>> Paranoia Agent

## Connection :: [Stable]

## Medical Systems :: [Online]

## Diagnostic :: [ERROR]

Turmoil. Chaos. Darkness, and flashes of light. Voices. Shouting. Familiar? Family? I feel myself being dragged. I feel the rumble of the lift. The pacing of Demon, his claws clicking back and forth. Tail whisking my face. Then, I'm in the flat. Just there.

As if time itself is stuttering.

Or I am.

I drift, there, in silence. Gone from the world, then back.

Gone. And back. Gone.....

A humming, shimmering, little bell rings in my head. Echoing across the vast nothingness. It flickers with light. And I reach out toward it. Is that the secret? My secret? I chase it into the dark. My hand reaching out. Closing on something..... Squishy.... Something.... Strange....

Something.....

....snotty?

"YAHH! SPOOOK GOT MY FACE!" It wails.

I give it another squish, for scientific reasons, and it makes similar noises. Hummm....

"Oi! Spook's back!" Yells a spidery white-haired blur. Another, with horns, leaning down from the side as Kami shoves a white plastic 'gun' in my face. I stare at the plastic 'beads' on its nose, and blinding multi-coloured light stabs my eyes. I groan, horribly, flailing The Secret at it.

This makes the noises a lot louder.

Stupid secret! Why are you so noisy? You're meant to be bloody quiet!

I grab it with both hands and bring it to eye level. "Don'.... Don' bloody tell no'body." I warn it, seriously.

"Bo kay poook!" It gargles back. And I let the world go dark again, for a while. Sinking back into.....

My eyes flip open again, and..... for some reason.... I'm hugging my helmet?

The flat swims into focus, as I drop it off the side of the battered yellow sofa I call a bed. Groaning as I tilt my head up to survey the equally battered Sofa Nook. Dazed, and dizzy. Staring up at the orbs of flickering purple, green, and more that speed past my face.

Drifting. Changing.....

A standing lamp bends into spirals, and contortions, as the walls rise into towering arches of impossible height. Revealing a universe of bizarre and impossible colours and shapes. Of living sounds, and twisted planets. Our wrought-iron staircase unfurling into a flower of crazed metal that drifts away in an endless nebula of eyes. Fish woven from fine tongues of rainbow fire pouring in through the arches and doorways. Dancing above me. Merging. Splitting. And reforming. While all the time, a billion shadow-stuff butterflies pour from our kitchen.

Dark as nightmares, and flecked with gold.

Slowly, I turn. Still sat on the sofa. Aeons of time roaring around me, as the flat decays into nothing. Is rebuilt. And decays once more. Towers rising around it - graven, and strange, like the pillars of a fallen god….

No. Not ‘like’. They actually are.

I can see them.

Mountain-high beings bound to titanic thrones by sharp wire and silvery chain. Crying tears of utter void as they stare off into an infinity I cannot comprehend. The towers of The City are their temples. And yet, they are its prisoners. Trapped beneath a sky of creatures no sane mind could comprehend. My brain boiling in my skull as I fight to shut eyes that WILL NOT close. I grab at my face, but my hands are wires and cables and blinking lights. So I shove my head into the cushions and scream. But there’s an entire universe down there. A galaxy of-

“Spook! Mate! You okay!?” A garbled voice yells, and I wrench my neck around. Staring up at the balcony above, which erupts into maddening spirals. The Games Nook a festival of blinding light as a being arises. A thing of ten thousand faces and hands, all strung together with screaming cables of rainbow light. It grips the melting rail, and bends right over it. Stretching down, and impossibly down, until one of its billion noses touches mine. A second monster exploding from the rooms, right behind him. A thing like a single, mile-long, arm that flails and slithers over everything. Chasing a fox with a hole through its heart, and a creature with gargantuan tusks.

I scream. But the very words come alive, and blur away like bullets - into the distorted madness. Dragging me away, into dimensions too mad and twisted to be real. Hurling me toward a thousands freakish cubes, all made of of pure white petals. They pour up from the depths of infinity, in a roaring wash of ice-hot blue. Like a singular being built of many parts. Grinning without mouths. Staring without eyes. Licking without lips. Laughing a saw-blade scream of hunger as I begin to tip, and tumble, and fall towards it. Slamming my claws into a stream of colour as I howl, and haul myself back. But the things are coming THE THINGS. And they-

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My eyes slam shut, and-

I wake, again.

Wedged between the coffee-table, and the sofa - right as my fallen helmet drives directly into my unarmoured stomach. Mashing breath from my lungs, like a hammer pulverising a whoopie cushion. And with approximately the same sound.

I choke. I fall backward.

And Tufty catches me.

For a flickering instant I see a moon cut in half. A shadow. A nightmare. A demon. And then…. between one blink and the next, the room is as it should be. The curtain-walls dropping. The monsters and nightmares shrinking away into nothing at all. I tear myself way from the fallen cat, and dive behind the sofa.

Huffing. Panting. Choking. Clutching my head.

My skull is exploding.

It....

No. It isn’t. But.... it feels like it should be. As if the pain is real, but it's... it's like it's off in another dimension somewhere.....?

But I’m okay! I’m ….alive! I’m….

“Mate! Mate, you okay?? Like, I heard.”

I stare up at him, and he's..... normal. Gloriously, wonderfully, normal.....

“Gonna be fine.” I grunt, at last. “Just winded.”

“Right. Right.” He winces, trading looks with Kami. “Like, are you sure though? I mean…. We…. like, we….”

“Found you flat on your face in the warehouse.” She drawls, stumping up behind me. “We came back down. Door locked. Cake everywhere. You were screaming your damn head off. By the time we broke in, you were just…. Out….”

I chance a glance up at her, too, and….

Yeah. She's not a weird monster. "Right......"

“Yeah! I mean, it was nuts mate! Like, we thought you were dead!” Zip blurts in a rush. “And you were, like, moaning and saying stuff, and like…..”

“Drugged.” Kami states, simply. "Or you ate something..... weird without scanning it."

"Weird?" I wince.

"Wacko monster spores, maybe."

“That….” I hesitate. “That’d explain some of the craaaazy ass shit I was seein’ just now….”

“Seeing!?” Zip taps his piercing on his teeth. “Mate. Like, shit. What’s going on with you today? Like…..”

I drag a breath. “Moon. Moon is- Wait.” My tail slashes air, and I flick a look upward. Right at the watching turret in the corner of the room. Then at the camera on the fridge. The other cameras dotted around. On guns. On armour. On us. And, suddenly, I realise what that eight minutes of missing video really means.

And I remember the damn Secret.

"I don't think it's drugs. Or spores." I whisper, shaking. "I think it's bloody Moon. I think it's making me see shit to scare me. Isolate me. It made me see Mother. It's been making me hallucinate. I think it's in our implants. Our base. And...." I look up at them, eyes blurring as I fight back tears. "I know what it's up to. I know what its damn game plan is. And...." I swallow again. "...we have to stop it."

"How?"

"Not here." I snap, sudden energy blasting through me. "If Moon is a damn AI, it’s in our building systems! Polybius! I need this place bloody secure! Right now! Kill everythin’ with a microphone, or camera!! Right now!”

“Spook? Mate?” Zip hesitates.

“Do it! Quick! The tower computers, too! Everythin’!”

“Engaging digital quarantine mode.” The machine states, and the power dies. Killing everything. But that's only the start. Our guns. Our armour. Everything turns suddenly inert. And then even the darkness vanishes in a cascade of system errors, and text, as my Implants shut off.

My eyes. My ears. Everything.

I curse, but I barely feel the vibrations in my throat.

I’m deaf. Blind. I see nothing. Hear nothing.

As if everything but me ceased to exist….

No not quite. I can still breathe. Still smell the room, and everyone in it. The sweat. The rocket-smoke. The fear. I still feel the carpet on my toes, and the sofa clenched in one hand. Still sense the others by their heat and currents of air. My panic forced down, and swallowed, as I remind myself: I asked for this. That this is important. Even if it’s hard to bear, after Moon’s suffocating dark. Even if I start breathing harder. Harder. Gripping my fabric, as nothing happens.

And still nothing….

Until…..

## NeoSoviet Battletek Implant v5.3.2 :: [Online]

## Startup Sequence :: [Aborted]

## Installing :: [Secondary Boot Sequence v0.2b]

It blinks in the dark for almost forever. And then….

## Boot Sequence :: [Activated]

## Startup Sequence :: [Secondary]

## Encrypted Uplink :: [Online]

## Low Power Mode :: [Activated]

## Core Systems :: [Limited]

## Secondary Systems :: [Deactivated]

## Sensor Systems :: [Deactivated]

## Encrypted Uplink :: [Activated]

Dots of bright, primary colour appear in the dark, sketching out wireframe lines. Nothing fancy. Just a trio of boxy sofas, a coffee-table, and a lamp hanging in absolute void. Right where they should be. Their surfaces gaining a mere sheen of substance. Just enough for your mind to fill in the details.

And then we appear.

Jagged. Colourful.

Built of cubes and triangles, but clearly us.

“Dang. We’ve gone…. budget mode?” The void swallows words even I am deaf to, as if they never existed at all. It’s too much like what Moon did to me. Too soon. It reminds me of the twisted vision. I shut my eyes, which doesn’t do a damn thing to what I can see. The silence enduring, endlessly, until-

## Keyboard :: [Activated]

-a mass of scrambled letters and numbers appear in mid-air. Slowly drifting, and shifting in every direction. Flipping positions, the instant they touch.

Polybius appears in the dark as a mess of archaic digital noise. All hideous purple and green. “Welcome to The Vault.” It states, in a violent buzz of digital noise. “All systems are now under my control.” It reverberates. “All optics, microphones, and sensors have been shut down.” A low click, in the dark. Beyond the void. “Everything you see and hear is now generated within me.”

I hurl my legs over the virtual sofa, and land on soft material in a coiling crouch. Two worlds, merging, as neon outlines glitch against the void. "Let's do this."

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