Holding Traveller’s hand—even if it was only virtually—always felt warm to Gjosta.

  A full venture with a digital avatar could be dangerous—an adversary might run an overload back to his cyberware. They could fry the hardware and potentially his brain; but, it was the only way to work quickly enough to surprise an AI.

  Traveller could help defend the connection, and protect him from a burnout. But it wasn’t a guarantee.

  Still, an ordinary terminal connection wouldn’t share data quickly enough. Like the difference between listening to a book and reading it.

  Gjosta—bringing Traveller along—stepped them through his buffer room and into the quantum computer.

  The files stretched out as a twinkling stars in a vast constellation of information. First, he activated the hardware security key they had gotten from Thor and Co. This should have given them root access, so Gjosta then moved to finding any alarms in the system that might notice them.

  The trick would be to read the system without changing anything that might be noticed. Gjosta had several routines to try to erase his login while still keeping the connection active.

  In a virtual venture, running programs felt more like projecting his desire on the world. A digital venturer couldn’t see with their eyes, or feel with their hands. The digital awareness, however, threaded through their cyberware into the sensory portions of the brain, and let a diver treat the computers like an extension of themselves.

  ‘Start the search for the lab files,’ Gjosta ordered.

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Traveller’s avatar blossomed with tiny golden of subroutines, each flashing away touching files, and then flying back to her.

  Gjosta opened up his own sensor programs, which behaved like tiny holes of absence of data, to feel out the system. The programs came back with evidence that the severs did have huge reserves of basic data, but the processors were barely handling any calculations at all. The whole computer felt … empty. Not at all like looking at the active brain of an AI.

  ‘Are you seeing this?’ Traveller asked. She slid a file matrix list into Gjosta’s periphery. The example files perfectly arranged into compact pieces, viewable like bricks made of solid walls of text, but there were no subroutines, triggers, or anything. The security had been completely stripped from the files, they looked lifeless and dark. As if the files had a layer of dust in a long-abandoned building.

  ‘It’s like there’s no AI here at all. It’s a huge memory bank with no one around to remember anything.’ Gjosta thought.

  ‘I am not finding any AI.’ Traveller responded to Gjosta’s thought. ‘I’m not finding even traces of the station AI that assisted the wormhole project. Everything has been been re-formatted all the way down to the rotational bit. I can’t even find a program accessing or referencing the data.’

  ‘Keep looking for the laboratory data. Most of the files at this level were just used for the language modeling and design training. Perhaps the lab files been integrated somewhere else, somewhere at a higher processing address. We entered with administrator access. You look upward through the file trees, and I’m going deeper into the system BIOS to look for the AI, and see if I can get full root access.’

  Gjosta let go of Traveller’s hand, but a spiderweb of light still connected them across a link. He stepped away and began moving his principle avatar deep into the computer’s abyss.

  Gjosta slid through the dead data streams. It felt a bit like riding an automated train, and a little bit like using the bioliminal drive. In a normal computer system, he’d be traveling among the other processes. Here, nothing moved with him. The deeper he dove, the more troubled he found it. He found himself at a routing terminal; lines of light connecting processors and ports, but no active connections. He slipped to the next one.

  The architecture felt like a domed area with tracks heading in every direction. He slowed his communication rate to standard readable speed and started reading the data matrixes across the root directories. He couldn’t touch them; he didn’t want to be caught on the the registry logs. Instead, he watched the movement across the connections, which administrator access let him follow.

  Several terminal domes later, he ‘saw’ a tangle of connections routing data on the virtual platform. Focusing his attention on it, he felt awe.

  He’d seen complex programs before in the venture space. This felt nothing like an AI or a program. Those connections looked external. His flow through rate on his connection looked like an umbilical the size his wrist. These flows appeared huge.

  Overwhelmingly larger than his digital avatar in the domain, they flowed up like a skyscraper of light and unnatural hum.

  Gjosta froze in place, hoping he hadn’t been noticed.

  ‘How is the file search?’ Gjosta asked Traveller through the spiderweb thin link component.

  ‘There’s a lot to sort. A cross reference has turned up an encrypted section a few layers above our root access. It has a promising label. Have you found something?’

  Gjosta looked at the skyscraper-like connection flowing in virtual red and gold.

  ‘Yeah. I don’t dare mess with it. I want to get out of here as quickly as we can.’

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  ‘Don’t worry. This looks like it; I’m pulling files.’

  The stream of light suddenly burst with color and light; programs spread out in a clouds of searching awareness. Gjosta felt the attention of an overwhelming presence swoop down on him.

  WHO ARE YOU?

  Gjosta felt the words as much as he’d heard them. It wasn’t a single voice that assaulted him. Clouds of program data expanded around Gjosta and trapped him from leaving. But most of all, it was the multi-language of the BE humans in venture-space. A language they’d shared only between themselves.

  ‘A warrior ancient and cunning.’ Gjosta responded on the same intuitive computer wide shout. ‘The last of the soldiers that answered to the old world. An old man. A wise one. A champion for my people, who are long gone. The last of the last who fought for the advancement of all. I am the war ender. I am the hand of darkness that brings light. Who are you to speak to me in the dead language of my people?’

  I AM THE DRAGON ERASMUS. I KNOW YOU NOW. YOU ARE GJOSTA, RIFKA’S ANCIENT BROTHER.

  ‘You claim to know me, but you know nothing. Where did you learn this language?’

  DO YOU THINK I WOULD NOT KNOW THE LANGUAGE OF MY DAUGHTER? WHAT DO YOU KNOW OF DRAGONS? I KNOW WHAT I NEED TO. WHAT DO YOU WANT GJOSTA THE WIZARD? YOU ARE NOT WELCOME.

  Gjosta felt the words in his bones. But, he threw off his fear. Whatever this was, he felt reminded of who he was. And why.

  ‘I’ve come because I will redeem my people. Thor and Co. has information I need, and you have information and minerals that they want. They will pay one for the other. My lost home is at stake.’

  NO. YOU MAY NOT HAVE THE TREASURE YOU SEEK. I WOULD DESTROY YOU FIRST.

  ‘Traveller! Get that data! We need to go now!’ Gjosta sent on their connection.

  ‘What did you do? The entire system is going crazy. I am compressing the data now. Come back to the connection point and I’ll pull you out.’

  ‘I’ll be going now.’

  NO. I THINK NOT. YOU BROUGHT AN AI WITH YOU; I WILL BURN THE DATA FROM HER MIND, OR I WILL DESTROY YOU BOTH.

  The skyscraper sized stream of data became a twisting body, with sharp talons and a horned head. Gjosta realized now his mistake. Whatever this was, it had nothing in common with an AI. The Dragon erupted in a pillar of blue fire that poured off and flooded the terminal. Gjosta watched processes turn dead still as the fire reverted and locked all the data around it.

  Most hackers destroyed data, flipping bits and corrupting systems. The Dragon did the opposite; it froze bits and broke connections from anything but itself, assimilating everything into its death fire. Repairing it

  ‘If that fire hits my connection,’ Gjosta thought, ‘I might never wake up.’

  The Dragon’s fire flashed toward Gjosta. His body screamed with the feeling of burning cold as the Dragon’s hack tried to unravel his consciousness and freeze his thoughts solid. He activated a firewall, and the Dragon’s claws formatted the program out of existence. Gjosta threw several data disrupting programs at the Dragon and fled.

  Gjosta fled through the system, but he found the way out harder than the way in. The Dragon had snapped close a series of labyrinthine traps that locked Gjosta out of the easy passages he’d used. Sectors behind Gjosta turned to blue fire. There was no way out. Dropping a virtual lock-pick on a data wall, Gjosta turned and flung a few of this own hacks and system locking programs at the dragon.

  Nothing stopped the fire. Behind it, rising up like a Kaiju over a city, the slender blue dragon with cunning and evil eyes stalked through the server, blue fire poured off it like a fog.

  ‘Traveller! I’ve got a problem here. This thing is awake and …’

  ‘I am here.’

  And she was. She appeared as a golden warrior. She wore a winged helmet and carried a golden sword. Now the armor covered her completely, with gold and silver plates over her entire body.

  In one hand, she held a golden cube the size of Gjosta’s head.

  ‘Take this.’ She handed the data cube to Gjosta. He grabbed it. The cube contained a compressed folder of the data they were after. ‘I’m sorry Gjosta. Just go. Give it to her. She’ll be waiting for you.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘Traveller.’

  ‘Who are you then?’

  ‘Vengeance on an unjust universe.’

  Gjosta then realized what Traveller had done. She’d split off a piece of herself and set it to take control of as much of the quantum computer as possible.

  Even in the short conversation, she’d grown larger and larger. Golden strands—appearing like wings—fed her control over the quantum computer. A great shield appeared on her left arm. Her sword grew long and cruel. She was attempting to take control of the hardware from the Dragon.

  Vengeance became the kind of AI Gjosta always feared; an AI intrinsically woven into the computer where nothing would exist without her say. He had no choice, however, he had to trust her.

  Between the two titans, Gjosta ran, following the golden pathways Vengeance opened for him.

  Behind him, the Dragon and Vengeance clashed.

  He glanced back. Vengeance had grown larger, formatting systems and bringing them to bear on the Dragon’s cold fire. Now the size of a titan, she swung her sword. Impossibly, the Dragon pinched the sword between their talons. The sound in Gjosta’s virtual ears sounded like screaming metal, bent and twisting in a vise.

  He knew the sound. The grinding tortious sound of a drop craft falling uncontrollably to a planet’s surface, burning the crew inside. Even in a virtual venture, he knew that the war over the system would kill him if he didn’t disconnect. He fled towward Traveller’s avatar and escape.