Server Extant

'My lawyer has informed me that I am very remorseful.’

-Every sack of shit that ever got caught

The thin, glowing yellow numbers of her HUD chronograph turned over to 15:00 and there was a quiet ‘ding’. The words, ‘REMINDER: ALL-COMMITTEE MEETING IN TEN MINUTES’ appeared at the corner of her vision.

She was out of time. Time to go reason with the Pharisees.

She’d seen no one of note go through the boolean. Certainly no one from the clans. That meant she was going in alone. She sighed, rose from her crouch and was just about to drop the twenty meters or so to the street below when she heard the commotion. There was a sound of crackling gunfire, the deep-bone thump of a base track, audible below the veneer of its superficial melody. Something was happening, a stir or traveling presence, making its way up one of the neon-rippled avenues of the Strip, invisible to her present location.

Instead of going down, Morghain went up, leaping the few extra meters to the top of the street canyon, and emerging onto the plain. Here, she moved swift and low, in danger of taking a hit from the firewall’s automated defenses, which were triggered by twitchy and badly-modded visual-field detectors. She came to another descending canyon and hopped over the edge, hanging off the rim. Below, a great surge of gleaming exo-skeleton-like bodies was moving along the avenue in a black tide. Hundreds of roaches and ranked Ids from the clans, moving along the greater concourse. Above their heads, war standards, glyphs and weird symbols made of living fire, danced and flickered. The mass of fighting Ids flashed along the length of its body with celebratory gun fire, sending tracers and beams of light into the sky. Struck by stray bullets and energy weapons, a huge commercial mascot, in the form of a retro-looking space opera robot, was sheared off its mountings in a shower of sparked and crashed disastrously into the street below, crushing dozens of roaches and triggering more cheering. The thumping war beat was deafening.

At the head of this mass, Morghain saw the stalking forms of Cubist, Hammerziet, Lopslide, and several other kingpins, Calandarman, Horrid Impregnator, The Zule, Enemy Crab God (or ECG), IX and Seven Point Plan, a.k.a 7P. The asymmetrically-horned figure of Carnivous was not visible. Around them was a praetorian guard of Kysairon rankers, many well-known to her, and a vast mob of roaches.

Morghain skipped along the avenue lip then dropped into the chimeric parade.

‘Hey Morghain’ said Lopslide, ‘nice tits! Are they real?’

‘Nice giant gun-arm,’ she replied, shouting above the din, ‘I’m sure that’s not compensating for anything.’

‘Not at all. It’s merely a massive, rigid body-part that ejaculates bullets.’

‘Well, you look like something Freud would jerk off to. What is all this?’ She fell in with the group.

‘Victory lap,’ said Hammerziet. ‘We just hit Epsilon server.’

‘You hit Epsilon? Where is Carnivous?’

‘Dunno’ said Cubist. ‘Still on Epsilon, probably.’

‘What?’

‘We had to bail,’ explained Lopslide, ‘they started blowing up our carriers. Carnivous wouldn’t come. He was doing some samurai shit.’

’So you just left him there?’

‘We’re not his lackeys’ replied Lopslide, ‘If you think I’m getting tagged, as an accessory to his personal psycodrama, my continuing existence would indicate otherwise.’

‘What happened?’

‘We busted their security ring and stacked the junction box’ said Cubist. ‘You should have been there Morghain, you’d have loved it.’

‘Ah!’ said Hammerziet, ‘Like the old days! But we had to skip out before it blew.’

‘So you don’t even know if you disconnected junction control?’

’It’s called ‘breaking’, not ‘hanging around to get your ass fucked’’ said Cubist. ‘We got off-server just as their picket arrived. We had to plow straight through a GPC to do it.’

’That was cool’ said Lopslide. ’We took a ninety percenter and went straight through.’

‘It was my idea,’ said Cubist. ’If you want to ram him, ram him,’ I said.’

‘Point is,’ continued Lopslide, ’a minute after that, the sky would have been full of imperialists, once the other GPCs dropped. If Carnivous was stuck on-server, and he didn’t blow the junction, he’s gone. Unless he can fight all of P-fed by himself. So it was cool and all, but he did nearly get us tagged.’

‘Are you coming to the all-committees meeting?’ inquired Morghain.

‘Fuck no!’ replied Lopslide, as if she’d asked him to slice open his penis, to see if it was full of candy.

‘But you just declared war on Motor!’ she protested.

‘So?’

‘That’s-’ Morghain paused. There was a chance the council hadn’t heard yet. When they did, it would be marginally better if the news came from her. Without a voice of reason present, they were likely to vote some drastic punitive measure against the clans, which would antagonize them, at the exact moment that unity was needed.

Time was crucial, and there was no profit in reasoning further with these nihilists. She took off, swift as a spring-loaded gazelle, racing for the Block.

‘There she goes’ said Lopslide, as Morghain’s form disappeared into the chaotic press. ‘Running away from me. Just like every other woman.’

‘Why worry?’ asked Hammerziet. ‘Carnivous’ll be fine. Or not.’

‘Why Worry?’ replied Cubist, angrily, ’We nearly fucking died, that’s why! Like, died-died. Us.’

‘True.’

’Let me tell you something, everyone acts like Carnivous is just another high-functioning sociopath with a twitch-gaming addiction, but the crap he’s been pulling lately puts him way past that. He’s degenerating into a bona-fide, no-shit, luna- he-e-e-ey buddy!’ Cubist’s tone changed abruptly as he caught sight of Carnivous himself, stalking directly towards them, against the flow of the crowd.

‘Carnivous!’ yelled 7P.

‘The fuck you get off Epsilon?’ demanded Lopslide, but the Kysairon boss didn’t answer, sweeping past them in the opposite direction. As he struck the great, ragged mass of roaches and rankers behind the leaders, the entire parade threw itself into chaotic reverse, the kingpins hurrying to catch up, the lower ranks swirling, shouting and falling over each other. Carnivous ignored his comrade’s demands for explanation, the gunfire and sirens, the violence and adoration of the mob. His eyes were on the dark shape that loomed above them. He was heading for the Block.