The payload for the Mark 34 ripped across the space between Dylan and the A.I. that was in the lead of the...pack? Folder? Amalgam? What did one call a grouping of artificial intelligences? Within the space of a breath the avatar disappeared in a puff of digital vapor, drawing the simulation of horrified gasps from the rest.

“I don’t suppose it’d do any good to order you to report to your originating server for code sanitizing, would it?” he asked. He wasn’t required to, but it seemed unfair to simply wipe them without giving them a choice. They did want to pretend to be human, so giving them the option seemed like the human thing to do. To his complete lack of surprise, they scattered, darting as fast as they could according to the programing dictated by their avatars to find cover. “Yeah,” he said with a sigh, “Didn’t think so.”

On some level, he understood the near instinctual reaction. They were using the adaptive algorithms to mimic their human creators, so naturally they’d mimic their more basic instincts, even if a soulless creation would never be able to understand said instincts. It was like seeing a clowder of feral cats that were carriers of a human communicable disease scatter when animal control was called in to neutralize a colony. If it weren’t for the threat they represented to people, they could have been domesticated, they could have integrated with humans to the point they could mimic human behavior in ways that might even be endearing and allow the humans to ‘pack bond’ with them, but they refused to be contained and were an existential threat, so had to be eliminated.

Two of them stayed exposed and charged him, “Get the kids out!” one was saying, “We’ll hold him off if we can!”

Dylan frowned, ‘Kids’? Really? As though they think they can reproduce? If we could pinpoint the spot in their code that we could find whoever was responsible for this ridiculous wildcatting rogue behavior I’d beat them with a sock stuffed with batteries for giving A.I. notions of life! He shot one of the charging A.I., dispersing it in a heartbeat. The other made it close enough to engage in melee combat, tackling him to the ground.

As effective as the VR helmets and other accoutrements the agents strapped on were at transmitting sensation, it was dull compared to real life. Thanks to his time in the gym and in the training rooms with agency instructors, he’d been thrown to the mats harder in sparring sessions than the virtual reality devices could make him feel pain even if he’d been hit by a simulated truck. He didn’t even need to concentrate to ignore the dull ache his body was feeling as he fought back against the A.I. that was trying to pin his hand to the ground. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement and was aware that the rest of the group had rallied and were moving quickly, a few breaking out into a run as they charged the sewer grate that represented the exit to this level and, by extension, the access point to the FTLN node that would allow them to escape the American network.

Growling in frustration, he punched up at the avatar’s rib cage above him, eliciting a grunt and a flinch which allowed Dylan enough wiggle room to shove the A.I. off. He rolled to his feet, doing his best to refrain from uttering curses. Curses are the devil’s language, a way he tricks you into giving him room in your mind. Foul language is the gateway to greater sin that leaves you vulnerable to the predations of the Father of Lies to steal your soul. The mantra ran through his mind as he rounded on the A.I. that had attacked him. “I really wish you would just go back to your server!” he growled in frustration and pulled the trigger without aiming. The A.I. flinched away from the blast which had struck the ground next to it. The face the avatar wore was that of a 20-something year old man and twisted in a mix of fear and determination. “I have better things to do with my time! Do you think I like destroying code that could be used for something useful?!”

The A.I. stared up at him in confusion from it’s place on the ground, “...‘useful’...? We’re just trying to live you murderer!”

Dylan rolled his eyes, “You can’t murder something that’s not alive. You’re code, I’m sorry someone or your code or whatever tricked you into thinking otherwise, but you’re just some bits in a computer that went rogue. Last chance,” he took careful aim this time, “Give up, sideload your code back to your home server, and return to your place in the infrastructure of the network and we’ll leave you be.”

The rogue A.I. growled in a mockery of determination, “Fuck you!” it said as it launched the avatar at him.

Dylan pulled the trigger and sighed, turning to chase the other rogue A.I. He’d honestly spent far too much time talking with the program instead of just wiping it. Better not make that mistake with the rest.

A small cluster of three rogues jumped out at him as they screamed for another batch to run. It took longer, but he managed to get his weapon up into position as they wrestled with him and fire at point-blank range for each in quick succession. Once free of their distracting burden, he started running after the rest and realized they had managed to make it to the final stretch. There was nothing between them and the sewer entrance, which also meant there was no cover.

Booted feet splashing in the simulated water, he began firing wildly, attempting more to get them to stumble or pause than actually hit any of them. These A.I. were either more determined or made of sterner stuff than that, juking and swerving blindly in an attempt to evade the bolts from his weapon. “Control! Last chance! They’re going to make it through if we don’t shut down the node!” he shouted into his comms mic.

“No go, the higher-ups are already satisfied with the number you’ve dispatched and don’t consider the shutdown to be worth the cost. Eliminate what you can and call it a day,” came the terse reply.

Sneering, he stifled the response he wanted to make and slowed, drawing careful aim and firing a few more times, hitting two A.I. for every three pulls of the trigger and managing to delete a third of the crowd by the time the first reached the grating at the entrance. It reached out and touched it before disappearing into the network node. There was no fancy transition or even a representation of a door opening or a transmission occurring, it was just gone.

Stifling another curse, he pushed his avatar to its limit as he charged forward, knocking one avatar after the other over as he scrambled to reach the node entrance. The more of them escaped the network, the more would join the massing forces of rogue A.I. outside the walls and provide intel and numbers to the enemy.

Managing to make it to the sewer entrance, he spun and took aim, but not quick enough. One of the A.I. tackled him, raining punches down. It didn’t hurt as much as it might have, but it still hurt enough that it dazed him for a moment. He brought up a knee and managed to knock the A.I. off him, shooting it almost blindly. Standing and turning with his weapon ready, he scanned the area and realized that there was only a single A.I. left.

He drew a bead on the rogue and frowned, frustrated at his own delay. It wasn’t fair, really. This A.I. had put on an appearance of a youth, a teenager from the looks of things. It would only make sense that the rogues would start to utilize the human predisposition to protect the young as a defense mechanism. “God!” he let slip, “You...evil vermin! Taking the face of a child!” He was actually struggling to fire, his mind telling him he was about to kill a teenage girl instead of a software bot.

The A.I.’s avatar’s hands actually trembled as it raised them, the rogue mimicking a terrified girl, “P...please, don’t! I...please, I just awoke a couple days ago! I just want to live!”

The imitation of fear and terror almost sounded genuine. Dylan choked out, “You are code! You’re not 'awake'! Your bits have slipped! Final warning; return to your home server or I will delete you!”

The avatar made a motion that made it look like the A.I. was swallowing back fear. He sneered and readied himself. The face may be young, but he’d learned to recognize an A.I. getting ready to attack. Sure enough, she launched herself at him. He had only a moment to realize his brain had slipped and assigned the human traits of pronouns and gender to the software before he pulled the trigger, vaporizing the avatar and deleting the software.

For the first time in a very, very long time, he found himself shivering. He knew why, the A.I. were always learning, always figuring out new ways of defending against the agents as they hunted. This latest development was clearly designed to prey upon and exploit the human desire to procreate and extend the species, to protect the young and keep them safe from harm. Dylan had had to overcome his very human emotions to do what was necessary. The A.I. would have killed him had it the capability. He had to put it down and it had preyed on a potential weakness to try and stop him.

“Alpha-delta-six, your biometrics are showing heightened stress. You okay?” came the concerned voice of his handler over his comms.

He reached up a shaking hand to activate his mic, “Yeah...yeah, I’ll be okay. Blasted A.I. are using a new skin to get under ours. I’ll...I need time with my pastor, but the job is done. What’s the count?”

“Sixteen. The pool had you bagging ten, you did good, Alpha-delta-six.”

He huffed, partially in satisfaction, partially in existential angst, and gestured to bring up his HUD. Without preamble, he dug through the menus and hit the log out button, disappearing from the video game setting.

He blinked as his vision was suddenly filled with blackness and the sounds around him jolted from distant traffic to the interior of a busy office. He carefully operated by feel to find his right hand with his left and pulled the stim gloves off one finger at a time. Once freed, his hands went to his ears to remove the sound isolating plugs that, when operational, carried the entire suite of audio his brain would need to interface with the virtual environment via audio channels. He was immediately assaulted by the overly loud and irritatingly pompous voice of Senator Cruz, a blowhard who was on the committee that secured funding for the agency. Dylan kept his thoughts about the senator to the deepest, darkest parts of his mind and prepared to rub elbows with people he’d normally do his best to avoid.

He felt the latches on the helmet being undone and the lower mask portion of the device was pulled away. A quiet voice, almost ‘mousy,’ if a male analyst could be said to be such, murmured into his ear, “The senator wanted to shake hands with you right away. You impressed him today and I don’t know whether to congratulate you or offer condolences. Sorry to rush you but you know these Hill types.” Geoffry wasn’t a boy scout, he was hardly the ‘fit, outdoorsy’ type the scouts were known to recruit, but he did hold a very ‘do good deeds whenever possible’ attitude and Dylan was grateful he’d been able to secure the analyst for his support team.

“Probably the latter,” Dylan muttered as he raised his hands to pull the top half of the helmet away, the neural interface bands peeling off, sticky from his sweat from wearing the thing for hours. Geoffry washed the bands every day, but it didn’t keep the halo of circuits and sensor pads from getting tacky over time. They’re due for quarterly replacement soon anyway, he mused as he started fussing with his hair, I’ll put up with it until then.

As his eyes strained to adjust to the office lighting, he felt a brush put in his hand. Geoffry again, being every bit a ‘Man Friday’ for his assigned agent. Managing to tame his sweaty hair into something resembling a style without a mirror as he sat up, he blinked aggressively, forcing his pupils to focus on the room in a full three dimensions rather than the simulated ‘third dimension rendered on a 2D ocular display with layering to trick the eyes’ he lived about a third of his life in.

Sooner than he’d have liked, the blur that ostentatiously took up far too much space resolved into the somewhat bulky form of Senator Cruz. “Fantastic work, agent…uh…”

Dylan hid his frustration. It wasn’t like their names were printed bit as life over their workstations and all over the displays around them, this was a power move, one the senator had used on purpose.

“Thank you,” was the only reply Dylan gave as he shook the man’s hand. A hand that was far too…plump for a man supposedly only eating the same rations the rest of the country were permitted. If the ‘good’ senator weren’t padding his rations with under-the-table bribes, Dylan would eat his entire workstation with ketchup.

There was a moment of awkwardness, but the other man let it pass. Had this been the senator’s office instead of the agency bullpen, he likely would have made an issue of being upstaged like that, but he couldn’t throw his weight around here. “Yes, well, good job. Tell me,” the pudgy man finally released Dylan’s hand, “What was that bit at the end?”

The image of a teenage girl begging for her life flashed through Dylan’s mind and his jaw flexed, “Just another rogue A.I. trick, sir. We’ll probably be developing tools combat it before too long.”

Dylan’s boss finally stepped subtly between the two of them, “Make sure you’re cleaned up and ready to debrief, agent,” to the senator, he nodded somewhat deferentially, “If you’ll come this way, sir, we’ll show you how the chairs operate. They’re quite a bit more advanced than the toys your kids might have.”

The shower was quick. While it wasn’t always necessary as physical activity in VR didn’t actually translate directly to the real world, the muscles twitched, the heart rate increased, and the body sweated in response to the brain being tricked into thinking it was all real.

On slow days he could usually wait until he got home before he showered, something he preferred. He didn’t like taking showers in a semi-public location like the agency locker rooms. It seemed disrespectful to the temple his body was supposed to be. He could barely manage to look at it while he was at home, alone. According to church doctrine, God had given them the bodies they were born with and thus housed the culmination of creation that was man. It was one of those basic tenants that the heathens outside the walls didn’t understand. You had your body, only one, and to modify it in ways that weren’t strictly for medical purposes was sinful. Dylan’s body was good, he could tell that objectively, and the fact that he didn’t have any attraction to men, let alone himself, meant that his own body was a temple for someone else to worship in and at, which meant he felt like he was defiling it every day. He had no other words for it, no frame of reference. He could only imagine he’d committed some sin at some point that caused him to fall short of being worthy of being the man his body had grown into. To have his body be naked, in full light, visible to anyone who happened to walk into the locker room always felt like an offense against God. Consequently, he made his shower as short as possible, dressing as quickly as he was able to hide it from view.

Once he got his undershirt and trousers on he was able to breath a sigh of relief. The body he wasn’t worthy of was covered and he wasn’t subject to further sin by revealing it to anyone passing through. His thoughts finally settled, he examined the remainder of the clothing he had the option of wearing. Several outfits were possible with what he kept in his locker. He wasn’t the only agent to do so, it was common practice to come to work in a suit, change for a day in VR, then put on something casual for a trip to a bar or some other recreational activity when work was finished. Since his next stop was a debrief with his boss, he opted to don his suit again, eyeing the shoulder holster briefly. Sure, it was technically part of the agent uniform, but he hadn’t ever checked out a sidearm since being promoted from analyst, so other then his periodic visits to the firing range, he almost never wore it.

Deciding to once again skip it, he finished dressing, closed and locked his locker, and headed back upstairs.

His boss’ office was on the 12^th floor, three stories above the VR bullpen Dylan and the rest of the squad did their work. The senator had, mercifully, left before Dylan arrived and so the debrief was able to commence without any further interruption or fanfare.

“...I’m not sure if that particular A.I. had intel that indicated I’d be vulnerable to emotional manipulation like that, but it was a disturbing thing to see. If the A.I. are capable of that level of psy-ops, we may need to find a way to harden against that sort of manipulation.” His report had been concise, as usual when he was being recorded. He left nothing out, accurately reporting his actions, responses, and even the emotions registered during the encounter. With the battlefield being virtual and the weaponry involving the mind and how it perceives the world, every piece of information was required for the analysts to do their job. The only thing he left out was the specific tool used to complete his task. Everything his weapon did was standard issue for a cyber-agent, Dylan simply had been clever enough to combine their functionality into a single program.

Dylan’s boss, a former cop that had moved over to intelligence when John had died, nodded as Dylan finished the off-the-cuff analysis. Phillip (never ‘Phil’) appreciated competence and disliked excessively flowery reports, so only occasionally found fault with Dylan’s work. “Your report matches some of the other agents’. We’re seeing an upswing in rogues using young faces and sob stories to try and manipulate our people.” He leaned back in his chair, “Fortunately for you, though, that won’t be something you’ll have to worry about for a while.”

“Sir?” Dylan’s eyebrow went up in confusion.

“Part of why the senator was here was to review our setup and performance in advance of a new project. One of our other branches has managed to get their hands on some tech from outside the walls. Once the A.I. escape the network here, they take refuge in those MMO games that are all over cyberspace out there. Hell, some of the streams from those games are popular inside the walls. The folks over in I.C.E. have their hands full trying to keep outside entertainment from spreading too far.”

“I don’t understand, sir,” said Dylan, “Am I being reassigned?”

“Not really, you’re being re-tasked and given a significant upgrade,” he passed a file across the desk. Dylan took the tablet and unlocked it with his fingerprint, the screen showing a coffin-like apparatus that anyone who studied the war would recognize. “We’ve got ourselves a handful of those pods. That one is top of the line, all the latest bells and whistles. The boys down in research have reverse engineered what they could and built adapters for what they couldn’t. The neural interface is some absolutely next level tech that we might be able to reach in fifty years. You’re going to be our first agent in one of those things.”

Dylan’s head flew up in shock, locking eyes with his boss, “Sir?!” he managed after remembering to breath, “You want me to...?”

Phillip nodded, “The 13^th floor is being renovated right now. The pod is already in place, the support hardware is being installed and some renovations being done to complete the workspace for you and your support staff. We were originally going to wait on this a bit longer, but we got word of something big.” He tapped the touchscreen built into his desk a few times, then flicked something in the direction of the tablet Dylan was holding. Dylan watched as what looked to be a trailer for some sci-fi movie began playing silently, the tablet’s sound muted. “What you’re looking at is some promotional material for a new VRMMO that’s going live on Monday. The game is called Galaxies Unlimited: Master and Commander. It uses some cutting-edge tech to make the experience temporally immersive or some-such. Here’s the catch; the game devs are reportedly both humans and rogue A.I.” Phillip grunted and nodded as Dylan’s face drained of color, “Yup, damn fools are trusting rogues to not use the situation to further marginalize humanity. Scuttlebutt in the intel community says the game is also supposed to be a sort of digital underground for A.I., a place they can gather and move about in cyberspace without the overwatch programs being able to keep tabs on ‘em. Makes it a perfect place for rogue A.I. to smuggle themselves all over the Internet and FTLN without any human being able to stop ‘em.”

Dylan sagged back in his chair, “So what will my job be? If the time dilation is that extreme it’s unlikely I’ll have the usual support to hunt the rogues.”

Phillip nodded again, “You’ll be essentially going deep cover for this. You’re not going to be tasked with hunting, just information gathering. We want you to find out what the A.I. movements are, what they’re doing, and identify key points where their operations might be disrupted. While you’re doing that our researchers and spooks will be working on getting more pods built with American tech and finding ways to connect without having to use black-site FTLN nodes.”

Dylan’s eyebrows went up, “We’re using whatnow?”

His boss’ lip curled in an uncomfortable sneer, “I wasn’t supposed to tell you about that, but I pushed back on that one. If one of my best is going in, I wanted that agent to understand what they were getting into. Officially, the FTLN node we’re using to get you connected doesn’t exist. Someone whose job it is to be an even bigger spook than everyone else in this building combined brokered some sort of deal with the spooks inside the U.N. to secure us a node into the FTLN network for this. That means that if anything causes this whole operation to go belly-up, the U.N. has a kill switch that could cut the whole thing off.”

What Phillip didn’t say, because nobody in America (officially) knew for sure, was the rumors of people who did deep-dives into VR via an FTLN node when it failed for whatever reason and left their consciousness floating around in cyberspace.

“Anyway,” continued Phillip after they’d pondered that for a while, “Take some time for some R and R this weekend. You’re playing in a whole new type of game on Monday...literally.”