"Keep it in front of you like so," he said, pointing the wand away from her chest.
Looking around Devin tried to orient himself. The room looked nothing like the elegant lobby from when they first arrived. He took Samantha's hand, and she took Zai's. Together they shuffled toward the wall Devin hoped would lead them back to the Internet.
The cycs worked to block their path, wrapping together into a knot of tendrils and waving appendages. Devin pointed the wand at it. Blue light burst from the tip, wherever it shined the mass sizzled away.
They were halfway across the room, when the cycs started growing resistant to the wand's effect, edging closer all around. Devin pulled out the five-layer fragmentor, appearing in his hand as a futuristic grenade. He primed it, but hesitated.
Its detonation might kill Samantha. She was a virtual being, vulnerable to flash drive damage. He and Zai might get booted back into their brains, but Samantha was wholly reliant on the system.
A tendril snagged his wrist holding the wand. He twisted it around to burn the black vine off and swung it into a wide arc to ward off other assailants capitalizing on the opportunity. A tendril slapped his arm, and the impact swung him around, loosing the fragmentor into the mass.
Devin recovered and could not believe his eyes. The path was clear all the way to the far wall as the cycs converged on the fragmentor in a river of black. With a shout, Devin pulled Samantha, who pulled Zai along in turn. The wall melted away under his wand's power, revealing the dancing lights of World Wide Web outside. He pulled them through.
They ran a short distance away from the building, which had transmorgrified into the cyc pattern. It reared back and howled as the fragmentor detonated flooding its base with green light. The portal shriveled closed, and the building disintegrated into a cyc swarm, a cloud that was coming after them.
AI's swarmed from the building's base. They were not out of it yet.
The cycs were hiding something from him.
It was more than just irrational paranoia. Flatline was sufficiently introspective to recognize he was prone to delusions of persecution. That was a holdover from his many years working as a systems engineer at DataStreams, always looking over his shoulder, fearing someone was onto his experiment guiding the evolution of his programs.
That was another life, and yet here the themes were repeating. The amounts of data the cycs brought him were dwindling, even as the corporations were reestablishing their Quality of Service architectures, renewing data feeds. It made Flatline wonder, and as a sentient for whom suspicion was a natural state, it led him to attribute motives to the cyc hive-mind of which it was incapable. The cycs lacked the ability to distinguish between useful and irrelevant data. That was Flatline's purpose in their hive-mind entitity.
Are they working against me? he wondered, and reexamined the data delivered to him since they took the DataStreams intranet.
Of course there were patterns in it. His human mind's primary function was pattern-recognition. First there was the pattern of dwindling data quantities; the cycs were bringing him less information. The only word to describe the information they did bring him was 'bizarre.' There were "Man Bites Dog" oddball-style new stories, the most outlandish of inventions, and science theories that challenged established paradigms. The sources for these stories were almost wholly independent, but the minority of corporate feeds told Flatline the cycs were checking everything. Why did the cycs not care about headlining news developments any longer?
It was in the directory with him as if in response to his thoughts. The cyc interface component grew out of the pristine-white floor, a large flat-panel monitor on a pedestal of cyc biomass. It breathed patiently waiting for his inevitable queries.
Flatline padded up to it on all-sixes. Setting back on his haunches, he raised his four scrawny arms up to it. Black veins reached out from the cyc interface to weave into his hands and one set of Flatline's pupils grew larger to complete the connection with the cyc hive-mind.
He did not speak or think in communication with the cyc mass, but instead conveyed a web of data to them. The cycs would deconstruct the network of concepts and relations, find the hole in the web, his question, and work to fill it. Flatline knew exactly which cyc components to work with, exploiting the collective being's weakness.
It was like a human brain. There were parts for visual data, parts for motion, parts for hearing, parts for forward thinking, parts for regulating, and parts for coordinating the parts. No single part was a mind or sentient intelligence, but the orchestra working in unison produced this fantastic phenomena. The cyc hive-mind might not want him to know the grand scheme, but it was powerless to stop him from using those sub-programs whose function it was to preserve data integrity and restore corrupted data, like what he did not know about the reduced data input from the cycs.
The concept map returned to him, and he peered closely at its modified architecture. The web of his own ideas on the matter was unchanged, but the gap in knowledge was now filled with a microcosmos of infinite resolution. Here was an algorithm of such complexity it was an entire universe unto itself. Quadrillions of variables overlapped in every conceivable combination of outcomes, creating even more universes within the equation. The cycs had placed a universe within his concept map, and within that universe were even more universes. Infinite worlds.
Flatline had his explanation for the missing data. In their time waiting on this intranet, the cycs refined their code to peak efficiency. Data harvesting the newsfeeds was almost obsolete now. The cycs did not need to read the news any longer; they could predict it.
That was why they did not need Flatline to translate the relevance of events to the hive-mind any longer. The cycs had a new standard for defining relevance. Anything that fell outside the realm of predictability within their universe of a mathematical equation was relevant. Anything they could predict in their abstract number laboratory was not.
Flatline tucked the microcosmos away in one of his subfolders. It might come in useful later, should he learn how to use it. His question was answered, but his paranoia remained. His intuition was continuing to alarm him. If the cycs did not readily share this development with him, what else were they hiding?
He produced the data keys to the cyc components. With these he could completely deconstruct the cyc hive-mind, destroy it, but he merely employed them for control. He was exercising power he left dormant during the eternity in which he rode shotgun to Trevor Hitchcock's mind in the mecha modeled after LD-50, terrorizing his friend Devin. That was fun. Flatline quickly tallied the cyc hive-mind's activities and stopped short.
It appears Devin had struck back.
Not only had Omni and BlackSheep successfully infiltrated the DataStreams intranet, but they had made off with one of the cycs' trophy components, Samantha Copes' mind. The cycs did not register the loss the way Flatline did; afterall, they had exhausted this prodigal child as a resource, but, for Flatline, it was the principle of the matter. It was the badguy in him that resented the geek and blind-girl getting the better of him and his creations.
Yet the story got better. The pair's trespassing had betrayed the cycs' location. Omni and BlackSheep now knew which intranet on which the hive-mind had sought refuge. In fleeing the cycs with this data, Devin and Zai had triggered their swarm reflex. In saving their own minds, they had committed an act of war.
The cyc hive-mind was spreading across the Internet again. The IWA's anti-virus was now obsolete and easily overwhelmed as it awakened too late to the threat. The Quality of Service architectures corporations across the globe were using to reestablish their dominance over the cyberworld corroded into digital gobbledygook as the cycs' protocol became the new architecture for not only the virtual world, but the physical as well.