Chapter 69 Sixty nine
I didn't think; I reacted. I reached out with my mind, grabbing the Origin-Code that lay dormant in my blood. I didn't try to create a weapon. I tried to create a definition.
< ERROR: OBJECT EXISTS. >
I projected a blast of pure, chaotic data a "Solid-State" hologram of a concrete wall directly between Dax and the Sentinel.
The Sentinel hit the hologram.
For the first time, there was a reaction. The Sentinel shrieked a sound like tearing metal. The anti-matter limb slammed into the hard-light wall. The wall sizzled and dissolved, eaten by the void, but it bought Dax a microsecond.
The impact knocked the Sentinel back. It seemed confused, its fluid form rippling as it tried to process the data I had just fed it. It couldn't just delete the hard-light because the hard-light was code, not matter.
Dax rolled away, scrambling to his feet beside me. He looked at his hand; the tip of his glove was gone, the leather sheared off cleanly, exposing the skin. He was shaking.
"They can't eat code," Dax realized, breathless. "They can only eat things that are real."
"Then we make ourselves unreal," I said. "Dax, grab my hand."
The Sentinels were regrouping. Dozens of them were dropping from the ceiling now, a curtain of deletion closing in on us.
Dax grabbed my hand. His grip was tight, sweaty, and terrified. "Whatever you're going to do, Ghost, do it fast."
I closed my eyes. I visualized the Phase-State. I visualized the friction between the meat and the machine.
I am not matter, I told the universe. I am a variable.
I pulled the Origin-Code from the marrow of my bones and wrapped it around us like a shroud. I turned our physical bodies into a frequency.
"Shift!"
The world turned iridescent white.
The Sentinels lunged. Their needle-arms passed through us.
We were ghosts. We were standing there, visible, but we were vibrating at a frequency that existed just outside of their deletion protocols. We were data packets in a stream, intangible to the hardware.
The Sentinels stopped. They turned their faceless heads, scanning the space where we stood. They could sense us, but they couldn't touch us.
"We're phased," I whispered, my voice echoing strangely in the void. "But I can't hold this forever, Dax. It’s draining my bio-energy. If I drop the field, we solidify, and they eat us."
Dax looked at the Sentinels, then at the endless black horizon. "We need to find the Core. The Processor. If this ship is a drive, there has to be a write-head."
"Look up," I said, pointing.
Above the shifting geometry, at the very apex of the chaotic ceiling, there was a single, stationary point of light. It wasn't white or black. It was Gold.
"The Master File," Dax murmured. "That’s where the command signal is coming from."
"It's ten miles up," I estimated. "And we have no bike."
Dax looked at the swarming Sentinels below us, frustrated and impotent against our ghostly forms. He grinned that dangerous, reckless grin that had made me fall in love with him in a garage sixty-five chapters ago.
"We don't need a bike," Dax said. "We're code now, right? Code travels on the network."
He pointed to a massive, pulsating vein of black energy running up the side of a nearby pyramid structure, leading toward the Gold light.
"That's a data-stream," Dax said. "If we step into that... it should carry us straight to the CPU."
"Or it could disassemble us into binary," I countered.
"Well," Dax said, squeezing my hand as the iridescent shroud around us began to flicker, my energy waning. "I always wanted to know what it felt like to be an email."
The Sentinels were adapting. They were beginning to vibrate, matching our frequency. Their limbs were turning from black to grey, solidifying in our phase.
"They're learning!" I yelled. "Run!"
We sprinted across the obsidian floor, our ghostly feet making no sound. The Sentinels screamed and gave chase, gliding like nightmares.
We reached the base of the pyramid. The data-stream roared like a silent river of dark energy.
"Together!" Dax shouted.
We jumped.
We hit the stream, and the universe dissolved. There was no up, no down, only the rush of infinite information. We were shot upward, two sparks of human chaos riding the veins of a god-machine, heading straight for the golden heart of the enemy.
The crash was just the entrance. The real hack was about to begin.