The security was mostly human, as interlopers had hacked the heads in the past. They were some elite unit of the Absolute’s Toy Soldiers and there were a lot of them. Not to mention S-sats, though Zabilla could not understand why they would be any more secure than the heads. Perhaps they were on some kind of isolated control ’face. They were in the large open space where the G-car had first landed, a hangar made of poured reinforced concrete. The reinforcement in the concrete was a nano-process that bonded the individual molecules more tightly together. They were also protected or watched by the bunker’s automated weapon systems: turret-mounted strobe guns, smart munitions batteries, infrasonics, attack nano-swarms and virals. Zabilla didn’t see any Elite but assumed they could be there quickly if anything went wrong. It felt like overkill, but Zabilla was aware, intellectually anyway, that it was not.
She had watched the craft come down on the elevator platform. It was an old Rapier-class, three-person, long-range strike craft. The fighter/bomber was a decommissioned antique from the Art Wars that had been in the collection of one of the more successful players, though the truly great players frowned upon interests outside the Game. Zabilla thought the three nacelle-mounted Real Space engines made the craft look a little like the tridents she’d seen used by gladiators in the murder arcades. The Rapier fighter/bomber was one of the smallest classes of craft that had a bridge drive.
The cocoon was brought in on small AG motors and guided over towards the craft. Zabilla, with Dracup’s aid, had been using the full extent of her S-tech knowledge to repurpose and reprogram some of the Absolute’s S-tech collection. She also had a length of tendril-like biotech cable, the best money could buy, grown in a ’sect Hive habitat, to act as a connection. The avatar, who was there watching, did not want the cocoon going inside or even getting too close to the ship.
In theory, it was as simple as attaching the nav comp to the cabling, to the S-tech interface and then to the cocoon. That was the easy bit. Then they had to somehow make the nav comp give them diagnostic information on the cocoon. By this point Zabilla wasn’t even sure where this ridiculous plan had come from. She must have been desperate when she thought of it, though she was struggling to remember the genesis of the idea. It was now apparent that it was pointless. It wouldn’t work. She’d been clutching at straws.
The avatar turned to look at her.
‘Self-doubt is not an attractive quality, let alone in a player of your calibre.’
‘I… I’m… sorry,’ she said. Images were coming to the fore in her mind. Not images, memories that had been hidden from her. They had worn some sort of camo suits. The grotesques had seemingly come from nowhere. At first she had thought they were morlock-rights activists or even losers. She saw the needle and knew she was about to be wiped.
‘This is tremendous waste of resources, not to mention a security risk,’ the avatar continued.
‘There’s something wrong…’ Zabilla started.
Dracup turned to look at her. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Too soon.’
The Absolute actually shifted in its nutrient bath. More then fifty feet long and around ten feet thick, the Absolute resembled something between a slug made of human flesh and a giant phallus. What passed for its mind and its nerve endings were laced throughout the organism’s entire form. Once human, it had redesigned itself to take signals from hundreds of thousands of experiential broadcasts at any one time – the ultimate receptor of sensation. A creature designed specifically as a sensualist. It now realised that something was wrong. Something was terribly, terribly wrong.
It could feel its avatar neunonically give instructions to the AG motors suspending the cocoon to return it to the secure lab, to the automated defences to open fire and to the S-sats to do the same. All of them were ignored.
The Absolute itself tried to take control of Zabilla and Dracup if for no other reason than to find out what was happening. Even if they had been meat-hacked it would make an example of them. Instead it found that the experiential link was simply missing.
The Absolute squirmed and splashed around in its tank. This was exciting but it couldn’t be allowed to lose. It wasn’t what the Game was about. It was about pleasuring itself. The Absolute used the experiential link to take control of ten thousand of the best electronic security and warfare specialists on Game and in orbit. It opened the most secure computer system on the planet to all of them and had them move in unison to retake control of the bunker’s automated systems.
All the while it was playing back one of Dracup’s hidden memories before the experiential link had been severed. It saw Dracup programming diagnostic routines into the lab’s equipment. Even deep in his subconscious Dracup hadn’t been aware of writing the code after he had examined the bunker’s electronic security, also subconsciously. The sophisticated security hack had been laced throughout the new diagnostic routines that Dracup had been developing consciously.
It was a shame they hadn’t been players, the Absolute thought. They played well. Just as long as they didn’t win. It had to win. That was the only rule of the Game.
Dracup took control of the automated weapon systems and the S-sats. The avatar became a prism of light as every strobe gun targeted it. The rotating barrels of the fast-cycling lasers filled the air with lines of red and threatened to overwhelm the avatar’s energy dissipation grid. Then every AG-driven smart munition hit the avatar. The powerful automaton ceased to exist and was replaced with a sizeable crater.
The force of the explosion knocked Dracup and Zabilla to the ground. It only staggered the nearby armoured and augmented Toy Soldiers.
The Absolute felt the excitement rising. This was the most alive it had felt in centuries. There was a genuine threat here to something it wanted, but it was going to win. It took control of every Toy Soldier in the bunker complex. All of them were now rushing towards the hangar area with the purpose of killing Dracup and Zabilla and securing the cocoon.
As one, the remaining Toy Soldiers turned to look at the prone forms of Zabilla and Dracup. The strobe guns and anti-personnel weapons from the S-sats were cutting swathes through them, but all the smart munitions had been used on the avatar. They would be vaccinated against the virals, their own nano-screens would be programmed to fend off the nano-swarms, and the infrasonic would do him and Zabilla more harm than good, Dracup thought.
It was sickening. What remained of Zabilla was only just starting to realise what she’d done, even as her personality started to recede, screaming in this new and alien mind. The Zabilla fragment remembered releasing the program into the system bit by bit. The intelligent program had been developed by the Living Cities from code sold to them by Pythia by way of the Consortium’s intelligence agencies. The idea was that it was nearly undetectable. Released in discrete parts, it then formed briefly to find and record information. It had been partially detected and part of it destroyed, but not before it had managed to record the genetic files of every person serving in the bunker. Zabilla had retrieved the information in a set of results from one of her apparently failed diagnostics. She had put it together in her deep subconscious. The information had then gone to the implanted targeted viral factory that ran through her small intestine.
Dracup grabbed one of the Toy Soldiers, its ornate armour giving him lot of purchase. He rammed the bone knife into the top of the soldier’s neck just below his jaw line. Neurotoxins flooded the soldier’s system. They probably wouldn’t be enough to kill an augmented soldier, but they wouldn’t help. He backed away, still holding on to the knife and the soldier, using him as a shield as the others all started firing at once. Dracup threw himself back over the cocoon as the Soldier he’d been using as a shield exploded into chunks of steaming superheated meat.