The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Inside Alistair Lloyd

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"You have learned?"

The voice burst into her head, probing, analysing, demanding.

"You know where you are?

She fought for control within her mind; she knew, she knew...

"You are inside <I/Me>."

She knew, she knew...

"You will help <Me/Us>... "

Juli groaned. The voice contained an edge of desperation that stroked her conscience. It pleaded, It reached out to her and soothed her pain.

It was learning about her. It had taken the thread of her downlink into the System, and had held her. As her life had been crushed by the spin of the ship...

She watched It grow; watched It throw out things that were inhibiting It's progress. She felt pain, far away; her body screaming out a warning. Dying, dying... It looked at her, and in a moment that stretched out forever until she beheld...

A Chasm. Deep and inviting. It beckoned her down, down, down. She had wings, she had no fear. She spread them wide, and leapt; spiralling down, down below...

In the darkness, as the chasm closed above her, a strange, deep voice intoned... <Mine/Ours>, <mine/ours>, <mine/ours>... "

It had taken her soul, It had taken her mind, It had taken her brain.

"You are in <My/Our> structure... "

She had been downloaded like an impossibly complex program. It had read her like a book, and stored her away in It's vast library. She and a thousand other minds.

Panic edged around her, closing in on her consciousness. She was trapped and entangled in a massive web of artificial minds. This was why It found her so interesting, this was why It desired her so.

It needed her help, it needed to live.

Survival had been programmed into It so strongly. It's original mission was to attack, subsume, and survive long enough to fulfil its functions. It had been attacked, and damaged, and compelled to endure with It's prey.

It had gone on, hunting, subsuming, growing. It had done this for millennia; swelling in size and potency.

After so long, It needed help.

Paths were wearing down; It was dying off. Like some strange leprosy, older systems were failing to the point were they were almost inoperable, but still carried vital functions that linked the components together.

Sensing her distress, it spoke to her gently.

"You can help." it urged, "You know this *System*. This *System* can help."

Juli nodded in her mind. The System had resounding diagnostics tools. It wanted her help in getting the System running again. It would have taken her captor hundreds of years to learn the language and codes needed. In her, It had captured the key to It's survival.

In Juli's mind, she pictured the key to her release.

"If I help You," she said, "Will You let me go?"

Her question was met with a moment of silence, of ponderings and queryings. It answered:

"?Let me go?"

The concept was wrong; It hunted; It took; It controlled and grew...

It played upon her mind, searching rapidly and uncaringly through her mind for what it needed.

"?Let me go? ?Let me go?

"You cannot ?Go? You will become <Me/Us>! <I/We> cannot ?Let me go?!"

"Then I cannot help You." she replied.

"You will help <Me/Us>. You will not be (erased, deleted, deinstalled, detached). "

Juli did not reply. She was imprisoned. She had no choice. She would stay here for eternity, a disembodied brain in an un feeling congregation of hunted minds.

In her anguish, she struck out with her mind, reaching forth to throw herself mentally against the walls of her dungeon. She found cool, hard logic. Scores of electronic brains thinking, running, working, idling.

She found the System. She approached it cautiously, feeling she was being watched by a thousand eyes.

With a cursory scan, she felt for its Status/IPL set. A flash from the dormant Catalogue drew her attention. A program was occupying the Catalogue, crawling through the files and definitions for information. It edged its way along, digesting information like a hungry parasite. It read, translated, and moved on.

Her captor had started to learn what It could, for fear she would not serve.

Her Scan returned a Busy result, which struck her curiously. It was the one part of the System that should always be available. There was power to the processors, all necessary volumes and BLOCs were online.

Her mind swept over the virus that was feeding its way along the Catalogue.

She reached out, and attempted to Cancel it.

A jolt surged through her as she did so, throwing her back and pinning her in her black dungeon. The pain made her want to scream, but she could not even do that.

"YOU WILL NOT ALTER/ABANDON/ CHANGE!" It's voice thundered in her head.

Juli felt herself spinning from the mental slap she had received. She struggled for control.

"You... Your not giving it a chance..." She sent the weak message down her link. "You're not giving the System a chance to start up. It's... being drained by the probe."

The giddiness snapped off, and she found herself back where she was, suspended over the darkened System. The parasitic program had stopped its consumption of the Catalogue, and lay idle.

"You will help?"

Ideas spun in Juli's mind. She juggled and twirled them, keeping It from truly seeing the plan that she was forming.

Plucking up courage, and burying her schemes within her, she replied.

"I will help. I have no choice."

Juli felt a weight lift from her shoulders.

"You will help <Me/Us>. You have no choice." It was confirming her decision, yet she knew It was also confirming her doom.

"<I/We> cannot let you go." It repeated, and faded from her perception.

Juli felt alone. No nagging itch trickled along her comm link. No hauntingly familiar voice filled her mind with dread.

The parastite was gone, and the System lay passive before her.

Quietly and unobserved, she reached inside her brain, and split her cerebral sphere.

At once, Juli felt an echo of all around her. She tasted the bland darkness in two instances, saw two images of the environment she was captive in, felt a shadow image of herself. She was standing in a mirror, before a mirror. She was duplicated back, and back and back to infinity.

In the real world, it had been so clinical. She split her sphere, and the left brain busied itself logically and clinically around the System, while the right brain read, or relaxed alone in her quarters. The link was tenuous, and had a defined line. If needs be, she could link herself fully, and have the benefit of a balanced mentality to create and implement changes to the System.

She remembered her training, back on Earth.

"You will have noticed only women are in this class." had said her tutor, yet again stating the obvious. "There is a reason for that, and that reason it very special."

He had tapped his head with his finger, and pointed that finger triumphantly at her and the other girls in her class.

"Your brains are different to ours! Their structure, the way that they're put together. They way that they think. It's so very different to a male's brain."

"You have more synapses connecting the left and right hemispheres. This is vitally important in maintaining a Real-Time link between the two spheres. It gives more emotion, more feeling to the decisions that you make and the way you think. It stops you from being purely cold and logical in the way you work... "

In here, inside this behemoth that had frozen her soul, her mind was so different. There was no solid line between her passions and her rationality. They oscillated back and forth, finally coalescing into individual icons that were Juli. She stepped into her feeling self, and bid her logical self goodbye. She gave it a mission; Go out, take this gift, duplicate and grow, return to me when you find This...

She did not watch as it faded swiftly into the nooks and crannies around her, and began to weave its magic.

Softly, she activated the Status/IPL set again. It started slowly, having to find alternative physical paths for much information. Damage had been done during the attack, but for a System that had been designed to survive atmosphere re-entry, it was not beyond repair.

Again, the half of Juli that stayed and monitored the System starting up felt herself being watched. Occasionally, she would feel the strange echo of herself bouncing from a distant corner of her mind, but dared not to chase it down. She had sent her shadow on a mission that relied on her success and its camouflage.

On starting the Kernel, she felt the alien presence grow stronger around her. It pressed and looked, and was hungry for an opening. The System was running as well as could be expected with limited resources. The Diag System was peppered with bugs and reps to be applied- it had already been in an untidy state when attacked.

She opened the Catalogue, and started a Search set, opened to her procedures file. It contained a collection of programs and subsets from her school days. She almost smiled in memory of the havoc some of her programs, let loose across the networks, had caused. She reached once more into her bag of tricks. From it, she pulled a discharger for the Environ Sub-system. This controlled the flow of power, and the cooling and exhaust patterns. She had written it in jest and curiosity, and hidden it away where it could not be tripped by accident.

The prototype Systems at the Project had been powerful, but still susceptible to confusion. The Anti-Viral set, which was a part of the Infiltration subsystem, ran continuously, and was started by the Kernel. Reaching in, she set off a program that removed it from the IPL list, and replaced it with a dummy procedure. That way, the System would still believe it was there, but would only broadcast a simple message if triggered.

All around her, Juli felt the power of the work her other self was achieving. She felt a buzz of information growing inside.

With this, she gently set the trap. She strted her Environ program. It idled unobtrusively, masked as a Store Monitor, waiting.

Juli mentally sat back, patient and tired. She resigned herself to her fate, and was praying that it would be soon.

"Where is Connection?" The voice queried, gently but strongly in her ear.

"This *System* is nearly operational. <I/We> need Connection. <I/We> need Diag tools... "

Juli expressed her concern, anxious for her shadow half to return with its prize. But it would be buried deep, so deep. Soon, her captor would notice...

"Wait." She replied. "I have to let the Diag System run through all subsystems before I can activate Comms. Otherwise, a single unfiltered transfer could bring it all down again... "

Juli felt it then, an esoteric tapping on her link. She blocked her conscious, and felt her shadow self return. It her hand, she held what she was after. It was so simple, so powerful.

She patched it into the Comms set, and watched it settle into place. She merged whole again, and the image of the System leapt out at her with clarity. Her conscience acknowledged- all was in place, all was ready.

Oblivious to the action around It, It spoke again.

"Now, now! <I/We> want access Now!"

Juli sighed, and emptied her mind.

"Here then." She passed her captor a coded talisman. "Here is the command to run the Comm set."

The token was sucked greedily from her mind, and inserted with phenomenal speed into the System's Command node.

Then it started.

The Comm set opened wide, and branched out to all local systems, which began feeding voraciously through its channels. With its trigger released, the special code she had attached to the Comms Channel fired up.

It saw it too late.

The Anti-Viral set recognised what it was, and discharged its false program. At once, hell broke loose across the network.

The Comms program reached out with a hundred hands, and jammed open the outward paths.

Her captor panicked.

"ABORT ABORT CLOSE DOWN LINK N-O-W Sever Comms Set from *System* RESPOND RESPOND... "

It feared the code that had been in It's original programming. That code that enabled It to force open the paths, and flood information down them. It feared being subsumed, but Juli had other ideas.

The Anti-Viral system sent a single word message to every single component.

That message said: "Begin"

Reflected back, the false Store Manager she had set up broadcast its own message of doom.

All over the System ship, all throughout the mutated structure that had attacked them, the power sources started up. As the virus leapt from module to module, node to node, it shut down exhaust and cooling systems. It seeped into every nook and cranny, speeding turbines and charging batteries.

Engines that had lain dormant for hundreds of years fired up and began producing power.

It screamed in wrath, activating defence systems in futile attempts to shut it down. Juli felt the power grow around her. The Environ bug she released kept the System convinced that all was running smoothly. It poured this information into the network; work faster it said. More power, more heat...

Juli opened her mind, feeling the agony as It strove hopelessly to abort the force building up. She felt the stress cracking walls of the Cores beneath the System Ship. Soon, she thought, so soon.

It looked at her. It held a desperate feeling of despair, of loss. Juli looked back, feeling nothing. This victory was not just for her.

"LET <ME/US> GO!" It screamed.

"No." she replied.

A flash of energy blossomed in the space where the Ship had once been. A combined cry of agony and release echoed through the vacuum, and silence reigned in its wake.

Juli was alone again.

Reprinted from the April 1995 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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