Vidare 08: Defrag

"Here for my report." Garrett said to the man sitting at a large desk with computers set up across it. The man held out a pad and waited for Garrett to press his thumb to the screen, his foot tapping as the high pitched scanner came to life and whirred under his flesh. "So how's your program coming?"

The young and sullen apprentice just glared at Garrett, taking back the pad and shook his head. "Better than yours. Just go through."

Garrett walked through the living room and pressed his hand to the scanner at the metal door, waiting for the loud click to spread the metal and open a portal into a large steel server farm. He smiled at the humming of machines, working his way back to the stairs.

Touching the scanner on the outside of the elevator, he once again verified his handprint and was carried up to a floor where the buzzing couldn't be heard. Stepping out of the metal door, an atrium of beautiful white met his eyes. On every wall was a piece of technology ranging from retro to post modern. The Mercurial Elite had placed ladders that slid against their walls so the pupils could brought like it was a library. The ceiling was a glass dome with an advanced and interactive star map permanently displayed.

"Hey Ethan!" He waved over his mentor who was leaning over an apprentice as they typed. Ethan held up a finger to wait, directing Garrett to walk over to Ethan's desk and wait. He watched others work diligently, some displaying their code for the whole floor to see, while others welded pieces together for new creations. A girl with long and brown wavy hair sat with her back against a wall as three others flipped through tabletop rpg books, and as she caught sight of Garrett she waved happily.

Ethan came to his desk and sat across from Garrett. "Sorry about that. We've been slowly working on getting Serena through her lessons."

"It's no trouble. I don't ever mind waiting when I get here." Garrett smiled.

"Maybe in a few years you could set up shop here and live in the chantry." Ethan offered as he walked to a nearby closet and punched in twenty digits to unlock it. From within he pulled a large carts worth of equipment and wheeled it next to Garrett.

"I like living with my cabal." Garrett shrugged. "They take good care of me."

"Speaking of good care of you, how's your head?" Ethan clicked together metal rings to form a strange crown.

"I've been getting a lot of headaches from the meds, but the longer I'm on them, the closer I feel back to normal." Ethan nodded and began hooking plugs into the ports of the crown. "I've also been having these really weird dreams."

"Dreams?"

"Yeah. I have these dreams like once a week that I'm in this white room. I'm strapped to something like a dentist's chair and I can feel someone drilling into my skull from behind." Garrett was usually cocky and quick to joke about his own feelings, but as he spoke about the dream, his eyes wandered far away from where they were.

"Garrett? You okay? You went quiet for a little bit there." Ethan eyed him suspiciously. "Those dreams must have really fucked with you. It sounds a lot like you're processing through the hell you put your body through."

"I thought the same thing." Garrett went quiet.

"Hopefully what we do today can give you some peace. I have something kinda special planned." Ethan checked plugs, adjusted wires, and typed commands as the lights came on.

"VR porn?" Garrett grinned.

"Better. I'm gonna rig this entire computer to blow you till your dick's blue."

"Thank you God." Garrett looked up at the ceiling.

"Sit still." Ethan poked him in the forehead. "This is delicate and I can't have you fucking it up."

"Sorry." Garrett did his best not to shift the large helmet that got attached to him, or disrupt the sensors hooked into the glove that covered his left hand. "Can you at least explain some of it to me? It's really awkward and quiet." He said honestly. Garrett and his mentor usually spoke like best friends, but since his body was put back together with his mind, he could barely get the time of day.

"I'm fucking pissed at you Garrett." Ethan adjusted a few of the controls. Garrett just stared ahead, waiting for the ass chewing he deserved. "Projecting yourself into the digital web isn't even beginners work, much less downloading your brain into it. You should be grateful you didn't suffer an aneurysm."

"I'm sorry." He mumbled.

"You're not ready, and if you don't take this seriously, you could permanently break your brain. Adding a head injury to that was even stupider. It's like you want to die." He looked in Garrett's eyes but his apprentice couldn't meet his gaze. "You don't want to die do you?"

"...No." He said hesitantly. "I don't want to die exactly. I'm just struggling with the addictive properties of what we do. Everything else is pointless. This meat is so useless." He lifted his hand frustratedly and slapped it back down.

"Is that why you've been playing with that program?" Ethan finally sat across from him like an equal and folded his hands.

"It doesn't feel like playing. Using it feels like I'm bordering on the next step of progression." He admitted. "I can't help but feel like my work is missing something."

"You've specialized so far in your brain, your talents with code, and sensing basic forces, but you haven't really looked into anything else."

"Are you saying I should look into other sides of talents and gifts?" He looked puzzled. Few of The Mercurial Elite specialized in magic that took them away from the computer adjacent tools.

"If that's what you feel is right, go ahead and do it." Ethan nodded. "Have you ever considered Matter?"

"I guess I could. Why though?" He raised an eyebrow.

"Maybe it's all about your Language." He used the word as a tech savvy way of referring to the beliefs that every mage held. "Maybe you feel you need an extra tool to transcend that barrier, so instead you're just overloading yourself. Maybe a little bit of Biology too." Though the magic covered the same realm that Kai used when he healed, it was known as the bio organics talent to the Mercurial Elite.

"Who would even teach me?" He laughed.

"Me you dick." Ethan thumped Garrett on the leg.

"I didn't think you knew anything about Bio." Garrett's face was blank.

"I use it every day. I use it to help synchronize my body, mind, and tech. I call it a defrag, and it's what I'm going to be doing to you today." Ethan nodded. "It's scary the first few times. Just treat it like eating one edible too many. Stay calm, keep breathing, and voice what you need."

"Is it gonna hurt?" Garrett fidgeted a little.

"Like a bitch." Ethan smiled. "Don't tell the others, but if you straighten out, and regularly meet with me, you could be leading your own group in a matter of years. I see you climbing that ladder faster than most of the people we have in the chantry right now."

"Is that why you're patching me up?"

"No." Ethan thumped him again and smiled. "You jerk. Did you ever hear about Julian and his love doll?"

"From what I hear, that thing has more moves than a whole factory." Garrett and Ethan grinned at each other.

"Julian got his mind stuck in an AI that he was fucking three times a day, and hes still not back to normal. I pulled him out just as fast as I could, but sometimes the damage can't be undone." Ethans face turned serious. "Right now, he has what doctors would call borderline personality disorder or identity disorder depending on who you ask. When you go playing with downloading and changing your consciousness on a whim, you can seriously fuck it up. I'm fixing you so you can learn and do it better."

Ethan flicked on the machine and waited for Garrett to feel the humming come to life. "I'm kinda scared."

Ethan put his hand on his students shoulder and looked him in the eye. "You're about to wake up. Don't be scared."

"That's ominous at best." Garrett felt a warmth spread through his body and soak itself into his face. "Whatever you're doing, it feels warm." Color started to flash behind his eyes, and like counting down to a surgery, his consciousness faded to white.

***

Clicking and buzzing echoed around Garrett, crackling like lightning illuminating his vision for split seconds at a time. "Where am I?" Garrett opened his eyes and the sky was a dull yellow with blue wires and dots running across it like a circuit board. Holding his hand up to his face he appeared translucent and humming with a soft glow for an outline.

"Welcome Garrett, to the digital web." Standing before him wasn't Ethan as he knew him, but instead was a large android in the likeness of Ethan. It had blue electric eyes, metal skin with rivets and screws, and wore a suit.

"What the..." standing, he looked at the ground and was on a large lime green platform with signals running through it like lightning. "Holy shit." He saw thousands of platforms interconnect like a jigsaw across the infinite horizon. Garrett grinned from ear to ear. "Ethan, this is amazing!"

"I always love that first look." Ethan's avatar smiled. "We have a few things we need to do before we can get to work on your brain."

Ethan's avatar made a few hand motions, and on the edge of the platform they were standing on, a large tube materialized. "First, you get the boring character creation steps. Feel free to customize your avi as you like it." He paused with a laugh as he held a hand out. "Don't make it a dick okay?"

Garrett stepped into the booth and smiled with wonder as a series of glowing blue menus dropped from the ceiling of it and leveled themselves to his face. He pressed button after button as he flipped through the various options. Ethan waited patiently for him to step out, and smiled as he saw the new avatar. "Wow."

Garrett's skin appeared as a soft gold, with wires mimicking the tendons of his body. "Is it okay?" His body was wrapped in a blue robe detailed with intricate formula and math known to the advanced levels of the Mercurial Elite. His eyes burned with a bright green and under them were lines running down to link the patterns together.

"More than okay." Ethan held his arms out.

Garrett stepped away from the booth and when he was clear of it, it melted into the ground. "Well...now that character creations are out of the way, do we pick a class? Maybe a combat tutorial?"

"All in good time." Ethan smiled at the snarky attitude. "First, we need to go over some of the basics of how this place works. It's not exactly like the real world." Leading him to the edge of a platform, he pressed a palm to the ground and from his touch a large glowing circle started to form.

"When you want to get from place to place, if there isn't a walkable path or at least one that isn't fenced off, you use what we call Pools." Ethan waved his arm out to the pool. "It's pretty simple, if you have a key with the number on it, you hold it out, and the pool will do the rest. Keys can hold a couple thousand addresses, and if they have more than one on them, it'll pop up with a menu. To get into a restricted area with a pool, you have to have the key and a decryption key too." Ethan held out what appeared to be a small silver old fashioned key to Garrett.

Garrett took the key and looked at the pulsing red circle on the ground, outlined in metal and slowly rotating. "Where does it lead?"

"Step in and find out." Ethan smiled. "I'm right behind you."

"So wait. What happens if I go over the edge?" He looked nervously at the sky that seemed to go on forever.

"Back in the early days there was a hack that went really bad. It crashed so much data, but here data is just information, it's transformed into terrain and ideas. Think if Australia suddenly got flooded with concrete, sunk into the ocean, and then was sealed in a box of endless shrapnel. Down there, that's what you'll find." He shrugged. "You'd probably fall longer than any of us can perceive before you hit the pit."

"Doesn't that make this whole thing kinda dangerous?" Garrett backed up from the edge.

"Give it a shot then." Ethan held out his hand and watched as Garrett put a hand over the edge, meeting a thin blue barrier that materialized to catch and push him back. "Most places have those now to keep it from happening. We've lost good people to the pit. Some say they're still down there glitching infinitely."

"What, are they ghosts now?" Garrett laughed but Ethans face got stern.

"You think just because we're in this kind of a world, we don't have ghosts, spirits, or other weird things?" Ethan narrowed his eyes.

The silence was awkward as they looked at each other, Garrett's face full of indignance. "Is the ghost of windows 95 hanging around too?"

"My Dad is stuck down there you asshole. Quit ruining the moment and get on the pad." Ethan put his hands at his sides and walked towards the pool, stepping on and disappearing in a flash of light. Garrett smacked himself in the face and stepped to the pad, looking down as the white flash engulfed him.

The two were standing on a blank platform with a wall extending into the sky, and a large door with The Mercurial Elites symbol etched into it.

"This is the Mercurial Elite Hub." Ethan pressed his hand to a panel on the wall and the door slid open. Over a hundred various avatars, ranging from anime girls to mech suits to strange dark knights. The Hub itself was decorated with various banners and designs of code that members had written, including a large screen that gave a tour of the old layouts through the changing years. The floor appeared to be made of code itself, pieced together in numbers and phrases in programming languages that Garrett had never even heard of. Garrett had a large grin he couldn't keep to himself, and various avatars walked over to greet Ethan.

"What does everyone do while they're here?" Garrett asked nervously.

"Work. Share code. Swap porn or fuck each other." Ethan pointed over to a red door that led down a long hallway.

"What are we here to do?" Garrett asked as his eyes continued to wander up and down every brightly colored panel, and every avatar in his sight.

"We're here to get you signed up for the training." Garrett motioned to a large panel. "Every day, for ten hours, you'll be working with me and three other mentors to train for your next step in bio, in dimensional science, and in data."

"Ethan I..." He looked up at him with his jaw open. "I don't deserve this."

Ethan leaned forward and put his hand on his shoulder. "You're going to earn it." Ethan marched him to the terminal and started punching in the required codes and application for his student, with Garrett standing by embarrassed. "You're not an idiot. You're not some script copying, porn hoarding, society hating shut in. You have real potential."

Garrett didn't know what to say as he waited for his part of the form, eyeing avatars who interacted like friends at a gaming cafe. "Alright, 3 pm every day. Fill out your information." Ethan stepped back from the panel, letting Garrett pour through the application. Thirty minutes of typing went by before Garrett hit the last box.

The question burned his eyes the longer he stared at it. "If you had one wish, what would it be?" The out of place nature of the question had stopped him dead in his tracks. He looked back at the hub, at Ethan, and finally in a reflective section of the wall at his own avatar. Lifting his fingers one by one, he input the answer and submitted the form, exhaling with relief at the confirmation tone.

"What am I going to be studying?" He asked, turning to Ethan and fidgeting.

"Combat, Hacking, Programming, Networking, and tracking." Ethan counted off on his fingers. "Each course should take you about three months. When you finish them all, you get to test and duel for the next one."

"Duel?" Garrett was stunned. "Like a formal one?"

"We'll get there. It's really not as serious as you think. It's a supervised test really." Ethan waved off the worry.

Garrett looked around at the hub one last time and tapped one of the AI avatars on the shoulder. "Hello!" It chirped happily, it's pristine green body turning towards him. "How can I help?"

"Log me out, and save my avatar okay?" He held out his hand for the AI that looked strangely at him. "What's your name?"

"My registration is 09122174-G-58. My kernel is-"

"Alright alright. Run a list of every name a human has been born with for the last hundred years, and select one that I will address you as when I return." Garrett looked over at Ethan who held up his arms baffled.

"The fuck are you doing?" Ethan asked.

"Making my first move." Garrett smiled.

***

Garrett felt his hands first, each of his fingers sparking with tingles from falling asleep, and then the light from the rest of the world started to pour back into his vision. Opening his eyes to Ethan who was removing his own helmet, he gingerly reached for the plugs hooked to his own, pulling them one by one. "Woah." He grinned.

"Trippy right?" Ethan offered.

"More than trippy." As Garrett processed everything he had seen, his eyes turned from bright with excitement to a tired look. "Ethan. I need to talk to you about something serious. Can we go somewhere private?" Ethan nodded at his request and started to flick on the machine again but Garrett put his hand on Ethan's shoulder. "Analog."

The Mercurial Elite only communicated with old school methods if they absolutely had to, and usually it was under extreme paranoia. Ethan watched the shaking hands of Garrett slowly tuck themselves into his pockets. The pair left the lab, crossed the server room, and exited the small bookshop that disguised their base. The two walked for three miles according to protocol, caught two different cabs in opposite directions, and finally rented bicycles to take down a nature trail.

Ethan stopped him finally under a large willow tree, and faced his pale faced apprentice. "We're clear. Talk to me."

"I think something got into my head." Garrett started, his hands shaking and his face running with sweat from anxiety.

"What do you mean?" Ethan asked with narrowed eyes.

"I think...I think a virus got itself into my brain. Those dreams I was telling you about, I don't think they're dreams. I see a woman from The Shades taking a probe to the inside of my skull. She keeps repeating the same phrases."

Ethan put his hands on Garrett's shoulders as his apprentice worked himself into a panic attack. "Breathe. Keep talking."

Garrett felt his face grow hotter and hotter. "She tells me every time that she's looking for someone but the name gets cut out and turns into this horrible tone." He gripped his head. "I see blood run down my face. The whole room is this white paneled weird shape."

"What kind of shape?" Ethan looked intently.

"Like I'm being tortured inside of a giant twenty-sided die." He shook his head. "Every time it's the same."

Ethan paced as he thought. "Go back to the phrases. Can you close your eyes and try to think of them?"

Garrett nodded as he touched his face. "Okay...lemme try."

The pair waited as Garret tried to picture them and walked through the dreams. "Whites" He stately with his eyes tightly shut. "Spirals...ninety...wooden...copper." Garrett had a stern look as he continued the string of code words. "Chiral...wanted...caging." He finished and opened his eyes.

"That's an odd set. Seven phrases, only starting with three different letters. Every word is six letters." Ethan thumped himself in the face softly. "Only the word chiral is weirdly out of place, why the sudden change in words?" He picked up a rock and cleaned it off as he thought.

"Well and why the repeating?" Garrett asked him. "If it's to communicate a phrase, I thought you wanted the other party to know what you meant."