Ragnarok (11 page)

It didn't work. The Crag stayed opaque and black. The ads were all highlighted, but whatever part of them was inside the site coding wasn't revealed. Yoshi tried again with the same results. Avatars around him could see what he was doing. One laughed. He linked back to V team.

“I saw the code for the ads. It's not a problem with your rooster. It's the Crag. It's invulnerable.”

Vibeke replied, “Go ahead and start clicking the ad links. Just log their contacts one by one and come back. We can handle it from there.”

“No, let me try one more thing first. Your rooster is only set for noninvasive penetration of the site's code. I have an intramarkup hack. If I apply it to the Gullinkambi, it should be able to see through the Crag. It'll damage the permissions a little, but it's a website. It won't feel anything.”

Violet watched as he applied the new coding, a rather brilliant modification. She felt some trepidation at his last words. If any site could feel, it would be this abomination. She reminded herself the rock walls were just site code. He activated the modified Gullinkambi, and they could see inside the Crag.

They saw eyes. There was a grotesque crablike face inside the rock. Yoshi staggered back. They could see more. Inside the spiral rock crag was a gigantic face with several mandibles, feelers, and eye stalks—and it was looking at them. Not only at Yoshi but right through his visual link to V team. The Gullinkambi cut out. The stone went black again.

“Okay, guys,” Yoshi stuttered, panicked, “I'm coming up topside. You can keep your program.”

Yoshi began to skip across the cliff toward the portal to the common net. As he did the Crag began to shake. It was the first time Violet had seen an earthquake online. Avatars began to tumble down the sides.

“What the hell is happening?” asked Veikko.

“The Crag is moving,” said Vibeke plainly. She spoke as normal, but Violet could hear something in her voice. She had never seen anything like it either. The Crag continued to shift. As Yoshi fought the local gravity settings and ran for the portal the mountain began to turn onto its side. That helped Yoshi for a moment, with the Crag turning he was almost to the edge, almost to the portal. He leaped for the junction and looked in the clear when a gigantic black claw appeared from under the mountain's edge and grabbed him. Its chelae squeezed down on the old man, and he vanished in a gruesome puff of pixelation. The visual link cut out with a sickening yank, as if their eyes had been pulled out with it.

V team stood on the eighth ring staring at the hole. Violet tried to understand what they'd just seen, some sort of advanced site AI or a defensive mechanism? No other sites had anything like it. She had never imagined anything like the face she'd spotted within the Crag—the Crab. A crab's face within a mountain-sized shell, a face that would be haunting her dreams. Its eyes were….

Still looking at her from the pit. The crab's face had emerged from its mountain shell. It saw them from the void, even after Yoshi's
link went dead, the Crag was watching them from below. Four of its eyes breached the portal on their long stalks and stared. As they stared, the black avatars began to crumble. Violet couldn't tell what it was at first. It was a hack completely unlike Alopex's but every bit as powerful. Their avatars fell away and revealed their residual self-images. At horrible resolution, with no added trackability, they
suddenly looked a lot like themselves. It could see their faces. And they couldn't stop looking at its grotesque visage. Angry at being hacked. Anger radiating impossibly, tangibly from those hot flat eyes. Violet's only consolation was that it was a site looking up from the void; they were safe. She hoped.

An instant later, the deadly claw reached out from the pit and landed on the spinning vortex of the bottom ring. The entire Undernet shook. The spinning ring shattered with sickening lag. Textures across the Undernet began to lose resolution. Motion became jerky as it hit, freezing up and making sound chirp painfully as its stream broke up. Violet couldn't grasp what was happening. The Crag was not only moving but disrupting the Undernet. It shouldn't have been able to touch the damn thing at all, only users could step onto a new site, not another—

“It's not a site!” shouted Vibs. “The Crag's not a site! It's a user!” And what they were seeing made sense. The contact barriers didn't exist because the people there were walking on a person. They accepted it in as soon as they touched it. And their hack, the Gullinkambi, it could see through page code but not a living avatar. Yoshi's modification could. He had just tried to peel the skin off of a person, and now the person was very pissed off.

V team began to run for the higher rings, toward the logout protocol. It was difficult amid the lag. Time kept freezing, and by the time it caught up, there was more and more damage. The rings shook and jammed. Their visual output lost resolution or flashed out entirely for several seconds. Avatars tumbled down the walls as the Crag's gravity coding took them over. The Undernet was getting deleted by its claws as they climbed.

They jumped off of the unspeakable pornography ring just as a claw hit behind them. Obscenity spilled from the stores into the void by the terabyte. Violet saw Varg recall his Tikari, still a separate avatar but one revealed as a mechanical caterpillar. It coiled around him as in the real world. She did the same with Nelson and hid him in her chest. What avatars the Crag didn't crush and destroy outright were landing on its massive shell, the mountain where its native avatars, like lice, would begin to devour them, or beat them away toward the void in fear. V team climbed as fast as the new gravity would allow. The Crag followed, slowly clawing its way up the rings, smashing them along with any users who hadn't yet logged out in the panic. The log-outs jammed the top door to the Nikkei. A crowd of frightened criminals, mutants, and perverts formed to block the way. The top rings had escaped. The middle rings were blocking the door. Those from the lowest rings were doomed.

“We need Alopex!” Violet shouted.

“C will know!” Vibs replied.

“Fuck C team! It won't matter if we're dead.”

“This will make every news log on the planet anyway, trust me. Call Aloe!”

All four activated their emergency calls. The information tore through the Undernet ceiling and into the Nikkei, and from there back home. It hit every link in Valhalla. C team saw V's signature, and Cato cursed loudly before running to a pogo to find their real world bodies. Alf and Balder halted their chess game to monitor. T team recalled their mosquitoes and headed for a pogo. R team rushed onto the Nikkei to begin rescue procedures. Half the other teams in Valhalla began monitoring. Alopex's priorities also shifted like an avalanche. The fox manifested at the Undernet portal.

Violet began to feel nauseated from the jerking lag and fits of deafness. The Undernet was breaking up around them. The crowd of remaining avatars was blinking and shifting rapidly from their own contact barriers mashed against each other. Suddenly Alopex broke through. Seeing the crowd, she first tore a new portal into the underground, programming a fifteen thousand channel log-out complex to get rid of the crowd. Trolls and Skuzzbots began to pour out onto the Nikkei floor before the eyes of startled stockbrokers and business avatars.

The Crag's legs were almost upon the top ring. Some of the spambots tried to attack it to no avail. They burst into code as they hit its thick armor. A kind of hack armor they'd never seen before. What kind of mind was inside that thing? It had clearly grown beyond all common capabilities for avatar scaling allowed online. Its destructive power was beyond comprehension, as if a thousand denial attacks emanated from its every limb. It forced physics onto every site it touched, like its presence made the net vulnerable to earthly peril. And it came so close now Violet could see its eyes again, glowing yellow within red from behind the crustaceous spiky mandibles and claws.

Another leg emerged from the mountain shell and reached straight for V team. Alopex emerged through the emptying portal and assessed the threat. Within a thousandth of a second, she ran every denuding program she had on the beast. Her trace program hit it first with no results. Her invasive trace couldn't penetrate it either. Half a dozen more programs failed before a scanning cloud routine running off the surrounding netscape contact points made it through: The user was Bill Ulster from Amarillo Texas, 176 kg, fifty-four years old, multiple arrests for net crimes, disappeared twenty-one years earlier, the same day the Black Crag went online. Alopex attempted to disrupt his link to no avail. It was a tunnel-penetrative tomography link. His higher brain functions were taking place completely online.

V team climbed topside into the Nikkei. The market was mayhem, in chaos from the influx of spambots and fleeing porn connoisseurs. The logs and news volumes were getting flooded by users and programs alike. Violet saw an economic log toppled and smothered by a crowd of gamblers. Debuggers were at the rim of the portal trying to keep the code-rot at bay. A monetary planetoid above was falling into the Crag gravity and several dead avatars lay scattered, either crippled users or improper log outs, some disfigured by the Undernet collapse missing texture maps, others mutilated with their nurbs ripped off. The Alopex system felt out for V team and ingested them, resorting their link from AleGel into herself. New safety protocols loaded instantly.

The rest of Alopex jumped out from the pit. Violet was about to ask if she'd neutralized the Crag when a claw erupted from the ground. The thing had torn all the way through, up to the proper Nikkei. It began to prop itself up as the Nikkei began to fall into the void left by the Undernet's destruction. Orbiting logs and company sites disappeared, going offline to escape. One hit an immersion log-out error and got impaled on the top of the Crag's rising spire. Its segfault lines cracked open, and the lice swarm crawled inside. The whole planetoid, once labeled as XeServ, went dead black and crumbled to binary.

Alopex was busily scanning for any weakness. It took several seconds, an eternity for Alopex, to find one. And only one. In order to maintain a site-like gravity and enormous size, the user had put a great deal of dependence on physical simulators. He was so invested in the sims that the Crag very nearly functioned in netspace like an animal in the real world. Alopex could work with that.

The little white fox representing Valhalla's mainframe grew to several hundred times her usual size. She adjusted her physical simulators to match those of the Crag. Because Bill Ulster's brain was totally immersed in the net and fully dependent on the simulation, his avatar's destruction would render him brain-dead. Alopex was vulnerable as well. The Crag was a powerful being, the most powerful user her logs had ever recorded. All things being equal, they'd have a fair fight. But a fox is more agile than a crab. The fox attacked.

What denizens hadn't logged out of the Nikkei stood still. Across the offices and markets of the Nikkei, what appeared to be a 300-meter tall fox was wrestling with a 300-meter long black hermit crab with a mountain for a shell. The Crag hit Alopex with its limbs, shaking the Nikkei and causing a painful lag across half the local nets. Back in Valhalla, lights flickered. The ground code broke further under their feet. Large chunks of the planetoid were now falling into the void. Veikko fortified their island with new locking protocols as the access tower beside them fell into the great 404.

Alopex bit into the limb and tore it from the Crag, throwing it into a log silo, which broke apart beneath it, leaking news tickers everywhere. The Crag was unstable. Aloe stayed on top of it from there. She didn't let it get another foothold. She bit and tore into every appendage it thrust toward her until it was crippled and fell onto its side. Then she went for its eye stalks, scratching monitoring programs out of the thing's face. The mandibles fell and rendered its action protocols null. Deeper still she dug into the shell, ripping out meaty chunks of net code, then avatar code, and finally brain code. It was a grisly victory. What was left of the Nikkei was covered in crab guts and crag rocks. A puff of Aloe's super-realistically simulated hair was clogging the mass debugging gutter, which was already on overload trying to deal with the destruction of the Undernet and several trillion terabytes of Nikkei programming.

From the dead Crag's shell, its native avatars were wandering away. Some looked at V team, but none tried to attack. Their days of contact barrier violation were over. A familiar brainy green avatar spotted them, bowed to them, and logged away. Alopex took a last glance at them, scanned for their safety, and blinked out. Violet and team just stood, awkwardly, on their island of green plastic netscape, surveying the chaos around them. Ragnar and Ruger hopped down from a floating chunk of stock market without a word. The rest of R team waited above.

A familiar blue rooster floated down from the sky, losing feathers as it flapped its wings. The Gullinkambi landed at Veikko's feet and crowed. He scooped it up and nodded to Ragnar, who activated his regional log-out and swept the teams offline. Violet awoke in the cold empty office from which they'd logged into AleGel. R team was absent; they'd logged in from Valhalla. T and C teams were standing over them. Tahir and Tasha looked like kids caught stealing candy. Most of C team looked stern but stood silent.

Cato stood alone before them all. Violet thought she heard more audio lag. She touched her link instinctively, that horrible squeaking of broken sound stream was back. It took her a moment to realize it was the grinding of Cato's teeth.

 

 

Y
AMASA
-K
AIUN
WAS
making too much money. It was making too much money and not giving half enough of it to Zaibatsu, so Zaibatsu offered an ultimatum: forfeit its earnings for the last three years or be dissolved into another more sycophantic Zaibatsu subsidiary, the YUP. Neither was an option. Their earnings had all been responsibly invested in more ships, better safety features around its islands, and advertising for maritime transportation. To give up and be assimilated into the YUP was just as impossible, because a few days before the deadline, the YUP personnel arranging the takeover ceased to exist. So when Yamasa was set to go rogue and die fighting the Yuppies, the Yuppies never came. The entire navy seemed to drop off the face of the Earth, or at least into storage under its oceans.