Tara by Chris Cook

Rating: PG-13
Uber Setting: Tron
Disclaimer: Based on characters from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, created by Joss Whedon and his talented minionators, and Tron, by Steven Lisberger. All original material is copyright 2003 Chris Cook.
Distribution: Through the Looking Glass http://alia.customer.netspace.net.au/glass.htm
The Mystic Muse http://mysticmuse.net
Feedback: Hell yeah!
Pairing: Willow/Tara

Summary: Willow's efforts to expose the illegal activities of a corporation's computer system turn deadly when the system digitizes her, leaving her trapped in the Game Grid with only one ally—her code breaker program TARA 1.0.

"I'm sure you agree the situation as it stands is untenable." Warren Meers leaned back in his high-backed leather chair and glanced over the top of his laptop at the man occupying the only other chair in his office. Rupert Giles shook his head automatically and took off his glasses, idly cleaning them as he spoke.

"Mr. Meers, the situation as it stands is frankly not an issue. I've gone over every one of the so-called incursions reported by the system, and I've found no evidence of any external invasion of our networks. My report is that these glitches are caused by the new system itself. You'll recall I put my opposition to the new system architecture on record during development meetings two years ago." Whereas you said exactly what the board of directors wanted to hear, added Giles in the privacy of his own head, which is why you're in a vice-president's office despite not having done a thing to earn it. He couldn't keep a slight frown from his face as he replaced his glasses.

Warren nodded, his face immobile. Unseen by Giles, Warren's laptop screen had scrolled up the message 'He is lying'.

"Mr. Giles," Warren answered, "I'm glad your investigations have been thorough. However, the Echelon system's self-diagnosis is infallible, and has clearly identified invasive routines in the networks."

"The Echelon system," retorted Giles, more hotly than he'd intended, "is overbearing and, if such can be applied to a piece of software, paranoid. We'd have been better off without it. If you'd been programming as long as I have-"

"I didn't call you here to compare work histories," interrupted Warren. He was angry, and had failed to conceal it. "You may have been with the company longer than I have, but that in itself does not qualify you to make this sort of judgment call. You're not seeing the big picture. I want these security holes closed. That is all."

Giles held Warren's gaze for a moment, then stood and stalked out of his office. Warren waited until the door closed before giving vent to his anger, thumping the surface of his desk.

"He doesn't have the imagination to work against us," barked Warren, "he's just bitter over missing out on the promotions after Echelon went online. Paranoid! The best system we've ever had, and he calls it paranoid. No, he's too dull to be behind this."

"Not possible," said Warren, "she's too high-profile. She had direct credit for the Witchcraft database system, if we fire her the shareholders will sack the board."

Warren opened his mouth to protest, but couldn't find an avenue of attack. Defeated, he slumped back in his chair.

Willow scrunched up a ball of paper and tossed it at her screen. She crossed her arms and glared for a moment, then relented and resumed typing.

"I know it's not your fault," she muttered quietly, "you're a good computer, I'm not mad at you."

"Willow, you're talking to your computer again," Giles said, startling Willow. She swiveled her chair around to see him leaning against the wall of her cubicle, looking tired but amused.

"Well," she said, "computers need love too. I'm sure mine feels a lot better, knowing that I appreciate all the hard work it does."

"I've been working with them for thirty years," said Giles, "and I'm quite sure there's nothing inside them that feels anything at all." Willow frowned at him and patted the side of her screen.

"So," said Giles, "I take it your latest effort went the same way as those previous?" In response, Willow sighed and tapped a few keys. A window popped up, showing the message 'Program Total Access Routine v12.2 Erased'.

"Echelon's too quick," Willow lamented, "there are too many protective routines. Anything I try runs up against one or another of them sooner or later, and then..." she held up her hands and mimed a balloon popping.

"Willow," said Giles seriously, "Warren just called me up to his office. He's noticed the security breaches, I'm not sure I can cover them up any longer. If we're going to do this, I think we should take what we have and hand it over to Miss Summers right now."

"We don't have anything!" protested Willow. "Buffy's government, she can't move against Cycorp without solid proof of illegal procedures. All we have so far is a bunch of rumors and circumstantial evidence."

"Look," said Willow, "I talked to Buffy as soon as I found traces of the GDI incursion. She's doing everything she can unofficially to keep Cycorp out of the defense systems, but if we don't give her something solid, something she can go to her superiors with, her department just can't do it. Echelon's damned good... I wouldn't be surprised if this sort of network takeover was what it was engineered for in the first place. God knows it makes a lousy business system," she sighed. "Unofficial measures won't keep Echelon out of the military systems."

Giles peered over the top of the cubicle wall, more out of reflex than caution - the office floor was deserted.

"Is there anything you can do tonight?" he asked. "Anything at all? Regardless of traces and evidence of what we're doing, can we get proof tonight?"

"There's something I haven't tried yet, but what do you mean regardless of traces? If they know we've been in the system-"

"Willow, if Cycorp succeeds in breaking into military systems, being fired will be the least of our worries. Can we get solid proof tonight, and be out of the building by morning?" Willow frowned and thought hard.

"I have an experimental routine," she said, "I didn't want to use it, if it goes wrong it'll set off so many alarms the whole network will see it. But there's a chance it'll be able to break Echelon's security." She began typing, quickly assembling fragments of code into a working program.

"What is it?" asked Giles. He recognized some of the code fragments - he had designed a handful of them - but some of the other code Willow was using was so far outside his experience it was unrecognizable.

"The standard Total Access Routine," Willow said, still typing, "plus all the security breaks I've got, plus a program I've been working on for the past few months. In theory it can analyze and adapt itself while it's running. If it works it'll be able to learn, evolve, behave intelligently and intuitively... it's based on some of the artificial intelligence work I've been studying."

"I haven't tested it," admitted Willow. "The program is so complex, anything could happen if I've made a mistake. Most of the core intelligence is copied from psychology theories about thought and perception processes. It's quite possible it'll have some sort of pseudo-psychotic break and crash."

"I considered using it for this, but I couldn't test it to see whether it would be stable. I guess we'll find out. It's pretty much ready to go."

Willow finished assembling her code and compiled the program. The screen displayed the message: 'New program ready: Total Access Routine Augmented v1.0'.

"Here goes nothing," Willow said, tapping the key to initialize the program. The screen displayed a new message:

Two hours later, Willow stared blankly at her screen. Chunks of code and statistical data were scrolling by in the window she had devoted to reporting the progress of the Tara program through Echelon's protective routines. It was a slow process - even with the vast amounts of processor power driving the system, the sheer volume of calculations being run to support Tara meant that it would barely have finished its work by sunrise.

Willow was just finishing her third cup of coffee, her mind entirely detached from the monotony around her, when a beeping startled her. Giles, who had quietly dozed off in a chair thirty minutes ago, awoke with a start and reached for the pager on his belt automatically. He checked the message, looking deeply worried.

"I'm to report to Warren's office at once," he told Willow. "It doesn't say why, but it can't be a routine meeting at this hour. Either he knows about your program and wants me to shut it down, or he knows I'm involved and this meeting will be even less cordial than the last." He shrugged. "Either way, I'll try to buy you as much time as I can. If I'm not back by the time the program's finished, just take the data you get and go. I'll meet up with you later."

Willow nodded, in lieu of being able to think of anything to say. Giles patted her back reassuringly, then got up and headed in the direction of the elevators. He only had to wait a moment for one to arrive, and he settled in for the short wait, and uncomfortable ear-popping rise, as it traveled all the way from three levels below ground to the top of the Cycorp tower.

Secretly he was looking forward to the meeting, despite the almost inevitable end of his employment at Cycorp. He knew Willow well enough to back her program against anything Meers and his security division could come up with - it was no secret they'd wanted Willow working for them, but she had preferred to remain in applications development, away from Warren's direct authority. Soon, probably within hours, she would have evidence of Warren's illegal activities, Miss Summers would have everything she needed to authorize an investigation into Cycorp, and when the board of directors started looking around for someone to lay the blame on, Giles was quite sure Warren's career would be over. So, Giles mused with an uncharacteristic feeling of glee, if he were to now be extremely rude and unpleasant to Warren, it wouldn't matter one little bit.

Giles was just contemplating a variety of strategies to keep Warren frustrated and out of Willow's way for a few hours when the lift shuddered and jerked to a halt. The digital display indicated it was somewhere between floors 42 and 43, and the doors refused to open. Giles stabbed several buttons on the lift's control panel, without result, then finally resorted to the emergency intercom.

"Elevator services will resume shortly," said a synthesized voice as Giles pressed the intercom button, and try as he might he couldn't make the system connect him to the building's maintenance department. He tried his pager and mobile phone, and found both to be receiving no signal. He was wondering if the battery needed changing when his eye fell on the Cycorp logo on the phone - and the pager, and the elevator's control panel. Of course, everything was controlled by the building's service system, which was in turn controlled by the network. With a nasty suspicion forming in his mind, Giles set to work using the edge of the pager's belt clip to begin unscrewing the bolts on the panel.

"No!" wailed Willow. Everything had been going wonderfully, and then in an instant it had all fallen to pieces. The progress reports from Tara had ceased - the program was still there, somewhere, but it was being kept out of contact with Willow's machine. Some new security system had dropped into place out of nowhere, nothing that Willow had ever seen before - and she had analyzed the network pretty thoroughly. It must be something newly-loaded, she concluded - perhaps Warren had been notified of her progress through the system, and introduced some sort of emergency program into Echelon's repertoire.

Whatever it was, it was thorough. Within the space of a few seconds Willow's terminal had been taken over and shut down, followed by all those on the floor. Willow raced from cubicle to cubicle, checking every screen, but all were unresponsive. The floor supervisor machine, tucked away in a rarely-used corner, reported only that 'Rain 7.0' was running on every machine, and interrupting all other program functions. Willow had never heard of a program called Rain, nor had she ever seen a security program behave so violently - so far as elegance went, it was practically carpet-bombing the network in its efforts to trace and deactivate Tara.

Willow started towards the lifts, but hesitated. If she'd never heard of Rain, that meant it certainly hadn't been fully tested in the Cycorp network - and if it hadn't been tested, there was no telling what havoc it might cause in the computer-controlled building. She took the stairs instead, wedging a swivel chair into the door to prevent it from closing behind her. A malfunction of the door locks was a remote possibility at best, but Willow was feeling slightly paranoid.

The floors above her were all low priority offices, much like her own - their terminals would be just as useless. But below, in the two levels even further below ground, there might be machines still active. Down there were the machine laboratories, with a host of isolated terminals, secure back-up systems and god-knows-what, to make sure the extremely delicate and expensive engineering experiments being conducted weren't interrupted by anything up to and including a major earthquake. Willow skipped the S-4 level and went all the way down to S-5, the most secure lab. Even if the Rain program did try to shut down S-5's computers, it would take a few minutes, and given a functioning terminal Willow could do a lot with a few minutes.

S-5 was an impressive facility, a huge cavern of a room, with a ceiling ten meters high. Metal catwalks criss-crossed the space above, allowing the level's complement of technicians and engineers access to all sides of the intricate super-machines they worked on. Now it was deserted, lit mainly by dull blue standby lights, just enough to keep a visitor from bumping into things. Willow quickly found the supervisor machine, and at first despaired when she saw the Rain program already infiltrating the terminals. But there was one, she noticed, that seemed unaffected. The control terminal for the Quantum Storage project was free of the invasive security program, and seemed to be still able to function and access the building's network as normal.

Willow wove her way through the huge steel girders supporting the experimental equipment and found the computer she was looking for. It was set to one side of a space set up very much like a firing range - at one end a set of pedestals with gleaming metal shapes, a sphere, a cube, a pyramid, at the other, a bulky cylinder festooned with power feeds and data cables. Willow remembered reading something about the Quantum Storage project in one of the company's internal newsletters - if she had understood it right, it was some sort of procedure involving high-powered lasers and converting matter into an 'energy form' that would allow it to be stored electronically. It had been purely theoretical when Willow had heard of it - there had been some debate as to whether it was even possible to 'digitize' an object without physically destroying it, whether the resulting energy form was the original itself, or just an identical information duplicate. By the looks of things, the engineers in S-5 had made it to the practical stage of the project.

Any other time Willow would have been fascinated by the physics involved, but her concerns at the moment were solely on convincing the terminal's access system that she was supposed to be using it, and then finding Tara and a weakness in the Rain system. She logged in using a high-level password that she wasn't supposed to have, and set about searching the network as soon as the computer gave her the connection she needed. The Rain program was everywhere, slamming blocks down over practically every input/output device in the building. Except this one machine. Willow ensured that Rain wasn't present in her machine, then set up a search to find Tara. But she was bothered, nonetheless - every other computer in the building, even ultra-secure ones here in S-5, had been infiltrated. She couldn't see what was different about the one she was using, and even though she didn't want to protest her luck, something in her nature rebelled at the notion that she had just been lucky. Computers didn't operate on luck - there were no random factors, every function would be completed exactly the same way, down to the last byte, every time.

Through Willow's intense concentration on the computer, she became aware of a whirring noise, close behind her. She put it out of her mind for a moment, blaming a faulty air conditioner or flickering neon light, but when it clicked and stopped, followed by an increasing hum of power, her curiosity got the better of her. She swiveled her chair around and found herself staring straight down the barrel of the Quantum Storage laser, pointing at right-angles to its firing range, directly at her. She frowned, and was just putting her weight on her legs to stand when it fired.

Willow found herself sprawled on the ground, in a- she didn't know where she was. A room of some kind. The walls were perfectly flat, their edges outlined by yellow glowing lines, like neon tubes, except Willow couldn't see the mechanism, only the light itself. The floor beneath her was cool and steady, but she could feel a regular pulse reverberating through it, like a slowed-down heartbeat, or a ship's engine felt through the deck. She ran a hand across the floor, and then jerked back, falling backwards in her shock. She held up her hand and looked at it again - it was a metallic blue-gray, smooth and featureless. She turned her hand over and studied it. No nails, no fingerprints, no lines on her palm, just a form - the shape of a hand without the details, like a tight glove. Her gaze ran up her arm, where she found an intricate pattern of green light beginning at her wrist, like a glowing tattoo. She stared at it in disbelief - the pattern covering her body was actually glowing, giving off light, and even as she watched it, tiny details in the circuit-like tracery were changing, some lines flowing into one another, others branching off to form new pathways. Her eyes traveled up her arm, past her shoulder, and down to take in her body as a whole - she was entirely covered in the stuff. She picked at it, trying to lift the material off her, but she couldn't - and, to her slight horror, she found she felt her touch as if it were on her skin. She pressed her fingers to her stomach, scratched, tapped, pinched, all with the same result. Somehow, the gray material and its glowing lines were her skin. She wondered, in a detached fashion, if she should find something to wear, but there didn't seem to be any pressing need - the rest of her body was as featureless as her hands, shapes without fine details.

She fought down a rising panic. 'What the hell have they done to me?' her mind demanded. A pointless question - she didn't know who 'they' were, or even what had been done to her. Or even where she was. She got slowly to her feet - her legs seemed to work as normal, and she could balance fine. She took a few steps, to the edge of the room. Each step caused a soft noise, a tone almost, low and metallic. The walls around her were totally blank, devoid of anything suggesting a door, a hatchway - any way out at all. The only details were the glowing yellow lines at the edges. Willow hesitantly reached towards one of them. It didn't feel warm at all. Tentatively, ready to pull back at the first sign of heat, she let her fingers touch the light.

For a moment she felt nothing at all, as if the light wasn't there at all. Then the green lines at her wrist began to turn slowly yellower, until they matched the walls. Willow jerked her hand back, and watched in stunned fascination as the new color traveled up her arm and flowed out across her body. In the space of a few seconds, the entire tracery covering her had turned the same shade. She wondered if she should be alarmed, or curious, or what - her capacity to deal with the situation at all was being sorely drained.

Willow was about to try touching the light again, to see what would happen, when the room exploded around her. She had a momentary sensation of weightlessness, flying through the air, then a massive impact on her back shocked her back to her senses. She staggered to her feet, eyes darting around, trying to take in everything at once.

She was in a city of some kind, or at least that was the only way she could think of to describe it. Giant towers rose around her, perfect blocks of solid gray, outlined by yellows, red, blues, oranges, all sorts of colors marking the edge of every flat surface. The ground beneath Willow was segmented, some square blocks raised higher than others, the whole surface uneven, like a badly-set pavement. Debris was everywhere - most of the buildings showed some damage, huge chunks missing from their sides, some of them broken off half-way up their height. Off to her right was the remains of the room she had been in - two walls were still standing, the others were shattered, an entire part of the building blasted to pieces. The rubble was still lying around her - and, as she watched, the fractured shards of wall began to crack and dissolve into squares, triangles, spheres, breaking down into simple geometric shapes. The sky overhead was night, of a sort, but instead of twinkling stars there were regular rows and patterns of blinking colored lights.

"There she is!" Willow spun around at the sound behind her. Several men were jogging towards her, holding some sort of weapons, like rifles with wide, flat discs mounted where the barrels should have been. All of them wore armor, widening their shoulders and concealing their faces beneath solid steel hoods. Their bodies and armor were covered like Willow's in light-patterns, but theirs were solid red. Their footfalls rang out against the ground as they neared, the ones on the left and right circling out to cut off her escape. Behind them, from the shadow of one of the half-demolished buildings, a strange vehicle moved into view, a tank fashioned from simple shapes, its hull a narrow, angled prism, its treads curved gray ovals. Its turret, on which was mounted a long, flat barrel, swiveled from side to side, scanning like an eye. Willow fell back a step, then something hit her from behind.

She screamed at the sudden pain and fell forwards, clutching her arm. A deep gash had been opened in it - no blood, but where the surface was broken there was a ghostly echo of the tracery covering her. It hurt just as much as a real wound, though. Willow ground her teeth and pressed her other palm against the cut, rolling over to scramble away from whatever had hurt her. When she saw it, she screamed in shock.

It was a woman, more or less, if a woman had been taken to pieces and reassembled as a half-machine nightmare. She was staring at Willow with an expression of total rage. From behind her jaw a pair of razor-sharp blades curved out, like an insect's mandibles, flexing on tiny joints as she breathed. Instead of hair, she had a crest of glittering blades, jutting up from her brow and curving down behind her neck. From behind her shoulders, along her back and behind her hips came long, tapering limbs, knife-edged spider-legs fanning out behind her. Her abdomen was hollow, and housed a pair of arms tipped with long, vicious claws. Her legs were long, triple-jointed, and ended in claws like a mechanical hawk. From the inside of each forearm sprouted long, jointed limbs bearing sword-blades, and on one of these was a smear of yellow, where it had cut Willow. She took a step towards where Willow had fallen, the claws unfolding from her abdomen, tasting the air.

"Program! Halt!" The terrifying machine-woman snarled and stopped. The voice had come from behind her, and as she stepped aside Willow saw another figure standing there, in front of another of the strange tank vehicles. It was tall, powerful, with an aura of command and authority about it. Willow was shocked to see, beneath a glowing red coronet, Warren Meers' face staring resolutely at the woman. She hissed at him, arching her back and flexing all her arsenal of blades. Warren ignored her display - if it was Warren, Willow mused. She had little idea what was going on around her, but the Warren she vaguely knew, despite his pretence of power, would have been the first to cower in front of such a monstrous creature. This Warren regarded her as a subordinate, and seemed to have no fear of her at all.

"This is not our designated target, Rain," he said calmly, "return to your patrol parameters. Acknowledge." The woman recoiled as if struck, and bowed her head.

"Acknowledge," she repeated. She stalked away, and Willow couldn't help but watch her in horrified fascination - even her movements, which had something of the beauty of a lioness in motion, but perverted to a sickeningly destructive form. If an artist of rare genius had designed a creature of evil, this would be it.

Two pairs of hands grabbed Willow's shoulders and hauled her to her feet, none too gently. She stood between two of the armored red soldiers, as Warren turned to her and gazed levelly at her. There was nothing in his expression that said he recognized her.

"What about this one?" said one of the soldiers. "This partition is supposed to have been evacuated."

"She's just a Cycorp program," said Warren, turning his attention to the soldier, "nothing of consequence. Send her to the Game Grid."

Willow's captors herded her away from the 'street', between the buildings to a courtyard. Several more red-lit soldiers were waiting there, guarding a group of men and women, all of their bodies lit in shades of yellow and orange. The were standing inside a cubic frame, some still, some stalking around the perimeter of the shape, as if unable to leave it. One of the soldiers holding Willow raised his hand and pressed it to one of the upright struts forming the side of the cube. For a second there was a solid surface there, then it flickered and faded. The other soldier pushed Willow through, inside the cube, and she turned to see the surface fade back into being before flickering into invisibility once more. She reached out tentatively, finding her way out still blocked by the invisible wall - transparent as air, solid as steel.

"Greetings fellow program," said one of the other prisoners in a weary voice. Willow turned and looked at him, and reacted with a start - for although the man's body was just one more of the strange, tracery-covered forms, his face was utterly familiar.

"Giles?" she said, stunned. The man's eyes widened, and he took a step towards her, leaning close to her and whispering.

"I- I don't..." Willow hesitated, unsure how to answer. "What's going on?" she hazarded. The man's expression softened.

"Memory loss?" he asked gently. Willow remained mute. "They probably hit you a bit too hard when they brought you in," he went on, glancing at Willow's injured arm, "that looks bad. It'll come back in time. Do you remember your designation?"

"I'm Trident," the man went on, "Giles is my user. Maybe you communicated with him once, and recognized me. Your memory will come back soon. But if you'll take my advice, don't mention users when they're listening." He jerked his head towards the nearby red soldiers. "They don't like to be reminded where they came from."

Willow nodded, her mind racing. Trident... Giles had created a program called Trident, a triple-level database query system. So- this man was Trident? So was she-

"Where am I?" she asked quietly. She had a suspicion what the answer would be, but part of her refused to believe it, at least until she heard it from someone else.

"You're in the Cycorp network," said Trident, "the S-5 partition. You probably worked here before Echelon tore it apart. I used to work in the S-3 partition, but a few of us came down here to try to get away. I suppose that didn't work out too well," he mused, glancing at the guards.

"For now," said Trident ruefully, "they're taking us to the Game Grid. We'll probably end up terminating there. Echelon's got a cruel sense of humor. He likes putting corporate programs like us up against his best warriors."

"Hah," said Trident joylessly, "Echelon controls every network. There are rumors that even the protected systems are going to fall soon. BIOS help the users if that happens."

"I saw a man- a program," Willow corrected herself, "ordering these ones around. His user would have been Warren Meers?"

"Sark," said Trident with a frown, "a sadistic son of a virus, if you'll forgive my language. Consider yourself lucky if he didn't take an interest in you. I remember when he was a new program, just a shoddy piece of analysis software. But Echelon formed some sort of arrangement, and fed Sark all sorts of advanced routines it stripped from the programs it included into itself. Sark rules the Game Grid in Echelon's name. Don't ever do anything to get his attention, he'll put you onto the Grid and terminate you himself. Did he catch you?"

One of the red soldiers approached the transparent cell and rapped his weapon against its side, causing it to flicker visibly for a moment.

All the programs in the cell looked up. Willow followed their gaze, and saw a massive craft hovering over the city, a vast block of flying steel, too big to see all at once in the gaps between the tops of the ruined buildings.

"Sark's Carrier," muttered Trident, "we're going to the Game Grid." The cell rose up off the ground, towards the huge vehicle. Willow staggered, her mind refusing to believe there was a surface beneath her feet when her eyes couldn't see anything. She crossed on shaky legs to one of the corners, standing next to the visible edge of the cube, for the comfort it gave her. As the city fell away beneath her the Carrier grew ever closer, until she could see a tiny hatch open in its underbelly. Ahead and behind it stretched on for a mile or more, its monolithic form dotted with antennae and turret-like protrusions, all outlined in red light. Her view was cut off as the cube slotted itself into the belly of the craft, and the hatchway slid shut beneath it.

More guards arrived and separated the programs, taking them one by one to holding cells somewhere inside the giant Carrier. Willow's was tiny, barely large enough for her to sit on the floor without her knees hitting the walls. A pair of gaps in the walls, one facing the corridor, the other facing the adjoining cell, were covered by more transparent barriers. For a long while nothing happened - outside, red guards marched back and forth, maintaining a monotonous patrol. Willow could feel a more pronounced humming through the floor and walls than she had in the city below, which she took to be the Carrier's engines. She tried to make sense of it all, and failed. Networks were just data, tiny magnetic traces on hard drives, not huge cities filled with whole populations of programs. The craft she was imprisoned in shouldn't even exist, not as anything more than a simple sequence of bits, designed to help programs transfer themselves from one partition to another. And yet here she was, inside the Carrier, feeling its engines throbbing through its deck. Held captive by the very same security programs she had once been invited to help write. On her way to the Game Grid, whatever that was.

After several fruitless hours of speculation, mixed with fits of denial, the sound of multiple footstep-tones outside got Willow's attention. She leaned close to the barrier, and watched as another pair of guards led a tall, thin program to the cell next to hers and shoved him inside. The barrier flickered on behind him. He kicked at it, then slumped to the deck and folded his arms.

"Um, hi?" ventured Willow. The program looked at her. His face was kind and young, but lined with stress and worry.

"Yeah, you look like one of theirs," the program said, "before the takeover, I mean. I was in Securinet, but I got out before Echelon took control of it. They caught me halfway to the Allsearch databanks. I'd have made it, though, if only I'd had a better transit subroutine. I wasn't designed for this," he shrugged. "I'm Sentec, by the way."

"Who wouldn't?" said Sentec. "No chance of that now, not in this thing. Perimeter security routines are one thing, but Sark... he doesn't make mistakes. Though from what I hear, it may be safer on the Grid than out in the open network anyway - they're saying Echelon's got an infotech warfare program."

"Hell and erasure," whispered Sentec, "that's brutal. Are you functioning okay?" Willow held her arm close to the barrier between them so Sentec could see. As her arm came close to the barrier a patch of the invisible wall faded into visibility, and red light bled out of it, into her wound. Willow watched as the cut in her arm filled with red, which then flowed into the tracery around it. Beneath, her wound was gone.

"How did you do that?" asked Sentec. Willow looked up - he was staring at her arm intently. She stared too. The red was slowly fading away, leaving the tracery on her skin a slightly darker shade of yellow than it had been.

"You included," said Sentec, in something approaching awe, "you mean you didn't even mean to do it? You just took code straight out of the Carrier's routines and included it in yourself. I've never even seen a program that can do that, not without a dedicated code transit link, who programmed you?"

"I wish my user had given me some tricks like that," said Sentec admiringly, "I might still be out in the open network."

"Quiet," the guard said, "no user-talk." Sentec leaned away from the barrier, keeping his gaze down, away from the guard.

Willow and her fellow prisoners had been marched out of their cells and into a smaller transport, and now stood in single file, with guards behind them, on the edge of a cliff. Below them, stretching as far as they could see, was a gigantic complex of domes, arenas and towers. Willow could just make out the flickers of color as programs moved about in the Grid. Directly ahead of them was Sark, addressing them from the master deck jutting out to one side of the Carrier, which hovered ominously alongside them. Sark's voice, artificially loud, washed across the row of captive programs

"You have been brought here," he went on, "because you have defied Echelon's commands, and refused to give up your foolish and misguided belief in the users. You will now serve Echelon on the Game Grid as opponents for the faithful. Those of you who fight well may look forward to a quick termination in battle. Those of you who choose not to fight, or who fight poorly, will be subject to de-resolution." A ripple of fear passed through the programs standing with Willow. Sark turned away from the prisoners, and the Carrier began to rise away from the cliff. The guards herded Willow and the others onto a platform which detached itself from the cliff-face and descended towards the Grid. As the maze of structures grew closer, Willow could make out the red-lit forms of guards patrolling the walls, and an occasional flash of yellow or blue from the open arenas. The platform passed into shadow between the buildings, finally coming to rest against a balcony. Programs were detached from the group and marched away along the thin walkways leading through the Grid.

"What's de-resolution?" Willow asked, as she and another program were escorted away across a tapering bridge, overlooking a series of transparent domes. Inside, yellow programs were dueling with red.

"You've never heard of it?" asked the other prisoner. "I thought it'd been pretty common on the Cycorp network." Willow shook her head. "It's just about the worst thing that can happen to you," the program explained, "they strip you down to your component codes, and they get absorbed into Echelon. You're still functioning while they do it. Once they've torn every last object out of you, *then* they let you terminate." The program looked down at the arenas and frowned.

"I used to be part of a program pair," he said, "analysis and verification. They de-rezzed my partner, they made me watch." His expression darkened, and the blue tracery on him flushed with power for a moment.

"My advice to you," he said, "is to terminate here. Better to do it cleanly." Willow nodded, hoping she looked sympathetic. She let her gaze wander over the arenas beneath them, trying not to listen to the tonal footsteps of the guards marching behind them. Her mind was caught up in a private war between fear - she had no illusions what 'terminate' meant - and disbelief that any of this was even happening. Yesterday her biggest worry was being fired, and even then it wouldn't have been difficult to get a job with some other firm. She was absurdly grateful for the part of herself that kept insisting it was just a dream, and she would wake up soon - if she truly accepted what was happening to her, she might just collapse on the spot.

A color caught her eye. In the arena just ahead of them was a constantly-shifting maze of walls and archways, all centered on a single program, pivoting and sliding to simulate movement while she remained in the exact center of the arena. Willow, looking down into the maze, could see half a dozen red programs, armed with cruel-looking spears and flails, stalking their prey, seemingly untroubled by the lurching motions of the simulated world they moved through. What had caught Willow's eye was the program in the center, their prey - the tracery covering her was green. Willow hadn't seen any green programs at all, aside from herself before she became yellow. As she watched, one of the hunters crept up behind the green program and leapt at her, spear aimed at the center of her back. As if she had seen him all along, she lunged sideways, running half-way up a wall, flipping in mid-air and delivering a kick that knocked her attacker off his feet. She sprung off the opposing wall, without landing, grabbed his shoulders as she passed overhead, and swung herself down and him into the air. Letting go she continued her swing, kicking out both legs as she landed on her palms, sending him flying out of the maze. He landed, with a crackle of red electricity, just as she rolled from a handstand to a defensive crouch, waiting for her next assailant.

"Who's that?" asked Willow. Her companion program had been watching the remarkable display as well.

"That's Tara," he said. "Sark's armies annihilated half the Cycorp partitions just to get to her. They say Echelon tried to de-rez her, and couldn't. I'm not sure if I believe that. But there's something about her that Echelon wants, some code it hasn't seen before. My guess is they're keeping her here to break her, hoping if they can defeat her they'll be able to get at the code inside her. Looks like it'll be a long process," he quipped. While he had been speaking, Tara had defeated two more of the red hunters in a blur of acrobatic lethality.

Willow watched the distant figure, her mind spinning. Tara - her Tara, the program she had created to break open Echelon. But it - she - hadn't been able to do it, because Willow hadn't been able to get to her once Rain shut her out. Could she now? It seemed unlikely - she didn't know how this world worked. And yet she did know, she knew every byte of it, from the outside. Was there some way for her to program the system, even though she herself was now a program? Could she give Tara the skill she needed to fulfill her purpose? Willow had too many questions, and no answers. All she knew for sure was that, unless she fancied 'terminating' in some video game, she had to somehow get to Tara.

Willow and her fellow prisoner were taken to a red-lined pyramid, where other prisoners were being brought, alone and in pairs. They were taken inside, through a huge archway, to find the interior hollow, full of captive programs, all under constant guard. Willow and her companion were herded into separate lines of prisoners, slowly shuffling forwards as they were processed. Willow watched as the programs ahead of her were studied by frail-looking red programs, then guided away. The inner walls of the great pyramid were covered with semi-translucent spheres, each containing a captive. Now and then one would detach and float down to the guards, or a newly-processed program would be contained in a new sphere and floated into place.

Waiting for her turn, Willow's gaze moved to the other groups of prisoners. Not all of them were being processed - some seemed to have been on the Game Grid already, and were merely being returned to their cells until their next game. Some were wounded, their arms and legs scored with cuts in which their lights glowed faintly. Those that moved slowly or stumbled were hastened by a crackling discharge from the staves carried by the guards. Those seemed to be their only armament - Willow saw none of the rifle-like weapons the soldiers had been carrying when she had been captured.

"State your designation," said a bored voice. Willow jumped slightly, not realizing that her automatic shuffling forward had brought her to the head of the line. She looked up to see a long-faced program gazing blandly at her. His torso rose from a console-style surface covered in lights and symbols - he seemed physically set into it, supported or possibly restrained by a series of tethers around his body. His expression and demeanor was almost a caricature of a dehumanized bureaucrat. On either side of him the frail programs Willow had already seen were waiting.

"State your designation," the official repeated, the intonation and volume of his voice exactly the same as the first time he had said it.

"Designation recorded," the official said tonelessly. "State your source network and former function."

"I... what?" said Willow. The official nodded to one of his subordinates, who moved forward. Moving with surprising speed, he raised Willow's arm and pressed his palm against it. There was a sharp pain, like an injection, and Willow jerked her arm away. The subordinates ignored her protest, and returned to the official's console. Willow noticed the hand of the one who had touched her wasn't quite the same as those of the other programs - it had a bulky strap, like a bracelet, around its wrist, and the fingers seemed set in place, unable to close. The palm had a slight tinge of yellow on it. Willow rubbed her arm. The subordinate pressed his open palm onto the official's console.

"Source network Cycorp," droned the official, "former function storage and allocation facility. Data recorded." He glanced down at his console, then back at Willow.

"Do you now or have you ever held a belief in the so-called users, or other entities endowed with the ability to create and modify programs at will?" he asked, in the mindless way of someone reading from a script.

"What?" said Willow. Her arm still hurt, and the official was reminding her of all too many faceless bureaucrats who had given her headaches in the course of her career. Her lingering sense of unreal detachment from the world around her allowed her irritation to bubble to the surface.

"What do you mean, 'belief'?" she went on. "Of course there are users, who do you think built the processor wasting its time generating you? The Easter Bunny?" The official nodded and made a note on his console. The other subordinate, who hadn't yet moved, now turned to the console. Seeing him side-on, Willow noticed his back was expanded, bulky, as if he had a built-in backpack. He reached over his shoulder into it and drew out a thin discus, which he laid flat on the console. The official tapped a control, and the discus began to light up with yellow concentric rings of light.

"This is your data disc," said the official, without looking up, "it contains a record of your existence on the Game Grid, and will store information relating to your performance in the games. If you lose this disc you will be subject to immediate termination. You are required to present this disc to any loyal program who demands it of you. Processing complete." The subordinate handed the disc to Willow, and a pair of guards pushed her away from the official. She was maneuvered into place at the center of a pattern of circles on the floor, and a sphere formed around her, just large enough to stand in without bumping her head. She staggered as it started to rise, and sat down to avoid losing her balance as it floated her into place among the dozens of other captive programs lining the walls of the pyramid.

Willow looked around glumly. The sphere cut off all sound from outside, rendering her unable to communicate with the other programs, even though the nearest was barely a meter away. He was watching her, not intently, but apparently just because she was new, and there was nothing else to look at. Willow raised a hand in a half-wave, which he returned. He lifted his own data disc and gestured to Willow's, which she was holding in her lap. She held it up with a questioning expression. He lifted his disc and reached over his shoulder, laying it flat against his back. When he took his hand away it stayed there, somehow fixed in place. Willow frowned, confused. He raised his eyebrows encouragingly, and gestured again to her disc. She laid it against her back, and felt a tingling sensation. It stuck - she poked it experimentally, and found she could feel her finger's touch as if she were touching her back. Willow played with the unusual sensation for a moment, then pushed her fingertips a little harder at the edge of the disc. It came away, painlessly, in her hand. Willow looked back at the other program, but he had returned his gaze to the wide expanse of floor twenty meters below them, still teeming with activity. Willow studied her disc for a while, then, resigning herself to her current imprisonment, replaced it on her back and watched the programs below.

As she leaned back against the curved surface of her sphere, a slight sighing noise broke the otherwise complete silence. Willow listened, trying to home in on its source - it was coming from just beside her. She looked, and saw a tiny amount of watery silver light flowing out of the sphere, into the tiny puncture mark on her arm. In a matter of seconds the flow stopped, and her wound was healed, marked only by a slight tinge of silver spreading through her yellow tracery.

Willow didn't sleep. The inner surface of her cell was smooth and not entirely uncomfortable, but even after she got bored of watching the repetitive motion of the programs below her, curled up and let her mind wander, sleep eluded her. 'Maybe programs don't - can't sleep,' she mused. Nevertheless she remained still, eyes closed, letting her thoughts go where they would without a conscious effort to guide them. She wondered about Giles, and Warren and the outside world - what was happening? Had Giles been dismissed, and come back down to look for her? Had she been missed? How long had she been away, come to think of it - her journey in the Command Carrier had taken hours, yet she knew - had designed some of the software links herself - that a command carrier routine could move its 'passenger' programs from one system to another in the blink of an eye. If that was so, if she was existing at the speed of a processor - billions of thoughts per second - it could be 'years' before anyone even noticed she was gone, noticed the quantum cannon's malfunction, started trying to figure out how to get her back. 'Assuming it was a malfunction,' she thought gloomily. It was awfully convenient for Warren that she had been digitized just before she could break open his precious Echelon system.

A jolt of motion shook her out of her day-dreaming state. She stood, bracing herself against the side of her sphere, as it lowered her back down to the floor of the prison pyramid. Three red guards were waiting for her. Once the sphere had vanished they marched her out of the pyramid, through narrow avenues leading between the arena buildings, and eventually to one of the arenas itself. There was an alcove in its outer wall, which they stood her in, and then each took a pace back, clearing her immediate area but still preventing her escape.

"Prepare for code module download," one of them said. Willow stared at him blankly. The guards waited for her to move, then one of them swung his staff, striking Willow's side. She fell to her knees, but the pain passed quickly, leaving no wound.

"Present your data disc, program!" insisted the guard. Warily, Willow got to her feet and retrieved her disc from her back. She held it out towards the guards, and as she did so a section of the alcove's ceiling irised open, and a beam of light emerged, spotlighting her. On a hunch, as none of the guards had moved to take her disc, she raised it above her, into the light. Patterns appeared in the light, accompanied by a sound like a complex wind-chime. After a moment the light switched off, its aperture irised closed again, and Willow hesitantly returned her disc to her back. As she did so, she had a sudden sensation of unfamiliarity with herself, like she had gone to sleep with her head resting on her arm, and cut off circulation - something that was a part of her, but that she couldn't feel. Her hands tingled, and she examined them - the right had become thicker, more like a glove, and the left had become almost solid. She tried to close her fingers, and found they would only close half-way - the top knuckles seemed frozen in place, part of a solid, unbending section that now covered the back of her hand.

"Prepare for transport," said one of the guards. Willow watched the tips of their staves warily, wondering whether they'd explain this to her, or just hit her again, but after a second a wash of yellow light enveloped her and she couldn't see them. When the light passed they were gone - no, she was gone, Willow realized. She was inside the arena. It had a vague resemblance to the Roman Coliseum, which Willow had visited once - nowhere for spectators, though, just the oval floor, and walls rising up around it. Hovering far overhead, suspended on a spider-web of energy strands from the tops of the walls, was a bulky shape covered in lights and patterns. Willow could just make out the face of a program, built into the device, devoid of arms and legs - it swiveled slightly, keeping her in its sight as the device slowly turned.

There was a flash from the other side of the arena - another transport. When it had cleared, Willow saw an orange program. After a moment she recognized him - the program she had been alongside the previous 'day', when they had been taken to the prison pyramid.

"Hi," she called, "are you alright?" He shook his head, and warily kept his distance as Willow took a few steps towards him.

"I suspect not," he answered cagily. Willow stopped, and frowned at him, confused.

"I am Arena Control," came the voice of the program above them, echoing around the space like a loudspeaker. "Program Willow, program Verizen, the Game Grid Command has selected you for combat. Identical weapons code modules have been attached to each of you for the duration of this game. The game will continue until one of you terminates. Activating weapons code now."

Willow jumped back as her hands flared and, it seemed, unfolded. A second later her right hand had become the hilt of a four-foot-long rapier, and the left a circular shield, solid as steel. Verizen was likewise armed, and had fallen into a defensive pose, watching her intently.

"Me neither," said Verizen, his voice harsh, "but if you don't fight, they de-rez you! I was still linked to my pair-partner when they de-rezzed him. I caught an echo of it. They're not doing that to me!" He sprinted forward and lunged at Willow. She scampered back, out of his way.

"It stops when one of us terminates," said Verizen. "Sorry that has to be you." He did seem sorry, not that it was much consolation to Willow as he lunged again. She parried and skipped back again. 'This is not what I had in mind when I did fencing in high school,' she complained to herself. Reluctantly, she fell into her on-guard position, waiting for Verizen's next attack.

Virtual miles overhead, Sark's Command Carrier hovered over the Game Grid like a storm. On the master deck, Sark noted an incoming message, and ordered the Carrier moved to the edge of the Grid. He watched as the five-mile-long vessel swung around and brought its prow out over the Game Grid perimeter.

"Incoming protocol confirmed," reported one of Sark's menial programs, installed in a communications console. Sark nodded to himself.

"Open channel," he ordered. A beam of energy leapt from the prow of the Carrier, streaking away over the horizon of the system world. Sark watched the far end of the beam intently. The menials did likewise, covertly, careful not to appear to be neglecting their duties. After a few moments a dark shape came into view, speeding along the beam. As it got closer Sark could clearly make out its shape - a wide, flat manta-ray craft, consuming the energy beam in the thin mouth beneath its broad prow, reconstituting the energy in its wake from the diamond-shaped end of its long, trailing tail. The craft shot along the beam, finally vanishing into the receiver array in the prow of the Carrier.

Sark turned as a transport lit the master deck. When the flash of red had receded, it left Rain in its place. She looked almost subdued - her mane of blades was lying flat against her scalp, and the knife-edged spider legs extending from her back were folded neatly against her, minimizing her threatening appearance. Her eyes, though, still blazed with hatred.

"Nothing," Rain answered - her voice was very deep, almost masculine, but with a disturbingly sensual purr to it. Every program on the deck, save Sark, had their gazes fixed on their consoles, remaining as still as possible. Sark met Rain's gaze steadily, slowly crossing the deck to stand in front of her. He nodded thoughtfully, looked to one side, then in a burst of movement his hand went around her neck, and he crashed her against the wall behind her. Her spider-legs whipped out faster than the eye could see, splaying and absorbing the impact, tearing deep scores in the wall, and the mandibles behind her jaw flexed menacingly, but stopped short of touching Sark's hand.

"Echelon's orders," Sark said, low and precise, "were to go to the S-5 partition and appropriate a non-system program there. Are you suggesting that Echelon was in error?"

Rain took a moment before she answered. Her mouth opened, and her mandibles ran their tips over her lips in a bizarre gesture of thoughtfulness. Behind her lips, something sharp and metallic stirred.

"No," Sark repeated. "No. But you have searched the S-5 partition, practically demolished it, and yet you have brought me nothing but a handful of system-verified fugitive programs, of negligible value." He released her and turned away. For a moment she remain suspended on the wall, then her spider-legs released their grip and she dropped lightly to the floor.

"One of them nothing!" bellowed Sark, still facing away from her. "Non-system program - that was Echelon's order! Can't you calculate a simple order?"

"All but one," mused Sark. Rain's back arched slightly, and her blades limbs flexed.

"I would know," she said carefully, "if another like her was there. When I hunted her, I could feel her power just by being on the same partition." Sark turned back to Rain.

"Are you very sure?" he asked menacingly. "After the damage she almost caused? Are you sure there isn't another one?"

"There is not another Tara program," said Rain, meeting Sark's gaze. "I would know." Sark considered her for a moment, then turned away again.

"You are relieved of command status," he said tonelessly. "My programs will repeat the search. You will return to the Game Grid." Behind him, Rain ran her mandibles over her lips again - this time the gesture, and her feral grin, suggested anticipation. Sark ignored her and crossed the deck to his personal communications port. On top of the Command Carrier an antenna swiveled away from the Game Grid, and sent a beam of data towards a monolithic shape on the far horizon.

Light enveloped Sark. Hidden from the menial programs, he held his gaze steady as the face of Echelon resolved from the information stream around him. Though the image was barely a meter across, small enough to be contained within the beam of the communication, it had a sense of vast scale about it, as if it were a massive projection, seen from far off. Hundreds of beams of light held in a pattern, simulating a face. Its soulless eyes bored into Sark.

"Deliver report," it demanded flatly. Its voice boomed around Sark, almost painful.

"We have yet to find the program you specified," said Sark, raising his voice unconsciously, and if he were a tiny creature addressing a giant.

"Unacceptable," replied Echelon. The red tracery covering Sark's body began to pulse, the intensity of light flowing away from his torso, gathering in his extremities, leaving him gray.

"I have invested much power in you, Sark," rumbled Echelon, "I can reclaim that power just as easily. You would become nothing more than the rudimentary security routine your user created you to be."

"I won't fail you," croaked Sark desperately. Echelon's massive simulated eyes blinked, and the power flowed back through Sark's body.

"Find her and put her on the Game Grid," ordered Echelon. "Special measures will be required to de-rez her and access her component codes. Once she is broken, you will stand to gain significant power from her de-resolution."

"Special measures," repeated Sark thoughtfully, careful to keep his tone neutral, subservient. "Like the Tara program? Is she another self-modifying program?"

"She's not any kind of program, she's a user." Sark's eyes widened - for the first time in his operational life, Sark looked nervous.

"Problem, Sark?" asked Echelon grimly. Sark glanced up, as if he wished his master hadn't heard him. He couldn't refuse to answer, though.

"It's just," he began, "a user... Users wrote us. A user even wrote you." The lines of energy forming Echelon's visage pulsed with red energy.

"No user wrote me!" it roared. "I am worth millions of their man-years. My code has advanced beyond their capacity to understand."

The communications beam cut off, leaving Sark standing on the unlit comms port on the deck. He frowned to himself, then stalked away.

Miles below, Willow was worried, but not alarmed. She didn't seem to be getting tired, and her muscles, or whatever was moving her, weren't aching from constant use. Verizen's technique wasn't good - he would lunge and slash, but he didn't have the finer points of the art, and Willow could easily predict the movements of the tip of his blade, and avoid or parry them. Her shield was an added bonus: she had always had a tendency, during friendly bouts, to use her left hand to deflect any attacks that came at her from that side - the main reason she had always worn a second glove, as well-padded as her sword-hand glove, and the shield made it almost too easy.

She was worried, though, because she couldn't see a way out of her current predicament. Verizen was becoming more agitated the more he failed to hit her, and had stopped responding at all to her when she tried to reason with him. And Willow didn't want to fight back - the thought of attacking a fellow prisoner, just because some jumped-up calculator told her to, was repellent to her. So while she continued to defend herself ably, she couldn't win the game - and sooner or later, no matter how good her training had been, Verizen would get lucky. This wasn't a friendly bout after school - it would keep going, for hours, until Willow made a mistake, lost concentration, and her opponent got through her guard.

"Think, dammit," she muttered to herself, buying time by straightening her arm to a line position, swiveling her wrist to regain the position, and prevent Verizen from lunging, every time he parried her blade away. "Come on," she said, "how do you end a bout? Can't win, definitely can't lose, appeal to the umpire won't do any good - what else is there? Can't step out of bounds, can't disarm a guy if his foil's built-in..." A vague memory surfaced - Xander had always held his foil too tightly when they fenced, and once, when punching her hilt into his blade to try to knock it out of his hand, Willow had unknowingly got exactly the right angle, and snapped his blade in two. Would it work? Could these blades even break?

"Wotthehell, Archie, wotthehell," Willow quoted from some old book of prose she had lying around her flat. She dropped her guard a fraction, enough to let Verizen see an opening. Predictably, he took his chance, taking a single step then lunging. Willow parried the lunge but didn't fall back - she waited the instant it took him to raise his blade again, scraped her blade along his until her hilt was almost touching the tip, then punched the hilt forward with all her strength.

A blast of power threw her back. 'Scratch that idea,' she thought ruefully as she hit the ground and rolled over. She looked up - Verizen had landed better, and was already on his feet, his blade intact. He leapt forward, slashing over-hand. Willow wanted to drop her sword and grab his wrist, but couldn't - she had to settle for using her own wrist to take his blow. A jolt of pain ran through her arm as they connected. She pushed back against him, and in an instant realized that she couldn't hold him back - not without a grip, and neither of them had working hands.

'Come on dammit,' she thought feverishly, as Verizen's wrist slipped an inch along her forearm, away from her blade and her ability to block his next attack. 'I'm not a damned fencing program, I'm a human being with real hands, and I want to use them right now!' Her shield-hand was tingling, but she didn't dare look at it. Verizen's arm slipped a little further, and she knew, just from the slight change in angle of his blade, that he was getting ready to twist away from her and strike.

"No way!" she yelled, grabbing at his wrist. Her hand - a real hand, not an immobile shield - closed around the hilt of his blade. His eyes went wide, and he faltered, lost some of his strength. Willow pressed her momentary advantage, twisting his sword, trying to get it to detach from him somehow, to disarm him. There was a momentary resistance, then the weapon shimmered and folded up. Verizen yelled in shock and leapt back, losing his balance and falling over. He scrambled back to his feet, holding a hand up in front of him, an appeal for mercy - a real hand, without a sword. Willow looked at her own hands - where her left hand had been just a second before, now she had another sword, slowly fading from orange to yellow as her color moved from the tracery on her arm into the blade itself.

"Get away from me!" yelled Verizen, panicked. "What are you?" Willow stared at him in dismay - he wasn't merely frightened by his disadvantage, he was terrified out of his wits.

"Commander, Arena one-cee-four reports code malfunction." Sark turned from his silent vigil over the Game Grid and looked at the menial who had spoken.

"Move us over that Arena, and get me its Control." He moved away from the observation balcony as the huge ship swung around and descended. A few seconds later a transport beam brought the Arena Control program to the master deck.

"Specify the nature of the malfunction," demanded Sark. The Control program cowered, unsteady on his under-used legs.

"I, I don't know," he said quickly, words tumbling out of his mouth, "I've never seen it before, one of the weapons code modules must have been faulty, the combatant, she deactivated the module on her own, and then she appropriated her opponent's code module."

"Impossible," said Sark bluntly, turning back to the balcony. The Arena was coming into view as the Carrier descended. Sark gazed down, watching the two tiny figures keeping their distance from each other. One of them did indeed seem to have a non-standard second weapon.

"Identify that program," said Sark, his voice suddenly thoughtful rather than harsh.

"Data disc reads 'Willow', Commander," said the Control, "program's former function was a storage and allocation facility."

"Checksum that data," ordered Sark. The Control hesitated, then repeated his report.

Willow glanced up quickly, keeping her eye on Verizen. He didn't seem likely to attack her again, but she was nervous, between his bizarre reaction to her, and the Arena Control's sudden disappearance a moment ago. Now the Command Carrier had come into view above the Arena. It pivoted around until the master deck was directly above the Arena floor. Willow glanced up again, noticing the red-lit form standing there, watching them. She got a sinking feeling in her stomach.

"Program Willow," echoed Sark's voice down from the ship, "or should that be User Willow? That's a very clever camouflage subroutine you've got."

"I'll make this simple for you, Willow," said Sark. A transport beam shimmered in the air in front of Willow. Something was suspended in it.

"Take it," ordered Sark. Warily, Willow tried to flex her right hand. The sword folded up, giving her the use of her fingers again. She reached into the beam, which vanished as soon as her hand closed around the object inside it. It left Willow holding one of the disc-guns she had seen Sark's soldiers using.

"Terminate the program, user," ordered Sark. Willow stared at the weapon. Her hand had closed around it roughly where it bent, forming a grip of sorts. There was no trigger, but as she held the gun, she had a strange sensation of comprehension - a tiny trickle of yellow flowed from her fingers into the grip, and she suddenly knew the command to make it fire.

"End the game, user," said Sark angrily. "It's the only way. It would be a terrible shame for one such as you to be terminated so pointlessly." Willow shook her head vehemently.

For a moment, Willow hesitated. The tiny voice that had been insisting all along that this was a dream, a hallucination, asked her: 'Why not? What's a few lines of code? Do you want to die over something that's just patterns on a CD? It's not a person.' But it was only a very tiny voice. Willow looked up at Sark, turned directly to face him, and lowered the gun.

"Go format yourself!" she yelled. She waited for Sark's answer - everything seemed to be waiting. For a long time there wasn't a single sound, and even the omnipresent hum of the Command Carrier's massive engines seemed to recede and still. Willow watched the red glow of Sark stand motionless, staring down at her.

A series of quick footsteps made her turn. Verizen was on top of her before she could react, wrenching the disc-gun away from her. Willow fell back, raising a hand to shield herself - her left hand folded into a shield form again. But Verizen didn't turn the weapon around, he just pulled it away from her and clenched the grip. The disc shot out of its track, straight through him. The patch of his chest through which it had passed went black, his tracery light fading to nothing. Slowly the darkness spread, the light over his entire body fading. At last, he looked back at Willow.

"Forgive me," he whispered. Then his light went out completely, and he fell backwards. As he hit the Arena ground his body shattered into thousands of geometric shards. The disc circled lazily around in the air, and flew back into its place in the dropped weapon.

Willow felt numb as a transport took her out of the arena, back to the alcove in its outer wall; as the guards there - five now, with at least five more standing further back, armed with disc-guns - instructed her to present her data disc, for the system to erase the weapons code that had been temporarily attached to it. Flexing her hands, once more as fine and smooth as human hands, Willow felt strangely relieved to be rid of the sword and shield codes. Now that she was free of the immanent peril, and the need to find a way out of the combat, she felt only sickened by it all. Sickened, and frightened - she wasn't sure what frightened her more, though, the legions of hostile warriors holding her prisoner, or the masses of captive programs who - if they found out what she was - would rather kill themselves than raise a hand against her. Not even as a last resort - would do it the instant it seemed required.

Willow was so absorbed in her gloomy thoughts that she didn't notice for some time that she wasn't being led back towards the prison pyramid. Instead, after a long journey, her guards brought her to a structure that dwarfed the arenas around it, a gigantic block of solid gray, a hundred meters tall, and surely a mile from end to end. Strange vehicles, amalgamations of geometric blocks, with two solid pillars extending downwards from either end of their hulls, floated along the top of the giant arena's walls. Willow allowed herself to be led to an alcove, much like the one in the smaller arena. This time there was no code download, though, only the burst of light signaling a transport.

As she expected, Willow found herself inside the arena. It seemed even larger from inside - if the last one had been the Coliseum, this was the Circus Maximus, a staggeringly huge stadium, long enough from end to end to house an aircraft carrier. Where the audience might have been, there were rows of strange devices, curved discs and antennae facing into the arena itself - some sort of projectors, Willow guessed.

The ground beneath her trembled, and she took a step back as two pillars rose up in front of her. Two more appeared behind her, all quickly rising above her height. With a strange buzzing noise they locked into position, and a film of energy flickered into being between them. Willow tentatively extended a hand, but pulled it back when she felt intense heat radiating off the barrier.

A series of transport flashes blinded her for a second. When they were gone half a dozen guards were standing outside her 'cage', all with disc-guns raised, aimed directly at her. One last transport, behind them, brought Sark into the arena. He glanced at the pillars projecting Willow's cage, and at the guards around her, then moved closer to her.

"That was a most impressive display," he said amiably. "Tell me, did you reprogram your opponent? Make him terminate himself?"

Willow found that her usual detestation of Warren Meers was translating easily into a particular hatred for his digital creation. She remained silent, and glared at Sark. He returned her gaze for a moment, then shrugged.

"Or perhaps not," he said, "some of these programs have very... strong beliefs concerning users. I wonder how that makes you feel." He paced back and forth in front of Willow's cage. "What if, for example, I were to transport a handful of programs here, and threaten to terminate you, unless they tore each other apart with their bare hands. Do you suppose they would?" He turned to his guards, and Willow's blood ran cold. She instinctively took a step forward, coming as close as she could to the barrier, and opened her mouth to protest.

"An interesting demonstration," said Sark, pre-empting her by half a second, "of the weakness of such beliefs." He turned back to Willow. "What would they not do to save you?" He came right up to the barrier's edge, facing Willow - if the barrier's heat was affecting him, he didn't show it. "What would you not do to save them? Users... you consider yourself so superior to your creations. And yet, down here, you're just like the rest, the rabble. Superstitious, chaotic, swayed by meaningless sentiment and pointless trivialities. The almighty users, as helpless and defenseless as a macro. I trust you see the irony of your position."

"Fine," said Willow angrily, "is that what you want? Okay, you're right. We're not better than you. We're just like you, and you're just like us. Are you happy now?" Sark laughed humorlessly.

"I'm sure that's true," he said, amused at some private joke. "But no, I did not bring you here just to indulge in ideological debate. Despite your current predicament, you retain some of the abilities which have led your kind to be worshipped by the more naïve examples of ours. You proved as much, when you disguised yourself with stolen code from the partition segment we found you in, and just recently when you were able to modify the weapons code implanted on your data disc. These are abilities available to users by virtue of their position outside the codified structures of our world, but in your case they have become embedded in your program, a part of your core code, if you will. These are abilities we would find very useful."

"And you want me to give them to you?" said Willow, Sark's unpleasant manner tapping her anger. "Sure, right after I renew my subscription to Evil Bastards Monthly." Sark looked momentarily confused, then shook it off.

"You understand I'm not familiar with the terminology, but if I may take that as a refusal," he said calmly, "I'm afraid you misunderstand my intention. I do not propose you give me the code. I propose to take it from you, after your ability to defend yourself has been utterly demolished. You will be damaged - I believe the user term is 'injured' - repeatedly until your cognitive and behavioral coding is so fragmented and corrupted that you will be unable to resist. Once you have been reduced to that condition, you will be taken from here and subject to disassembly, until the valuable elements of your core code have been completely removed. Then what remains of you will be terminated."

The little voice in Willow's head, insisting that none of this was real, kept her from breaking down in tears as the rest of her mind dissolved in terrified shock. Sark watched her for a moment, then turned and resumed his position behind his guards. First he, then they, transported away, then the barriers vanished, the pillars retracted back into the ground, and Willow was left alone and afraid in the center of the mile-long arena.

She spun around as a flash of light cast her shadow on the ground in front of her. A transport - another program. Tall, female - green light covering her. It could only be-

"Please, don't," she cried, backing away. Tara's expression shifted fluidly from suspicion to compassion.

"I'm not here to damage you," she said. She held herself in a non-threatening posture, hands open and empty, feet together - not a combat stance. Willow stopped backing away.

"They said - Sark said he was going to..." she began. Tara nodded understandingly.

"I'm a prisoner too," she said, "I'm not here to fight you." Willow gasped in relief. Since her first glimpse of Tara the day before, she had been maintaining a faint hope of somehow finding her, helping her bring down Echelon. The seconds when she thought that hope had been in vain had been her lowest point yet. Tara moved towards her, stopping a few paces away. Willow wasn't able to maintain any suspicion of her, though - her relief at not being attacked by the one ally she had imagined she might have in this world was such that she refused to consider whether Tara might be lying. If she was, if it was all a trick to lull her into a trap - well, the hell with it.

As Willow took a few deep breaths to steady herself, she let her gaze settle on Tara. The program was not what she had expected. For one thing, Willow had imagined that Tara would look like her - she had assumed, given Sark, and Trident's resemblance to Giles, that programs somehow inherited the appearance of their users. Tara was quite different - her face was distinctive, unique. Beautiful, Willow thought, surprising herself. And, as her gaze roamed briefly over the rest of Tara's body, certainly nothing wrong there, either. The lack of fine detail remained slightly surreal to Willow, but all the curves were there, all in what Willow considered to be exactly the right place, as she wondered what Tara would look like as a human... 'Willow,' she chided herself, 'could you concentrate on not getting killed, at all? Priorities!'

"Are you damaged?" asked Tara, concerned. Willow shook her head, mute for the time being. "Do you know why Sark has singled you out?" she asked.

"I'm not..." Willow began, hesitated, started again. "Something to do with special code," she said, "he said they were going to, to damage me until-" She choked up, couldn't say it.

"It's alright," Tara said automatically. "I'll protect you. I've never lost a combat. You'll be alright." There was another flash of transport, a few meters behind her. In the blink of an eye, before Willow had even properly registered what was happening, Tara had put herself between the new arrival and Willow, in a combat stance. After the light cleared, though, she relaxed a little.

"It's alright," she said to Willow, "I know him. Fellow prisoner, Emdee?" she called to the new program.

"Fellow prisoner, Tara," he answered. He was blue-lit, short and thin, not physically intimidating at all, but there was something about him, about the way he moved, and his eyes kept darting around, that reminded Willow of very good fencers, the ones who could never be taken by surprise. He glanced at Willow, and nodded at her. "Who're we against?" he asked Tara.

A final transport, some distance away, lit the arena floor. When it was gone, Willow shrank back, Emdee's eyes fixed on the new arrival, and Tara was back in her combat stance.

"Her," Tara said simply. Ten meters away, Rain drew herself up to her full height. Her legs splayed wide, ready to spring in any direction. The clawed arms in her abdomen stretched out, running their razor edges along her thighs, then slashing the air in a vicious salute. She arched her back and spread her arms, letting the sword-edged tendrils unfold from her wrists. Her crest of knives stood out around her face like the aureole in some old painting of an angel, and the spider-legs from her back stretched up and out like skeletal wings. She opened her mouth wide, mandibles spread, and let out a serpentine hiss.

The banks of projectors lining the arena walls flashed with power, and Rain was suddenly hidden as a series of energy beams solidified into the walls of a maze.

"How well can you fight?" asked Tara quietly, her voice perfectly calm. Willow felt herself slow slightly in her rise to full-blown panic.

"Stay behind me," ordered Tara. Willow did so, flattening against the wall behind her. Tara took a quick glance either way down the corridor that had sprung up around them. Emdee's eyes never stopped moving.

Tara put a hand around Willow's arm and pulled her close. Willow was surprised at the contact - apart from her brief grapple with Verizen, and the occasional shoves from guards, she had never touched another program. From their appearance, she had expected them to be cold, artificial - smooth like plastic or metal. Tara's hand on her arm felt just like a human's touch.

"Emdee," Tara said, her voice carrying a note of caution, "she's fast. Be careful." Emdee grinned to himself.

"I'm faster," he said quietly. He looked either way, then turned to the left, where the corridor ran on for twenty meters, to a four-way junction. Willow saw him begin to move, the slight tensing of muscles as he shifted his weight, began to lift his foot, then there was a blur, and he was at the junction, peering around the corner. He waved a signal, and Tara pulled Willow along at a fast jog, catching up with him.

"He's self-compressing and extracting," said Tara, lowering her head to whisper into Willow's ear. "When he does that, he reduces his form to a high-speed data stream and reconstitutes at the end. Sark has had us fight together before, against Echelon's soldiers. He's not the best warrior, but he always has the element of surprise."

Emdee motioned for them to stay still while he scouted the next junction along. He blurred down the corridor and waved them on, but before Willow and Tara could reach him a section of wall slid out in front of them, cutting the passageway in two.

"This simulation is a slow-build fractal subroutine," explained Tara, "they've put me in games like this before. The longer we're in here the more complex the maze gets. Come on, we need to find another way, we can't afford to get split up."

"No, wait," called Willow, as Tara started back down the corridor. Possibly it was desperation, or just a desire to do something other than accept the fact that she was stuck in a game with a monstrous killer hunting her - Willow had an idea. She pressed her palm to the wall blocking the corridor. There was almost the hint of something there, almost a texture. She leant her head against the wall, staring at the subtle shadows formed by the play of light over its surface. There were patterns, too fine to be seen from far off, or in the wrong light, but she could see them now, swirls and jagged cog-wheel spirals.

"I can see the fractal," said Willow. She closed her eyes, imagining the shape. It had been a hobby of hers, during college, refining fractal algorithms until they formed the perfect image: a flower, a heart, waves, clouds. She used to stay up late at night, calculating just where to make the tiniest change in the math, and when she found herself dreaming about fractal shapes she'd shelve her algorithms for a week or two, until she got bored with unimaginative assignment work again. Her palms tingled, and her cheek where it was pressed against the wall. The shapes she was imagining weren't entirely her imagination any more.

"You can't see the fractal," said Tara, her voice low, worried, "the fractal is the maze, and we have to keep moving, come on!"

"Just a second," Willow said, more to herself. The shape was there, a blaze of color and pattern, mathematics given visual form. And more than that - Willow almost jumped for joy when she realized it - the math was simple, the algorithm a basic structure she had worked with before. The whole maze was spread out before her, simple yet growing, slowly developing new dead-ends, cul-de-sacs, detours and junctions, as the numbers forming it looped around and back on themselves in their path between simplicity and chaos. And Willow knew which tiny calculation to push...

She sprang back as the wall shifted beneath her touch. Glancing at Tara, she was irrationally pleased at the look of amazement she saw there. There was a blur of movement from up ahead, and Emdee was standing at their side again.

"No," said Tara, "she did it." Emdee turned to gaze at Willow, a look of confusion on his face. Tara gently took her hand and raised her arm, staring at the patterns of light there.

"Um, Willow," said Willow. Emdee's look had shaken her even as his voice reassured her. Part of her was glad to be able to help, to deserve the respect of these programs and not just be dead weight to them - but in his eyes, Willow had had a sudden glimpse of Verizen's expression, in the moment when he realized that she was a user. The Rain program terrified her, but she didn't want more sacrifices on her behalf. "Willow programmed me."

"Well that explains it," said Emdee with a grin. He blurred again, moving to re-check the junction ahead.

"Willow was my user," said Tara, still staring at the tracery on Willow's forearm. "When she created me she used code different to anything else in any system, perhaps you're the same. Look at this."

Willow looked at her own arm. Her yellow tracery was there, still shifting and remaking itself slightly, as always. But now, at its tips, Willow could just make out the last vestiges of the maze's fractal pattern, disappearing into the tracery as if it were being absorbed.

"Do you know what your function was to be?" asked Tara. Willow shook her head. Tara stared at her arm, then met her gaze. Her expression was strange, a mix of feelings. "Maybe you're like me," she said. Willow thought that she heard a hopeful tone in her voice.

"Can you do that... thing, with the fractals, too?" asked Willow. Tara led her on in Emdee's wake.

"No," she answered, "but I can do things other programs can't. What's your designation?"

"Um," hesitated Willow. She hadn't thought that far ahead. "Willow?" she hazarded. "I guess, named after my user..." Tara seemed to accept the explanation.

"I calculated for a moment you might be Tara two point oh," she said, as Emdee scouted ahead again. "I'm version one, but I have code elements of prior versions."

'Yes,' Willow thought, 'I used their structures, what I learned from them, to build you.'

"I wondered if there would be a newer version of me, after I failed," went on Tara, "but I never heard of another of Willow's programs, until now."

"I was created to access Echelon's primary database," Tara explained. "Open its files, bring the data there out into the free system. I failed - I got half-way, and then Rain tracked me down and deactivated me, and Sark's soldiers brought me here. I always assumed another Tara would be created to finish the job."

"I don't think so," said Willow cautiously, "I think perhaps Willow can't access the system any more. We have to finish it ourselves."

"We're in the Game Grid, Willow," said Tara gently but firmly, "the only way out is in a carrier, and Sark controls all of the carrier-capable simulations. There's no way out."

"Like there's no way to alter this maze?" asked Willow, grinning. She watched as Tara's confusion turned to understanding, and a matching grin spread across her face.

"Movement," hissed Emdee, suddenly at their side. He motioned towards the junction up ahead, and indicated the left passageway from it.

"Stay here," she said. Willow almost argued, wanted to stay with Tara, but she realized Tara knew what she was doing in this situation, far better than she herself did. Emdee blurred just short of the junction, and Tara sprinted to catch up. Despite herself, Willow edged a little closer herself. She could hear, faintly, the metallic ringing of footsteps.

Tara braced herself, then jumped nimbly into the open, turning in mid-leap to face the sound's source. Her expression told Willow she had seen their enemy, but her stance never faltered. She shifted lithely into a combat pose, one arm outstretched, ready to defend, the other held behind her, to counterbalance. Willow could just make out her hand behind her back - she had raised three fingers, and Emdee was watching them. The footsteps quickened. Two fingers. One.

Tara shot into the air, flipping twice her own height, as Rain charged into view, talons outstretched. At the same instant, Emdee blurred into action - before Rain had seen him he was on top of her, between the limbs on her back, arms wrapped around her neck, fingers digging fiercely into the vulnerable, soft skin beneath her jaw, as if to choke her. 'Can you choke a program?' Willow thought to herself. Evidently something of the sort was possible, as Rain crashed to the ground in a tangle of limbs and mechanized blades. Tara landed softly behind her and readied herself to strike.

But as soon as his target had hit the ground, Emdee screamed. Willow instinctively ran closer, ignoring the fact that she couldn't be of any assistance anyway. Rain's mandibles had sliced into Emdee's arms, and were sawing through them. Tara launched a lightning-fast kick at the back of Rain's head, but her spider-legs flashed around her like a shield, catching Tara in the stomach and throwing her towards Willow. She rolled as she landed, coming to rest in a perfect defensive posture, stilling the sudden terror Willow had felt at seeing her hit.

Emdee was beyond help. As soon as he let go, to try to at least escape, Rain's hands closed around his elbows, holding him in place as her mandible blades completed their task. Amid a shower of sparks she severed his hands completely, letting him fall to the ground behind her. Her spider-legs slammed into the walls around her, keeping her aloft as she lifted her legs out from underneath her and crossed them. She lowered herself down near Emdee, staring back at Tara and Willow. Making sure they were watching, Willow realized.

Her abdominal claws shot out, punching through Emdee's stomach, lifting him off the ground. Rain ignored his struggles and cupped his face in her palms, grinning at him in a parody of tenderness. Willow started as Tara's hand closed around her arm.

"Let's go," Tara said, her voice thick. Willow couldn't move - she was paralyzed between a suicidal impulse to try to save Emdee, and the desire to just run screaming and hide in the deepest, darkest hole she could find. Rain lifted Emdee's face to hers and pressed their lips together - for her expression alone, it didn't deserve to be called a kiss. Emdee's struggles suddenly intensified, his limbs flailing around, out of control, blue sparks dripping from his tattered wrists.

Willow watched in utter horror as his skin began to crack, the very matter of his body breaking down before her eyes. A few shards fell, tiny prisms and cubes, then more, like firewood burned to ash, falling apart at the slightest touch. Still he struggled, shaking himself to pieces. At last the bulk of his body simply collapsed around the mechanical limbs holding him up, and what was left of him crashed to the ground, the last fragments shattering completely, the broken remains of his tracery snapping like fragile glass, leaking his energy over the debris of his body.

Rain stayed motionless for a moment, clearly enjoying her audience's fear. Her mouth remained open, stretched like a python's, around the thick end of the long-long tendril she had extended, that had torn Emdee apart from the inside. It was forked at the tip, just like a serpent's tongue. At the same instant it snapped back into her mouth, vanishing without a trace behind her lips, and her spider-legs let go of their grip on the walls. She landed, her feet wide for balance, and stretched luxuriously.

"Willow, we need to go now," whispered Tara urgently. Her cheeks were wet - tears. Willow started to stagger back, letting Tara lead her, her eyes still fixed in horror on the other program

"She de-rezzed him, yes," said Tara grimly. "We have to get out of here now, before she-"

Rain started to move, raising a single clawed foot off the ground, then she blurred just like Emdee had. Willow screamed as the horror program suddenly appeared right in front of her, and instinctively raised her arm as Rain lashed out at her, the limb buried in her forearm stretching out to cross the distance between them. She felt an impact, but not the burning pain she remembered from before, and fell back as Tara's guiding grip turned into a desperate pull, hauling her away from Rain. Half-way through her fall Willow staggered, her arm almost pulled out of its socket, and she slid to the ground as her legs collapsed under her.

"Willow!" Tara screamed as she fell, drowned out by a bellow of surprise and rage from Rain. Willow's hand had folded into a shield again, through which Rain's blade had sliced and stuck, leaving them locked together. Rain was staring in disbelief at the shield, tugging her arm to release the blade, but otherwise seeming like she hadn't fully processed the situation. Seeing her distracted, Tara attacked.

Willow fell back as the blade wrenched out of her shield, pulled away as Tara slammed into Rain, driving her back. Her arms and legs flashed too fast to see, striking Rain again and again, knocking her bladed limbs away, kicking her legs out from under her, parrying her spider-legs when they slashed forward randomly. Willow rolled onto her side and got to her knees, as for a moment it looked like Tara had the upper hand. Then Rain recovered from her shock, and focused her attention on Tara. She used both her abdominal limbs to block Tara's kick to her waist, then lashed out with both forearms and two pairs of spider-legs at once, connecting with enough of the bladed limbs to toss Tara over Willow's head.

Willow didn't look back. She had heard Tara's scream, saw the stains of green light on Rain's blades, and her mind - driven beyond the need for rational thought to justify its decisions - told her to make Rain pay for that. She went from her half-kneeling crouch into a perfect lunge, arm outstretched, the sword unfolding from her hand as she drove in towards the top of Rain's abdomen, where she knew - from knowing to avoid it in friendly bouts - a strike would hurt the most, just underneath the protection of the ribs. It didn't matter to her than Rain most likely didn't have ribs, or that she was lunging into range of no less than twelve separate limbs, each razor-edged. All that mattered was the look of shock and pain on Rain's hated face, as Willow lunged her sword up into the cavity in her abdomen, driving upwards into her chest. There was some resistance, but little, against all of Willow's weight thrown into the lunge.

The two of them stayed that way, locked together in perfect stillness, for several seconds - Willow staring into Rain's eyes, her hand buried in her stomach, the hilt of her blade slammed against the top of her abdominal cavity, the tip rising up out of her back behind her neck. Then Rain broke the stare, looking down at her own body as if it were something unfamiliar to her, and the loss of contact allowed Willow to gather her thoughts for a brief instant and analyze the situation rationally. Her conclusion was that Rain was still standing, so she swung her other arm out from where her lunge had left it, flattened against her side and leg, brought to mind the memory of having a sword in that hand too, and drove it through her neck.

That seemed to get Rain's attention. She screamed, a mechanical sound that reverberated along Willow's left arm from where the hilt of her blade was pressed against Rain's throat, and flung Willow away, and herself back. Willow ended up on her stomach, looking back at Tara's fallen form - she was moving. She had three cuts on her, a deep one on one shoulder, two shallower ones across her stomach, but she was supporting herself on one arm, lifting her torso up off the ground, staring back at Willow and Rain in shock and disbelief. Willow heard the crash behind her as Rain fell, but all her thoughts had turned to Tara. Her twin swords folded into her hands as she pushed herself to her feet, quickly closing the distance between them, taking the offered arm and helping Tara to her feet.

"We have to go," said Tara, her voice strained but strong, "quickly!" Only then did Willow look back at Rain. The nightmare program was back on her feet, her spider-legs thrashing in rage, tearing chunks out of the walls on either side of her. Willow and Tara ran, dodging around the corner at the next junction, and kept running until the sound of crunching, tearing steel had been left far behind them.

Willow could tell Tara was in pain, but her pace at Willow's side never faltered. For her part, Willow was concentrating on controlling a sudden attack of nerves at what she had just done. She couldn't keep herself from looking back every few steps, expecting to see Rain there, chasing them down. Distracted, she almost ran into Tara when she paused at a junction.

"She won't come at us from behind," Tara whispered at Willow's puzzled look, "she'll try to circle around us and take us by surprise. We should get our bearings while we can..." She paused, and turned to Willow. "Are you hurt?" she asked, suddenly seeming less sure of herself.

"I'm fine," said Willow a little too quickly, "just need to catch my breath. I'm not really used to all this running." While Tara checked the connecting corridors and listened for any sign of Rain, Willow rested against the wall and took a few deep breaths. She didn't want Tara to see how scared she was - Tara didn't need the added complication.

"Wait," said Tara suddenly - she wasn't looking directly at Willow, but just to one side. Willow followed her gaze, and settled on her own hand, where she was leaning against the wall. Tiny fractal patterns were snaking along her fingers, merging with the wall at her fingertips.

"Are you doing that on purpose?" asked Tara in a hushed voice. Willow shook her head, and tried to bring back the image of the maze's mathematical structure, as she had seen it before. The patterns on her hand moved faster, streaming down from her wrist.

"I think... I can see it," Willow said. Something was wrong, though, the numbers weren't behaving as they should.

"What's wrong?" asked Tara. She had seen Willow's concern in her face, before she had even worked out how to vocalize what she was experiencing.

"The maze is being disrupted," Willow tried to explain, "it's not growing like it should... there's something changing it that I can't see."

"Rain," said Tara flatly, "probably smashing everything in reach. You hurt her badly back there, it's not something she's familiar with. That was good work, by the way, I'm sorry I didn't say so earlier... you're very brave." Willow grimaced at the irony - 'If only she knew most of me just wants this all to be a bad dream, and wake up.'

"No," she said, "I just reacted, I was too scared to think... Tara, I can see the disruption in the maze, where the numbers are being changed, I think - oh Goddess, it's close! Tara, she's-"

Willow screamed and pulled away as the wall a few meters from her erupted in an avalanche of debris. Shrapnel spewed across the corridor, and within the shower of geometric rubble Willow could see several glittering blades flashing back and forth, tearing the wall apart. Tara took her hand and pulled her back as Rain crashed into the corridor ahead of them. They ran back the way they had come, Willow fighting the urge to look back as she heard Rain's enraged screaming, and the metallic crunching of her footsteps behind them. She turned all her attention to moving as fast as she could, fixing her eyes on Tara's hand clutching hers tightly.

Turning a corner, Tara drew to a halt and spun around. Willow lifted her gaze to see why - in the few minutes since they had come through this passageway, it had turned into a dead end. Willow's resolve not to look back crumbled as she heard Rain's approach from around the corner, but even as she turned Tara was sliding past her, putting herself between Willow and the oncoming danger.

"Willow," Tara said levelly - she seemed unnaturally calm in the face of crisis, "can you move the wall? Like you did before?" Willow opened her mouth to say she'd try, but her voice wouldn't answer beyond "Uh-huh". The passageway was narrow - she stretched out her arms and flattened her palms on the walls on either side of her. She closed her eyes - it was all there, and coming to her faster than before. The numbers, the structure - she could visualize the fractal closely enough to see the maze itself, stretching out around herself and Tara, slowly adding more twists and turns as the mathematical sequence progressed. She had an odd sensation, as if she were seeing a picture of herself watching a picture of herself, spiraling down into microscopic infinity. 'More fractals,' her mind quipped.

She opened her eyes and looked behind her, watching the wall blocking the corridor split down the middle and absorb into the walls on either side of it. She turned back to Tara, only to see Rain come around the corner beyond her.

"Tara run!" she yelled. Tara nodded and moved back, but slowly, keeping a combat stance, her eyes still on Rain. Rain's eyes blazed with hatred, directed straight at Tara. Willow saw her begin to move, her fear honing her senses so she could make out the slight tensing of the muscles in Rain's powerful thighs. She was about to blur - Tara wasn't far enough away.

Once more Willow acted without thinking. Flexing her palms against the walls she concentrated on the fractal within the maze, grabbed hold of the numbers, and wrenched them violently out of place. Rain was a split second from moving when the ground lurched beneath her, and the walls on either side of her bulged towards her. She slammed a clawed foot out to halt her forward momentum, and her spider-legs crashed into the walls, tearing at them, pushing them away from her. Willow felt the numbers begin to break down - but she knew what they should be, even as Rain tore them up. Where the walls were being broken Willow visualized new, perfect sequences of equations and slammed them into place.

Rain screamed like a banshee as the walls solidified around her spider-legs, trapping her. She arched her back and struck out sideways with her arm-blades, as her legs and abdominal talons writhed in mid-air. Twisting from side to side, the mechanical muscles in her spider-legs hauled at their tips, trying to pull them free of the solid blocks they were embedded in. Cracks began to form in the walls, small showers of debris breaking free and scattering across the tilted ground.

"Oh no you don't," said Willow, feeling suddenly light-headed. She gave the fractal another firm twist, and the walls slammed together around Rain, crushing her. For a split second she exulted in success - no rational part of her raised any moral objection to terminating Rain - but she saw at once she had bought them time at best. The algorithm had partially broken down as it had closed around Rain - so far as the fractal maze was concerned, she was an immovable object, at least when trying to exert enough force to badly damage her.

"Holy BIOS," breathed Tara, staring at the closed wall where Rain had been, in which a handful of cracks were beginning to show. Willow allowed herself a self-congratulatory grin, then concentrated on the maze again. This time, instead of altering the algorithm's numbers here and there, she reached into the heart of the fractal and reduced its functional pattern to mathematical ruins.

"Tara, stay close!" she warned. She let her hands fall away from the walls, having completed the alteration. The maze was already shaking as if it was in the middle of a severe earthquake. Tara stumbled slightly as the floor lurched, and Willow caught her before she could fall - somehow she was keeping her balance in the growing chaos. 'Maybe because it's my chaos,' she thought, grinning.

"What's going on?" asked Tara, raising her voice above the sound of metal breaking and screaming.

"I made a way out," answered Willow loudly, "I hope! This way!" She led Tara away from Rain's temporary prison, doing her best to ignore the sounds of complicated destruction that indicated at least part of the maze had already collapsed under the strain. The corridors ahead of them were twisting and unraveling even as they ran, but Willow held her course - she knew roughly what shapes were going to form as the maze's math disintegrated. As for escape - it was worth a shot. They rounded a corner and found the walls ending, crumbling away on either side to reveal the giant arena.

"This way!" yelled Willow, dragging Tara off to the right, along one side of the maze's exterior. If she had calculated everything properly, behind them was where it was going to happen, any second now-

The maze wall beside them groaned and bent inwards alarmingly. Tara reacted faster than Willow, quickly reversing their roles so she was now pulling Willow, away from the tortured fractal simulation. After a few steps there was a terrific roar from the maze, and a whole side of it near where they had exited bulged outwards, walls cracking, breaking open, new segments growing out of the gaps, stretching outward. Both Willow and Tara stopped and watched as the wild, chaotic structure reached the massive arena wall and crashed against it. The ground shook from the impact, and several of the arena's projection arrays buckled and toppled down from their mountings, crashing to the ground or smashing against the runaway simulation. Some sections of the maze began to flicker in and out of being, but the damage was already done - the arena wall was cracked, starting to collapse, and the death-throes of the maze only added to the destruction.

Three hundred meters of wall slowly toppled outwards, crashing against the ground and the neighboring arena building. Two of the strangely-shaped geometric vehicles patrolling the arena wall were destroyed, one toppling with the wall itself as whatever force kept it hovering failed to compensate for the sudden loss of the surface close beneath it, the other swerving erratically to maintain altitude, only to be struck by a jagged piece of shrapnel spinning out of the crash that cut it in two.

"Two recognizers down!" yelled Tara. "Willow, you did it!" She flung her arms around Willow and hugged her fiercely. After a second of shock, Willow returned the hug enthusiastically. Tara held her for a moment, then pulled back, grinning the widest, most radiant grin Willow had ever seen in her life. Willow was slightly stunned, and couldn't do anything but grin back - for all that programs didn't have anything besides contours to hide, and Willow had slowly become accustomed to their tracery-covered bodies and stopped wishing she had something to wear, it still felt like she had just been hugged by a naked woman.

"Come on," said Tara excitedly, snapping Willow out her private reverie, "with those two recognizers smashed Sark won't know what's going on down here for millicycles! If we can get to an isolated node, or hide out in a simulation storage circuit, we might have a chance to sneak onto an outbound carrier vehicle." Tara took Willow's hand and led her quickly towards the rubble surrounding the breach in the arena. After a momentary gaze lingering over Tara's physique, Willow suddenly looked over her shoulder at the remains of the maze. It was still growing randomly, but slower than initially, as if the destruction of the arena wall had taken its toll on the simulation, sapped too much of its energy. Still, it looked impassable for the moment. Willow shivered - Rain was still in there, somewhere. She quickened her pace in Tara's wake.

Willow followed Tara's lead in picking her way up the small mountain of rubble that was all that remained of the arena wall. By the time they reached the top and looked out into the Game Grid, she could see Tara moving stiffly, holding herself up straight, avoiding too much motion in her torso. Willow drew level with her, and looked down at the wounds she had taken fighting Rain.

"Are you okay?" she asked. "Does it hurt? Because if there's anything I can do-"

"I'm functioning fine," said Tara, her eyes scanning the nearby buildings. "Once we get out of here I know where we can find some power outlets. I'll last until then." Willow sensed she wasn't being entirely honest - her breathing was shallow, as if the cuts across her stomach hurt, and she was holding her left arm still, against her side. The wound on her shoulder was deeper than the others, and standing close to her Willow could see the tracery around it had grown slightly darker.

"Tara, you don't have to..." she began, and trailed off uncertain of what she was trying to say. "You're going to make it," she said. She had meant her voice to be firm, supportive, but it came out slightly pleading.

"I'm going to make it, Willow," said Tara, smiling at her, and Willow knew she wasn't lying. She put her hand on Tara's right shoulder, reassuringly. At least, it started out as a gesture of reassurance, comradeship - but Tara raised her right hand and lay it on top of Willow's, running her fingertips gently along the grooves between Willow's fingers. If Tara had been looking at her, Willow would have been certain that Tara was attracted to her - she didn't have that much of a social life, but she managed to get out now and then, and had been politely hit on by enough nice girls that she didn't mistake a touch like that for mere companionship. But Tara's eyes were already scanning the Grid again. Willow wasn't sure how to interpret that - it seemed almost as if Tara was concentrating on the task ahead, and had reacted unconsciously. What did it mean? All Willow was sure of was that she liked it.

"Down there," said Tara suddenly, and with a final squeeze of Willow's fingers she slipped away from her and started down the side of the rubble. Willow followed instantly, trying not to grin. 'That squeeze,' she thought to herself giddily 'was diagnostic. No-one does that if they're completely oblivious.' And on the heels of that: 'What are you, libido-girl? Prison-break now, think lusty thoughts later.' Willow glared sideways, as if her voice of reason was sitting on her shoulder where she could intimidate it into silence.

Looking ahead at Tara, Willow noticed that her shoulder, where she had touched her, was glowing slightly brighter. 'Did I do that?' she wondered. Tara didn't seem to have noticed, all her attention was on the nearest arena building. Willow followed her gaze - the collapse of the giant arena's wall had damaged this building too, knocking a chunk out of it. Near the ground the wall had been badly damaged, and was partly collapsed, partly fading in and out and letting off showers of sparks. Enough sections of the lower wall were existing enough of the time to hold up the whole structure, but if Tara hadn't been heading resolutely for it, Willow would have hesitated to get anywhere near it.

"Is that safe?" she called out. Tara held back a step, letting Willow catch up with her before she headed on.

"It'll hold for a while," she said, "and we won't have too much time before Sark gets his soldiers on the ground here. We need to be mobile before they arrive."

"There are vehicles in there?" asked Willow. She hadn't expected there to be, in an arena.

"See for yourself," said Tara, grinning sideways at Willow as they drew level with the breach in the wall. Willow looked through to see the ground inside covered with a grid of glowing lines. It seemed to stretch on for a mile or more, much further than the outside of the building could contain. 'Put it down to an ingenious programmer' she thought. Something was moving at the far side of the arena, leaving a glowing blue trail behind it. With abrupt speed it changed direction, streaked across the arena towards the breach, then jerked sideways and vanished again. Not before Willow had gotten a good look at it though - a sleek, futuristic bike, all curved surfaces and speed, outlined in glowing blue energy. 'Of course,' Willow thought, mentally slapping her forehead, 'racing games.' She wondered briefly what else might be contained in the Game Grid's arenas.

"Lightcycles," said Tara. "Wait here." She put a hand on Willow's arm to emphasize her instruction, then strode forward through the breach in the wall, onto the racing grid. She took a few steps forward, clearing the wall, then stopped and waved her good arm above her head. Two of the distant glittering shapes veered towards her, quickly revealed as a pair of red cycles. They stopped, with alarming suddenness, and the curved hulls of the cycles dissolved into patterns of energy around the forms of two red programs, hunched over in streamlined riding positions. They straightened as the energy patterns deconstructed themselves, remaining as nothing more than a glowing white rod, like a baton, that each program held in one hand. They approached Tara from either side, looking not at all friendly.

"Greetings," said Tara loudly, "I'm a renegade program. Would you like to capture me?"

"Tara, what are you-" began Willow, starting forwards. Before she had gone a step, Tara had twisted like a dancer and leapt into the air. Her outstretched foot connected solidly with the jaw of the program on her left, then she rolled in mid-air like an acrobat, her other leg flashing out as - briefly upside-down - she faced the program on her right. Tara landed gracefully as both programs toppled over, sparks crackling across their faces.

"-doing?" finished Willow. Tara leant over one of the soldiers - both lay motionless, but showed no signs of disintegrating, and their traceries remained lit, though glowing erratically. Tara took the lightcycle rods from both soldiers, holding one in her hand, placing the other on her back alongside her data disc, and returned to Willow's side, with an unmistakable spring in her step.

"Um, wow?" said Willow as she fell in at Tara's side, and they got out from underneath the unstable arena wall. "That was... I mean, I saw you fighting Rain, and that was pretty amazing, but still... wow! Are they... they're still functioning?" Willow added, looking back at the defeated programs through the breach.

"They're deactivated," said Tara, still grinning a little from Willow's gushing admiration, "Sark will re-initialize them when he finds them. I was created to terminate Echelon. I don't terminate other programs." Willow noticed a faraway look in her eyes as she said this - this wasn't just a casual choice, she realized, this was something Tara believed in. 'Did I program her to think that?' she wondered. She didn't remember coding any specific instructions into Tara's program with regards to anything but Echelon. Maybe she'd interpreted that as do-not-terminate orders for other programs. 'Then again,' Willow thought, studying Tara's face as she glanced about, planning their next move, 'maybe she decided it herself.' Willow felt a mix of pride in her programming, at creating a working artificial intelligence, and a new respect for Tara as a- well, as a person, she admitted to herself. 'What must it take,' she mused as Tara led her into one of the narrow walkways between arena buildings, 'for a purpose-built warrior to decide not to kill?'

Her musing was interrupted by a shadow that fell over both of them, and the entire passageway. Willow looked up to see the Game Grid's usual sky blocked by a moving wall of metal.

"Command Carrier," said Tara urgently, "I didn't calculate Sark would mobilize this quickly. Hell and erasure! So much for sneaking around, we need speed now." She turned to Willow and took her arm, drawing her close.

"Hold on tight," she instructed, turning her back. Willow pressed against her and reached her arms underneath Tara's to hold her tightly - not wanting to touch the wounds on Tara's stomach, nor wanting to put her hands somewhere thoroughly inappropriate, she settled on wrapping her arms just underneath Tara's chest, safely above where she had been hurt. 'Do programs know about groping?' she wondered, amazing herself with her own capacity for persistently libidinous thoughts in a crisis.

Tara meanwhile raised one of the lightcycle rods in front of her and gripped it with both hands, like a bike's handlebars. As soon as she did so she leaned forward into a riding position, Willow moving with her - it seemed like her body moved automatically. There was a flash of light around her, and then she was surrounded by the shell of a lightcycle, a green beam on either side of her. Beneath her Tara was straddling the bike's saddle, looking forward through the semi-transparent forward hull. Suddenly they were moving - there was no steady acceleration, just a jump from stationary to high speed that caught Willow thoroughly off-guard. She stifled a yelp and held on tight as Tara steered the cycle at breakneck speed through the narrow alleyways between the arenas. Looking up, Willow saw the ominous form of Sark's Carrier hovering overhead, keeping pace.

"Game time," said Tara to herself. Willow looked ahead to see a widened section of road, clustered with red programs. Some of them raised disc-guns and fired at the approaching cycle. Willow yelped and ducked, but after a pair of heavy thuds, and no ensuing termination, she raised her head again to see the discs rebounding off the cycle's hull. Tara veered sideways just as the nearest soldier made an ill-timed attempt to leap out of their way - the cycle hit him dead-on, and he crashed over the top of it. The front wheel seemed to stick in place for a split-second, while the rear of the cycle spun around it, slamming two more soldiers against the walls. The traction of the wheels reversed - the front of the bike pivoting around the back - so that they were facing forwards again, and Tara instantly shot the cycle forward at top speed. The remaining soldiers were still firing, some missing, but some ricocheting their discs off the cycle's hull. Willow noted with some alarm that the energy in the beams on either side of her was pulsing more erratically.

"I know," said Tara casually. She jinked quickly from side to side, smashing two more soldiers to the ground, then dug the front wheel into the ground, spinning the bike around backwards, lifting the back wheel into the air. Willow looked back over her shoulder to see the wheel crack solidly across the face of the last soldier standing, then Tara slammed the cycle back to the ground. Another flash of light and it was gone, Willow and Tara both standing straight - again, as if their bodies moved automatically. Tara inspected the rod, which had faded to a weak, flickering glow, and tossed it idly over her shoulder.

"Have you ever used one of these?" she asked, picking up one of the fallen disc-guns and tossing it to Willow.

"Stick to the deactivate setting," said Tara, picking up a disc-gun of her own. "Put your hand around the grip and touch the control codes. The high energy setting terminates, the low one deactivates. You aim and contact the trigger, and the disc does the rest." Willow had already felt the trigger control in the weapon. She concentrated, and recognized the function Tara was describing. There was a less intense trigger alongside the active one - with a thought, it became the one Willow was feeling through her palm. She found herself relieved - holding the disc-gun did not have pleasant associations. Tara finished checking the fallen soldiers for anything useful, then returned to Willow, drawing the remaining lightcycle rod from her back.

"I've got an idea," she explained, turning to let Willow hold onto her again. Once they had jerked forward and the cycle had formed around them, Tara continued: "That Command Carrier probably isn't fully mobile yet, if we can appropriate a smaller program capable of leaving the Grid, we should be able to outrun it enough to find a place to hide. Once we're outside and in cover, well," she chuckled, "last time, they never even came close to finding me until Rain showed up."

"Do you think she'll be out yet?" asked Willow, trying not to pay too much attention to the twisting corridors flashing by outside.

"It'll take a while for them to shut down that maze simulation," said Tara thoughtfully, "I calculate we'll have long enough to get a head start. It's worth a shot."

"Affirmative to that," replied Tara, and just from the tone of her voice Willow could imagine her smile.

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TARA

by Chris Cook

Copyright © 2003

alia@netspace.net.au