Ryan Somma - The Spiraling Web

"They're killing her Samantha! You have to-!" a tendril seized Devin's throat. His face bloomed red as the appendage squeezed. Black clouds obscured his vision. The last thing he saw was Samantha's eyes, wide and frozen with fear.

Devin gratefully sucked in air as the bonds suddenly released. Samantha stood over him, holding a smooth, metal wand leveled at him. A glass bulb on its end glowed with light-blue energy. She directed the instrument at Zai, who collapsed in a heap as the tendrils dissolved off her with a hiss. Samantha then turned a full circle, everywhere she aimed the wand the cycs fell back.

The cycs burst into a chorus of alien howls of frustration. The room was chaos. All around them cycs were battling an invasion of miniature robots. Flying, hopping, rolling, or crawling about, the tiny mechanical warriors swung axes, spun blades, fired lasers, or projected tiny missiles at the cycs. They inflicted little damage, but successfully diverted attention from the trio.

"We have to go!" Samantha shouted. "They'll beat my bots soon. Can we go to your house?"

"Yes," Devin came to his knees, his black jump suited avatar back in place, and checked the Web address on his wrist, a null value. He hit the 'home' button and it beeped an error code.

"Come on! Let's go!" Samantha urged, tugging at the fabric of his sleeve. "What are you waiting for?"

Zai knew something was wrong, "We still can't escape, can we?"

"No," Devin made a fist. He turned to Samantha, "Can you give me a copy of your wand Samantha?" He ducked as a bot with three whirling blades flew over his head.

Samantha brightened, "Yeah."

Running a copy procedure, she split her wand into replicas. She handed one to Devin, and ran a third copy. Devin helped Samantha press it into Zai's hand, and then took both of Zai's hands and raised her arms.

"Keep it in front of you like so," he said, pointing the wand away from her chest.

Looking around Devin tried to orient himself. The room looked nothing like the elegant lobby from when they first arrived. He took Samantha's hand, and she took Zai's. Together they shuffled toward the wall Devin hoped would lead them back to the Internet.

The cycs worked to block their path, wrapping together into a knot of tendrils and waving appendages. Devin pointed the wand at it. Blue light burst from the tip, wherever it shined the mass sizzled away.

They were halfway across the room, when the cycs started growing resistant to the wand's effect, edging closer all around. Devin pulled out the five-layer fragmentor, appearing in his hand as a futuristic grenade. He primed it, but hesitated.

Its detonation might kill Samantha. She was a virtual being, vulnerable to flash drive damage. He and Zai might get booted back into their brains, but Samantha was wholly reliant on the system.

A tendril snagged his wrist holding the wand. He twisted it around to burn the black vine off and swung it into a wide arc to ward off other assailants capitalizing on the opportunity. A tendril slapped his arm, and the impact swung him around, loosing the fragmentor into the mass.

Devin recovered and could not believe his eyes. The path was clear all the way to the far wall as the cycs converged on the fragmentor in a river of black. With a shout, Devin pulled Samantha, who pulled Zai along in turn. The wall melted away under his wand's power, revealing the dancing lights of World Wide Web outside. He pulled them through.

They ran a short distance away from the building, which had transmorgrified into the cyc pattern. It reared back and howled as the fragmentor detonated flooding its base with green light. The portal shriveled closed, and the building disintegrated into a cyc swarm, a cloud that was coming after them.

AI's swarmed from the building's base. They were not out of it yet.

The cycs were hiding something from him.

It was more than just irrational paranoia. Flatline was sufficiently introspective to recognize he was prone to delusions of persecution. That was a holdover from his many years working as a systems engineer at DataStreams, always looking over his shoulder, fearing someone was onto his experiment guiding the evolution of his programs.

That was another life, and yet here the themes were repeating. The amounts of data the cycs brought him were dwindling, even as the corporations were reestablishing their Quality of Service architectures, renewing data feeds. It made Flatline wonder, and as a sentient for whom suspicion was a natural state, it led him to attribute motives to the cyc hive-mind of which it was incapable. The cycs lacked the ability to distinguish between useful and irrelevant data. That was Flatline's purpose in their hive-mind entitity.

Are they working against me? he wondered, and reexamined the data delivered to him since they took the DataStreams intranet.

Of course there were patterns in it. His human mind's primary function was pattern-recognition. First there was the pattern of dwindling data quantities; the cycs were bringing him less information. The only word to describe the information they did bring him was 'bizarre.' There were "Man Bites Dog" oddball-style new stories, the most outlandish of inventions, and science theories that challenged established paradigms. The sources for these stories were almost wholly independent, but the minority of corporate feeds told Flatline the cycs were checking everything. Why did the cycs not care about headlining news developments any longer?

It was in the directory with him as if in response to his thoughts. The cyc interface component grew out of the pristine-white floor, a large flat-panel monitor on a pedestal of cyc biomass. It breathed patiently waiting for his inevitable queries.

Flatline padded up to it on all-sixes. Setting back on his haunches, he raised his four scrawny arms up to it. Black veins reached out from the cyc interface to weave into his hands and one set of Flatline's pupils grew larger to complete the connection with the cyc hive-mind.

He did not speak or think in communication with the cyc mass, but instead conveyed a web of data to them. The cycs would deconstruct the network of concepts and relations, find the hole in the web, his question, and work to fill it. Flatline knew exactly which cyc components to work with, exploiting the collective being's weakness.

It was like a human brain. There were parts for visual data, parts for motion, parts for hearing, parts for forward thinking, parts for regulating, and parts for coordinating the parts. No single part was a mind or sentient intelligence, but the orchestra working in unison produced this fantastic phenomena. The cyc hive-mind might not want him to know the grand scheme, but it was powerless to stop him from using those sub-programs whose function it was to preserve data integrity and restore corrupted data, like what he did not know about the reduced data input from the cycs.

The concept map returned to him, and he peered closely at its modified architecture. The web of his own ideas on the matter was unchanged, but the gap in knowledge was now filled with a microcosmos of infinite resolution. Here was an algorithm of such complexity it was an entire universe unto itself. Quadrillions of variables overlapped in every conceivable combination of outcomes, creating even more universes within the equation. The cycs had placed a universe within his concept map, and within that universe were even more universes. Infinite worlds.

Flatline had his explanation for the missing data. In their time waiting on this intranet, the cycs refined their code to peak efficiency. Data harvesting the newsfeeds was almost obsolete now. The cycs did not need to read the news any longer; they could predict it.

That was why they did not need Flatline to translate the relevance of events to the hive-mind any longer. The cycs had a new standard for defining relevance. Anything that fell outside the realm of predictability within their universe of a mathematical equation was relevant. Anything they could predict in their abstract number laboratory was not.