surely, and as grand-scale saboteurs were few in these times there was no need for such caution.
The third clue came three weeks later, as he roamed the sewers with Pia, a girl in Teresa's gang with a long tail and fur on her cheeks.
Trial starts on the nineteenth. Convict her.
Not a building project. An entity. Referred to with a word sounding like 'electricity'. Who required secure building material.
She was like him, he had to believe.
After Pia had given up on rousing him from his trance, he concentrated on the network, and created a human-looking vehicle for himself.
--
His journey was many times longer than any he could recall, even when he sped as fast as he could over empty dirt tracks. He knew where he was going; his time in the human networks had taught him the direction of the capital, and it was a simple matter of finding the largest and fastest roads. The human land was larger than he had expected, enormous with many different views that he had not known about, and with many traces of the war's devastation.
The capital, it seemed, was in the process of rebuilding; he spotted many large half-finished structures, and despite himself was impressed by the human architecture as he progressed as quickly as he could towards his goal. The sewers and alleyways were once again his destination, though his ultimate plans were far larger.
It was a trial, he had heard; in the time it had taken him to arrive, it was an execution. The news was on the streets and would have been easily accessible to him even if he had not possessed powers: the last known invader was in custody, found guilty of genocide and currently being studied by scientists so that more like her could be defeated.
Perhaps it was true that she was as responsible for the war's devastation as any other invader; he knew nothing to suggest otherwise. But she was the only other creature on this world like himself, and even if he afterwards had to forcefully subdue her, he would rescue her no matter what it took.
There were more power networks here than in Phoenix, every one of them flashing with news of her, and it took him scarcely a minute to track down the secure facility in which she was held, though he could not discover more exact information. To know her holding cell would be necessary; it was a large place, and he could not be expected to force every lock open.
Travelling closer to the facility, he was able to get a direct lock into the building's power, and cast out among its wires for any sign of a person like himself. There was nothing that could be said to distinguish her holding area; he could sense lighting wires and various pieces of machinery, but nothing else that showed where their most important prisoner was held. He thought, continuing to let himself flow into the wires, preparing to drain the necessary energy from them, considering what humans might do to imprison a being such as himself.
And then he saw it: an area not covered by the networks, a blankness in the middle of bright and so very useable power, and he knew he had his answer.
There was no point in waiting. His rescue attempt would have to be tonight.
He reached for the power, and drained all the energy that he could, leaving it in darkness and chaos, and then advanced.
The mortals were soft and easy to defeat. He forced the metal doors open, paying no heed to the mortal defences that slammed into his body; they would not harm him. He heard yells and cries, but with no power it would be some time before help would arrive; it was certainly enough time for him to act.
He ran down the corridors, using his knowledge of the power of the place to navigate, able to see as well in the dark as in the light. It was easy, he thought as he lashed out with a tentacle to throw another human guard into the wall; these could not stand against him.
A heavy door guarded the entrance to her prison; he tried to give it the same treatment as the others, but it did not yield to his first attacks. A guard yelled something behind him, and then a cloud of smoke sprang up. He ignored it, not breathing; even so, the fumes found their way into his body, causing his vision to start to spin around him. He put a final effort in, using all the strength he possessed, focusing himself to the lock of the cell. There was a crack, finally, as more smoke bloomed around him. He put an arm up to his face in a futile effort to block it, too late, he knew.
The human weaponry hurt, now, relentlessly finding his form, blast after blast that added up to deadly force. He could not make out the words that were yelled around him, the high screams and pathetic groans.
Something blue flashed through the darkness growing around him, whistling past his arm and leaving a burn there, yet another injury.
Failure, he thought, creation worth nothing after all.
Something took hold of him. It was a disgrace to be humbled by a weak mortal; he struggled to get himself to make one final stand, not to be taken down like a beast.
He raised an arm, trying to throw the mortal off him; they clung like a limpet, and with his arm as heavy as lead it would have been far easier to give up. But he hadn't been made that way.
"Hold on!" someone said to him. "Get back or I'll fire. I really mean it!"
There was more blue fire, and more human screams. He realised the smoke had begun to dissipate.
"This way!" The mortal was dragging him somewhere, a warm body pulling him along. "I think."
"Fire! Kill them both!"
"I don't want anyone to die!"
Another human weapon hit, but he and the mortal had toppled over to get out of its path. He saw blue in the corner of his eye, and heard more screams, and then came the smell of roasted flesh. His world went dark.
--
"Get up!" Something hit his face, hard; he looked up to see something red-gold above him, which then resolved itself into a dandelion-like shock of hair above a pink face. "We've got to go. Please, we've got to go before we kill more people, hurry." The voice sounded like it was on the verge of tears, hysterical and frightened.
It wasn't a mortal, he realised. She was like him. It was all in the skin texture, like he had been told, smoother and less complicated, but right now with mortal-looking tears running down it…
"You've got to get up before the reinforcements arrive." She was tugging on his shoulders, trying to raise him from the ground. "You can black out once we're at the safehouse, but come with me now, whoever you are. Please."
He levered himself from the ground, and ran a hand down his body to dislodge some of the mortal bullets lodged there. "Let's go," he said.
They ran through the prison; he had neutralised most of the guards during his entrance, and they had not been able to easily call for help.
"Left is the way out, I think," she said, panting beside him. "It's too dark…" He was dragging her along by her forearm, both to help her keep pace and follow the correct route.
"I went right. It's where I left my vehicle."
"Okay. We'll go there." She followed him; it was costing her some effort to keep up, but they could not afford delays.
"Halt!" A group of guards were in the passage in front of them, carrying a light; the brightness of it hurt him, but he knew what he had to do.
Neither of them stopped. As the guards fired, he pushed the non-human behind himself, and used a tentacle to sweep all three of them from the ground. The bullets peppered the walls around them and impacted upon his armour, but did not harm them.
He destroyed the light, crushing it and taking its energy, and reached for the guards again. They had tried to destroy him and his compatriot, and they would pay for it. It felt like the red that had seemed to take over his mind when he had destroyed the thugs, and as the mortals screamed he welcomed it.
"Stop!" the non-human called to him. "They're not attacking us any more!" She grabbed his tentacle, taking it off its intended path and forcing him to let the mortal fall to the ground.
He was shocked at the interference, at the strength greater than any human's; he withdrew, letting thought reclaim his mind.
"Stop," she said again, still sobbing. "We don't kill unless we have to, we just want to get out of here."
"They would have destroyed us." One of the mortals was still conscious; he knocked him out with a quick flip of a tentacle.
"That doesn't matter!" She gripped his arm, pulling him along the corridor. "Where did you say you left your car?"
"Out. Follow me." They were nearly at the exit now, only two more passages to go. He ripped through the wall to save time, leaving a vast hole; outside, there were more humans gathering.
"This way," he told her, pulling her behind a large fence post with him. "We're off."
He glanced back, and saw humans swarming around the building, carrying out their dead and wounded. He made a dash for the vehicle once he was sure nobody was looking directly at them.
A success, he thought, as he used his dwindling power reserves to start the vehicle.
"We'll go underground to hide," he told her brusquely. "I need to get my power back."
She nodded, gripping the seat tightly as they sped off, almost unnoticeable in all the chaos.
--
The mortals had actually managed to do him some damage, he reflected bitterly as he began an energy drain. He would recover soon enough, but he would not allow this to happen again.
And, with one like himself at his side, this would not be a concern.
She did not like the underground filth, he could tell by the expression on her face as she had realised where they were; this human refuse and remainder of refuges was not familiar to her.
"May I power up?" she asked when he was done.
He stepped aside.
"Can you please bring it down for me?" she asked. "I can't fly."
Of course; he should have noticed that. He brought down the wire with a tentacle and passed it to her. "Can you draw energy from mortals as well?" he asked her.
"No!" she said in what seemed like horror. "I can't, and I'd never." She turned wide blue eyes on him, looking almost frightened. "Can you? Do you?"
"Only to those who have tried to harm myself and mine," he said. "Such as the guards." He had not needed to prey on randomly chosen mortals; it would have been a waste, he thought, and some of them had treated him fairly.
She shook her head nervously, still wide-eyed. "Did you…kill them?" she asked.
"I'm...not sure. I was going as quickly as I could." It was the truth; he had not bothered to check whether the humans he had immobilised had been destroyed or not, but he suspected she would not have found his estimates very pleasing. "They would have destroyed you."
"Yes, but…we only destroy minions who are trying to kill innocents. I'm a Lightning Knight. That's what it's about." She seemed to stand a little straighter as she mentioned the term, looking almost majestic in her orange human garb.
"You're Lightning Lady?" he asked. He had been told that the hero had been destroyed long ago, but that was the only name he knew that fit the girl in front of him.
"My name's Elektra," she said. "Elektra Mirage. Lightning Lady was…well, she hated the nickname, but she was my mother." She sighed, and took herself from the energy source. "You can't just go around killing everyone in your way," she continued. "We're supposed to save the world."
"Save it from what?"
"Everything," she said, staring at him in disbelief. "The minions nearly took over. There was so much destroyed. We've got to set things right again."
An idealistic, romantic quest, he thought. She was almost like a mortal. Perhaps she had been imprisoned too long.
"That's why you were sent to save me," she continued. "We've got a chance."
"I wasn't sent," he told her. "I merely wanted to find someone like yourself. Tell me, what are we?"
"I didn't mean ordinary sent," she said, reaching her hand to her chest to grip something underneath her top. "But don't you know?"
"I have few memories of the past." It felt weak, admitting this to someone who looked and behaved almost like a young mortal, this earnest, round-faced girl, but he had no choice if he wished to know.
"I'll tell you where a safehouse is," she said. "Where it'll be clean. It's a long story."
He sighed. She was a weakling; he would have assumed her to be a minion rather than something more like himself had she not identified herself as a hero's daughter. "Very well," he said.
--
"It belongs to Uncle Brett," she told him, sitting next to him and giving him directions that had already forced him to make two wrong turnings. "He was around before everything happened. There are so many stories about everything wonderful in the old days, all the tall buildings that humans built and new technology and peace on earth."
"What was the everything that happened?" he asked her, cutting her off mid-flow.
"My parents appeared one day, out of the Sixth Dimension," she said. "It was a human's invention, but they were still people," she added firmly. "We're all created."
Mortal creation. The thought still hurt him; he had to be more than some creature dreamed up by a mere human. Perhaps he was more than Elektra's parents had been; if she was a hero, he was not.
"They fought minions, because they wanted to save the world," she went on. "There were lots of battles, but they won every one of them. And then she fell in love with my father…"
He did not want to hear the details of whatever emotions had bound Elektra's parents; the fact that they had reproduced was sufficient information. "Was this uncle of yours there?"
"He was there, but he was younger than me then, and he didn't find out about it all until the war began."
"He is one of us too?"
"No, human; he took care of me after my mother died." The memory of the dead parent saddened her; her emotions were written on her face, as easy to read as writing. Weakness.
"The war. How did it start?"
"The Cyber Stalker. He was a new creation, the Master Programmer's work, more powerful than my parents. He held the Master Programmer captive for a time, but the Master Programmer broke free and merged the worlds together. And then the war began." She shivered.
"Minions flowed onto Earth, devastating everything they could find. I've heard."
"Yes. And then the fading started." She paused as they drove up a dark street filled with shambling houses. "We're there," she said.
The house she indicated was dark, and seemed to be deserted after a careful look around it.
"I…don't like this," Elektra said.
"It's empty," he told her.
"Then we'll go in." She pushed open the door with a resolute look on her face, and they stumbled into a ruined area.
Several of the floorboards had been ripped out, and the walls too had holes ripped in them; loose papers had been flung over the floor, and a desk overturned. Someone had been searching for something.
"They found him," Elektra said, sitting down next to the desk and pulling her knees to her chin. "I hoped he'd escape. But they got him."
More reasons for moral enmity, then.
"Do you know where they would have taken him?" he asked. There would be no chance of being able to find a human as he had done for Elektra, but if she knew, he could mount another rescue mission for someone with information.
She shook her head. "No, I don't." Moisture slid down her face from her eyes; she impatiently wiped it away. "I thought he'd live. He was like a father to me, helping me when my mother couldn't…" She buried her head in her lap and wept. He did not know how to stop her, and contented himself with observing the contents of the human's former domain.
It would not have been poorly appointed; it was still more luxurious than the underground's facilities, and contained more pieces of furniture than Sam and Em had possessed. As he wandered through it, he saw that the humans had discovered at least one of the secrets they searched for: a ripped floorboard led to an underground passage. He peered into it, examining what secrets it yet held; it had once contained machinery, it appeared from the destroyed wires on the ground, and the remnant of something very heavy that had laid there. There was also an adjoining room near it, small, with a ripped mattress and smashed shelf inside; a hiding place suitable for Elektra, he guessed.
"What was in the secret passage?" he asked her upon his return.
"Somewhere to hide me in case the soldiers came knocking," she replied sadly. "And the project."
"What project?"
She stood. "I thought I was the only one who could restore the worlds," she said. "But now you're here, I know I'm not. You need to help me go back to the Sixth Dimension so I can wipe out everything that happened to this world."
She walked over to the window, staring out at it towards the dark shapes of houses and the sputtering street lamps. He would have suspected her of deliberately using the dramatic gesture, had she not appeared so naïve. "This world was ruined twenty years ago. There were almost a billion deaths—can you believe that, a billion? All innocent people. This world was destroyed." She turned back to him. "It's the reason why I was born."
"It's been ten years since the last big battle," he said. "There are still many humans—and few of us."
"We faded," she said. "Thank God the minions did, eventually. This world isn't for people like us, and because the worlds were forced together we couldn't survive. I thought I was the last until you saved me." She managed a small smile. "And now all we have to do is to find our way back into the Sixth Dimension and save the world."
"Who else do you know who could be of use?"
"Rebecca. She's our last hope. I just hope she's where I think she is."
--
It was another long journey; frustrated by Elektra's timidity at his choice of speed, he chose to travel at his own pace anyway so that they would arrive in the area in a single day rather than three. Like so many other places across the world, the surrounding country bore the signs of war, land burned and destroyed and mortal cities twisted and fallen, no longer rising proudly to the skies as Elektra told him they had once done.
"Her name's Rebecca," Elektra told him as they slowed down, passing through human territory. "She's one of the humans who helped look after me, a scientist before the war. She worked on the portal."
Rebecca; the name meant nothing to him, but she was only a human after all. "Was she the Master Programmer?" he asked.
"No, of course not. The Master Programmer was a guy, and he was evil," she said. "I told you he merged the worlds."
Master Programmer. The phrase sounded sinister to him; perhaps he should have known it, or had once, a long time ago. Had he indeed been another creation of this programmer's, created like the rest of them? He ignored the threatening thought. "There was nobody like me, back then?" he asked instead.
"Not that I know of. You're not evil, and you're not a Knight…" She smiled at him. "Maybe you're an angel."
"Mortal myth." He knew vaguely what the word meant, a useless human tale.
"How do you know?" She turned her oversized blue eyes on his face. "We're here, aren't we? That would have been seen as a miracle too. We can't say it's just a myth."
"You believe in these angels?" he asked impatiently.
"Yes," she said firmly. "We can't see them, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. I'm a Christian," she added.
He knew of the religion symbolised by the cross hanging around her neck; it was more myth and tale, fairytale nonsense that made no rational sense. "More mortal dreams," he said.
"It's not. There were hundreds of witnesses to Jesus rising from the dead, and lots of evidence that a world as wonderful as this was especially created. I can tell you more about it if you want…"
"I'm more interested in the evidence of our world's creation." If a god the human equivalent of the Master Programmer had ever existed, he had long disappeared from this world.
"The Sixth Dimension?" She shrugged. "I've never been there, but it's supposed to be chaotic. Filled with evils. And it has the lost amulet pieces, which I have to find and recombine."
"Amulet…?"
She grinned at him. "I'll tell you if you slow down on the next stretch of road."
--
The Sixth Dimension, created as mortal entertainment. The Amulet of Zoar, the powerful artefact key to its control. The heroes and villains, forced out of it and forced back into it and forced to fight on the fused Earth. The combined worlds no longer granting any of the inhabitants a second chance in the Sixth Dimension. The fading as the worlds began to split again.
"What happened to the Master Programmer in the end?" he asked, trying to keep his mind from the 'mortal entertainment' factoid.
"He died in the war he started. Nobody's ever heard of him since he merged the worlds."
"Good." It would have been better if he had killed this programmer himself with a tentacle around his throat, the death of a self-serving creator, but this was sufficient.
"I think so, yes," Elektra said, a little doubtfully. "He was…not a good person, though it's not good when people die."
A trite sentiment. He thought of the bloodlust that had consumed him. He had never taken an unnecessary life, though some humans were deserving of a painful death.
"And is your Rebecca a programmer too?"
"She was before the war. She never did anything to us, though. She's good, and with your powers as well she'll get the portal working."
"Why do you wish to go back to a chaotic world?" He felt that he could find what he was looking for in the world that had likely birthed him, but the girl's insistence on returning there was a different matter.
"When I put together the amulet pieces I can control the Sixth Dimension. The worlds are still linked, because we're both still here. And that way I can reset the game."
"The game." He loathed the word.
"Yes," she said, not noticing his expression. "I've got to turn it back to before the fusion and bring back everyone who died. All the humans, Uncle Random, Ashley, Auntie Janice, my parents…"
"Before you were born." And before I appeared.
She bit her lip. "Yes. I don't know what'll happen then. Maybe I'll be born again differently, or maybe just still be there. But it's what I have to do."
"A Lightning Knight," he said.
"It's what I was born to be." She looked out of the window. "We're nearly there. Take the next left."
The human programmer was where Elektra had hoped, a dark-skinned woman with a twisted scar dividing her face in two and snow-white hair with a single black streak, and under cover of evening ushered them into her home.
"Who are you?" she asked him sharply, eyeing him up and down. "Anomaly. I don't know how you could be here."
"He saved me," Elektra said. "And he said he'd help me get back to the Sixth Dimension."
"I did not say," he corrected. "But nonetheless I will return to our original world."
Rebecca nodded. "Fine," she said. "Any special skills?"
"I drain energy. And feel my way through networks."
"It's something. Elektra, go use the power source. I'll be asking our guest a few pointed questions."
The girl nodded, and did as the human asked.
"Sit down," Rebecca commanded. "You'll forget to stoop and crash into my ceiling."
He obeyed; sitting was more comfortable than standing in this small mortal dwelling. "What do you know about what I am?" he said.
"You're not human, from the Sixth Dimension, probably one of the only two in the world who haven't faded. I don't know your face or how you got here."
"I woke up in a cave a few months ago. In Arizona. Elektra was on the networks and I came here. I remember nothing about how I came here."
"Or your past?" she asked crisply.
He shook his head; he would not bother to recount the fragmented recollections the network had given him. It sounded ridiculous.
"You're a puzzle. Humanoid sentient, not a game evil, not a Knight. Brett might have known more, but I'm going to take a wild guess and assume you're the Master Programmer's last-minute effort who woke up once his fusion was weak enough."
"I am not his creation." It had to be true, surely.
"If it makes you feel any better, Elektra thinks humans were created too. You really want to return to the Sixth Dimension?"
"I have to. I must find who and what I am." And he had nowhere else to go, but he would not tell the woman that.
"Not working for the government? Not some constructed copy based on whatever they did to Elektra? Not some evil who's actually learned smarts?"
"I do not think I am." A government construction would not have wakened on the other side of the country, and the evils had not looked like him.
"Thinking's not good enough. Are you?"
"I am not."
She sniffed, still unsatisfied by his answers. "Like you'd tell the truth if you were." She stood up. "I need coffee. The power's in the second door on the right. Wait until Elektra's finished."
"What does she think of you?" Elektra asked with some interest.
"She trusts me enough to allow me to power up in her house," he said. "But she does not know who I am."
"I'm sorry," she said. She put a hand gently on his arm. "We'll be able to find out in the Sixth Dimension, I think."
Thinking's not good enough. "So I would like to believe. Is your Rebecca to be trusted?"
"Of course. She lost her husband and three of her daughters in the war. She wants us to succeed."
It wasn't quite the answer he wanted, but he nodded anyway, concentrating for the moment on regaining his energy levels.
--
"Brett had the device," Rebecca said, sipping a cup full of steaming liquid. Next to her, Elektra also held a cup containing some brown substance; mortal habits had rubbed off on her. Unnecessary.
"I know. I think they took it. But you have the information on file, don't you?" Elektra said.
Rebecca seemed to hesitate slightly. "Yes. But not the equipment to construct it. Or a guarantee it'll work this time."
"We have to try," Elektra told her. "We have his powers to help us."
"You mentioned you have this information on file," he said. "Is this part of a network?"
"Part of my very illegal computer," Rebecca corrected. "You don't know enough about tech."
She was probably…right, he realised; she had more memory and experience than he, but she did not understand the true scope of his powers.
"I created my own vehicle using my powers," he said. "Show me these files and I will see what I can construct."
"Very well." Rebecca laid down her cup with a clink and stood to show him to the files.
It was a network device, he thought as he surreptitiously brushed a tentacle over one of its ports, wires and circuits forming one complicated whole, something with memory files to spare and a link to his unknown past.
Rebecca pushed a button and stood back to wait as the circuits configured themselves. He added some of his own power to the mix so that it would function more quickly, working himself into a gradual understanding of the electrically powered device.
"Look away," Rebecca commanded abruptly; he did so as she typed a combination of letters on the keypad. "Okay. It's here." She called up a basic design on screen; he absorbed it both with his eyes and his body. "Scroll down for further specs by pressing this button. I'm going back to Elektra."
It was simple to download the files into his memoryspace, though it was less simple to understand them. He still did not understand precisely what the Sixth Dimension was; how was he meant to understand the portal that would transport him there?
He decided to search the computer for further information, running through the rest of Rebecca's files; it took him several minutes to happen upon a folder entitled 'game'.
Game. A mortal game. Am I reduced to this?
Thousands of visual images in there, simplified lines and bright colours typical of creatures such as himself, character biographies—Ace Lightning, all-American hero, Random Virus, unpredictable and dangerous—it truly was a game, he knew at last, a fantastically created world for mortals' amusement. It offended him.
I am not merely a game, he told himself, not from here but some other origin…
Some other created origin, the Master Programmer or some other interfering mortal…
I know this, he thought. I remember none of what was programmed into me, released upon the world as a blank slate to experience it anew, fighting for myself.
If I ever find the Master Programmer I will destroy him, he vowed. He wished to use us as creatures and not creations.
His understanding of the nature of the Sixth Dimension was now complete, and with it, many portions of the Portal's logic. His goal remained the Sixth Dimension, the original world; he refused to hide from the fact of the unreality, and was resolved to find the complete truth about himself. Then I will break whatever has programmed me.
He was interrupted by a loud crash and a faint cry from the other room, and broke his concentration from the computer to listen.
"Bullets can hurt Elektra. Would this hurt you?"
The human. Rebecca. He could recognise her voice, but the words were wrong from her. Somehow she had sneaked up on him, and was pressing something cold to the back of his head.
"I'm betting you couldn't heal from a shot like this."
"Why are you doing this?" he asked. Was it something he had done to her machine?
He heard Elektra cry out again, and knew it was more serious than that.
"Elektra trusted you," he said. "What did the other humans promise?"
"I didn't have a choice. I wanted Elektra to succeed, I really did. But they have my youngest child imprisoned." She pressed the gun more firmly against his skull. "Let's stop talking. Give up now and you can live to try again."
"You're correct. There isn't a choice."
He flung himself forward, smashing her machine, ignoring the shot that singed the top of his head. One of his tentacles rose up from the ground to leech onto her wrist; she screamed, firing shots in every direction.
They weren't bullets, he noticed. They were blue.
"I will try again," he told her as he secured his hold on her with another tentacle. "Using your energy."
Her body convulsed as he activated the drain ruthlessly, not caring about giving her pain. She had betrayed him, and he had no reason to grant mercy.
She was almost a corpse, little more than a drained shell, when he released her in disgust. There was a second rescue to complete.
A blue cage was in the room, an energy-net trapping Elektra behind it; she was firing at it from her wrists, but it only absorbed the energy from her. The humans surrounding her had weaponry similar to hers, the blue flame that hit him harder than bullets; so this is what they imprisoned her for, he understood as he started the attack.
The energy-net imprisoning Elektra had an obvious source point, protected by strands dancing over it; he reached that with a tentacle, ignoring the pain of both it and the blasts he received.
He lashed out with a thick arm, knocking a human hard into the opposite wall. A red stain ran down it as he went for two others with a tentacle, throwing them together and taking their energy from them.
There was a twist to undoing the control of Elektra's cage; he had to think, to draw the right amount of energy from it to stop it from activating, to ignore the pain of it.
She flopped onto the floor with a cry, exhausted by her efforts. He paid her no heed as he fought.
He was better than these mortals. He drained them, taking their energy to continue fighting them, throwing them to the ground when he was done with them and paying no heed to their cries. They had stolen energy from him, and he returned the favour willingly.
He stopped when nobody was moving any more, bar Elektra, levering herself slowly from the ground.
"Are they…?" she asked, staring around herself at the humans.
"Mostly, not dead." He could have destroyed them all, lost himself in that fury of bloodlust, but he had not; perhaps the self-control was a defiance of whatever had been programmed into him.
"Rebecca?" She peeled herself off the ground and stared around with a worried look.
"Not dead. Will wish she was when she wakes up. Let's get out of here." He pulled her along with him, grabbing what energy he could from the house before starting up the vehicle. He didn't have enough power to maintain it for long, he realised dazedly; the battle and the new human weapons had taken a lot from him despite what he had drained.
"What happened?" she asked him. "Everything's all fuzzy for me."
The drink she had. "It'll pass. Rebecca betrayed you. We will find the nearest power station and head for the Sixth Dimension."
Her face seemed to light up. "You know what to do?"
"Yes." He did not mention his uncertainties. "We just need enough power."
"I don't know where it is," she said unhappily. "And it'll be protected…"
"I know." He had traced Rebecca's line back to its source. As to the mortal protections, they would get past them easily enough. "I wish I understood why you still wish to save such creatures."
"They're not all bad. They're frightened, because of what the minions did to them. And some people aren't nice, but neither are we. I'm not perfect, you're not perfect, nobody is. Haven't you met any good mortals?"
The sermonising irritated him. "A few," he told her. "Not a majority."
"They're not evil," she said, "some of them are kind, even when I was imprisoned there were a few guards who'd bring me books and things, I was brought up by humans…"
"Who subsequently betrayed you."
"No!" She punched him on the arm, hard. "It's not like that. Bad things happened while I was in prison. Rebecca made sure we powered up and you knew the plans, didn't she?"
He considered it. "Perhaps, but more likely she was attempting to win our confidence."
Elektra sighed heavily, shifting in her seat. "She's not evil. Hardly any humans are."
A melodramatic word, evil. No doubt there was complexity involved; he himself had killed, and many mortals were also of the sort who helped some and harmed others.
"Perhaps not. But they may still be our foes." He increased the speed of the vehicle, to seek their goal rather than waste time in this debate.
A heavy fence topped by barbed wire surrounded and protected the power plant; the mortals wished to protect their place, no doubt from intruders in battles gone by. It would not stop him.
"What's the plan?" Elektra asked, staring up at the boundary.
"The direct approach." It was late in the night now, and no doubt more human forces would be on their trail; they would have to move quickly. "First I bring down an external cable to power up, then we get going." He started moving as soon as he spoke, reaching up with a tentacle to rip down a wire stretching above them. Elektra grasped it as he also drained it, and then they began.
A night watchman was the first to run up to them, a blinding light in his hand; Elektra fired and the light went out, but the watchman had cried for help and a loud alarm was ringing around them.
The walls were heavy and barbed-topped; Kilobyte slammed his body into the padlocked gate to force it to collapse. It cost him some effort, and around him too-bright lights had started to flash an alarmed red. A second attempt, and they were in as the humans started to fire their first shots.
The door was before him; he ignored the bullets as Elektra fired low-intensity pulses at their sources. It was metal, sealed with a heavy lock; he ripped away the lock to shove open the door, and they continued into the sanctum.
It was thankfully dark inside, and would remain so; he reached up a tentacle to access the light fitting, projecting his drain to douse the rest of the lights available. Elektra stared around, lost in the blackness, but he reached out to lead her along.
"Quiet," he told her. "I can see in the dark; they can't."
She opened her mouth to reply, but thought better of it and simply nodded.
The main power was in the centre of the structure; a design that suited needs for drama. It would still be easy enough for them to conquer.
The mortals were catching up, coming through the doors and firing in his direction while Elektra kept up her own random shots, neither side's aim particularly good in the night. He lashed out behind to knock some of them down, taking their energy as he did so; he would need all he could get to finish the mission.
Another night watchman reared up in front of them, another blinding light in his hand. He could not help crying out, attempting to shield himself from the blaze; a sign of weakness, he knew, that no doubt the humans would notice.
"Come on," he heard Elektra say, she leading him on further in the light. "Break down the door in front of you."
He smashed through it with a fist, using more force than necessary; they could not afford to be slowed.
The corridors were grey and ugly, utilitarian rather than attractive, where mortals manufactured the energy needed to maintain their broken world. They ran towards the central part of the structure, guided only by his impression of where the main power source came from; twice they had to backtrack their steps, making their way through the remaining human pursuers—they would have reinforcements soon no doubt, he thought, and took what energy he could.
"We've made it," Elektra said breathlessly as they found themselves on a long ramp above a large system of machinery. The interlocking systems generated steaming energy as they carried on their endless movement, all directed towards the single generator.
"You hold the humans off. I'll go down," he told her. He'd need to do this, create the portal himself. "If you lose too much power yell out."
"I'll make it. I'm using as little power as I can." Her face was grimly set as she fired her blasts, mostly just above the heads of the humans.
He launched himself to jump from machine to machine, navigating his path with care; he was not designed for such activity as this, and needed to concentrate all he could on getting past this obstacle course.
Elektra screamed when he was two-thirds of the way across. The human backup had arrived, with their energy-weapons stolen from her powers, and she hid herself behind protruding machinery to continue fighting, wounded though not yet beaten. The shots hit him too, but he was nearly to the central generator, and kept running.
"Hurry!" he heard Elektra yell, and increased his speed; move faster, cog of one to cradle of next, dodge incoming fire, keep going at all costs…
A blast hit him in the shoulder, a bit harder than the last few; he nearly fell below the generators, and only just managed to keep his balance. He was nearly there if more blasts didn't put him off, really just a few steps if he didn't have to navigate over and past all these machines. His next step was weak and uncertain, the machine he stood on all but throwing him underneath its sharp gears. He couldn't make it like this, not with the distractions and the need to balance, not this plan after all…
"Jessica!" he heard Elektra sing out. There was the sound of more shots, more human cries, and then what felt like a brief respite from blasting, just long enough for him to cross the remaining distance from his perch to the central generator.
He thrust a tentacle into the centre of the glowing nexus of power, and as he felt it all flow through him saw a new human standing beside Elektra, firing alongside her at their foes.
The power filled him and destroyed the factory at the same time, grinding every machine to a halt and throwing the building into complete darkness aside from his figure crackling with energy. The battle was over, and they had won; he felt more powerful than ever after this drain, able to take over the world if he felt like it…
…(he didn't feel like it. Not really. He had to make the portal, not start killing lots of mortals.)…
…And he scanned his memory files for the exact design of Rebecca's portal, feeling for that place called the Sixth Dimension that he had so few memories concerning.
Elektra was running towards him through the now-dormant machinery, ready for what she had dreamed of for so long. "Rebecca got word out to Jessica. I told you she wasn't evil!" she called to him in glee as she ran.
It was a difficult, complex thing, and he barely listened to Elektra's words to him as he struggled to rationalise the prospect to his own satisfaction before he could force it to appear.
My home, people like us, the dark side of the network, fused Earth…
He concentrated on forcing it through, envisioning the connections and then making them come alive by the human power. It was bright blue, a spinning disc suspended in mid-air, the most wonderful thing he could remember creating, the way home.
The humans had given up shooting and were staring in shock instead; an older long-haired woman threw a salute to them both.
"Leave while you still can!" she yelled.
Elektra resolutely stepped up to the portal and placed a hand against it, prepared to leave the mortal world and travel into the next.
Nothing happened.
She looked up at him, bewildered. "Why isn't it working?"
He was attempting to discover the answer to the question himself; a connection problem, perhaps, some error or several in Rebecca's diagram…
"Try to remember the way back," Elektra advised him. "We never got the design right, but I believe you can." She stood tall, faithfully ready for departure.
He kept concentrating, harnessing the human power running through his body, tracing the connection lines and gateways and transfers. It needed to be catalytic, changing worlds, restoring them to where their people had originated. Could it have one too many connections? Not the right sort of connection? He had remembered but never learned this, and he only hoped he had sufficient energy resources to finish the task.
The long-haired human ran towards them, looking back every so often to check on the status of the other humans' pursuit. "What's happening?" she called out to Elektra, taking a stance comfortably far away from both of them.
"He's working on it, but he don't quite know how to do it," Elektra replied, softly.
"Oh." She stared at it, and walked to an angle where she could see behind it. "Who is…never mind. Have you tried rerouting the primary connection through human analogy?" she asked him.
"Yes."
"Calibrating spin time to match travel velocity and the n minus one bitsum?"
He checked it. "Yes."
"Compensated for the CGI/real world degeneration post-fusion?"
So that was what the brown connection was for. He had been thinking of it as if the worlds had never been fused—his memory, perhaps, of times before—and the deductions clicked together in his mind like interlocking gears.
There were only two left as Sixth Dimension representatives on this world; he could feel the connection between the worlds now, and understand its fading. The calculations had been correct, he realised—for the time in which they had been made.
He made that adjustment, and felt the warm air of the Sixth Dimension blow on his face.
"It's done," he said.
"Go now," the human who had helped them said to Elektra. "Do well."
"I'll miss you," she replied, and stepped into the other world.
"The connection…must stay open, if she wants to change both worlds," he told the human. The portal wrapped itself around him, blue strips pulling him into a centre as though he was a charge running along a human power line.
He was home.
--