Ryan Somma - The Spiraling Web

A cyc froze as a cartoon doll tore through its chest. It trembled in place, electricity rolling all over it, and dropped to a kneel. Falling forward, it burst into a pile of writhing tentacles, which immediately fell lifeless.

The other two cycs pulled apart, loosing their connection. Zai's punk-rock doll-baby avatar swirled into spinning roundhouse kicks that struck the head clean off another. Waving arms reached up, trying to find its missing head, before the body collapsed. Black Sheep ground a dying tentacle underfoot.

She laughed sadistically as the third cyc took a cautious step back. She put one foot forward, increasing the animosity in her countenance. This was purely for her own benefit; the angry frown on her doll's face was meaningless to the cyc. This was savoring the moment, satisfying her bloodlust.

Samantha strained against the constricting web. The cyc was simultaneously hacking her persona, indicating the hive-mind knew of her presence here and equipped this cyc with her mind's schemata. It was now using that to deconstruct her thoughts.

But it had to get past her conscious resistance, break her will. So it squeezed harder, applying more pressure to her mind's physical associations. It was difficult for Samantha, fighting off the sensation of being crushed to death while maintaining guard over her psyche. Her hands slowed in their efforts to build the weapon, as her attentions were drawn to survival.

Samantha felt herself losing the battle.

The cyc fell into two halves, disintegrating. Zai was energized with this catharsis, this power surge replacing the hopelessness. She listened for other cycs, but detected none. Then she tried locating Samantha, calling out to her through an instant messenger. There was no response, but also no error message. Samantha was still on the system.

Zai toggled her command line and instant messaged Samantha again. This time she used the connection not to send a message, but a file, her avatar. A trick she learned playing hide and seek online with Devin.

She stood before a cyc grotesquely distorted with the process of digesting Samantha. Zai hesitated. With her command toggle, she lacked the precision to attack the cyc without risking Samantha. The helpless frustration welled up inside of her again. The baby-doll covered in tribal tattoos glared at the cyc impotently.

Suddenly the cyc shrieked and contorted. A blast of energy exploded from its side, ejecting its prisoner. Zai's system described Samantha standing there, fatigued and holding her own weapon.

The cyc reared back, regrouping for another attack, but Zai interceded, stepping solidly in between to blast the cyc to ribbons with one cartoon mitten-fist. Feeling back in control, she dropped her baby-doll avatar and smiled.

"Zai!" Samantha exclaimed in joy. She rushed up and wrapped her arms around Zai's knees.

"Whoa," Zai laughed and teetered, almost loosing her balance. "Careful, you're gonna knock me down."

"I knew you would come back," Samantha laughed.

Zai was about to return the hug, when a rustling in the bushes made her freeze. Samantha must have heard it too, because she let Zai go, and raised her data-purger warily. Zai's headset described two cycs emerging from the forest, poised to attack.

"Samantha," Zai whispered, "I killed three in the courtyard plus the one here makes four. How many more are there?"

Samantha was no longer scared, "Just these two."

"Good," Zai said, and blew away the one on the right with a thought. Samantha simultaneously vaporized the one on the left.

"Just like a multi-user dungeon," Samantha said.

"Except you die here, you die for real," Zai said, she checked her system clock. There was only thirty-minute's worth of power left on the power supply, and Alice still remained to contend with.

Devin floated in a world of white, a world of unnerving disorientation. He struggled with this discombobulation for a brief time, but calmed himself. He knew what this was, existence without a body. It was not to be feared. He was like Flatline now, digi-mortal.

Where he was on the Web, he could not know, but it was purposefully devoid of details. His bodiless perception provided a 360-degree view of the surrounding great white nothing. He was in a holding cell, but being held for what?

The answer came moments later as an unmistakable tendril sprouted out from the white, branching out in all directions from a single point, sporting eyes like morbid fruits. Devin intuitively knew its purpose was to absorb him into the cyc hive-mind. The room's lack of detail was meant too keep him weak and confused. Without stimulus, there was no way of knowing if he was successfully interacting with the environment. The cyc-harvester was the key; providing him a spatial reference.

Now a floating network of veins, the cyc launched at him. He dodged out of its reach instinctively. At its center a bulging sack pulsed with life, filled with unidentifiable moving objects, stretching and contorting the thick obsidian skin.

A branch lashed out at him and the cyc shrieked scrambled chaos as the appendage vanished into glowing cinders. Devin had imagined a powerful data-corruptor destroying the limb. The code compiled instantaneously in his mind and the lightning bolt originated from inside of him.

The cyc's alert mode triggered and the ball of veins and eyes bristled thorns. The sack became solid metal. Devin saw human faces frozen in contorted expressions pressing through.

A micro-maelstrom of spinning blades, fireballs, and miniature tornados assaulted him, Devin evaded these and lunged his consciousness into close quarters with it. He erased all means of attack from it simultaneously. It howled inhumanely, and then retreated, whirling around like a dervish, folding into itself like water flowing down a drain.

The cyc component froze, caught in Devin's will. He pulled it out of its connection to the hive-mind, leaving a hole floating in the air. Through this existed an entire world made of writhing cyc code. A tidal wave of eyes opened to look at him.

A sequence of thought commands from Devin sealed the hole and scrambled the room's encryption. The environment shook with the hive-mind's assault, but the security held. Devin had bought a few moments.

He examined the component in his possession. It was minimalist in design, streamlined to collect the consciousnesses whose bodies were amputated during the cyc invasion. The human mind was helpless without a body, so the harvester component lacked advanced defensive programming..

The room shook again as the hive-mind hacked the system's encryption. Devin slashed open the sack at the cyc's center. The minds held there swarmed around him as balls of light, filling the room with confused exclamations.

One of the minds was not like the others. It floated in front of Devin, the translucent outline of a human body took form, with a glowing model brain visible in the head. Veins traced around this, the jugular leading through the neck down into the chest, where a beating heart was briefly perceptible before a rib cage closed around it. A skull hid the brain and muscles obscured the skull. Oedipus tissue was covered with brown skin and hair. A short, round Arab male floated naked in the air before Devin, beaming a smile of recognition.

"Omni," he said in pleasant astonishment.

"Traveler?" Devin asked, unsure how he recognized this as his friend from the Legion of Discord. "How are you?"

"Dead apparently," Traveler laughed. "As are you." He gestured to the cyc-component hanging limply in Devin's grasp, "I can't believe it. How did you defeat that harvester? None of us could stand against it."

"I'm uncertain," Devin looked at his hand, which wasn't there before and realized he was floating naked in the air as well. "I have this whole array of data in my mind for how these cyc components work. As if it were always there, but my brain's architecture was unable to access it."