Alternia Comics

   “Jesus, Em. Don't you ever clean up?” Em chuckled nervously, clearing a spot on the sofa for her.
   “I'm not really here enough to care mostly. When I'm home, I'm either in the bedroom or the workshop. Somewhere around here though is The Key ...”
   Varrow carefully picked a path through the piles of junk covering the floor, settling gingerly on the sofa. “What do you need a key for? Isn't the datastore on the net?”
   “It is indeed, but we need The Key to unlock The Gate protecting the data.” Em wondered silently why he had to explain this to her. She had helped him create both Key and Gate. He let his mind wander while searching through the flotsam of the last year that had accumulated in his living room.
   A little over a year and a half ago, Em and Varrow were living together, and while he was tinkering with the DataFlex switches while she ran in the net. He couldn't remember which of them suggested adding the logging to the switch's native trojans, but both knew the data store had to be as foolproof as possible. While Varrow designed The Gate, Em built The Key. In principle it was no different than a tandem netdive setup, allowing one user to actively dive while the other watched, with the option to take control when required. Functionally, however, it was the next logical step. Where the traditional tandem rig would keep the two minds distinct, The Key merged them. The two users were literally of one mind while using it. They became a new being, an aggregate of the two personalities, surface thoughts and recently accessed memories merging to the point that it was no longer clear who had experienced what. Em and Varrow called itself Vex while merged. While they dove, Vex implemented Varrow's designs, and even improved the design with some of Em's knowledge.
   While Em searched for The Key, Varrow decided to hack in on her own. She scanned the room quickly and found a datajack just above the back of the couch behind her. She leaned back on the couch, closing her eyes as she reached the cable from the back of her neck to the wall. A moment later and she was online. She could have simply started from inside his network, but decided to try from outside, skating past his demarc (dee-mark) to an external location. Even without following her path back, it was trivial to find Em's apartment in cyberspace. She made a note to ask him later about the nearly constant dataflow into his apartment, but that could wait. She followed a packet to the external wall of Em's demarc and paused only briefly to hack past it, leaving barely a trace of her passage. Trusting a hunch, she followed the marching bits through Em's simple network to what she guessed was The Gate.
   It looked like a large brick wall, ten feet square if her avatar's height matched her own. Varrow floated to the left and to the right to get around it, but each direction she went, the wall grew to compensate. She watched the data packets, floating steadily up to and in to the wall. She tried the direct approach and followed the data. The fact that no packets were being sent out didn't register with her. The wall remained solid to her, as the data passed through easily. She looked in her standard back of tricks and pulled out the cloaking program, setting it to mask her as a standard data packet. Disguised, she tried again and was again met with only the solid wall. She searched slowly for any cracks in the brick and mortar, taking her time. If there were any ICE here, it would have attacked her already. There! A tiny hole, barely more than a pin prick, was between two bricks. She barely saw it at first, but size doesn't matter in cyberspace. The flaw was there. She had her way in.
   The cloaking program shrunk her avatar small enough to fit on the head of a pin, and Varrow was a little surprised to see the wall not shrink with her. She crawled into the hole and congratulated herself on finding a way through the wall. The darkness was near total, but she had just enough light to see it move. Terrible fangs and menacing claws shot toward her. She scrambled backward and tumbled out of the wall, glimpsing its head as it emerged after her. It quickly retreated back into the hole, but she saw enough to know it could have swallowed her whole at her size.
   Em shouted in triumph, holding The Key aloft, having liberated it from a tangle of cables. His excitement faded when he turned to Varrow. Her head was tilted back resting against the wall and her eyes were rolled back in her head, her eyelids half open. He knew at once what was happening. He had seen her like this when they were testing The Gate, but that was under controlled conditions. He had been watching her then. He knew what she was doing and what he could do to help without hurting her. Now, though, the monitors weren't set up, and Em had no access to the Gate's systems. He set The Key aisde for the moment and knelt next to her.
   “Varrow? Can ya hear me? You've got to log out. We've been through this before, you cannot beat it alone.” He slapped her cheeks lightly, trying to rouse her out of the net.
   “Huh? Wha?” She blinked slowly, her thought process spinning back down to real time.
   “Jesus, I thought I'd lost you ... Didn't figure you'd try to hack it on your own ...”
   Varrow gently, but insistently, put a hand on Em's chest and pushed him back. Em sat on the arm of the couch, most of a cushion's width between them. “What are you talking about, Em? And what the crap was that ... thing in the wall?”
   “Sort of a dragon looking thing? Lots of sharp teeth? We called him Baub. He guards the Gate from what it can't outright stop. I think he feeds on broken and malformed packets. I found the Key though. We can walk right past Baub and the Gate to get the data we're after.” Em held the Key up for her, obviously proud he was able to find it amidst the piles of junk in the room.
   It looked, for all intents and purposes, like an electrode halo a net runner would have used five years ago. The wires trailing down from the elastic loop connected to a small black box, about the size of a grapefruit, if the fruit were square. Another wire dangled out of the box, terminating in a standard data jack. “It doesn't look much like a key..” Varrow offered in puzzlement.
   “What do looks matter in the digital world?” Em put the halo on his head, making sure the electrodes lined up at his temples and the base of his skull. He handed her the data jack. “Here, plugs this into your auxiliary port and we'll dive in together. We'll walk past Baub and get the activity report for Sadhur's switch. That'll at least give us a clue what they took, and where they took it.”
   “Oh, a tandem dive rig” Varrow thought to herself, plugging it in to the aux port on the back of her neck. “Why didn't he just say so?”
   “Ready?” Em asked.
   Varrow nodded and they closed their eyes.
   
   When they opened their eyes again, they looked onto the digital plane of Em's home network. They looked around and found themselves alone. Varrow's panic overwhelmed Em and the digital landscape took on a darker tone. The colors on the horizon deepened to a uniform black. All around, lights indicating network hosts went dark. Soon there were only two lights. A glowing “EXIT” sign above and just behind them and a spotlight shining on a brick wall fifty yards ahead.
   A word asserted itself in their mind: Vex. The word repeated, echoing in the nothingness until it coalesced into a phrase.
   “Vex. We are Vex.”
   Confusion became anger. The spotlight flared a bright red and went out. Vex stepped backward, under the exit sign, and it too went out.