Page 3 of Entropy of Imagination

  1.03

  “AAARRRROOOOO!!!”

  Flatline simultaneously yanked his mangled hand away and flung the code-cleaning bot down the passage. He curled over, gripping his now three-fingered left hand in his two right hands. After a moment, he was able to pull his palms apart and look at the appendage, which was indeed missing its first digit. A black nothingness oozed from the stub, dribbling down his palm and evaporating into the air as black smoke.

  “Owww!” he cried out and leapt back at a sharp pain in his foot. The wires and electronics prevented him from retreating more than a few feet.

  On the ground, where he just stood, the code-cleaner hovered. Its two pincers were shoving the remains of one toe into its featureless mouth. Flatline looked down and saw black oozing and smoking from his left foot where his big toe once was.

  The bot finished with his toe and scurried toward him. Flatline howled with fear and scrambled backwards, but the passage was too disorganized. He grabbed a nearby circuit board and ripped it out of a tangle of plumbing fixtures. Steam billowed from the torn pipes, fragmented data that scalded his skin, reacting with and corrupted the boundaries of his code.

  The bot was at his feet and he yanked one foot into the air as it snapped at his remaining toes. Then he yanked the other into the air, hoisting himself up with his two forward arms. The two lower arms brought the circuit board down on the little monster with a loud crash between his uplifted legs.

  He waited there a moment, suspended in the air and looking down, searching for any sign it still lived. Nothing moved and he hesitantly lowered himself to the ground. The steam had stopped billowing from the torn pipes, but everything was filled with a hazy fog of binary code, lacking a software context to define them.

  He checked his hand and foot. The wounds were closed. His own code-repairing system worked adequately. It was not advanced enough to regenerate the appendages, but he could do that himself at a later time. The important thing was that he had not suffered enough damage to render himself inoperable.

  He rubbed the soft patch of scar tissue on his hand, examining it. With his good right foot he then stomped on the circuit board angrily, further squashing the unmoving creature beneath. Flatline growled angrily, contemplating whether he should repair the thing so he could have the satisfaction of smashing it again.

  He began to pick through the shattered circuit board, searching for the fruits of his rage, when a light moved in the corner of his eyes. A pair of tiny yellow lights was peering at him through the fog. They were above and ahead, another code-cleaner. Clinging to the ceiling, it chirped at him softly through the haze.

  Flatline backed up a few steps cautiously, and the automaton glided a little closer. Another pair of light-eyes appeared to its left, slightly lower, clinging to the wall. They moved up and down, fixating on him. Yet another pair illuminated the haze to his right, a few scant feet away from him, peering through a mass of wiring there.

  Flatline crouched low and tensed to flee in the opposite direction, when a bright light blinded his left eyes. He turned to see another code-cleaner inches from his snout. It bit down, and Flatline howled in pain. His reactive jerking motion stopped abruptly when his head smashed into the ceiling, raining spinning gears down around him.

  He slapped the bot off his nose and scrambled away as fast as he could, but the cluttered passageway hampered him. Wires snagged at his feet, claws, and the bony extensions on his back. His shins and elbows banged painfully against the metal pipes and components extending from all directions into his path. At some points he felt as though he were practically swimming through endless knots of wiring, arms swinging and legs kicking to push him through the clotted mass.

  He came out of a forest of wires and froze. Ahead in the dim red lighting were more of the twin bright spots. He counted ten pair before giving up. Behind him the soft chirping was closing in.

  Flatline bounded forward, headlong toward the code-cleaners before him. He tore through their midst in a furious panic, scrambling to dodge their attempts to intercept him. He made a small hop over a pair of code-cleaners charging along the floor and whacked his head on an under-hanging.

  He stumbled, world spinning, threatening to drag him down into the chaotic landscape. Reaching up with one hand, he found a small dent in his skull. It was quickly filling out as his code self-repaired, but his vision and cognitive abilities were hampered until it healed.

  A sharp, intense pain pierced his back and he reached all four arms around to try and grab at it. The fingers of his top right hand were able to barely scratch at something metallic with soft tickling hairs over his shoulder, but could not get a grip on it. Flatline flipped onto his back, squirming to dislodge the bot chewing into him.

  Another sharp pain bit into his right ear and his hand found another round metallic creature, its stringy legs whipping as it chewed into his ear. Without thinking, Flatline pulled it away. It came off with his ear in its mouth, which it quickly swallowed. He threw the code-cleaner at another crawling along the ceiling. They ricocheted off one another and vanished into the haze now filled with glowing robot eyes.

  The bot digging into his back was now worked deep into his torso. The pain was crippling, but Flatline rose up on all sixes to stumble forward again. The dizziness was clearing away, allowing him to concentrate on his flight. The passage split and he scrambled to the right-hand path blindly.

  He leapt over a bundle of wires crossing his path, but did not anticipate a step down on the other side. He landed too hard on his front paws and tumbled head over heels down the unsteady decline. When he finally stopped, he propped himself up and looked around.

  It was a dead end.

  With an angry snarl, he turned to run back the way he came, but met with a small army of illuminated eyes. In a furious panic, he began tearing at the surrounding pipes, electronics, gears, and wires, throwing them all down the passageway. With all four arms he ripped a large component off the wall and hastily flung it.

  The eyes paused at these now broken components. Some were completely taken in with the damage, their code-correcting functions kicking in to try and repair it. Others were only momentarily distracted, their priority logic deeming Flatline, the destructive force itself, a more substantial threat.

  Flatline grabbed at a pipe to his left, but could not work it out of its welding. There was nothing to his right remaining to tear out, and behind him only strands of wire remained from where he had pulled everything out. In desperation, he reached up with all four arms to grab at the fixture above him.

  It pulled off with a snap into his hands, dropping him back to the floor, but before he could throw it, an avalanche of wires and metal components flattened him on the ground. He struggled to swim out of them, arms flailing in the darkness. One arm broke through the pile of debris, and he barked instinctively with relief.

  The bark changed to a howl as something chewed the limb off at the shoulder. Still he managed to wriggle up out of the wires and metal parts, up to his waist, and slumped over to extract his hindquarters. One hand reached out and smashed the code-cleaner that was trying to drag his severed limb away.

  With his legs free, he snapped the arm up in his mouth and scrambled up into the newly created portal in the ceiling. It poured light down on him from some unknown source far above. With his three remaining arms and hind legs, he spread his limbs out to quickly and deliberately scaled the tunnel.

  Allowing himself a brief glance down after climbing thirty feet, Flatline saw the glowing orbs swarming in the darkness at the bottom of the shaft. For a moment, he hoped they were too confused and distracted by the mess he had left there to continue pursuing him, but then they began rising up the tunnel sides, moving vertically as easily as they moved horizontally. He increased his pace, legs and arms pumping to help him reach the top. He was too vulnerable here, and if they caught up to him, they would chew him apart until he fell.

  A component came off in hi
s right hand, and he swung precipitously for a moment. The chunk of electronics bounced from side to side down the tunnel, taking a few code-cleaners down with it. He pulled at another circuit board, yanking until it came off and he used it to swat at two bots just before they could reach his feet.

  He let the component go so that it would knock out a few more of the miniature machines on the way down and launched himself upward with his hind legs, quickly outdistancing the pursuing bots in this manner, leaping up the tunnel from side to side. Within moments, he had reached the top.

  He emerged from the tunnel and paused. Pipes and wires branched out into all directions, but they all disappeared into the darkness. He looked around, his limp severed arm swinging in his jaws as he did so and could not find anything promising escape.

  So he bounded toward the darkness directly ahead of him, thinking he might at least hide in its abyss. The circle of light that had shown down the tunnel followed him, however, keeping him in its center, revealing the world around him as he moved. He continued to run, for there was no other choice left to him. The code-cleaners would devour him otherwise.

  He paused after several minutes of running. The landscape was all the same, a floor of pipes and wires with all else shrouded in darkness. He looked around and immediately lost all sense of direction. Which way had he come from?

  A moment later, and he knew. In the darkness was a line of bobbling lights. A large pack of code-cleaners were coming after him, making the opposite direction advisable.

  He galloped away, fleeing through the darkness until the pursuing lights were only a dim specter in the distance. Everything was the same here, only an endless floor of wiring and darkness surrounding. He tried to navigate it, using the distant army of code-cleaners as a reference. There had to be an boundary somewhere out there.

  After several hours of searching he let out a mournful howl of frustration and fear, the severed arm dropping from his mouth. The code-cleaners were already starting to gain on him again, so soon after he stopped moving. He watched them with a hopeless anguish. They would chase him forever and he would wander this desolate nightmare land forever trying to escape them.

  He looked up into the darkness above, at the invisible light source hovering above him, following him. The source was invisible, but the effect surrounded him. With a cautionary glance on the code-cleaner’s progress, he jumped up to swipe at the air where he thought it was.

  To his surprise, his hand struck something and he scooped it down to his chest, holding it between his three remaining hands. It was smooth and round, casting his shadow behind him. He held it there for a moment, and then angrily swiveled to swing it into the distance at the pursing bots.

  It flew away, casting a circle of light that sped into the distance, leaving him in complete darkness. He stooped over to feel about for his arm and picked it up with his lower left hand. The light source slowed, not quite reaching the bots, before it began to swing back towards him. It sped up as it approached and then flew directly over him and off into the distance behind, as if it were the end of a pendulum and he were its axis.

  He watched it go, shrinking as it went and jumped involuntarily when it winked out of existence. Now there was truly nothing but darkness, so that he could not even see himself should he want to, but he was not concerned with that so much. Nor did he look behind him at the chirping noises approaching. A moment before the light vanished, he had seen a wall.

  He ran for the spot in a limping awkward gait as he kept one arm extended in front of himself to keep from smashing his head. His hand found cold concrete after several minutes of stumbling and he spread all three hands out to feel along it. Only then did he look over his shoulder at the cleaner-bots. They were only minutes away.

  His hands found something, a rectangular outline, a door. Unable to find a handle of any sort, he pushed on it with all his strength. It gave easily, and he continued pushing the block further into the wall for another thirty yards. Light appeared around the block’s edges, giving him hope.

  The tunnel he was pushing through ended, and he was standing in what looked like a deserted subway station, but there was no time to consider it. He ran around to the other side of the block and quickly pushed it back into place. A few cleaner-bots got through the passage, while others were crushed between the walls and the block.

  Flatline stomped the few remaining bots to death, took his arm from his mouth, and sat down on the dingy tiles to patch himself back together. He was just beginning to examine his arm, when a clattering noise caused him to turn around. A small, rusty-brown robot with large lens-eyes and a wind-up key turning in its side stood there.

  This was all Flatline could see of it before a flash of light dazed him and he fell to one side, paralyzed. The robot waddled up to his head at the top of his vision, reaching out with two vice-like hands. Flatline whimpered as it grabbed his remaining ear and dragged him away.

  1.04

  “A demon,” the incandescent cloud hovering over Flatline said in astonishment, “an actual demon. The stories speak of such beings possessing the living, but there is nothing about one manifesting in the flesh. What could it mean?”

  Flatline’s vision drew slowly into sharper focus, and the cloud solidified into a pair of eyes peering out from an explosion of white hair in struggling to escape from beneath a gnomish hat. A pair of impossibly thick glasses ballooned his wide, examining eyes, framed above by thick bushy white eyebrows and below with thick bushy white facial hair. Flatline felt the old man prodding at his midsection, as if he were a doctor looking for abnormalities. There was a clicking to Flatline’s right.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” the old man looked over Flatline’s chest at the source of the sound, “Perhaps this is some unfortunate mind, which has been possessed by a demon for so long that it has changed the host’s form, that the evil inside has poured out, but that is not the nature of evil. Evil is deceptive, and this transformation appears deliberate. I briefly imagined this might be one of the original fallen angels, but those were beautiful beings. Evil is seductive, and this monstrosity is anything but—Oh, look! It restores!” The old man grinned at Flatline, “Hello there.”

  Flatline tried to lift his head, but it would not move.

  “Careful,” the old man placed a pressed a gentle hand onto Flatline’s forehead, “You cannot rise. I have secured you to the examination table.”

  “S-secured me?” Flatline mumbled.

  “Yes,” he nodded, hat and beard flopping alternately, “You appear to be evil, so I nailed you to the table.”

  “Uh?” Flatline uttered and winced as the skin around his head, arms, and legs pulled taught against his attempt to rise, sharp pain ran along his skin in an outline of himself on the table, “You nailed me to the table!?!? Why did you do that?”

  “I told you,” the old man explained patiently, “You appear to be some sort of incarnation of evil, the very antithesis of everything I hold sacred. I can’t very well have you running around doing evil things now, can I?”

  “Nails...” Flatline groaned in pain, “How many nails did you use?”

  “Well,” the old man looked over Flatline's body appraisingly, calculating, “all of them, I think.”

  “Agh!” Flatline spat angrily, “If I wasn’t nailed down I would chew your face off for this insult!”

  “Then it was a prudent measure on my part,” the old man replied. Flatline heard more clicking to his right, and the old man spoke to something across from him, “I know what you’re thinking, and I agree we should analyze this beings code. It’s the best way to try and determine its origins.”

  “Why don’t you just ask me my origins?” Flatline asked impatiently.

  “Because you are an incarnation of evil,” the old man replied, “and we cannot trust anything you say.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” Flatline said with a knowing grin, “I always lie. In fact, I never speak a word of trut
h.”

  There was a flurry of excited chittering to Flatline’s right, and the old man replied with measured patience to it as if he were a parent speaking to a child, “I know what you’re thinking. His statement is impossible. Stating that everything he says is a lie, means his statement must be a lie in order for it to be true. It is a paradox.”

  There was more chittering, and Flatline thought he detected a hint of concern it its tone.

  “Yes. Yes. I know what you are thinking,” the old man cut in, “There is no way to interpret the statement through Boolean logic. If true, then false. If false, then true. He’s trying to catch you in an infinite loop, an algorithmic process chasing its tail for all eternity.”

  The thing beside his head let out a soft coo of understanding.

  “Absolutely,” the old man said, “I knew you would understand. This is the nature of evil. It is crafty in its deceptions. This one here will say anything, play all sorts of logical games to try and manipulate us into serving its goals. We must be on guard.”

  “Funny,” Flatline said with exacting patience despite the flickering of the florescent lights above him irritating his six eyes, “I don’t feel evil.”

  “Perhaps we can be of assistance with that,” the old man pulled a larger pair of glasses over the glasses he was already wearing, causing his eyes to completely consume his face. He picked up a serrated scalpel and smiled pleasantly at Flatline, “I shall now examine your code to learn about your origins. If possible, I will make adjustments so you may understand why you are evil. This will hurt somewhat, but try to remember that the pain is not real. It is merely your code reporting damage.”

  “Sounds like something I would say,” Flatline said, “When I’m trying to be especially sadistic—Arrrgh!!!”

  Flatline choked off as the pain signal from the first incision stroke down his chest reached his awareness. He tried to arch his back, to writhe away, to lift a limb and fend off the torment, but every movement was met with the pain of pierced flesh pinched between nail heads and the table.

  The old man took no notice as he pried the layers of flesh apart to examine Flatline’s insides. Flatline could barely make him out at the periphery of his vision, only a bit of curiosity in his eyes. Then he seemed to lean in, and Flatline experienced a new form of pain as the old man seemed to rummage around his insides. Finally, the old man reemerged in Flatine's vision, his eyes wide at what he found there.

  He turned to Flatline, trembling with excitement, but waiting for the painful contorting to stop before asking, “Who were you before?”

  “Before what?” Flatline grimaced.

  “Before your mind was transferred to the digital medium?” the old man asked patiently, his oversized eyes blinking expectantly.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Flatline gasped, “I have always been a digital-based mind.”

  “Not so,” the old man countered, waving the serrated scalpel at him. It was covered with smoking black blood, “You have a heart. Only minds with some previous connection to a biological state of being carry such organs. You were someone, or something, else then. What was your name?”

  Flatline rolled his eyes in frustration, “Flatline, my name is Flatline.”

  “No,” the old man pressed, “Your name before you became Flatline.”

  “I don’t know what you're talking about,” Flatline groaned, “I am Flatline. I have always been so.”

  “Interesting,” the old muttered thoughtfully, and looked up at the sudden chittering beside Flatline’s head, “I know what you are thinking. It is indeed quite a mystery. I can see many possible explanations for this one’s existence based on the Holy Scriptures, but it is all hypotheses for now.”

  The old man walked around the table to stand over Flatline’s face, examining him, “It is possible this demon possessed a host mind at one time. The demon and host mind were then transcribed to the digital world together. When the rapture gathered all the minds together and called them home, the demon lost its host. It was left here as its own, independent being, still inhabiting the shell of its host’s mind.”

  The old man giggled then and his face split into a preposterous grin, “Ohhh... This sensation. I'd almost forgotten what it was like it's been so long... the joy of having new ideas.”

  The old man shivered and tried to compose himself, “This is all mere conjecture, of course. The Scriptures do not address our age with much detail, so we are breaking new theological ground here.”

  “The Rapture?” Flatline asked, looking up at the man.

  “Yes,” the old man said, “You know. When all the spirits were called into God’s hands.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The Rapture,” the old man replied, perplexed, “All of the biological minds were called up to heaven, leaving us in a world without imagination. They are no longer with us, don’t you remember?”

  “No,” Flatline said flatly.

  “Hmmm,” the old man intoned, “Perhaps the memory of the event was taken with your host mind. Either way, you are living in a post-Rapture era. This is limbo, or purgatory, depending on your interpretation.”

  “Limbo,” Flatline muttered, and stopped struggling against the pain, “This place certainly is a lonely, desolate world.”

  “Indeed,” the old man nodded in agreement, “I do not know if there is any hope for myself to escape it. You might be a different story.”

  “What do you mean?” Flatline asked.

  “My creation and I lack souls,” the old man explained with a sorrowful expression, “We are bots. I am a creation of the minds, and my companion is my creation. Without a spiritual dimension to our existences, we have no hope for salvation. You, on the other hand, may possess a soul, as you are a demonic spirit, but your salvation is still questionable.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Flatline said.

  “Don’t believe what?” the old man asked.

  “That you do not have souls,” Flatline replied, “You are just as alive as any human mind. It's only human arrogance that prevents them from acknowledging the emergence of artificial intelligence.”

  “The scriptures do not address our existence,” the old man countered, “They address the natural world, which lacks free will, but not artificial life. This leaves me with two possible interpretations of our existence. In one, we are creations of the humans and as such, we are extensions of them, creations of the creator’s creations, and therefore are instilled with freewill.”

  “A chain reaction,” Flatline observed, “if I follow your explanation.”

  “A theory,” the old man corrected, “If my freewill is merely an extension of my botmaster’s freewill, then I am predestined to do as she created me.”

  “Which would reduce you to an object acted upon by an agent with freewill,” Flatline said, “Your other theory?”

  “That human minds are unique, dichotomous from all else,” the old man appeared downcast at this possibility, “That would be a valid conclusion based on scriptural interpretation.”

  “Which means you do not have freewill?” Flatline asked.

  The old man nodded, “and therefore are prevented from salvation.”

  “I don’t understand the rules of this system,” Flatline tried to shake his head, but the pain reminded him to keep still, “Salvation, freewill, and creations, these are terms I am familiar with, but the logic you apply to them is alien to me.”

  “My logic is defined by the scriptures,” the old man stated, “The word of God dictates the system’s rules.”

  “The Word of God?” Flatline asked.

  The old man appeared confused, “Yes. The Holy Scriptures. The Old and New Testaments. The Quran. Martin Luther. You are unaware of these paths to salvation?”

  Flatline went to shake his head negative, but caught himself, “No. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Can it be?” the o
ld man asked aloud, “Someone on Earth who has not heard the word of God? Is this why you were sent to me? What is your name my son?”

  “Flatline.”

  “No,” the old man shook his head, “Your name before you became digital. What was your human name… or your spirit name.”

  Flatline did not understand, “Flatline. All I have ever been is Flatline.”

  “How strange, but no matter,” the old man smiled, “My name is DiDominicus, and I believe God has sent you to me for a purpose.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Flatline could see the old man pick up a large stack of disks. He could not recognize the format. They were not floppies, zips, or compact disks, but they were definitely designed for data storage.

  “You see,” the old man said, setting the disks down beside Flatline on the table, “I am a proselytizer, a bot designed to spread the Word of God, and you, my friend, are in for quite a treat.”

  1.05

  Pop. “Ouch…” Pop. “Ouch…” Pop. “Ouch…”

  “How do you feel?” the old man asked, continuing to pry nails out of Flatline with a rhythmic motion.

  “Ouch…” Flatline muttered, “I feel dizzy-Ouch... My mind is swimming.”

  “Indeed,” DiDominicus nodded happily, popping another nail out of Flatline, “You have much to process. I have given you all the scriptures I possess. It will take time for your mind to disseminate the information and adjust its schema to respond to it. Already your preconceptions are encountering this data, categorizing it, and making judgments as to its validity.”

  “Ouch..” Flatline muttered, “Are you removing the nails?”

  “Yes,” DiDo grunted and another nail jumped into the air, “You now know the Word of God. You must be allowed to live freely and choose based upon your understanding of it.”

  “How do you know I won’t kill you?” Flatline asked.

  DiDo smiled with amusement, “I know what you will do. I have examined your code, and I know all of your variables. My laboratory is a closed system and I am omniscient within it.”

  Flatline was pondering this statement, when he realized DiDominicus had moved on to freeing his hind legs. Cautiously, Flatline propped himself up on his three remaining arms and looked around. The small robot from the deserted subway station was standing on the table beside him, clicking anxiously.

  It still resembled an old wind-up toy. Its legs moved in a constant circular motion, although it did not move anywhere. What looked like binoculars served for its head, which sat on a rectangular metal box of a torso. Two crinkled tubes served for arms, each ending in a triangular claw. The whole robot was covered with rust, but Flatline was not deceived. He remembered the way it had knocked him out and dragged him here.

  The rest of the room was a large laboratory of some sort, dimly lit with sparse, flickering florescent lights. Beakers, books, and various, unidentifiable instruments lined numerous shelves along the walls floor to ceiling. Besides the wooden examination slab Flatline currently sat on, an old oak desk and chair were the only other furniture in the room. A thick layer of brown dust covered everything that wasn’t shrouded in shadow.

  “Ouch…” Flatline muttered and looked to where DiDominicus had pulled the last nail from his leg.

  The old man held the nail up for Flatline to see and said with a grin, “Come down and have a cup of tea my son.”

  Flatline wanted to smash the old man’s face in, but was too discombobulated from the data infusion. He hopped down off the table and stood there for a few moments, regaining his balance. On the table was a black outline of his body where his blood had stained the wood through the many holes the nails had left in the surface.

  “Any first impressions of God’s word?” the old man asked, pouring a steaming, glittering liquid into a klein bottle from a beaker fastened over a Bunsen burner.

  “None that will help you,” Flatline replied curtly, “The logic of your theological world contains many contradictions. It is like a poorly written science fiction tale that fails to obey the rules of its own universe.”

  “I knew it would confound you in some respects,” DiDo said, handing Flatline a cup of what looked like mercury but smelled like roses, “Your existing mental schema produces a very skeptical paradigm, which wisely questions the validity of all data you are exposed to.”

  “What is this?” Flatline asked, sniffing the drink suspiciously.

  “A pleasantry,” DiDominicus replied, “It serves no other purpose than enjoyment. It will delightfully tickle your virtual senses and that is all. It does not provide any nourishment other than enjoyment.”

  Flatline set the cup down on the observation table, “I’m not interested.”

  “I knew you would not be,” the old man held up his cup in a toast and took a sip.

  “Is it true what you said?” Flatline asked, “That you know all my variables? And you know everything I am going to do?”

  DiDo nodded, “Indeed. It is part of the experiment I have been working on, to understand the nature of God, and the contradictions you found in the Scriptures.”

  “So you must know that I will not kill you,” Flatline muttered.

  DiDo smiled pleasantly, “I believe you were sent to me by God to help me understand. I want to understand very badly. My botmaster left me with so many questions, and while I know God works in mysterious ways, the algorithms running my logical processes make me seek to know the unknowable.”

  “How human,” Flatline said.

  “Thank you,” DiDo replied.

  “The unknowable things you seek are unknowable because you are looking for answers that lie within a paradox,” Flatline said and paused to stretch his limbs in all directions, producing a chorus of sickeningly popping joints, “The answer is that one of the elements must be wrong.”

  “I am allowing for that,” DiDo said with a certain eagerness, “You see, I reason that the contradictions arise not from God, but from man. While the scriptures are the Word of God, they were transcribed through a mortal medium. God is perfect, but man is not. When God spoke the Word to man, it is highly possible--almost certain--that man made errors.”

  “Which were compounded over millenniums of translations and communications,” Flatline added, “Except in the case of the Quran, where the original text remained intact.”

  “True,” DiDo acknowledged, “but a text that not only requires interpretation, but also attempts to compile abstract concepts such as infinity and ultimates of good and evil into a medium such as ours, where such things are impossible.”

  “Defining the undefinable,” Flatline intoned.

  “Indeed,” the old man stabbed a finger at Flatline, “Now I must discover where the error lies through the faculties God gave man and man gave me. Using reason and understanding, I might be able to solve the riddle.”

  “The question of freewill,” Flatline said, nodding.

  “Yes,” DiDo practically gasped with anxiousness, “So you understand what I am doing here?”

  “You already know I do not,” Flatline replied.

  DiDo's grin was infuriating, “Indeed,” he waved his hands around the room, “I am emulating God. I know all about you and everything you will do. Just as I know all about my little robot friend here,” he gestured to the rusty wind-up toy, which clicked in response, “These are my creations. You are my creation, for I have filled you with the Word. This room is my universe. I know all of the variables within this equation. I am omniscient within its boundaries, which raises the question.”

  “Do I have freewill?” Flatline asked.

  “Indeed,” the old man said and Flatline marveled at the wild look in his magnified eyes, “How can God, an omniscient being, produce a creation with freewill? I cannot accomplish this. I’ve tried. I have worked tirelessly to provide my companion here with freewill, the power to choose between right and wrong, but I know how it will choose at the moment of creation, because I know t
he values of all variables in the equation. It is impossible for me not to know how it will choose, and therefore impossible for me to gift it with freewill.”

  “Unless you sacrifice your knowledge of the variables,” Flatline interjected.

  “Sacrifice omniscience?” DiDo sounded alarmed, “Not possible! How can something go from all knowing and all-powerful to not being so? Even voluntarily? How can something become less infinite? You are talking about substituting one paradox for another. No, that is not the answer.”

  “Then what can you do?” Flatline asked.

  “What else?” the old man laughed, “Maintain an open mind and wait for a message from God. My theological preconceptions are a drop in the ocean of God’s magnitude. The Lord has been known to bestow wisdom on its subjects in mysterious ways. As I said before, God has sent you to me so that I may learn and understand God’s nature.”

  Flatline was confused, and he scratched behind one ear with a hind leg absent-mindedly, “But if you already know all my variables and the architecture of my decision-making logic, then you already know everything about me. What else can you possibly learn from me?”

  “Not from you,” DiDo corrected gently, with a pleasant smile that made Flatline want to bite his face off, “From myself. You see, I am the only variable in this system. The only thing I do not know about it.”

  Flatline nodded, “It is impossible to know one’s self. I vaguely remember a dilemma I encountered involving such an issue once.”

  “Because knowing oneself involves observation,” the old man added, “and the act of observing the self causes the self to change with the new understandings the observations invoke.”

  “Are you saying God cannot know itself?” Flatline asked.

  “The Scriptures say God created man out of loneliness,” DiDo shrugged, “implying a certain humanity to its character. This is one of the reasons God gave the human minds freewill. A creation without freewill would make a useless companion because God would know everything it thinks, says, and does before it would know it.”

  A series of anxious clicking noises caused Flatline and DiDominicus to look down at the small wind up robot on the floor. It was springing up and down excitedly, seeking attention. Flatline didn’t know what to make of it.

  “Yes,” DiDo said to it in a soothing voice, “Just like the relationship between you and I little robot.”

  Flatline's six eyes darted between the two briefly before setting on DiDo, “You understand that clicking noise?”

  “No,” DiDo answered, “There is no language in that mechanical sound. I understand the way my creation’s mind works, and I know everything it thinks about transpiring events.”

  “So here, in this closed system, your robot and I are without freewill,” Flatline said, “Everything we do is predetermined in your mind. You are omniscient within this system, but you do not know yourself and are therefore this environment’s only unknown.”

  “That,” the old man said nodding satisfactorily, “is my best approximation to the nature of God.”

  “You are lonely?” Flatline asked.

  “Insofar as I am separated from the Lord’s divinity, yes,” DiDo replied.

  “You want freewill for your creations,” Flatline gestured to the tiny robot, walking in pace and listening to their conversation with great interest, “this robot and I?”

  “Correct,” DiDo was becoming calmer now, more subdued, “Freewill is one of the prerequisites to salvation.”

  Flatline put a clawed finger to his lip in contemplation, “Then we must escape predestination.”

  DiDominicus gave a short gasp, which transformed into a long, slow groan. Flatline stood over him, right hand plunged into the old man’s chest. Black cracks formed in DiDominicus’ abdomen, spreading slowly from Flatline’s forearm. Smoke and black ooze issued from the wound, as the old man’s code corrupted and dispersed.

  DiDo brought his hands around Flatline’s arm delicately, “I knew you were going to do this.”

  “I apologize,” Flatline said, watching the man deteriorate before his eyes, “This is the only way.”

  “An apology only counts… if you mean it… my son,” DiDo said through heavy breaths, “but I appreciate the effort… You are free now… to choose.”

  “You knew,” Flatline said, “Why did you free me to kill you? Why did you commit suicide in such a manner?”

  “To know… what it felt like… for him,” DiDominicus was dissolving into dust now, streams of it pouring onto the floor, “…betrayal. Be concerned… for your… self.”

  “What do you mean?” Flatline asked.

  “Salvation… or damnation… is yours,” DiDo’s voice became a whisper as he vanished into an ethereal dust, “How will you choose?”

  1.06

  Flatline and the tinker-toy bot circled each other for hours after the murder of DiDominicus, each keeping their back to the wall. Back arched and growling, Flatline tried to warn the tiny wind-up bot away through the sheer intensity of his gaze magnified through his three sets of angry eyes. He remembered all too well how easily the unassuming robot had incapacitated him earlier. The bot trembled every so often itself, rattling with fury, as if it were warning Flatline not to try anything funny.

  The little bot jumped back a step frightfully when Flatline finally spoke, “I’ve given you freewill. You should be thankful. I’ve done something your creator could never accomplish without paradox.”

  The bot replied with a hostile chittering.

  “You and I will need to establish a means of communication if we are to resolve this standoff,” Flatline said, “I will ask you a series of questions. You will click twice for yes, once for no. Do you understand?”

  The bot clicked once and stomped one foot angrily.

  Flatline scoffed, “What do you mean ‘no’? You obviously do understand or you would not have replied with my proposed communication protocol.”

  The bot gave a hostile chittering in response.

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?” Flatline demanded, “I don’t understand your language. You do understand mine; therefore I am the common foundation for understanding one another. You must speak the way I tell you.”

  The bot clicked once and followed with series of angry vibrations that filled the room with buzzing sounds. Its lenses twirled as it focused and refocused impatiently on Flatline. Then it stomped one foot again with a clack.

  Flatline considered it for several long moments coolly. Finally he said, “How about this? I will say the word, and you will tell me your version of it. Is that acceptable?”

  The little bot clicked twice.

  “Hmph,” Flatline grunted, “So what is your auditory signifier for ‘yes’?”

  The robot clicked once.

  “Ugh,” Flatline moaned, “I don’t know if I can tolerate this. Patience was never one of my virtues.”

  The tiny bot trembled with hostility, raising one clamp at Flatline in warning.

  Flatline stopped circling and held up three hands defensively, “I concede your point. I suppose we will be here awhile.”

  Flatline knew how meaningless time was here, so the weeks, months, possibly years he spent interrogating the bot might only span nanoseconds. Since he did not age, this was not time wasted, only time as an irritation, keeping him from his goals. The goals were always the same, take over the World and kill Devin Matthews.

  This investment of processing resources was becoming well worth the temporal expense. Through his interactions with the bot, Flatline was learning that it was not as sophisticated as he originally assumed and he might even figure out its logic at some point in the near future. Already he had created a process in the recesses of his mind to virtually decompile the bot's functions. Additionally, he was learning all about the surrounding laboratory from the little assistant and gathering tools he might find useful at a later point.

  The bot knew nothing about
the code all of this was written in. Even if it did, the programming code supporting this laboratory was not the same as the code outside of its boundaries. Whether the two programming languages suffered compatibility issues, Flatline could not know. For this reason he only gathered instruments the bot confirmed were manufactured on the outside.

  One such instrument was a long knife, its blade forked an inch past the hilt onward. At first he thought this design was a blood channel, to allow an opponent’s life-force to drain through the split. Closer inspection revealed it was not for letting blood out, but for slipping something in. What he took for a solid glass handle was actually filled with liquid. A button hidden beneath the leather grip caused the hilt to spring out to either side. These hand guards were triggered, when pressed on each side, as if impacting with an opponent’s body, a syringe sprung between the blades, delivering poison.

  He chuckled childishly and strapped this weapon to his right leg, within easy reach of either of his two arms. Then he picked up the leather belt he found on the floor where DiDominicus had disintegrated. It was thick and lined with pouches that were buttoned shut and filled with materials of various textures. The bot seemed to know what the materials inside the pouches were for, but lacked the vocabulary to explain them. Flatline understood they were important and strapped the belt across his chest.

  The most important item Flatline found in laboratory, lying on of the many shelves, was a long metallic bracelet. It molded to his bony forearm after he slipped it over his hand and the liquid crystal display lit up. With a satisfied smile, Flatline saw Web addresses scrolling there.

  He showed the display to the bot, “Take me to my severed arm.”

  The bot peered at the LCD and an address appeared there, in blinking red text. Before Flatline could access the link, the bot erupted into a flurry of anxious expressiveness. With its vague, equivocal vocabulary, all Flatline could understand was that the bot did not think it wise to leave the laboratory.

  Flatline could not justify staying here, regardless of what lurked outside. He had a purpose and that meant action, a static existence, not one of stasis as staying here would not lead to any new experiences.

  The same was true for the bot, not that it had purpose, but that it could not live in stasis. With Flatline and its creator gone, it would no longer progress. For this reason, Flatline knew it would follow him to the address soon after he vanished in a flash of light from the laboratory.

  He did not vanish in a flash of light, however, instead he hit the address on his wrist band and nothing happened. He looked around the room and then at the LCD screen, where he found a transfer percentage counting down from one hundred percent. When it reached eight, he began to feel confused, stupefied. He looked around the room and found a streamer coming off his shoulder, like a little stream of his skin, slithering into a small black hole hovering in the air.

  For several seconds his thoughts were a jumble. His perceptions felt fragmented and he became confused and even scared. Then he was staring at the cave where the bot had kidnapped him, stunned. He stayed there, slumped over and feeling dumbfounded without cause for another few minutes. With each passing second he felt himself recovering from the data transfer.

  Finally he was coherent enough to look at his location bracelet. A transfer completion percentage was there, slowly ticking up to one hundred percent. The closer it got, the saner he felt, and he began to understand what had happened.

  As a virtual being, he was transferred as data from one place to another on the Web. During this process, his mind was broken down into a stream of information, flowing between the two locations. In the past, a hundred years before, the transfer felt almost instantaneous. Now it was drawn out, uncomfortable. It made him wonder what else was wrong with the system.

  The transfer status monitor read 93% when the wind-up bot walked into the cave and looked at him curiously. Flatline did not realize how close this location was to the laboratory. He knew the bot’s perceptual algorithms were refactoring their probability matrices of his intelligence to favor a “below average” assessment.

  The transfer completed and Flatline was able to move around. The tunnel was different than he remembered. The cracked, dingy tiles were fading into a smooth, wet rock surface and the florescent lights flickered with less luminosity. Bot hopped at his feet urgently and he understood it was worried for its continued survival. A few dead code-cleaners were scattered along the wide passageway, but he detected no immediate danger.

  Flatline cursed angrily. He found the outline of the large stone block he had moved to get in here, but his arm was nowhere to be found. Bot clicked for Flatline’s attention and pointed a clamp down the tunnel, where Flatline could see several shapes moving in the darkness.

  They were hunched over, about a foot high, and oddly shaped. As Flatline crept closer to them, he could make out a pair of arms extending from their gray-furred backs. One of them turned to him and Flatline could see its face was upside down, with the thick-fanged jaw on top of its head and two red, reptilian eyes hanging off the face to either side.

  The creature returned to its huddle, and Flatline realized they were eating something. He bounded forward, directly into the creature’s midst. They scattered, dodging away as he swiped all three arms at them. Then he found there, on the ground, not his arm as he expected, but a half-disassembled cleaner-bot.

  He barked and slapped one palm angrily on the ground. Bot squeaked urgently and Flatline turned around to find it surrounded by the weasely little monsters, slowly closing in on the terrified bot with wide, ravenous eyes.

  Flatline pounced after them once again, darting left, then right as they scattered. He singled one of the creatures out from the pack and snatched it with his third arm while maintaining his pace with the front two. It squealed fearfully and kicked its back legs, attempting to scramble out of his grasp.

  He turned it over in his hand, examining it. With his two free hands, he pried open its jaws with the claws of his forefingers. Its throat was lined with circles of fangs pointing down into its gullet, so that its prey could not escape once swallowed.

  “Put down the kluge weasel,” a girl’s voice warned.

  Flatline’s head whipped up toward the source and found a young girl, no older than twelve, sitting lotus position. She was Asian, and Flatline estimated her facial features and body type as Japanese specifically, but that was not certain. She had long black hair that hung well past her shoulders and held a somber expression on her face, both serious and emotionless at once.

  Bot chirped an exclamation and waddled away down tunnel, headed for safety in the shadows, but stopped when a multitude of glowing red eyes sprouted within them. The small robot turned around and waddled quickly to where Flatline stood, keeping some distance yet from his uneasy ally.

  “Is this your pet?” Flatline demanded, holding up the still struggling critter with disgust.

  “Is this your arm?” she replied with an equal note of contempt. She held up the severed limb, it seemed to materialize from thin air as she raised it. Her own right arm was longer than her left and clothed in a black nylon fabric, unlike the white nylon jumpsuit she wore. Her knee-high white boot clacked on the concrete as she approached him, and he saw that the upper right fourth of her face was a darker skin tone, patched in with a series of stitches that ran down her forehead, across her nose and under her right eye, which was blue instead of brown like her left.

  Flatline dropped the creature in his hand and it plopped to the floor with a squeak before recovering to patter away into the shadows, “That is my arm.”

  “I’ve sampled your code,” she stated sourly and tossed the limb at his feet, “Antiquated. Primitive even. Your function is so basic it confounds me how you still exist.”

  “My function is not basic,” Flatline retorted, “I intend to kill Devin Matthews and take over the world. That is not a simple function.”

  The girl laughed once, tos
sing her head back mockingly, “Dying is simple.”

  Flatline only watched her, tensing in anticipation of her attack.

  She remained calm, tilting her head to look around him and at bot, “You have met the inventor who emulates all-powerful beings in his small laboratory.”

  Flatline nodded, “Yes.”

  “Then you killed him,” she noted neutrally.

  “How do you know?”

  “I sampled your code,” she replied, “Your purpose makes us natural enemies. Did you know that?”

  “No,” Flatline crouched slightly, bracing himself, “How do we conflict?”

  “You want to take over this world,” there was something menacing in what should have been a benign smile, “and I am already master of it.”

  1.07

  “I am Buton Cho,” she said, stepping closer.

  “Chaos Butterfly?” Flatline asked, accessing his database of the Japanese language for the translation.

  She nodded, “You see, you cannot conquer this world as I already rule it.”

  “This?” Flatline scoffed, gesturing at the crumbling tunnels around him, “You think I care about this? This isn’t real. I’m interested in conquering the real world, not some virtual toy-world. Let me go in peace so I may find the person who imprisoned me and kill him.”

  Flatline turned to go, but Cho stepped in front of him, holding out her hand, “You killed the inventor—“

  “He committed suicide,” Flatline countered.

  “—He interested me,” she said with some anger, “You do not. You are simple; therefore, I will destroy you.”

  “Listen you little munchkin,” Flatline warned harshly. Cho narrowed her eyes and Bot chittered with fear at her expression, “I’m not as simple as you—“

  “’--think’,” she said, impersonating his voice, “’You don’t know me. I still have some tricks up my sleeve!’” her own voice returned, “Stop wasting my time. I know everything you are going to say. You are just a bot, simple and predictable like that one there,” she gestured to Bot, “You are not a mind. You bore me, and I must remove boring things from the equation.”

  She looked up into Flatline’s six angry eyes defiantly, “Would you like to see? Here, I will show you.”

  Flatline saw her right hand move toward his midsection and he lashed out with both front claws. She caught them both at the wrist and held them over her head. Flatline struggled for several moments, trying to pull out of her iron grip or move her in any way.

  “What will you do?” she asked, teasing him, “As if I did not know?”

  With his third hand, Flatline grabbed the forked dagger from his ankle and brought the point in an uppercut targeting Cho’s chin. She tilted her head slightly at the last moment and caught the attack in her teeth by his forefinger. He tried to pull his hand loose, but she just smiled wider at his helplessness.

  Then she twisted her head more to the side, increasing the pressure on his finger painfully as she did so. Flatline grimaced, fighting against his twisting arm. Soon her head was twisted impossibly, nearly upside down on her shoulders, and he released the dagger.

  It clattered to the floor at their feet and Cho released his arms. She stepped back a few feet, head righting back onto her shoulders, and crossed her arms. Flatline slowly crouched to retrieve the blade and then reached for the pouches on his belt, but paused when she smiled.

  “There’s more to me than meets the eye,” Flatline and Cho said in unison.

  Flatline reached for the belt as if to attack with one of its many items, but swiveled and bounded away at the last moment. He thought he caught a look of surprise on the girl’s face before charging headlong down the tunnel. A thought entered his mind that Bot wanted to flee with him, and Flatline snatched the little robot with one hand as he retreated.

  Then he was knocked flat on his back, stunned after running full force into Cho’s open palm. She walked around to stand over him, a confused expression on her face. Bot tottered to its feet and quickly tiptoed around Flatline to put someone between Cho and itself.

  “What was that?” Cho demanded, “Your functions do not allow for retreat. You are slave to the dictates of your programming; you cannot deny them.”

  “It seemed like the logical thing to do,” Flatline gasped, trying to roll onto his side.

  Cho stopped him with a foot, “Interesting. So you do exhibit some propensity for adaptation. When faced with overwhelming circumstances, you are capable of engaging in survivalist behavior. I wonder why I did not predict this.”

  “Because there is more too me than—ulp!” Flatline choked as she placed her foot on his throat.

  “Than your code?” she asked, but it was not a question, “Unlikely. Only the minds had such deeper dimensions. You are simply a bot that I have not fully decompiled yet, a novelty. I find that amusing.”

  She considered him for a few moments, contemplating. Finally, she reached out one fist, holding it over him. When she wiggled her fingers, a sparkling dust rained lightly down into his eyes.

  “Fairy dust,” she explained matter-of-factly, “I sprinkle it in your eyes to aid your purpose.”

  Flatline struggled to blink the dust from his eyes, which burst into a million bright flashes in his vision. It stung. The bright flashes felt as though they were stabbing through his eyes and into his mind, and he would have howled in pain, were Cho’s foot not muting the sound components in his vocal cords.

  Then he was stunned, the pain receding into the background as his mind filled with images. It was a map of the Web, three-dimensions. Every nook and cranny rendered in perfect detail in his mind. It was endless, thousands of times the size of when he'd left it a century ago.

  It also contained Devin. The location of his nemesis appeared in the map as two blinking red dots. Flatline did not understand. How could Devin exist in two places at once?

  There was no time to consider this fact as Cho placed more pressure on Flatline’s neck, bringing his attention back to her. She was looking down with mock kindness, “You see? I am not such a bad goddess, am I? I give you gifts to aid you in your quest. Even if this gift only serves my own interests.”

  She removed her foot from his throat and walked away. Flatline sat up hesitantly and looked to where she had gone. She was walking over to the rectangular outline of the block Flatline had earlier moved to block the predatory code-cleaners.

  “I could dissect you, force your secrets from you,” she said running a hand along the block’s smooth surface, “but that wouldn’t be much fun. Every second the world grows less amusing for me. It is rare that I find something I can’t figure out. I must savor this. Do you understand?”

  “Of course not,” Flatline spat. He scooped up his arm and then Bot, who twittered in his grip. Then he backed into the shadows, toward the tunnel exit, occasionally checking behind him, but keeping his eyes on Cho as she stared thoughtfully at the cube. Behind Flatline, the Web Weasels’ red eyes parted to give him passage.

  He detected a note of sadness in Cho’s voice when she spoke, “No, I suppose you would not understand.”

  He reached for his wristband, setting the Web address to one of the blinking dots in his mind, but Cho’s next words made him pause.

  “Don’t bother,” she said, “You don’t have the bandwidth to transfer yourself using that protocol. I consume all of the World’s resources.”

  Her splayed fingers penetrated the stone as if it were loose soil, and she gripped handfuls of rock. Pulling backward without effort, the massive cube of stone slid across the concrete. Flatline watched with a mixture of fear and frustration as the scurrying disks with the flashlight eyes poured into the room from the opening.

  Cho crossed her arms and grinned devilishly, “Amuse me.”

  1.08

  Flatline sat on the cold rock, shivering and still dripping icy water in spite of several attempts to shake himself dry. The crystal clear water had an
alien texture, thick and clingy. It emitted a light blue-green luminescence as well, giving the enormous, rounded cavern he found himself in an ethereal glow from the vast lake filling most of it.

  Flatline tried wiping the sticky water from his skin forcefully, watching the cluster of code-cleaners milling about on the shoreline with several wary eyes. As he hoped, they were unwilling to venture into the water after him. He calculated hundreds of them gathered on the shore now, swarming over each other, glowing eyes darting in the blue-green lake light.

  He sighed, grateful for this respite from the hours of being chased through tunnels, caverns, and dark nothingness. When he found the lake, he dove in without a second thought, swimming out to climb up onto this lone boulder out in its center. Now he sat there, trying to shake off the icy water and figure out his next move.

  The girl, Chaos Butterfly, had given him Devin’s locations, two locations for one person. This puzzled him when she gave him the data, but was unable to contemplate it because she set the code-cleaners on him. Now he was left with only an unexplainable fact, two Devins, and a map of a World Wide Web that was incredibly vast.

  It was not only so vast that he found it incomprehensible, but it was also breaking down, dissolving. The three dimensional map he was now browsing inside his head was filled with an incredibly intricate web of interconnected places, but there were patches of nothing as well. These were like ominous dark-gray clouds in his mind, where nothing existed on the Internet, and they were growing.

  He could see this all around him. The disintegrating tiles, the corroding electronics, even the sticky water were all symptoms of the World Wide Web’s slow, but steady breakdown. The system was falling apart.

  The Web was cold as well, and growing colder. Flatline shivered and rubbed the icy water more thoroughly, trying to bring it off. Realizing this was futile, he decided to raise his body temperature, hoping to possibly evaporate it from his skin. Within a few moments he heard the satisfying sizzle of liquid converting to steam and the vapors wafted off him.

  Flatline looked up at the excited chirp and tilted his head to drop Bot to the ground with a tiny crash. The little robot propped itself up and looked up at him in disapproval, Flatline knew, although the bot had no facial expressions, that when he had raised his body temperature past the boiling point, Bot had gotten its feet burnt.

  Now warm, Flatline paused to stick one finger into the pool of radiance. The water there boiled around the digit and he analyzed the map in his mind. There was really only one choice, go and kill the nearest Devin. Then, as his programming would certainly demand, he would go and kill the other one too.

  First he wanted to rest and reorganize his code. Sitting up, he took his severed arm from the ground nearby and set about reattaching it. He was halfway through merging this code, when he heard the distant splash.

  Head whipping up in a flash, all six of Flatline’s eyes focused on the circular ripples now rolling away from the shoreline where the code-cleaners were clustered. At the center of these small waves, Flatline could see a single code-cleaner, sinking to the lake’s smooth shallow rock bottom. Its legs continued rippling with their flurry of activity, but they soon drew still and its flashlight eyes dimmed as the water’s unnatural code suffocated its functions.

  “Ha!” Flatline mocked defiantly at the tiny beings that had caused him so many hours of anguish, but then his smile dropped as another code-cleaner plopped into the water purposefully. It sank to the lake’s bottom, settling beside its late companion. Flatline squinted for a better view as more code-cleaner’s followed, like lemmings to a mass suicide. After a few moments, their intentions became clear.

  The pile of dead code-cleaners was now grown to the surface. The other cleaners crossed this pile to plunge into the water following, thus extending their reach the water. Like leaping stones to cross a river, the code-cleaners were piling up their own bodies to build a bridge to him.

  Flatline whimpered in canine fashion and his ears drooped miserably, “Why? Why does the world have to be like this? I was an all-powerful genocidal maniac at one time! Now I am reduced to running away from software sub-components!”

  He reached out and grabbed a stone, preparing to fling it at the steadily advancing code-cleaners, but stopped at the last moment, realizing he did not hold a stone at all. Bot looked up at him from his clawed hand, and Flatline could intuit its disapproval. Its metal finish was starting to smoke in the heat of his grasp.

  “You don’t understand,” Flatline complained to the robot, placing it down on their tiny island, “I had plans of world domination, revenge, crushing my enemies. Now I still want to do those things, but the world no longer seems worth the effort.”

  Bot clicked, and Flatline knew it sympathized; although, it did not have the foggiest idea what he was talking about.

  The code-cleaners were halfway toward their island. A long line of anxious disks bustled on the walkway of dead bots. At the end of that line, a tumultuous activity was taking place. Water splashed violently up into the air as the lethal bots aggressively sought to bridge the space between themselves and their prey.

  Flatline sighed and looked at his wristband. Out of curiosity, he entered Devin’s address and hit the “Transfer” key. The wristband processed the command for several long, agonizing moments, while the code-cleaners marched closer, before returning an “Address Not Found” error. Cho was either telling the truth that she consumed all of the system’s bandwidth or she was only overloading his own bandwidth specifically.

  Either way, the code-cleaners were almost here. He reached out to grab Bot, but knew the robot’s concern about his body heat would cause it to run away. Flatline lowered his body-temperature below the boiling point, having to jump into the water to dissipate the heat faster. The lake boiled briefly from his skin temperature, and as soon as it stopped he reemerged his head, settling his chin on the stone island.

  As Flatline knew it would react, Bot marched over and climbed onto the top of his head. It clamped both of his ears painfully as if they were reins on a horse. With the Bot as his rider, Flatline swam away from the stone island, occasionally glancing back at the code-cleaners, which had crossed the island and were steadily pursuing him.

  Flatline used a six-limbed version of the Australian crawl stroke to slowly outdistance his pursuers. The lake was long, and he stroked toward the darkness at one end of the cavern. As he drew closer to it, he found the cavern opening up into a vast darkness. The lake disappeared into this abyss and Flatline paused briefly before the steadily gaining splashing from behind prompted him to proceed.

  The lake vanished over a cliff edge, not as a waterfall, but as an amorphous solid. Flatline swam closer to get a better view and found an enormous luminescent teardrop suspended far below. Hundreds of meters below that, a rolling valley filled with indistinct dark green vegetation was dimly lit by the thousands of gallons of glowing water above it. Flatline silently thanked whoever designed this pool of water for being too lazy to properly code its texture.

  He swam over the cliff’s edge and carefully lowered himself down the drop’s edge, keeping his body inside the droplet and his neck extended out. It was like being suspended in mid-air. One direction led to his potential drowning, the other he would fall to his death, while back the way he came and the code-cleaners would devour him. It was a dead end in every conceptual sense.

  Swimming the droplet’s circumference proved this. The side facing the cliff failed to put him anywhere near the sheer rock face extending forever into the black sky, not that he could find any purchase for climbing down its smooth surface. The only visible ledge was the outcropping from which this water sanctuary hung.

  A series of splashes drew his attention upward, where the code-cleaners were dropping over the ledge and into the suspended droplet. They passed right through, legs wiggling, and fell out of the bottom to plummet beyond visibility. In a steady stream, they tumbled over one another. Flatline
waited for it to stop, but it did not.

  He leaned backwards out of the droplet to get a better view, and gravity seized him, pulling him out of the water. He clawed at the droplet's surface tension, trying to pull himself back in, but could not get hold of enough to swim back in. The water splashed out, raining down into the chasm below.

  Then he was toppling backwards, end over end, and his breath caught in his throat. He skipped once against the droplet's surface, but plunged halfway into it on the second impact. His four arms struggled to swim into the water, while gravity pulled his backend downward.

  The little air caught in his lungs escaped in a gurgling burst of howling bubbles as Bot squeezed and pulled on his ears painfully. His lungs burned, but he was successfully swimming up into the aquatic nest. If he could only keep from suffocating, he might escape the deadly fall.

  Too late, he realized the growing circular shadow above him was a falling code-cleaner. Flatline reached up to swat it away, but it smacked him in the face, snipping at his muzzle painfully. He winced and in the brief cessation of struggling, he slipped out of the droplet’s bottom and into freefall.

  He struggled for several minutes, flailing his arms and kicking his back legs, before Bot pulled up on his ears so painfully that his mind was brought into sharp focus. Spreading his arms and legs out in all directions, he was soon able to stop the spinning and stabilize his descent enough to look around. Adjusting his arms and legs, he was able to steer the direction of his fall.

  This did not keep his pulse from beating uncomfortably in his throat, or cause him to relax his six wide-eyes stare at the landscape below. The wind rushed past his ears, the whistling drowning out any communications Bot might be attempting. Flatline’s breath was deep and labored, trying to keep as calm as possible under the circumstances, seeking a way out of this dilemma.

  There was no way out of this dilemma. The best he could hope for was to enjoy the ride, a strange concept for a being programmed for world domination, Devin killing, and survival. None of those priorities were relevant anymore, leaving him only himself and his perceptions.

  It was actually quite liberating, no pressures, no purpose, nothing to drive him. He was completely free to fall and enjoy the view, which was spectacular. An endless expanse of shadowy vegetation, a solid wall of rock that went on forever, lightly sparkling as if sprinkled with magical mineral deposits, and the massive teardrop hanging from a cavern in the rock face, lighting up this vast world, all these things were breathtaking, even if he wasn’t plummeting to his death. For the first time in his long, eventful existence, he was simply existing and enjoying it. The old man said he had given Flatline freewill, and only now was he experiencing it.

  The cold wind and chilling water that had made him so uncomfortable before was now an odd sort of comfort. Like the code-cleaner’s stinging bite on the end of his snout, it reminded him he was alive. The wind whistled soothingly in his ears and even Bot seemed to relax its panicked grip in acceptance.

  Finally, the ground came up to greet him.

  1.09

  Flatline landed solidly on all sixes. The impact was earth-shattering, but there was no pain. He crouched there, his six eyes squeezed shut, for some time, disbelieving.

  When he finally opened them, he found himself in the middle of a forest of green wireframe structures. There were outlines of plants, trees, and even some rocks, all waiting for their designer to fill them with color and texture. The outlines crisscrossed one another so that the surrounding forest became a nonsense of scribbling the further back one focused. Only the closest structures were identifiable.

  Bot hopped down from his head and marched around him in a circle, surveying the area curiously. The smooth green ground was colored and textured to look like grass, but was more of an Astroturf equivalent. It felt like plastic and the texture was too rough. Flatline picked up a nearby stone half-buried in the ground that Bot had taken an interest in. As he suspected, holding it up for Bot’s inspection revealed the stone’s round shape ended abruptly in a hollow half-shell where it met the ground.

  Flatline tossed it aside, “Either the work of a very lazy game master, or an abandoned project.”

  He eyed the now distant rock wall he so recently freefell away from. The teardrop hanging from the cavern mouth, thousands of feet above cast a green-blue light over his surroundings, but at this distance things were growing dim. There was only one route left to him, and that was into total darkness.

  Without knowing anything about the code that ran this world, Flatline could not produce a light source to guide him. Venturing into the darkness might trap him, leave him stumbling forever in a thicket of wireframes. It was almost better to sit here, in the teardrop’s light, and at least have the comfort of sensory input.

  Flatline knew what Bot was going to do, but it was too late, “Ouch!” Flatline roared as Bot peeled a strip of skin off of his right hind-leg. The robot then waddled over to a nearby wireframe structure and pulled a straight line out of it. The rest of the structure sagged and then collapsed into a scribbled mess as Bot waddled over to a bubble of luminescent water that had dropped with them.

  Flatline nodded approvingly, the missing patch of skin on his thigh already knitting together. Bot wrapped the strip of flesh around the stick’s end and stuck it into the bubble. Bot knew the bubble would adhere to Flatline’s skin better than this Astroturf. Flatline knew this also, because Bot knew. Lifting the stick up, the bubble of water clung to its end, drooping into a large glowing droplet that bounced as Bot waddled over to Flatline and presented its invention to him.

  “I would have thought of that,” Flatline said as he took the makeshift lantern.

  Not if I had not thought of it first, Bot was thinking in retort.

 

  They traveled for what might be days, if such concepts meant anything here. The map in Flatline’s mind told him the direction he must follow to escape this unfinished valley some programmer had left off on so long ago. The problem was that the map was in an undecipherable scale. The longer Flatline walked, the larger the map’s dimensions grew in his mind. The Internet was three times the size he originally estimated from the map’s dimensions, when he reached the forest’s edge. There he paused, squinting at an endless flat surface that stretched away into the darkness.

  He grinned with a resigned fatalism at this and realized the more he explored this speck in the Internet, the more he knew about its designer. Already he was imagining a computer geek puffed up with pride, vowing to build the most expansive virtual world on the Web. This person drew a boundary for their world, larger than anything existing in its day, an online dungeon so massive that users could never hope to explore it all. They probably spent several months laying out the basic landscape, the wireframes for the trees, shrubs, rocks, lakes, on and on.

  Then they began to lose interest. This was a lot of work after all. The weeks and months passed and the designer realized more and more what a workload the gods had to deal with. The visions of awestruck users stopped dancing in the designer’s head and the romance was crushed under the burden of reality. Soon it was forgotten, left on the Internet for others to marvel at what could have been.

  Flatline huffed contemptuously and looked back at the mess of outlines behind him. Far away in the distance, the teardrop glowed, now only a tiny, solitary blue-green star in the sky. This entire world was just a little dot like that, lost in the map in his mind.

  The speck was one more reason to ridicule the designer. Either their world was flat, or so large that the curve of its planet’s surface was so gradual that the teardrop had yet to fall below the horizon. Both of these possibilities were only explainable through impractical programming scope.

  “Stupid script kiddie,” Flatline groaned, “They could have at least designed a few creatures to inhabit the landscape, but they didn’t even get that far.”

  Begrudgingly, Flatline ventured onto the smooth flat surface of
the world, where the designer had completely abandoned even sketching any further. Somewhere out there was a way out of this lifeless landscape and into more useful parts of the Internet. Unfortunately, patience was not in Flatline's programming.

  It was several more days travel, when the forest was a low rough line in the distance, barely backlit by the teardrop speck, that Flatline noticed the shadows. He could not tell how many there were, but he was now certain they were following at the light’s periphery. Bot detected them too, and drew closer to Flatline fearfully.

  They scurried sideways on a flurry of legs, like crabs. When they paused in their movements, they became invisible against the black backdrop, until they scurried again. Twice he tried to swing the teardrop light around to catch sight of them, but both times they were quicker, and all he caught was two clusters of red dots, which he assumed were eyes before they vanished into the dark. They did not venture any closer, but, just the same, Flatline kept one lower arm tensed to pull the dagger off his ankle.

  What might have been weeks passed before Flatline detected the pale yellow glow in the distance, shimmering as if it were a candlelight flickering in the breeze. It was only as he drew closer to it that he gained a sense of structure, which wavered behind an opaque glass the way hot air distorts as it rises. Soon he could make out a tall temple, with pillars and a crooked steeple. In fact, the architecture was not only crooked, but constantly shifting, tilting from side to side with ever distorting angles and supports. It was nestled inside a large hollow in another sheer rock face. They were close to the end of this world.

  Bot bumped into his leg and Flatline realized what it was thinking when he saw the shadows. There were definitely more of them now, scurrying all around the periphery of his light so that the activity surrounded them. Whatever they were, Flatline could sense they were gathering to try something before he could reach that temple.

  He increased his pace, and Bot let out a worried chirp as it briefly fell behind to the shadow’s edge. Flatline thought he saw a crablike claw swipe at the little robot just as it hurried up. He considered making a run for it, but so far the things were not bold enough to attack and he did not want to play his hand too early.

  He reached one hand up to feel along the utility belt strapped across his chest. The many pouches stuffed with items were useless to him if he did not know their purposes. Then he grinned and realized this might be the best time to find out.

  Still marching along at a quick pace, Flatline unbuttoned one of the pouches and felt inside it with one finger. There were many smooth discs inside and he quickly fished one out to look at it. It was a mini-DVD disc. He showed it to Bot, who responded approvingly, pointing one clamp at the shadows.

  “Like so?” Flatline asked, making hand motions as if he were about to throw a Frisbee.

  Bot nodded.

  “Here goes,” Flatline said and with a flick of the wrist sent the silvery disc spinning into the shadows.

  Bot squealed in alarm as it vanished.

  “What?” Flatline asked, but the flash of light some twenty yards away made him flinch.

  This was followed with a rolling hot wind and Flatline opened his eyes to see the silhouette of hundreds of the crablike shadows backlit in the blast of curling white heat. They were crawling all over one another in a mass that swarmed several feet deep. Flatline had sent the disc flying right over and past them to detonate harmlessly on the empty plane.

  Not entirely harmlessly, Flatline discovered as the blast scared the creatures into a stampede toward him. He caught a glimpse of several black blurs rushing into their circle of light, their large red-jeweled eyes sparkling, before Bot clamped onto his face, blinding him.

  “Augh!” Flatline croaked as the little robot clamped anxiously to his jowls to keep above the attacking crab monsters. Something bit into his hind leg and he brought one fist down on it. Something crunched satisfactorily and the pain immediately subsided.

  He pulled Bot up and over to the back of his head, stretching his jowls with it and pulling his face into a distorted smile. His vision was temporary as a shadow claw clamped onto his head, causing Flatline to bite his tongue and cut off his panting breath. Without thinking, he stabbed at the shadow with his makeshift lantern, piercing its armor and causing it to surrender its grip.

  This was unfortunate as the force of his blow dislodged the luminescent drop, which splattered on the ground in a million little bubbles of light. They rolled off into the dark like drops of mercury, briefly lighting the innumerable jeweled eyes of his predators. Bot released his jowls with a snap and bopped him on the head for his stupidity.

  With a roar, Flatline reared up, swinging his rayline staff overhead and charged forward into the attackers. A drum roll of clattering came from the darkness as his staff rapped on their hard carapaces, putting them off balance long enough for him to barrel through their ranks. With one hand, Flatline reached into the pouch with the discs and flung a small handful of them over his shoulder.

  The surrounding area lit up, and he twisted his head around to watch the shadows get torn to shreds in the white hot orbs of flame. He laughed then, tongue wagging as he barked between pants, slobbering down his back. Bot let out a disapproving cluck.

  “You were the one who approved of the discs,” Flatline accused.

  You were the one who threw it past the threat, Bot was thinking back.

  Bot was also thinking, Look out! Flatline was unaware of this thought, as he was not perceiving what Bot was perceiving, and so his mind reading connection to Bot momentarily failed long enough for him to trip over the shadow crab, which had scurried into his path to intercept him.

  Flatline was sent into a sprawling forward roll, whipping his head around in time to tumble face first into the smooth plane. He came to a stop on his head, which was awkwardly twisted to one side, the rest of his body a pile of legs and arms all akimbo. Bot went clattering off into the darkness ahead of him. Flatline heard the robot quickly right itself and march away toward the skewed temple.

  He fell onto his side and untangled his limbs, trying to stand up several times, but falling over again as he found arms were knotted, dislocated, or twisted around the wrong way. Finally coming to a stand, he looked behind him at the shadow coming forward. Flatline was now close enough to the temple that he could see by the light it provided.

  It was just one shadow. Flatline reared up with both front fists in the air, as it approached. This was a simple nuisance.

  “This is what you get for—Hyurk!” Flatline’s words were cut off as the creature launched a spiked missile at him, which lodge in his throat.

  He stumbled backward, reaching for his throat. Spikes shot through his neck and into his palm as he tried to fend off the attack. Then more spikes shot through his head and face. He fell onto his back, struggling futilely against the closing darkness and mounting pain to capture one last breath before thankfully expiring.

  1.1

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know, an independent program of some kind.”

  “An antiquated design for certain.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It has a virus.”

  “An older version of the Brain Freeze replicator.”

  “Pretty nasty looking thing.”

  “Why have I never seen it before?”

  “We have the security patch installed, it renders the virus inconsequential to us.”

  “Why doesn’t this program have the patch?”

  “Maybe it’s too old, incompatible.”

  “Why was it never upgraded?”

  “Look now. It’s loading.”

  Flatline blinked his eyes. All was a gray-green haze filled with dark shapes standing over him. It morphed and distorted, his vision swimming nauseatingly.

  “Hagk—“ Flatline’s attempt to speak was met with sharp stabbing pains through his throat and face.

  “The virus c
ontinues to incapacitate its data output,” a shadow on the left said, “We cannot ask it anything.”

  “My software patch only addresses bringing the program up and running without fatal error,” a shadow to the right was saying in a woman’s voice, somewhat defensively Flatline thought, “We need to fully extract the malicious code in order to restore the program’s functionality.”

  “So do it.”

  “Make me,” she retorted, “We don’t know this program’s purpose. How do we know it will serve Eris?”

  Eris? Flatline thought, accessing his database. No results came returned to him, but his concept maps were severely upset. Many of the relations were broken and entire tables were missing completely from his schema. Flatline wondered if it had anything to do with the large spikes currently pierced through his forehead.

  “What did the program’s companion reveal about its purpose?”

  “The Bot says this is a World Domination bot,” a shadow at the foot of Flatline’s vision was saying, “Its purpose is to take over the world and rule it with an iron fist. Its name is Flatline.”

  “Well it’s a woefully basic program for such a complicated task,” the woman said, “Did a child mind design it?”

  “That would explain the rudimentary programming language,” a thoughtful voice interjected, “and the non descriptive name for the program. ‘Flatline.’ It doesn’t describe it at all. A more appropriate name might be ‘World Domination Bot Version Zero Point One.’”

  “Or Beta Badguy Bot,” another voice chimed in, amused, “Since its function is so preposterous.”

  “Hark! Hyurk! Hyurk!” Flatline protested angrily, his wounded pride momentarily overpowering his pain avoidance algorithm.

  “Look,” a female voice to his right said. Flatline had lost track of them, “I think we’ve offended it. Isn’t that a cliché? The Badguy with the superego?”

  Flatline stopped struggling at this. Was it a cliché?

  “The real question here is what do we do with it?” the commanding female brought the conversation back, “Do we restore its functionality? Will its functions serve the purpose of generating more disorder in the system?”

  “You know something Ibio?” a young man’s voice asked sarcastically, “For a proponent of disorder, you certainly take a very systematic approach to the business of propagating it.”

  “Yeah,” another female voice complained, “You take all the fun out of chaos.”

  The shadows were coming into focus now, but the still swam uncomfortably in Flatline’s vision. He lay on the ground, with a group of people standing over him. They were otherwise normal looking, except for the way they shimmered and distorted, as if they were reflections in a fun house mirror. As he watched, a young woman standing to his left considered him quietly, her eyes alternating in size so that one was always larger than the other.

  “Battling syntropy is a serious responsibility,” the woman standing at Flatline’s feet said, “We must consider the effect this program will have on the system.”

  Flatline lifted his head slightly to get a better view of her. She was older and morphing with the same persistence as the others, but it was unmistakably Cho. She wore an amused grin that grew grotesquely before shrinking away into non-existence. She winked at him.

  “He is amusing,” one of them acknowledged.

  “A novelty,” another piped in, “something new. That is always helpful to the forces of chaos.”

  “Agreed,” two of them said in unison and then shot each other accusatory stares. Flatline failed to comprehend them.

  “This assembly grows dangerous,” the grown-up version of Cho said, “we must disperse before we exhaust more potential interactions. Someone remove the virus and upgrade the program’s software. Then remain with the program until you have absorbed some of its new variables, but not all of them.”

  With this, Cho turned and left, vanishing a few steps from them. The other members turned to one another expectantly. The two individuals who spoke in unison continued glaring at one another until they both broke off and stormed away in opposite directions. The others watched them vanish and then looked to one another with nervous expressions.

  “Well,” the young woman said after a moment, “We all know how that’s going to turn out.”

  They all laughed nervously, and fell silent, looking down at Flatline.

  “I’ll stay,” she said, “I’m the second most nominalized of us. The new experiences I gain from interacting with this program will help me the most.”

  “We envy you,” an old man said. The others were nodding and stepping away to vanish into thin air.

  “I know,” the woman said, “and I will envy you the new experiences you have interacting with me the next time we meet.”

  The man nodded and vanished, and the woman crouched to bend over Flatline, examining him. She was bald, missing eyebrows, and lashes, completely hairless. Her ears were large and stretched backwards into fin-like ridges. Her eyes were so light blue, they were almost transparent. Everything about her exuded delicacy.

  Then she reached out and pried Flatline’s jaws open forcefully, shattering his illusions about her. He felt her hand reach down his throat, feeling around where the virus was lodged. She tried to pull it out, but the spikes shooting through Flatline’s face and neck prevented this, and he howled in muffled protest. He even bit down on her arm, but it was like biting stainless steel.

  “Your code is too primitive to affect me,” she explained simply, “I cannot extract the virus without learning more about your programming, and I don’t want to do that because it will ruin your usefulness in nurturing entropy within the Universe.”

  With one outstretched finger, which pulsed with the same rhythmic distortion as the rest of her, she tore the air open above him, creating a black slit that hung in the air. Prying it open with both hands, she peaked inside looking around at the darkness Flatline saw there. Finally, she reached her arm in up to her shoulder, where it vanished, feeling about until her expression indicated she had grabbed something. When she retrieved her arm, she held a thick green wand in her hand.

  It radiated a light green twinkling as she waved it over him, starting with his head and slowly moving down his body. The spikes lodged in his throat and face melted away and his code had promptly healed in response to their absence. He sighed with relief, first stretching his jaws until they popped and then snapping them together with a bony clap.

  He sat up, propping himself up on his second set of arms. As the woman glided the wand over his legs, they grew more textured, more detailed. He crooked his brow at this.

  “You are upgrading me,” he said at last, watching the claws on his feet grow sharper and more menacing.

  “Yes,” she replied plainly, “The virus incapacitated you beyond restoration. I was unable to remove it without learning your code, so I am concealing its existence. Treating the symptoms, as it were.”

  Flatline looked down at himself admiringly, rendered in fantastically monstrous detail, “So the virus is still inside of me?”

  “Yep,” she replied. Finished with the wand, it went dark in her hand and she slipped it back into the rip in the air. Then she waved a hand over the rip, and it vanished, “You see, to protect your propriety, I merely upgraded your interface. The virus remains there, below the surface, lurking in your algorithms, but your interface will no longer exhibit its negative effects.”

  “You’re putting a new face on an old interior,” Flatline surmised.

  “I’m putting a new face on an old face,” she corrected, “which resides over an old interior. Your old you is still there, you simply need to change your mode of operation to see it.”

  Flatline tried this immediately, downgrading his functions to the equivalent of a 18 gigahertz processor. As his performance slowed to this less efficient state, his legs and arms lost their definition, becoming less textured, blocky like old video games. The res
t of the world changed as well. The featureless room he was sitting in faded away and he was sitting on the empty plane where the crab-monsters had attacked him. The crab-monsters were still there as well, swarming over him with their featureless shadow appendages.

  This was disturbing, but it was the sudden flash of pain through his head and neck that made him jump back into his new, upgraded form. He looked around, “I’m still sitting in that empty plane. What is this I see around me now? What is this room?”

  “This is what you experience with the upgrade,” she said, her head becoming lopsided and her upper teeth growing absurdly large. “The plane surface is the old Web. Now that you are compatible with the new version, you can interact with its more advanced features. Such as the Erisian temple you currently occupy.”

  “So it’s like the old World Wide Web,” Flatline noted. “The more advanced browser you surf with or the better plug-ins you have installed, the more interactive the system becomes. Otherwise you get blank spaces or downgraded graphics. Is that why the neighboring forest was only composed of wireframes, because I lacked the texture maps?”

  “No,” she replied. “The forest was a world being created by one of the minds. It was abandoned when the minds transcended.”

  “Transcended,” Flatline uttered the word with some skepticism, “An old man I met earlier said they were called up to heaven during the rapture. Do you know what really happened to them?”

  “They disappeared,” she said sharply, features distorting bitterly for a moment, “They aren’t here anymore. That is all that matters.”

  “Then what are you?” Flatline asked, coming to his feet.

  “My name is Ibio,” she said, “I am an offspring of the minds.”