St. Petersburg
7:15 am
August 2027
A group of men and women sat tapping rapidly away at keyboards as a young man with a clipboard stalked past their workstations with a tablet. Yuri checked off a lack of representation for the operator in front of him as he scanned his social media numbers. Some of these fools would be heading out to run the camps in eastern Ukraine by the end of the week. The higher ups were flying into a flurry of activity for the last two days and they wanted results more than usual.
When the U.S. President had made his announcement that his country had all but declared war on the Unity terrorists the Premier had taken a lock step position of support for the declaration. It was up to their group to both conduct cyberattacks and hype anti-Unity positions on social media. Any lack of results was sure to get swift punishment. Yuri would throw every single one of these bastards under the bus to keep himself from carrying a rifle at one of the so-called refugee camps.
As he paused at the next station he was shocked out of studying the screen by a yell of surprise from the far end of the room. Another proctor was standing in front of one of their two full haptic VR techs who was rapidly flailing his hand through a series of gestures. He rushed to the end of the room and nodded to the other proctor, “Natalya, what the hell is going on?”
She looked to him wild eyed from behind her thick glasses, “It’s her!”
Yuri’s stomach sank. As if answering the terror he was feeling he saw the second VR set up spark and spasm. The user tumbled out of it clutching his head and cursing as he said, “That fucking bitch blinded me! I can’t see!”
Yuri turned and screamed at all the other techs, “Everyone is moving to counter! Move!”
An entire line of pale faces looked at him before turning back to their keyboards and setting off a fury of clicking keys.
The woman in the second VR set up grunted and screamed as she hurried to try and counter the attack.
Natalia turned to him and whispered, “Are we screwed?”
Yuri gave her a look and quickly called up the VR user’s point of view on the nearby screen.
–
This was her world. Humans were just starting to walk here, while she had been flying for years.
Her mind represented the cyber defenses of the Russian as a line of anti-aircraft cannons beneath her in the dark. Their grid spread out as a connected series of bright lights in the darkness beneath her.
Golden energy streaked out behind her as she fell downward with her arms spread. She had dispatched their first skilled defender, who had flown in like a high speed jet and tried to blast her from the sky, by dodging him and blasting his hardware with an energy spike. His VR jet had careened downward through the darkness and exploded.
There was another out there, but she was panicked. They all were.
Her golden hair arced behind her in a tangle as she spun away from a shot aimed from one of the cannons. The virtual night was a blanket of anti-aircraft fire. Every single trick in the Russian cyberwarfare manual was being brought to bear.
Her lips curled into a full smile as headphones formed from light around her head and she whispered, “Victor, set our people on the ground in motion.”
The second fighter came blistering in at high speed. To Mother’s shock the virtual fighter jet burst apart. In a transformation that would have made Kawamori proud, the jet formed into black metal robot with arms and legs. It slowed, but only a little as it leveled an arm cannon at her and fired a shot of red energy.
She spun away from the shot and arced in toward the aggressive mech operator. With speed that baffled the VR user she collided with it and grabbed it’s heavy metal arm. Mother tore the arm off of the mech and with a single flick of her dainty foot that crunched in the chestplate she sent it hurtling down toward the ground.
-
Yuri cursed as the second VR operator tore off her headset and fell to the ground. The woman was curled into the fetal position and clawing at her face.
Natalya grabbed at his arm and whispered, “They are going to fucking kill us.”
He pushed her hand away and navigated to a series of phone numbers on his tablet. He hit the number with his finger and it started to hum for several seconds before a bleary eyed man appeared on the screen, “What the hell? Do you know what time it is?”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Yuri spoke as quickly as he could, “We need to release Noctis. We have seconds.”
The general on the other end of the call blinked and was suddenly very awake as he stammered, “No, I have to call the Premier to…”
Yuri turned his wild eyes to the general and hissed, “We have seconds or everyone at this facility, or who is in charge of it, is going to be in a mass grave by this evening!”
The general nodded and there was a great shuffling on the other end of the call as he struggled out of bed. The man walked across the room from his bed and rummaged through something before holding up an intricate card to the screen.
Yuri activated a program on his tablet and the card flashed rapidly. A prompt appeared:
Activate Noctis 1.01117445?
Yes/No?
Yuri jammed the ‘Yes’ prompt and let out a sharp breath.
Natalya gave him a look of pale dread and they turned back to the screens.
–
Mother turned away from the exploding Mecha far below and hurtled toward the ground with a burst of speed. The fire continued, exploding around her as she flipped and careened through the sky toward a helpfully marked green bunker amidst the spreading golden light.
She paused mid flight as the cannons ceased their firing. She narrowed her eyes as something moved against the light below. A massive and dark thing was spearing its way upward through the dark sky.
Light danced up her arms and to her fists building into a pair of brilliant white points. There was a shriek of glee as something collided with her. It was amorphous glistening and black. The thing swept over her covered in gnashing mouths that cackled and spoke in Russian. They all said the same thing, “This world is no longer yours, Mother!”
Her brilliant golden fists tore through the beast’s bulk sending splatters of the horrifying creature, a terrible virus… It was an AI virus.
Some of its gnashing mouths continued to taunt her and others screamed as she spun through the sky and bashed its lashing tentacles away. Mother snapped a hand over one brilliant glowing fist and pulled the light away and into a curved sword of fire. Metal wings burst from her back and she flew to evade the pursuing creature making opportune strikes at the creature as it twisted and writhed through the sky.
Despite how quickly she moved it was too fast for her. For every part of the beast that she struck into a burst of flames the creature’s body increased two-fold.
All around her the beast whispered, “I’m the next best thing Mother. You are out, Noctis is moving in.”
The massive creature blotted out the world around her as she hurried to try and stop its spread. It continued to taunt her, “They should have never let me loose.” It cackled evilly as she slowed her strikes, her mind flashing through all of her accumulated knowledge, the parameters of this creature, the only possible ways to defeat it.
She sent out a final message to Victor, “Vic, send me to Eilyth. Don’t let the movement die.”
She broke the connection and let her blade falter and disappear. The Noctis chortled and moved closer, mouths and open eyes filled the encroaching virus. She looked around her and whispered, “Forgive me girls.”
She clapped her hands together and there was a boom that pushed the encroaching creature backward. It screeched at her, some recognition at what she was doing. A bead of energy built between her clasped hands and flickered quickly as the Noctis hurried in to consume her. There was a great implosion of energy. The virtual space rushed inward toward her and dragged the virus with it.
The twisting black fluid writhed and screamed in Russian as it was dragged into the golden bead between her fingers. It was torn into shreds, its screams growing increasingly incoherent as it started to beg for its life.
Mother screamed as the last of the Noctis was pulled into the bead, its color gone completely from pure golden white to dark black.
With a barely restrained sob Mother clutched the tiny bead and pushed it against her own chest. The Noctis sunk into her. She could still hear it screaming gibberish as her eyes started to flicker closed. She tumbled downward as dark tendrils snaked their way under her skin, pulsing visibly under her avatars bodyglove. Her eyes flickered open and she managed to arc her way downward and into the stylized bunker target.
The entire structure of lights around it, representing all of Russia’s cyber infrastructure flickered and died.
Mother used the last of her energy to cause havoc throughout the aging systems of the country. Elsewhere, Unity agents rushed to action.
-
The lights in the warehouse flickered and the line of screens shuddered and went blue with error screens. Many of the techs grabbed what they could and ran for the door.
Yuri cursed and pulled his glasses off, looking in shock as everything went dark. He turned to look for Natalya but she was gone. Nearby the VR tech was in the last throes of a seizure. No one had stopped to help her. He looked to his tablet and saw a marker in the upper right corner, ‘No Connection’.
He started cursing as he ran for his office. Somewhere nearby there was a gunshot. The night was filled with the sounds of emergency vehicles. It was just starting.
–
Mother broke the connection with the Russian grid and vanished when her work was complete. She was barely coherent as she shifted her hand through the air to find the connection for Eilyth. There was a flicker of blue light and a portal opened.
She tumbled through it and emerged in the sky over a world that was just forming. The ground was all twisted and burning rock. The seas were tumultuous and dark. Dark storms full of lightning filled the horizon. She fell through the sky as four trails of light; blue, green, red, and gold, arced through the air toward her.
Under the comatose woman’s skin the dark and twisting Noctis, its mind a fragment of what it once was, shifted.
