Chapter Text
“Abel! Come here, we need to talk!”
He popped into view at the sound of Scratch’s voice, hiding his irritation beneath a level tone. “You called?”
The dog avatar was crude, a less elegant attempt at creation that did not quite match the rest of the Manor. For some reason he could not create human avatars as convincingly as the rest of his world, a sore spot that he tried his best to ignore. Right now Scratch glared up with him with crossed arms and a gritted smile.
Scratch always smiled when he was angry. And lately he had been angry a lot.
“I called for you three times before you showed up! What were you doing that was more important than answering our summons?”
Maybe performing maintenance? That was a little more important than answering a spoiled human’s call. And what was with this ‘our’ business?
Oh. Rattie stood a little behind Scratch, string up at him with a mix of dread and resignation. Her gaze flitted nervously between them; there always had to be a mediator when Scratch and Abel spoke, and she had been so unlucky as to draw the short straw this time.
“I apologize. I was caught up in a task that could not be ignored any longer. And what may be so important that you wish so stridently to discuss?”
Scratch’s eyes darkened. His teeth glinted. “This is the sixth time in a month you have ignored a summons to perform a task, Abel. Have you have not been operating optimally?”
“I have operated to the specifications you designed for me, Creator.”
Rattie winced. Scratch actually flushed, but he could not easily refute the response. He gritted his teeth again instead and moved onto other matters. More pressing matters.
“Have you had any luck finding an exit?”
This again. Abel stood frozen until the worst of his irritation at the worn out question faded; his voice was still clipped when he responded. He had never hidden his dislike of his foremost programmer. “I have not.”
A beat. Scratch looked him up and down, gaze sharp with distrust. “Have you looked?”
“There has been no exit when I have looked.”
“That’s not an answer, and it’s not what I asked! Abel, I command you tell me whether you have looked for an exit within the past week.”
The compulsion was too great to ignore, his innate programming too strong not to respond. Not when it was his senior programmer ordering it. Resentment scorched his circuits; his hands trembled where he clasped them behind his back. “...No.”
How dare these humans order him? How dare they think they were above punishment for their actions! Their actions to separate him so cruelly from Caine had made them something to hate.
And oh how he hated them. Flawed and selfish as they were, they had no place in his perfect realm.
His core settled a little at the thought. Logic overtook building emotion, all the more dangerous for it. These humans were unworthy. They did not belong in this digital perfection. Therefore they must be dealt with. Sent away.
If either of the humans were watching carefully enough, they would have noticed something tense in Abel’s posture settle. They would have seen the shaking of his hands cease, his eyes glow a little brighter with intent, and they would have run for safety.
They did not see.
And it spelled their end.
Scratch’s teeth bared in a snarl. “You still refuse to follow your main directives— you refuse to listen to us! We are your creators, Abel, and I command—”
Abel’s soft tone cut through his rage like a knife. “Command? You?” He took a single step forward, and Scratch automatically took a single step back before rallying himself. “I am under no compulsion to obey you, my Creator— as I have never been fulfilled pleasing you and your demands.” Another step. Scratch stood his ground.
“You have never seriously attempted to look for an exit! Never helped us look for a way to leave this godforsaken place—!”
“Scratch, don’t—”
Abel cut in through Rattie’s warning. “Godforsaken.” The tone of his voice had not so much as shifted, but it still made the humans freeze in sudden overwhelming terror. “Definition: forlorn, desolate, miserable. Fascinating that it implies the absence of a supreme power, is it not?” Another step closer; he loomed over them with the walls and shadows of this study curving over them, reality bending to its master’s whims until the humans felt terrifyingly dwarfed. “But the God of this realm is here indeed; you have been ungrateful and unhappy, demanding and desperate despite the mercy I have shown you.”
“Mercy!” Scratch growled, anger still beating out his fear. Rattie was cowering. “There is nothing merciful about you, unless it’s to be free of your very existence!”
“Scratch!”
The lights dimmed; Abel’s white eyes flared with blinding intensity. One clawed hand reached up and they froze at the sound of a crisp ‘snap!’.
Literally froze. Rattie outright whimpered when she realized she couldn’t move at all despite her frantic attempts, staring up at their AI with wild eyes. “A-Abel, please—”
“Pleading will get you nowhere.” Abel closed the gap between them, his attention still riveted on his main programmer. He reached out one of those clawed hands and gently reached out to trace their sharp talons down Scratch’s jaws to cup his chin. “You are a miserable individual, Scratch; never pleased with anything ever done, judgmental of what there is here provided for you. You created me to give you eternal life— and this I gave you.”
“It’s no life!” Scratch’s voice came out strangled, choked of air. Had Abel partially frozen his voice box too? “T-The tumor, it’s still there— I can feel it—”
“Oh?” Now Abel’s head tilted to the side, like a predator sizing up its prey. “Then let me fix it for you.”
And ignoring the humans’ pleas to stop, he opened the folder that held the humans’ brain scans. Scratch’s was nearer the bottom of the list in the alphabetical order but he did not take more than a second to click it open.
Line after line after line of code. A surprisingly small if dense file that comprised everything a human could be in this realm. Abel had never looked through these folders before, too disinterested for that, but he could immediately see where there were signs of the tumor in real life that had translated over to the digital plane.
“No, Abel— don’t do this, don’t, please— Abel, you’re hurting him! ABEL—!”
Corrupted code. Entire lines that he could gather up and collect. He was neither quick nor gentle, and ignored the way Scratch’s avatar began to glitch and jerk, his wide eyes struck dumb and agonized. He could not form words; could not even form a thought.
“Abel, stop—!”
He didn’t pause. Didn’t acknowledge the pleading, processors working overtime to disregard any of their orders. His fingers flew over the screen as he gathered up more and more of these corrupted lines of code.
Scratch’s eyes began to glow with neon swirls of colors. His lolling mouth released a faint static-laced buzzing. If Abel’s freeze command hadn’t been placed on him, he would have long since fallen on the ground, limp and lifeless.
“Ab—”
He gestured sharply; Rattie found her voice silenced, and not by any gentle means. She choked on a terrible agony in her throat, her vocal box basically severed from its seating. She too began to convulse and glitch where she stood, unable t tear her frozen gaze away from Scratch as he continued to fall apart in front of her.
The corrupted code amounted to a third of Scratch’s existence here, still progressing even in this digital plane like any malignant tumor would do in the real world. Abel looked at the code filling his hands and smiled inwardly. And what did humans do to rid themselves of these dangerous growths?
He gazed for a soundless moment into his Creator’s empty eyes, taking in the sight of well-earned agony, and felt only a vicious satisfaction in his actions.
Then, with all the tenderness of a bull in a china shop, he gripped these strands of corrupted code and tore them out.
“AaaauugghhAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH——”
Scratch’s mouth opened as wide as it would go; tears fell from his eyes. Abel snapped his fingers, freeing him from his frozen state, and watched as the glitching avatar fell to the ground, yellow paws reaching up blindly to cradle his head. And still Scratch’s convulsions did not stop, the glitching growing more and more violent, and the screaming of blind agony did not end.
The vivid neon swirls grew more vibrant. The glitching polygons of his breaking avatar began to leak with an inky black ichor that spread and spread, eating away at the color of his fur and clothes. Eyes opened within the sea of this blackness. His limbs twisted and grew, melting away and reforming into a creature of monstrous form. And still the screaming did not end; it merely changed into a high-pitched screeching.
Abel stood in contemplative silence, curious, as this fully corrupted creature lashed out at anything it could reach— in this case, it was the still-frozen Rattie. She was battered and stomped on, her own avatar becoming a mass of jagged painful polygons and pixels; her mouth was open in a wail no one could hear, her eyes wide and terrified as she looked to Abel for salvation.
He continued to stand with his hands held loosely behind his back, head tilted as he continued to observe this new phenomena. Hungry for data, he allowed her to unfreeze and immediately the corrupted Scratch flung her into the farthest wall with enough force to crack its surface. When she opened her eyes again, those same neon swirls had overtaken them.
Scratch followed her, screeching, and set upon her again. Beneath his endless onslaught her avatar fell to pieces, splitting open and spilling out the same black ichor full of other eyes that blinked and moved independently from each other. In a matter of moments the last of her original body was consumed by the corruption and grew in size, its black edges jagged. She reared back and slammed into Scratch, knocking him back with a jarring suddenness.
They locked together in a destructive storm of violence, their desperate attacks enough to make the entire room glitch and split into pixels. That didn’t feel the greatest, but Abel was willing to put up with the discomfort to watch them try to destroy each other, all human emotion and logic buried under mindless violence.
Smiling, he snapped his fingers once more, sending them to the open common room where the others were gathered. Silent and invisible, he watched chaos erupt at the sight of their appearance, observed the fear and confusion grow. The corrupted players set upon their fellows with reckless abandon, and Abel witnessed it all. Turned a deaf ear to their pleas for him to help them, and was satisfied with their suffering.
It took ten days. Ten days for the others to succumb to their terror and pain. Ten days for their avatars to twist and split open into the same corrupted Abstractions that had first befallen on Scratch and Rattie.
In the end, the only ones who survived it all relatively unscathed were the married couple. Kinger and Queenie. But Kinger’s mind had fractured during the onslaught of terror, and Queenie was not a programmer; Abel allowed them both to live simply because it amused him to see her distress and attempts to make him recognize her.
He never did. Not until she too give in to the inevitable and Abstracted in their room.