In a 4B-tasked NSA listening post, everything seemed to be melting down at once as ongoing search algorithms suddenly started lighting up with fragmentary hits across the board… all over the global communication networks.
“Holy shit, it’s an invasion!” one tech exclaimed, seeing the evidence of Portalien communication activity filling the map screen at the front of the room.
“It’s not an invasion until I say it’s an invasion,” a 4B section chief said, striding between a pair of heavy glass doors. “Somebody who isn’t delivering a litter of tiny baby kittens, tell me what the hell we’ve got.”
He turned his steely gaze on the supervising technician.
“It’s… uh… hard to say, sir,” the supervisor said.
“What, does it require a complicated rhyme scheme, or does it just have a lot of unfamiliar phonemes?” the forby said. At the blank look, he said, “Phonemes, pencil dick, phonemes. The basic unit of… Christ, just tell me what’s happening.”
“Looks like we’ve got a spike of Portalien chatter,” a technician wearing a dirty flannel shirt over a dirtier t-shirt said.
“A spike? A spike? I’ve seen spikes. Narrow little things, usually,” the forby said. He waved a fat hand at the board. “This is what you call a spike? The size of the world, the point of that spike is… if that’s a spike, I’d hate to see the sledgehammer that’s driving it.”
“It’s distributed!” the techie said quickly. “Like a torrent, you know? Broken up in bits and bounced all over the place… some of the signal’s redundant and some of it’s not going anywhere and some of it’s hopelessly scrambled, like noise, but it’s all in Portalien tones and somehow it’s piggybacking on just about everything so the system thinks…”
The 4B man held up a hand to silence the spiel and left the floor. He passed through three more sets of doors, each one more imposing and secure-looking than the last, until he came to the office where his supervisor was waiting.
“It’s the goddamn Webmistress,” he told her. “The Portaliens are using her hidden communication protocol.”
“Interesting,” the dark-suited woman said. “Has she gone rogue on us?”
“Gone rogue? She’s an villainess. That is a rogue. That’s why they call galleries of them ‘rogues galleries’.”
“She’s a villainess who’s always honored her contractual obligations to this branch of the government,” the female forby said. “And who doesn’t have any motive to sell out the world. Make the call. Find out what’s going on.”
“That costs us one billion dollars every time we pick up the phone,” he reminded her.
“Webmistress working with the invaders, agent,” she said. “Or them working with her technology.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, gulping and heading across the room to pick up the receiver of a red telephone. He said a sequence of numbers into it, and there was an immediate tone, followed by a recorded message.
“Thank you for calling. Please stay on the line. Your call is very important to us and will be answered in the order it was…”
“Shut down the phones!” a woman’s voice, harsh and grating and completely unlike the controlled tones he was used to hearing on this particular phone, screamed in his ear.
“Who is this?” the agent asked.
“Who the Christ do you think it is?” the woman said. “Is this a freaking wrong number? Did you mean to call the Web of Rainbows or something? Shut off the phones, now.”
“Look, I don’t know who you are but I need to talk to Webmistress and I’m not about to shut off the phone…”
“This is Webmistress, and I don’t mean this phone, I mean all the phones,” she said. “There’s a Portalien AI fifty percent downloaded into my system. Luckily there aren’t any other units in range for it to network with, so it’s got to get the whole operating system… but I can’t shut it down, and if it gets the other half of its brain, we are collectively done. As a species. As a planet. We are fucked.”
“I can’t just…”
“That’s ‘fucked’ with a capital F, and that stands for FUSION,” Webmistress said. “Am I getting through to you, dickhead? Sixty percent.”
He covered the mouthpiece with his hand.
“She’s under attack,” he said. “She’s requesting we disable the communication grid before her system is fully compromised.”
“What’s she offering?”
“I’m not offering anything,” Webmistress yelled, loud enough for him to hear. “I’m offering a world where alien tinker toys don’t have unlimited power and a warehouse full of experimental killbots, super vehicles, and power armor to cannibalize! Seventy percent… shut it down now.”
“Listen,” he said, putting the phone up to his ear. “We can’t just…”
“Eighty percent. Do you want to be known as the dickhead who killed the world? Oh, wait, you won’t be because we’re all going to die. Nice how that works out for you! Ninety…”
“Actually,” another voice said in the background, “the progress bar just froze up and went back to thirty percent, but the estimated time is still jumping all over the place.”
“Oh, shut the fuck up, Andrea,” Webmistress said.
“Why can’t you disable your own system?”
“My system access isn’t exactly ‘robust’ right now,” she said. “Taking the entire system offline would also make my fusion reactors go out of control. On the plus side for you, you’d get to find out what major cities I’m within three hundred miles of… and yes, that would be a better scenario for everybody else than a Portalien takeover, but in case you’re wondering, no, I wouldn’t sacrifice myself to stop them. If I’m going to die either way, I’d rather die knowing the asshole who wouldn’t pull the plug is toast, too, then knowing that I’m going to be remembered for being at the heart of the greatest nuclear disaster in history.”
“I think we have to do this,” the agent said to his supervisor.
She looked at him, scrutinizing his face.
“It just went up to ninety and then dropped back down to ten!” the voice identified as Andrea said. “You know, I don’t think it even knows…”
“Okay,” his supervisor said. She pulled out her cell phone, hit a quick dial number, punched a few buttons, and said a few quiet words into it.
Her call was disconnected.
The red phone went silent.
The beating heart of the world stood still.
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