#adas

TEN

The program that came out of the dark was one only under the most cursory of examinations. Adas noticed that it was a kaleidoscope of circuitry, put badly together so it didn’t always create full, smooth pathways. It kept on cycling through hues, as if it couldn’t decide what sort of energy it was carrying, or what goals and emotions motivated it.

GAM noticed their half-formed attackers weren’t attacking it. He punched one, kicked another and barreled through a third, accepting a rain of haphazard rakes and blows on his armor just so he could get to Adas and Vidi.

Vidi was staring at the new program, her face frozen in horror. “What are you?” she breathed.

“An em-em-emergency count-t-t-termeas-measure,” the program replied.

“You’re not real,” Vidi shot back breathlessly. “You’re pieces of people.” She could see what the others could not, that the program didn’t have a disk on its back, but it had broken shards of several disks embedded everywhere on its person.

“Yes,” the program agreed readily. “What-what. Whatever was handy. To do the j-j-the job.”

“Worm,” GAM ground out, everything in him recognizing the enemy he’d been programmed since his inception to face.

“GAM, don’t -!” Vidi whirled around, trying to stop the Sentry, afraid that giving the program a name would give it the solidity it didn’t yet have.

“Virus.”

“Am I?” The program looked at itself. The more it spoke and interacted, the more refined it became, limbs in the right places, body parts the right size. It made the shattered lines of its circuitry all the more obvious. “I sup-suppose I am.” It looked up at them, and the colors of its eyes stopped whirling through the spectrum. “A virus.”

It leveled a virulently yellow gaze on them all. The color bled down over its body. “A virus to d-do the job.” It pointed at GAM. “You keep-keep-keep getting in m-m-m-m-m. You are. in. my way.”

“Run,” GAM said simply.

Suddenly his shield was in his hands and he led the way, using it as a battering ram to mow down the simulacra, not caring if they clawed at the shield or at his armor as he forcibly opened up an escape route. They sprinted for the lightrunner. Behind them, the worm shrieked in a dozen different voices, and the awkward copies of itself that seemed to be all it could manifest peppered the three programs’ path, pulling themselves hastily into existence, but not fast enough to stop them.

“Go, go, go!” he shouted at them as they reached the vehicle at last. Vidi dove into the backseat, Adas into the passenger’s seat. GAM slid over the hood and scrambled into the driver’s seat even as the GO4 opened up every commline on her faceplate. “All active Ilo communication lines, I repeat, this is a Class-1 Alert, there is a virus loose in Ilo, I repeat, there is a virus loose in Ilo. All programs are to retreat beyond city limits. I repeat, retreat, retreat, retreat. Abandon the city at once. All active Ilo communication lines, I repeat -”

GAM hit the speed boost on the racer and the vehicle surged forward, tires whistling helplessly for a moment. A veritable wall of simulacra was shambling towards them but the lightrunner’s tires, made for rougher terrain than a city street, caught and launched them forward roughly enough to make them bounce in the seats.

“Vidi!” GAM risked a look back, but the courier was curled up in a rocking ball, making frightened little disconnection sounds. “Vidi, are you hurt?”

“No,” she whispered. “No, I’m fine.”

“Adas?”

The GO4 gave him a thumbs up, never stopping her broadcast. Outside, alarms began to wail and echo through the ruins of Ilo for the second time.

“It was made of people,” Vidi wheezed.

“What?”

“It was made of people, GAM, it was made of all the dead people.” She hugged herself tighter. “All the bits and pieces of their disks. Why would someone do that, why?”

GAM focused on driving them out of Ilo as fast as he dared.

Yes, What-what. Whatever was handy. To do the j-j- the job.

Viruses were, by their very nature, unpredictable. Every city had had its encounters with them, every security program knew what the protocols were, even if they amounted to ‘there is no protocol, contain and raze’. But nothing GAM had ever been taught could explain how a virus could simply gather up bits and pieces of the dead and come alive from them. There were many ways in which a program could come online, but all of them required outside input.

He followed that thought to its inexorable conclusion, and found an answer he didn’t like at all. “WallSec, can anyone hear me?” he called out into his own helm, even though he knew he was too far from Halcyon to reach. Only silence answered him.

The lightrunner suddenly rocked on its tires, bouncing sideways, and an immense piece of debris went flying by its side, close enough that if GAM had reached out he could have touched it. Vidi screamed. Adas stopped broadcasting her warning and curled up in her seat. The Sentry fought the vehicle back under control and deployed the off-road cleats, willing to sacrifice speed for stability. “Vidi, tell me how it’s throwing those at us.”

She made an unhappy sound but uncurled herself and peeked out of the rearview window. “From above, they’re coming from abov- watch out!”

GAM swerved sharply, and a piece of a building a little bigger than the runner slammed on the pavement before them, leaving a massive crater before shattering into smaller pieces and brief splashes of primal matter. The lightrunner crested a hill of rubble, crashed back down onto the horizontal on the other side, and surged forward.

“Strap in,” he told them tersely as he threw the runner into overdrive. “This isn’t going to be pleasant.”

The standard Grid lightrunner was made to conquer every sort of terrain. It was an Outlands exploratory vehicle, designed to both go where no program had gone before, and to defend itself and its passengers, violently if necessary. But that had been the two-passenger baseline. The canopied model the three of them were currently riding had been heavily modified with the comfort of its passengers in mind. Forced to do its original job, it bucked and jumped angrily, leapt awkwardly onto the other side of a river of wreckage, and landed so jarringly Vidi bounced on the back seat and nearly crashed into the canopy. Both she and the GO4 scrambled to secure themselves to their seats as the Sentry urged the vehicle forward.

The virus didn’t bother chasing them. Past its initial fury at being balked, it accepted readily that its goals couldn’t be so easily achieved. Some part of it knew that these… difficulties were as they must be, because they had been so before. It didn’t know why it knew such things, but it knew them, and knew them to be true.

Instead it sank once again into the substance of the ruined city all around it, leaving fractals of ugly yellow all over the place where it had been. It knew that it meant such a place was damaged, perhaps beyond recovery, but it didn’t care. From that same unknown, innate well of knowledge came the certainty that whatever it was damaging wasn’t real, so it didn’t matter.

It found a pipeline, empty and cold, and raced along it as energy once had. In places the pipe was absent, shattered beyond usefulness, and in such spots it simply forced its way through the very substance of the world around it. For not being real, it was usefully solid.

But quick as the virus was, its prey was quicker. It had wheels, and an engine, and an ample though limited supply of energy. Catching them before they abandoned the limits of the city was looking more and more unlikely and that, it knew, was bad. Leaving the city would reveal its presence. Revealing itself was bad.

Why?

It had no answer to that question, only certainty, and that… irritated it somewhat. Knowledge was one thing, one could accept knowledge as a given thing. But lack of knowledge was potentially dangerous. An unanswered question might jeopardize its mission. Still, it had no time to dwell on it at the moment.

A number of simulacra received instructions. It saw the first immense boulder that they picked up and lobbed at the vehicle, but it paid no further attention; instead it detoured toward another building, crafting simulacra ahead of it as it went. It wanted to make copies, full copies, useful allies, siblings that would share in its purpose and dedication, but something in the very fabric of the world all around it wouldn’t allow it to do so. For something not real, it was proving very contrary.

Why?

The simulacra would have to do until it could figure out what was going amiss with the duplication process. It flowed up the top of the building, a shattered habitat tower already leaning precariously to one side. As it reformed at the top, it could see the two-pronged attack on the vehicle of its target, the sundry boulders it was being bombarded with as well as the growing tide of simulacra trying to close in on it. It considered, and its extensions suddenly began to drop to four limbs. Their speed and agility improved instantaneously. Hm, four tires were indeed better than two. “You c-ca-can-can-cannot. You cannot hide. her. from me forever, sec-sec-securit-t-t-ty,” it said calmly into the dark.

It was hard, finding the right sequence of sounds through so many shattered libraries, but its memory was made up of fragments anyway, of bits and pieces of code that had never been its own to begin with. Here and there it could sense something that had bound them together, but it had been an imperfect joining. It had been made quickly, not precisely. There had been no care in its creation; it could tell, just by comparing those binding bits with the larger, intact shards lodged in its being.

Why?

The building swayed dangerously. The simulacra tore at what few foundations and structural pillars still remained at its base. Several of the creatures were crushed; none seemed to care. Atop it, the virus was untroubled. It knew that a fall, a crush, a great many things could not kill it, could barely hurt it. It had been created to endure, and spread, and fulfill two simple objectives.

Inside the lightrunner, Vidi cringed at what her eyes were telling her. “GAM, the building!”

“What building?” the Sentry asked tersely. All of his attention was focused on avoiding the flying pieces of Ilo being cast at him from every conceivable angle while still keeping the vehicle headed directly for the ramp leading out of the city. He could see in the rearview mirrors that the virus’ creations had shifted to a quadrupedal stance, and while they weren’t quite keeping up with the runner just yet, they were getting there, evolving and improving at phenomenal speeds.

Adas all but crawled into his lap to look out his window. “Oh, no,” she whispered, and pointed. “They’re trying to collapse the central habitat on Sector 95.”

GAM risked the barest of looks, simply because if both of the programs with him though it was a danger that needed to be pointed out, he could only trust them. He saw the building swaying, saw the brilliant, poisonous yellow dot atop it, and did a quick calculation in his helmet. If that building fell, it would block their way out of the city. If they had to turn around, they might never get away; the flawed duplicates were learning to run faster than the lightrunner way too quickly.

That was the problem, wasn’t it? The virus wasn’t just a worm. It was also a program, a full-fledged creature of the Grid. It was learning as it went, and everything they did to balk it, it found a way to circumvent. If it thought collapsing the building wasn’t going to work, it would find something else to throw at them, literally and metaphorically, and that time they might not see it coming.

GAM stayed the course.

“WallSec?” Vidi asked in timid fright from the backseat.

“GAM?” Adas’ voice was a little more urgent.

“Do you trust me?”

They were both silent. Then they both strapped back into their seats. “Did you know this was gonna happen?” Vidi demanded from the back. “Is that why you were so twitchy?”

“I knew we were bringing a heavy active-process-memory program into a wasteland with not enough other programs to camouflage her presence,” he replied. “I was afraid something was going to happen.” He swerved wildly, barely missing a chunk of debris the size of a sailer cargo container that nearly sent the lightrunner spinning like a top. “This was not part of my predictions, though,” he admitted through gritted teeth. “Adas, open up that panel,” he directed, one finger pointing at the central dash.

She obeyed instantly. The lightrunner’s structural circuitry flashed and gleamed.

“Put your hand in, up to your elbow. Any further than that and your fingers are going to find the engine, and no one’s going to like that meeting.”

She gave him a horrified look. “I’m not -!”

Vidi scrambled forward between the two of them and began to worm her arm into the space.

“Just shy of your elbow!” GAM said hastily before explaining. “Your arm’s longer.”

“Alright,” the courier agreed, her voice shaking. “Am I looking for something in particular?”

“It’s a small, long cylinder, specs to follow. It’s connected in four places along its length to a larger block. Don’t touch the block.” The numbers flashed on the black faceplate, well aware that a few dreadlocks had turned to stare at him.

Most of Vidi’s eyes, however, were focused on the open dash, looking past it, at the innards of the lightrunner. The courier wriggled forward a little more. “Got it! What am I doing with it?”

“When I tell you, yank it out.”

The lightrunner raced on. The building the simulacra were attacking suddenly faltered, tremors racing through the entirety of its remaining structure. At ground level, pillars and supports snapped, cracked and shattered, and the immense structure began to fall.

“GAM!” Adas cried out.

The Sentry tucked his head minutely to one side, the falling building growing larger on the blackness of his faceplate. He had to time it perfectly. He couldn’t give the virus a shot at something else. Out in the Outlands they’d be as impossible to find as a Stray in a crowd, even for the strange monster.

The building began to accelerate as its mass came into the grip of different variables that those which had held it upright.

GAM saw his chance. “Now!”

Vidi yanked. Simultaneously, the Sentry shut down the all-terrain cleats. The lightrunner surged forward, and then accelerated with an unhappy, screeching wail, half the systems on its dash going red. GAM didn’t care; ahead of him he could finally make out the ramp leading out of Ilo. The virus-mimics fell back, unable to keep up with the sudden burst of speed of their prey.

Vidi fell backwards onto the backseat, clutching onto the small cylinder she’d just removed. From her vantage point, through the runner’s canopy, she could see the building falling down on them as if the sky itself were crashing down. She couldn’t do anything, say anything; she stared, every eye fixed on that swiftly-closing doom.

And then she was looking at empty sky, at directional vectors and high-altitude data-lines, the distant markers of the upper limits of the Grid. Some people said they ought to put cities there, habitats and whatnot, that it was wasted space. She liked it like that, empty and vast and full of potential and, at the moment, empty of falling buildings and horrible half-formed quasi-programs and viruses made up of dead people.

The falling building thundered down, creating a massive ripple on the structure of the city and causing a minor shockwave that lifted the rear end of the lightrunner off the road, but the little vehicle was past it, away, untouchable. It skid into the ramp with a howl; GAM threw on the all-terrain cleats once again and got them out of the drift, and they were gone, out of Ilo and into the Outlands.

The virus reformed itself at the bottom of the ramp, watching the lights of its prey dwindle in size in the dark. “Well,” it said. Its simulacra clustered around it, awaiting further instructions. “Well played, sec-sec-security,” it murmured, before it turned to them. “There are-are others in th-the city. B-b-b-bring-bring them to me.”

If it could not make appropriate replicas of itself to help with its tasks, well, it would have to make do with what was at hand once again.

ELEVEN

They stopped once the scarce lights of Ilo had faded. GAM drove them far enough off the road that a few rolling hills would keep them from being easily detected, and dragged out a small Wrench from a discreet compartment inside the lightrunner. With it he opened up the engine.

Vidi surrendered the cylinder without a single protest. “What is it?”

“Limiter,” he explained as he bent over to examine the engine for damage. “It’s a city vehicle. It’s loaned out fairly regularly. It’s so city vehicles cannot be taken out for a joyride.” He secured the cylinder back in place with the Wrench, inwardly glad that he’d damaged nothing that the limited-use emergency Wrench and his even more limited knowledge of mechanical systems couldn’t fix.

“You are literally so dedicated to not having fun that you put speed limiters on government vehicles.” Vidi’s tone was utterly dry.

“And right now you’re very glad we do,” he countered mildly.

She made a face at his back and turned away, huddling against the side of the runner for a moment before straightening up again. “Wait, why are you putting it back, anyway? What if we have to get away from that thing again?”

“Because without a limiter of any kind, I can force the runner to go as fast as I want to -”

“Exactly!”

“- up to and including burning the engine out accidentally.”

She threw her arms up and made a highly exasperated sound at him before slumping against the vehicle once again. On the passenger seat, Adas was still trying to contact anyone who might be listening; GAM had even given her the public frequencies used for other Halcyonites to contact either WallSec or CitySec. Eventually, with a tired sigh, she stopped trying. Her faceplate folded away, to the sides of her face, and she rubbed wearily at it.

“Nothing?” Vidi asked quietly.

Adas shook her head. “Nothing. I can hear the traffic control from the high-altitude lines, but those are all automated. And there’s some weird little tune repeating in one high-frequency channel, but with a virus loose I don’t want to interact with anything that’s not talking like a proper program.”

Vidi nodded. It sounded sensible. GAM closed up the lightrunner’s hood. “What now?” she asked him.

He paused on his way to the driver’s side. “I think you’re asking the wrong program. I’m just the driver.”

Adas, her face in her hands, looked up abruptly. “We need to get word of the virus out, so no one runs into it.” She buried her face in her hands once again with a despairing, exhausted little sound before she pummeled the dash with an angry fist. “How. How did that thing get loose in Ilo? The Spirestorm wasn’t enough?” He blew out a sharp breath. “Vidi, I am so, so, sorry.”

“Uh… ok?” The courier replied uncertainly.

“If I’d known you were going to be at risk, I would’ve never asked.”

“Oh, pffft. If that’s the problem, he’s the one that owes me an apology. He knew something was gonna happen.”

“I suspected something might,” GAM had frozen at the door to the driver’s seat. “I had no proof and no guarantee, and I was certainly not expecting the hack to get desperate.”

“Desperate?” Vidi blinked at him.

“Desperate how?” Adas came out of the vehicle to stare at him.

GAM put the emergency Wrench back in its discreet little compartment and straightened up to look at them. “The virus.”

“You think whatever’s behind the Spirestorm’s created that thing?”

“I think it’s a reasonable conclusion. Programs don’t spring up out of nowhere. We all have a cause, a source, an inception. Every program alive, even Strays, have both a source and a reason to exist.”

“No, they don’t,” Vidi shot back at once. “Not every program.”

“Every program. That reason might not be evident to everyone, maybe not even to the program in question, but there are two things that define every program on the grid.” He lifted a hand to count. “They have a source and they have a reason.”

“No they don’t!” Vidi retorted. “Not every program has a source, or a reason, or both. Some just… are.”

The Sentry shifted minutely, his tone amused. “I don’t agree. Even you have both.”

“Whoa, hey!” Adas jerked in surprise at the sudden singling out of the courier. “That’s kind of mean, why wouldn’t she.”

“It’s not mean, it’s fact,” he replied evenly. “She’s a Gridborn.”

Vidi’s mouth worked emptily for a few moments. “You… How…”

“When I first met you, your hair attacked me. Twice. I kept trying to see the connection point between it and your body. I kept thinking it was a Cosmetic, or a patch. But your hair’s not the attachment, your body is.”

Vidi recoiled as if he’d threatened her. “Customers… don’t like it when you look so different.” She huffed. “And I needed somewhere to put the soukscan.”

“And first-gen Cosmetics are cheap, even the permanent ones,” he added mildly.

“But what does it matter, what you look like? A program’s a program,” Adas protested.

“Yeah, on this side of the Sea,” Vidi explained, exasperated. “In Flow and Ark they think I’m some sort of freak.”

Adas gasped in empathetic offense.

Vidi faced off the Sentry once again. “And I may have a source, I mean, in theory, if you want to get philosophical about it, but I sure don’t have a purpose, do I.”

“You do,” he argued with implacable calm. “You might not know it, no one might know it, but you do.”

“You are -! How long have you even known?!”

“Long enough.”

“I’m going to throw something at you!”

“Out of what, your virtual stockpile of intangible blueprints?”

“Wait, wait. Is that what the Spirestorm’s after? Gridborns? Because your tags and parameters are flexible?” Adas paused. “Your storage’s flexible! You could have kept me there scavenging for decacycles!” she cried out indignantly.

“Uh…” Vidi squirmed minutely. “I mean, you didn’t really put a good limit on it?”

GAM crossed his arms on the canopy of the lightrunner and watched Adas verbally assault Vidi. At least the courier had the good grace to look somewhat sheepish at what were, to be fair, very valid accusations. Some part of him felt selfishly vindicated.

Another pointed out that the wind had picked up.

The Sentry was used to receiving incongruous data. There were a lot of sensors built into his armor, and his wavelength had a minor, everpresent awareness that feed him data regarding his immediate environment on a constant stream. Mostly he ignored it.

But the situation was precarious enough that he turned his attention away from the squabble to look all around. There was a breeze, yes, where moments ago there had been nothing. But why was that important?

He cast all his senses out, and found nothing. That was nowhere near as reassuring as it ought to have been. “We should go,” he called out. His instincts were screaming that they’d been still too long.

Adas and Vidi both turned to look at the Sentry, and found him standing pillar-still, head tipped up, the edges of him almost impossible to see against the darkness of the Outlands all around him. If not for the violet circuitry, he’d have been less than a shadow.

“GAM?” Vidi asked timidly.

“Get -” His head whipped around; he’d detected a whistling sound coming at them at the sort of speed that was usually reserved for missile weapons.

He had likely picocycles to react, and he had to react accurately. The target couldn’t be Adas, she was too close to Vidi, and the hack wanted the courier alive. It couldn’t be him, it was near impossible to catch a Sentry by surprise with long-range weapons, everyone knew that.

He leapt over the hood of the lightrunner and yanked the two other programs with him. “Run, run!” He let go of Vidi; he had faith in her sense of self-preservation. One hand free, he grabbed for his baton, and deployed his shield.

An immense construction grappler came out of the dark. It was a massive five-pronged device the size of a lightcycle, a combination physical claw and gravimetric snare universally used by construction crews to deal with all the requirements of their job. It was coming at them as if it had been launched out of one of Pevir’s railguns, and it slammed into the side of the lightrunner, partially carving a rut in the terrain before striking.

The vehicle went airborne at the sheer force of the impact, spinning upside down wildly, massive gouts of primal matter coming off it. It landed once and bounced violently up, a twisted wreck too big to fully derezz, whirling on every axis.

We won’t make it, GAM realized abruptly. He’d dropped his guard, comfortable in the company of programs he trusted. He’d forgotten the very real danger hunting after them. And now, unless he did something, they were all going to pay for it. He shoved Vidi forcefully, sending the courier stumbling into the terrain, spun, caught the back of Adas’ robes, and threw her away from the incoming wreck as hard as he could. The GO4 squealed in uncomprehending shock.

The Sentry dropped to one knee, put his shield up and braced himself.

The crushed lightrunner slammed into him, and he might as well have been trying to stop a sailer going full speed. Pieces of the terrain flew everywhere, blank voxels cascading into the air and back to the ground, pummeling the other two programs where they’d fallen. The runner slid, rolled, rocked, and came to a halt close enough to Adas to illuminate the fallen actuarial with its flickering, failing lights.

In the sudden, abrupt silence filled only with the gusting wind, when GAM cried out in pain the sound went through both his companions like the shock of grabbing a data-line.

“GAM!” Adas picked herself up first. She got as far as her knees before she caught sight of the Sentry and came to a dead stop, horrified.

GAM was pinned under the wreckage, primal matter dripping on him, carving sizzling runnels in his armor and into the body beneath, wounding him one burning voxel at a time. His faceplate had shattered and several circuitry paths had been ripped apart, going dark. And still he had put both hands on the wreck and was heaving desperately against it.

Adas scrambled to his side. “GAM!” She stood up and pulled at the runner. She might as well have been trying to budge the Grid itself.

“Adas, run,” he gritted out. Without the filters of his helmet, he sounded oddly young, desperately in pain.

“Vidi!” Adas screamed.

The courier leaped over the ruined vehicle. “No!” she gasped at the sight that welcomed her. Blindly, instinctively, she joined Adas efforts.

“No! Run!” he wheezed at them. Part of the terrain the wreck had landed on collapsed, and he howled in agony when the lightrunner further dropped on him.

Vidi stopped trying to fight a battle none of them were going to win. Instead she stepped back, her hair flaring up like a brilliant halo, scanning the ruin of the vehicle. Abruptly she scrambled over the wreck, yanking at a section of it. “Adas, help me!”

Adas didn’t hesitate. She climbed after the courier, slipped her hands into the seam Vidi was fighting, and pulled. Abruptly, what had once been one of the runner’s doors crashed open. Vidi went down on her face on the wreck; Adas slid right off it with a squeal, next to GAM. She looked up just in time to see the Gridborn squirm into the wreck.

“No!” GAM hissed at her. “No. Go. Get out! Before they get here!”

“We’re not leaving you. I’m not leaving you!” She took off her outermost robe, leaving her in the basic last-gen form-fitting uniform, and shoved it between him and whatever the dripping, destructive primal matter was.

Vidi suddenly landed next to them. “Something’s coming,” she hissed.

“Then get your plan working fast,” Adas replied.

Vidi’s face set to stone as her hair swept back and forth over the wreck. A couple of eyes blinked warnings and she scurried forward. When she found the right spot, she pressed the emergency Wrench to it and twisted. A chunk of the lightrunner came loose with the Wrench and she shoved it aside. Consciously removed, it didn’t derezz, but at least it was a little less weight on the WallSec.

“Why does it have to be so complex!” she snarled quietly as she fought to reconcile her previous memory of the lightrunner’s blueprint with the twisted tangle of lines in front of her eyes. “Four wheels and a go-box. That’s all it needs. But no, you gotta put in fifty other systems and your stupid limiters and a dozen other bits and pieces in the way -”

Her hands and the Wrench flew along as fast as her eyes could pinpoint weak spots, loose joinings, pieces that could be quickly and easily removed. She had to kick one particular bit until it crashed aside, nearly falling on her. She raced back and forth, taking the lightrunner apart guided only by desperation, memory and her eyes. The first time the machine wrenched upward, even if it was only a breath, she could have screamed in joy.

Adas dragged over a twisted piece left behind and shoved it in the gap to one side of GAM, did the same on the other side, and rushed back to kneel by him. “GAM? Still here?”

“Still,” he admitted, his voice strained and full of pain. “I’m getting used to no one doing what I tell them,” he added.

She couldn’t help but laugh a little through her panic. “You’re too sensible. No one ever wants to listen to sensible programs.”

“I’ve noticed.” He tried all the same. “You need to go. You need to run. The range on the magnetic conveyor that launched that claw isn’t good. They’ll be here soon.”

“We’re not leaving you.” Vidi slid over the wreckage, yanked loose a pipe, threw it aside and ran off.

“I thought only Pevir had magnetic weaponry.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “But this wasn’t a weapon before.” The lightrunner abruptly budged upward another breath or so, and he let out a strangled sound of pain, but his hands never stopped pressing up.

Adas found more debris to shove under the vehicle. “What is it, then?”

“Adas, it’s the virus,” he turned to stare at her. Past the shattered helm, he was young, male, with dark skin and bright, luminous eyes as violet as his circuitry - he was Halcyonite to his core. His features were sharp and strong, and tiny voxels were trickling from a gouge just under one of his eyes. “It’s a construction rig. They repurposed their conveyor, like me taking the limiter out of the runner. It learned that from me. And then it took any program, any vehicle it could catch in Ilo. And now they’ve found us, and they’re all coming here. You have to r- ”

Vidi suddenly dropped next to them. “That’s all we get. They’re here.”

They both peeked over the wreck. A bit of a way away, a construction heavy skiff was hovering over the spot where the grappler had originally hit the lightrunner. Bright spotlights were sweeping over the grappler and the terrain, erratic but very obviously searching for something that wasn’t there. A grappling cable was coming down to secure the grappler. The skiff’s antigrav programming was focused on parallel plates running along its sides, creating twin dust storms underneath it – the cause of the light breeze GAM’s instincts had sensed in that weatherless part of the Grid.

The entire ship was a vitriolic, poisonous yellow.

“I didn’t think normal viruses could take machines,” Adas breathed.

“What about this thing is normal,” Vidi shot back quietly. She cast around until she found the pipe, shoved it under the wreck, and leaned on it with all her weight.

GAM bit down on a scream as the lightrunner shuddered and slid. Adas took back her robes, twisted them into a makeshift rope and secured them around his arms. She nodded at Vidi, who repositioned the pipe and shoved as hard as she could.

“Go!” GAM managed to grind out, almost inaudibly, and Adas yanked, dragging him out, back and free. Free of the wreck, the damage he’d taken was even more terrifying.

“Vidi, my baton. There’s a… there’s a crawler.”

She found it, but Adas was closer. The GO4 snatched it up and, unwilling to touch him just in case it should hurt him even more, secured it to her person. “We’re not leaving you. Come on. On your feet. We are Halcyonite programs and we are currently in danger.”

“Yeah, time to do your job, WallSec.” Even as Vidi joined in verbally harrying him, she and Adas struggled to get him up. It was Spire’s odds that his legs were still working, but security programs were usually built tough beyond belief.

“She’s not. You’re… not.” He bit back, badly, several sounds of pain, but he helped them wrangle him upright, folding back the useless helm and leaning heavily on both of them. His hair was black, very short and threaded with more violet. One leg was working; the other was dark all the way up to mid-thigh. “You’re in Halcyon… illegally.”

Vidi gasped at Adas. “No way!”

“I am a visiting diplomatic envoy!” She was entirely too glad to indulge the harmless accusation if it would help keep him from derezzing. She glanced at his back and blew a heavy sigh of relief: his disk was battered but in one piece. Slowly, they began to shuffle directly away from the distant, yellow lights of the skiff.

In a moment, the only light was their own, which made it terrifyingly plain how badly damaged GAM was. Until that point, whenever they were together, his was the most brilliant bit of circuitry on their combined spectrum, and a potent component of soothing calm on their combined wavelength. All of that was gone, leaving behind only the white and blue tones of Adas and Vidi, and the whirling mix of their worry and his pain.

Behind them, they heard the skiff begin to winch the grappler up. “We have to move faster,” GAM ground out.

“We’re going as fast as we can, I think,” Adas strained to reply. He wasn’t just taller than both of them, he was infinitely more solid, a giant slab of a program. Unsurprising for a security program, but not very helpful at the moment.

“Move where?” Vidi gritted out. “We’re in the middle of nowhere!”

“Not… nowhere,” he managed, and nodded.

They both looked up. Faint and distant, Parnassus’ lights cascaded up into the sky, thin white tendrils driven up as if in unseen currents, reaching so far that it seemed as if they might touch the other side of the sky.

“Do you think he’ll help?” Vidi asked.

“We don’t have a choice,” Adas replied firmly. “And I won’t give him one either.”

“But we have to move faster,” GAM persisted. “The skiff’s slower than the worm. And it’s got… it’s got arms.”

Reminded of the uncanny, half-formed and broken mimicries of itself the virus seemed able to extrude at will, all three of them did their best to make haste along the terrain. “You are so heavy, WallSec!” Vidi protested.

“I did say -”

“You say to leave you behind one more time and I will throw something at you.” She brandished the emergency Wrench on her free hand.

He managed a wan little smile at that. When something glitched and scraped somewhere in the darkness behind them, his expression set to stone. “Don’t look, keep moving.”

Adas reached behind her and grabbed her disk with her free hand.

“You’re surprisingly handy with that,” GAM noted, “for an actuarial program.”

“So I watch a lot of the matches at Pevir, so sue me. Everyone needs a hobby,” she bristled defensively.

“I’m not complaining,” he admitted.