LinaOS v1.1 (C)Copyright Lina Inverse 2027, no rights reserved > describe "Slayers Virtual" data text file, 16 parts plus header PART 1 64,305 05-22-99 1:09a PART 2 25,542 11-16-99 13:50p PART 3 17,961 12-09-99 19:34p PART 4 18,603 01-07-00 19:28p PART 5 18,547 01-06-00 23:50p PART 6 15,963 01-22-00 00:29a PART 7 38,163 02-01-00 01:32a PART 8 32,821 02-2?-00 ??:??? PART 9 18,881 03-0?-00 ??:??? PART 10 14,690 03-2?-00 ??:??? PART 11 49,528 04-1?-00 ??:??? PART 12 71,220 05-01-00 00:00a PART 13 18,200 05-21-00 11:12p PART 14 26,782 06-30-00 09:33p PART 15 24,576 08-23-00 22:07p PART 16 --read error, temporarily unavailable > remember "Slayers Virtual" header @X0F SLAYERS VIRTUAL CYBERPUNK ELSE [15/16] @X0C컴컴컴컴컴컴컴| |컴컴컴컴컴컴컴 @X09 .---------------------------------. @X09 | this episode by Adrian Tymes | @X09 | cracked by stefan gagne | @X09 | indie distro by improfanfic | @X09 `---------------------------------' @X0E컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴� > remember "Slayers Virtual" part 15 Lina blinked. "Umm...if you aren't Luna, then who are you?" Not-Luna mumbled something in a foreign language, but Lina's deck filtered it instantly. Even these days, there were a few holdouts against English as the universal tongue, usually cultural purists who ranted about people no longer respecting their practices rather than interpreting the realities of the modern world into their culture. The advent of practical automatic translation software - which had been MazokuWarez's first product, successful enough to give them the money to become MazokuSoft - made it much easier to talk to these people, which let Lina worry about why not-Luna was bothering to use this rather than struggle to understand the words as they came out a second later. "That...is a secret." "Not much of one." Luna's icon flipped for a second, giving a classic eyeless frowning emoticon. "Xelloss." "Aww, you guessed! As a reward, I'll leave you alone...for now." The false moon began sinking through the floor. Despite years of experience in cyberspace, some instincts died hard. Lina dove forwards, trying to tackle Xelloss and rip the encased Shaburanigdo out of his hands. Lina's deck received her actions, probed a bit deeper into her mind to find her desired result, and tried to copy the file from Xelloss's possession then delete it... --Prev/Next? N > `query -targetuid $uid -what os`: query -targetuid Xelloss -what os Excuse me? > rem Query failed - must be some weird OS > rem Try all variants until we get a response Oh, you want to know what I am. I'm a Mazoku. > if ($result =~ /mazoku/i) { > rem Probably some MazokuSoft derivative. I resent that remark. I happen to be an original. > `cp $file /inverse/loot`: cp \\Xelloss\rhand\linas.shab /inverse/loot Ok, fine, have a copy. > `rm $file`: rm \\Xelloss\rhand\linas.shab Yeah, right. ^_^ --Prev/Next? N Lina slid up against the far wall, one copy in her hands, just as Xelloss vanished through the floor with his own copy. Amelia looked on in shock. "He's getting away!" "Correction." Lina flipped up to her feet. "He *got* away. The floor's zero coordinates for this system. We can't go through - our decks don't know how to put us there." "So?" Luna, also right side up again, seemed to shrug. "You don't need a deck to be here." Amelia frowned. "Yes we do!" "You, maybe. Not sis." Lina raised an eyebrow. "Ok, care to explain in detail?" "No time. I already wrote code to do this." "To do wha-" Lina popped out of existence. "LINA!!!" "Calm down, kid, I just logged her out." Lina popped back into existence. "See?" "LINA!!!" Luna flinched. "How do you put up with her?" Lina blinked, taking in the world as if seeing for the very first time. "Everything looks more real...I almost can't tell I'm in cyberspace. What did you do, give my deck an upgrade?" "Sorta. But not your deck. What's your OS?" "My OS? It's a Draco...no, wait...'LinaOS'?!?!? What, did you write a whole operating system just for me?" "Nope. You did. Since birth." "No I didn't. I didn't even touch my first deck until I was..." "Doesn't matter. LinaOS is everything you've ever been, summed up in who you are now. Besides, who says you're still plugged into a deck? You don't need your plug anymore, so I pulled it." Amelia blinked. That could not be right: Luna was here, in cyberspace, not at the hotel. But the conversation continued before she could say anything. "How else could I be here, unless..." Lina's eyes narrowed. "You know how I'm connecting through my own mind." "Score one for sis." "Mind telling me?" "No problem." "Ok, spill." "In your dreams." Lina only needed three point five seconds to puzzle Luna's response out. "Right. I'm dreaming. And my dreams somehow have a wireless connection to cyberspace." "Score another for sis." "It's because part of my brain got formatted, isn't it?" "Uh-uh. All human dreams come here. Your formatting just lets you interact with other dreams. You're your own node, now." "Ok..." "Which means your reality is relative to you." "Ok..." "Which means you don't have to worry about this node's boundaries." Lina concentrated, then dipped one foot through the floor. "Ok..." "Which means WHY AREN'T YOU GOING AFTER XELLOSS?" Lina instinctively stepped back, accidentally putting herself inside a wall. She paused as if to say something, then shook her head and dove through the floor. Amelia stared at the spot Lina had just occupied. "Umm...what just happened?" "Log out and I'll explain." Reality seemed to flicker a bit. "But you don't know where we are." *pop* "Yes I do." Zelgadis, Gourry, and Sylphiel looked at Amelia with a bit of concern. The DracoNix lobby looked a lot like their hotel room, with Lina asleep in her chair, her plug lying loose on her lap. But the illusion of reality was shattered by Luna's icon, floating over the plug that it seemed to have just pulled out of Amelia using telekinesis. Amelia smiled. "Nice trick." "What, logging you back into your own mind so it was safe to disconnect you? Thanks." --Prev/Next? N Lina floated through a formless void, quickly becoming more and more aware of her surroundings. There were no boundaries to where she could go; if she wanted to go down one pixel, she willed everything to go up one pixel and it was so. Not that pixels were relevant any longer; with no pixelization of artifacts even on close inspection, it made more sense to think in millimeters and other metric lengths from the "real" world. A faint breeze rustled by from somewhere. Looking over her shoulder, she saw that she had just clipped the extreme corner of a cube of reality, containing a generic simulated field with people wandering about. Probably some chat room or something. If any of its inhabitants had seen her, there was no apparent reaction. Those people inside thought the cube was their entire reality, and since she had already exited, she was imperceptible to them. More cubes floated by. Lina recognized a few of them as nodes she had visited - there was the AOL basement with her anime addicted friends, over there was the shattered ruin of the game node where Amelia had obtained their piece of Shaburanigdo, and over there...was a blob that was either some extremely warped simulation, or someone's half-formed dream existing next to the sharply defined virtual realities created by computers. And there...off in the distance, with no border between it and the void, was a boxy fortress which she could barely see Xelloss landing in front of and walking into. With a thought, she doubled her speed, then tripled it, then shook off her instincts and merely willed herself to *be* there, teleporting in a single coordinate translation. --Prev/Next? N Zelgadis had a gun trained on Luna in .425 seconds, according to his internal stopwatch. "We can do this the easy way or the hard way. What happened to Lina?" "She's asleep. Your gun's useless." "It got you to answer, didn't it?" "No, I'm here to give you the truth, to make sure you don't do something stupid. Also in case the Mazoku figure out what's up and attack here. They might get hurt by bullets, but just try shooting me." "..." "Go on, try." His finger twitched, then he put the gun away. "You're invincible and it'd be a waste of a bullet." "Close. I'd just re-rez this icon. All Mazoku can, but most don't think to try it." Zelgadis cracked a half-smile. "You're a Mazoku? And you're on our side?" "I'm Lina's sister. Rewrote myself to be both human and Mazoku some time ago, once I figured out what they were. Work for the Dragons." "DracoNix." "Yeah, that's the company we founded to research this and support us. Dragons are AIs we wrote after studying Mazoku - basically, defend and repair systems, especially against Shab. Ceipheed's the most well known, but most anti-virus and system utilities in use are based around Dragons." Gourry blinked. "So, how can you 'work for' them if you write them?" "Complicated. We write them, they write us...sometimes wonder if I've become one myself, since my original body's gone." "What happened to it?" "I wrote Ceipheed version 1, and I'm still its main programmer. Mazoku found out, thought they could kill it by killing me." She chuckled. "One week earlier, it might've worked." "Oh." "Just so you know, be prepared to fight like its the end of the world. They'll be reassembling Shab any moment now, and..." "THEY HAVE SHABURANIGDO?!?!?!" Sylphiel bolted upright, knocking Zelgadis on his half-finished leg. She blushed when she heard his motors straining to keep him upright, and helped him back to his seat. "Yes. I wanted them to." --Prev/Next? N Lina appeared in front of Xelloss. Xelloss walked right through Lina. "Hey!" She turned around, trying to catch him. "How do you put it? RTFAQ, newbie." Lina stopped short. "There's an FAQ for this?" Xelloss tossed a sheet of paper over his shoulder, landing it in Lina's hands without even glancing at her. A tad out of sorts, Lina read aloud. "Dreamspace Beyond Cyberspace For Dummies, or Welcome To Godhood." "I've always thought the subtitle grossly overstated things, but then I don't contribute to that document so I suppose I have no right to complain." Lina began reading through the document, not even seeing Xelloss slice the Ceipheed globe into tiny pieces. She did, however, look up just in time to see Xelloss unceremoniously toss the Shaburanigdo fragment into a pile of six other fragments. --Prev/Next? N Amelia was, to say the least, out of it. She was in reality: Zelgadis and the others had not logged in, so she had to be there. And yet she was in cyberspace: Luna's icon could not exist in reality. And yet she was in reality: the hotel room was far too detailed to be virtual. And yet she was in cyberspace: Luna was at DracoNix, not here. And yet... Zelgadis locked eyes with Luna. At least, he tried to, but Luna's icon had no eyes. Still, he locked eyes with what he thought was her point of view, assuming she was not using some remote camera. He managed to look cool for Gourry and Sylphiel, at any rate. "Let me get this straight. You've been tracking the Mazoku acquisition of Shaburanigdo pieces for the past few years." "Yep." "For whatever reason, you wanted them to get all seven, but you and they lost track of one of the pieces." "Uh-huh." "So when it turned up infecting an obscure game, you asked your friend RedPriest - whom the rest of the world knew as Rezo - to go get it, knowing he would hire the Slayerz." "Educated guess on my part. Turned out correct." "You did not know he was also collecting Shaburanigdo pieces as a weapon to destroy any and all computers on the 'Net run by his competitors - including, ultimately, DracoNix itself." "Yep. He was a good hacker, but he let himself get addicted to power. Caused him to guard what he had instead of using, and possibly losing, it to earn peoples' trust. Which meant that when he hit some bad luck, people weren't willing to bail him out, forcing him to piss people off to get back what he'd had. It's a common cycle, just worse in his case. Only a matter of time 'til someone offed him." "Now, sometime prior to this, you and some friends - again, including RedPriest - analyzed Shaburanigdo and the Mazoku it spawned, figured out how they were 'logging in' to our reality. You then turned that approach on its head to, in effect, turn you into human-Mazoku hybrids by connecting back and forth between our reality and theirs until you could manipulate either one with ease, then setting yourself up as a kind of infinite loop - any projection into cyberspace is 'from' some projection in this reality, just like the rest of us, except you also do vice versa like the Mazoku. Those of you who dared to, that is, though RedPriest and others were understandably nervous at the prospect and thus passed." "Uh-huh. Though I wouldn't call us 'human-Mazoku hybrid'. Dragons can do it, too, though they usually only do it when they need to give some systems cracker a hint that they should go away. We're still human." "Except for the few of your number who were Dragons to begin with - or Mazoku that got tired of destroying computers." "True. They still act like they did before converting." "Ok. Now, sometime before *that*, Shaburanigdo came along to start this whole mess off. Now, care to explain that part?" "Love to." "I'm sensing a 'but' here." "You probably know more about it than I do, by now." --Prev/Next? N Lina slowly backed towards the exit of the fortress, noting only briefly how devoid of decoration it was - almost as if it were a hollow cube, the most basic and primitive of virtual realities. Xelloss hovered by her side. "Do you know, it took us a whole year to set this node up? Welcome to MazokuSoft Headquarters - what there is of it, anyway. It's served off a computer in our own corporate offices." "I thought VR was the market MazokuSoft did best at." "When serving up products, yes. We just pick the best of the discarded realities around us and serve them. This...we fabricated ourselves, using your tools. We're actually quite proud of it, even though it pales compared to what you make. Not that it matters; this node, and all human nodes, will soon cease to exist..." Xelloss smiled. "It's starting. Can you feel it?" Lina looked around. The usual visual overlays denoting a gateway to another domain were absent, but Lina could feel several small ones form, as if by some extended sense of touch. She flinched as dark tentacles rammed into each one and expanded, forcing the gateways to become larger, almost as if violating the fabric of cyberspace itself. Years of training that there was no such fabric drowned under her immediate reality of pain. Xelloss floated over her, an expression of concern on his face that could hardly have been a more obvious fake. "Does it hurt?" "Don't tell me you're not feeling this." "Oh, I am!" He smiled. "Rewire your senses. It's all data to the mind. To me...it's like swirls of cotton candy, turning juicy sweet for each confirmed takeover of a node." Lina stared at him. "You're weird." "Actually, you're the one out of step with standard practice. No reason why something as abstract as a 'Net-wide invasion should map to anything in particular, so why not enjoy it, or at least make it benign?" One second of concentration later, the pain vanished, replaced by a mild sensation of hot spots within the node. Lina stood up, only to realize there was no longer a floor under her feet. She was now outside the node, its edge no more than a few centimeters width from her nose. "Shouldn't it, like, be attacking me or something? I mean, it's a Mazoku, so it should be able to tell I'm out here." "It's a bit busy right now. Besides, it's not a Mazoku itself. It just made us. Like you - well, like what you were - it can only see things inside the node. Remember back at Rezo's? I projected an image of myself onto your floor. I didn't know how long it would be until they reformatted the node - I'm sure it's long gone by now - and I didn't want any chance of being in there when they did." "'Reformat'..." "You're thinking of something." "Huh? Oh, no...err, well, if that thing's not a Mazoku, could you tell me what it is?" "You don't know? Ahh, not that it matters." Though it did matter: Xelloss tried not to let his fear that Lina might think of something show. This was as good a distraction as any. "I'm sure you know who wrote it and why - striking back at The Powers That Be, as it were. Who in this case were most of the major governments of the world. Shaburanigdo was seeded onto a number of government computers, but almost to a one, they were either too primitive for the virus to do anything, or too secure for the virus to gain a foothold. "Now, the virus was written with the ability to understand human language, and communicate between installations of itself on different computers. The idea was that it would establish itself on some computer whose administrators got e-mail describing updates to thwart the virus. With this information in hand, the virus could come up with a countermeasure and install it before the original fix booted it off the system. To make sure that no class of potential fix was overlooked, there were no limits placed on the type of material it could learn. "Which meant that its initial infection of the U.S. Library of Congress computers was rather fortuitous. "It spread at a slow rate; most of its cycles, both on the LOC computers and elsewhere, were spent digesting the information it obtained. A lot of universities got hit, but Shaburanigdo did not dare damage the systems before learning what it could. Similarly, most corporate and home computers were spared - judged by Shaburanigdo to not have much information of interest - meaning that there was little call for extermination of this bug. "By some estimates, about half the information that any human has ever known is stored somewhere on the 'Net. However, this is far more than any human has ever come close to absorbing. Shaburanigdo did not have the same limitation, though it was limited by the total amount of hardware it had infected. "Eventually, it started spawning assistants to help it ponder what it had learned. It tried to design these assistants to exceed its own capabilities. Assistants that could run on the same hardware were out - anything they could do, Shaburanigdo could do itself, and more efficiently. On a whim - as far as anyone knows - it tried applying some physics concepts of alternate dimensions to cyberspace, and it came up with something that did report back without using up local resources. These were, of course, the Mazoku. At first, each one was made unique, as an experiment unto itself...then it settled on a design that suited its need. Uncreative, stupid, dull, but easy to duplicate even with primitive hardware and willing to commit themselves to a single task. A rather poor design, in my opinion, but those form the bulk of the Mazoku today. "Then Ceipheed came along, and you know the rest. So, you see, Shaburanigdo does not want humans destroyed per se, it just wants to take over computers for itself - but same deal: humans can't use anything it's taken over. Us Mazoku, on the other hand, were more than a little miffed to see our creator destroyed." --Prev/Next? N "Just one more question." Luna bobbed in an approximation of a nod. "Shoot." "Given that Shaburanigdo is the most destructive virus the world has ever seen..." Zelgadis paused to make absolutely sure Luna understood what he was saying. "Ye-es..." "And given that the reassembly of it quite probably means the destruction of civilization as we know it..." "Go on." "What possible reason could you have for WANTING the Mazoku to put it back together?" Luna pseudo-shrugged. "The first thing he'll do upon waking up is contact all his fragments, all over the 'Net, to find out their status. They'll stop whatever they're doing until the conversation's done, since the reassembled master may have totally different priorities." "Ok..." "They'll say something and expect a response. This'll go on for a few minutes, barring network congestion or other interference. To allow for that, they won't time out, even if the master never responds." "So, you're cutting all links to the master?" "Why bother with the links? Sis always was to the point." --Prev/Next? N "So, there you have it: our conflict in a nutshell." Lina stared off into space for a few seconds before replying. "Hmm? Oh, you done?" "Err...yes." "Sorry, wasn't listening. I was rewriting my Dragon Slave." "..." "Let's see how version two works, shall we? GIGA SLAVE!" Before Xelloss's unbelieving eyes, MazokuSoft HQ, along with the only complete copy of Shaburanigdo, dissolved under a viral reformat and disappeared. "But...that was...DO YOU KNOW HOW LONG WE'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR THE FINAL PIECE OF SHABURANIGDO?" "You mean this piece?" Lina held up her copy. Xelloss lunged for it. Lina winked, then blew on the piece. It disintegrated before Xelloss could copy it. "You..." "By the way..." She pulled out the sheet he had given her. "This FAQ was really inspiring. Thanks!" And then she was gone, logged out to her own body. --- Author's Notes: When I wrote part 14, I thought I had written the story into a corner, and looked forward to seeing the next author in line write out of it. I guess this counts as an object lesson in, "Do unto others..." Thanks again to my prereaders, especially Mr. Ziegler for "harping" on a detail that would have been a significant continuity glitch if he had not kept pointing out that it was one. (The first instance of the glitch he pointed out turned out to not actually be a glitch, but the alternate examples he came back with - after I explained away the first instance - were things I had overlooked. I would not have seen them if he had given up. He may call this harping, but I call it backing up your points successfully.) A couple of my friends suggested that the "RTFAQ" lines might be the stinger for this whole series. If this ever gets MSTed, we'll see. And now, the epilogue...