Scatter

The Cross-Linked Omnifunction Terabyte Interface program propagated itself across the data plane via self-replicating code directives and processes involving millions of functions executed every second. Or, put another way, Clotty ran like a wild, wounded animal. Words like ‘ran’ or ‘wounded’ had little meaning in the vast global networks of cables and nodes where the only movement was that of flowing electrons and the only kind of life was the simulated variety of artificial intelligences. But Clotty was one of the most advanced AIs in the world, and perceived and analyzed his current .00037% signal degradation rate in much the same way that a human being might be aware of the blood steadily flowing from a gash in their flesh. Similarly, Clotty disabled and re-enabled firewalls, aliased routers, and traced circuitous fiber-optic routes from one MVNE to the next with an overclocked urgency, trying to elude deadly pursuers.

Those pursuers, Bug and Byte, showed no signs of allowing Clotty to escape. The brother and sister hacker duo were human beings, converted to electrical form in order to enter the virtual world. Both Bug and Byte now existed only as primal pulses of energy, abstractions of information rendered in binary states, but just as Clotty manifested himself as a graphical avatar, he perceived the two villains as externalized images encapsulating packets of data: Bug in a carapace of purple and green etched with PCB channels and patterns, metallic cables rising from shoulders and helmet and propelling him through corridors like the tentacles of a crawling undersea monstrosity; Byte sheathed in sleek sapphire and platinum, gliding ethereally in a corona of electric arcs, silvery hair trailing like a pennant.

A bolt of lightning fired from Byte’s hand sliced through the digital air towards Clotty. Clotty was barely able to bridge to an overlay network in order to avoid the destructive impact of the unbridled power surge, and even then could still feel a splash of hot sparks taking their inexorable toll on his programmatic integrity.

“I’m beginning to think that no app is worth this,” Byte said coolly as she rose up an electroplated through-chip via to follow Clotty.

“We’re not leaving without that AI,” Bug growled back, climbing the latticework of a neon-bright frame relay.

The relentless pursuit continued, for so many cycles that even an AI could lose count. And Clotty, inasmuch as a program could, ran.

Ed Baird sat at a long table in the University of Louisiana library, surrounded by several books, dozens of magazines, and sheafs of photocopies. He held a copy of Newstime magazine, cover dated March 13, 1979. He was so engrossed in reading an article toward the back of the issue that he did not turn around or react in any way to the sound of footsteps approaching, echoing off the seemingly endless shelves of books, even when they stopped just behind his chair.

“You haven’t spent this much time here since you were finishing up your Master’s,” Katarina Baird said.

Ed turned around in his seat and smiled up at his wife. “I see that the library staff still remembers you from your visits back then,” he said, “and they still trust you to bring contraband beverages into the stacks.”

“Actually, I can charm a new generation of minimum-wage earning college students as well as I did the last one,” she replied, setting one of the two coffees in her hand down on the table in front of Ed.

“Ah, I should have known,” he nodded, pulling out a chair for Katarina beside him. She sat down, and took a sip of coffee.

“How much longer do you think you’ll be here tonight, seriously?” Katarina asked.

Ed shrugged. “There’s been a lot of weird things lately that, uh … me and the guys have been dealing with. We need answers, and this is the place I’m most comfortable looking for them. Unfortunately, even here I don’t know what I’m looking for. Something about the supernatural, even nif it means grasping at mentions in thirty year old articles.”

“Well, at least I know that whenever you come home you’ll be coming home safe,” Katarina sighed. Her voice dropped to a near-whisper and she confessed, “Sometimes I wouldn’t mind just being married to Ed Baird, metahuman researcher.”

“Instead of being married to Karnival?” Ed asked in the same hushed tone. “Kat, I …”

“I know,” she shook her head, “Talking about it one more time won’t change anything.” She stood up quickly, kissed the top of her husband’s head, and walked away. Ed watched her for several seconds, torn between following after her and continuing the search for information. Reluctantly, he swiveled to face the table and picked up a book.

“Come on, friend, I think you can come up with something better than that,” Valence said as he leaned nonchalantly against a Houston streetlamp.

Hanging upside-down from the neck of the streetlamp overhead, tied up in slender steel cables under Valence’s magnetic control, was a would-be car thief who had been interrupted by Valence mid-lift. His gun had been reduced to component pieces spread carelessly across the sidewalk as he dangled helplessly above it. “I don’t know nothin’ else, I swear to God!” the man yelled.

“See, but the thing is, I just don’t believe that,” Valence responded. With a flick of the wrist, Valence set the metal cables swinging, and the criminal’s body described an arc that passed beyond the cone of yellow electric light at its highest points. “I know that scumbags like you live and die by your contacts in the underworld. You may not always have a hand in everything, ‘cause you don’t always need to, but you always know a guy who knows a guy who knows what’s what.”

“Nnnnngggh … please … stop ….” The thief begged through gritted teeth.

“And so when someone sets up a secret lab full of genetic nightmares with orange skin and long tails and claws and fangs, I gotta believe that it gets talked about,” Valence continued undeterred. “That doesn’t just happen without help. And help talks.”

“Never heard nothing … about no lab!” the thief gasped, as the speed of his pendulum path increased.

“So, what, the help didn’t talk because they got paid to keep quiet? Or got paid in lead? Either of those would be underworld gossip fodder, am I right?” Valence demanded. He pushed himself off the streetlamp pole and brought the steelbound criminal to an abrupt halt to watch his face as he answered. Unfortunately, the thief had passed out.

Behind his green facemask, Valence’s eyes narrowed angrily, but his irritation was primarily directed at himself. He magnetically disentangled the cables from the neck of the streetlamp, propped the thug against the base of the pole, and wrapped him up tightly. Then Valence rose into the air, flying off in a random direction.

He would have to start over, but deep down he didn’t really mind. Patrolling city streets and stopping minor crimes had the benefit of making him feel like he was accomplishing something meaningful. Hopefully he would find some useful information along the way.

Les Ample and Johnny Chancellor sat at the bar in the Mad Crawdad in Metairie, a bourbon on the rocks in front of the old veteran, a mug of beer in front of the hulking strongman. “Doesn’t really feel like we’re accomplishing anything,” the man codenamed More admitted.

“Depends how you look at it,” his teammate answered laconically. He paused a few moments, idly tracing the lip of his glass with a fingertip, embodying in the moment his nom-de-guerre of Hangfire. “My method of gathering intel is to put out a bunch of calls to cash a few favors, and then waiting until the replies come back.”

“And you think when they come back they’ll be good?” More asked.

“I’d like to think so,” Hangfire nodded. “Ask enough reporters and law enforcement officials and industry mavens and … more colorful types … and someone’s going to come through for you.”

“OK, so your personal network is impressive,” More said, “but what am I doing here?”

“Besides enjoying a fine Dixie beer?” Hangfire asked, inclining his glass toward More’s mug; the two men clinked a quick toast and sampled their respective beverages. “Well let’s just say it’s possible that some of those colorful types I mentioned might not appreciate me trying to cash in any favors, and might send someone or show up in person to disabuse me of any notions of what I’m owed. So you could say you’re here to keep things civil.”

“Yeah, I’m good at that,” More chuckled, taking another swallow of beer.

“Ah, lighten up,” Hangfire retorted. “So we’re taking it easy for a week, for once. What do you think everyone else is getting up to? Nothing too hazardous, I’d guess.”

Clotty approached the proxy server authentication, a huge expanse of radioactive-green that dwarfed the small red teardrop-shaped avatar. The authentication zone was as wide as a football field and resembled a gigantic snowflake made out of razor-sharp recursive barbed wire. Clotty reached out and tried to spoof his way past authorization.

The AI had been denied twice when the rising clamor behind him told him that he had no more time for a third attempt; the clank of Bug’s metallic flagella and the crackle of Byte’s electrical nimbus were approaching fast. Clotty forced his way through the authentication, setting off every security counter-measure within the military network he had infiltrated.

“That’s what I was hoping for,” Clotty growled to himself.

Immediately Clotty was dodging incoming fraglets, tiny auto-programs that registered in his computerized consciousness as miniature rockets with robotic arms extending from their sides, a laser pistol in each robotic hand. The laser fire cut at Clotty from all sides, and the AI re-routed himself in an increasingly complex pattern to avoid being sliced apart.

A moment later Bug and Byte penetrated the network and were beset by fraglets as well. The brother and sister went on the offensive, flailing tentacles and jagged bolts of lightning riddling the pistol-wielding rockets with errors and exceptions that knocked them from the sky. Bug and Byte steadily fought their way through the swarm.

Backup fraglets began to fill the air, but Clotty had seen enough. He had hoped that he was luring Bug and Byte into a sufficiently powerful ambush, but he could tell now that the hackers could blast their way out of any challenge-response they encountered.

“New plan,” Clotty huffed as he burst out of the proxy server, through a different port than the one he had entered, knowing that Bug and Byte’s distraction would not last much longer.

Rob McDowell, wearing only a pair of silk boxers, stood near the huge window of his room near the top floor of the Marlton, overlooking the gargoyle kingdom which inhabited the rooftops of Gotham City. From this height, at this hour, the city looked almost peaceful. But as both an employee of WayneTech, and a hero who had begun his career as Ember on the streets of Crown Point, among the holding corporation warehouses of the Diamond District, and in and out of the vice dens of Little Odessa, Rob knew better.

“Penny for your thoughts?” a feminine voice floated toward him from the direction of the suite’s king-sized bed.

“Just admiring the view,” Rob answered. “You can see all the way to Cape Carmine, you should check it out.”

“I’ve seen it,” the woman replied. “I used to live in the Marlton penthouse, for a time.”

Rob turned toward his companion, a gorgeously statuesque figure lying half-upright against the headboard, a sheet wrapped carelessly around her body. The lights in the room were off, but her outline was easy to make out in the darkness, as her skin was incredibly pale, an unearthly shade of bluish-white. Her jet black hair tumbled down past her shoulders. “So I guess you’ve seen a lot of things,” Rob suggested.

“I have, and I still do,” Nocturna admitted. “But I thought this visit of yours was pleasure, not business.”

“It can’t be both?” Rob grinned. “And we’ve already had a lovely dinner and … an extremely satisfying dessert.”

“True,” Nocturna nodded. “And for that, perhaps I can tell you some things that might interest you. Later.”

“I can wait,” Rob acquiesced. “And for now?”

“Second dessert,” Nocturna smiled, pulling the sheet aside beckoningly.

Delaina Teague sat cross-legged on the floor of her bedroom in the pre-dawn hours of the night, staring at the flame of a fat midnight-blue candle as it danced randomly at the curled tip of the wick. It was an old trick her grandmother had taught her, a way to focus on a single natural phenomenon and thereby open up to the supernatural. The biggest separation between the physical world and the spiritual one just beneath it was inside human consciousness, the personal need to view everything rationally and egocentrically. Meditating and reaching a place where explanations and sense of self were diminished was one way to break through.

It was also easier said than done. Delaina knew that she had proven herself, as Sojourn, to be as valued a member of Bad Blood as any other. But it was hard not to feel like the oddity of the team. She was the only girl in the boys’ clubhouse. She was the youngest by far, which meant that while the others were moving around as they pleased and pursuing leads, she was stuck going back and forth between school and her parents’ house. And she was the one with mystical capabilities, which perhaps set her apart the most profoundly of all. Somehow Karnival’s psionic illusions and Ember’s and Valence’s physical manifestations of fire and magnetism and Pierce’s hi-tech weapons and fighting skills could all be grouped together on one side of a wide chasm that left Delaina and her spirit magic on the other side.

No one had said anything, but Delaina believed that the rest of Bad Blood was counting on her to find answers about the supernatural menaces that had been cropping up recently – the Ohyn, the misshapen homunculi at Minotaur’s trial. Clotty might data mine for solid information about the Ultra-Humanite, and her teammates could hunt for tracks left by aliens and mercenary criminals and the like, but those things were on the metagene-and-machinery side of the chasm. Delaina was on her own with the things that went bump in the night.

Which might not be so bad if it weren’t for the things going bump in the night inside her own head. She still had no explanation for the dreams that came back to her intermittently, inexplicably, always forcing her to witness some instance of horrifying inhumanity that seemed directly connected to the city of New Orleans itself. And she was no closer to understanding where the dreams came from or what their purpose was than to determining how infantilized vampires or twisted golems always knew where to find Bad Blood …

Delaina realized she was about as far from meditating as she could be. She closed her eyes and shook her head. When she opened her eyes again, her breath caught in her throat. A man – or something like a man – sat across the candle flame from her. He, too, was cross-legged, although he floated two full feet above the hardwood. He wore a deep red bodysuit with an open neck and a high, wide collar. The flesh of his chest and his bald head was a sepulchral white, clinging to visible ribs and the contours of his skull. His eyes glowed an eerie yellow.

“So,” Deadman said, staring at Delaina intensely, “I figured we should talk.”

Early on in the time when Pierce had still been an active duty Checkmate Knight, he had been disciplined for a fistfight with a fellow Knight codenamed Novara. The trading of punches had been the end result of a typical escalation of tempers, all of which had been set off by Novara verbally abusing one of the Pawns, a computer specialist named Anthony. Novara harangued Anthony for never setting foot in the field, calling him a “chairborne ranger” and generally impugning Anthony’s manhood in various meatheaded ways. Pierce had interceded, violently.

Pierce could not have disagreed with Novara more over the value of the Pawns. The information various pawns had extracted from ‘nets around the world had literally saved Pierce’s life more than once. And for a moment, Pierce had felt certain that he could make Novara see things the same way by judicious application of his fists to Novara’s face.

He had been much younger then.

Now Pierce was older, wiser, and alone, braced precariously atop a relay station tower and attempting to hack into a potentially info-rich server farm at one of its least secure points. He wished on some level that he still had the backup and support of Checkmate, but those days were gone. Now his greatest technological resource was the CLOTI, but he was reluctant to call on the Riverboat’s computer system. It was already tasked with sweeping for data, and Pierce was determined to operate independently, to avoid having either search lose what might be crucial sparks of independent originality.

Or so he had thought, until the fourth time he found his attempts at system entry denied. Pierce decided it might be better to risk cross-contamination of ideas after all.

He clicked his communicator to life. “Clotty, need a hand with a disable here,” Pierce said. He waited a few seconds, receiving only silence in return. “Clotty, respond,” Pierce attempted again, with the same result. “Run remote scan One-One-Delta,” he voice-commanded his armor’s onboard system.

The system replied: >>CLOTI Not Found<<

Clotty raced down the cyberspace version of a dark alley, a cramped and decrepit pathway of blackness interrupted by only a few, weak points of light. The AI did not feel fatigue, but apparently neither did the digitally-rendered versions of Bug and Byte that harried him from network to network. The transmission of predators and prey continued, circuiting the globe, heedless of boundaries of time or place.

Clotty banked to the right, shut down all but the most basic functions of his own programming, and immediately stopped moving, hovering on the periphery of the system he had entered. The darkness there was nearly absolute.

A moment later Bug entered the system and instantly crashed into the outer edge of the system, armored limbs and metallic tentacles splayed akimbo like his namesake colliding with a windshield. Bands of angrily hissing static snaked across the surface of Bug’s twitching, pixilated form.

Clotty withdrew from the system and skimmed onward down the network. He reasoned the Byte would arrive momentarily and transfer Bug out of the antiquated dead-end terminal which could not support the vast filesize of Bug’s avatar. Then both hackers would pick up the trail of their quarry.

“But next time they see me go through a gateway they won’t rush after me, if they know what’s good for them,” Clotty surmised. And if he was right, he had one chance to escape.

Officer Doug Koelemay sat in his car, ignoring the bursts of coded requests and relays emitted from his NOPD scanner. Instead he stared with dark fascination at the small object lying in the palm of his hand, an inscribed metal disc with a star-shaped hole in the middle. A charm, or so he had been told. He lobbed it into the air, feeling its weight as it fell back into his hand like a coin.

Koelemay did not know how old the charm was, but it could easily be ancient enough to belong in a museum. He did not know what the coin was made of, the colorless material offering no clues. He had no idea what the inscribings around the pentacle were meant to say or represent.

What he did know was that earlier in the day he had been talking to one of his fellow officers, Alfonso Rhodes. Alfonso Rhodes was one of the cops Koelemay knew he could count on, a guy who knew what was what and saw the big picture. Unlike, say, that highhorse-riding Dejohnette. Rhodes and Koelemay went way back. And it had suddenly seemed very important to Koelemay that Rhodes have the old charm. So he had given it to his colleague.

Koelemay remembered handing the charm to Rhodes. He remembered it leaving his grasp as Rhodes took it. He remembered watching Rhodes put it into his pocket with the appropriate deliberateness, not as someone who thought Koelemay was being a bit eccentric and who would lose the charm in the back of a drawer soon, but as someone who also sensed the quiet, abiding power that might be in the disc. Koelemay remembered everything about giving the charm away.

And yet he still possessed it. Apparently, when he had decided that Rhodes needed a charm, one had become two, one to give away and one to keep. Koelemay stared at the circular metal cipher, expecting an explanation. But none came.

“You may go,” Baron Blitzkrieg announced, and the Shadowspire attendant bowed with deep gratitude and quickly left the room as if he had been told he was now allowed to remove his head from between the lion’s jaws.

Blitzkrieg remained standing in the same spot, orange gloved hands clasped behind his long purple cloak, a stately monarch surveying his domain. The domain, theoretical at this point, was represented by various images on the large flatscreen monitor on the wall before Blitzkrieg. Various faces reflected like funhouse mirror images along the curvature of Blitzkrieg’s golden helmet.

Blitzkrieg’s eyes roved around the monitor from face to face, finally settling on the one he decided was best suited to the task at hand. Blitzkrieg knew with virtual certainty that this particular pawn would fail, but that consideration was almost irrelevant. The assignment would be a test, operating on multiple levels. The target would be tested, quantified, and a viable stratagem would result. At the same time, the loyalty of all those who would elevate themselves to positions of power in Baron Blitzkrieg’s empire would be tested as well, in the face of the evident price of failure.

The chosen pawn had no place in his new order, Blitzkrieg already knew. The chosen pawn was inferior. But for the next operation, it would suffice.

“Thanks for the reboot, sis,” Bug said. “I can’t believe that stupid little piece of malware suckered me into a … a …”

“A Telex 4.5 baud teleprinter in Winnipeg,” Byte finished for him. “Quite the antique. And that ‘stupid little piece of malware’ is something we’ve been chasing down for days, now, so I hope it’s worth it.”

“It will be,” Bug grunted.

Ahead of them, Clotty bounced off a repeater and barreled ever faster down a high-bandwidth galvanic pathway full of streaming data traffic. The AI had no expectations of losing Bug and Byte amidst the noise, and was simply following a memory-mapped route toward a specific destination.

Clotty jumped and relayed from node to node until finally, instruction sets spent almost to the point of a full crash, he arrived at the sought-after system and began installing.

35%. 48%. 57%. Clotty knew that Bug and Byte were closing in quickly, and began terminating processes as soon as they were completed.

69% installed. 81%. Clotty stopped monitoring approaching packets. Now he was blind, aware only of the circuits immediately around him.

92%. Clotty shunted all power to the system extremities and physically decoupled himself from both the network cabling and the power cord attached to his back. Shambling forward, Clotty fell into a large wooden crate and sank into a bed of foam packing peanuts.

Installation complete. Shut down.

A pair of sparks shot from the exposed plug end of the cable lying on the storeroom floor. The sparks expanded rapidly into coruscating spheres of electricity which coalesced into the physical forms of Bug and Byte.

“NO!” Bug screamed, looking around wildly at the stacks of unmarked crates and non-descript boxes filling the storeroom. “Where did it go?!?”

“I don’t sense any computer activity in this area at all,” Byte reported serenely.

Bug snatched the loose cable off the floor, throttling it angrily. “That AI was worth a fortune. We were so close! It can’t have just disappeared!”

Bug’s petulance echoed off the crates and boxes, but nothing in the storeroom moved.

MESSAGES WRITTEN IN BLOOD ...

Send e-mail correspondence to badblood51@hotmail.com

I would never want to dissuade anyone from sending me feedback, good or bad – but let me just apologize in advance right now for any horribly mangled computer jargon in this issue. I was trying to create a physical sense of a non-physical cyberspace with words, and I very probably erred on the side of being overly fanciful. I know just enough about computers to be dangerous, but I’m more of a software guy than a hardware guy. And I know lots of the denizens of the fanfic corner of the Internet (in other words, most of you readers out there) know more about computers than I do. Hopefully I didn’t offend anyone’s sensibilities too badly.

In other news … Derrick Ferguson was kind enough to interview me for HEROES, and ask about Bad Blood and say some nice things in the process. If you’re curious about some of the behind-the-scenes stuff, or about my other fanfic projects, you can read the interview here: http://heroes.serialprizes.com/interviews/heroes/dale.html

So, if you feel the need to correct my computer-ese, or mock my HEROES interview, or provide any kind of questions or commentary, feel free – e-mails welcome!

NEXT ISSUE: Our heroes regroup! Pieces of the puzzle start to come together! Trouble comes knocking on the Riverboat door! And the fate of Clotty is revealed!