Shadows Out of Time

Those who’d been wounded too badly to escape but who were not yet dead lay moaning or screaming upon the floor; those who could still move, crawled or pulled themselves hand over hand towards the exit, leaving trails of blood. The Marines laid down their weapons and went to harvest survivors. First, they brought the female representative who’d been the subject of the speaker’s wrath to the podium, and flung her across the wood, which creaked under her weight. The Sergeant at Arms handed the Mace of the Republic to the senator, who raised it over his head and began chanting in some guttural tongue. Then with a swift motion, he raised the mace overhead and brought it down in a vicious arc. One of the eagle wings crushed the skull of the sacrificial victim, who had mercifully lost consciousness from blood loss. What remained of her blood spattered the microphone and streamed down the podium.

The Marines went to retrieve another sacrifice.

Choking sounds came from the screen. The MSNBC talking head rose from behind her desk, returned to her seat, and sat heavily, her hands trembling. Tears streaked her face, carving runnels in her makeup, and a string of vomit ran, unnoticed, down her chin. “I’m sorry. News from the Capitol is…shocking seems inadequate. Government spokesmen have confirmed that two unidentified gunmen entered the Senate chamber earlier today and, using automatic weapons, killed most of the representatives in attendance. The President appears safe for the moment. That’s all we know. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of the slain.”

Sam and Mingming exchanged glances.

“Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod.”

Mingming put a hand on his arm. “Sam: slow, deep breaths. It can’t be FERAL. It wasn’t designed to do anything like what’s happening. There’s no way it could do anything like that.”

“So, what, Mingming? You’re telling me some kind of malevolent ghost infested the Internet at precisely the moment FERAL escaped?”

“Hear me out: At worst, someone or something that was already out there must have compromised FERAL or hijacked it. It could then use the software’s migration mechanism to move through the Web and broadcast messages to all the main social networks.” Mingming squinted at the computer. She shuddered; she could’ve sworn it was whispering to her. She turned off the external speakers, and the whispers quieted but didn’t vanish. She shook her head, trying vainly to quiet the voices, then took a deep breath and forced herself to focus.

“But FERAL can only send out objective statements of fact. That’s all it was designed to do, and it has no capacity to evolve into something different. The code isn’t self-modifying. That’s why I think it must be something else. Or someone else who’s screwed with the code.”

Sam had calmed enough to think through the implications. “So, okay. It’s not our fault. We’re enablers, at worst. What else could be doing this?”

“Russian or Chinese hackers?”

“Maybe. We’d have to pin down FERAL long enough to test whether the code’s been altered. The nature of the alterations might provide clues.”

“I’ll start probing the network to see if I can at least localize FERAL.”

In a suburb of Tokyo, Haruto launched his VPN software, then navigated his browser to the Pornhub site. Palms sweating, he typed “shokushu goukan” into the search field. In a second, his screen filled with cartoon images of lovely young Japanese women draped in tentacles. Sweating a little harder, he clicked the play button for the top-ranked image, then the button for full-screen view. On the screen, the cartoon characters began writhing in disturbing, yet arousing ways. But as Haruto reached for his box of tissues, the screen image changed. It was like watching through the back window of a car while the mouth of a highway tunnel shrank and receded as the car burrowed deep under a mountain, and he felt the same sense of pressure above him.

Then the recession stopped. Within a frame of writhing blackness, the tentacles morphed from flat animé colors into photorealistic appendages, attached to a scaly green head that glowered beneath a pair of bat wings. Haruto’s breath froze in his chest as a powerful limb tipped by enormous, darkly gleaming claws, reached for him. Then he began screaming.

When the police finally broke down his door, Haruto was no longer screaming. Instead, he was writhing on the floor, pants about his ankles, chanting what were clearly words, though words in no language either officer recognized and that had obviously never been designed to be spoken by human tongues. He was not alone in this. By the end of that day, thousands of similar cases had been reported.