Ryan Somma - The Spiraling Web

Building by building, he removed any possible hiding place from the Intranet. The process would take years, but so long as Flatline could not escape the I-Grid, there was little for Devin to worry about. He was only stalling for time after all.

Other sections of the city began to vanish, leaving blank space where DataStreams' many small business tax-write-offs took residence, but not under Devin's command. He looked around and found the sky filled with other minds, the LoD, forming a mental net across the grid of ideas below. Many of them were integrating cyc components, opening their minds to the cyc programming and becoming more powerful as a result. Together, they were making short work of DataStreams corporate infrastructure.

PosidonsGrrl caught a glimpse of the hairless malignant that was Flatline. Devin caught her thoughts and analyzed her perspective on his long-time foe. Flatline looked like a mouse scurrying about a maze in the grid below.

Devin was on him instantaneously, and Flatline appeared to detect the pursuit, limbs accelerating into a cartoonish blur along the pavement. Devin reached out to seize his opponent in his attention, but Flatline vanished off the Intranet onto a local system. In a flash, Devin traced Flatline's path, dispatched a chatbot to the person most likely in position to intercept, and leapt into the network connection in pursuit.

There was nonsense, bits of sensation, confused abstract existence. Devin briefly managed to wrestle enough neurons away to see out one eye, but without the inner-ear's functions, there was no way to stabilize what he saw. Devin was the more experienced with the human mind, but Flatline had the advantage of getting here first.

POW! The world came into sharp focus as Flatline abandoned control. Devin quickly figured out why as pain channeled up the body's nose, tears blurring its view of the overcast skies above. He thought he could hear Flatline cackling in the brain's subconscious.

Dana stood over the body and placed a foot on its solar plexus, "That's for my partner you scumbag!" She held her thumb to her temple and said to her pinky, "Thanks for the tip Dev."

No problem , Devin knew he had programmed his chatbot to reply.

Devin was so disoriented, being forced through such a wide range of experiences in so short a time that he was unprepared when Flatline took over the conscious mind again. Devin watched through one eye as Flatline reached out and claimed a squirming spiderbot. He held it eye to eye with their shared face, synchronizing with it, and it downloaded them into its flash drive.

Devin followed as Flatlined leapt from here to a nearby bot, and was confronted with a perspective towering above DataStreams' center building. Two stalk-like legs reared up and smashed into the structure housing the I-Grid. The batteries were too exhausted for lasers, and so the guardian-bot was bashing itself to pieces bringing down the building under Devin's earlier command.

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.