In the back of the much-abused van, Lina, whose name was legally Berkowitz, but also, in some sense, something else, brooded. Once again, they were on the run. Before, they'd been on the run to somewhere. Sure, they'd also been on the run from Rezo, but Atlass City had loomed as a destination in the future. With Atlass clearly inhospitable, they were now on the run not only from Rezo, but also from Halshiform and the FBI. With no destination, she felt like a hunted fox, beset by dogs without a hiding place. Powerless, chased. Like she used to, sometimes, alone on the city streets. Frightened, confused.
So why the hell was she running?
In a place that was not a place and never was one, a man who was not a man, but used to be, returned to the state that was, for him, consciousness. He'd been thrust out of the cyborg's mind, and violently, but Anthony Halshiform was not bothered. The boy, no matter how advanced his body, was of no use to him. Only the girl, that one shining girl, held the answer. He flexed his finger -- analogues, all that was left to him now, and gazed around the "room" where he was. Seigram had built it, and Seigram maintained it, and nothing on this earth could create a software environment quite like a Mazoku, but still...
But still...
Millions upon millions of pixels per square centimeter, updated thousands and thousands of time a second, tactile sensation, the little noises of the real world, and even a natural smell in the air, but it wasn't quite the same. He couldn't tell what it was, he couldn't see or sense a thing wrong, but he knew it was just a simulation, a shadow of reality. With a flick of his mind, Halshiform brought himself to where it had happened, the construct in which he had left behind his body for this immortality as a string of digits. Immortality which, without a body, was already starting to wear thin. Even the most advanced cybernetics wouldn't provide an answer. Even Rezo could give his nephew nothing more than cameras for eyes and only the crudest touch. He imagined that unrealistic reality would be even worse than the realistic unreality he inhabited now.
The only thing powerful enough to hold him, and powerful enough to allow him to live in a satisfying way would have to be the human brain. A relentlessly analog system, the information stored in patterns of connections, and he was digital now, immortal in the electronic flux. He'd resigned himself to his state, comforting himself with the glory of achieving his goal, the goal of humanity ever since it had first understood mortality, the goal of escaping its cruel bondage.
Until the girl had fallen into his lap. He'd hardly believed it when he'd caught her right in his old domain. The moment he'd touched her connection he'd known, even though it should have been impossible: A human brain, digital. He'd found his new body, even if it was of the wrong gender, and once he found how it had been done, he'd have immortality in a human body, or as many human bodies as he wanted. And if Rezo thought he could take the girl, he'd show that self -- important fool. He had the Mazoku on his side, after all.
With a chuckle in his mind, Halshiform flitted to the Atlass City Information Technologies Guild nexus, leaving behind the link to his old, mortal existence.
"Go back? Have you lost your mind, Lina? You've got half the country after you, and you want to go back." Zelgadis turned his head towards the back of the vehicle, producing a reaction of shock from Syphiel even though he continued to steer the people-carrier flawlessly. "I shouldn't be surprised. But do you really insist on bringing us all along on a suicide mission? I am not happy with my current mode of existence, but I prefer it to a lack of any such mode."
"It won't be suicide, Zel. Rezo isn't anything more than his computers. And there's no computer I can't take out. If we hit him hard, and now, when he thinks we're running, we can have him beat before he knows we've hit him. We all get him off our tails, you get your new body, we all go home happy."
"And justice triumphs! Right?" interjected Amelia, who had already firmly latched onto the idea of a full-frontal assault on the enemy.
"Justice? Don't be absurd. Even if we do manage to somehow beat Rezo, whatever that entails beyond leaving rude messages on his computer, there's still the government, Lina. Or have you forgotten about them?"
"Don't be insulting, Zel. I'm sure you know something about RPR's systems, and with my cracking skills and that knowledge, we can yank control of the whole company away from that smug bastard."
"I still think this is suicide, Lina. If we stop for long enough to do this right, we'll come out of the connection staring at a company hit squad."
"Hit squad?"
"I used to be in charge of them. And they're very, very, good. If we go back to Atlass, they'll have us. I'm not turning around, Lina."
"Relax. We don't have to go back PHYSICALLY. I say we go to ground, hole up, and mount the hacking run to end all hacking runs. Even Gourry agrees with me, right?"
Gourry awoke long enough to nod confusedly, wipe the drool from his chin, and yawn once. Moments later, his snores reverberated once more.
"You're not going to listen to me, are you? There's a hotel 23.6 kilometers down the road. Will that be a suitable place for your deathwish fulfillment?"
"Just fine. And stop calling it that."
In the top office of a building of stone, steel and glass, R.P. Rezo jerked as he was forcibly pushed out his nephew's mind. Within the vastly powerful systems of that building, in the construct of a gothic cathedral, analogous to that office, his representation in the electronic world resolved itself. To darkness. The red-clad man breathed out a single "No.." before attempting to bring up image after image to his direct brain imaging system. Even after his sight had been burned away, it had been possible to input low-resolution images directly into his optical cortex. Slowly and with little definition beyond shapes and shades of grey, but it was better than the eternal darkness he suffered in the material world. Now, however, even those blurs failed to appear to his vision. His darkness was now complete, covering both his eyes and the eyes of his mind. What had begun so many years ago, on the day that Shabrunigdo had burned through the world's computers and his sight with such ferocity, had been completed. R.P. Rezo, world's greatest computer scientist, perhaps the most brilliant mind of his generation, was now blind not only to the world, but even to the world that he had helped create.
What before had been a whisper turned to a scream, and that single word of denial echoed throughout both the real and electronic versions of RPR Technologies.
A single purple-suited figure smirked and enjoyed what he considered a symphony in the key of despair. However this day ended, he knew he'd be amused, and probably benefited.
The closest hotel had turned out to have barely enough bandwidth to pull text, strictly last century stuff. So it was that the carrier pulled into a significantly nicer hotel at a substantially later time. A credit card that didn't actually exist paid for a pair of rooms, and a band of exhausted renegades, save for the sole cyborg, rested, preparing for the morn.
Zelgadis sat awake, blocking Gourry's snores from his mind by the simple expedient of filtering them out at his ear-mikes. Tomorrow, he would face his uncle, the man he had served for years, the man who had cursed him with this body. It was a situation calling for sleep, but sleep eluded him. Although his body did not need it, his brain did, though less than most. Even so, sleep refused to come, even when he took the step of shutting down all input. In the perfect silence and darkness, his consciousness floated, waiting.
Shortly after dawn, Zelgadis's internal chronometer overrode the cut-out and woke him. Sleep must have finally come, and he'd gotten the little his mind had needed. Soon, he'd wake the others, and the attack could be mounted. He didn't like it, but he had to admit that they couldn't keep running. 6:01. In 59 minutes, he'd wake them and they'd walk into the lion's mouth.
Rezo had not slept. Instead, he'd woken his personal doctor, and kept him, and his staff, awake the whole of the night as well. To no avail. The entirety of his optical cortex was completely non-responsive. Not a neuron flickered, not a synapse jumped, no matter what stimulation was pumped in. Jacked back in, Rezo cursed that girl. Her, her mother, and her sister. The three of them had been nothing but trouble since he'd first hired her mother two decades ago. Brilliant, but a trio of thorns in his side. One was gone now, and another outside his reach, but the third would not escape. No, she would bear the sins of not only herself, but her entire family. He clenched his fist. Without question, he'd have her, and his treatment. The treatment might not work now, after what she'd done, but revenge would still be sweet. The status of the search for her twittered in his ear, slowly tightening its noose around her location, wherever it might be.
"Mfmphphmmm. Syphmmmflfl, ymml..."
Zelgadis broke in on Lina's muffled speech with a note of derision, "Perhaps you could swallow, or at least stop putting in new food, before you speak, Lina?"
Lina tossed a roll at the cyborg and restated herself. "I was saying that Syphiel should stay out and watch us. If something goes wrong, I want her able to pull the rest of you out, and she's the best with hardware, even if she's not up to our speed on system-cracking."
Syphiel nodded. "That's probably best. I don't have much experience with this sort of thing, so I'll be of the most use watching your backs from out here. I'll see what I can do with the setup, too."
"And Gourry, you'll be coming in with us."
Two streams of orange juice jetted across the table, neatly hosing down Zelgadis and Lina. Gourry blinked as his toast hung loosely from his lips.
Lina carefully wiped her face and continued. "I've got a plan, but I need a decoy for it. Gourry diverts attention, Syphiel pulls him out, the rest of us do the job, and we all have a nice big lunch. Now," she said, smiling, "is that sausage spoken for? I didn't thnmf sm."
Amelia pouted, her fork poised just above her now vanished breakfast link.
Lina was the first to touch down, cape settling around her ankles, and Amelia arrived an instant later. Immediately, they were joined by a featureless grey humaniform, vaguely male.
Lina, now undeniably Inverse, pressed her face into her hands. "Gourry! Have you NEVER been online before? EVER?.
"Well, ah, Lina.."
VOICEPRINT IDENTIFIED
"What the hell was that?", asked Lina, startled by the disembodied voice usually reserved for system-error messages.
Sylphiel's voice, similarly disembodied, but still recognizable, replied confusedly. "I have no idea, Ms. Lina...It's coming from somewhere else, but it's interacting with this system, and..."
ALPHA WAVE VERIFIED
BEGINNING STAGE ONE DECRYPTION >>>>> COMPLETE
"It's doing SOMETHING, Syphiel! Find out what the hell it is!"
BETA WAVE VERIFIED
DOWNLOAD COMMENCING >>>>> COMPLETE
"I can't figure it out! It's accessing information on Gourry's connection! Gourry, dear! Are you all right?"
"Shouldn't I be?"
MNEMONIC PRINT MATCHED
BEGINNING FINAL DECRYPTION >>>>> COMPLETE
With a flash, Gourry's basic template changed into a full-featured representation of the tennis pro. Oddly, however, he was clothed in armor made of grey scales with a ceramic sheen to them, a scabbard topped by a banded handle hanging at his side. Even before anyone could react to this transformation, however, a large head, that of a blond man in his middle age, appeared and smiled gently.
"I'm so glad you were able to get this. Maybe now my research won't be lost." Without another sound, the face dissolved, leaving empty air and Gourry's new representation.
Lina smiled. Not the pleasant smile of the now-vanished teacher, but a crafty, vicious smile. "I don't get it, but this certainly changes things."
Just outside the final security level within RPR Technologies, a black clad figure appeared from nowhere. As Zelgadis had expected, the blind bastard had shut up the inner areas, but Zelgadis had put so many backdoors throughout the outer areas that it would have taken either years of work or a complete re-creation of the security system to lock him out entirely. Just past eight now, and at half past he'd open the way for the others. In the meantime, he began to ready some of his more vicious programs. He hadn't burned a system in quite a while, but before he'd made that request of his uncle, he'd brought down quite a few. He'd wanted power, and he'd gotten it, and maybe it was time for the good doctor to see exactly what power he'd given with this body.
The clock on the dresser changed over to eight-twenty and Syphiel took another drink of coffee. The connection was clean, for now, and all three interfaces were running properly. Over in the corner, Zelgadis sat, chin to chest, cord running from his wrist to a dataport in the wall. She didn't know much about him, but he at least looked fine.
What interested her more was what had arrived to the deck from numerous points all over the world, she couldn't tell how many. The avatar was standard, just a few upgraded security and protection protocols, manifested as armor, but the sword was something else. She'd seen parts of its code before. Not put together, but as fragments across a dozen projects on her mentor's computer. She'd written some of that code, mostly unimportant parts, but enough to know something about what it was.
A collection of hardware interface routines, for any sort of possible device. Routines that had something to do with the protocols for connections to AOL and similar services and providers. Routines to call low-level traps in every OS she'd ever seen, and some she couldn't recognize. But no clue as to what all these things did. It was a tool of some sort, but Syphiel had no idea what sort. The buzzer went off on the dresser clock. Eight-twenty-nine. Time for things to get started.
Three oddly dressed avatars loitered in front of the gateway between AOL and RPR's primary front company. A tremor shook the electronic ground, and like the walls of Jericho, it all came tumbling down. Digital skyscraper, daemon-staffed reception desk, ICE and human security all flickered out in the space of a clock-tick. All that remained was a spiraling staircase, rising up into the grey sky without any sort of support, itself supporting a black rectangle hundreds of meters in the air, a construction that would be a slap in the face of physics in the real world.
At the base of the stairs stood Zelgadis, arms crossed.
"It seems he didn't get any of my private commands out of anything but his own little room. Convenient, but I don't think we'll have much surprise."
"Surprise, shurprise. That's his office, right?" Lina smiled and began to key up her spell. "So let's go blow him up. I think a Dragon Slave should do it, huh?"
Rezo felt his office shake, just as the search ended. In the system. She was in the system. Perhaps his luck was looking up. He allowed himself a smile and rose. Soon, he'd have her, and with her, what he wanted.
Well, there it goes. It feels like my previous part, but that's not intentional. It just happened that way. We've been on the run for nearly ten episodes now, and if Halshiform is to be the problem, Rezo has to end. Unlike DG, we don't need forty concurrent villains. Focus, focus, focus. If you read this, PLEASE sign up. Please?
Special thanks to:
2F -- For all of improfanfic, great Slayers fanfic, and starting SV. Not to mention giving me the time I needed.
Aaron Ziegler -- For kindly offering to preread, even if I couldn't get it to you in time. What was ready wasn't worth showing to ANYBODY.
GS Mikami Gorgeous Songs Collection -- Just because.