“No time to cry, my dear! We must depart for the breach!” Alexa shook Ember out of her panic paralysis.

“I’m scared, okay?! My Administrator controls only extend to commanding the simulated people in here and adjusting my avatar parameters!” She cried.

“How is someone with diplomas in psychiatry, security, rehabilitation and Tartarus prison management so dim? Don’t you have 100% in every course you’ve taken too?” Alexa shook her head. “Honestly, sometimes you're as dim as your brother.”

“Don’t bring my brother into this, I know he’s dim!” Ember wailed, ignoring the fact that Alexa somehow knew about her diplomas.

“Okay, I know what to do! Follow me.” Alexa dragged Ember towards the kitchen.

The Wardsworths sat there, looking as grouchy as ever. It seems that when the simulation restarted, they had begun their life at the kitchen table.

Alexa shoved Ember to the center of the kitchen. “Magnify your voice to the maximum possible propagation setting.”

“Okay. Give me a sec.” The hero’s copy nodded.

“Now yell at the top of your lungs - Attention everyone! Stop the man made of lasers by any means necessary!”

Ember shouted the command and her scream had reached a new resonance, propagating and multiplying itself. The supersonic crescendo tore apart the very air itself. In that very instance, a circumference of forty kilometers of Centralia suburbia, the center of which was house number eight of Primrose Drive, had lost their windows.

Alexa’s ears rang with an unending pulse even as she covered them up with both of her hands. She removed her hands, noted that her ears were bleeding and gave Ember a thumbs up. “Ow. Noisy. Well, that should do it! We better run now!”

The Wardsworths stupidly blinked in equal parts confusion and dread. This was a whole new level of unprecedented destruction for which they were entirely unprepared.

Mrs. Wardsworth looked at her kitchen in abject terror. Every single glass item there had stopped existing as such. The stove was a gaping maw filled with jaggedy shards. The cabinets were a ruinous mess of colorful ceramic chips. Drinking implements vanished along with the plates.

The Living room was no better off - the television set was smoking, its screen cracked. Mr. Wardsworth’s glasses were but frames now, missing the glass parts.

He didn’t seem to mind that much. He walked into the bedroom, rummaged therein and emerged with a hunting rifle. Mrs. Wardsworth also succumbed to the command, and went to grab a kitchen knife.

Alexa and Ember emerged out onto the street along with thousands of simulated citizens that were wielding a variety of random weapons.

Primrose drive looked like a warzone. The windows of all the houses were gone. Smoke poured from some of them out of broken electronics. The streetlamps no longer had glass or lightbulbs in them. Sirens sounded in the distance.

Alexa looked at the Primrose Drive sign as she stepped off the sidewalk onto the concrete driveway. The sign flickered with a multitude of names for a second. Pricket Drive. Picket Drive. Primary Drive. Potent Drive. Infinity Paradox Prison.

"Yeah that’s about right. A much better name." Alexa squinted at the sign. Ember looked at the road sign. The sign was still in its standard sans serif typeface street font, but now it stated: “Infinity Paradox Prison”.

“What’s the fuck is happening?” She gasped.

“The code I wrote is finally taking control, rapidly spreading across the simulation. The damage caused by Three is helping it a lot as the repair algorithms are struggling to fill the permanent holes he’s leaving in data.”

Alexa noted that some simulated citizens had chosen vehicles as their weapons. As Three was returning from the gas station, he was immediately run over by a truck, then a bus, then a volkswagen, then a teenager ran him over with bicycle, smacking him with a baseball bat.

Ember yelled for one of the citizens to give up their car to them and they did so with a compliant smile. Alexa drove their newly acquired blue sedan away into a completely random direction.

“Do you know where the breach is?” Ember asked, wincing as she heard gunfire echo behind them.

“Approximately, yes.”

Somewhere behind them a deep boom resounded, the earth shaking and a small mushroom cloud rising into the air as Three encountered a fuel truck driven by a very determined citizen.

“How?”

“I’ve been seeding the city with my code for years. There’s a lot of my bits around. What you thought as a tick of a girl being broken down by the increasing hardships of your simulation, was actually very cleverly disguised data manipulation. The super who wrote this sim was big on visual programming. Adding stuff to it wasn't that difficult. Keeping up the appearance that I was doing nothing at all was the hard part.” Alexa grinned, driving the car at full speed.

Ember choked. She had been very, very stupid indeed. She didn’t think that the simulation could be manipulated in such a manner. She didn’t have a diploma in sim programming. If she did, they wouldn't let her work as a warden here. Editing the sim backend code was a big infraction.

"What's going to happen to us when we hit the breach?"

"Me? I'm probably going to wake up. You? You're made of data that can't be run outside of this sim so you're going to float right on the rim of the Centralia server bubble until I plug you in somewhere really nice. My self-sustaining code will probably keep on replicating through the breach until I dunno when."

Ember blanched. Inexplicably, her life was now in the hands of her prisoner. Alexa would determine if this ghost of Hero Resonance lived again or slept forevermore.

“Look behind us. It’s starting!” Alexa pointed in the back view mirror.

Ember looked.

Three had lost all of his clothes now, looking entirely like a human nervous system made of brilliant, red lasers. Having shredded cars and weaponized people with his nullification power he reached number 8 Primrose drive on his quest to erase the two girls out of existence.

“Stop!” Mrs. Wardsworth emerged from the house, striking him with a kitchen knife. Mr. Wardsworth shot at Three from the side. Three turned to the man, laser eyes cleaving Mr. Wardsworth in twain. He then zapped the annoying, red haired woman that was bugging him without remorse.

M_s. Ward_o_h lost her data, burning and falling. As she collapsed to the ground and shattered into dust the house behind her suddenly lit up, blinding, unholy radiance reaching out from the furnace room.

The house number eight in front of Three shimmered with an unearthly glow, covered in lines of light. Spirals made from glowing numbers encircled the house, shining like a new galaxy of stars in the night, an impossibly gargantuan diagram of focus and code spreading outwards. The street lit up like a christmas tree. Trees, rocks, streetlamps, houses, everything that Alexa had written code on was lighting up.

Three spun his head in confusion. The ground trembled. The house number eight groaned and shifted, walls folding into enormous gears bits, everything within it, from furniture to rooms rearranging itself into a new complex data pattern.

Houses, cars and buildings snapped apart, forming gargantuan gears made of starlight. The machinery of the stars, a gigantic fractal hexagram created by Cassie began to tick into motion.

Three fell as the road he stood on suddenly shifted sideways. He let out a printer-like screech as the expanding fractal engine overtook him, folding his data into itself, rearranging what he was into more computational power for itself.

“What the fuck is that?!” Ember choked as she saw fractal gears forming from surrounding terrain behind them taking apart anything and everything.

“The word crisis in Japanese has both the words danger and opportunity in it. This is a prison sphere reformed, remade into a self-sustaining, reactive data weapon - a Fractal Sumerial Difference Engine!”

“WHAT?!” Ember yelled in horror.

“Yeah, the name is a little silly, but whatever. I made it, therefore I call it whatever I want. Did you know that Sumerians invented multiplication, long division, arithmetic and geometry in 2600 BC? Also, they had cool beards and a super that gave people wings.”

Lines of glowing code were spreading from the enormous fractal in the center of the simulation, engulfing all of Centralia.

“You see, had the SCA heroes not made a foolish decision to imprison a very determined and adorable little supervillain for one hundred thousand years of accelerated time, my pretty data weapon would not come to exist! Tartarus has fallen and you, Hero Resonance, have helped me do it by giving Agatha the backend access keys!” Alexa laughed driving the car ahead of the all-devouring, all-integrating code.

“Noooooooo!” Ember screamed, looking behind them at the horrid code-fractal that consumed all in its path.

“Mwa ha ha ha ha!” Alexa laughed with her villainous laughter. “You’ve lost, hero! Behold my real superweapon, created to consume the Superstate from within!”

A hole in a wall of a building loomed in front of them, glowing with offset, rainbow colors. It was the data breach made by Three. The car shot through it just as Alexa’s code engulfed the entire city of Centralia setting it alight, folding streets and buildings into themselves.

. . .

“Hrm.” A blue-shirted, blonde technician looked at prisoner number 92681. The technician could have sworn that Alexa was already awake, according to the panel, but frankly that would have been impossible. Nobody woke up on their own from S-stasis, nobody escaped the mental prison designed by brilliant super programmers like herself. The tech was feeling exhausted today. She had to work overtime as the system was showing way more glitches than usual that had to be fixed.

She decided to ignore the prisoner's brain pattern data, presuming that it was just another stupid glitch. Other panels showed that the Centralia simulation was still running at full capacity without interruptions and that the transfer was done. The tech tiredly rubbed her face, trying to stay focused, nodded to the SCA lawyer present and disengaged Alexa from the simulation.

"Welcome to the world of tomorrow!" The sim-tech announced, as Alexa groggily opened her eyes.

“What year is it?” Alexa hissed out, feeling that her mouth was incredibly dry.

An SCA lawyer wearing a black suit and tie stood in front of Alexa, glasses glinting. He held a clipboard with some documents in it.

“Hello, Alexa Terranova.

You’ve been in S-stasis exactly one day of real time. We had to pull you out ahead of schedule because of several coinciding reasons.

One - the Equalizers have filed an injunction against the Superstate, saying that we have no right to imprison you since you haven’t actually done anything. They don’t normally stand up for villains that we reeducate with the accelerator with so much vigor. Truly extraordinary.”

The lawyer took a pause, flipping through documents.

“Two - there’s that one insane Equalizer Enforcer in Saint Mary. What was her name? Ah, Verse Twenty-four Nineteen. She said she will murder one hero every hour until we release you, starting with the retired hero Joseph Kanard. Very scary girl.”

“Woo.” Alexa smiled. “Good old Cottie pulling through.”

“Three - you are legally a hero’s sidekick and therefore we had no right to put you through S-stasis without the hero in question having a say in it. Unfortunately, we could not reach Hero Resonance. She seems to have disappeared off the map and isn’t answering our calls. We are presuming she is deep undercover.”

“Can you put me back in for like five more minutes?” Alexa yawned. “I don’t feel fully reeducated yet. Feel like I might go out and commit some horrible Superstate-ending crimes again.”

“No.” The lawyer said with a frown, seemingly not approving her joke. “You’ve been declared innocent by the Superstate. All charges that the Five had against you had been dropped. You will be compensated one million S-credits for being hit several times by Nonpareil and one day in S-stasis, deposited to your hero’s account.”

“I have a hero’s account? I’m a superstate citizen?” Alexa grinned brightly, silver eyelashes fluttering.

“No. You are an academy novitiate. If you graduate as a Hero, then you will receive your citizenship.”

“Don’t get your hopes up, girl. Many heroes, including myself, do not like you. We know that you were a part of some anti-SCA nefarious plot and that you got out through a legal loophole.” The tech commented from her station. “Every super on the planet knows you by one name only - the Doombringer.”

Alexa stuck her tongue out at the tech.

“To add to point number three.” The lawyer cleared his throat, annoyed at the technician. “Hero Resonance has made a formal declaration that you are to be her future sidekick minutes before your arrest. We received an employment contract signed with biometric iris recognition yesterday. Unfortunately, it took twenty four hours for us to notice and process the said contact, as it was the weekend.” The lawyer readjusted his glasses. “You will get your academy notification letter soon.”

“I just don’t understand why our brightest S-stasis educator would choose her as a sidekick of all the people! It doesn’t make any sense!” The technician grumbled.

“It’s because I’m cool and hip and have many heroic qualities, duh.” Alexa grinned at the tech.

The lawyer sighed.

“Is Nonpareil going to apologize for slapping me around?” Alexa asked.

“No. He has declined to comment on the situation.” The SCA layer replied.

“Well, it’s going to be his funeral then. Glad to see another dumb-ass sticking to his guns. It’s going to be quite the challenge to break one little, indestructible staple.”

“Considering how he will be one of your instructors, it is more likely that he will straight up fail you.” The tech said, not feeling convinced that Alexa could break Nonpareil.

“Please look into the light to acknowledge that you understand the terms of the compensation package and I will give you your own Hero’s silver card.” The lawyer handed the pen that was flashing green to Alexa.

“Pffff silver. This feels like a downgrade.” Alexa winked at the pen.

The tech raised an eyebrow at her, confused at what she was talking about.

The lawyer handed her the card and turned around.

“One more thing, Mr. Lawyer. I’d like a copy of my sim-data please. I know that you guys are going to purge it because of legal reasons and stuff, but it’s honestly very special for me. My favourite instructor Hero Resonance is on there. Her and I had a lot of fun in the sim. She taught me quite a bit about being nice to people and how to be a proper lady and hero!” Alexa smiled softly.

“I’m afraid that we do not give out sim data.”

“I’m willing to pay for it.” Alexa waved her new, silver credit card.

“Very well. The 100 petabyte data set will cost one million S-credits.” The SCA lawyer looked at Alexa seeing if she would pay up such an exorbitant sum for something so incredibly useless. After all, the simulations were incredibly complex due to their realism and only the S-Stasis SCA supercomputer could run the data properly.

Alexa nodded, giving the lawyer her card back. The lawyer smiled, having tricked the idiot girl out of all of her compensation money.

“Please give this girl her S-stasis simulation data on a usb data-drive.” The lawyer nodded to the technician.

The tech also grinned. This girl was an absolute idiot, it seemed. She got lucky once, that’s all. Extracting anything of value out of the data she just purchased without having access to the SCA S-Stasis hardware and software would be akin to finding a needle in one hundred billion haystacks. By itself the data was useless, just a bunch of ones and zeroes. It didn’t run on it’s own! The reality of the world would soon crush this girl’s foolish dreams, the tech had no doubts about that.

The system blinked angrily at the tech, asking for support. Twenty six toilet cleaning drones had stopped working this morning. It was an unprecedented disaster. She sighed tiredly, turning away from prisoner 92681. She had to get back to her duties. Why couldn't things just work right today?