Vyvani

I scramble onto my feet, still reeling with uncertainty and bafflement. The last moments of my occupation of Hazikawa’s mind fill my memory. Being expelled from his consciousness is not so much a shock as the reasons for its occurrence. It was not as if his mind had recognized me as a malignant, foreign presence, a virus to be eradicated. Rather, it was as if another hostile force, one of unspeakable malevolence and stubborn hatred, realized the competitive existence of my habitation of Hazikawa’s mind, then expelled me for its own advantage.

I rush through the aisles. Many, but not all, of the holoViewers depict scenes of their subjects boarding transports, being armed with weapons.

I teleport myself to the Joryoku room. The scenes depicted within the holoViewers are…unspeakable.

A battle rages in fiery streets. Smoke billows into the sky but is held in place by a steel canopy. Civilians flee. Glowing projectiles are scattered throughout the air. Men and women similar in dress to the boy named Jin fight side-by-side with other Joryoku fighters. But I can see the terror reflected in their eyes, and not just of the kind that is borne from fear of death. It is the sort of terror that is the amalgamation of fear and a helpless resolve; the knowledge that a terrible fate awaits should they fail in their endeavor.

It is easy to see why.

The subjects of the holoViewers, the Kargu, commit terrible, terrible deeds. Unspeakable crimes. This is not warfare. This is unrestrained hatred in its rawest form. Humankind in its cruelest state, committing acts of butchery too terrible to name.

A part of me that hovers far in the corner of my mind like some distant memory begins to throb at the sights before me. I too, was human once—flesh and bone—and not just lines of code. If I could cry, if the tears could come, they would have.

A child and its mother flee from the subject of a holoViewer. They scream and shriek, casting backward glances at the approaching predator. A woman in a leather jacket pounces in between the hunter and the hunted. Her hair is as crimson as the blood which streaks in small rivulets down her grimy cheeks. She holds a crackler in one hand, a photonBlaster in the other.

I extend my consciousness into the viewer so that I may hear the sounds directly inside my mind.

“Run!” the girl with red hair screams. “Gento, take them!” A man to her rear hurries away with the escapees. The Kargu subject hurls its flameSword, where the weapon finds its mark. The mother falls onto her face, a blue beam impaled within her back. The one named Gento picks up the kicking child, but hesitates to flee from the carnage.

“Ako—"

“Gento go!” the girl with red hair cries. She swings her gaze at the subject. “You have me to deal with now, you son of a bitch!”

She swings her crackler at the Kargu. Her face is one of steely resolve and fierce concentration. The Kargu dodges backwards, then lunges in a bioCharged movement. The girl with red hair skips to the side, her own enhancements flaring. In a fluid movement, she charges forward in a bioCharged maneuver and stabs with her crackler, a little too far to the right. The Kargu swerves to the left, but he has made a fatal mistake.

The subject glances down, where his opponent’s photonBlaster was waiting. Green beamShot flares forth. The Kargu shifts his gaze back to the girl’s face. She is wearing a look of triumph, her smile one of relief.

But then the Kargu’s arm shoots forth and his fingers bunch around the flesh of his enemy’s neck. The girl’s eyes widen, and the wild, blue electricity of a crackler point spears through the Kargu’s arm.

The Kargu stumbles, but he does not fall. His other hand jolts upward, and a plasmaKnife’s blade is thrust into his opponent’s chin, all the way into the depths of her skull.

The girl sputters, her mouth forming silent words. The Kargu twists his knife violently, and the girl’s eyes roll backwards until there is nothing but white.

I gasp, and I close my eyes.

“Ako!” someone screams.

My eyes flick open, and I see that the one named Gento has still not fled. His face is twisted into an expression of horrified rage.

Putting the child down behind some fallen barrels, Gento lunges at the Kargu. He falls like a log after being struck by a chance beamShot. Even as Gento attempts to climb back onto his feet, the Kargu limps towards him. The subject looks down at the floundering form of his enemy, bioCharges his leg, and smashes down his foot. Red splatters over the concrete floor like a star with countless rays.

The child shrieks and begins its fruitless fleeing. The Kargu notices this. He takes a step forward.

“No,” I whisper. “No!” I shriek.

The Kargu continues stumbling onward. He looks down at the wound inflicted from green beamShot. And still he continues on like an unstoppable boulder. The child is too young to move quickly while caught in such fear. It stumbles with shaky step, each movement a risky, arduous undertaking.

I focus all my energy, all my consciousness, and touch the server tower connected to the holoViewer. I must stop him.

Please.

I begin to pixelate. I send forth my mind and—

I encounter something terrible.

A storming orb of consciousness; a web of thoughts so intricately threaded and interconnected, ever ensnared in the struggle of ideas, susceptible to the stubbornness of dogma and the flexibility of hypocrisy. A human mind in its rawest form.

But it has been transformed into something terrible from the madness of conviction and misguided principle. It has been indoctrinated into something fierce—to rub my consciousness against it would be to open my own self to such virulent adamancy.

I send forth my thought to the holoViewer. I see the child, its strength having failed at last. At the first stumble, it had lost all hope. It now only quavers in fright upon the ground, waiting in the path of the Kargu’s relentless march.

A part of me had hoped that the Kargu’s body would fail him from the effects of the green beamShot. He is too tenacious for that, it seems—his determination is too keen.

I have no choice.

I insert myself into the raging, black maelstrom, under threat at every moment of being shattered into a million pieces. At times I can feel my code unraveling. I can sense the hinges of my being holding together with the utmost strenuosity, like a rubber band being stretched to its final limits.

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My mind pulses—I am extended, then compressed, and I fight back with all I have. The resistance I encounter is fierce, filled with such vitriol. I wonder if I have made a terrible mistake.

What is this strange new code that has taken this man over? What has corrupted both this subject and Hazikawa?

I cannot defeat this. I cannot overcome his hatred. I cannot take him over as I did Hazikawa before the insertion of the virus.

The Kargu raises his hand against the child to deal the final blow.

But perhaps I can stop him, halt his movements for a while, just long enough until his body is consumed by the rot of radiation.

And as the battle rages around me, I fight my own, stretching myself so thin that I know that going any farther will result in a glitch and a failing of my systems.

It is the hardest thing I have ever done.

But even implacable mind cannot triumph over failing matter, and the crazed Kargu finally falls victim to the effects of green beamShot. As he collapses onto his knees, a Yamda fighter lifts the child into her arms. I catch sight of a flaring golden blade swinging from the side, and the Kargu’s head rolls.

I must rest. I materialize from the server, and collapse onto the ground. I realize Sabina must not find me here, as well as whoever these holoViewers have been set up for in the first place.

With the last of my remaining strength, I teleport to my old home in Shirumo and curl into my sheets. I fall into a deep sleep, hoping my systems will soon cool down.

*******

When finally I wake, I find Sabina sitting by my side. She has a bowl of water on a table beside her. She dips a wet rag into it, wrings it of its excess moisture, and dabs it against my forehead.

The action is heartwarming, but I can’t help but be amused that she is caring for me, a virtual being, as she would a child. Coolant applied to my system processors would have done the trick.

I burst out into laughter.

Sabina yelps, nearly drops the rag, and clutches it against her chest. Her cheeks turn a deep red, and she hurriedly brings up her tPanel to disintegrate the items out of existence.

“I appreciate the gesture,” I offer. A wide grin extends across my face.

Sabina nods hurriedly and pushes her techSpects up higher onto her nose in an attempt at regaining dignity.

“Your processors were burning when I came into the office today,” Sabina says quickly. “The outer cores were nearly melted from the heat. What did you do last night, Vyvani?”

“Nothing,” I answer with a shrug. “Just some…experimentation and exploration.”

Sabina smiles. “You really are a curious and driven young woman, Vyvani.” She taps on her tPanel, and two steaming cups of coffee pixelate into existence upon the bedstand. She hands one to me. “Just be careful next time. Our facilities are not equipped with the most powerful of processors.” She looks into my face with a searching gaze. “I am searching for them, however. Don’t you worry. I won’t let you be limited by something like that.”

“Thank you, Sabina.”

She grins satisfactorily, like a pleased parent. She begins tapping into her tPanel as she speaks. “So today, we’ve got an interesting bit of code for you to experiment with. We have been running it through your systems for the past few weeks—I’m not sure if you were aware of it—but whenever you and I visited museums and such, we tested the code to see if it actually worked.”

“Code? Ah. To capture my emotional reactions, all that bit.”

“Exactly.” Sabina scratches her head. I peek over to her tPanel. The code manifestation pulsates in the form of a blue orb with an ever-shifting surface, rippling like the waves of a vast ocean.

“What is it?” I ask curiously.

“When we first inserted you into the system, we only had rudimentary versions of this code,” Sabina explains. “It mimicked emotion; the code was written to the best of our ability, but I am sure you noticed you weren’t really…feeling like your old self.”

I nod. Her revelation explains a great deal of why I had been so numb to things, more so than my old, human form, at least.

“Ten has created two parts to this code. The first, which you see here, is the emotion code. It analyzes your past history, the decisions you made, what events from your past impacted you most; then uses those things to predict how you would feel in certain circumstances, and injects a sufficient amount of that emotion into your system based on its analysis.”

I frown. “I’m not sure I’ll like that, Sabina. What if what the code makes me feel isn’t really…me?”

Sabina nods understandingly. She places her coffee back onto the table, and lays a hand on my wrist. “I absolutely agree, and understand your concerns. It will be only a test run, and if you really hate it, you can unravel it yourself. You are in control. In fact, the bigger concern with the code is that you might not feel anything new.”

I cock my head. “What do you mean?”

“Well, it can only see how you acted in the past, based on your memories, so it is limited to basing a response drawing from ‘old information’, so to say. But past behavior is not a good indicator of future possibility. There is no room for inspirational impulse, or a reaction drawn from novel realization.” Sabina then smiles smugly. “There is other code for that.”

“Oh?” I ask curiously.

Sabina beams, like a triumphant child. “I like to call it the Inspiration Code. Ten, being the scientist he is, calls it the Incentive Factor or the Catalyst Code.” Sabina recites the names in a voice drenched with a sarcasm that implies her fondness for her friend. “So cold, so boring, if you ask me.”

She brings up her tPanel and shows it to me. The code is an orb similar to the blue one from earlier, but its palpitations are much more volatile, the undulations marred by sudden outreaches of the surface into jagged peaks and spikes. Two colors war within the form—green and red—with a mixed portion, blackish in its hue, roiling in between.

I feel the echo of unease while looking into the code.

“When will I get that?” I nod at it.

“I want to ease you into it slowly,” Sabina assures me. “One thing at a time.”

“Alright then,” I jump abruptly onto my feet and clap my hands. “So, when do we do it?”

Sabina gives a cry of surprise from my sudden movement, which then transforms into continued laughter. “There’s my girl. Let’s do it right now, if you wish.”

Using my skills, I teleport us into the center spire of the Crystalline Towers. It is there that I first encounter the researcher named Ten.

He’s a tall and wiry man, his shoulders so stooped that one might think he carries the burden of the world’s sorrows on his back. He combs back a shock of disheveled black hair, then pushes up his techSpects. He offers a timid wave.

“Hello, Vyvani. You don’t know me, but I have been observing you from the physical world. My name is Tenzo, though Sabina calls me Ten.”

I offer my hand in humanly greeting. “Sabina’s mentioned you before. A pleasure.”

His demeanor appears to relax somewhat, though his movements are still restless and abrupt. He takes my hand in his. “Yes, yes. A pleasure indeed.”

Tenzo’s eyes are agitated, skittering across the floor and walls as he works on his tPanel. His fingers are jerky as they move, and he continuously offers awkward smiles at both Sabina and myself.

Suddenly, a door appears against the far wall of the chamber. Tenzo whips around and beckons us to follow. “Come, come with me.”

We cross the length of the room. It takes everything I have to conceal my surprise when Tenzo finally opens the door.

It is a database city, or the beginnings of one, similar in blueprint to the one I have been secretly observing. Only one center tower rises from the center, but the strange, glassy roof of everlasting day stretches across the sky. So now I know who the holoViewers in the secret city were set up for. I keep my suspicions at bay.

Tenzo leads us into the center tower and steps through the doorless surface, much as I have been doing all this time. I follow silently, with no indication of my familiarity with the act.

We end up in a server room, though this one is brightly lit. A strange VR pod rests in the center, similar in appearance to a half-roofed bed. A series of holoViewers and screens are set up behind it.

“Before we begin, let us first inspect your state,” Tenzo says. He steps to the screens and begins typing furiously. “There was no need for this extravagance, you see. We could have merely inserted the code from the outside, within our facilities, and have had the same effect. Sabina insisted we do it this way, with a physical representation of transfer, as she believed that the part of your mind that still retains its ‘humanness’ would give the event greater weight and credence if we did so.”

Sabina smiles sheepishly and almost blushes. “A gift for a pupil, Vyvani.” She pats my head, then proceeds to scowl at her friend. “Really, Tenzo?”

The researcher chuckles nervously.

They pull up my own consciousness, a slowly twirling orb of light grey and soft blue hues, smooth and nearly unrippled. Any wave which traverses its surface appears to be an anomaly. It is so different in its…temperament, to the other code I have encountered today.

As Tenzo and Sabina speak amongst themselves, gathered around Sabina’s tPanel, I gaze with increasing interest into the sphere of my consciousness. I recall the blazing storm that was the Kargu man’s mind, and I begin to wonder of who had commanded him to commit such atrocities. I think of Sangsum, of Shampai, of Akato, of Kargu. I think of Vorin and Shora. A ripple crosses the surface of the orb as I think these things.

“Are you ready, Vyvani?” Sabina says. She squeezes my shoulders.

For a brief moment, the orb of consciousness is overcome by shadow and flickers, ever so slightly, before returning to its stable form.

“Absolutely,” I answer.

Sabina takes me by the hand and leads me to the VR pod.