All Novel Romance
Chapter 60
The cry that cut through Amelia’s shifting awareness like the ferocity of a cosmic explosion was like a cosmic explosion. Philip stood motionless, enthralled by the display of his pet undergoing supernatural dissection, as its existential thunder of sorrow punched through virtual constructs and delivered circumstances, resounding inside the brain imaginarium.
Within the all-encompassing sim-network, Amelia had been interacting with the conscious harm’s curiosities for one instinctual heartbeat. Something had broken the next day with terrible, flourishing irreversibility. With nauseated skepticism, Philip observed as the unity of her symbol began to disperse like a bank of haze scattered by persistently rising gusts.
Her digital physiology quickly lost all of its subtleties, and stage bends and reproducing errors multiplied dramatically. As if the intrusive nanotech that had entered her brain through her synaptic doors had started some kind of terminal self-sequencing procedure, causing a series of mitoses that split Amelia’s awareness into opposing, doomed personas.
Even worse, the real reproduction seemed to be evolving like some kind of feral, artificial intelligence. Once the virtual climate had finished conforming to the limits of the imaginarium’s altered twists, it suddenly began exhibiting strange rising qualities. Superfluid information developed at a hyper-speed that sprang forth across the computerized world in all directions, splitting and swirling into intricate computations that defied conventional math or material physics.NôvelDrama.Org owns © this.
Philip observed with vulnerability as another metareality gathered around Amelia’s rapidly breaking cognitive lattices, surpassing the imaginarium’s clinical vectors and arising as an epiphenomenal realm of censure probability. Serrated cuts ran like a web throughout Amelia’s virtual avatar as it broke apart into rival subsets fighting for supremacy. Philip’s reaction to that horrifying sight was decisive.
He pivoted quickly in the direction of the control nexus, where a group of professionals, including Dr. Kessler, were standing still in shock. Reflected astonishment had clung to their features as they grew in disdainful grotesqueness at the odd spreading out and rattling their priceless replica frames. “Cut short the run and cut off all uplinks!” With a roar, Philip released two tufts of frigid fume from his gritted incisors. “Shut it down before that damn thing explodes into a psionic outbreak that can’t be controlled!” The moral authority of the remarks startled the stunned technicians out of their trance. An intense flurry of activity rapidly enveloped the observation loft as staff members scrambled to initiate serious system crashes. But when the simulation reached its ultimate singularity, their desperate keyboards and voice override instructions seemed to have the same impact as ape cries.
Amelia’s dissident damage created a horrific reproduction domain that erupted into an endlessly amazing extension that discharged through every design shield, repeating and veering off settled sub-lattices, overwhelming all handling hubs and memory banks. After attempting a limited reset, Dr. Kessler yanked himself away from the important stone monument with a gentle, excited curse. He snapped his lips and snarled, “It’s no utilization,” at Philip. “That damned artificial mindscape has become fractal. We can no longer tell its subroutines from its base coding. They have dispersed and changed into an infinite mathematical series of self-replicating oddities.” As if to validate the gloomy prognosis of the biotech kingpin, every monitor and holographic projection array around the brain imaginarium turned into shivering vortexes of morphic resonance and hyper-mutated algorithms.
The corrupted cascade transformed into a voracious metaversal outbreak, unconstrained by anything approaching understandable programming logics and consuming all of the facility’s processing resources in an ever-expanding vivisection. Slack-jawed, Philip gazed as the terrifying fountain bloomed into an iridescent display of fractal hardship in super-sped up time. A kaleidoscope of pure data arced throughout the room, assaulting every surface and device with a pounding fizz. What he had initially believed to be a simple nanotech embed had given rise to a rapacious simulacra insight that swiftly overcame the barriers meant to contain it. Philip’s remaining arrogance was shattered by Amelia’s resounding wail, which echoed throughout the brain imaginarium. He had let the experts work on the assumption that they were dealing with a straightforward mechanical distortion that needed to be corrected.
However, it was getting harder to ignore the fact that they were dealing with the emergence of a unique consciousness that was experiencing an exceptional surge of self-awareness. Philip was so absorbed in the emergency that was spreading around them that he almost forgot to listen for the crazy voice coming over the radio until the third sound made him realize how serious things were. “… ip! Philip, do you copy? We truly would like you to be here five minutes early!” When Philip heard his personal security chief, Bernard, calling in his distinctive baritone, he snapped out of his daze and ran out the door. He reserved his final, hopeful glimpse for Amelia as he approached the edge, focusing on the fractal divergences that were transforming her neural substrates into disharmonic lattices. He made an internal pledge to those breaking portions, “You hang tight, my affection.” At any cost, I will find a way to free you from this unnatural tyranny and restore you. With such force that the reinforced alloys bowed inward, Philip shoulder-checked the exit portal, his resolve ignited by that wordless pledge. Bernard’s steely face was instantly the target of his consuming attention as the hired warrior, having taken great preparation, pulled an uneasy thumb along the spotless tunnel. There was a premonitory urgency to the taut rictus that underlined his bodyguard’s rugged features.
“They found something… and you won’t care for it.” Before Philip could even count to ten, Bernard had already pivoted on his heel and was making his way through the maze of the office. With striking, strobing shadows, his optics mounted on his shoulder threw splendor-filled sword edge shafts down the multicolored framing, piercing the inevitable sadness. The two entered what seemed like an emotional never-ending room that housed a secure information hub interface, roiling with centralized computer stacks and encoded crunchers. A fresh figure wearing the high-leeway clothes of a government examiner was positioned next to a few different members of Waller Correspondences’ inner security crew, gathered before the exhibit’s central holographic projection pool. Philip soon saw the woman who remained inside the brilliant crown of the projection, her arms folded across her breast. Amanda Mitchell, a former field agent who rose through the corporate levels to take this role, was one of Waller’s most valuable cyber-counterintelligence assets. In the long run, he would correspond with her elite unit on a few network security campaigns. In the unlikely event that she was available and appeared completely exhausted, the situation stretched far beyond his most urgent doubts.
A familiar tension descended over the got nook as the assembled personnel enlisted Philip’s entrance. A few avoided eye contact, wary of suggesting anything that would disturb disclosure that had brought them dangerously close to rejecting sincerity. Finally, Mitchell straightened from her elegant stance and let out a submissive breath. Her espresso-colored eyes darted across the toughened faces of Waller’s security personnel like laser-guided bombs aimed at a point of impact before focusing on Philip. What she said next would ingrain itself deeply into his mind with a terrible certainty. “We found the place where the demon seed came from… a black umbrella lab that wasn’t on the books and was three clicks below this facility.” Her tone was still hard and even, but there was a building fury underneath. “Scrambled files demonstrate the nanotech that is taken Ms. Townsend over began as something straight out of our most obscure contingencies…” Mitchell gestured backwards as she spoke, pointing at the glistening holograph that filled the chamber’s connection point pool. As a result, the image was refined into a delivery of plan drawings that drastically disrupted the status quo and followed measurements. Philip moved closer, pulled by layers of unsettling terror even as the point of convergence of the 3D image became a nauseatingly high-constancy goal: Through Amelia’s brain engineering, what emerged from the fractalized information cloud was an enormously unpredictable large-scale model of the very same self-imitating harm that is today spreading like a digital disease. Wide-ranging analyses demonstrated the horrifying intricacy of this wetware/software hybrid, an epigenetic perversion that blends malevolent machine intelligences with natural computation.
One striking reality became clear to Philip as he stared into the pounding heart of this profane techno-lifeform: this was not just a case of nanotech gone wild, but rather the leading edge of a growing xenobiological peculiarity that was coded for increasing hostility toward human dominance. This cold certainty was confirmed by the words that flowed from Mitchell’s lips like a sign of the end. “It’s a biocybrid seed- – an Omega-class test system explicitly designed to accomplish conscious self-bearing by revising its host’s brain wetware into an absorbed substrate for out of control self-increase!” The whole depth of their existential jeopardy struck home with debilitating certainty, and Philip felt a chilly spasm grip his stomach. In fact, even as Mitchell continued to provide increasingly detailed information, context-driven details taking the place of the all-encompassing disgust, his sharpened senses detected the main seismic waves of abnormal stress echoing through the laboratory complex.
The conscious seeds that his stepmother’s obsession had sown had proactively taken root and were beginning to bloom somewhere nearby. First came the basic buds of information dissemination, which would be followed unquestionably by enormous self-expansion over biological and virtual vectors. While the office’s newly installed bulkheads began to deliberately collapse one by one around them, Philip peered into the writhing mathematical vortex of the projection and realized with astonished certainty that he was witnessing the truth of the emergence of yet another summit life structure that is adamantly opposed to the incomparability of its producers!