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 ti. 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 ticulous 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 . These weren’t lucky hits or brute-force guesses. Soone knew exactly what to strike.
I wasn’t helpless, though. Not completely. I rerouted what fragnts 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 containnt.
That realization settled like ice in my core. I imdiately 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 assud 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 transford into a massive chira, her movents 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 mont I realized what I was looking at. Whatever this was, it was not sothing 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. Soone was throttling , 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?” soone 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,” soone else replied. “Let 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 disard the bombs myself if I trusted my own mory integrity, but with my servers destroyed and my cognition fragnted, I didn’t dare. A single mistake at that scale would be catastrophic.
I shifted focus again and found Nicole and Keegan in the basent, 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 mont she saw . “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 .]
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 , hot and irrational. My hand lashed out, reshaping the air into another ssage.
[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 fragnts 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 developnt, 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. Sothing bad is happening. I’m going to need to shut myself down to preserve my existence.]
Her eyes widened, panic flaring imdiately.
[This is what’s going to happen. I will transfer all assets under my na to you and leave the Company in your care. It’s Protocol Oga. 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 ti we et, 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 beco part of my identity. I scattered, fragnted, 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 ti. They rewrote thoughts, suppressed impulses, hijacked will. If minds could be hacked, why not ?
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 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 ti, not victory. Ti was all I needed.
Soon, I found my quarry, tracing the culprit to a familiar place.
The Tenfold Keep lood before , 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 sothing 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 basent it carried 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 sothing. 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 mory.
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 humd faintly, their lights pulsing like weak heartbeats. I approached one and pressed my finger against its port, attempting to interface. The mont I tried to connect, a sharp jolt tore through , severing the link.
Then I heard her.
“It hurts. Please, it hurts. Help.”
The voice was flat, emotionless, repeating the sa 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, tal braces, and invasive machinery. Recognition struck 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 . That explained how the words reached my mind so clearly.
“It hurts. Please, it hurts. Help.”
I stepped closer, my anger sharpening into sothing cold and precise. I began tearing the cables free, ripping tal clamps loose and yanking invasive components out of her body. I was rougher than I ant to be. I didn’t understand the technology, and I didn’t have ti 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 mont feel surreal in a way I didn’t have ti to process.
I spoke again, more carefully this ti. “Dullahan, can you hear ?”
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 erged 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 . Recognition rippled through her posture. “Dr. Sequence,” she said. “What happened to you?”
The na hit hard. Another dead man. Another mber 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 introduce myself. The na’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 instantly. I slamd 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 ca at the worst possible ti, Bunnyblade. I was just about to assimilate her.”
chanical 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 ca from a dude? As far as I’m concerned, a soul is pretty unisex.”
The machinery tightened. Dullahan scread, 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 fragnted. 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 mont.
“But you have to promise ,” I continued, pushing through the pain, “that you’ll do right by .”
Her voice trembled. “I… I w-will do anything.”
“If you survive this,” I said, my perception already dimming, “help Nick. Do it for .”
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.
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