“I take back what I said about you being smart, James.” She rests her head on the floor of the podium and stares up at the evening sky. “Well if you don’t know, that thing will, soon enough.”
His blank look only makes Virginia laugh, and thus cough, all the harder.
Troubled, James asks, “What the hell do you mean?”
Virginia can no longer manage a laugh, but her grimacing smirk is raw condescension.
“For Christ’s sake, James. She just massacred a city. With that amount of people’s memories, someone must have at least seen an image of her before we all transferred.”
James notices Matilda rocking back and forth. “Wait, so you know who she is?”
Virginia’s voice is weak, faltering. “Of course I fucking do. That’s why I assumed I could get in her head.”
James pleads, “Virginia. You have to—”
She cuts him off by spitting more of her lifeblood at him. With her end approaching, she’s only able to drool it on herself.
“Blow me, you piece of shit.”
And with that, the last breath leaves her. Virginia’s body becomes still.
Eyes focused on nothing, James finally gets up and collects a catatonic Matilda in his arms. He carries the Scry through the now-vacant domain of Neverland. It seems every citizen of Neverland was connected to Virginia’s big celebration. As they reach the edge of the city, Matilda shifts her weight and pushes herself out of his arms. Standing up, Matilda shakes off the accumulated dust filming her clothes.
“So, where to next, Gramps?” she asks.
James lets the cheery bravado slip, hoping it’s a sign of her old self.
“With Neverland down, there’s no transportation lines available. We’ll have a lot of walking ahead of us.”
Matilda snorts. “Back to your old ‘dodging the question’ self, I see.”
Taciturn prepares a counter but thinks better of it.
“Delaware. We need to go to Delaware. Hank Brown has the next key.”
Matilda tightens her lips. Taciturn cannot read the expression it creates. “Can I see Virginia’s?”
Taciturn moves alongside her and hands her Virginia’s bracer. As the Scry’s hands grab it, James turns Virginia’s words of warning over in his mind.
The moon’s light reflects off the bracer in Matilda’s hand. “Huh… all that, for just this.”
They walk in silence for a few minutes before Matilda speaks again.
“I’m assuming you knew this Hank dude. Like you knew Virginia.”
James looks forward at the road ahead.
“Yeah. He actually used to be a friend of mine, back at Fall Water. Ran the R&D department and dealt with most of our third-party developers.”
For a while, they continue in silence. Finally, Matilda asks, “How would you describe him?”
James thinks of his old friend – it’s a complicated question. The only correct answer is significantly simpler. “He’s gone batshit crazy.”
Matilda lets out a single laugh. “We’ve already met a sleazy ruler in Babylon and a deranged cult-leader in Neverland, and Hank is the crazy one. Great.”
Despite the sarcasm, James reflects that it’s the first he’s heard her laugh in a long time.
They continue down the road in silence.
As night reigns over the eerily silent Neverland, a wind rises, howling through the city streets. It sweeps billowing clouds of information dust into the air. Lights in the city start to flicker off – street lamps, apartment windows, stores. As buildings start to age and crumble, the tower bell from Amazement Square falls to the ground and shatters. Wild grass breaks through the asphalt and cobblestone, while bushes and trees expand, overflowing into areas humans traveled heavily just hours before. The System claims an empty realm from inhabitants that perverted its code. Taking back what belongs to it. Making things right.
Chapter 13: “The Road”
James and Matilda walk side by side along Interstate 60 from Neverland towards Richmond. The inhabitants they’ve passed in the quiet, green landscape have been a random sheep or two. In the early years of the Cyberside, the surrounding cities of Scotsville and Amherst were full of people. Now they remain empty – silent, eternal mausoleums to the causalities of the First Traffic War. The derelict cities remind James of the bloody conflict and his involvement in it.
At the time, James had hoped he could avert disaster through his technical prowess. Gathering former colleagues from his tech department, they banded together and formed a society to safeguard the Cyberside. Creating a knightly order, they fancied themselves the digitalized incarnation of the Knights Templar. Together, they would protect whichever pilgrims they chanced upon on the road, ever secretly fixing critical issues within the System using their extensive engineering knowledge. Despite their good intentions, their idealistic vision soon fell before the harsh reality. In the end, humanity’s problematic nature was less fixable than any technical issues they had ever planned for.
The First Traffic War was the first major harbinger of the horrors humankind could inflict upon itself in the digital world. Vast tracts of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland became conflict zones when the fighting between the Triangle Alliance and the East Coast Enclave began. While Neverland remained neutral and unaffected, the other regions were not so lucky. As the war over influence and traffic raged on, the populations were caught between violence and the early forms of slavery that would soon manifest rampantly throughout the Cyberside.
Seeing the horrors and drastic alteration to the System’s code, James’ knightly order – calling themselves Taciturns – stepped in as best they could. Their hope was to stem the tide of destruction and code alteration, but their numbers were too few to make any significant difference between the warring factions. Before long came the System’s first regional shutdown. In the blink of an eye, Maryland ceased to exist. All of the area’s inhabitants found themselves in new zones, the landmass having simply disappeared. Finally comprehending the potential consequences of their actions, both the Enclave and the Triangle entered an uneasy armistice. The Triangle shut its doors completely, erected massive walls along its borders, and turned North Carolina into an impenetrable, isolated realm. Rumors began spreading of the experiments being run behind those walls, but reliable news first slowed to a trickle, then stopped altogether.
With their own ranks dwindling, the Taciturn Order gathered for one last time. Disbanding, they would concentrate on preserving themselves, and retaining and honing their base of advanced engineering knowledge. As solitary nomads, they would each seek to address what they could handle – local issues and the containment of monstrous anomalies. Over the years, James lost touch with most of his fellow Taciturns. Many died, while still others strayed from the path. When a handful gathered to tackle the Bakersfield Incident, James learned that some of their original order had tried to enter the Triangle, convinced that the answers to fix everything were hidden there. No one was ever heard from, and chaos within the Cyberside continued.
Now, reluctantly, James finds himself on a similar path, traversing old battlegrounds and heading to an area of Cyberside which, by the evidence, no one returns from.
And he does it all in the company of a Scry.
James laughs inwardly and grimly at what his other Taciturns would say if they knew. With two more keys to go, James wonders if he’ll get the chance to learn what happened to his Taciturn brothers and sisters that ventured into the Triangle.
With rapid communication lines either down or closely monitored, James insists they stick to a slower method. They walk down an empty highway, traversing an entire indexation zone before James decides it’s safe to set up camp. When they finally stop, Matilda’s physical exhaustion is on a par with her mentally haggard state.