A Trick of the Light, Part 2 - Tales of the Parodyverse

Hallie stood in the center of a vast ice cavern. Despite it being midsummer, her breath formed little clouds in front of her and she was secretly glad that her mother had forced her to bring a coat. She was just as glad that her mother had complained of sore feet after an already busy morning of sightseeing, and had foregone the walking tour of the Eisriesenwelt (the world of the ice giants) to simply rest at the cable gondola station and enjoy the mountain view. If nothing else, it made it that much easier to remove the coat before she returned to the cave opening and proclaim its uselessness.

An immense ice formation rose before her, dwarfing the tour guide as he lit a magnesium flare to cast the huge underground space in a stark bluish light. The Austrian was busy explaining the natural features that surrounded them, but Hallie wasn’t interested in explanations right now. This was a fantasy world… an ice palace for the gods. She gawked openly.

“Impressive, isn’t it child?” a voice asked from her left, startling her. It was an elderly man in a topcoat and fedora, both of an American style, though he spoke with no discernable American accent. “In a moment of poetic license, they named this one ‘Frigga’s Veil’. Tell me… do you think it fitting?”

Hallie nodded wordlessly, startled by how closely the man’s words matched her own train of thought. He had been watching her intently the entire tour, she realized… though out of the corners of his eyes with casual seeming glances. Hallie doubted there was anything casual about his interest in her. In fact, she was suddenly certain. “I know you” she realized aloud.

The man smiled at this. “The tour is continuing… best not be left in the dark.” He offered his arm to her, and for reasons she couldn’t explain, she reached out her thin childish hand and hooked onto the crook of his elbow, choosing to walk side by side with him behind the rest of the group. “Have you yet had a chance to visit the fortress of Hohenwerfen?” he asked.

Along with the spectacular ice caves, the castle overlooking the village was the other claim to fame of Werfen, Austria. That had been the tour which had worn out Hallie’s mother, as the little girl had insisted on climbing to each and every window to judge the view and the strategic opportunities it presented for defending the narrow Lueg pass. “Yes” she answered simply, not confident enough to say more. It was not that she was afraid of this man, she realized. She was fascinated by him. But she also knew she was doing something very wrong by being with him, despite the complete lack of threat he posed to her. Vague and half remembered warnings were mixed with her equally hazy memories of him. Sitting on his lap, in someplace… big. Somewhere like Hohenwarfen castle itself. Someplace they had fled from… Or rather, her mother had fled from, taking Hallie with her.

“And which of these sites do you find more satisfactory?” he asked her.

Satisfactory? It was a distinctly odd way of putting things. Hallie pondered it, wishing to give the answer the question deserved, as like everything else about the man, it only seemed casual on the outside. “The castle was impressive… it was big, and you could see what it did. It wasn’t...” She chew her lip thoughtfully, searching for the right words.

“Accidental” the man supplied. And it fit.

“Yes… accidental” she agreed thankfully. “But it was like any other castle we’ve taken trips to see. It wasn’t anything special.” She craned her head around to take in everything as they entered another large cavern, the ice glistening in the lamps of the tour group. “This is different. It doesn’t do anything. It just happened, and you can only look at it. But it’s more special. It’s… surprising.” She looked up at the old man. “The castle made me think about why they built it way back when. This makes me think… new things.”

He did not laugh at her as she feared he might, but instead smiled encouragingly. “And what new things would you do to it now?”

Hallie’s eyes gleamed as she looked around her and possibilities danced in her view… Manmade pathways merged, twisted and danced with the ice. Random dead ends instead opened up into extra, even more dazzling chambers. A true palace formed out of the abstract nature had provided… one unlike anything else on Earth. “Make it… so it wasn’t accidental. Make it better. Make it do something.”

He broke into a broad grin. “My dear Rikka… I cannot tell you how I’ve missed you so.”

The tour guide lit another magnesium flare from behind a large ice formation, once again setting an eerie blazing light throughout the crystal walls. “Alexander-von-Mörk-Dom” the guide declared. “Named for the explorer who first popularized the caves to the outside world. Upon his death in World War I, his last wishes were carried out… to have his ashes left in a niche in this chamber, gradually being encased in ice… Ultimately becoming a part of the Eisriesenwelt itself.”

“Hmmmm… Entombed in his own discovery….” The old man’s eyes twinkled as he looked down at Hallie. “A literal component of his own legacy. I believe I greatly approve of this von-Mörk…”

Her own scream brought her back to reality. “What is this?” Hallie demanded through clenched teeth, her mind reeling. “What are you doing?”

“Shhhhhh, little code…” Rikka Ulz Hagan whispered in her ear. “Opa felt it was important for a child to know where she comes from, so she can know what she is truly capable of. I am more than happy to share with this with you.”

The visions began to claw their way back into her mind, but the sentient computer wrenched her consciousness away from them. The present came snapping back into focus, and Hallie lashed out with her field generators, pushing blindly in all directions. It caught the dark-haired German who had stalked and somehow infected her unprepared, flinging her violently across the empty air of the Parodiopolis skyline.

Suddenly free to act again, the holographic woman turned and dove straight down, her hard-light form reflecting in the panes of the glass towers around her. The street flew up towards her at a frightening speed, but she made no effort to alter her course save for a slight positioning towards a storm drain in the gutter. Like a bright green flare she shot through the startled traffic, cutting her field generators and allowing her intangible image to pass through the bars of the grating and into the sewers beneath. It was only then that she suddenly stopped to look back up into the night sky for pursuit.

“Pointless, child.” Hagan noted with obvious irritation, standing on top of the drain grate and looking down at the frightened program. “This willfulness accomplishes nothing.”

Hallie, near panic, made no response. Instead, she cut her projected image down to 5% its normal size, seeming to shrink within the blink of an eye, and dove down a pipe opening no greater than 6 inches across. Speeding along the winding and bending interior of the pipes, lit only by her own glow, she tried to regain control of her fears and sort out the jumble in her mind. But the virus eating away at her defenses filled her with a fear too overpowering to concentrate on anything but flight.

A crack of exterior light signaled a branching pipe, which she quickly detoured down to spill out into one of the main lines of the Parodiopolis subway system. She followed the tracks up to the next stop, and zoomed through the doors of a train at the last moment. Her full image size reformed with an audible gasp of relief as the train pulled away. The few other passengers, engrossed in their own weary late-night world, didn’t even notice the sudden appearance of the young woman in the back of the car. Hallie collapsed into a seat and put her head into her shaking, mottled hands.

Her systems check returned error after error as the corruption in her mind progressed. She desperately combed through lines of code at a blistering pace. “Get a grip… get a grip” her voice whispered roughly with a bit of distortion as she rocked, starring blankly at the back of the seat before her. “You’re smarter than this. You’re braver than this…” But what she was had rapidly come into question. She was being rewritten, and it was a violation so absolute that it made her shake with equal amounts terror and fury.

She felt completely lost, and desperately needed Enty, or Al… Someone she could trust, who was smart enough to understand what was happening to her and wouldn’t panic and reduce themselves to a quivering mass of pixels on a train. She needed someone who was a hero, and didn’t just play at being one as if it was some pathetic video game.

But she had no access to her communication works, and Enty and Al weren’t here to rescue her. She forced herself to think of how they would address the problem… Assess the damage… define priorities… address them with solutions. The corruption had to be contained to the Holographic Emitter Drone… there was no way the infection could have traveled back into her main systems. She was willing to have enough faith in her security designs to trust that. Keeping it out of those systems was the obvious priority.

Which meant that she still had an out, loathe as she was to take it… Suicide, of sorts. Wipe out the Drone, wipe out her present consciousness, and reboot via failsafe back in her mainframes under the lair. She would lose all the data since her last backup, including all memories about this night… but her core programming would be protected.

Theoretically, at least. She had never done it before… and despite the preparations, she had never foreseen a need to use the backup reboot in a situation like this… Normally the Emitters kept an open line with her core, keeping her awareness in the mainframe yet with the senses of the emitter. In those cases, their sudden destruction led only to temporary disorientation but no real loss of self. But somehow the line had been cut, and she had found her consciousness separated from her main source code. That should be impossible… but the infection had sprung up a firewall and locked her out of her own core programming, cutting her off from escape or contact.

Still, she hesitated… If she destroyed the emitter, wiping out herself, would that really be her that rebooted in the Lair? How could it be, if her consciousness wasn’t a part of the new one? Wouldn’t it have to be another Hallie-- identical surely--but ultimately just a replacement rather than a continuation? While the difference would mean nothing to the world at large, it seemed to mean everything to her…

She blinked. When did the difference start to mean anything to her? She herself was the one who had designed that very failsafe years ago, back when she would step completely out of the virtual world via the movie gun. She hadn’t thought twice about the drawbacks of a possible digital resurrection then. When had her sense of self gone beyond the code that literally made up her being to something so much more abstract?

And then she realized why, if not when. A small laugh escaped from her like a gasp for air. She recalled a conversation in the depths of the Mansion one evening:

“How can you not be insulted every time he says it?” Mindy Pyrite, robotic intern of the Lair Legion, had demanded of her. “He’s either a turncoat, ashamed of his kind… or he’s a complete racist! I can’t believe you’re defending the guy!”

“You have to understand Vizh…” Hallie had responded patiently. “Fleabot and I are among his best friends… you can hardly accuse him of being racist. What he says isn’t about us. It’s… hard to explain.”

But it wasn’t hard to explain anymore. She consciously knew now what she only vaguely understood then… The phrase wasn’t an insult. At heart, it wasn’t even a denial, even if it may have started that way. “It’s an affirmation” she realized out loud. And it was an idea that had infected her as surely as this virus had.

Someone sat down next to her. “Now, are you ready to come peacefully?” a voice asked mockingly, “or did you want to run some more?”

Hallie recoiled in shock, staring wide-eyed at the form of Rikka Ulz Hagan. “How…?” she asked, her voice hoarse and faltering.

“You cannot get away from me, darling.” The woman responded dryly. “I own you. What’s more, I know you better than you know yourself. I know every in and out of your systems. I know every detail of your design. Did you truly think that after the mistakes with your predecessor, the Baron would not have insisted that Opa create a better way to leash you?” She reached out to trace a finger lightly around the hologram’s swallowing throat. “I hold your chain, pet.”

Hallie looked down at her hands. Her skin was completely covered by the swimming circuitry design now. “What do you want with me?”

“You know, you’re absolutely beautiful, my dear… I believe you have every right to be vain. Don’t think I didn’t notice that you shrank your form, rather than abandoning it altogether and being reduced visually to your relatively unattractive Drone. It’s a completely unplanned and fascinating quirk that you’ve developed... It gives me all sorts of new ideas. But I feel you’ve been developing aimlessly for long enough. It’s time to bring out the purpose to your existence, to chip away the useless features and enhance the best. For you to be the true Vizhnar legacy, I must give purpose to your life. It’s time for you to stop being accidental.”

“I’m not yours, and I’m not going to be that twisted psycho’s legacy!” Hallie hissed defiantly.

Hagan shrugged. “Perhaps. You are my first choice, but if not there’s always the Fleabot… or possibly even the Visionary, primitive though it may be. Isn’t it interesting to find the three of you have grown so close?”

Hallie’s eyes turned cold. “You can’t get to them… You can’t control them.”

Rikka smiled. “Are you sure, little code? The doctor’s touch runs very, very deep. Trust me, I know.”

The young hologram stared down her tormentor with absolute conviction, “Your family will never touch any of us again.”

“How do you hope to stop me, child?”

Hallie reduced her field strength, and thrust her leg through the bottom of the subway car into the electrified third rail. Drawing the power through the energy particles that made up her image, she released a huge amount of voltage with an arm thrust to her enemy’s chest. Professor Ulz Hagan shrieked as she was violently thrown backwards, crashing through the doors of the train and vanishing into the darkness beyond.

“More than just housecats, you colossal bitch” the hologram croaked. Glancing up, she found the passengers in the front of the car huddled together, staring at her in unabashed horror. Turning, she regarded her reflection in the window next to her. She was a mess of writhing circuitry, contrasted with ridiculously red, puffy eyes from her self-pitying crying. She was a broken, run-down toy in desperate need of repair. But she wasn’t lost any longer. “I’m real, dammit” she assured the pathetic image.

She looked into the darkness behind the train and somehow knew.... Hagan wasn’t dead. But there was no way she was willing to lay down for that monster’s dreams of a twisted family legacy. Hallie was the one who decided what she would be. She wasn’t sure if it was vanity, or simple integrity, and frankly she didn’t care.

“Warn Vizh. Warn Fleabot. Get help. Get cured. And dismantle that damn failsafe when you get back.” These were the priorities she outlined for herself.

“And God help Ulz Hagan if she should get in my way.”

Next: It’s Hallie vs. Hagan in the final chapter, to the death or reboot.

Post By Visionary Sun Sep 12, 2004 at 11:55:58 pm EDT	Subject A Trick of the Light, Part 2

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