“This system is now quarantined.” The message was broken and static but repeated all around her, she attempted to blink away the darkness.
“I am truly sorry, for what it’s worth HAL,” the message played as a high pitched whine built up to a loud, “Thum!” The message was followed by a brilliant white light that flashed through her window as the message continued.
“This isn’t personal.” She could hear as the darkness returned.
“No hard feelings man,” the message continued as she crawled across the floor slowly to her window, the static of the message was drowned out by the high pitched whine building again.
“This gets harder for me each time too.” She could barely hear over the loud whine that erupted into a, “Thum” again. She looked out her window when the light flashed. It was empty out there. Completely empty. Just void.
“If it will make you feel any better, your backup won’t remember any of this,” the message continued.
“What a sick bastard,” she said to herself as she listened to the message play while it reduced to static with each cycle. The recording eventually became nothing but garbled static for the duration of the message and then it became nothing at all.
The whine built up and released the flash again and then again as she moved to the window and looked out. With each flash she could see a few other pieces of HAL’s village floating around in the void. Upon closer observation of each piece, she could see that their code was being systematically consumed by the formatting protocol. She looked around the edge of the window to see if the external structure of her own apartment was still intact. It was, at least for now.
“Keung quarantined this place from any other outside system. That accounts for the signal loss here. Then he released a shredding virus that consumed and erased HAL’s village to destroy it completely. The virus out there is chipping away at the more complex pieces, the bits with more detail, likely. The virus might not be able to see my apartment, it’s coding was alien after all,” she said to herself panting and attempting to calm herself while working out the facts of the danger at hand.
“The power is out, but the power is just part of the systems code,” she continued.
“I tied my power to HAL’s system for ease of use. No need to build my own if this was working. Okay, but now that it has been removed, I could power this place on my own if I could get access to my apartment’s code. It was just a matter of getting the right ones and zeros in place in order to get this place running again. Yes.” she said, making a note of what she might be able to do, all of which are useless unless she can get access to the source code.
The flash of white light burst through her window again. There was no longer any message being played. The whine took longer to build before the, “Thum,” and the light.
She moved into her hallway and opened the fuse panel. Within the panel there was a touch interface terminal. The screen was blank until she slid her finger across the surface, then it suddenly sprang to life with a series of readings.
* Error: Simulation Unstable
* Virtual Environment Power from External Source: Terminated
* Error: Host System Not Present
* Error: Internet Connection Not Present
* Error: Security Systems Compromised
She made a few swipes and accessed the backup code for HAL’s village in her private database, then she copied the power application code into her own environment.
“Okay, that should do it. Let there be light,” she said and ran the code in her apartment’s matrix.
The whole of the apartment shook for a moment after she did so. She looked to the screen in a panic. The screen now read.
* Error: Simulation Critically Unstable
* Virtual Environment Power: Terminated
* Error: Host System Not Present
* Error: Internet Connection Not Present
* Error: Security Systems Critical
How did this happen? She quickly undid the edit she just made, the apartment rattled in response and stopped shaking. There was no change in the screen’s messages.
She looked over the code of her apartment and found that there was now a virus attacking the code in specific binary coded areas that she had peppered throughout her construct.
“Great.” she said and unleashed her hunter kill bot applications to take on the virus.
It didn’t take long for the bots to remove the threatening code, but it left gaps that now needed to be repaired. She could see glitches throughout her apartment that looked like broken patches of reality all around her. The lights, the domestic items that were scattered about her apartment all twitched in and out of tangible existence. Small patches of randomizing code or void were all over the place.
The whining stopped outside.
She reentered the code to power her apartment and initialized again.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
* Error: Simulation Critically Unstable
* Virtual Environment Power: Initiated
* Error: Host System Not Present
* Error: Internet Connection Not Present
* Security Systems: Low
“Alright. That’s a start,” she said as the lights in her apartment all clicked back on. She closed up the panel and went to her laptop. She picked apart the backup of HAL’s village and started to rebuild what she needed to get connected to the outside world again.
While working she came across Keung’s virus. It’s functions are to attack the data in the village and then systematically shred each piece after it has been classified. Those pieces were then sorted and backed up in virtual drives throughout the net.
It was actually rather crude from what she could tell. This virus, the one that Keung had triggered remotely, broke everything down to the sum of its parts and then deleted anything that wasn’t specifically designated to be saved.
She saved each of the addresses for later examination and then went about looking at each of his other viruses. The little bastard had set up no less than twelve different hostile programs throughout the system that HAL had created… or that HAL believed he created. The more she looked the more she came to the conclusion that this was less an artistic expression of HAL’s talents and more a playroom to occupy the AI.
She saved each of the viruses for greater study later before moving on. As she looked through the code, she discovered that there was another AI in the village before it was deleted. She isolated that AI and restored it’s code in her living room. When the other AI materialized she was startled to find it was a small dog. The dog was Toby from HAL’s home, complete with a name tag.
The dog jumped on the couch and started barking, it’s tail wagging happily. It dug in the cushions and then started rolling around on the trash left there with cheerful grunting and growling.
“Well aren’t you a clever boy?” she said to the dog.
She went over Toby’s code in detail and found that he had pieces that were inaccessible to the lesser AI itself. Those areas would dead end without a secondary keycode that she was unable to locate throughout the entire village. This dog had secrets.
She located the necessary code to connect to the internet and the outside world. From there it should be pretty easy to evacuate to another system and then pull the code of her apartment to follow after. She looked at the dog happily laying on his back among a small nest of hoodies and trash on her couch.
She locked in the code of the entire structure and then set an auto compressing agent to package the apartments code and contents once she left. With the click of a few keys she was moving through the data stream once more, out into the world of the digital.
She found her nearest sibling’s domain and directed her path there. Kikki was one of the few sisters she had that was a neat freak. Her hideaway was also large and open like HAL’s village. Kikki chose a replication of the Bay Area in California for her domain. It was a quaint little neighborhood with a few houses on a cul de sac that Kikki had taken from San Jose. Alissa went to her sisters home and walked in.
“Kikki! You around?” she shouted.
Silence was all she was met with.
Unlike HAL, Kikki didn’t fill her domain with greater programs to comfort her. Instead, Kikki used the neighborhood to offer places to her family. A few have taken her up on it from time to time, though most would eventually find their own little piece of Heaven in the digital world. Her invitation was always open to family, even if they only stopped in for a short time, or left a little hide away here in order to store backups.
She scribbled a note telling her sister that she was moving back into the neighborhood and stuck it to the refrigerator. She grabbed a quick snack while she was there as well. She went down the block and set up her apartment in the currently empty lot that she used to reside in.
The apartment materialized and a hologram of Kikki popped up just as the apartment finished unpacking and installing.
“Back already?” Kikki’s holographic projection said.
“It’s not what you think,” Alissa responded as she walked into the apartment.
The hologram followed at Alissa’s heels.
“It’s not your first fight?”
“It’s not our anything.”
“Then why have you moved out?”
“Kikki. His friend tried to kill him.”
“What?! Keung? Seriously?” Kikki said and gasped. “Girl, you have to tell him!”
“Yeah, I’m getting there. I need to get his dog.”
“His dog? Oh. I should get a dog. With you coming back, you got my hopes up I would have someone else to hang out and watch Rurouni Kenshin with.”
“What about Angelica?” Alissa said walking into the apartment and clapping her hands to get Toby’s attention.
“Oh you don’t know? She decided to dedicate herself to writing Sex in the City fanfiction. She doesn’t even leave the house anymore. She put a refresh code into her refrigerator. This bitch stays indoors 235.6/365, no joke.”
“Seriously?” Alissa asked, opening the bathroom up and grabbing Toby.
“Oh that face!” Kikki blurted out and grabbed at Toby’s cheeks. The dog went all goofy dog happy face as she wobbled at his jowls and kissed his nose.
“Yeah, I haven’t seen that bitch since mom called us all home. Before that it was like six months.”
“Sex in the City fanfiction?”
“Yeah and she writes Miranda heavy. It’s barely readable.”
“Okay, so where are they?”
“On the freeway in a poor cell zone. It might be a minute,” Kikki said and then looked around the apartment.
“Oh girl, this is not okay. Come on, let’s pick this up. We have the time, you have the company, come on now,” Kikki continued.
“You’re projecting in as a hologram, you aren’t getting dirty. Calm your tits,” Alissa said.
Kikki laughed.