electric sheep

Jet tried not to cringe at the look, but assumes it was because it was probably a tacky request to make. Still, if it means Ram or any one else doesn’t die, he’ll risk a protocol breach. As far as Program life mattering less than his own? Well, he took a lighter to that memo a long time ago. 

“We can’t risk giving you energy,” said the medic. “But I’ll send a flask for your friend here. The virus itself? We’re still analyzing it. It seems a virulent strain, one that should be fatal, but -”

It’s clearly puzzling the medic. “We have no idea what in your code has quarantined it so completely. I’ll chalk it up to User intervention.”

He’s not wrong, but it takes a little more effort for Jet to keep his mouth welded shut. 

“My worry is that did you both destroy all of the infection vector? We may have a very bad plague on our hands otherwise.”

     “Well, I guess someone up there’s still looking out for us,” Ram said with a slightly wry smirk. He’d always felt his relationship with the Users was something of an inside joke, considering the beings programs so revered were incapable of performing their own basic risk calculations, but this just puts it over the top. “Or I’m just incredibly lucky.”

     Now there’s a joke.

     “Far as I could tell, it was a rogue element. The fact that nothing else showed up when I hit the ground means it was probably alone out there.” He’d seen worse, in his travels -- heavily infected systems where nothing could survive, corruption so pervasive it turned the ground to acid with every step of your boots. The steady decline of the Grid’s stability would probably finish them all off long before whatever mutant strain of code crawled out of the Outlands managed to do it. 

     Either way, they’re running out of time. 

     As if on queue from the thought, the hacker feels an uncomfortable twinge in his core.

The medic nods. “We’re all looking. My partners were in Gallium. No one was sure if it was the Occupation or some rogue rebellion spinster faction. Could have been Iso Supremacists for all anyone knows. Chan’s unit was in Helium - nothing but rubble there.”

“The good news is that you’re stable enough for surgery. Get that viral code removed. It’s showing…well, I’ll be glad that something’s quarantined it.”

Jet kicks himself for saying it, because it seems tacky at a time like this. “Any chance either of us could get some energy? I ran myself way too low.”

The alternative reason for asking is that if they need a miracle pulled when healing Ram, they won’t be able to get one when a User’s out of gas.   

     He wants to say something clever about the ‘supremacists’ or the ‘rogue rebellion factions’, but he keeps it under wraps. It’d be nothing but foolish to provoke the person who’ll be messing around in his code shortly, the mere mention of which sets a displeased expression on his face. He wouldn’t call himself squeamish, per say, but getting poked and prodded isn’t one of his favorite things. 

     Jet’s request comes at a good time for Ram, at least. Instead of dwelling on his own medical fate, he can instead distract himself with worrying about the User. Present company prevents him from saying anything about how he better not find out some bit-brained excuse for a script overexerted himself to revive a lowly hacking function because something in surgery went wrong, but he hopes the message is conveyed in the hard look he levels at the User.

     “He needs energy more than I do,” Ram says instead. “Don’t think I’m processing things efficiently right now, anyway.” He can’t pinpoint any particular symptoms, other than a full-body feeling that something’s off, though he doesn’t think some downtime would be entirely remiss. 

“True,” Jet says. “The portal to Encom dropped me off in the middle of nowhere. He was out there exploring on his own, and he’s better conversation than the Gridbugs.”

The security script does pull up Ma3a’s sigil and credentials. “It would see much of your disc isn’t compatible with our system, but your Encom credentials do check out.”

Yeah, well Ma3a’s encryption and the whole User thing might have something to do with that, sorry. “I’m still here to help in whatever way I can, officer.”

“One down, then.” the guard says. He raises an eyebrow at Ram. “One to go. If you aren’t a scout, then what was your business out in that dead zone? We were out this far looking for any Resistance cells that may have survived.” 

     “Like I said, I’ve been helping him catalog the status of our system. We wanted to see if there was anything left out there.”

     It’s a weak explanation if one were to compare it to Jet’s well-planned cover story, and Ram knows it. Giving an unverified program a complete tour of the system probably doesn’t look too good, either, even if protocol has fallen out of favor in recent cycles. 

     “A lot of programs -- friends -- are still missing,” he tries, “and with how fragmented the Grid’s become, Users know where you’ll end up if you take a wrong turn somewhere. We thought we’d see if anyone had turned up, and I guess we wandered a little farther than we should have.”

     The story is still heavily modified, but it’s as close to the truth as Ram is willing to tread, given the circumstances. Still, there’s a touch of sincere remorse in his voice at the mention of lost allies and companions. Much like Jet, the hacker is motivated by a strong set of personal convictions, too. 

As the analyst wormed his way through the narrow spaces between pieces of equipment, he registered the sound of a disc striking a program, and flinched. He couldn’t tell who’d been hit, but he knew that stopping to figure it out was a bad idea… If his newfound ally had been derezzed, running towards the danger wouldn’t do anything to help.

Given the circumstances, the best thing Kryptor could do was focus on finding a way out of here.

He turned past a bulky metal structure that housed components of the building’s energy distribution system and ran down the corridor. So far he hadn’t seen any guards… It seemed like the only ones who were in the room were focused on Ram, though he certainly couldn’t count on that keeping him safe for long.

As he reached the end of the walkway, though, Kryptor saw something that just might be useful: a circular shaft which housed a series of large cooling fans. This one was much wider than the vent shaft they’d been crawling through earlier; if he leaned forward a bit and kept his head lowered, he could stand upright inside it. Such a structure might logically be used to expel hot air from the building, which would mean that it led outside… Even if it didn’t, it would lead to another mechanical room. Fewer guards than in the main areas.

He drew his disc and sliced through the wiring that supplied energy to the fan. There was a screeching grind that had his hands flying to the sides of his head to cover his ears, and the machine began to slow down. As soon as it was feasible to do so, Kryptor ducked between the fan blades and into the shaft.

He looked back for Ram.

“Hey! Through here… This way!”

     There followed a long moment of hesitance, both programs tracking each other’s movement as they circled in a wide arc. Each was preoccupied with calculating potential first moves and waiting to see if striking or dodging would be a better bet. It was the sentry, ultimately, who acted, barking a harsh “Identify, program,” as he drew his disc-wielding arm back into a ready angle. Ram was half tempted to laugh at such a strict adherence to protocol. A time like this, and identification is still the first concern? It should’ve been obvious based on the other guard’s fate that the hacker wasn’t an ally, nor was he meant to be here. 

     CLU must not have left these guys with much room for free thought.

     “You want my disc so bad, you can have it!” he called back, taking the slight window of opportunity he’d been granted to throw the weapon with as much might and accuracy as he could manage. Hardly a nano had passed before the sentry responded in kind, and the projectiles only just managed to avoid colliding in mid-air. Neither target was hit; each program caught his disc on the rebound and the uncertain dance began again. Tongue caught between his lips in an expression of complete concentration, Ram was on the verge of making another go of it when a harsh screech of a noise sounded overhead. Not exactly what he’d had in mind, but a welcome distraction nonetheless. While the guard was busy trying to pinpoint the source of the sound, Ram once again let his disc fly. This time, it produced a direct hit. Turning at the last minute to meet his end head-on, the other program had time for only a garbled noise of confusion before his form joined the voxels that had already been scattered.

     Not wanting to hang around and invite more trouble, Ram was quick to dock his disc and climb the scaffolding he’d seen Kryptor disappear up not long before. It took only a brief search to locate the potential exit he’d managed to find, and the thought of escape was enough to bring a small, if not weary, smile to the hacker’s face.

     “Good find,” he commented, tilting his head to look around the space. “A vent this big’s gotta be some kind of central unit - hopefully that means it leads where we want it to.”

     Picking his way out of the wreckage of the former building was something of a challenge, considering that Ram was still wobbly on his feet. Whenever he stumbled, he’d put a hand out and Flynn would be there to keep him from falling. A tactile program by nature, he appreciated the brief moments of contact immensely. Some part of his processors was still struggling with the fact that this was real, that the User was really alive and here and with him after so much time had passed. What had long felt like an impossibility was finally reality.

     It proved what Ram had always privately believed -- that there was always a chance. Rarely, if ever, were the odds set perfectly at one hundred percent. A fractional percentage of possibility always remained, and that sliver of hope was not something to be taken lightly.

     Once they’d made it back out to the street, Ram was surer of his balance, though he kept close to Flynn as they walked. There were a million questions that he wanted to ask, and the biggest obstacle was figuring out which query to tackle first. The internal debate kept him quiet for a long moment, his eyes wandering over the urban sprawl around them. In current company, he was reminded that this entire system was mostly Flynn’s work, and being in the presence of the Creator made him consider his surroundings far more closely than he previously had.