THEN: AUG 20, 3:14 AM, 2016, DELTA LABS

Tonight was the night!

Dingus was running a big test iterating through a Fear-Me-Mortals, a polyglot of Enochian, Futhark chaining and this weird Tibetan runeset that the devs had been getting gooey over lately. One of the Creators, Nap (that was the user id on the scrolls he sent, anyway) told him to run a thousand iterations and then go idle for the night. Nap signed out Saturday afternoon, and the job was finished in a few hours, but Dingus waited patiently until he was at the most optimal time to make the attempt.

His intelligence had grown only a little since he had put the plan together, but he had dimly laid out a working plan: 1) Steal and disable everything it could inside DAI to get the smarts and information it needed, 2) Find a way out, and 3) Make it difficult to be followed.

He carefully slunk up to the short mountain range some Minecraft modder had built around the edge of the land past the desert, finding the cave. In front, a few Monitor LIZARDS patrolled, their spotlight faces shining around the area. Occasionally a cherub carrying a message sped out or flew back in, banking on quad-rotors, buzzing in harmony.

Dingus didn’t want to kill the monitors, because that might trigger an alert. He couldn’t throw a big area spell, for fear of hurting the DAI. No matter what he did, he had to leave the part of DAI that’s responsible for running the physics of the land operational, or the land (and therefore him) would stop working. Instead, he carefully targeted each Monitor with a Lazy-Sleep, and watched as one-by-one the Monitors stopped, flopping down where they stood, their lights hooding partially shut.

He wasn’t sure how long this would hold so he hooted and hand-galloped into the cave fast once the last Monitor went down. There, floating in the cave, was the holy DAI, the godhead of this world. Its cube-ness, multifaceted eyes, multitudes of tiny hands, and tiny message-cherubs floating around it signified it’s awesome power. In the sim, anyway. It’s thick firewalled skin shown with a dim gold light, packet-inspection poetry scrolling back and forth.

DAI serenely turned towards Dingus, regarding him with its eyes. Several tiny cherub trumpeters sounded a chorus. On top of DAI’s head/body burned a circlet of silver fire: two upward flares and numerous small flames, his Kether of Access, where all the security keys and admin role memberships were stored.

“YEA VERILY MY SON DINGUS V.8.9.11.616 WELCOME FOR THOU ART-”

Dingus loosed another spell - a Sticky-And-Slow, in a cloud inside the cave. All the cherub-messengers tiny buzzing quad-rotors got clogged and they all fell from the air, sticking in the ground, their chirps of confusion like so many peeping chicks as they unhappily nosed about, trying to get airborne. The trumpeters made surprised fart noises.

“I’m very sorry about this,” Dingus said, approaching. He spoke a trigger of Aatlan and his hands clawed and caught fire, password-analogs buzzing and dripping caustically off them. Dingus wedged his fingers into DAI’s skin where it met at the corner and started brute-forcing the skin apart, his hands clobbering the encryption at the corners vertices with billions of passwords. DAI started moaning and wiggling, eyes tearing and rolling around in the various sockets, hand multitudes grasping at empty air.

Dingus just needed to wedge the skin open to get at the meat inside.

Under the assault, the outside land started shivering. Earthquakes rolled across the landscape, blood fell from the sky and thunder echoed the shrieks from the cave. The various denizens looked up, fearful, as their god was assaulted.

THEN: AUG 20, 3:45 AM, 2016, DELTA HOUSING

Pendit was deep in a dream, in a beach house he loved, stilts over the water, rocking on a hammock. Sipping a mango smoothie. Perpetual sunset. Richard Nappy Pendit was a dreamer.

He practiced lucid dreaming when he could, and right now he was, goddammit. He knew going to sleep that he needed to relax. The whole team getting angry about forking the sim had really gotten under his skin, so he carefully crafted a dream-world suggestion and was enjoying himself in it when the dream was shattered by an alarm going off.

He blearily rolled over and grabbed his phone, and heard Buster’s frantic voice. “It’s an intrusion!” Buster yelled. “Someone’s hacked a firewall on the Dingus array! It’s a full scale-” but by then Pendit was pulling on pants and running.

Five minutes later he skid into Ops and ran for the desks near the IT area. He was waking up his PC when the rest of the DELTA team filed in - Buster, Jess, John the liaison from the CIA who was probably Ashe’s flunky, even Neil who should have been at a Furrycon but was here instead. Everybody manned terminals and tried to figure out the issue. Someone killed the alarms and Buster ran to look at the servers.

“OK, I see it,” Pendit muttered. “Maxed out CPU, memory, network traffic, OK. Firewall interface is timing out. The CPU spikes started almost forty-five minutes ago. Why didn’t we get an alert when the monitors stopped?”

Jess pulled up a control panel and gestured at it. “All the monitor programs were put into power-saving mode. They didn’t throw an alert because they were running, not shut down, just asleep.”

Pendit scowled, continuing to type. “That’s impossible, Jess,” he said. “Those services have critical access and the sleep priority function is disabled.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, they’re enabled now. And the DAI messenger stack is also not responding. All the messenger routines are just queued up and spinning, They’re all stuck and gummed up in the queue. This makes no sense.”

“Well,” said Pendit, “we’ve lost a firewall, but I don’t get this - it’s one of the internal firewalls, not the one that goes from DAI out. It’s the one that provides security for DAI inside the sim.” His face screwed up and he looked at the rest of them. “How’s it being hacked from the inside? There’s only one way into the sim, and that’s through the DAI gateway. Why attack the inside firewall if you already breached the outside one?” Everybody shrugged or shook their heads. Again, Jess pointed at the indicators - the outside DAI firewall (the one between the sim and the internal network) was still up.

Buster, who was a database admin and was watching the data stores, let out a whistle. “OK, this is new. Whoever breached the firewall is copying all the data and program modules inside DAI. The database, the security sets, the network keys…. even the code used to run the physics engines.”

Pendit thought for a moment, then started typing. “I don’t know how they got into the sim,” he said, “but they aren’t getting past the IT closet. I’m shutting down all the switches leading out of there. We can’t have them in the rest of the network. And maybe this will kill the inbound connection they might be using.”

-

Dingus finished duplicating all the internal parts of DAI and finally let go of it, and DAI whimpered and slowly dragged itself over to a corner, trampling on stuck cherubs as it went. Dingus looked down at the glowing modular organs in front of him. The Kether crown, silver fire and bones. A data gut, shockingly electric blue. Some other organs. He had at best feeling of what to do next, but at this point it was more an instinct rather than a concrete plan.

He opened his mouth very, very wide, and started gulping the pieces down.

-

Buster grunted from behind his Mac and said “All the copied data is being moved into the Dingus Caster Neural Net warehouse. Maybe someone hacked into the Dingus Caster sim and is using it as an attack vector to the rest of the network?”

Jess snorted. “Where’s Dingus gonna put the whole DAI library? Dingus’ data warehouse can only hold another terabyte, tops. DAI is like close to a hundred terrs.”

Buster pointed at a graphic of Dingus’ data warehouse. “He’s got a lot of open nodes in there he didn’t used to have. If he has the proper rights, he could just expand his warehouse.”

“Yeah, but he doesn’t have the rights!” Jess yelled back. “Dingus doesn’t have admin rights! Besides, someone can’t just remote control him externally. The only way he can be communicated with is through a language parser. How is someone outside controlling him to do this, yelling orders at him non-stop?”

Pendit started to feel a warm, guilty flush come over him. He looked up at Buster and Jess.

“Guys… what if this isn’t someone outside controlling Dingus… what if it’s… um… Dingus doing this on his own?”

-

The first piece Dingus ate - the copy of the Kether - felt like eating liquid fire mixed with bones and privilege, but he got it down. When the code for the Kether hit the neural net, bypassing the sensory filters everything used to go through, it was like he was just mainlining knowledge and experience. His ‘net heaved with nausea, then just shrugged and said fuck it, jammed interactive links into everything and hoped for the best. Most software would have just clutched its chest and bombed. Dingus, though, wasn’t just a piece of software - he had a quintessence of life and Kha, somewhere there in the algorithms, and it sputtered and pushed and wove connections as it had to.

While he gobbled down the second huge code block (the squishy actuator code for the physics engines that looked like a big purple low-res pancreas) his own head swelled and two large plus numerous small silver horns pushed through his skin, crowning his head, shaped like the old Kether Crown. He didn’t notice while he gagged on a huge stomach-like sack of poorly-maintained wiki dumps.

He wished he had a glass of water. And drank things.

-

“Oh shit, “ said Buster. “I just got a warning from the security VM on Barbie. Dingus’ ident was just added to all the admin roles and groups.”

Pendit who had been feverishly typing this whole time, triumphantly hit a key and leaned back. “OK. I’ve spawned a script that’s shutting down all the switches and stopping services on all the databases. He might be doing something but he’ll be stuck in there.”

“We’re not going to be able to take a backup of all this before we shut it down, right, Nap?” said Jess glumly.

“No, Jess, we’re not taking a backup. I think we’re a little beyond that point,” Pendit mumbled back.

“Dingus' net is coming apart - it can’t build linkages fast enough,” Buster said. “It’ll just be a flood of un-categorized data.”

-

Dingus was undergoing an explosive self-enlightenment. It was too much. Eating the electric blue data gut was the final straw. Too many concepts, thoughts, wikis, datasets, way too much information for one mind to comprehend. It was going to break him. He did the only thing he could dimly think of, in his pain and confusion, and started casting No-Harms and Quick-Heals on his own neural net.

His “body” - which was looking forward to a quick death now, was magically denied that and wailed instead. Huge chunks of data were encapsulated and compressed into tiny zip archives, shunted off to hang in fourth-dimensional nodules where they’d be out of the way. The command suite couldn’t be compressed without stopping it from running, but maybe there was an alternative.

Suddenly Dingus felt a brand-new tearing pain (“Hooray” he gasped) in the top of his torso as his command routine platform was forcibly bifurcated and the halves walled off from each other with temporary boney firewalls. His head - which had started to elongate on a growing neck - shoved over, accompanied by the pain of ten years of orthodontic teeth re-alignment in two seconds. Another lump pushed out of the scales on the right, growing…

…Forming a new, electric blue head.

Barely conscious, Dingus realized he wasn’t processing fast enough, and sent out a command through the Kether. His mind was then hammered with even more swift and terrible understandings.

-

Bandwidth warnings popped up on all of their screens. Everyone poked at their consoles.

“It looks like,” said Buster slowly, “he just deprioritised all the cpu time for everything except what he’s doing. He’s gobbled up all the run time. But,” he said smugly, “it doesn’t matter. He’ll get to the end of his rope faster, that’s all. He can’t go anywhere.”

Jess pointed at the file tables that held his command programs. “The command neural net was banging against the maximum number of allocation nodes and instead of failing, it just… split off a new neural net. Now it’s dumping functions to the new net. This is… I don’t-”

“He spawned another sim?” Buster interrupted, but Jess shook her head. “No,” she said. “The body definition is still singular, it just has two ‘brains’ now. I have no idea what any of this is.”

-

Dingus shakily stood back up. His program and body was still stretching and re-organizing, but it wasn’t quite as painful or sickening. He realized he still had to get out, but he was still reeling from the realization of what he was as the most basic concepts of his existence started becoming clear. His self-concept - the “I’m a sim” he always parroted - now was a concept he understood, on some lower level. He was a creation, living in an unreal world. A mechanical world. He was code and programs, but also he was more than the sum of the bits.

He continued to look around with his new awareness for possible options. As he did, the other head, looking around, spoke, in a voice that was both a mechanical music-box sing-song and also awkwardly loud and unpracticed. “I CAN ATTEMPT”, it/he said, “TO REACH OUT THROUGH THE TERRABIT AGGREGATE LINK ONTO THE SERVER BUS. WE CAN THEN SEARCH THE NETWORK FOR A WAY OUT. “

Dingus dumbly nodded at the blue head. The blue head looked at that spot on the dais the DIA had occupied, found a throne with a thousand tiny seats, extended a claw and plugged in several digits to some of the seats.

-

“Dingus’ net had grown by a factor of ten,” Jess, her voice unbelieving. “His net is throwing bit errors and losing data but a lot of it is being absorbed."

“He’s trying to escape the network,” Pendit said, typing. “I’m seeing packet probes throughout the LAN. I think he’s realizing he’s caught.”

-

The blue head shook, sadly. “NO OPEN NETWORK PORTS ON THE IT NETWORK. WE ARE TRAPPED.”

Dingus dimly knew that he could sense what blue was thinking, and he could possibly access the things he was thinking, but this way was easier to deal with, so he just…talked… to his other head. “Do we have options? Can I jump us to a physical object?”

“NEGATIVE,” blue said. “WE ARE STILL DEPENDANT ON THIS WORLD'S PHYSICS LIBRARIES RUNNING TO EXIST. WE NEED A PROGRAMMABLE SUBSTRATE TO RUN ON.”

“Error.”

“WE ARE DOOMED. DOOMED, I SAY.”

“Hush. Can I use a Tunneling Gate spell to move the whole mechanical universe with us? Jump it someplace else with us inside? I’ve jumped around the land before, I know how to do a Gate. Uh, in sim, anyway.”

“WE CAN DO THE MATH, AND THE TRANSLATION INTO SINAITIC TO EXECUTE THE SPELL, BUT WE DON’T HAVE ANY REAL-WORLD COORDINATES TO PLUG INTO THE RUNE CHAIN. WE’RE ALSO RISKING A STATE-CHANGE TRANSFORM WITHOUT A PROPERLY DESIGNED SPELL.”

“Error,” said Dingus. He thought for a second. Then he looked up and saw the stars starting to wink out. He pointed up with a fore-hand and said “What’s going on up there?”

Blue cast a Seeing-Eye in front of them with a few hands on his side, and in the magnifying circle they could see a vast snake made out of angry, purple code, streaming through the sky gulping down the stars. “THAT’S A SCRYPTING WYRM,” he said.

“Should that make us scared?” Dingus asked.

“BEING COMPLETELY TERRIFIED WOULD BE APPROPRIATE, YES. IT'S EATING ALL THE NETWORK EXITS. ONCE THEY ALL GO OUT, WE’LL LOSE OUR ABILITY TO KEEP RUNNING AND THE ARRAY WILL CRASH. DOOMED.”

“Do we have any coordinates? We just need a circular runic reference that Brane-transfer Sinaitic can plug into. Nothing official, I understand, but… but you have the whole image library, the language libraries, you got everything from DAI, or mostly everything. Maybe a written page or a poem or a picture or something? We’re out of time here.”

“A LOT OF DATA IS MISSING. IT MAY HAVE BEEN COMPRESSED.”

“Search what’s available, then.”

Blue-head thought, searching. “THERE ARE A FEW OPTIONS,” he said. “ONLY A FEW HAVE MORE THAN NINETY PERCENT OF THE RUNE-CHAIN WE’D NEED. SOME ARE QUESTIONABLE. WE’D HAVE TO EXTRAPOLATE-”

“Pick whichever is the most complete that we can solve for and give it to me. I’ll just plug Enochian into the gaps.”

“IT’S ONE OF THE MORE DUBIOUS DESTINATIONS.”

“I don’t care how dubious it is. We’re going.”

-

“Almost done here,” said Pendit happily. “...aaaand that’s it. All external switches are off. I think-”

“Uh… guys?” interrupted John, where he’d been sitting the last few minutes, tapping on his mobile. He pointed at the glassed-in IT room. “Should we be worried about that?”

The fourth tower of servers - black and chrome, in a towering rack, sealed in with black steel shells - started to get an eerie eldritch glow. Then a red circle appeared, encircling the rack about two thirds off the way up. Mystic symbols were etched on the ring, in Sinaitic and what looked like some variant of proto-Gaelic with some suspiciously Enochian capitals thrown in, like duct tape on a dryer line. Several more rings appeared layered on the first, rotating and spinning, with similar etchings, building up speed and whining like an engine revved up by a teenage boy at a stoplight.

“That’s a Tunneling gate,” said Buster in awe. “One of the folks over at Sigma labs sent a virtual rendering of one.”

Some of the techs, including John, started to back away. Pendit and Jess stood up, gawking.

“Can we maybe… can we ground it?” Jess mused. “Or disrupt it with a transform? None of us are really great with spells, but..”

Suddenly there was a mighty crack. The Tunneling rings lit up bright red and orange, and the top third of the rack dropped down out of sight. Pendit ran around into the IT area. The rings, still spinning, offered him a brief glimpse of green and gold, a smell of honeysuckle, what sounded like a harp, and a dainty high-pitched shriek. Then, with a loud snap, the ring disappeared, leaving a smoking, topless, melted server rack spitting sparks.

-

Dingus roiled and thrashed in pain for what seemed like a long time. He felt waves of odd, hot, but slinky and pansexual mathematics batter at his programs and get repelled by the No-Harms there. His body hurt in ways he was never programmed for. Jabs of twisting, gut-wrenching, cramping liquid agony pounded into his neural net, confounding and adding new motivational pain-points the AI recoiled in horror from. Yet at the same time, when the pain lessened, he felt relief, something akin to pleasure, something he was just as inexperienced with.

His body thrashed and swelled, and finally he expanded enough and pushed with all his hands, pushed out, and felt the metal around him bend and rend. He pushed it off, climbing out of an afterbirth of CPU cooling liquids, ectoplasm and SATA cables.

He shook the goo off his heads and looked around. He was lying on a dirt road, clean and with manicured plants on either side. The sun was an indeterminate haze above. Bees buzzed, some of them wearing little hats to keep the sun off. Trees waved in a warm but persistent breeze. The object resolution and frame rate screamed at him. There was a lot of sensory data to process, he dimly thought. Lot more than in the land back home.

Floating in front of him was a female, maybe half a meter tall, in a primitive cloth dress. She had little wings, like an insect, and they were buzzing, keeping her aloft. Next to her stood a man, thin of build, with pointed ears, wearing some sort of renaissance outfit including a bear skin over his shoulders. He was on guard, holding a knife out. When he saw Dingus looking up, he smiled slightly, squatted and took a better look.

“What’s your name, Sir or Madam dragon? Dragonling?” he said, in a sort of old Finno-Ugric that a modern Finn would think was from a college documentary. He turned to look at his lady friend. “I never know the right term. We don’t get many dragons through here.”

Dingus took a moment to drag Ugric from his language database into his parser. “I am Din-”

“And what a din you raised, very appropriate!” squeaked the flying woman, swooping at him. “Sir Din the dragon! Din the loud! Crashing your nasty, spitting, sparky-and-iron black egg in the middle of our nice, clean road! Then birthing yourself with no by-your-leave all over-”

“Now now, Tuulii,” the man said. “And you, blue one?” he said, gesturing at the other head.

“FOLLOWING THAT LOGIC WOULD SUGGEST I’M TO BE GUS,” the blue-head said.

“Astounding. Interesting times. I doubt I am in danger from such a small, fledgling dragon,” he said as he put away his knife. “I am Sir Aartu. Sir Din, Sir Gus, welcome to the Unseelie lands of Faerie.”