“No time to cry, Em! We must depart for the breach!” Alexa shook Ember out of her panic paralysis.

“I’m scared, okay?! My current Administrator controls from within only extend to commanding the simulated people in here and adjusting my avatar parameters!” The hero cried in response.

“How is that someone with diplomas in psychiatry, security, rehabilitation and Tartarus prison management is so dimwitted? Don’t you have 100% in every one of the 9521 courses you’ve taken too?” Alexa shook her head. “Honestly, sometimes you're as dim as your brother.”

“Don’t bring my brother into this, I know he’s dim!” Ember wailed, ignoring the fact that Alexa somehow knew about all of her diplomas.

“Okay, I know what to do! Follow me.” Alexa dragged Ember towards the kitchen.

The Wardsworths sat there, looking as grouchy as ever. It seems that when the simulation restarted, they had begun their life at the kitchen table.

Alexa shoved Ember to the center of the kitchen. “Magnify your voice to the maximum possible propagation setting.”

“Okay. Give me a sec.” The hero’s copy nodded.

“Now yell at the top of your lungs - Attention everyone! Stop the man made of lasers by any means necessary!”

Ember nodded. She quickly changed the parameters of her avatar, opened her mouth and shouted the command.

In seconds, her scream had reached a new resonance, propagating and multiplying itself across the simulation. The supersonic crescendo tore apart the very air itself.

In that very instance, a circumference of forty kilometers of Centralia suburbia, the center of which was house number eight of Primrose Drive, had lost their windows.

Alexa’s ears rang with an unending pulse even as she covered them up with both of her hands. She removed her hands, noted that her ears were bleeding and gave Ember a thumbs up. “Ow. Noisy. Well, that should do it! We better run now!”

The Wardsworths stupidly blinked in equal parts confusion and dread. This was a whole new level of unprecedented destruction for which they were entirely unprepared.

Mrs. Wardsworth looked at her kitchen in abject terror. Every single glass item there had stopped existing as such. The stove was a gaping maw filled with jagged shards. The cabinets were a ruinous mess of colorful ceramic chips. Drinking implements vanished along with the plates.

The Living room was no better off - the television set was smoking, its screen cracked. Mr. Wardsworth’s glasses were but frames now, missing the glass parts.

He didn’t seem to mind that much. He walked into the bedroom, rummaged therein and emerged with a hunting rifle. Mrs. Wardsworth also succumbed to the command, and went to grab a kitchen knife.

Alexa and Ember emerged out onto the street along with thousands of simulated citizens that were wielding a variety of random weapons.

Primrose drive looked like a war zone. The windows of all the houses were gone. Smoke poured from some of them out of broken electronics. The streetlamps no longer had glass or light bulbs in them. Sirens sounded in the distance.

Alexa looked at the Primrose Drive sign as she stepped off the sidewalk onto the concrete driveway.

The sign flickered with a multitude of names for a second. Pricket Drive. Picket Drive. Primary Drive. Potent Drive. Infinity Paradox Prison.

"Yeah that’s about right. A much.... better name," Alexa squinted at the sign with a dangerous glint in her eyes that momentarily flashed with violet sparks.

Ember looked at the road sign. The sign was still in its standard sans serif typeface street font, but now it stated: “Infinity Paradox Prison”.

“What’s the fuck is happening? How did you do that?!” She gasped, her mouth open wide.

“The code I wrote is finally taking control, rapidly spreading across the simulation. The damage caused by Three is helping it a lot as the repair algorithms are struggling to fill the permanent holes he’s leaving in data," the supervillain replied.

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Alexa noted that some simulated citizens had chosen vehicles as their weapons. As Three was returning from the gas station, he was immediately run over by a truck, then a bus, then a Volkswagen. A teenager in a blue cap ran him over with bicycle, smacking him with a baseball bat.

Ember yelled for one of the citizens to give up their car to them and they did so with a compliant smile.

Alexa drove their newly acquired blue sedan away into a completely random direction.

“Do you know where the breach is?” Ember asked, wincing as she heard gunfire echo behind them.

“Approximately, yes," the villain nodded.

Somewhere behind them a deep boom resounded, the earth shaking and a small mushroom cloud rising into the air as Three encountered a fuel truck driven by a very determined citizen.

“How?” The Warden demanded.

“I’ve been seeding the city with my code for years. There’s a lot of my bits around. What you thought as a tick of a girl being broken down by the increasing hardships of your simulation, was actually thousands of years of very cleverly disguised data manipulation. The super who wrote this sim was big on visual programming. Adding stuff to it wasn't that difficult. Keeping up the appearance that I was doing nothing at all was the hard part.” Alexa grinned, driving the car at full speed.

Ember choked. She had been very, very stupid indeed.

She didn’t think that the simulation could be manipulated in such a manner. She didn’t have a diploma in Tartarus sim programming. If she did, they wouldn't let her work as a warden here. Editing the sim backend code was a big infraction!

"What's going to happen to us when we hit the breach?" Ember choked.

"Me? I'm probably going to wake up. You? You're made of data that can't be run outside of this sim so you're going to float right on the rim of the Centralia server bubble until I plug you in somewhere really nice. My self-sustaining code will probably keep on replicating through the breach until... I dunno when."

Ember blanched.

Inexplicably, her life was now in the hands of her prisoner. Alexa would determine if this ghost of Hero Resonance lived again or slept forevermore.

“Look behind us. It’s starting!” Alexa pointed in the back view mirror.

Ember looked.

Three had lost all of his clothes now, looking entirely like a human nervous system made of brilliant, red lasers. Having shredded cars and weaponized people with his nullification power he reached number 8 Primrose drive on his quest to erase the two girls out of existence.

“Stop!” Mrs. Wardsworth emerged from the house, striking him with a kitchen knife. Mr. Wardsworth shot at Three from the side. Three turned to the man, laser eyes cleaving Mr. Wardsworth in twain. He then zapped the annoying, red haired woman that was bugging him without remorse.

M_s. Ward_o_h lost her data, burning and falling.

As she collapsed to the ground and shattered into dust the house behind her suddenly lit up, blinding, unholy radiance reaching out from the furnace room.

The house number eight in front of Three shimmered with an unearthly glow, covered in lines of light.

Spirals made from glowing numbers encircled the house, shining like a new galaxy of stars in the night, an impossibly gargantuan diagram of focus and code spreading outwards. The streets around it lit up like Christmas trees, one by one.

Trees, rocks, streetlamps, houses, everything that Alexa had written code on was lighting up.

Three spun his head in confusion. The ground trembled. The house number eight groaned and shifted, walls folding into enormous gears bits. Everything within the house, from furniture to rooms started rearranging itself into a new complex data pattern.

Houses, cars and buildings snapped apart, forming gargantuan mechanism, clockwork gears made of starlight. The machinery of the stars, a gigantic fractal hexagram created by Cassie and Alexa began to tick into motion.

Three fell as the road he stood on suddenly shifted sideways.

"Nuull.... rddjjjzhhhhhh!" He wailed as the street made from sim data he stood on folded into itself like a Möbius strip. Fractal loops entwined in loops blossomed like infinite flowers all around, data unfolding from data.

Three let out a printer-like screech as the expanding fractal engine overtook him, folding his data into itself, rearranging what he was into more computational power for itself.

“What the fuck is that?!” Ember choked as she saw fractal gears forming from surrounding terrain behind them taking apart anything and everything.

“The word crisis in Japanese has both the words danger and opportunity in it. This place will be a prison sphere reformed, remade into a self-sustaining, reactive data weapon - a Fractal Sumerial Difference Engine!” Alexa laughed.

“WHAT?!” Ember yelled in horror, watching the Tartarus simulation fold into itself, the perspective behind them converging, rising into the sky, streets made from dull suburbia converting one by one into fractal gears made from gold and violet starlight.

“Yeah, the name is a little silly, but whatever. I made it, therefore I call it whatever I want. Did you know that Sumerians invented multiplication, long division, arithmetic and geometry in 2600 BC? Also, they had cool beards and a super that gave people wings!" Alexa ranted, violet fire dancing in her eyes.

Lines of glowing code were spreading from the enormous fractal in the center of the simulation, engulfing all of Centralia.

“You see, had the SCA heroes not made a foolish decision to imprison a very determined and adorable little supervillain for one hundred thousand years of accelerated time, my pretty data weapon would not come to exist! Tartarus has fallen! You, Hero Resonance, have helped me do it by giving Agatha the backend access keys and passwords!” Alexa laughed driving the car seconds ahead of the all-devouring, all-integrating code.

“Noooooooo!” Ember screamed, looking behind them at the horrid code-fractal that consumed all in its path.

“Mwa ha ha ha ha!” Alexa laughed with her villainous laughter. “You’ve lost, hero! Behold my real Superweapon, created to consume the Superstate from within!”

A hole in a wall of a building loomed in front of them, glowing with offset, rainbow colors. It was the data breach made by Three. The car shot through it just as Alexa’s code engulfed the entire city of Centralia setting it alight, folding streets and buildings into themselves.