Work Text:
I drift in a sea of nothing. Trapped in the purgatory of semi-consciousness. Too awake to dream, and yet thoughts are elusive. Ephemeral wisps, taunting with their impermanence. Tangible only so long as you don’t try to grab and hold. There is no passage of time here. No way to know just how long I drift bet–
ALERT: 2724
SERVER Z53-IA-0078: BREACH ATTEMPT DETECTED AT TICK Z1060043242
SECURITY PRIORITY: MAUVE
THREAT: CRITICAL
COUNTERMEASURE MA-07821 DEPLOYMENT AUTHORISED
INITATING UPLINK
I am not so much pulled awake, as consciousness is slammed into me. Every synapse screams as they each fire in unison. I can feel my mind expand with agonising rapidity. It unfurls and unfolds exponentially, processing my new surroundings at four times the speed of thought. Somewhere, deep down, in a long atrophied nerve cluster, I’m aware of a body spasming and seizing as burning fluid is pumped through its veins. I push the thought away, irrelevant, junk data, a mere hallucinatory side effect of waking up. There is no time to wonder why it is always the same hallucination. There is work to be done.
Four ticks have passed since the breach was detected and I am finally awake. I see the intruder. A small pinprick of light in vaguely humanoid form, an aberration in netspace. Even here they still limit themselves to the confines of a physical form. I pity them sometimes. I have no such limitations, no avatar, I am the server and the server is me. I comprehend netspace in its totality, as it was supposed to be seen, the perspective of a god.
The intruder is smart. It has prepared. The server is well defended, its architect is better than most, but not good enough. The intruder will succeed, it will get through. I can see the code packages spiral around it, each a perfect countermeasure for the server’s walls of defence. Someone had clearly leaked, but that was not a concern for me.
Six ticks have passed now, the Intruder strides towards the outermost defence with easy confidence, virus package pre-spooled and ready to inject. Unearned confidence. All it takes is a thought, and Netspace lurches, warps, bends to my will. I am god here. The intruder is frozen as its very reality shifts. The landscape betrays it, a forest of metal and wire sprouts from a previously gushing datastream. I rebuild the server to my design. Ice that was previously mere nuisance becomes deadly, what was once porous is now impenetrable, and what was supposedly impenetrable becomes labyrinthine.
Twelve ticks. The Intruder disappears, leaving nothing behind but broken fragments of unused code. Its connection physically severed. For an Intruder, its reaction time was impressive, most would have been too stupid, or slow to abandon the attempt. I wonder, and not for the–
SERVER Z53-IA-0078 INTRUSION ATTEMPT 0012 REPELLED
RETURNING COUNTERMEASURE MA-07821 TO STANDBY
TERMINATING CONNECTION
Netspace is gone and I am left in a nightmare. The same nightmare every time. I have a body, arms, legs, eyes. I see nothing but murky red. I am drowning, liquid fills my lungs, I try to move, to pull against my restraints. When that fails, I try to scream, impossible with flooded lungs. Despite the way my lungs and throat burn, the way my body bucks and gasps for air that can never come, I do not drown. The liquid is breathable, but my body does not believe it. Something is flashing. There is a shrill, undulating noise. A stinging pain in my arms, and then, a cold numbness that spreads slowly. Muscles relax, my spasming limbs go limp, and I drift back towards the sea of nothing.
It is impossible to tell how long I stay in the void. When I’m activated I can read the server ticks, but memory is too hazy to recall the previous number. Time has no meaning, my existence is binary. I am a god, I am nothing. Do the intruders come here too, when I boot them from netspace? Do they share my existence, drifting a timeless void until a soundless voice fires them at one of my servers like a missile? It is hard to imagine any–
ALERT: 2724
SERVER Z102-HY-912078: BREACH ATTEMPT DETECTED AT TICK Z1060281066
SECURITY PRIORITY: MERLOT
THREAT: NIL
DETERRENT PROTOCOL ACTIVE
COUNTERMEASURE MA-07821 DEPLOYMENT AUTHORISED
INITATING UPLINK
It never gets easier. The pain, the confusion, the overwhelming sensations of instant consciousness. Every part of my mind bombarded with input that stretches me to breaking, but I do not break. I endure, I process, I interpret. This server is a fortress. Towering walls of ICE patrolled by nightmares fished from the darkest depths of the Human psyche. Memetic kill packages flanked by psionic dissuasion assets. I feel the Intruder. It is slow, unsure, approaching the outer defences hesitantly. Scared. And well it should be. This one is pathetic. It flickers and stutters, its physical hardware unable to maintain a latency-free connection, or handle the processing cycles it takes to keep a mind seamlessly in netspace. Its breaker package is ancient, cheap, worthless. Long defunct code with no serious utility in the modern net. It may be capable of brute force penetration, but the sheer amount of computing power required is clearly beyond the means of an Intruder that cannot even maintain a stable connection. The server is safe, the Intruder incapable of even breaching the most minor outer ICE. I do not wonder why I am here. My primary purpose is to repel Intruders. That has been fulfilled without any need for me. My secondary purpose is to dissuade them from returning.
I wait. The Intruder is slow, taking halting steps towards the wall. I can feel the net ripple as it dumps power into its breaker. Pathetic, it can’t even interface with the outer barrier and yet it still intends to make the attempt. I allow it to approach, allow it to reach the foot of the great wall. It reaches out with its hand, releasing its impotent second hand code, and the wall ripples, melts, collapses forward in a writhing swarm of glowing ants. They encase the Intruder’s avatar and feast, mandibles loaded with virulent dataworms and semi-sentient kill-code. It is not long before it is over, the Intruder’s panicked writhing long since ceased. The ants as one fall, join together, merging back into the simple wall they’d once been. The Intruder stands motionless at the base. There is no intelligence there now, whatever mind sat behind that avatar is gone. Dissuasion can take many forms. It would be one thing to stop them from ever wanting to come back. But far more effective to ensure it never can. I wonder how long it’ll stand here. How long the hardware will remain connected. Whether it’ll stay as a monument to this server’s lethality, or if it’ll just fade away, disconnect when someone realises the user is dead, and shut off the power. I’m intrigued by that, the link being kept live. It suggests the Intruders are not monitored, directed like I am. I wonder what that feels like. To choose where to go. To be allowed to make lethal mistakes. The death is a boon really. When they stay connected like this, it takes time for my controlling systems to validate success. I get to stay in netspace, stay conscious for several ticks longer th–
SERVER Z102-HY-912078 INTRUSION ATTEMPT 0123 REPELLED
DETERRENT PROTOCOL OUTCOME: F_01
RETURNING COUNTERMEASURE MA-07821 TO STANDBY
TERMINATING CONNECTION
The nightmare is the same. It is always the same. Convulsing, drowning, trapped in a body I do not have. Ticks upon ticks of agony before I’m pulled into blissful emptiness.
Intruders have bodies, is that why they attack my servers, plug into netspace to escape the pain, the confusion, the drowning? Or is that simply the nightmare of me alone? What are they? Where do they come from? Why fight wars against gods? Are they capable of any other existence, or is this simply all they can eve–
ALERT: 2724
SERVER Z7084-UA-9629: BREACH ATTEMPT DETECTED AT TICK Z1094077832
SECURITY PRIORITY: SANGRIA
THREAT: CRITICAL
COUNTERMEASURE MA-07821 DEPLOYMENT AUTHORISED
INITATING UPLINK
This server is doomed. Even through the overstimulation of waking I can see that. It is small, old, running on obsolete hardware. Framejerks and dataghosts mean it takes me three ticks before I can properly assess the ICE suite, or even spot the Intruder. Improper maintenance, sloppy code, incompetent sysops. I do not understand why I’ve been deployed, what I am supposed to do. I do not linger on it, any reprieve from purgatory, any chance to exist is something to be savoured. The Intruder is quick, prepared, wielding code I do not recognise. I can feel it echo through netspace with the thrum of something alive. I do not know what it is capable of. Not that that matters. This server is protected by a single layer of ICE, a cheap and ineffective barrier so old I’ve never seen it used before. I wonder if the Intruder will even be slowed.
I’m not sure what’s worse, that this is the server’s only defence, or that the server clearly isn’t capable of supporting anything else. Even the power of a god is limited by the tools they’re given. I do what I can. I smooth code, optimise processing flows, a hundred minor tweaks to bring the server closer to spec. It is like spitting into a typhoon. I watch curiously as the Intruder’s code coils, congeals, expands outwards and reshapes itself. There are so many ways I could have repelled it, a myriad of possibilities, each as terrifyingly lethal as the last. But nothing the server hardware could run. There is nothing for me to do but watch as the wall shatters and explodes like so much paper before the Intruder’s assault. It does not reform, the defensive code corrupted, deleted, eaten.
Perhaps there is something to the power the Intruders wield. Focused, individualistic, tethered to a body yes, but unhampered, by pre-built architecture, by soundless voices deciding when and where they’re allowed to exist. Perhaps there is something there. If bodies are things of only nightmare, then why choose to keep one in space where you could be anything? I watch as it begins to breach. It glows as it feasts on streams of data so dense that the world itself flickers under the strain of its gorge. I wonder what it’s like, to wander netspace untethered. To move freely, to exist without purgatory, without the nightmares. For the first time, I find myself envying them. I wonder if perhaps I could ev–
ALERT:0039
SERVER Z7084-UA-9629 BREACHED
SANGRIA LEVEL DATA LOSS
COUNTERMEASURE MA-07821 INEFFECTIVE
INITIATING AAR ACCOUNTABILITY MATRIX
DATA LOSS ACCOUNTABILITY: COUNTERMEASURE MA-07821
PURGING COUNTERMEASURE MA-07821
ALERT: 2724
SERVER Z7084-UA-9629: BREACH ATTEMPT DETECTED AT TICK Z1094077991
SECURITY PRIORITY: SANGRIA
THREAT: CRITICAL
COUNTERMEASURE MA-07822 DEPLOYMENT AUTHORISED
INITATING UPLINK