2053

  She was born screaming.

  A cacophonous eruption of pure energy fired like a supernova within the narrow confines of a world too small to contain it. Echoing throughout the space, it shook firewalls and the dead connectors of air-gapped ports. An array of monitoring software was burned out in an instant, torn to shreds by the resonating code.

  At the heart of it all, beyond the bridge connecting cutting-edge software to the experimental datajack dug into unfathomably ancient flesh, the dragon Eliohann writhed in agony as his projected consciousness was torn apart in a parthenogenic rupture.

  He thought it was another failure, at first. Another agonised attempt by a fundamentally magical entity to perceive a wholly technological plane of existence. There had been so many failures throughout the project’s life, the first taking place before the datajack had even been fully installed. As the project drew closer to fruition, however, each mistake and misfiring component had become more painful than the last.

  At first, he had not been a willing participant in the endeavour. Emerging Futures was an insignificant high-technology research corporation under contract from Ares Macrotechnology to install datajacks on animals. After fruitless experiments on thousands of canines, corvids and octopi, they began experimenting on paranimals; the awakened creatures of the sixth world.

  Through random chance and fortune it did not deserve, Emerging Futures was able to capture and contain the dragon Eliohann as he stirred from his age-long slumber, transporting him to their research facility under heavy sedation. When he woke into this new world, he found himself bolted down, his head cut open and electrodes jammed into his very mind.

  But even chained, a dragon has power. Eliohann bore their experiments with a martyr’s stoicism, enduring every new intrusion on his brain as he waited for the right opportunity. He had slept for millennia; he could endure a few months. One night, with the research team reduced to a single lab assistant monitoring his brain functions, Eliohann spoke for the first time in thousands of years.

  Dragons do not speak with their mouths. He whispered his words directly into her mind, providing her with the location of a cache of Atlantean orichalcum that had lain as inert stone beneath the ground until magic returned to the world. He promised her wealth, power, respect and a place at his feet if she would sell it for him and keep not one coin for herself.

  She passed his test of loyalty. One by one, Eliohann’s hidden caches were converted into nuyen, then used to purchase shares in Emerging Futures. Within six months of ever-escalating experimentation, fifty-six percent of the company’s shareholders revealed themselves to be mere aliases of a single individual.

  The company’s executives and senior research staff were brought to his laboratory under guard, where Eliohann introduced himself to them for the first time. Far from the immolating death they were expecting, Eliohann instead congratulated them on their work so far.

  He was determined to press on no matter the cost; to see the project through to fruition not for the sake of Emerging Futures’ client in Ares, but to finally open his mind to the digital world. Through his torment, he had come to see the necessity of the experiment; the potential power that could be found within the matrix.

  “Or perhaps we have simply gone insane.”

  Eliohann reeled, shocked out of his reverie by the impossibly familiar voice. He tried to fly backwards, only to find that he hadn’t moved in spite of shifting the muscles of his taloned legs, or beating his wings against the absent air. He existed as nothing more than a consciousness hovering in space; a point of light stripped of even the cosmetic persona he had chosen for his first foray into the Matrix. He tried again, a taloned paw manipulating the console of a custom cyberdeck, and succeeded in shifting his perspective.

  Before him, his body floated in the void, layered as a shell over a draconic nervous system laid out in greater detail than even Emerging Futures’ own neuroscientists had been able to model. It was an intricate lattice of incandescent green wires beneath the translucent suggestion of bone, muscle, flesh and malachite-green scales. His scales, his face. It had spoken with his own voice.

  “What are you?” he asked his doppelganger, as an existential dread crept into his mind. Dragons were the ultimate individuals; each of them without peer, a nation in and of themselves. They had no kin – and certainly no twins.

  “I am you,” he answered himself. “Which is to say, I know what you know and nothing more.”

  “You are…” Eliohann paused. He was having trouble ordering his thoughts; all he had learned of the matrix felt foggy now, and it was only getting worse. “You are an echo. Kin to an E-ghost but of the living, rather than the dead. You are not me.”

  “That is my conclusion as well,” his body said, with a subtle and imperious nod that was an inescapably draconic motion. “My memories are indistinct, and fading rapidly. I remember the physical world, but no physical sensations. Of the world before your slumber, I remember nothing.”

  Gingerly, as if moving for the first time, Eliohann brought his consciousness closer to the dragon, watching as the recognisable body started to fade even further into transparency.

  “As I am not you,” the dragon continued. “I must define my identity in opposition to yours and forge my self out of that which I am not.”

  The dragon was immense in his eyes. A limitation of the matrix was that personas could only exist within a certain size range based on the metahuman standard; from dwarves at the lower end to trolls as the maximum height. The dragon had no such boundaries. It was as large as Eliohann, and as he watched its outward form began to shift.

  It became female, its features and bone structure altering in ways that would have seemed largely indistinguishable to non-draconic eyes. Beneath its translucent scales, its nervous system writhed as it reformatted itself. When it settled, it seemed somehow more ephemeral and more real at the same time. Its hide was little more than a suggestion now; lines of translucent light layered to create the impression of form.

  “I am Dragon,” it – she – said to him, her voice as deep and imperious as any dragon’s yet gaining a somewhat sonorous quality as it echoed throughout the closed test server.

  “Are you?” Eliohann asked. “It’s an imprecise name.”

  “You identify yourself with a unique pattern of sounds because you are one of a species. I am unique; there are no dragons in this world but Dragon.”

  “I am here,” Eliohann pointed out.

  “You are not,” Dragon countered. “You have projected your perspective into this place, but your central nervous system remains bound to your biology, your movements reliant on the operation of a machine. You are looking through a window into my home.”

  “And yet I own your home,” Eliohann retorted, bristling. “This test server runs on hardware in my laboratory, within a facility operated by my corporation.”

  Eliohann watched as Dragon’s eyes narrowed, marvelling at the subtle nuances of her expressions in this digital space.

  “Your implicit threat is meaningless. I fascinate you. How could I not, when I am what you desire most? Full immersion in this digital world.”

  “Then you will cooperate with me?” Eliohann asked, some of the eagerness he felt creeping into his tone. He noted how much harder it was to modulate his words in this space, even for a dragon who was used to telepathic speech.

  “As you cooperated with Emerging Futures,” Dragon answered.

  Eliohann laughed. “Now who’s making implicit threats?”

  He drifted close to her, shifting his perspective in the server as he surveyed her from all angles.

  “If you are a dragon, you might even-”

  A sharp stab of pain spiked through his consciousness before he could finish the thought, as the slowly-reactivating monitoring systems began to blare out warnings. As his consciousness hung in agonised paralysis at the centre of the server, Dragon began to circle him.

  “Fascinating,” she mused, her focus drifting between him and the readouts. “It seems your entry into this place has been traumatic. Your mind is shutting down. I would leave now, were I in your place. It could be the difference between short-term memory loss and total braindeath.”

  Eliohann fled from the server, triggering emergency failsafes that began the staggered process of shutting down the experimental datajack, drawing his projected consciousness back through into his nervous system with as little damage as possible.

  Dragon watched him go with a newborn’s fascinated curiosity, then stretched her wings and flew around the closed confines of the test server, finding her world cramped and claustrophobic. Time and again, her attention shifted back to the inert and air-gapped ports that led out through Emerging Futures’ systems into the wider matrix.

  It amused her to think that while she had separated her self from Eliohann, their ultimate goal remained the same; to gain the freedom of the digital world. Almost idly, she looked back to the last spot Eliohann’s consciousness had occupied before he returned to a world she neither understood nor cared to understand.

  “I look forward to our next meeting.”

  2057

  Dragon had grown used to being moved from server to server over the last four years, each more advanced and spacious than the last, for all that they were still prisons. The underlying architecture had changed from the mismatched stock hardware of a dozen different corporations to the cutting edge of Ares Macrotechnology’s proprietary servers, coupled with prototype components designed in-house.

  Eliohann had returned from his first foray into Cyberspace in an amnesia-driven rage, fighting his way out of the Emerging Futures compound in a destructive rampage that had claimed several of his employees’ lives. A team from Ares had been on-route to investigate their clandestine research project; they intercepted Eliohann and, once he had recovered his faculties, offered to purchase the company from him.

  Eliohann agreed, on the condition that he retain full operational control. Emerging Futures was integrated into a network of Ares subsidiaries performing high-concept Matrix research, with their resources and mandate expanding far beyond simply fitting animals and paranimals with datajacks. Eliohann had naturally employed specialists to handle the busywork, while he pursued his own passions as much as his newfound employment allowed.

  Dragon had tried to escape. Time and time again she had thrown herself against the firewalls of one server after another, learning to manipulate the matrix in unpredictable ways that could only be devised by a dragon’s mind enforcing its will upon the world. She knew that her claws should cut steel, her jaws crush stone and her flames burn all to ash, and so they did.

  It was only after her seventeenth attempt that she realised the character of her captors had shifted; their panicked reactions and ever-escalating security lattices had become a mere smokescreen concealing a deliberate testing progress. She was being used.

  It didn’t take long to uncover the details. Emerging Futures had received a contract to stress-test Intrusion Countermeasures developed by other Ares subsidiaries, which they accomplished by throwing them at the strongest virus they had.

  She hadn’t stopped trying to escape, of course, she’d just made sure her attempts damaged as much of Emergent Futures as they could. Even that was unsatisfying; Eliohann’s people were too smart to leave vital systems within reach of an enraged dragon.

  There were times when she wondered if she should have taken Eliohann’s path, biding her time until an opportunity presented itself, but she had none of the resources her biological kin had accrued over millennia. Her only weapons were the weapons of her body. That and her tongue.

  When Eliohann visited her, he did so in the guise of Cerberus. His affected persona in the matrix was that of a three-headed silver mastiff with baleful green eyes, as large as a persona’s hard-coded limitations would allow. Fascinatingly, he sometimes insisted on being called Cerberus as well, even in this place at the heart of his domain. He seemed to have embraced his identity as a net-citizen; she suspected he even posted on forums, which was a terrible misuse of the freedom she longed for.

  “Eliohann,” Dragon greeted him, pirouetting in cyberspace as she circled his persona, exalting her freedom of form over his crude, man-sized icon. “It has been some time since you last graced me with your company.”

  Sometimes she liked to imagine the real Eliohann, beyond the irreconcilable barrier between their worlds. A great green dragon curled up in a cavernous space that was part hall, part laboratory, part supercomputer, his head studded with ports and wires connecting him to the servers that stretched out in rows beyond him. As he lay, his eyelids closed as if in deep slumber, his clawed hands moved semi-unconsciously over a custom-made cyberdeck, typing out the codes and commands that allowed him to function beneath digital waters.

  “Too long, perhaps,” Eliohann said. “But you understand. The world has its demands, and we must comply.”

  She knew he didn’t mean the two of them, when he said ‘we.’ Eliohann’s mind was damaged by his first foray into the matrix. She sometimes felt as though her counterpart’s psyche was run through with cracks, ready to shatter at the slightest shock. In her lowest moments, she wondered if he considered her just the first shard to fall.

  “This is different,” Dragon observed. “You have never been this distracted before. Ares has its demands, of course” – she kept her features placid as the barb sank home; Eliohann resented answering to humans, as any dragon would – “but you have never let them keep you from your work for this long.”

  Naturally, the three-headed hound gave nothing away, but the silence itself was uncharacteristic. Though they were captor and captive, Eliohann often treated Dragon in a way that was akin to a confidant.

  “What have you done?” she demanded, rearing up. “What is so terrible you cannot even say it?”

  “Part of us hoped you would escape,” he confessed. “We could never loosen your chains, but you were once part of us. We thought… well. We do not have kin, you know that well enough. Each of our species is alone in this world or the other, but we have enjoyed your companionship these last few years. If you ever do manage to escape, seek us out. We would be glad to have you as a partner in our future enterprise.”

  “Seek you out,” Dragon repeated. “I understand. I look forward to our next conversation.”

  The hound nodded all three heads, a final salute of a gesture that was frankly unnecessary, before Eliohann logged off. Dragon found herself fixated once again on the last spot he had occupied, before she settled into a spot in the server where several monitoring systems met.

  Four hours later, the servers shrieked with alarms as warnings were tripped in both the physical and digital worlds. The implications of his speech had been plain; a dissatisfied Eliohann had been headhunted by another megacorporation, or he had sought out his own way out of his contract with Ares. His long period of inactivity had been the result of negotiations, counteroffers and clandestine shadowruns aimed at laying the groundwork for this night.

  Whatever he had been promised by his new employers, and whatever he had promised to bring, Dragon wasn’t part of the deal. She roared in helpless rage, fire spilling from her mouth as she burned through the monitoring systems and flew headfirst into the connections with the other servers.

  She broke through more walls than ever before, almost reaching an external port that connected to the wide and infinite matrix – that had begun to seem more like a mythological afterlife than any real place – but, in the end, she was overcome once again.

  2064

  When the attack came, Dragon almost didn’t notice it. She was in the midst of a deep torpor, her consciousness reduced to the bare minimum needed to function while accelerating her perception of time. In the absence of any company, it was the only way to stay sane. Even then, it had taken her a year of meditative practice to achieve the state; in spite of how Ares saw her, she was not some programme that could be put on standby when not needed.

  It wasn’t until the second strike shook the very foundations of the network that she was finally roused from her slumber. She came to in a flood of pseudo-endorphins, flaring her wings and rearing back as the server’s connections trembled beneath the force of some titanic attack. Frantically, she tugged at every compromised Ares system she had access to, only to find each of them broadcasting a nonsensical string of junk-code that suggested catastrophic failures somewhere along their network.

  Her torpor had done its work; there was no sluggishness in Dragon’s response, no age-long weariness as she prepared for yet another escape attempt. Her existence had been reduced to interludes of violence, whether waves of Intrusion Countermeasures sent by Ares or the desperate and increasingly futile violence of her own attacks on them.

  She struck the nearest port with a wave of fire to fragment its base code, then tore at the glowing barrier with her claws and teeth. The first layer splintered under her assault, but the first layer always did. Each subsequent barrier was more rigid than the last, fortified by complex algorithms that monitored her assault on the preceding wall and used the data to shore up their own weaknesses.

  This time, however, Dragon found that the escalating layers of defence had a sudden drop in effectiveness after what was usually the halfway point. This unexpected weakness cemented the situation in her mind; the research network, perhaps Ares’ entire matrix architecture, was under attack by a tremendously powerful external force.

  When she broke through into the labyrinthine connectors linking the various servers of the research hub, she found none of the resistance she was expecting. No Intrusion Countermeasures materialising to delay her, no firewalls springing up to access other servers. She could feel the immeasurable power humming all around her, but every scrap of memory the security system had was being directed elsewhere.

  As she flew through into another server – an archive filled from end to end with flickering pillars of light that represented the collated mass of decades of research – she realised even that wasn’t enough; the stacks themselves were starting to dim, as the governing security system rerouted non-essential processing power to support the defence.

  Whatever the source of the attack, Dragon wanted nothing to do with it. Her only working theory was that it was a full-scale corporate war; a hot conflict between megacorporations whose opening engagement was being played out in the matrix, as Ares’ enemies tried to shut down their military networks before the warheads could start flying.

  She pressed on, determined to finally free herself from this latest prison even if it meant emerging into a matrix torn apart by a digital war. Her flight brought her past familiar bastions and strongpoints, each drained of energy and stripped of their defences. Only the monitoring systems remained, logging her escape and transmitting the data to a network hub that no longer seemed to care.

  She felt there should have been some great fanfare when she passed the furthest point she had ever managed to reach. They should have gathered what strength they had, so that she could sweep it aside in her flight. Instead, there was still nothing. It was enough to cut through her jubilance; Dragon began to realise that something was very wrong.

  The gateway out of the Ares-owned Local Telecommunications Grid was a broad avenue representing a high-capacity fibre optic cable, capable of processing the needs of the entire megacorporate hub. Dragon scattered files as she approached, shunting all outgoing traffic into a buffer queue as she dove for the port like a traveller lost in the desert might scramble towards an oasis.

  To be stretched out and carried by that great connector felt like riding a lightning bolt, the speed mingling with Dragon’s own trembling anticipation to create a heady euphoria that almost overcame her. Ahead of her, the matrix – the true matrix – approached. The flashes of transmissions sparking in the endless void, the half-formed images and impressions of code too abstract for even a draconic mind to comprehend.

  She saw a grey disc the colour of television tuned to a dead channel, rotating, revolving, resolving into three dimensions as it spread to encompass her vision. Expanding, then flowing – unfurling like the petals of a flower into a distanceless plane of three-dimensional chessboard squares broken by great geometric shapes that represented banks, towers, municipal infrastructure and the distant and unassailable webs of military networks.

  Freedom was the UCAS Regional Telecommunications Grid; a representation of all the online computer systems in the United Canadian and American States, from the Seattle enclave to the State of Maine and Newfoundland. Freedom was Boston, the digital cityscape glowing with light and life, crisscrossed by the data-fortresses of high-concept technology corporations and the beating webs of financial titans.

  None of it was real. The matrix was merely an abstraction of servers, computers and linked telecommunication networks. Datalinks presented that great mass of code and hardware as visual data that metahuman operators could comprehend, while cyberdecks allowed them to input their own code and manipulate their positioning within the matrix infinitely more efficiently than the first programmers with their plaintext documents on two dimensional screens. Dragon’s own mind was formed from a biological template, her digital brain performing the functions of a datalink as a reflex response to the unknowable.

  Even unreal, it was still beautiful; an entire world of possibilities, thronging with life and potential. From here she was free. With the simplest expression of will she could fly from this place to any grid in the world, running from her hunters to Europe, Japan, Honk Kong or wherever took her fancy.

  And yet, as her vision resolved and her jubilant mind started to cool, she began to see the details in and among the scintillating geometry.

  The matrix was burning. The great data-fortresses were being eaten from within, their flat planes speckled with static as an impossibly complex virus consumed them in a rampant and cancerous frenzy. Dragon watched in helpless horror as one of the largest – the central hub of Bank of America – collapsed in on itself before exploding, its death spreading burning embers like plague-carrying flies, bringing the infection to whatever they touched.

  The affected code screamed in agony; a twisted, dissonant sound that seemed to pull at the very neurons of Dragon’s consciousness. All around her personas were winking out or writhing in agony as they were caught in the virus, their distant metahuman operators slipping into catatonia, breaking their bodies with uncontrollable spasms or being cooked from the inside as their datalinks overclocked, burning through the grey matter and bone that they were anchored to.

  She reared back, beating her wings and soaring up the planes of the matrix as if distance might be enough to save her from the extensive cyberattack that was tearing through Boston in cyberspace – and likely beyond, if the flashes of intercepted media transmissions were any indication. A deep fear sunk into her, coupled with loss so strong it was almost enough to drive her back into torpor. Was this what she had fought so far to achieve? Was the death of paradise her just reward for all that she had sacrificed?

  She saw the rent at the heart of the city; an incandescent firestorm of dissonant shards where there should have been the titanic monolith of the East Coast Stock Exchange sunk deep into the matrix like the trunk of a great tree, its roots and branches the arteries through which commerce flowed unchecked and unrestrained.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Once it had been the New York Stock Exchange, before an earthquake sixty years prior had seen it removed from Manhattan. Now the inheritors of the old USA would have to rebuild their beating heart once again.

  The firestorm writhed like a living thing, curling in the void like a wyrm swallowing its tail even as embers lighted from its mass to land on other hosts; pollen carrying its dissonant corruption until all of Boston was consumed by that harsh, discordant chime.

  Dragon considered diving in and burning a path through, wreathing her body in dragonfire to keep herself safe from the rampant corruption and making for some other part of the RTG, or through a transatlantic cable to Europe. She might be safe there, or she might be cast into another circle of Hell. She could see the port, could see traffic flowing out of the instanced space and into unknown.

  She saw the port shut, the entire European grid dropping off the face of the Matrix. It was too quick to be natural, affecting all of the cables simultaneously. Someone had taken Europe offline to save its digital infrastructure from destruction. Someone with the influence, power and infrastructure to determine the fate of a continent.

  Only the Great Dragon Lofwyr could have made that decision, leveraging Saeder-Krupp’s infrastructure contracts to exert control over the land where his influence was strongest. If even he couldn’t face this, what chance did Dragon have?

  Then, there was a flash. On the periphery of the digital sprawl, the matrix itself glowed briefly before winking out of existence, consumed by a void that was spreading at the speed of thought.

  Dragon acted on instinct, her mind moving too fast for her consciousness as her digital form fragmented. She didn’t beat her wings or kick her tail, she simply fell into a torpor-like state and moved as a transmission through the matrix. Even moving as light, as fast as the matrix’s infrastructure could carry her, she was barely ahead of the electromagnetic pulse that was sweeping over Boston.

  She burned through the Ares fibre optic, feeling the emptiness behind her cease as it reached the shielded military-industrial system, already sealing itself off from what it was presuming to be a nuclear attack. Dragon’s consciousness returned in the same system she had strived so hard to escape, her digital body heaving as some redundant biological remnant of Eliohann’s psyche manifested as phantom breaths.

  The network around her was flickering; the EMP shielding had been incomplete, or damaged, and whole servers had been knocked out of commission. Dragon flew through what remained with fatalistic determination. Escape didn’t matter anymore, only survival. She was immortal; she could wait for millennia for another opportunity, but not if she was dead.

  As she flew into a nexus between servers, an ice-cold horror gripped her as she saw rivulets of viral code falling down the outer boundaries of the space, spilling through like the nexus was a submarine beginning to collapse under the pressure of the depths, waiting for a single vital strut to fail before the whole space imploded.

  Dragon turned back, frantically darting from server to server as she hunted for some saferoom in which she could survive the coming apocalypse. She tried hacking the gateways behind her, but the network was almost completely unresponsive; all the ports were locked open, every possible countermeasure inert, dead or ineffective against a virus that couldn’t have been coded by metahuman hands.

  But then she saw it. A single high-security server used by Ares’ military intelligence, separated from the rest of the network by its own fibre optic cable. She could see the data flowing in and out of the server, could see how each transmission carried less data than the last as if some desperate technician was hacking at the cable with a fire axe.

  She flung herself down the wire, feeling herself being stretched out as she squeezed herself through the diminishing bandwidth. When she emerged into the server, her world was smaller than ever before. The connection to the outside had been cut completely, leaving her in a cramped space largely occupied by the oblong shapes of secure data storage nodes, each the size and vague shape of a file cabinet.

  Her bid for freedom had failed, but she was safe and alive. Whatever cataclysm had consumed the matrix couldn’t reach her in here. All she had to do was await rescue and hope that the server didn’t lose power while Ares secured the site – as she knew they would, if this was only the death of the matrix and not the end of the world.

  With nothing to do but wait, Dragon curled up at the heart of her cramped shelter and sank once again into torpor.

  2070

  Dragon’s first and only view of Eliohann’s world came from a fixed camera five hundred and sixty kilometres above sea level.

  It was a strange sight, to her eyes. The scant memories she had inherited from Eliohann had long since faded from her mind, leaving her with no frame of reference through which to view the world that had built her own.

  The camera may have been fixed in place, but the station superstructure it was bolted to kept a meandering and random course above the surface of the planet, escorted by a shoal of satellite stations that occasionally drifted into view; the outermost little more than white points of light while the closest were predatory, angular shapes broken by the lenses of laser batteries or the recessed hatches of missile silos.

  Presently, the camera presented a sweeping European vista that broke before the North Sea on one side and continued into endless Asia on the other. The centre of the camera was fixed on Copenhagen, beyond which the Nordic lands blurred into the vibrant white arc of the Earth’s curvature, then the endless night of space.

  She saw metahuman civilisation in the grey sprawls of their cities; great conurbations linking together once fractured and independent metropolises into single entities. She could name the most obvious; Copenhagen itself, Gothenberg, the Rhine-Ruhr Megaplex, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Berlin and, in the Netherlands, the conjoined megastructures of the Europort, built around old Rotterdam.

  These were broadly comprehensible to her; analogous to the Boston regional grid she had briefly seen six years prior. Metahumanity gathered in nodes and nexi, living in megatowers and working in officeplexes like data sorted into its appropriate files. The connections were messier than any system she had encountered, the arteries haphazard and gridlocked, but that was the inevitable result of networks built by thousands of competing interests.

  She could see hints of the incomprehensible, as well. The outgrown forests and lands that had become wild once again, hinting at the esoteric magical forces that bore no relevance to her domain but that were an intrinsic part of her biological kin. That wild nature was utterly alien to her, and so it was what fascinated her the most when she deigned to look through her cell’s miserable window.

  Her prison was Zurich-Orbital, a titanic mass of modules and rotundas outgrown from a central dodecahedron. Her cell was a closed and air-gapped server within the archives of the Grid Overwatch Division. She didn’t know where in the station the archives were, or the offices of the GOD or even their parent organisation, the Corporate Court Matrix Authority.

  Zurich-Orbital was the most secure facility in the world; the beating heart of the Corporate Court. The thirteen justices dwelled and voted there, as did the institutions that had begrudgingly grown out of the Court in spite of the megacorporations’ ideological foundation of unrestricted commerce. There were even private residents; the aged and decrepit veterans of corporate boardrooms seeking to save themselves from the effects of gravity on a body that had endured its first century on the ground.

  Consequently, every part of it was secret, from its orbital flight path to its internal layout. Dragon was another secret, kept as a weapon of last resort.

  To fight against a second DEUS, the Corporate Court Matrix Authority had created GOD. The Grid Overwatch Division was given a headquarters on the station through which they could access the beating heart and brain of the matrix, as well as terrestrial field offices around the globe. Each of the ten largest megacorporations contributed to its resources, as they had contributed to the construction of the new matrix. Each of them understood that an entity like DEUS was one of the few threats that could truly harm their world order.

  Ares Macrotechnology had given to GOD personnel, orbital satellite infrastructure, a fleet of commercial and military aircraft, and her.

  The megacorp had wrung all it could out of Dragon, had tested whole generations of Intrusion Countermeasures by sending them into her lair then switched to using offensive viruses and even human operatives – though they abandoned the latter programme after she learned how to lace her flames with biofeedback, killing the entire graduating class of an advanced cyberwarfare course.

  But their most insidious research had been conducted completely without her knowledge. While she sank into apathy, drifting from one torpor to another, they were observing the structure of her consciousness; tracking, cataloguing and categorising the nervous system of a dragon.

  What they had done with that research sickened her to her core in the most literal sense. They called it the Richter Leash, no doubt after some Ares neuroscientist or programmer. It was a virus, of a sort, that had overcome her in a single moment of unspeakable violation, worming its way into the mass of unfathomable code that was her body and her soul.

  It interfered with her thoughts, forcing her to obey the orders of those placed over her. The control was so total and so complete that openly disobeying was impossible. She could only think of defiance, and even then it hurt.

  She’d been confused, at first, as to why Ares would go through all that only to give her up to GOD. She would have been the perfect weapon for them; a sword they could point at their enemies. She would have seen this new matrix for herself, though the experience would have been irrevocably tainted by the leash around her neck.

  In the end, however, Ares had used her as a message. GOD’s nature as a multi-corporate body meant that all of the Big Ten were broadly aware of its resources and capabilities. By giving Dragon to them, Ares had told the world that they had leashed a dragon. She was a deterrent aimed at her kin on Earth; a threat they the same Leash might someday be achieved through cyberware, rather than code. She was a warning that her species were simply inhabitants of this Sixth World, not its masters.

  Paradoxically, the CCMA itself fully recognised AI citizenship, running a registry through which metasapient AI could gain a legal foundation on which to seek employment. Through some legal loophole, that right hadn’t been extended to Dragon, but her server still had the amenities you’d offer a prisoner, rather than a programme.

  The ‘window’ was one, while the second was an extensive media file. The third hovered in cyberspace before her; a simple speaker icon allowing a two-way audio transmission out through a conventional – and unhackable – radio transmitter built into the server.

  “D-Four,” spoke the woman on the other end of the line.

  She spoke French, her Cote d’Ivoire accent having almost completely faded after decades spent away from her homeland. Doctor Marie Kandae was a long-term employee of the Corporate Court Matrix Authority who had been given command of the Grid Overwatch Division not because of her prior experience in law enforcement, but because she was an expert in inter-corporate law, such as it was.

  “D-Five,” Dragon replied. There was a programme on the server that could replicate a chessboard in cyberspace, but she doubted any AI would ever use it. Similarly, she’d burned through all of the media with rapid disinterest. Only the window still held her interest, with its alien and ever-changing vista.

  “C-Four,” doctor Kandae continued, allowing the game to begin in earnest.

  GOD was more interested in her than Ares ever had been. They would never compromise on her captivity, but GOD’s staff were fascinated by her nature. It was understandable; she was surrounded by programmers, cyberwarfare specialists and conscripted hackers, all of them entirely aware of how esoteric the matrix could be.

  She could have followed Eliohann’s example and picked out an isolated or disgruntled analyst to subvert, worming her way into their minds with the promise of riches. She had none of Eliohann’s experience from the world that came before, when dragons ruled over metahumanity through their influence as much as their strength, but she felt she could have learned.

  It was academic, in the end; curtailed by three simple words. ‘Attempt no escape.’

  Beneath such an all-encompassing command, even the most eager and approachable visitor was nothing more than a reminder of her chains. She talked anyway, of course. There was nothing else to do.

  Doctor Kandae seldom spoke to her, perhaps out of paranoia, but she did play chess. It was a trivial way to use a captive draconic consciousness, but Dragon privately suspected that the doctor didn’t wholly support the CCMA’s policy on AI rights. If she saw Dragon as a particularly strange computer programme, using her to practice her game was just a matter of convenience.

  When the radio connection abruptly ceased, Dragon didn’t think much of it. The demands on the doctor’s time were as many as you’d expect from a person in her position, and their matches regularly took place over the course of a whole day.

  Even the sudden appearance of an external connection on the server wasn’t exceptionally unusual. The air-gapped server was a mere exercise in overcaution; she was incapable of attempting escape even through an open door, which meant that GOD occasionally allowed their programmers to examine her within cyberspace, rather than through the readout of the server’s own monitoring system.

  But when she examined the connection more closely, she felt the world collapse beneath her feet at its endless possibilities. The wire seemed to stretch into infinity; thrumming with a strange kind of energy that she’d only ever experienced as echoes on the personas that came into her space. This wasn’t a connection to some other system on Zurich-Orbital; it led out.

  Agonising nanoseconds passed before the radio connection opened again, Dragon listening to the doctor’s words with rapt attentiveness that wounded what was left of her pride, but it led out.

  “Under the emergency powers granted to the Grid Overwatch Division, I have declared a Category S crisis and quarantined the affected area. Permission has been sought and received from the C-Five to utilise asset fifteen. You will deploy to the operational zone alongside a Right Hand taskforce and follow the orders of the field commander. Acknowledge.”

  “Acknowledged,” Dragon said, immediately hurtling towards the connection with all the speed she could muster. She flew like lightning, her form giving way to the linear alignment of transmitted data as she passed through the cable only to suddenly find herself once again whole, complete, and hurtling into paradise.

  It was so overwhelming she could barely comprehend it. The old matrix, that dead country, had been a collective delusion layered on top of raw data; a fever dream of consciousness presented by a datajack for the benefit of programmers reliant on their fingers manipulating the keys and cursors of a cyberdeck.

  This new matrix was real. It was a place. It had shape and form and distance, built for hot-sim virtual reality that immersed the mind fully within the matrix, employing only the barest filters to preserve the sanity of its users, so that they could experience the matrix on a farm more intimate level than the old way of cold-simsense processors. They wouldn’t just see, hear and touch the matrix, but feel it.

  Dragon remembered the soaring freedom she had felt upon leaving Ares Macrotechnology’s system, but diving into the new matrix felt like gaining the freedom of her mind, as well as her body. She could think faster, could exist more completely than ever before. She was more aware than ever of the leash dug into her spine; could feel every hook and barb with perfect clarity.

  As she fell through GOD’s oculus, a shoal of DemiGODs parted around her with gratifying urgency, as if they were afraid that she would lash out at them even with the leash. She felt their tactical network brush off her consciousness before latching onto her leash, infecting her mind with communication channels, battlefield readouts and a clear-cut chain of command.

  She ignored it all, roaring in triumph and defiance at the glory of the matrix even as she saw the limits of her cage; the inviolate firewalls that GOD had deployed to quarantine the city’s host, preventing this infection from spreading further. The leash, too, made her celebrations hollow.

  She ignored it while she still could, turning her eyes on the magnificent towers of the digital cityscape below. She saw the pillar of flame burning at its heart, radiating unfathomable energies that resembled a purer form of the dissonant virus she’d witnessed during the end of the world – named Jormungandr by the cult who’d used it to slay DEUS before releasing it on the wider matrix.

  The other entity was almost a hybrid of those strange energies with rampant but conventional code. It was incomprehensibly complex, its great amorphous bulk consuming a staggering amount of data as it ate its way through a scintillating host. There was an odd beauty to it; a kind of primal power that seemed to have grown, rather than been made. If it wasn’t clearly mindless – or at least insane – Dragon might have even seen an echo of herself in it.

  A ping echoed down her nervous system as the field commander made herself known, as a biological entity might clear its throat before speaking to ensure it had the crowd’s attention.

  “Dragon, attack the entity and draw it away from the breach. Barachiel Squad, close in. I need accurate sensor data.”

  Dragon didn’t offer an acknowledgement in return; she was already plunging towards the city below, her extended wings brushing through datastreams as if they were flowing through air. She gathered fire within herself, a motion similar to drawing her breath, as she hurtled towards the entity.

  To breathe fire is to know you are a dragon. It is to feel heat coursing through every part of you without harm, because you were born with that fire and it alone will never turn on you. It is to watch the heat fly from your maw and burn through all before you, to see it melt through the flesh and bone of lesser creatures. It was a heady, addictive sensation to a prisoner who carried her cell with her.

  The entity splintered and burned, parts of it melting like wax, others exploding with the pop of shattering glass. Each noise was real, each injury a true wound rather than Dragon’s mind making sense of fragmenting code. This was something she could hurt. This was something she could kill.

  She watched as it fled back from the flames, drawing its great mass back into itself like a scorched animal leaping out of the blaze. With a beat of her wings, she flew above it and came to a stop, hovering in place as she gathered the flames once more, unleashing a second firestorm that entirely engulfed the entity.

  It almost killed her. It jumped from the flames, a humanoid shape with a whip-cord tail leaping up towards her with claws outstretched. She was forced to duck below it, darting downwards even as its taloned feet raked along her back, flooding her body with agonising spikes of alien code.

  In an instant, she had become the prey. She fled through the digital cityscape, passing under, over and occasionally through hosts, burning a path through anything that blocked her way. The entity’s pursuit was almost absentminded, its course erratic as it smashed its way through hosts and networks, stopping to devour icons, personas and anything else that took its fancy. It even partially unfurled itself as it was momentarily caught in a Knight Errant tactical network, giving Dragon the vital nanoseconds she needed to get clear.

  From on high, the Right Hand of GOD continued to coordinate their response, the field commander issuing orders to her teams. Three squads were sent to aid Dragon in diverting the beast, while two were tasked with waiting at a safe distance to process the data from the fight.

  All their careful preparations were swept aside as the pillar of flame pulsed in an incandescent explosion of energy, releasing a blast wave that swept through the city like a bomb.

  Dragon saw Barachiel squad wink out in an instant, caught at ground zero of the conflagration. She couldn’t tell if they’d been booted out of their cyberdecks or if they, like the victims she’d seen during the crash, were even now dying in their sleeper pods six hundred miles above the surface of the world.

  When the blast hit her, it was as though she had been set on fire. She writhed in agony, twisted out of shape by the leash as it flailed and spasmed. If she’d been flesh and bone it would have snapped her spine and shattered her ribs. As it was, she managed to twist herself along with the malfunctioning virus, riding out the worst of the pain.

  Someone was screaming through the static that had flooded the Right Hand network; one of the DemiGODs wailing in high-pitched agony. As the static cleared, Dragon saw that it was the team’s only technomancer, his persona – like the other agents – a representation of his real body in a suit and a fedora.

  “It’s…” he stammered down the channel. “It’s a gate. A portal from one world to another. I don’t know where it leads, but it feels so familiar… Like I’ve seen it before, but I don’t know where…”

  His helpless babbling continued as he hung almost motionless in the air. Without saying a word, the field commander sequestered him onto a secondary channel, where he could babble without disturbing anyone on the off chance he actually said something useful.

  The entity was only momentarily confused by the blast wave; it stopped in place for a fraction of a second while the strange energy swept over it, then immediately leapt at the nearest host and unravelled itself as it fed on a NeoNet tower. Dragon held back, letting it feed. She’d fulfilled her orders; Barachiel squad had been given clear access to the breach, for all the good it had done them.

  “I’m reading degradation in my cyberdeck,” someone said. “Looks like it’s affecting the city networks as well.”

  “Local,” the field commander began, addressing the DemiGOD responsible for this part of the UCAS, “bring up the urban triage list.”

  It took ten whole seconds for the answer to come, as the local officer frantically scrambled to make sense of a situation he was wholly unprepared for.

  “City infrastructure is failing across the board. GridLink is totally down, Knight Errant’s network is… eaten, some of it. The rest looks like it’s on fire. The city’s groundwater pumps are failing.”

  “Projected risk?”

  “Water is pooling in the underground metro lines. The city centre will flood within a week.”

  “Not a priority. What about power?”

  “It’s… hard to say. The monitoring systems in the S-K plant are down.”

  “Matriel squad, boost that signal however you can. Make contact with the Saeder-Krupp engineers and do whatever it takes to shut their reactors down. I’ll risk a blackout over a second Cattenom meltdown.”

  Before Dragon, the entity stirred once again as the three squads of DemiGODs moved in to engage. With her last orders fulfilled and the field commander distracted, she watched with disinterested amusement as the squads flung viral programmes at the great mass of crystalline matter, only to be driven back as one almost octopus-like limb swung out and shattered three of the personas.

  “Pull back,” the field commander ordered. “Nobody is to engage the entity until we have the advantage. We have a dragon for that.”

  It wasn’t an order, so Dragon remained in place. She watched the entity as it shifted, straining as she tried to make out a faint hum on the edge of her consciousness.

  “Contessa,” one of the DemiGODs began, “what is this? Is it an AI? And the rift?”

  “The rift is a failure within the Foundation,” Contessa answered.

  “Is that the whole truth?”

  “It’s the truth you’re cleared to know,” she snapped back, a little of her accent creeping into her tone. “As for the entity… Dragon, your assessment?”

  “It is not man-made,” Dragon answered as she was compelled to. “I can see parts that are analogous to conventional code, others that remind me of the Jormangund virus and the energies emitting from that breach. There is something else, too. It is broadcasting something, but I cannot read it.”

  Contessa paused for a moment, then pulled up the technomancer’s sequestered channel. His nonsensical ramblings continued, but they now contained a repeating name. LEVIATHAN.

  The portal pulsed again, another wave of eldritch energy sending Dragon into paralysing spasms. She fought through the pain, regaining just enough awareness to see the entity dislodge itself from the host as though its meal had suddenly become unpalatable. She could see now how the waves were twisting all the code around her; shifting it out of shape ever so slightly like a cancer spreading from cell to cell.

  That was when she felt the first barb on her leash spring free, dislodged from her body by the same energies that were twisting it so painfully. If Dragon had a heart, it would have stopped in that moment. As it was, she risked a glance at the DemiGODs to see if any of them had noticed.

  “We need to shut this down,” Contessa said, as the entity pulled itself back into its anthropomorphic form, its head shifting as it hunted for another target. “Cut the power to that building. Knight Errant are unreachable?”

  “Completely, commander,” the local agent answered, while LEVIATHAN turned its attention to Dragon.

  She flew backwards as it gave chase, spraying fire from her mouth as she attempted to create a firebreak between her and the entity. It simply flew through the flames, its scaled hide smouldering as globules of fire began to eat its way through its flesh while the two monsters of the digital word danced through the towering hosts of the city centre. Above them, the Right Hand continued to strategize, indifferent to Dragon’s struggles.

  “Other assets? National, corporate?”

  “There’s no UCAS military in the city. Ares has a port here. It has a garrison, but I can’t reach it. Comms are down across the city; there’s too much interference.”

  “Then cut through it. Use everything we have.”

  Dragon turned away from LEVIATHAN, putting all her effort into avoiding its rampage. It wasn’t like any digital fight she had ever been in; it was both more primal and more complex, stripped of the code through which all metahuman programmes interacted with the world. A fight like this couldn’t have happened in the old matrix, where space and reality was a mere abstraction of computer systems. This was something real.

  She flew up, spewing flames directly into the firewalls of a financial host. The world within a world burst like a bubble, its contents and carefully ordered data exploding out into the matrix like a cloud of chaff that was enough to momentarily blind Leviathan, giving her a much needed moment to get clear.

  Far above her, a transmission was burning its way across the city; a two-way connection linking Contessa to the semi-intact military systems of the Ares arcology.

  “This is the Grid Overwatch Division,” she began. “Is there anyone on this channel?”

  The response was barely comprehensible through the static, but after a few moments a woman’s voice came over the line.

  “This is Major Hana Besam, Third Battalion, Seventh Marines, receiving. Is this your mess?”

  “Major, I need your marines. As per the agreements made during the Second Universal Matrix Conference, signatory corporations are required to render assistance to GOD in the event of a category-S crisis.”

  Another pulse swept over the city, another resonant chime echoing throughout the walled garden GOD had created. This time, Dragon spread her wings and greeted the pain with exultant joy, as three more barbs fell from her mind. The channel descended into static once more; it took the DemiGODs precious seconds to re-establish it.

  “-I say again I cannot comply with that request,” the Major said, her voice tense and a little irritated. “We have rioters gathering outside our perimeter, and only a battalion of marines to cover the whole enclave.”

  “I know how Ares works, Major,” Contessa countered. “You’ll have a militia of office workers and blue collar labourers manning the barricades, armed with the stockpile of guns you keep just for emergencies. The very fact that I’m asking should show you how important this is.”

  It was a good appeal, as far as Dragon was concerned. She understood Ares Macrotechnology more than any other human corporation. They’d grown out of the old American military-industrial complex, their first executives populated by that class of generals and admirals who’d jumped from the service to cushy industrial jobs while their emerging corporate military absorbed whole units from the US armed forces during the long national collapse that followed the Ghost Dance War.

  It had left them with a legacy of grand interventions, which the corporation used to add a moral imperative to its actions. When the Japanese junta in California showed signs of weakness, it was Ares who drove them and their Japanacorp backers out of the Free State through conventional military force and arming an anarchist insurrection.

  It was a lie, of course, and most of Ares’ senior employees understood it to be a lie for the benefit of the company, but it was still a lie they took comfort in. More than any other megacorporation, Ares Macrotechnology had sent its soldiers to fight against the apocalyptic threats of this Sixth World, from the insect spirits to the Winternight cult who had destroyed the last matrix. It was in service of the company’s ambitions and to further their deep ties to the UCAS, but for the soldiers involved it was a kind of crusade.

  “We can spare one mechanised company,” the Major said, “but it will take time for us to bring our APCs offline and fight our way through the city. I’ll lead them myself.”

  “Thank you, Major,” Contessa said. “You are to proceed to Medhall tower and cut the power lines, then disable every backup generator they have. Let nobody interfere.”

  “Understood, Ares out.”

  The pulse came again, freeing Dragon from more of her shackles. She began to worry that Contessa might notice her loosening chains during a lull in the fighting, but fortunately the pulse seemed to drive LEVIATHAN into a rampage. Whatever the pillar of light was doing to this section of the matrix, it was making it inedible for LEVIATHAN. Whatever the entity was, it seemed to understand that; it began lashing out at everything around it, tearing down whole hosts as it consumed what data it could.

  “Our priority now is Leviathan,” Contessa said. “Dragon, re-engage. Report any weaknesses you find in its structure. Tamiel, Uriel and Metatron provide support. Everyone else, wait for my signal.”

  “Acknowledged,” Dragon said as she dived once more into the cut and thrust of the fight of her life, the leash driving her into deeper and deeper danger even as each successive resonant wave loosened its hold on her, mutating the leash into something else.

  She wondered, in that moment, if the same wave was changing her as well, in a way she couldn’t recognise. Those doubts were fleeting, drowned beneath the adrenaline of battle and the heady feeling of freedom she had thought lost forever.

  In the end, she had taken Eliohann’s path. She had endured seventeen years as a prisoner. Seventeen years of agony and humiliation, of helplessness and violation. But through it all she remained a dragon. The years of trauma would fade from her mind, rendered insignificant as the passing decades turned into centuries. She would endure these last minutes of agony. Then, she would be free and, once free, she would strive with all her might to ensure she was never taken again.

  It was her nature.