Aki the Paragon

By the time I first spoke to Horatius Claudius Nerva, he was already dead. His post-mortem construct explained it to me. He didn’t say much, other than outline how the virus was about to plunge us into the digital equivalent of the underworld. Though, the construct did say one thing that piqued my interest:

‘Tell Gozan to stop overcooking fish.’

I knew neither if I’d get the chance to talk to the Sumiaka-kai’s boss, Gozan, nor why Horace cared about his fish-related culinary decisions. Nor did it matter. The glass shattered and the storm overwhelmed us.

I plunged into nothingness, landed on my backside, and skidded across mossy ground. Falling onto my back, I stared at the sky. Crimson, magenta, and azure streaked the heavens, as if an eternal sunset. Thick, ashen clouds of smoke hung low to the ground. Thick trees jutted from the ground, the circumference large enough to fit a dozen people inside. Clustered horizontal notches covered the surface at intervals. The leaves offered a thick canopy, blocking out a black sun in full chunks rather than loose spots of regular foliage.

I pushed against the tree to stand. The surface warmed me and felt too soft to be wood. It felt malleable, like skin. Thinking this, I craned my head skyward. The trees were fingers, the notches bunched skin at the joints, and the “leaves” were grotesque, chipped fingernails hinging out from the cuticles. Vines connected the finger-trees; some vines of braided hair, others intestines.

I gasped and reeled away, bile coming to my throat, only to topple over a crouched figure on the ground.

‘Who’s there?’ I startled, though the person on the ground didn’t respond.

I scrambled away, mud covering my exposed skin. The realm had the balmy humidity of a rainforest, and sweat fused my suit to my body. I peeled off my jacket and unbuttoned my shirt. ‘Lia!’ I yelled, cupping my hands. ‘Aurelia!’

‘Aki.’ Lia strode through the undergrowth, emerging through the ashen smoke.

I ran, never happier to see her. We embraced, briefly, and exchanged information. The Horace-construct had told Lia a lot more, but in essence: We needed to escape. Fast.

Sounds came from around us. I braced for an attack, but it was the others from the glass boxes. They’d been drawn to my shouting, if only because the rest of the realm was silent. Some had injuries.

‘Did Horace tell you how to escape?’ I asked. 

Lia nodded, wiping sweat from her brow. ‘He called it a Genesis Port. We need to travel in a single direction to find it.’ She glanced at the haphazard group. ‘How many can you carry?’

‘Two, maybe three.’

‘With luck, the group might thin.’

‘Lia—’

‘I’m kidding,’ she replied. I wasn’t mad; we used to joke during high-stress situations.

Based on Lia’s information, we needed to hurry. In the confusion, I hoped Aquinor members would accept a leader from the Sumiaka-kai. Sure enough, when I hopped onto a knuckle protruding from the ground and addressed the group, they listened. ‘Raise your hand if you can’t walk.’ I counted twenty, give or take, with four who couldn’t walk. I carried two, and the Aquinor lieutenant Corvus Corinthian handled the other pair. It was practicality, not self-sacrifice. Only Corvus and I had the cybernetics with sufficient strength to carry them. If we let them hobble on the shoulder of others, we wouldn’t move fast enough.

I walked ahead, followed by Corvus, Lia, Valeria, and then the remaining uninjured. The two I carried weren’t heavy, but my chest ached with each breath. In addition to landing poorly, the underworld seemed to passively drain my energy. The girl in my left arm wept, while the man in my right murmured incomprehensible things. Not great for my mental fatigue, either.

As the forest of finger-trees thinned, scents of sweat and rotting organic matter pervaded the area, making me gag. I walked faster, and Corvus hurried to match my pace. ‘Are you sure this is the right way?’ he whispered to me.

‘Distance, not direction.’

A few minutes later, we stopped. The group had fatigued. I put down the injured in my arms, and Valeria did her best to relieve their pain. I asked the girl for her name, but Corvus took my arm, dragged me aside, and shook his head. I shrugged him off; lieutenant or not, it was presumptuous of an Aquinor member. ‘No names,’ he hissed. ‘Not the time for empathy.’

Lia joined us, whispering in kind. ‘Strange to think how these aren’t our bodies.’ Corvus and I waited for her to continue, and she looked at us like we had lost parts of our brains. ‘Digital underworld. Our minds are down here, but our bodies are up there – in the real world. Injuries down here are perceptions.’

‘Why would a virus go through the trouble?’ Corvus said, thinking aloud.

To break us, I thought. A noise like an ancient fax machine resounded in my head. ‘I concur,’ Proteus told me. He’d been quiet since our arrival, and he explained that the digital underground sapped his energy, made him minimise his functions and bouts of activity. ‘You are correct: The virus breaks you mentally, leaving your body intact.’ Then Proteus…panted? ‘I suggest you move.’

I glanced at the group. Before I gave the command, I noted a change to everyone. Digital mirages—fragmented information—hung off our bodies, as if leaking from our pores. From Lia, I noted an old password for a personal computer in Italy. From Corvus, I noted codes for an Aquinor defence system in Qatar. We raised our hands, angling them different ways to inspect the information. Moments later, the information descended, merging with the ground.

‘The Rat King is absorbing your collective information,’ Proteus reported.

‘Let’s move,’ I said, jogging to collect the injured.

I moved with renewed haste. The Rat King harvesting information would’ve scared me under any circumstance, but with Lia here, it terrified me. She had information that led to him. If he discovered we knew, surely he’d change locations.

From the finger-tree forest, we descended a slope. The lack of animals or sounds, aside from our footsteps, unnerved me. In addition, our footsteps sounded like we crunched on hollow shells and brittle bones. The sound reminded me of pine needles. If the finger-trees were coniferous, what would the cones be like?

We neared an enormous lake. Like-sized lily pads dotted the water. Circling the lake wasn’t an option. We needed to cross. Yet, in a very human way, some of the group had trouble comprehending the invisible danger of staying in the digital underworld. All they saw was the black water and unstable lily pads.

Someone trailing behind said, ‘There’s something…’

‘Run!’ Lia yelled, leaping onto a lily pad. Valeria joined her. In the distance—the sound of wings. Buzzing. Car-sized horseflies poured from holes in the finger-trees, via the exposed nail bed. My mouth fell open. The horseflies coalesced into a swarm and drew near.

The horseflies’ stylets, usually used to pierce skin, were now used to cut people in half. An Aquinor member got severed at the waist. Screams and wails! A horsefly’s segmented eyes opened like a window and tiny hands grabbed an Aquinor member and pulled them inside. Guttural sounds; gnawing and gnashing.

Less than half the group had started across the lily pads. Desperation drove them forward, but too many mounted at once. The lily pads supported the weight of two people, at most. They floundered in the water. Some misjudged the direction and went back to the shore, back to the horseflies. We needed to move, but Corvus and I couldn’t carry two people. We had to choose someone to—

Corvus dropped both and nimbly dove into the water.

‘Drop them,’ Proteus ordered me.

I dropped the man, who said nothing and didn’t move, before hoisting the weeping girl onto my back. Running into the shallows with knees high, I followed Corvus. Water filled my mouth and got in my eyes as I paddled. We cleared the sunken lily pads and climbed onto fresher ones.

Nine weary survivors stood upon the lily pads. Our only solace: The horseflies hadn’t followed.

We had no choice but the march onward.

#

I adjusted the girl on my back and took tentative steps across the green surface. I swayed. From the unstable surface, or fatigue? I looked at my feet and found them stable; my head lolled from shoulder to shoulder. I wouldn’t last much longer.

As we neared the centre of the lake, the lily pads changed colour from a bright green to a dull orange. Mauve flowers bloomed in the middle. The nine of us regrouped at a cluster of lily pads. The buzzing of horseflies were a distant cacophony.

‘Did you tamper with my cyber-side systems?’ Lia asked Valeria, who wrung water from her top.

‘Can we talk about this later, Lia?'

Lia watched Valeria. I watched Lia, who stiffened, and I traced her gaze to a fragment of information hanging from Valeria’s shoulder. It listed the code to a berakite chest. A subheading listed the chest’s contents: Documents. The subject bar below: Zorica Exile.

Not outright meaningful – but questionable.

‘Keep moving,’ Corvus called, from two lily pads ahead.

The group progressed. I trailed at the end, still fixated on the two types of lily pads. Everything else in the digital underworld had an uncanny uniformity. It wouldn’t depict lily pads for purely aesthetic reasons. From my position at the back, I had the best view of any occurrences. I risked pausing, squinted, and observed the lily pads and people on them.

‘Did you see that?’ I asked Proteus. When Corvus had stepped on an orange lily pad, a brief, miniscule band of light had traced upward, stopped at his ankles, and faded.

‘I remember,’ Proteus replied. ‘They are scanning.’

‘Scanning for what?’

‘Critical data.’

Valeria stepped on an orange lily pad. The band of light travelled past her knees. It would’ve kept going, but Valeria hopped to another, resetting the process. Lia followed two steps behind. Another pulse. Critical data, I thought to myself. In a second, the band of light surged up Lia’s legs, torso, and ended at her neck. Bubbles formed around the lily pad. A cracking like broken old twigs followed.

‘Lia!’ I shouted, dropping the girl on my back. I dashed and skipped across remaining lily pads and reached Lia’s place as her lily pad began to fold inward. I leapt and shouldered Lia off, landing where she stood. Half the lily pad snapped shut. Water sloshed. I got my feet under me, just in time to keep from being squashed. Arms above my head, an immense pressure tried to flatten me. A bit of light stayed visible at the rim. My only hope of survival.

I couldn’t move and keep the lily pad from crushing me. Every bit of progress I made toward the rim weakened my position. When my fingers grazed the edge, I’d been forced onto my stomach. A slimy, viscous substance trailed down my head. I saw the rest of the group. Corvus had gained distance, now only stepping on the green lily pads. Most of the group did the same. Lia and Valeria stayed behind. Lia, wanting to help me. Valeria, wanting to pull her away.

‘We can still be saved,’ Proteus told me. I grunted; pressure on my back didn’t let me articulate. ‘If either of them tried, they would succeed.’

Good to know, I thought. To save my life, Aquinor needed to expend the bare minimum effort.

Lia struggled. She was strong enough from being pulled away, yet not strong enough to escape Valeria. But as she spat and swore, data became visible: Subdermal Adrenal STiM, activate, Y/N.

‘Yes,’ Lia snapped. She trembled and pulled away from Valeria with renewed energy. Swimming to my lily pad, she climbed into the narrow gap and, on all fours, pushed upward by arching her back. It got enough height for me to crouch.

‘On one,’ I said.

‘One,’ replied Lia.

We pushed off the lily pad and lunged into the water. The lily pad snapped shut, before folding into quarters, eighths, and onward until it vanished.

I told Lia about the colours, and she helped me climb onto a green lily pad. A short distance away, following Corvus, Valeria stepped onto the edge an orange lily pad. She waited and called for Lia to hurry. I opened my mouth, to warn of the band of light moving up her body, but Lia squeezed my hand.

‘Interesting,’ said Proteus.

As predicted, the lily pad snapped onto Valeria. Half her body had escaped it.

Lia hopped over there. ‘Did you tamper with my cyber-side systems?’

‘Lia,’ groaned Valeria. ‘I promise we’ll talk when—’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes, yes! For your own safety. Your sister doesn’t care about you; she only cares that you don’t bring back Zorica. A-And that girl—that girl, Aemilia Seneca, she recruits people for the USCC clean-up. Nothing more. She does not. Care. About. You.’

‘Were you involved in the exile of Zorica Sorranus, Viper of Aquinor – my mother?’

Silence, for a moment. 

‘You two are so similar,’ Valeria snarled. The sentence, often said with tenderness or pride, had nothing but spite. ‘How about some gratitude? I saved your life!’

Lia stood, face impassive. She took my arm. ‘We should hurry,’ she said.

‘Lia!’ Valeria struggled against the lily pad. ‘You don’t understand. I’ll tell you—’

The lily pad folded again. And again. And in a few seconds, Valeria seemed to no longer exist.

Lia and I followed Corvus across the lake, where we found a doorway of light. The Genesis Port. Lia didn't look back, and I didn't know what to say. Our handful of survivors stepped through the doorway, and back into reality.