III. Terror

Tara gets caught in a terrorist attack while Elza has to deal with an assault on her very mind itself.

III. Terror

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18th of March 2191
Central District: Offices of the Calico Corporation

"Tara Caine to the central auditor's office, please. I repeat, Tara Caine..."

Tara sighed and got up from her cubicle desk, stretching and rubbing her forehead with a groan. Underpaid, she was also working for a company that was seriously understaffed and, quite frankly, underdeveloped. Which other firm would force its employees to actually come to work rather than work from home?

Still, the money was alright. Not having passed her final attainment test at school, there weren't any companies that would employ her as a Meta technician rather than as a multiple personality answering machine. She only used two daemons while at work though. If her boss ever found out she could actually bring out three, she would be in a lot of trouble and would have a lot more headaches.

Had somebody snitched on her then? She doubted it, but it was always a possibility. Plodding along the stainless white corridor, she decided to quit, if they actually wanted to force her use all three daemons for the job. She sniffed. Somebody had definitely gone overboard with the disinfection fluid today, the smell was awful.

She had just rounded a corner, when the world went mad. The shockwave blasted her forward in what seemed like slow motion. She watched in muted astonishment as a multitude of pencils and other office supply items came flying by, followed by a chair that would have laminated her to the wall had she been just a little slower.

Every part of her meticulously spread-out self seemed to note other aspects, recording and filing them away for later use when the inevitable shock would subside. But she had more important things to do. She needed to roll or her head would crack open like a ripe melon. When the impact came, she had barely bent her neck and raised a protective arm. Blackness took her and swept away all conscious thought.

* * *

Elza found herself staring at the blue-green sky as her brain began to unfreeze by increments. Then her legs gave out and she fell forward, barely catching herself before hitting the ground. All the while He was watching her. She wasn't quite sure what formed the capital letter in her mind, but it seemed undeniable. The wolf had a look of amusement on his face or, as she contemplated this, probably his muzzle.

She knew too much about the game and about the tech behind it to have any doubts about what had just happened. Some sick b*****d had mind-raped her and installed this thing deep in her consciousness. But how? How did they bypass her safeguards that were not simply top notch but outright paranoid?

"I'm not a thing", the creature growled with a dismissive shake of its shaggy head, its gray-brown fur rippling like water, "You already had a part of you that was much like me. I simply gave it a voice and...", here he bared his long white fangs, "...teeth, lots of them. So don't try anything funny and we will get along like a house on fire."

She abandoned the thought of having her mind purged of him very quickly. Not because of his threat, though. She simply knew that her neural pathways were too full of secrets and contraband software to let any of those Agency lackeys take a poke at them. However, There was no way in hell, that she would become his b***h.

She wasn't foolish enough to try a physical attack.This wasn't even the real world and in the game he could hurt her, if he meant business. Her strike took him entirely by surprise and his voice rose from a surprised snarl to a yip as her mind closed on the parts that had definitely not come from her own subconscious.

Yowling pitifully he rolled on his back so quickly, he almost hit his head against a nearby rock. Elza released her mental grip on what could only be called his family jewels, even though it seemed ridiculous to her that the programmer had included such unnecessary details.

"If you behave I might not have to Cut you Loose", she murmured threateningly and he flattened his ears.

Now it was definitely her time to use capital letters that could not be misunderstood. Next she had to make whoever saddled her with this furry parasite regret the very day they were born. She growled and the wolf thing cowered even further.

"Will you stop sniveling already", she bellowed and the mountains seemed to throw back a tremendous echo.

Then she sighed, sat down next to him and started thinking. First off, she had to make sure there was no malicious code running in the back of her head. Closing her eyes, she pictured a perfect cube, each of its corners capped with a three-sided pyramid.

Slowly the eight pyramids seemed to extend outward from the very center of her being with the cube increasing in size whenever all of them has moved sufficiently. When the structure had grown to the size of her head without changing color, she released it and breathed out with relief. Everything seemed to be in order. At least some of those lessons at school now proved useful after all.

Next, she had to isolate the wolf daemon from the rest of her mind so it could not glean information or meddle with her thoughts. It helped that he had become more docile, because from his twitches and whines she could guess that he didn't like the procedure very much.

Finally, knowing that she now had nearly complete control over the creature, she had to give it a name. It's not like you get a pet like this every day, she thought, her anger already subsiding. Still, she would make them suffer, simply for good measure. She had to protect her reputation as a necromancer, after all.

Shrugging out of her line of thought, she found herself actually petting the thing and withdrew her hand quickly.

"Time", she called out and the game presented her with an overlay of numbers in front of the landscape.

Cursing, she noted that she hadn't just been out for a few hours but for half a day.

"You are terribly late, so come out right now", she intoned while carefully avoiding to look behind herself.

"No, I think I am right on time. How did you know I was there?"

She stiffened, then grunted and slowly turned around toward the female voice sounding way too close to her neck. There was no way she would tell her it had been a wild guess. She had always wanted to try and succeed at least once. Before she could loose a torrent of abuse, the other girl grinned and fixed her with a strange look:

"You two seem to have hit it off quite fast", she said looking at Elza's hand that had unwittingly started to pet the Wolf again.

Elza snorted and the creature next to her sniffed, both of them looking like strangely mirrored versions of each other.

"Well, I sure am glad you aren't taking our little... interference too hard. It was a necessary precaution to ensure that you have not been bugged. His name is Alex by the way. He might look like a shaggy animal, but his forte is covert mainframe intrusion and information extraction. While you were asleep, he gave us a veritable encyclopedia of your exploits in the realms of the illegal and downright reprehensible."

Elza gave her furry appendix a cold look and he had the decency to at least look sheepish before turning away.

"Of course", the girl continued, "now that you have fully integrated him, he will have to serve you. After all, he is now inhabiting part of your mind and is sustained by your very consciousness. Just think of this as meeting new friends that gave you a valuable present. You will need every friend you can get, where you are going now."

Her grin wasn't exactly malicious, but Elza could see the edge in it. She matched the girl's smile, showing teeth:

"Oh, don't worry about it", she said with exaggerated cheerfulness before locking eyes with the wolf: "Alex. Bite her."

Before she could protest, Elza's new pet had sunk his teeth into the left calf of the girl's avatar. Cursing, she tried to dislodge him, which left her hopping around ridiculously, until Elza ended the farce by hitting her over the head with her necromancer's staff. Carrying the unconscious body over her shoulder, she hissed:

"I know you are watching with your real body. What do you think would happen if I carried your avatar to the nearest town, stripped it down and tied it to the signpost near the quest board? I have fast boots, so you better start talking and don't even ask. You know what I want to know and you have access to my private channel now."

The female avatar in her arms suddenly began to vibrate, then it vanished in what the game depicted as a puff of steam. The landscape around her began to shimmer and twist and Elza saw the forced teleport coming seconds ahead. Whoever the girl really was, either she had succeeded to hack Elsewyrd on a fundamental level or she was an admin. Elza knew that, no matter how she looked at the problem, she was screwed.

In the cubicle room, the data connection gauge climbed rapidly once more. Sensors that were meant for medical monitoring were re-calibrated, and matter converters that would normally deal with bodily waste had to be completely rebuilt on the fly. Still, the whole process took less than a few minutes, before Elza's little home had been transformed into a somewhat unwholesome-looking one-shot teleporter.

Wires were twitching with pulses of energy they were never designed for and the occasional spark flew out of a tormented safety circuit. It started with a deep thrumming that steadily climbed in pitch until the whole contraption screamed. Then, as the last scrap of matter that had formed the human being in its center melted away and was absorbed into the ether, it went critical.

Elza awoke with a convulsion of pain. The rough cot underneath her did very little to soothe the burning agony that suffused every nerve and seemed to run to the very tip of her hairs. The only illumination around her came from an old arc lamp that burned its twitching line of light into her eyes.

She cursed softly when she noticed the four figures arrayed next to it. When one of them stepped forward and smiled, Elza recognized her at once.

"Welcome to hell. Please make yourself at home, because you are now officially dead."

Reviews

[Mad Ben]

There are more chapters waiting, but unless there is obvious interest for the series, I will not post any more in the near future.
If you like it enough to ask for another chapter to be posted, I will do so.
I hope this is not seen as too conceited, but I don't want to spread things around where nobody would look anyway.