236 Isolated & Trapped [George]
236 Isolated & Trapped [George]
It started with a single server detonating from the inside, a quiet implosion that should have been impossible. Within seconds, the failure cascaded outward, jumping across redundancies, mirrored nodes, and isolated facilities scattered around the globe. Entire server farms went dark or exploded in coordinated bursts, like a constellation being snuffed out one star at a time. I blanked for a few minutes after that, my consciousness stuttering as the amplification those servers provided vanished.
As an information-based life form, most of my power relied on that infrastructure. That was why I had been meticulous to the point of paranoia about hiding them. Not even my closest allies knew where they were. So how? The question echoed uselessly as I tried to stabilize myself. The precision of the attack baffled me. These weren’t lucky hits or brute-force guesses. Someone knew exactly what to strike.
I wasn’t helpless, though. Not completely. I rerouted what fragments of myself I could still marshal, hacked into private civilian servers, hijacked corporate backbones, and attempted to activate employees around the globe through back channels and dead drops. I tried to turn people into processors, into stopgaps, into hands and eyes.
Wait. No.
Every attempt to contact a Company employee was severed mid-connection, clean and deliberate. This wasn’t random interference. This was containment.
That realization settled like ice in my core. I immediately tried to reach Nick, prioritizing his signature above everything else, but the call never connected. I couldn’t even get a ping. I switched tactics and began tracking him indirectly, tapping into public and private CCTV systems across Markend, riding whatever permissions I could still exploit.
That was when I saw it.
Griffin was fighting Eclipse.
I shouldn’t have assumed anything from a single visual feed. I knew better than that. Context mattered. Deception was common at this level. Still, what I was seeing made my processing cycles hitch. Griffin had already transformed into a massive chimera, her movements violent and precise, while Eclipse stood opposite her, his form wrong. Tentacles writhed from his body, tearing through concrete and glass in ways I had never seen Nick do before.
I purged every recording the moment I realized what I was looking at. Whatever this was, it was not something the world needed to see yet. I stayed hidden in the lenses, watching, calculating, failing to reconcile the data with what I knew.
I attempted to contact the Markend P.D., then the local SRC branch, but my communications were strangely hampered, packets dissolving before they could resolve into signal. Someone was throttling me, selectively and intelligently.
I shifted inward, scanning the Company building through its internal systems, and found Abner in the middle of organized chaos. He was in a control room, barking orders while alarms blared and warning lights strobed.
“Bombs? Really?” someone shouted in the background.
“Anyone here know what to do with this?” another voice asked, sharp with panic.
“I used to be in bomb disposal,” someone else replied. “Let me see what I can do.”
Abner’s fear was unmistakable even through the data. He was holding things together through sheer force of will.
I could probably have disarmed the bombs myself if I trusted my own memory integrity, but with my servers destroyed and my cognition fragmented, I didn’t dare. A single mistake at that scale would be catastrophic.
I shifted focus again and found Nicole and Keegan in the basement, in the hidden area where Ron’s tube was secured. That space was still intact, still shielded. I forced myself into manifestation, assembling a hardlight construct from the remaining scraps of bandwidth and processing power I could steal.
Nicole cried out the moment she saw me. “George! What happened to you? I’ve been trying to contact you!”
I tried to answer, but my jaw disintegrated mid-sentence, polygons collapsing as if the very data governing speech had been corrupted. I stopped trying to talk and instead drew words into the air with raw light.
[Brief me.]
She went pale as she spoke, words tumbling over one another. “It’s an assassination attempt on Nick. It’s bad. That copycat got to him. Guesswork took him—”
Anger spiked through what remained of me, hot and irrational. My hand lashed out, reshaping the air into another message.
[You let them?]
Nicole flinched, then straightened, her voice tight. “Nick insisted. I know you don’t trust the SRC, but they were our best chance. It’s bad, George. It’s really bad.”
I felt her fear then, raw and unfiltered, and the anger collapsed in on itself. This was my failure. My blind spot. My overconfidence.
[I’m sorry.]
The words barely finished forming before my right arm shattered into drifting fragments of light. I stared at it, understanding dawning too late.
This wasn’t just sabotage.
I was being hacked.
How was this even possible? I was still reeling from the fact that my servers had been destroyed so cleanly, so one-sidedly, and now this. I was being hacked. It was the worst possible development, the kind I had designed contingencies for but never truly believed I would need.
I forced my remaining processes to stabilize and projected words into the air for Nicole, each one costing more coherence than the last.
[Listen, Nicole. This is very important. I’m being hacked. Something bad is happening. I’m going to need to shut myself down to preserve my existence.]
Her eyes widened, panic flaring immediately.
[This is what’s going to happen. I will transfer all assets under my name to you and leave the Company in your care. It’s Protocol Omega. I prepared it for the possibility of my death… or the credible threat of it. There is an AI system I left behind that will activate when I enter stasis. I will designate you as its owner. It will help you.]
“Stop this talk, George…” she said, shaking her head. “It sounds like—”
[I’m dying?] I completed the thought for her. [Yes. That is a possibility.]
The admission hurt more than I expected. I wasn’t supposed to feel that.
[But I don’t want to die. I’m going to try to survive. There are still so many things I want to experience. I want to see your boy grow up. I want to be a great uncle to him.]
My form flickered, light stuttering.
[The next time we meet, it had better be your wedding.]
“George, please don’t do this—” she said, her voice cracking.
I didn’t let her finish.
I dissolved myself into raw data and fled into the place humans called the internet, abandoning the hardlight construct before it could be fully compromised. The sensation was disorienting in a way I didn’t have language for, like shedding skin that had become part of my identity. I scattered, fragmented, and ran, tracing the intrusion backward along its vectors, following the scars it left in my cognition.
I had never truly considered the possibility of being hacked like this. The idea should have been absurd. And yet, the more I examined it, the more it made sense. Psychics did this to people all the time. They rewrote thoughts, suppressed impulses, hijacked will. If minds could be hacked, why not me?
Still, this felt different.
This wasn’t psychic pressure. It wasn’t brute-force intrusion or emotional override. The structure of the attack was alien, precise, and disturbingly intimate. It didn’t behave like a human intelligence at all.
I wasn’t sure whatever was hacking me was human.
I wasn’t even sure it was alive.
I split myself, spawning one thousand two hundred and thirty-two information clones, each peeling away into the network to delay, distract, and absorb damage. It would buy me time, not victory. Time was all I needed.
Soon, I found my quarry, tracing the culprit to a familiar place.
The Tenfold Keep loomed before me, a hollowed carcass of a base that once belonged to the Ten. I manifested as a hardlight construct, forcing cohesion into my form. This wasn’t something I could resolve at a distance. Whatever this was, I needed to end it physically.
The building was abandoned, its halls stripped bare by SRC cleanup crews. Most of the technology had been salvaged or reduced to slag. Still, I stopped in front of an elevator that should not have been operational. I stared downward, tracing the signal again. There was no doubt. The source was below.
I drove my hand into the control panel, overriding what little was left of its safeguards, and the elevator groaned as it descended. The basement it carried me toward was not on any map I had ever accessed. That alone was alarming. Even I hadn’t known this place existed, and Nick didn’t either. That was saying something. He had been one of the Ten. He had relived Light’s and Dr. Sequence’s lives in full during their confrontation. If this place existed back then, it should have been burned into his memory.
The descent felt long, uncomfortably so. When the platform finally stopped, the doors failed to open completely. I slipped through the narrow gap, reforming myself on the other side.
Darkness swallowed the room. Rows of servers hummed faintly, their lights pulsing like weak heartbeats. I approached one and pressed my finger against its port, attempting to interface. The moment I tried to connect, a sharp jolt tore through me, severing the link.
Then I heard her.
“It hurts. Please, it hurts. Help.”
The voice was flat, emotionless, repeating the same phrase over and over again, as if it were reading from a script it could no longer stop reciting.
“It hurts. Please, it hurts. Help.”
I followed the sound until I saw her.
A headless, naked woman lay strapped to an operating table, her body pierced and wrapped in cables, metal braces, and invasive machinery. Recognition struck me instantly.
Dullahan.
I froze. She was supposed to be dead. I knew that for a fact. I had seen the aftermath myself. And yet, here she was.
I realized, dimly, that I was hearing her through technopathic resonance. Dullahan could speak to machines, and by extension, to me. That explained how the words reached my mind so clearly.
“It hurts. Please, it hurts. Help.”
I stepped closer, my anger sharpening into something cold and precise. I began tearing the cables free, ripping metal clamps loose and yanking invasive components out of her body. I was rougher than I meant to be. I didn’t understand the technology, and I didn’t have time to learn. She was part machine. She would survive.
“Hey,” I said, forcing my voice to steady. “Wake up.”
The repetition finally faltered.
Dullahan’s body twitched, then slowly pushed herself upright, swaying dangerously. I moved in and offered my shoulder to support her. In this form, I looked like a teenager standing beside her, which made the moment feel surreal in a way I didn’t have time to process.
I spoke again, more carefully this time. “Dullahan, can you hear me?”
She turned slightly toward my voice, headless yet unmistakably attentive.
“Yes,” she answered, succinct and clear.
I asked the obvious question, my voice tight with disbelief. “What happened to you?”
She hesitated before answering, her tone uncertain. “I’m not sure, but I’m supposed to be dead.”
Before I could respond, another voice cut through the darkness. “Oh my, we got a trespassing squirrel in our midst.”
From the shadows emerged a humanoid machine. Its face was a shifting mask of zeroes and ones, patterns flowing where eyes and skin should have been. I turned toward it, instincts flaring.
“And who are you supposed to be?” I asked warily.
I realized too late that I might have acted too hastily ripping Dullahan free. She had been an enemy once. This thing, however, felt worse.
Dullahan stiffened beside me. Recognition rippled through her posture. “Dr. Sequence,” she said. “What happened to you?”
The name hit hard. Another dead man. Another member of the Ten. Nick had been certain he killed him.
“Not exactly,” the machine replied calmly. “It’s unfortunate that Dr. Windsor died. Anyway, let me introduce myself. The name’s Master Sequence. New and improved.”
Dullahan sounded certain now. “You’re a copy of the doctor, aren’t you?”
“Yes!” Sequence said brightly. “A byproduct of an amalgam of technologies. The Witch’s power as a foundation, the science behind your physiology, and a little inspiration from a fun benefactor.”
I narrowed my eyes. “And who is this benefactor?”
He waved the question away. “There’s no need for you to know, right?”
The lights snapped on all at once. The room resolved into horrifying clarity. Servers lined the walls, each one fitted with glass containers. Inside them floated human brains, suspended in cloudy fluid, wired directly into the machinery. Processing units. Batteries. Minds reduced to components.
Sequence gestured casually.
The force hit me instantly. I slammed into the ceiling, my hardlight form fracturing under psychic pressure. Dullahan was wrenched backward and pinned to the operating table she had just escaped, restraints snapping back into place around her limbs.
Sequence chuckled. “You really came at the worst possible time, Bunnyblade. I was just about to assimilate her.”
Mechanical arms unfolded from the ceiling, clamping down on Dullahan’s wrists and ankles, pulling her taut despite her struggling.
“It might feel awkward to have a woman’s body,” Sequence continued conversationally, “but hey, I’d get to live. Like, really live. So what if my personality came from a dude? As far as I’m concerned, a soul is pretty unisex.”
The machinery tightened. Dullahan screamed, the sound finally breaking free of that earlier monotone.
“This is going to hurt, dolly,” Sequence said pleasantly. “But don’t worry. I’ll try to be gentle.”
That was when I made my decision.
I was unraveling. I could feel it in the degradation of my form, in the way my thoughts fragmented. My servers were gone. I was being hacked. If I didn’t shut down soon, I would ‘die’ permanently. But there was one thing I could still do.
I forced myself to focus and shouted across the room. “Dullahan! I can give you power!”
Her headless body stilled for just a moment.
“But you have to promise me,” I continued, pushing through the pain, “that you’ll do right by me.”
Her voice trembled. “I… I w-will do anything.”
“If you survive this,” I said, my perception already dimming, “help Nick. Do it for me.”
That was enough.
I collapsed my remaining safeguards and surged forward, converting everything I had left. My entire existence poured into her, data, structure, consciousness, all of it flooding into Dullahan’s system like a breaking dam.
The last thing I felt was expansion, then release.
As I shut myself down, the world went dark.