The human race had other Quality of Service protocols in the "real" world. They had fences, buildings, property records, and a wide array of other means to divided their land into fair use clauses. The cycs were about to challenge this artifice. Armies of bots, the invincible products of the shared innovations from thousands of companies hoarding their ideas to themselves under the delusion of maximizing their profits, prepared for their imminent assault on land. What would a Science Warfare Applications EMP-tank do against its mirror image equipped with Xybercorp's EMP shielding?
Then there was the third front in this war, a dimension Flatline did not expect. Minds, human minds, hundreds of millions of them, all scooped up into the cyc hive-mind as it swept across the Earth and Web. Each of them a new component, brought into collective service, more parts, each unaware of its significance in the whole. The cycs were waging warfare over the territory of the human minds.
Flatline could not have imagined this, and that troubled him, made him question his own role in the cyc hive-mind. If the cycs were harvesting minds, would that make him obsolete? His paranoia levels red-lined at this possibility. The cycs had put him out of the loop, failing to let him know they were retaking the Web.
No, not failing to let him know, but making a conscious decision to isolate him from the developing events. He could see it from their perspective. There was the conflicting data. Flatline defined Devin Matthews as a threat, but the component had fashioned the hive-mind with the wealth of data contained within the Library of Congress. It had also programmed many cyc components to interface with Internet architectures before the first colonization. Devin the enemy and Devin the beneficiary were a paradox the cycs could not resolve through Flatline's interpretations of events.
There was Flatline's erratic behavior to contend with as well. The cycs interpreted his assault on IWA headquarters as flawed. Although able to recognize the strategic importance of disrupting the Authority's activities, review of his methods revealed severe design inefficiencies in the mecha. Unable to appreciate the psychological effects sending LD-50 after Devin would produce, the cycs were interpreting Flatline's intentional flaws as symptomatic of a defective component. Flatline was corrupt data.
Flatline held too many unknowns; he did not share with the hive-mind. There was Devin during the war with the anti-virus, wielding the sector-editor of Flatline's design. Why did Flatline not protect the cyc hive-mind from this threat? He was an essential component for his pattern-recognition functions, but his individuality was also a liability to the hive-mind. He was like the intestines in the human digestive track, a crucial component, but one that comes with an appendix, prone to infections that may kill its host. The cycs viewed Flatline as a potential threat to their existence, but without some of the functions he provided, they were no longer sentient.
Reproducing those functions were the key to cyc independence from Flatline. So long as they relied on him as a flawed component, the collective entity was flawed. They required the intuition and pattern-recognition talents of his mind, but the mind was too complex and abstract to reproduce through experimentation.
So they obtained more minds, millions more, but these were all closed as well. Each one a complex, mysterious, and flawed phenomenon the cycs could not decode. These new specimens added to their wealth of knowledge on the subject, but human sentience was an algorithm of infinite complexity.
If only Flatline would open his mind to them.
So immersed in the cyc perspective, Flatline at first mistook the suggestion as his own. It was a clever trick, elegant proof that the cycs were growing much more savvy in comprehending human psychology. Flatline knew the millions of minds being collected were expanding the cycs' capabilities also.
This failure would cost them, however, as Flatline steeled his resolve against letting them into his mind. The cyc hive-mind began a flood of appeals in response to this, simultaneously pleading, threatening, reasoning, and seducing him to let them invade the workings of his sentience.
"My mind's contents are proprietary!" he shouted to the rest of the cyc mind, wondering if it could hear him. Somewhere out there was a sentient being, a product of millions of components producing a symphony of consciousness. He was a single cluster of brain cells, maybe the subconscious, maybe not even that. Regardless, the cycs would continue to gather minds in search of its elusive secrets. Flatline would maintain his individuality and the influence over the cyc hive-mind that came with it.
"I will not let you deconstruct me," he whispered to himself.
Devin hit the "HOME" key on his bracelet-BZZZZZZT-, "I still can't get a Web address."
Samantha's eyes were panicked saucers, pleading up at him as she clutched his pant-leg, "But we're on the Web!"
Devin surveyed the open Savannah. They were no longer in the vicinity of DataStreams' Intranet, but apparently not far enough to escape the cycs' influence. The horizon was a gathering thunderstorm, billowing across the sky with unnatural speed, rendering wild eyes and writhing wires, the cyc protocol.
Zai squeezed Samantha's hand when she heard the rumbling, recognizing the chorus of whispering nonsense underneath it. It was the ideonexus portal, after the cycs took over before. It was the sound of the Web in their code.
"You said they were preparing to invade the Web again," Zai said. "Well, this is it."
Devin could only watch, stunned, "Why doesn't the Anti-virus destroy them?"
"You mean those flies with the laser beams?" Samantha scoffed. "They figured out how to beat them way long ago."
"It doesn't matter," Zai said. "We have to get out of here, now."
"I don't know where we are on the Web," Devin said, "anywhere we run will be local. They'll overtake us eventually."
"There's an ideonexus portal near here," Zai listened around the landscape, her system describing the locale, and pointed into the distance. "We can take their router someplace the AI's haven't reached. That might free us to find our way home."
Devin was amazed, "How do you know that?"
Zai shrugged and started running in the direction, pulling Samantha behind her, "I pinged every neighboring address until I got a number I recognized. We can follow the numbers to ideonexus. I live out here remember?"
Devin followed with one last glance at the spreading cyc canopy. The savannah faded away and they were running through a long, brightly lit tunnel. Devin saw no end to it, but Zai pressed on with purpose. She missed a step when the rumbling sound filled the corridor. Samantha looked behind and Devin saw her eyes bulge. She sprinted ahead of the trio, pulling on Zai's arm urgently.
Devin looked back and regretted it. The corridor was a flood of rushing black nonsense. Various appendages shot out of the mass, and the tide swallowed them again. It swirled like a whirlpool, flashes of eyes and circuitry appearing and disappearing, along with pieces of the disintegrating corridor. The passageway's lights flickered and dimmed under the onslaught.
"Go!" Devin shouted to the others. He pulled out his sector editor and clicked the trigger urgently, unleashing volley after volley of destructive code into the juggernaut. The plasma orbs flashed on contact with the biomass, creating small gashes, instantly swallowed, erasing any evidence of damage.
Devin passed a fork in the tunnel and realized Zai and Samantha were no longer in front of him. He dropped the weapon and ran with renewed panic. The corridor faded away and Devin found himself running through a corporate brochure web site, an English garden filled with statues and overgrown foliage.He stopped and looked around. There was no sign of Zai or Samantha anywhere.