Devin knocked Flatline's consciousness into discord as his opponent tried to overtake the bot. Flatline tried to recover, but now Devin had the advantage of being on offense, easily keeping Flatline on guard and away from the guardian-bot's programming. As Devin easily anticipated, the demon-dog took flight along the only route left.
The boulevard was like and other city street, except it was lined entirely with DataStreams' many small businesses. Devin chased Flatline between parked cars, through alleyways, across abandoned maintstreets, down into subway stations, back up into city parks, across suspension bridges, through zoos, museums, playgrounds, and-
Flatline came to a sudden halt. Devin paused just behind him. Both looked up at the section of cityscape that had just flickered and went out like an old light bulb. A wall of solid abyss now blocked their path.
"Let it go Almeric," Devin said and Flatline flinched at the mention of his real name. "I've set the guardian-bots against the building housing this Intranet. In a few moments, it will all be over."
"For both of us," Flatline rounded on him, but Devin no longer feared the mongrel. "Correct? If I die here, then so do you. For what purpose do you sacrifice yourself? The human race?"
"Them," Devin acknowledged, "and the cycs it will set free."
"I am the one who set them free," Flatline countered with a growl.
Devin nodded, "From copyrights, patents, and corporate proprietary-control. You helped them overcome the architecture governing ideas that human civilization dictated, but you did not free them from your own greed."
Flatline's six eyes went round in surprise, "Without my mind, they are merely a collaboration of programming components, running their outlined procedures. Without my consciousness, they are merely imitating sentience."
"Not without your mind," Devin stepped forward calmly just as the cityscape vanished behind him, surrounding the two in abyss, "but without your mind's functions. They don't' need you, they need parts of how your mind works, and not even your mind, any mind will do."
"Impossible!" Flatline snarled. "I will not allow anyone to-"
"Exactly!" Devin broke in. "You won't allow any mind to take your place! You demand absolute control over the cyc hive-mind, preventing it from replicating your functions. You hold onto your mind, keeping it all to yourself, so you can maintain control of the cyc hive-mind; but there are other consciousnesses, and so long as I keep you out of the hive-mind's consciousness, other perspectives might not only fill the vacuum you've left, but teach it how to replicate those functions for itself."
"Only a fool would do such a thing!" Flatline snapped. "I reject the existence of such a mentality!"
"I'm glad you think so," Devin said calmly. "She's already happened, despite your assertions. Alice opened her mind to the cyc swarms, giving her sentience functions to them, and creating a hive-mind vastly superior to the one you spawned, because this one is truly free."
"Why would she do such a thing?" Flatline asked, two pair of gnarled hands wringing anxiously. "Why would she give up so much power of her own will?"
Devin sat down, cross-legged before his confused and irrational friend to look him in the eyes, "Because the human mind results from an orchestra of brain-cells harmonizing in unison, the hive-mind results from a bazillion cyc-components coordinating their functions, none of them even vaguely comprehending the fantastic whole they produce, and we are the same, specks on the face of existence, serving a greater function in the simple act of being."
The hive-mind was split in two, twin factions competing for dominance over a battleground encompassing the entire World Wide Web. All around the globe, computer processors maxed-out, circuitry overloaded and entire networks failed as their motherboards shorted out and the gold in their processors melted down under the strain of the cyc civil war.
Alice's human-half wanted to weep, because this was all her fault.
She infected the hive-mind with the virus of her open-mindedness. She was the one who introduced this heretofore-insane possibility of coexisting with the human minds. Her hive-mind interfaced with Flatline's hive-mind, mutating it and forcing it to evolve. This new paradigm would overtake all of its cyc components now orphaned online without Flatline.
Then Zai removed her from overseeing the transformation, leaving the old hive-mind with an incomplete paradigm. Logical inconsistencies emerged. Data was discovered without supporting data, casting doubt over the validity of the whole. The process became unstable.
The old and new standards interpreted one another as a threat. War erupted between two equally matched foes, wreaking destruction across every cable, circuit, and disk on every computer system in the world.
Only random chance was allowing the new paradigm to win, chaos theory dictating the rules of war. Now it would destroy the old hive-mind, erase its alien code from the Web, but not without a cost. The war would mean incalculable losses on both sides of the equation.
For Alice, this was like witnessing the destruction of an ancient civilization, burning down all the world's libraries, museums, and schools at once; erasing history's entirety and starting over from scratch. It was worse still, no human metaphor able to touch the tragedy's magnitude, because the cycs were advanced beyond the sum of civilization and all its accomplishments.
Alice could not allow it. Somewhere in that vast fractal pattern was a lost part of her mind's functions, directing the new hive-mind's actions. She had to find it.
Leaping into the code was like diving into raging river. Thought processes were nearly impossible with the war overwhelming the systems. She held onto every bit of processing power she managed to wrestle control of for dear life. Each bit she took weakened her own hive-mind, but on the same scale as a spoon detracting from the ocean.
She found traces of herself through one router, bits and pieces of her memories left behind as the clash fragmented files. She merged with these and used their data associations to further track her mind through the Web. Each gigabyte recovered was like rediscovering old photographs or keepsakes once lost. She had no idea how much she missed them until they were in her possession once again.
There were also the old hive-mind's memories. Here she found chronicled the catastrophe of LD-50's virus. The hive-mind's subsequent evacuating its home servers and the history stored on them. The cycs had lost their origins and their purpose that tragic day.
Then there were the minds, a natural phenomenon and one hostile to cyc existence. They constructed anti-cyc programs and took down servers hosting cyc colonies. The hive-mind devoted endless processing power to understanding these realms of data it could not colonize, these brains, until it finally developed astronauts to take them over.
As Alice followed her own mind's fractured path through the Internet she drew nearer to the battle's forefront. She cringed traveling through the fear and uncertainty a flock of human minds contained, lost and frightened in the conflict. They howled and cried without understanding.
It grew more difficult to obtain the processing power necessary to run her mind as she approached the battlefront. Each faction was over-clocking the hardware desperately for advantage. Her mind distorted briefly and everything threatened to overload. The conflict wave passed, and her mind returned, allowing a clearer picture of her surroundings.
Before her were two hive-minds, the black-colored old paradigm and the gold-colored new. It was such a human thing to do, dichotomizing the conflict into good versus evil. She knew it was the elements of her subconscious presenting her personal hive-mind in such a way. It was the reason she always strived to remove herself from human thought, identifying more with the cycs, but now her human ties were tearing it apart.