Chapter 800: VPN ERROR

Chapter 800: VPN ERROR

It never fails.

Never.

Just when everything is going well, the Universe starts laughing.

And everything goes to Hell. - Reflections on a Malevolent Universe, Smokey Cone Press, 3981 PG

The cliffs were made of streaming, sparkling code that flowed by beneath the black ICE of the surface. Images appeared and disappeared, all of them of humanity. From Terran Descent Humanity of the Ninth Millennium Post Glassing to images of humanity circa Age of Paranoia. Even black and white footage of the Resource Wars and the Global Conflicts appeared and sunk back into the code.

The sky was streaked with blue, green, violet, black, and crimson, all chromakey adjusted until it was almost black. CMYK clouds drifted across the sky with RGB lightning flickering through them. The stars, if the sky held any, were completely obscured by the clouds, which, at times, took fearsome and terrible shapes.

The wind tasted of old blood, hot dust, and spoiled ozone.

The ground was littered with debris, boulders featuring one lightning instant of a mortal life, fragments of a sensory input scattered about like pumice after a volcanic eruption. Geysers spewed up raw data to fall to the ground in discrete packets that skittered across the landscape, red hot and smoking.

The Man, the Frog, and the Fox stood at the edge of the blasted plain, where the faint shape of twisted and tortured trees could be seen in the distance. Terrible shapes swooped through the clouds, dragons of antiviral code, garbage collecting daemons, and flying creatures made entirely of black ICE.

Behind them was a narrow cleft in the towering cliffs, which had the moss of discarded jpg fragments and sound file coding hanging from the sharp edges of the damaged coding that the trio had navigated to reach the plain.

Tortured figures, trapped in smokey amber, screamed silently as they reached for the hidden sky. The plain was littered with them, male, female, both, neither. Smoke covered the ground, preventing it from being seen easily and patches of fog drifted about.

"Where are we?" the Fox whispered.

"A terrible place," the Man guessed.

The Frog looked around, holding tight to his spear, his glowing globular eyes intent.

"A place of torment," the Frog said.

Fog near them swirled and for a moment a man reached out plaintively.

My wife, my children, he wailed in a voice more felt than heard.

Images of a smiling woman and laughing children appeared around him, the color quickly fading, then the images going black and suddenly charring and burning away.

Save them, please, for their sake, the man wailed as he sunk back into the fog.

"This is a haunted place," the Man said softly.

The Fox rummaged in his satchel pouch, drawing out a small crystal. It glimmered for a moment then lit with a white light that pushed back the fog and darkness. It began to sing a soft song, notes floating from it, winding around to create a path.

warm podling safe podling sing podling sing the song of hope sing the song of love sing the song of warmth one and one make two two and two make four three and three make six warm podling brave podling smart podling

"We shall follow the path," the Fox said.

The Frog and the Man nodded, reaching out to take each other's hands. The Frog reached out to the Fox, taking his free hand, and together they began to move forward, into the fog, following the trail of song notes that hovered in midair.

-----

Peter sat staring at the console. The rest of the work crew were off shift.

There's just not enough of us, he thought to himself, pushing himself back. The Detainee can only work so quickly. There were thousands of programmers, technicians, and specialists working in Atlantis alone and even then it was barely crewed. We needed five, ten times that number for full operation and now we need even more.Th.ê most uptodate novels are published on n(0)velbj)n(.)co/m

He stood up and stretched, then went through a slow set of stretching motions. Done, he walked over to the vending machine, opening it up, and pulled out a stimbrew. He cracked it open, walking back, and sat back down.

The whole system was barely holding together.

He had to admit, despite the fact that Sam-UL had been working from a hackers point of view, patching systems back together from old code and backups, the kid hadn't done too bad.

It's a shame you went mad, he thought.

A window opened up, flashing red and he checked it over.

A massive power draw from Alpha Layer fusion generators to an unknown system. He crosschecked, found no references in the system, and frowned. He got up, moving over to a binder, and opened it. He crosschecked the numbers, doublechecked, then moved over and slapped a button.

The holo-emitter spun up and a matronly woman appeared with a smoke between her teeth. She was naked, clad only in brimstone smoke and streaks of blood.

"What?" the Detainee asked.

Peter moved over and tapped the book. "This is pulling a mass power draw. What do you know about it?"

The Detainee moved up and looked down, suddenly clad in a dark gray skirt and blouse with a severe, almost military cut. She frowned.

"No. Never heard of it," she stated. "I mean, I theorized it. Built one and tested it but it was taken offline," she said. She shrugged. "The power draw almost caused a fission reactor meltdown."

Peter shook his head. "You have to know. It's your system."

The Detainee closed her eyes and Peter could see her eyes flicking back and forth. "It's not attached to any of the systems she controlled. I don't have control over any of them, I'm still locked out, but she didn't leave behind any memories of such a thing," she said, opening her eyes. "Whatever it is, it's all on you people."

Peter looked back down at the book.

PRIMARY E.L.E. MASSIVE TRANSMITTER ARRAY - MATTER TRANSMISSION SYSTEM RAINBOW BRIDGE DELTA ECHO ONE SEVEN THREE

"You sure?" Peter asked.

The Detainee exhaled smoke slowly from between her teeth.

"Trust me," she smiled. "I've got an honest streak as wide as the distance from Philadelphia to Norfolk."

"All right. I'll try to figure it out," Peter said, moving away.

The Detainee just exhaled smoke.

The last thing to disappear were her gunmetal gray eyes and her smile.

-----

Dreams of Something More sat, looking over the latest communiques from the Confederate Diplomatic Corps, which she was reading off of a dataslate designed to look like a scroll.

Her orders were the same. Ensure the peaceful transfer of power between the pre-War Lanaktallan government and the reforming governments shaking down in council space.

There was also the question of what the punishment for killing billions of Terrans in a non-belligerent star nation would be decided upon. Nobody was willing to forget the bioweapon attacks on peaceful planets, the use of genecracker weapons, or the places that got planet cracked before the formal declaration of war.

Dreams sighed and rolled up the scroll, looking around her.

She was sitting in her Pacific Northwest Temperate Rain Forest glade, Mr. Rings asleep in the bole of a tree, her guards around her.

Four Tukna'rn infantryman.

Peter looked at Legion and frowned. "What?"

"Fuck you."

"Yeah, we need to get outside," Daxin said.

-----

HAT WEARING AUNTIE

How bad?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

PUBVIAN DOMINION

As far as we can tell?

All of them.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

We've got around a dozen and one in a cryo-pod.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TELKAN FORGE WORLDS

We've got a few. Less than ten.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

HAT WEARING AUNTIE

What about the Crusade and the Doki Girlz and clusters like that?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

PUBVIAN DOMINION

The Idiots, as you used to call them, are intact, as far as we can tell.

But everyone else?

POOF!

Gone.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

LANAKTALLAN FREE THOUGHT GRAZING FIELD

It was strange. Armor just fell over. Empty.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

HAT WEARING AUNTIE

What about Admiral Smith's fleet or The Locusts?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

PUBVIAN DOMINION

The Locusts just vanished.

Admiral Smith's fleet, though?

Not a single one left.

Just... Poof!

She'd taken precautions in case of another archeoreversion attack.

One second they were there, the next, they were gone.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

RIGELLIAN SAURIAN COMPACT

We need to get a head count, if possible.

As soon as possible.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

How?

How did it happen?

And why did it happen?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

CONFEDMIL

I don't know.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

And that scares me.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---