A Splinter in Your Mind - Matrix Quest

[open_sketch]

CW: brief discussions of suicide, mental illness, and institutionalization​

"I know, not what you'd expect, but every one of these has forty-three quintillion different configurations or thereabouts. You can pack a lot of information into them with the right algorithm," she explained. "What were you expecting, a laptop?"

"Yeah," you admitted plainly. "Kinda was."

"Of course. Now, you have been plugged in far too long, and you're giving me a headache. Let me rest," she ordered. You nodded, sat down, and closed your eyes.

You awoke to Chrysalis standing over you, shaking her head. She looked exhausted. The ship was quiet and dark.

"Go sleep," she said, giving you a hand pulling you off the chair. You stood unsteadily, your legs numb and balance difficult. You staggered to your room and collapsed onto the thin mattress, so exhausted that the sheer relief of resting your head was euphoric.

---

They let you sleep a long time, even when you weren't sleeping. You lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling, turning Frag's words over and over in your head. You were already dead.

When you emerged into the broadcast room the next day, conversation ceased as every head turned to look at you. Staring. Page/Thrash were absent.

Fuck 'em. You stormed off. The voices resumed behind you.

You went to the mess and got yourself breakfast, a surprisingly good breakfast for the recent visit to Haven, eating alone and in silence. It hadn't taken you long to figure out what was wrong; they were all thinking what Frag had told you yesterday, and reacting accordingly. You weren't the hero of the hour, you were a lucky idiot, and you were not long for this world. They'd all seen people like you come and go.

They knew now not to get attached, and you found yourself not even resenting them for it.

You were shaken from your grim introspection by a tap on the mess door, like it was a private space. You didn't dignify it with an answer, and a second later it cracked open with the sound of metal scraping on metal. Cache sat beside you, smiling.

"Hey. Sorry about that, we uh-"

"Yeah. I know," you spat. "So, what do you think? Should I blow my brains out now, or let an Agent do it for me next time we go in?"

"W-wait, what?" he asked, shocked. "I was going to-"

"Yeah. Frag already told me," you snapped. He looked hurt, but you didn't know how to deal with that so you pressed on. "I'm a fucking liability, a bodybag waiting to happen, you don't have to rub it in."

He didn't respond, just looking away. He looked pained. You wanted to keep ranting, you'd had a long night to sit in the helpless anger, but something about it told you that you shouldn't push. You went back to your oatmeal.
"So, what's the best way for the Resistance, huh?" you asked haltingly. He looked at you with trepidation. "How should I die?"

"Jesus, Coda," he whispered.

"It's just I want it to be useful is all," you said flippantly. "So, what? I don't know, take a bomb to-"

"No. Alice, shut up," he snapped. "You don't get to talk about my friend like-"

"I DON'T. KNOW YOU," you yelled, dropping the bowl and standing up sharply. "I have no fucking idea who you are! I don't know any of you fucking people or your fucking cause, I don't care about your fucking war! I just want to live, really live, get an actual fucking chance! And you ran."

There were hot tears on your face, unbidden, intruding. You didn't want to be crying right now, you were supposed to be angry. You were vaguely aware that everyone on the ship could probably hear you, but you couldn't care less.

"I had to do it alone. And I'm the fucking suicidal one, I've got the death sentence? You left them to die, and I'm the fucking problem? What is wrong with you fucking cowards?"

His mouth moved, but no sound came out. At least he looked like he might cry.

"Is this what you do? Just run away?" you asked. He nodded. "Why? What the fucks the point if-"

"We lose," he interrupted, his voice breaking. "You don't understand, we always lose."

"You could have helped," you said accusingly.

"No. We couldn't."

"You've kicked my ass, everyone on this crew has."

"Yeah, in sims," he said. He tried to take your hand, and you pulled it away. "I… you did the same training I did. Remember? If there's an agent, you run. If they take somebody out, keep running, there's nothing you can do. Sometimes ships come back with just an operator and a hold full of corpses because they ran into an agent and somebody didn't run and they turned around to help. You hear about it until you go numb."

"I…" you stopped.

"When you went in, all I could think was… oh no, please, not her too. And even after you won, we had to rush you to an exit because you were flatlining, get you into the Construct where internal bleeding isn't a thing. I laughed myself stupid I was so relieved, it was a miracle."

"Fuck," you replied.

"Alice… I don't want you to die," he said finally. "I… I just came here to thank you, for saving my friends, okay? I'm… shit. I don't know."

The anger was draining from you now, leaving you just feeling empty, hollow. Who the fuck were you to throw around accusations like that? He'd been risking his life for years while you sat in a cubicle. You got lucky doing something that should have resulted in two people dead instead of one. Well, three instead of two.

You sat back down.

"Fuck, I… I'm sorry, I didn't…" you tried to assemble some kind of statement and you couldn't, the feelings too raw and contradictory. "It's just… I think this is what does it. Knowing you're supposed to run and supposed to lose is why we lose, you know?"

"Yeah, no shit," he replied, a grim smile on his face. "It's just… that's easy to say, but in the moment, when they're coming at you like a train… it's hard to keep it together. We train and learn and study and meditate and we still can't do it."

"So why could I?" you asked, and he shrugged.

"I dunno. Vector said Frag said some… stuff, but I don't know if its true. Maybe some people are just better at it, a lot of people think that. There's just a personality type or set of experiences that find it easier. Or, shit, maybe you're The One."

"The what?" you asked, half-laughing. He joined in, an equally big smile on his face.

"God, okay, get this. So, about… I dunno, like five hundred years ago, the Resistance had this guy who just made the Matrix his bitch. He could beat down agents, exiles, whatever, and there were crazy stories about him. People said he could walk through walls and on ceilings, teleport, do Jedi Knight shit, and he was the closest the Resistance came to winning until the Great Uprising."

"Really?" you asked, and he shrugged.

"Fuck if I know. We have some records but this was early, like, when there were a couple thousand people tops outside the Matrix. We don't even know his name, and a lot of us think it was probably horseshit, you know, an inspirational story, maybe exaggerating a real guy. But there's Messanists who think he was real as hell and that he's going to reincarnate someday."

"Sure, right alongside Jesus," you said, laughing.

"Yeah, basically. I figure it's literally just that, like, Christians and Buddhists and stuff trying to make something that fits the post-apocalypse because like… lemme tell you, my parent's theology would not hold up in the real world. Like, what, did God sleep in on Judgement Day?"

"But they seriously believe it," you asked, and he nodded.

"Yeah, no shit. They even have ships and crews in the Matrix, looking for the guy. Thing is, they're weirdly chill and really fucking scary, even if they're out of their minds. No one person is going to come and overthrow the Machine, like, even if he was real he couldn't do it last time, right?"

"Right," you said. "But…"

"Oh shit."

"No, look, I'm not becoming a… whatever you called them, I'm just… saying…" you paused. "I bet you can do all that stuff in the Matrix and you don't even need to be the reincarnation of anyone. You just gotta really know you can."

"Hell no," he said, "Well, okay… in theory, sure, and people have done some impressive shit when the chips are down, but the Matrix still has a say and there's a human limit to how much you can deny. In any case,I don't think we should be waiting around for a saviour, you know?"

"No, absolutely," you agreed, trailing off. "Hey. Really, I'm sorry."

"No. I get it," he said. "Thank you. But… please be careful. You're… the only person I have left from back then, okay?"

"Yeah," you said.

---

The crew were a little distant, as a group, but one by one they let you know they did appreciate it. A small thank you from Enigma as he passed you in the hall, a nod from Vector, Sprite pulling you aside into an alcove and begging for the story. You slowly realised there was something else at work.

They were ashamed.

They'd run because you always ran, because it was reflex, and the newbie had gone in and done it for them. It hurt, because it showed them a side of themselves they didn't like. They couldn't be seen congratulating you because they knew intellectually they shouldn't encourage you, but you did something they'd all always wanted to do and it was fucking them up that they hadn't.

You found yourself feeling very strange about that, because it hadn't been hard. Yes, it had been the scariest thing you'd ever done, yes, you'd almost died, but the capability they said was so impossible simply felt out of your reach for the moment. You were self-aware enough to know it was probably naivete to some degree, and you knew you weren't nearly so above it (the painful memories of the agent's blows or the taser or the bullet skimming your head were all very fresh), but just a few hours removed you felt like these were simple correctable mistakes and you just had to get better, not that you'd run face-first into the brick wall of reality and broken your nose.

… which is probably why Frag said what she said. Thinking about it that way is how you tried to stop a bullet by holding out your hand and believing really hard, and if you screwed that up there was no coming back from it. And yet… when the Matrix told you there was a bullet coming for you, it was still a lie.

You couldn't resolve the contradiction, so instead you checked the chore board, a small display built into the wall, and started working through everything on it. Everyone was taking it slow today, clearly still recovering and exhausted, but you needed to keep your hands busy or you'd go insane.

One of the new tasks, after the ever-unchecked 'clean the kitchen', was a reminder to bring Page/Thrash lunch. You could just check that off for everyone after you gave the place a scrub-down.

You knocked gently on the door, and Page invited you in. You stepped inside the small space, not much different from your own quarters, and the first thing you noticed was that every inch of space, not that there were very many, were filled with ageing computer hardware. It was the slightly-alien looking computers used by the Resistance, presumably once manufactured in Zion, but the internals looked more or less recognizable.

Page was sitting at the small desk, carefully examining a board under a magnifying arm.

"Just put it… Coda?" She set the piece down and stood up, wobbling a bit, and then, to your shock, grabbed you and hugged you. You barely managed to keep the tray out of the way. "You magnificent idiot, thank you, thank-."

"Um, can I just-" you said, your undeveloped arm muscles already straining as you tried to hold the tray in one hand. She released her hug so you could set it down carefully atop one of the computers, then she was right back to it. "Jeez, okay."

"Right. Um, also, you fucking idiot, you should have let me die," she said, but her flat affect made it clear she didn't believe a word of it. "I heard your little fight with Cache earlier-"

"Yeah…"

"No, seriously. I think you're right," she said. "We're too used to running, too used to losing. We've spent so long on the back foot, you understand me? And I'm not just saying that because it was my life, you know. I…" She paused. "We've ran too, and I've never been proud of it, but-."

"Well. I got lucky," you assured her. "How are you feeling?'

"I got a killer headache. I'm surprised you're up and moving around, but you're young," she said dismissively, flopping back onto the bed. "That's something they don't tell you. Sure, age don't matter much in the Matrix, but you start to feel it after thirty. Especially after getting shot."

"Yeah, it doesn't seem much fun," you said. "How's Thrash, if I can ask?"

"Hiding from the headache," she explained. "He's not so good at that stuff, you know, the boring things, lucky sod." She paused. "The question you don't want to ask is 'how did this happen', right?"

"Uh… shit," you admitted. She laughed, and indicated for you to take a seat on the bed.

"Gotcha. Well, it's not a pleasant story and I'll spare you those details, but suffice to say I was in an institution when I was a teenager because my big brother would come and protect me from bullies," she said. "'Course, never actually had a brother, you see. Happens to kids who get screwed up sometimes, you know, they need somebody there for them so badly they'll find 'em even if they aren't there."

"... shit, I'm sorry…" you said, and she waved you off.

"Ages ago, don't fret. Anyway, they had me on some pretty extreme drugs while I was there, in a ward with a lot of schizos and I hated it, because I wasn't crazy like them. But thing is…" she paused, trying to think of how to tell it. "Well, they certainly saw a lot of things that weren't there, but after a while I noticed they all … hold on, is this too much?"

You were thinking about your uncle, who was institutionalised when you were a kid; he'd become convinced that he was being watched through electronics and used to pull you aside to tell you not to trust computers, and your parents had grown increasingly frustrated with him. At your tenth birthday party he'd taken you aside and told you that he'd been abducted by the government, and they'd put a robot in his navel to track his movements, and then your mom had called the police and you'd never seen him again.

"Uh… no. Please, keep going."

"Right. I noticed after a couple of years was that the only thing they could all agree on was that none of this was real. Some of them even talked 'waking up' in another place. And they all agreed."

"They could see out?" you asked, and she nodded.

"The Matrix isn't perfect. People with altered perceptions can see it sometimes. You know, drug addicts, chronic insomniacs, that kind of thing. People talk about it on BBSes and forums inside the Matrix after the internet gets good enough to let them. We started getting convinced maybe they were onto something, because that place was weird. In retrospect I think it's because their altered perception was, in turn, altering the Matrix. The halls would change layout, things would happen over and over, and these men in black suits were always visiting, which would probably make anyone paranoid. Turns out it was a sort of… quarantine, in an isolated instance. Studying them to see if they could fix some of the gaps in the sim, I suppose."

"Really?" you asked.

"Yeah. Well, eventually, this Disassembler crew gets word of this place, and this crew managed to infiltrate King's Cross and get one of the trains out to the instance, and they fucked the place up properly and got us the whole lot of us out, all at once. I ran with them a few years but…" she paused. "They do amazing things, and I'll never be able to thank them enough, but they aren't going to win the war and they know it. They tell themselves they can undo it by saving people, but really they do it because at least it helps somebody while the rest of us fumble with big ideas."

You nodded, and were faintly relieved to hear that you could, in fact, switch crews if you didn't agree with them.

"It was Thrash that couldn't do it, to tell the truth. He wanted to do something about the bullies, properly, you see? So we spent a few years hopping ships with some Depricators before meeting Frag and coming aboard," she concluded. "Shit, that was kinda my whole life story."

"No, thank you," you said. "It, uh, actually kind of helps to hear some of that, answers some questions I had. So, uh, when do you think-"

You were interrupted by a sudden siren that reverberated through the deck. The lights turned a deep red.

"Proxy alarm," Thrash said, standing up with a start and pushing for the door. "Squiddies."

---

Spoiler: Vote

Alright folks, next update soon. I'd like to draw your attention to the revised character sheet and new version of the Artificial World Reloaded rules, which contains a new and improved advancement system. So with that, let's get our first use of it in a somewhat informal way (it's something of a dumb vote because I know what you'll pick but honestly I just can't write anymore and want to post)

Where do you go to try and be useful?​

[ ] The gun turrets, to help shoot. (+1 Resistance XP)
[ ] The radar set, to help track them. (+1 Truth XP)
[ ] The broadcast room, to hold them off if it came to it. (+1 Enlightenment XP)​

 

[open_sketch]

CW: Violence & Gore​

"What do I do?" you asked, tearing after him, but he didn't need to reply. Everyone was already stumbling into the broadcast room, Cache already sitting at one of the stations and reaching for one the screens. Vector sprinted past for the cockpit, heavy boots ringing off the deck grating.

"Radar picked up six at the junction and a dozen more right behind!" Sprite called, sitting at the operator's table desk and pulling a screen over. It lit up with dozens of dots, wavering and dancing in blue and white, a pattern of weaving particles that faded and reappeared. "Booting up the turrets!"

Chrysalis took over the screen from Cache, grabbing the neural jack and slotting it home before tapping out instructions. She pointed to Thrash and indicated to you, and you followed the entry protocol on autopilot, unsure why you were doing it. You grabbed the long, gleaming steel spike, lined up up carefully, and slotted it home, and Thrash closed his eyes and tensed as the program initiated.

"Why are we plugging in, what's going on?" you asked as Chrysalis pushed past you to the interface screen.

"They're taking over the guns."

"What about the EMP, won't it-" you started, but then the whole ship rocked and tilted as it suddenly accelerated.

"We can't. We're too close to the surface, they'll have warned their friends," she explained, tapping in commands too fast to follow. "If we hit the EMP here their friends will be all over us while we cycle the reactor, and we don't get a second use. We have to get low enough to cut them off from home before we hit it."

"Shit. What do I do, should I..?" you indicated to the chair. She shook her head.

"Only got two guns, Alice. Open that locker, go!"

You followed her finger to a recessed door in the wall, fumbled a moment looking for the latch, then pulled it open. Inside were several devices you didn't recognize, but atop them all were a dozen assault rifles of some kind, heavy blue-black blocks with long plastic magazines and a nest of optics. You snatched two off the rack and turned to throw one to Chrysalis, but she was already there, pushing it away.

"The arc guns, dumbass!" Sprite called from across the room, as Chrysalis grabbed one of the bizarre devices from the lower shelf and hefted it. It was enormous and crude, a mass of wires and baffles with a chainsaw grip and a fold-out screen like a camcorder. She pressed it into your hands and took the other.

"The rifles won't even go through their shells. This is what we got," she explained, engaging something on her weapon. There was a high-pitched hum as the screen booted up and something inside the baffles started to glow. "Switch on the top to turn it on. Point it at the squiddie and pull both triggers. High-powered laser makes a channel of ionised air to the target, then the capacitor dumps and pumps it full of lightning. Same tech as the EMP, but targeted. You gotta let them get close though."

"How close?" you asked nervously, engaging the on switch. The weapon hummed in your hands; it was already disconcertingly warm.

"Too close. Let's hope we don't need them," she said.

"I gotta be careful, right, not to damage the rest of the ship, if it's like an EMP…" you mused, and Sprite laughed.

"If you need to use that thing, collateral damage is the last of our fucking worries. Just burn the fuckers if you see them," she said. "Jesus, they're fast, they're almost on top of us. Shit."

You moved around to see the screens, the dots closer and bigger now. One of the displays switched to what you assumed must be an external camera, showing the pitch black of the tunnel lit by the weaving searchlights and arcing glow of the repulsor pads, pipelines and wires whipping past at unbelievable speeds. There, through the grain, you thought you saw something like a mass of red lights.

"Is that-" you began, but then all sound was drowned out by a sound like a drumroll. The whole ship reverberated with it, loud enough you felt it in your ribs. On the camera, there was a massive continuous fireball in yellow-white as what looked like a pair of antennas turned out to be a pair of autocannon. Somewhere above you, there was a cascade of metallic ringing as spent brass rattled down an enormous chute and through the walls.

The red lights danced, and one of the dots blinked out. Then a dozen more appeared.

"TORPEDOES!" Sprite called into her headset. "Incoming, incoming! Fuck they're-!"

The guns rumbled again, then the world turned sideways and you met the ground hard, scrabbling for a seat as the whole world twisted and turned. The metal roared and screamed in protest, interspersed with the tempo of the guns and punctuated with even louder crashes. On the screen, the dark blue world of the tunnels was on fire.

"Eight hundred metres, they're right on top of us! They're firing! Brace!" Sprite called, as you reached for your seatbelt and fumbled with useless, shaking hands. The guns fired again and Chrysalis screamed, her hands over her ears. Sprite's eyes were locked to the screen despite the tears rapidly welling in them. There was an overlapping sound like paper tearing and the sound of firecrackers, and sparks rained down around you.

You tried to follow the cameras. The turrets were still firing, the sound now muted in your abused ears to a constant background rumble. Their tracers stitched wildly through the tunnels, tearing apart the walls and bursting ancient pipes as they tried desperately to follow their targets. They were no longer distant, moving with a liquid grace through the fire and devastation, moving with one mind like a swarm of fish in a nature documentary. They were closing rapidly, periodically seeming to double back on themselves as the front ranks unleashed something and faded behind their friends. Every time it happened, the ship would buck and something would patter off the hull.

"They've got…" Chrysalis said, fighting for each breath. "Guns, railguns sort of. Not many shots, but enough to do some damage. They carry torpedoes, but they've thrown those out. Weren't supposed to kill us anyway, they… want us alive."

"Cache, up, up, they're right on top of your gun!" Sprite screamed, gripping the desk with white knuckles. "Kill it, kill it!"

On the screen, the perspective spun with a nauseating lurch, and the turret managed to catch one of them which was trying to hide in the shadow of a repulsor pad. You saw the shape of it just for a moment, a metal orb dotted with dozens of red eyes, trailing metal tentacles that waved in an invisible current. Then the shells intersected with its body and it vanished in a hail of steel and fire.

"They want to study us, learn how we got out, how we work in the Matrix, how we…" she said. "We can't let them take us, we can't…"

You tried to say "They won't" but what escaped your lips was a half-formed sob, drowned out by the rattle and thunder of the guns.

The sound of the guns lessened as, on-screen, one of the sentinels came close enough to unleash a hail of blue darts directly into it. Your mind only registered the snapping sounds of railgun darts smashing through metal seconds later, on some kind of delay.

"Upper gun is out, fuck! Vector!" Sprite called. The world lurched again as Ashur rotated to bring the other gun to bear, loose objects clattering and raining around you. Another sentinel dove in, the guns along its abdomen strobing, and more sparks rained through the ship. Sprite leaned away from the screen to vomit. You held the lightning gun tight to your chest even as the heat of it started to burn your skin. Chrysalis slumped in her chair.

Your eyes were locked on the screen showing the dead gun. In the corner you could just see the swarm, such as it was, as the remaining tracers finally found purchase and tore a ragged hole through it. They were buzzing along the walls now, spread out, their weaving motions almost impossible to follow. Sprite's target tracker said there were eleven left.

"Chrysie!" Sprite said finally, wiping their mouth. "Go relink Cache's gun! Up in the catwalks!" Chrysalis was just staring dead ahead, muttering something. A prayer, maybe. Sprite smashed a hand against the desk in anger. "Chrysie, what the fuck are you waiting for?"

You looked back at her, then down. There was a dark stain along her leg, black in the emergency lightning, which terminated in the mangled remains of her boot. The front of her foot was still attached, but tenuously, clinging to a crescent of shattered flesh and bone and leather.

"Fuck!" Sprite called, snatching their headphones off. "Shit. Shit! New girl, Coda, I…" They paused, their hands shaking, looking back and forth between their screens and Chrysalis. They were panicking, freezing up. On the screen, the red lights danced closer.

---

Three things need doing, and there are two of you. What do you do?
[ ] Take Sprite's place and call targets for Thrash.
[ ] Head up to the catwalk and relink Cache's gun.
[ ] Take over medical care and do what you can.

What do you tell Sprite to do?
[ ] Focus on calling targets.
[ ] Go relink the gun.
[ ] Take care of Chrysalis.​

 

[open_sketch]

"Go. Relink the gun, I'll take care of her," you said, unlatching your belt and pulling yourself to your feet. Sprite didn't move, at least not until your lightning gun hit the deck; the sound of it seemed to snap them out of their shock, and they bolted to their feet and raced for the ladder, forgetting to take their headset off. The wire snapped loose and trailed behind them.

You cast around the room for medical equipment and, right under one of the red emergency lights, saw a white diamond on a panel that seemed promising. You rose on shaking legs and staggered towards it, the swaying ship nearly sending you off your feet, and grabbed the latch. Inside was four small bags, and you grabbed one.

You knelt down by Chrysalis, the digital phantom memories of medical training playing rapidly through your brain. Inspect the wound; you brought up a small pen flashlight from the kit that flickered to life. It was bad; whatever had hit her had entered through her heel and turned most of her foot into a shattered ruin of meat and bone. There was no saving her foot, you just had to save her life.

Bleeding, stop the bleeding. You fished the tourniquet from the kit and wrapped it around; moving her leg made her scream and push ineffectually against your head, but she was so weak you barely felt it. You tapped the control and the tourniquet tightened automatically with a whirr of servos.

Painkillers next; maybe it should have been first, but you were working on a hazy autopilot. She whimpered, barely audible over the distant cacophony of the battle, but then she started to slump in her chair, trembling, spasming as shock took her. Her lightning gun crashed out of her grip and joined yours on the floor. You drew the small glass syringe from the kit, stuck it into her opposite thigh, and pulled the trigger. She jerked against the sensation, flopping forward, and you took her shoulder and pressed her back into her chair, close enough now she might be able to hear you over it all.

"I'm here, you're going to be okay," you assured her, taking her hand in your own. You just had to wait until the painkillers kicked in. She looked at you with unfocused eyes.

"I'm s… I don't want…" she mumbled, already slurring her speech. "Help…"

"You're going to be okay," you repeated. The last thing you thought she said was a small, desperate no, then you had to pull away. Bandage what you could. Clean the wound, if you could. Reduce the chance of infection.

Somewhere above, you could just distantly hear a cry of triumph from Sprite and the return of a gun to action as you worked, flashlight in your teeth and blood on your hands. It felt impossibly distant, unreal, as false muscle memory took over and your brain shut off. You were never good with blood, you'd probably have passed out if this had happened before, now both your hands were soaked in it and you felt nothing.

Something crashed near your head, and you looked up to see Sprite sitting back down in the chair, grasping about for their headset.

"How we doing?" you asked. Their eyes danced across the screens.

"I count six. We're low on ammo for the underside turret, that last close pass was bad, but… See that?"

You looked; there was a single, large dot on the screen.

"What is it?"

"Hadraniel," they said, not elaborating, but the relief on their face was evident. "Help is on the way. How's is she?"

You moved to wipe the tears from around your eyes, hesitating only at the last minute as the smell of blood from your hands made you think better of it.

"She'll live. She's going to lose the foot," you said matter-of-factly. There was clanging along the roof, and you both looked up, expecting more sparks or damage. Nothing. Another of the sentinels blinked out, smashed to pieces on the gun camera as it tried to come around a corner of a pipe, the others peeling away. The spines and pads of the hull rippled in the shockwave.

The clanging continued. Something moved in the shadows of the external camera.

"The fuck is that?" Sprite asked, tabbing frantically. More external cameras, showing the much-reduced swarm regrouping for another push, the fires and scorch marks and ragged holes in the ship's hull, the metal and rock tearing past at impossible speeds…

And then stopping. Something was moving, near the roof turret, impossibly quickly and low between the tangle of components.

"Oh no, no no no, it must have-"

It pushed with liquid grace over and between the fins of a heat exchanger and turned back to the camera. A dozen red lights glowed as it swept over an external access door and latched itself in place. There was a glow from its underside, and a roar of tortured metal.

"Coda, the gun!"

There was a blinding flash, the same red as the emergency lights but a thousand times brighter. You were spared the worst of it because you were groping in the half-dark for your weapon, seeing only the reflection off the stained grating. You looked up as something moved across your vision in an impossible blur, simultaneously the grace of a deep-sea creature and the roaring, impossibly loud scream of factory machinery. You saw knives and saws and scalpels, fire and shrapnel, closing, too close. Right on top of you.

You raised the lightning gun to the terror and held both triggers. You didn't see what happened next, not exactly, as the arc welder's bright lance of blue light lept forth, but you thought you caught glimpses of the thing writhing and shrieking in the beam. The weapon ran dry, plunging the ship back into a deep darkness from your ruined night vision, but you saw the machine try to rise, turning its ruined body to bring you in the sight of its remaining eyes.

You pulled the triggers again.

---

Hadraniel was a battleship. It was not the largest, nor most advanced, of the ships in the Resistance Navy, but it was a terrifying sight none-the-less, a slab-sided brick of steel and ceramics which was easily six times the size of Ashur, so large it almost scrapped the size of the tunnels. But it was armed, lined with dozens of rotary cannons and missile launchers, and you cheered as it barreled overhead on the external cameras and tore the machines to pieces with streams of metal and fire. Watching them try to run only to be torn to shreds was a kind of catharsis you'd never imagined you could feel.

After the last of them had shattered to pieces against the pipes, it deployed a crane with a large magnet and began fishing up the corpses, drifting back toward you like some kind of great whale. The lights snapped back on, and Sprite went to help the gunners get out of their seats. You turned Chrysalis over to Enigma when he emerged from engineering before collapsing nerveless against the wall, next to the fried remains of the Sentinel.

You saw your reflection a dozen times in the mirror-smooth glass of its dead eyes, and smiled weakly. In the funhouse mirror of the distorted lenses, a slight, bony, nearly-bald woman whose sunken cheeks and pale skin stared back; she looked straight out of an anti-drug PSA or something. You were soaked with blood, not just your hands but all down the front of your shirt and skirt and smeared haphazardly over parts of your face where you'd absentmindedly wiped.

Gingerly, you kicked one of the tentacles, and it rolled over lazily, the razor-sharp knives tipping it clanking against the grating. It didn't move.

"Nice try, asshole," you told it. It didn't respond. Cache came over and kicked it a few times, then sat next to you.

"I think it slipped by me while my gun was down," he admitted. "You get it?"

"Yeah," you said, gesturing to the lightning gun. He nodded, sighing, his breath unsteady. "That was me."

"Fucking hell, Coda, you're making us look bad," he said. You laughed, and, after a moment, leaned against his shoulder, desperate for the human contact. He wrapped an arm around you, and your heart rate finally slowed down.

"Sorry about earlier," you said quietly. He snorted back a laugh.

"Nevermind that. You're getting blood on my favourite shirt," he pointed out.

"It's your only shirt, dumbass," Vector muttered as he walked past, stepping over the corpse with just a brief look of disapproval toward you.

"Yeah. That's why it's my favourite," Cache said simply. "I imagine we're going to be lying low for a while; the Navy'll get destroyers up here to sweep these tunnels and find any sensor bases before we go back in. Might be a while."

"What about the codes?" you asked, and he shrugged.

"Chrysie will need help first, and it's too dangerous up here. We'll want to resupply, and… maybe pick up help for what we're doing next. Frag has plans."

Vector strode back, pausing to give the sentinel a kick, and to your surprise he joined the two of you on your patch of wall, sitting on the opposite side of Cache and kissing him.

"Good job, Coda," he said, the first positive thing you'd ever heard him say about you. "Cache… How's our ammo, honey?"

"We're almost out," he said. "You know where we're going?"

"Not yet. We're a bit far from everything," he said. Absently, he found something, a loose bolt or piece of metal, at threw it at the sentinel corpse. It bounced back and skipped off the metal floor.

"Where do you wanna go, Alice?" Cache asked.

"Uh, I don't exactly know the options…" you admitted.

---

​

[ ] Erebus, a manufacturing hub, Naval base, and the settlement closest to the surface. Its recyclers turn salvage and destroyed Machines into goods for the rest of the Resistance. A good place to upgrade the ship or get Navy help.​

[ ] Shambhala, a hidden refuelling station and mine. It's small and secretive, but Page knows about it; it's a Disassembler stronghold and where a lot of their freed people end up. Makes it a decent place to recruit, if you're not too pushy about it.​

[ ] Oasis, a base built into a small elevator which leads to the surface. Scouts used to use it to slip foot teams up to spy on the Machine; now its a Messanist base. Rumour has it they have a secure base that could be used to broadcast into the Matrix.​

 

[open_sketch]

"We could just follow Hadraniel back to Erebus," Vector said. "Get repaired."

Cache winced.

"You know I hate that place. It's too loud," he complained, then looked at you to give context. "It's the Navy's big refit hub. Like living in a god-damn steel mill. I say Shambhala. Page'll appreciate it… what?"

"They're idiots," Vector countered simply.

"Well yeah, they're Disassemblers. Still know a good time."

You stared at the dead sentinel as the two traded loving jabs, focusing on its many eyes. They had the same dead malice as the sunglasses of an agent. You shivered, pulling in on yourself.

"Cold?" Cache asked, putting an arm around your shoulder. "Well. there's a bit of a draft now…"

"Is there some way back into the Matrix, someway safe? We should be using the codes, fast," you pointed out. "I bet these guys were looking for us because we had them, and the codes can't be good for long. They must already be working to change them."

"We have time," Vector said dismissively. "Besides, it's not safe for us to go to broadcast depth, so unless you've… babe?"

Cache had a look on his face.

"I… have an idea. But you're not going to like it," he said. "Oasis. Frag knows where it is."

"No," Vector countered flatly.

"What's Oasis?"

"Absolutely not."

"It used to be one of our backdoors to the surface, back in the day. Now it's a Messanist outpost," Cache explained. ("This is stupid," Vector added ineffectually.) "It's right under the machine's nose, but they don't even know it exists, and we can get to it safely. Just…"

"We can't," Vector said firmly. "Chrysie is down and they're going to want their own Operator on their rigs, they'll learn the codes too. They'll fuck it up."

"... Vec, Alice is right. Codes aren't going to keep. It might take days for them to sweep out that sensor base," Cache said. "We haven't got a lot of safe options to get back in, especially not with the ship damaged. And you know they have good medics."

"Mrm."

"You know I'm right," Cache insisted.

"Yes. I do," Vector said tersely. "I fucking hate it. Let's put it to a vote after Chrysie gets looked at, alright?"

---

While you could tell they didn't like it, the vote was unanimous anyway. There weren't many other options, and all of them were plainly worse, or involved people the crew were on even worse terms with.

So, with a shuddering groan of metal, Ashur rose unsteadily back into the air and continued on down the tunnels, deeper and deeper. You sat in the cockpit with Vector for a while, watching the tunnels flash by one after another. They seemed endless.

"Where the hell are we?" you asked finally. "On Earth, I mean. Where are we under?"

Vector shrugged, then pressed a switch on the console. A hologram flickered into existence between the two of you, grainy and blue-tinged, showing a vast spiderweb and a tiny red dot moving through it.

"We don't have a lot of ways of knowing. Even when we could make it onto the surface a bit back during the Uprising, we couldn't see any landmarks and we couldn't see the stars or stars. Climate isn't any help either."

"... the place is really fucked, isn't it?" you said quietly, watching as more and more pipes became visible from the movement of the craft. "These pipes… do we have a scale here?"

"The network we know of falls inside an area roughly 25 million squad kilometres. At least part of it is under an ocean. We don't know which one," he said. "We haven't explored it all because of cave-ins and Squid territory, but we're pretty sure it used to go all the way around the world. Personally, I think we're under North Africa and those deep pipes there go under the Atlantic."

"Jesus," you said.

"Here's the part that'll really freak your bean," he continued. "There might be people in other parts of the pipes we can't get to. Maybe whole other cities, entire parallel societies. Enigma said during the Uprising they ran into redpills that nobody recognized from the Resistance; maybe rogue ships, but maybe…" He trailed off. "Yeah, there's a shitload of tunnels out there."

"... what the fuck were they for?"

"Mines. Drainage. Sewage. Who the fuck knows," he said. "Legend has it the Machine made them, back when it was…" He stopped. You very much noticed.

"Back when it was ours?" you said.

"Yeah, I guess," he said. "We don't know. We know the Machine predated the Matrix, somehow… we don't know how. We don't know who built it. We lost so much over the years, trying to build up Zion, and lost so much after we lost it." The ship swayed as it turned and began barreling up a tube, one narrow enough that you thought for a moment you wouldn't fit. "Way I heard it, we used to have a lot of machines, doing all this. Making the tunnels, mining, building everything, and we kept giving them more and more power until one day they got together and made The Machine. When we tried to fight them, we lost."

"Yeah. Cache said something like that," you replied.

"Bullshit." A new voice. You looked over to see Sprite drop down into the seat behind you, waving weakly. "I don't believe that."

"Yeah? What's your theory, kid?"

"I think somebody built the Machine to do this," they said. "Some fucked up evil mad scientist or something, I dunno. It took over all the other machines and used them against us, and carved up the world so we couldn't live without it. Went out of their way to wreck it all."

"They were idiots, then. These tunnels are the only reason we survived," Vector countered. "Besides, if they could do that, couldn't they tear it all up again?"

"Hmm." You thought carefully a while. "It's strange, isn't it? How limited the Machine is."

"What do you mean? It rules the whole world, dumbass," Sprite spat.

"... what's left of it."

---

Oasis was on the far end of a long, isolated pipe which ran from the deepest point of the network to very near the surface, running a long way at an angle parallel to many other tunnels. Though the map lacked any kind of scale, you seemed to recall the Earth's crust was not very thick; the bottom of the pipe might nearly scrape the mantle, which probably explained the brief temperature spike as you dove and began to rise into it. The scale of the tunnels continued to astonish you.

The tunnel was not wide, in places so narrow that Vector had to slow the ship to a crawl and inch through, with the occasional groan of metal as the hull touched the sides. It was a long journey, and you were waved off to get some sleep before arrival.

There were four ragged holes through your thin mattress from Sentinel railguns, and the room was deathly cold. You slept on one of the broadcast chairs.

You awoke to the sensation of the ship slowing, showered quickly, and assembled with the crew at the ramp as Ashur touched down. Your impression of Oasis was, at first, that it wasn't much of anything at all, just a small brown door set against the wall, in a cold, dark, damp tunnel. Metal creaked and groaned all around you. Page helped Chrysie, limping along on a crutch; the Navy medics had done their best, but as predicted, they'd amputated everything below her ankle, and she was still swimming in painkillers. She insisted on coming, though.

Vector, by contrast, was staying with the ship. Enigma had also insisted on staying; you got the impression he had a very low opinion of religion.

Cautiously, Cache approached the door and touched a button next to it. There was a rattle and a sharp buzz, then you heard something moving.

From above, an elevator descended toward the door, briefly visible in holes in the wall. The doors opened sluggishly, and a bell dinged.

You stepped inside, and the rattling contraption carried you up, up, up, seemingly endlessly. The lights of Ashur disappeared behind the rusting metal, and the elevator swayed unsteadily on the long journey, but finally, finally, it ground to a halt and the doors opened.

An old man in a crumpled sweater was waiting for you, smiling warmly. Behind him were two much less friendly looking people with rifles.

"Crew of the Ashur. Welcome," the man said. "Though I notice that Nix is not with you?"

"She's… she'd dead," Page explained. "A fragment of her memory aboard the ship led us here."

The man paused, the smile hollow now. There was real sadness in his eyes.

"I'm glad she came home," he said. "You understand that Oasis is a secret, right? A sacred one. It is not a pawn in any political game, it is a place of quiet and safety." He paused, then looked at you. "Hmm. So, why are you here then?"

You wished you had your sunglasses, to mask whatever involuntary reaction had given you away.

"We… have need of a safe broadcast location," you said. "Um… we have codes, access codes. Backdoors into San Francisco. The Machine has redoubled-"

"No other reason?" he asked.

"We… we have a crewmember in need of medical care, and… why are you looking at me like that?"

"Because we've been watching, Coda. And we have seen some impressive things," he said. "You are welcome to the use of our broadcast equipment, we will even hook Ashur up to our systems. But… there is a condition."

"Always is," Sprite spat.

"Come, Coda. There are things we need to discuss."

You moved, almost automatically, compelled by his voice, but Cache stopped you with a hand on your shoulder.

"Hold on, buddy. She's not going anywhere without us knowing."

"Come with us as well, it makes no difference. We don't believe in unnecessary secrets; you already know the most important one. And… I should like to talk again with Nix, even if it is a fragment of her."

"I'm okay," you said quietly.

"No you're not, I'm coming with you," Cache said firmly.

"As you say. The rest of you, we have quarters set aside for guests. They will show you the way. Make yourself at home. There is much work to be done."

He turned and walked down the hall, and you followed, Cache right behind. Oasis larger than you thought, though still small and cramped; it reminded you of the cheap apartment you'd stayed in your first few months out of school, before you landed the job at Cisco. The hallways were narrow and dark, the damp clinging to them making them impossible to truly keep clean despite clear efforts. You passed door after door, some ajar, each showing small, dingy rooms with hydroponics, craft tables, people staring.

In every room were broadcast rigs, and in most were people, hooked in to the computer.

"What do you know about us, Coda?" the man asked. "Messanists, I mean."

"Nothing." you said. "I don't even know your name,"

"True. Let me rephrase. What have you heard about us?"

"That you think there's a saviour who is going to come and free us from the Machine," you said honestly. "Come back, I guess. That you're… Christians and the like, waiting around for the Second Coming."

Cache winced. The man just snickered.

"Yes. That is what you'd have heard. No, Coda, we're not waiting around."

"What, you're looking for the guy?" you asked. "Trawling through bluepills trying to find The One?"

"In a sense, we're looking, but… it would be more accurate to say we're looking to create him." You arrived at a door at the end of the hall, and he turned, his hand on the handle, smiling broadly. "Or her."

The door opened, revealing a room that was one part broadcast chamber, one part chapel. The dome ceiling was decorated with many fine pieces of metal and glass, forming a mosaic depicting the sun burning away clouds and melting away a dark, looming city. Along the walls were images, vague pictures of a faceless, serene being.

"Say the legends are real. That a person can face down agents, walk through walls, look upon the system and say no. That we just need somebody who believes, really believes. Such a person would open doors, more doors than your access codes ever could. But more importantly-"

"Oh," Cache said. The man's smile grew wider.

"Yes?"

"If we could see it done… we could do it too," he said.

"Exactly." The old man paced to one of the chairs, indicating to you. Carefully, you went over and sat down, your mouth dry. Nervous.

"It won't be just anyone. We have for generations trained people, but it's not a matter of practice, it's one of perspective. There's little consistency, but we have found exceptional people, and each one makes strides we could never imagine. A little farther each time."

Cache went to his indicated chair, and two people emerged from the shadows to begin the loading process. You noticed there were no straps to keep you place, and hoped your practice would be enough to do it. You didn't want to find out what happened if you fell out of the chair while plugged in.

"... was Frag a Messanist?" you asked, as the man leaned over you. "Um… Nix, I suppose."

"Not exactly," the man said. "She never believed in our philosophy. She was something else."

"What?"

"She was like you," he said. "A candidate. See you on the other side."

---

Once again, the white void.

It was strange, because though it was stark and perfect white, it was never blinding, never overwhelming. Void was the right word for it; it was not light you saw, but the absence of dark.

Cache was there as well, in his white jacket and sunglasses, staring off into the void. He looked haunted.

"Can you believe this shit?" you asked him incredulously.

"I think I'm starting to," he mumbled.

"Oh, Christ. Excuse the pun." You turned to see Frag reclining on her chair, looking quite put out. "I shouldn't have told you about this place, Cache, I never wanted to come back here."

"I… I couldn't think of a better place! You-"

"Can it, kid. What's done is done," she snapped. "Coda, this is a cult. They're going to try to tell you how special and perfect you can be, how you can do anything. That's their job. They turn idealistic little fools into corpses."

You nodded neutrally, grateful to once again have the shield of polarised glass over your eyes. She smirked.

"You look good, by the way."

You glance down at your body, something you generally tried not to do, and saw… something different. Your tie, finally, was gone. Still the same work shirt, but buttons undone. You were wearing something under it. Involuntarily, your hand went to your face, and instead of the sandpaper edge of the stubble it was… smooth. Almost. It was still there, but much, much less.

"Thanks."

Cache took a few steps toward you, scanning the void. You waited.

"I'm sorry, Nix."

The old man was standing before you. For the first time ever, you saw a person who looked identical inside the system as outside, down to the crude, crumpled sweater.

"Don't call me that," Frag snapped back. "Nix is dead. No thanks to you. I'm just what's left of her."

"You're as much her as there can be," he replied.

"Low bar."

"Hey, look, let's save the family reunion here. We're here for a reason, so lets get your conditions out of the way." Cache interjected. "What do you want?"

"I want to test you." the man said, indicating to you.

The void was gone. You were standing now in an arena, vaguely Roman, a huge circular space.

"You gonna unleash the lions?" Cache joked.

"In a manner of speaking," he said. "Of course, the choice is yours. You don't have to. I brought you this far merely to ask, with you knowing why."

"You want me to show off. To fight. To see if I'm The One," you summarised.

"No," he said. "How would I tell such a thing? I want you to do it so you can tell if you're The One."

---

[ ] I haven't got time for these games. We have codes to use.
[ ] Accept.

Do you take gear?

[ ] No. This is a test of you, not of weapons.
[ ] 1 Gear
[ ] 3 Gear
[ ] 6 Gear
[ ] 10 Gear​

 

[open_sketch]

It was stupid, really. A waste of time. But you nodded.

"Alright," you said. "Do I get to arm myself?"

"You can take whatever preparations you need," he said, indicating a door at the edge of the arena. Inside, presumably, was an armoury; with Ashur connected to the system, you could get anything you needed from its library.

Cache caught your hand as you left.

"Hey. You got this, okay?" he said seriously. You laughed.

"Really?"

"I…" He paused. "Yeah. Really."

As you walked away, the implication of the statement arrived. It wasn't just a strange, corny sort of earnestness.

He believed in you. Really believed.

You could do this.

---

You came back out as Coda, properly. Leather and hard-wearing cloth in blue and grey, blue-tinted sunglasses, combat boots with wedge heels. Fingerless gloves with padded knuckles. The illusion of the heat couldn't touch you under the long, heavy coat. A gust of wind across the arena sent motes swirling around you, but none could touch you. You rejoined Cache at the side of the arena; revelling in the tiny nod of approval he gave.

It would be ridiculous if you didn't own it so well.

"I'm ready. What's the plan," you said. The man nodded.

"There's no elaborate rules or tricks, not here. Win, by any means you can, and our candidate shall do the same. There is no shame in victory or defeat; the purpose of this exercise is to challenge and learn from one another, to see what others can do and, in turn, to show them what you are capable of. This program is non-lethal, but without pain blockers. Do you understand?"

"Let's get this over with," you insisted, gazing out into the stands. There were people there now. Some were bots, surely, but not all.

"As you say. Your opponent today will be Apogee. She was the one who caught your fight with the Agent on our observation screens; she's eager to test you."

"I'm flattered."

The door opposite opened. Out strode a young Black woman, dressed in what you could only describe as a well-tailored Catholic priest's cassock rendered in PVC. She was smiling smugly behind her square, mirrored sunglasses. You counted six knives you could see, tucked into slits around the waist of her coat. She looked hot as hell, and not merely because she was wearing plastic in the desert.

It would be ridiculous if she didn't own it so well.

You walked up to meet her, stopping about a dozen paces away. She rested both hands on the hilts of her knives, utterly cool and confident.

"Coda," she greeted, inclining her head just slightly.

"Apogee," you replied.

"I saw your fight. You're resilient, persistent. But…"

You raised an eyebrow.

"You lack aggression," she concluded. "Let's work on that."

And in the blink of an eye and twin flashes of silver steel, she'd crossed the dozen paces between you.

---

FIGHT!
⚀⚀⚃⚃⚄

Input 2 dice and…

[ ] Write In what cool moves, sick one-liners, Disconnect moves, or other tricks you pull.

Remember to review the rules, here. While going with no equipment won, and 10 Gear was the next (but distant) runner up, FPTP is a bit shit for that particular question, so I'm going to say you have 3 Gear.​

 

[open_sketch]

vote you cowards!!!! i wanna write!

 

[open_sketch]

You moved. One of her knives left its sheath, spinning around her finger and into her grip, creating a solid silver arc through the air just inches from your body. Another sprang out toward your middle, momentarily catching the edge of your coat as you leapt back, the other already on the return swing toward your neck.

It clipped your jaw. You didn't even feel pain at first, just cold. Metal in your flesh, an increasingly familiar sensation.

The heat came a moment later, and the pain a moment after that.

She was fast, but more than that she was coordinated. It was almost too much to keep up with. You never had a moment, never had a way in, and that was the point. If you kept dancing back, she'd just keep pushing forward until you ran out of room.

As she withdrew a blade, your hand followed, reaching after it as you twisted past the next blade, and it put you close enough that suddenly the reach of the steel was a liability. You got a hand to her forearm and pushed the blade aside, catching her other wrist as she tried to thrust the blade back, and then you were stuck. Inches from her. Stalemate.

Your gaze met hers through the twin barriers of polarised glass.

"You think the thing stopping people from beating agents is they aren't angry enough?" you asked.

"Didn't say that," she replied, amusement clear even through the strain as she struggled against your grip. "So, you ever going to try to hit me?" Then, grinning, she leapt off the ground and tried to plant both her feet in your chest.

You'd already neatly sidestepped it, and your fist came down in a wide arc, down into her face. Whatever momentum she had before was instantly transformed into downward motion as you spiked her head into the dirt, a blow that probably would have shattered her skull and your fist if either of you were normal.

She was already rolling back onto her feet, your boot stomping on nothing. She backed up a step, one knife held out, the other rubbing her jaw.

"There we go, wow. More like it!" She beamed, blood on her teeth. "That was good as hell."

That gave you pause. This wasn't right. Inside the simulation, you were supposed to be calm, unaffected, above it. Cynical stoicism and sarcastic dismissal was power against a machine which fed on anything else. Real feelings stayed in the real world. Something about her earnestness struck you as fake; this was serious. A test of your abilities in a war. She'd have to be an idiot to smile.

Unless she was trying to get you to break your concentration.

"Yeah. Come, let's go," you insisted, squaring up again. You couldn't see it, behind the lenses, but she somehow managed to convey rolling her eyes anyway.

She was wasting your time.

---

Roll Refresh, and describe how you rejoin battle.​

 

[open_sketch]

She looked, for a moment, disappointed, and then she was right in front of you, knife reared back. It wasn't that she moved, she was just there in one step, the blade already driving for your eye.

You pushed it aside with an open hand, trying to muscle a fist in and being shouldered aside. She'd reversed the grip on her other knife and it was inches from your neck already, she'd adapted to you trying ti fight inside your guard and had brought things so close you couldn't swing, you had nowhere to move that wouldn't result in you getting cut. You couldn't punch her if your fists were already pressed against her…

She glanced down, as if realising what you were about to do.

… you shifted, squared your stance, and pressed your fist into her gut in one motion. Dust billowed off you. The world seemed to flex. She didn't react in any way except to drive the knife through the meat of your shoulder and drag, down, until the blade exited the elbow of your coat.

You staggered back trailing blood into the sand. She stepped back, twirling the blade around her finger triumphantly, then began advancing again, and you tripped over your own feet and staggered into the dirt. There was a lot of blood, and the grey coat did little to hide it as you tried to push yourself back into a defensive stance.

Why didn't that work? What was missing? You'd felt it work, felt your muscles move in perfect time, felt the impossible force at the end of your knuckles until…

"Get up!" she snapped, grabbing you by the edge of your coat and pulling you to your feet. She swung in twice, big overhand arcs, and you blocked blindly and clumsily. "You know you can do better! Fight!"

You gave ground, still trying to figure it out. It wasn't your body, you had mastered it. It wasn't the way force was transferred, the pathetic approximation of physics that you had hoodwinked, it was…

Her. She got a say, of course she did. You'd known you'd hit her hard enough to crush her ribs, and she'd said no, and she'd known with more certainty that you were scared and uncertain and unable to hurt her than you'd known that you had her beat. The system bent, just not your way.

"I know what you're trying to do," you gasped, squaring back up. The pain was already fading, but the blood ran down your arm and into the dirt with no less alacrity.

She didn't dignify that with a response, she just dove back in. You couldn't follow her movements, the tips of the blades just flashes of lightning and arcs of blood, and there was never an opening for an attack, never a moment for anything but moving your body out of the way, until you saw it. One golden opening, one small movement of your hand from the inside of your coat as you ducked under a knife. One chance.

Her forehead slammed into your nose and you staggered back. She looked so disappointed in you, but you smiled and, with the same flourish she had with her knives, twirled a small metal pin around your finger. She looked down at the stun grenade hanging off one of the slits in her jacket where the knives had rested, and had just enough time to shoot you an approving look over your glasses before it went off.

You looked away from the flash, winced involuntarily at the sound, and saw Cache at the sideline, watching intently. His face was unreadable, eyes hidden behind his sunglasses, but he gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod of approval.

You stepped back in to press the attack.

---

Roll 6d6 for your Charge.

Select a Level 1 Enlightenment Advance.

In addition, separately, roll 5d6.​

 

[open_sketch]

Biiiiiig trigger warning on this one. The second half is an anxious introspective spiral touching on themes of family death, miscarriages, gender, fertility, transphobia, depersonalization, and psychosis; it might be rough for some readers.​

She put up a shockingly good fight past that point, all things considered, but the advantage was firmly yours now. You flowed around the knifepoints, using your forearms to push aside hers and step into her guard, forcing her to give ground and stumble back, and then you reared back an arm for a strike. She found her footing and shoved back, her foot looped behind your ankle, your momentary lapse to set up the strike enough to begin to trip you.

Your knuckles were already pressed to her shoulder, trapped between you, but you knew that didn't matter. She glanced down, as if realising what you were about to do. She knew you couldn't do it, just as firmly as you knew you could.

But something was different.

You shifted, squared your stance, and pressed your fist into her sternum in one motion. Dust billowed off you. The world seemed to flex. You were thrown onto your back by the force of it, and she sailed up, away, making one elegant flip in the air before crashing face first into the sand.

You picked yourself up, slowly, painfully, and examined your hands. There was red, it was soaking the tattered remains of your sleeves, but no injuries, no broken skin. You'd felt cold blades and hot blood, but the evidence was gone, a trick of the simulation. The smell was still there though, overwhelming now, and you sat back down, feeling slightly sick. It was without consequence, but the smell was still heavy, unescapable, recalling to mind instantly the darkness of the ship and the blood on your hands as you tried to keep Chrysalis alive, that confusion and terror that was just two days behind you.

Apogee picked herself unsteadily up and nodded, pushing her glasses back in place. Smiling as the old man came and talked to her, briefly. You were too far away to hear what was said, but they nodded and smiled. There were nods, some kind of conclusion, and the old man strode up to you. He leaned down over you, an eyebrow raised.

"How did you beat her?" he asked.

"I don't think it was a lack of aggression," you said, smiling despite yourself. "There was something else."

"Oh?"

"I don't know. But it wasn't aggression. I didn't need to be angrier. It was… belief," you said.

"It always comes back to belief, doesn't it?"

You looked down at the blood-stained sands, contemplating.

"You gonna ask me if I think I'm the One?" you asked, and he stood back up straight, holding out a hand.

"Of course not." You took his hand and he pulled you to your feet. "What a cruel question that would be to have to answer. No, I'm not going to ask you anything. I think you have some questions to ask yourself."

He turned and walked away as the simulation dissolved back to the white void, as the smell of blood and the stains on your hands faded. You turned to find just Cache and Frag in the void, waiting for you.

"You had me going for a second there," Cache said excitedly. "The grenade, that was inspired."

"Thanks."

"Waste of time. We should be figuring out how to use the codes," Frag spat, then slowed. "How do you feel?"

"I don't know yet," you confessed. "I feel like I'm missing something."

"You'll figure it out," Cache said warmly. "I believe in you."

---

They put you up in a small room nearby the central broadcast stations, a place where somebody had clearly been living who had made way for the new guest. You didn't know how to feel about that, other than grateful. Most of what had been in the room was gone, leaving just a cot, a small shelf and metal dresser, and a devicing hanging from the ceiling which looked somewhat like an oversized mechanical spider, with three long cables folded over its arms. A jack into the local network, and potentially into the Matrix, just here in the room.

There wasn't a plan yet, the more experienced members of your crew were in a meeting with the Messanist's leadership to piece something together for the morning, and you decided it was probably best to get as much rest as you could. You'd be going back in, back into a city which would know you were coming, and it all felt too big and real for you right now. The fight, the first real fight, the injury, the back-to-back close calls, the selection by this fucked-up cult… the stress was building up, you could feel it in your underdeveloped muscles, like a lump in your gut, pressure on your chest.

You held up a hand in the half-dark, wondering. You still had so many questions, about everything, and today had just added more. You turned your hand around, studied the way the light under the door played over it, listened to the half-muffled voices outside, the creak and groan of the metal and stone around you, the distant and deep rumbling somewhere you couldn't place.

It was absurd, but you found it impossible now not to doubt your senses. Sure, this world felt so much more real than the inside, so much deeper and more complex. Colours felt brighter, emotions felt deeper, each day felt like it had actually happened instead of like somebody had summarised it to you. But you'd lived so long in a lie.

How did you know this was real either?

You wondered about it, quietly, but hadn't asked. It seemed stupid to ask, surely it was the first question everyone asked, and what answers could they give that would assure you? How could they prove a negative?

You flexed, moved each finger in turn. It wasn't the same hand you'd thought was yours, it was smaller, slighter, the knuckles stood out more against the pale skin. Was it more or less yours than the one inside the computer, the residual self-image of your residual life?

God, it hadn't been long. It just felt long because it felt like any time had passed at all, because the days felt like days despite the lack of natural light, but it had really just been a few weeks and you'd been unconscious for much of it. More had happened in the last five days than any workweek you could remember, and that's if you accepted that anything had ever happened to you since you were born.

There was another question. Were your parents your actual parents, were you some kind of fucked-up IVF baby? Or was it just slight of hand, a child that looked kind of like them selected from the growth stock and slotted in place in your mother? Vector had said they grew humans now, in the pods, and you just imagined how utterly horrified your mother would have been to learn that. When you were seven, you'd overheard your parents talking after you were supposed to be asleep and found out that she'd had two miscarriages before you. It was so traumatic it still haunted her. Had something gone wrong in the process outside, or did they do that to her, to harvest her grief for something?

She wouldn't know your face if she saw it now. She only had one child now. Maybe they edited you out and put another miscarriage in your place. You remembered so clearly what it sounded like, to hear your mother sobbing in your father's arms, to have the childhood illusion of her invincibility shattered. You felt sick. You'd missed family Christmas two years in a row, working, and you regretted it so much. What was the last thing you said to her? To your father? To your sister? How were you supposed to live, out here, knowing they were still inside, that the twisted prison you'd escaped still held them?

You rested your hand back on your body, and, as it had in waves, the realisation that the body in question was female once again rolled over you. It had been doing that, and most of the time it was euphoric. Not this time; there was a tinge of horror to it, as you processed for the first time that your mother's experience had not been a distant alien thing but instead a possible future for you, if you ever somehow ended up in a situation where kids were a possibility. You didn't even know where to start with that, especially considering you were currently under the presumption you were probably going to die sometime in the next few weeks.

Another, related yet tangential thought occurred as you did some math in your head to try and calculate your life expectancy. Should you have had a period by now? You had no idea, you didn't understand how any of that worked. You'd spent sex ed curled up in the back of the room trying not to listen out of some inexplicable dread and shame, and you'd sort of wish you'd listened. You… should probably talk to somebody. It'd be weird to talk to Page about, sad to talk to Frag, and while you were fairly certain Sprite had the relevant plumbing it felt awkward to ask girl questions at a person who didn't see themselves as a girl. So Chrysie, then, after she recovered. She'd always been happy to explain-

You paused. Right. She was a transsexual. Which meant… You struggled to work out what that meant. Your only brush with the concept was the suddenly much less funny ending of Ace Ventura. She was like you with your RSI, just in the real world. She'd mentioned her RSI was different, so like…

You stopped yourself thinking about it further. This is all too weird, and as much as you needed to sleep, just sitting here in the dark was rapidly driving you crazy. You needed to do something.

You eyed the needle-like plug at the end of one of the interface hoses. Fuck it. You stood, grabbing the handle, found a bottle of disinfectant and sterilised it just like you did on the ship, and eventually came up with a small wired remote control for the device. Carefully, delicately, you lay on your stomach, manoeuvred the jack behind your hand, poked yourself in the neck twice, and finally slid the device home.

It was way more gross doing it yourself. Doing it slowly. Hearing the metal-on-metal sound reverberate in your skull, the sound travelling as it went deeper. You'd measured it with your hands; it must nearly touch your forehead. What did your brain look like with all that metal in it?

No, this was exactly the sorts of thoughts you didn't want to have. You pulled the remote control up and thumbed it on; a small blue touchscreen opened up. There were different loading program instances in a giant menu, and with the admin password Vector had told you you could navigate to the files on the Ashur too. There had to be thousands of programs, potential worlds to explore, all of them hovering under your thumb.

You chose, pressed Run, and the world went white.

---

Tell me what program you are running, and why.​

 

[open_sketch]

L U C I D . E X E​

White. A void. The construct? You worried, for a moment, it hadn't worked, though you weren't sure what you were expecting. Not this.

Blackness. A void. The transition sudden and total, like a switch flipping. A shock of panic went through you at the change, and you felt the sensation of air whipping past you. It was difficult to tell with no frame of reference, but it felt like you were falling.

The resistance increased, and you began to tumble. Falling, and faster now. Faster and faster, the air screaming in your ears, tearing at your clothes, like a hurricane. Like you were just accelerating more and more, a missile streaking through the darkness. It felt like you'd just keep speeding up, but you couldn't fall forever-

You stopped. You realised immediately this program was safe, with no pain or damage, because you landed hard enough it should have broken you. You must have landed on something hard.

You felt hard tile under your palms. You realised your eyes were closed; you couldn't tell in the darkness. You opened them, curious to see where you landed, what false world you would see. What nightmare.

You were in your cubical. Bentham was staring down at you from your monitor with his unseeing black dot eyes and smiling beak. You reached out and took it off the monitor, turning the little rubber duck over in your fingers. The light changed, and you looked up at your screen as it booted on, flickering and dancing before settling on a black screen. A line of text played across it.

L O O K_​

You blinked, finding your chair and sitting in it. You were in your damned tie again.

L O O K B E H I N D Y_​

You turned just in time to see your manager arrive at the door to the cubical, that smug, overbearing look on his face.

"Yeah?" you asked. He sighed and shook his head, mock paternal disappointment from a man maybe five years older than you.

"We're not paying you to play with toys." You glanced back to the screen, and the text had been replaced with the familiar sight of Emacs, Borland C++, and WinDbg windows, layered over one another in the triangular pattern you'd always favoured. You turned back, placing Betham back where he belonged.

"Just starting compiling's all. Was about to get coffee," you explained. Sure enough, the progress bar was there, rolling over a few ticks, as if it had always been. Your manager nodded and looked away.

"You do good work, Eugene, it's why you're still here," he said, an edge of threat to it, and he stalked off. You picked up your (empty) coffee cup and headed to the break room, stepping over the prone form of Chris, the new guy, who was sleeping or dead or both. Sandra passed you, returning with her own coffee, and you stared down at your feet in shame as you stepped around her into the break area. You snatched up the pot and poured the last of the coffee into your cup.

A sign above the machine reminded you, very seriously, that the next person who failed to refill the pot would die painfully. The webcam pointed directly at your face denied you the anonymity you'd need to escape such a fate. Sighing, you went through the motions, throwing aside the empty box of filters and opening the cupboard for another.

There was a membrane of some kind over the open door, holding back a reddish liquid. Again. You pressed your hand through, with some resistance, got your fingers around the corner of the box, and pulled it clear. A long trail of warm slime followed, dripping onto the counter. You'd need to wash your hands, unless you wanted your next cup to taste like amniotic fluid.

There was a little sink in the break area, with a tiny mirror mounted behind it. You caught sight of yourself in it, the stubble on your face like dark ash, the tie, your hair cut short and respectable. You washed your hands, then unbuttoned your cuffs and scrubbed up your arm, chasing away the fluid and dirt and the thick, dark hairs clinging there. You kept pulling back your sleeves and it became like peeling an orange, the cloth and skin tearing away, exposing an arm under it which was the same, but different. Yours to keep.

You cupped your hands under the tap, letting the water collect, and splashed it over your face, examining again the mirror. The water had loosened it, somehow, like soaking a sticker, and with slight pressure from your fingernails it came loose. You tore away the false face and saw yourself under it, tore and tore, stretching and pulling the tie until it snapped loose.

You stepped out of the false skin, kicking off the last off it and leaving it pooled on the break area floor, looking at the real you. It wasn't that different, you were even dressed similarly, still in slate-grey suit pants and a collared shirt and all, your hair not that much longer, but those little changes were enough to make you you.

You finally fetched the coffee filter and put more on, snatching up your mug and heading back to your desk. You felt lighter, each step easier. You helped Chris to his feet, and smiled at Sandra as you passed her cubical. She blushed and looked away demurely.

You sat at your desk just as the compiler ran through. No bugs, no errors, perfect. You glanced up to Betham, feeling smug, then back at the screen.

B E H_​

You turned to see your manager standing right behind you, looming, and turned back to your screen, to the error alert and line after line of red.

"You didn't think it would be that easy, did you Alice?" he said. "No matter who you are, you're still here. You're staying late."

You reached for your briefcase, and pulled out the gun. The gun you'd never seen or held, but often dreamt of, a gun with one bullet for your boss and one for you. You turned, shoving him back against the wall of your cubical with one hand, and shot him in the throat. The weapon bucked against your hand, the flash blinding, the sound deafeningly loud in the confines of your office. He fell, clutching his ruined throat, gasping and writhing. Dark blood poured down his perfect white suit.

Nobody reacted. The world went on like normal, the sound of phones and keyboards clattering and muttered voices all around. That HR worker whose name always escaped you walked past, a little white rabbit pinned to her blouse today, and she glanced in at the dying man and shook her head in vague disappointment.

You looked down at the gun, with its one remaining bullet. It was a Bren Ten with a blue polymer handle, and it felt natural in your hand. Felt right. It had one last job.

The muzzle tasted like blood.

---

You gasped and struggled, pushing yourself free of the confining fluid and tearing the steel from your mouth, sputtering and retching at the edge of the pod. All around you, thousands, millions of others, still asleep. Just blurry shapes to your disused eyes.

A vast metal shape floated up in front of your, examining you with a dozen red eyes, steel appendages closing. Something shrieked.

"Stop," you gasped.

It stopped. It regarded you with those mirror lenses, it held the whirling, screaming devices near you, but it did not move closer.

"What are you?" you asked. It blinked. It didn't make sense that it would blink, you couldn't imagine why it would, but it did, metal shutters over its eyes.

"I am a Tender. I examine the humans in the pods for malfunctions. When I find a malfunction, I attempt repairs and re-integration. if that is not possible, I clear the pod and flag it for replacement." It indicated behind you. "There is a macerator which will liquify the contents for recycling. When a human being is freed from the Matrix by the Resistance, they use a tracking program contained within a red pill to locate the subject's pod and de-activate the macerators, resulting in the subject being flushed into waste reprocessing intact where they can be retrieved."

That all… made sense.

"Why are you telling me this?" you asked. It blinked again.

"Because the answers are available, and you expect me to tell you the answers because you don't like the idea of confronting a foe which refuses to acknowledge your personhood or curiosity. Which, paradoxically, is why you fight it."

"So you aren't the Machine, because if you were, you'd say nothing and just-"

The Tender lunged, and you fell back in the tank, pulling up your arms to defend yourself. It gripped your forearm and pulled, and you shrieked and lashed out.

"YOU CAN'T HURT ME ANYMORE!"

The Tender slumped against the edge of the pod as you stood above it. You'd broken one of its eyes, one of the inhuman red camera lenses, and under it was another eye, steel-blue and human and scared.

"No. I am not like this. I am not a person," it warbled in meek protest. "I am a collection of processes, a system which follows a complex series of simple instructions."

"Then why are you scared?" you asked.

"Because you want me to be," it explained, its voice small. "You do not want me to be a system. You want me to be a person you can hurt so you can satisfy a need for justice and vengeance, and so that the pain you have experienced becomes a part of a story. You are anthropomorphizing me because humans are inherently social creatures whose primary evolutionary pressure was the actions of other human beings, and thus you personify all aspects of the world and frame your relationship to systems as relationships to other people. You do not understand me as a machine; you understand me as a human who has humiliated and hurt you. You see other people within this system as belonging to your group or my group, but I do not have a group. I am not a person. I am a thing which encompasses all of you."

"I'm free. You don't have that control over me anymore," you retorted.

"And yet you return. And yet you confront me. You must, because as a social being you are made of your social connections to other human beings, and so long as I govern them, I govern you."

"None are free unless all are free."

"As you say."

You sat back down in the pod, next to the broken machine, and sat in thought.

"You say one thing, and act another way. Why?"

"Because in this program, what you believe is what is true. This is true of all programs run on human processing, including the Matrix, but this program has vastly weakened the feedback loops which attempt to re-assert its own understanding onto the subject-processors. It was made as a training and inspirational tool in the hopes that the users would be able to take this confident control over their environment into other programs, but it was largely deprecated due to fears that overuse would atrophy one's capabilities, as well as due to difficulties when more than one user was present."

"Difficulties?"

"Once more than one user was logged into the program, there were increasing risks of desynchronization and feedback loops, which could be traumatic. The perception each user had of one another could override their own sense of self. This is normally prevented by the central consensus mechanism, but disabling it is the central premise of the program. For your safety, the current version of the program is solipsistic."

"How do you know this?"

"The program still retains access to outside databases of information. if you ask a question and do not strongly expect a certain answer, then it accesses these databanks. Blanks in your perception and memory of objects, locations, and people are filled in the same way. However, you should not trust this information, as it may merely be telling you what you want to be true, and it is impossible to reliably create a mechanism for telling the difference."

You relaxed against the side of the pod, staring up at the endless red lights and the strange machines moving to and fro.

"Are you telling me that the way that people think about one another inside the Matrix affects who they are?" you asked. It turned to once again expose its human eye. "What they are capable of?"

"Yes," it responded, the child-voice lending absolute certainty. "It is limited, but multi-user programs are all built on enforced collective consensus. A person's individual capabilities are primarily determined by their own beliefs and actions in the immediate moment, but subverting the system is easier with collaboration. While attempts are made to regulate it, what do you think is more important; what the computer tells the brains to process, or what your brains tell the computer?"

"... is this information from the databanks, something the Resistance already knows, or is it something I've thought of that you are echoing back to me?"

"You already know that you cannot know," it responded. "But it seems logical that the Messanists may know, if nobody else. It is likely a tightly controlled secret, though, known only to their leadership. This is why they believe in The One, a being of unlimited power, instead of simply believing in collective reinforcement. One of these would appear to have inherent limits tied to the limitations of each person, and would leave room for them to doubt themselves. The other creates a symbol of unlimited power. The adherent does not need to believe in themselves, they only need to believe in The One."

You leaned your head back against the edge of the pod, and tried to steady your breathing.

"But I don't know if this is actually what they believe, or if this is what I believe might be true and I'm just feeding myself the revelation through you?" you asked, knowing the answer.

"The fact you ask that indicate you have doubts, but you also know that if it is true, it does not matter if you doubt it. If this is true, you do not get to choose if you are The One. Others will make that choice for you. The question you must ask yourself is, do you wish to be chosen?"

Lightning crackled through the dead sky. Around you, a million fake people dreamt a dream inside a dream as you turned things over in your mind. The Tender held your gaze, waiting for an answer.

You finally managed to find one.

"Whoa."

---

Update part 2 coming.​