Chapter Internet
[The following chapter contains strong language. Reader caution is advised.]
Saturday 13th May 2000
Y’know, it’s funny how I can still wake up the morning after a fight and feel achy, even when our powers heal up any injuries we sustain. Maybe it’s just my brain telling me I’m aching, or maybe there are some things Lokonessence can’t handle. Still, I got to have a lie-in on a Saturday morning, which is always nice even if it comes with a lot of aching.
I was about to talk through the usual Saturday routine but it hit me that I did that before… Oh, Kitty’s discovered SM:tv Live in recent weeks… yeah, she’s a 14-year-old watching a kids TV block, but I’m not one to talk when I’ve thrown it on in boredom before (and, y’know, have a collection of Transformers). It’s gotten a lot wilder since the last time I saw it. It’s always nice to see Kitty smiling and laughing.
Especially because I was anticipating a gloomier mood once the others showed up. Today marked six months since Bao and Harriet broke up… somehow that doesn’t feel like the best way to phrase it…
And I know, I probably sound bad dreading the inevitable dourness. I had the same guilt hanging over me as before, about the same discomfort hanging over me as before. And for all of that, Bao would be having it a hundred times worse than me.
A painfully-long handful of minutes after midday, Bao arrived.
“Hey guys, can I go into Neil’s office? Really need to use the computer!”
“Uhm…”
Dakota thought very hard about this, while Bao bobbed in giddy impatience.
“Leave everything exactly as you found it-”
“Sweet, thanks! Alex, come with me!”
And he bolted up the stairs at half the speed of light.
“Well then…” Dakota spoke in surprise as I turned to her. I was glad it wasn’t just me taken aback by the whirlwind which had swept into the house in place of the dark clouds I was expecting.
“Guess I’m on Bao-Watch,” I chuckled, then made my way upstairs and across to Neil’s office.
… I just realised, you probably weren’t aware he even had one… Dakota told us it was just a cupboard when she first showed us around, and I’m not even sure how long it was before I learnt what it actually is. Neil has a very strict “no entry” rule when it comes to it, and I guess Dakota had the foresight to not draw attention to it to try and keep us from getting curious about it.
As for why she was letting Bao in now? I figure she thought it was best to go with whatever it was that had caught his interest, if it meant him not dwelling too heavily on the break-up…
(Or maybe it’s just me that thinks the six-month anniversary of a break-up would be upsetting…?)
Bao was already loading the computer up as I entered, so I took the opportunity to gather my bearings. It was a small room, made downright cramped by the bookshelf almost overflowing with books on one side and a filing cabinet crowned with folders on the other. The computer monitor stood proud yet dusty on a desk, the single window casting light down upon it. Bao had settled into the chair stationed in front of the monitor as the standard teal backdrop sprung onto the screen, dotted with programme icons.
“So, err… what’re we here for?” I asked my friend as he scoured the screen for the dial-up.
“I found this awesome peer-to-peer software last night!” he remarked, and gave a little “aah!” as he found what he was after. Thankfully, it opened without requesting a password.
“Okay, you’re gonna have to explain what that means…”
“Y’know Napster?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s like that!” he explained succinctly.
“Ah, right!”
And as the familiar noises of the internet connection being established filled the room, my brain took a moment to catch up on what he’d just said.
“So it’s like something that already exists?”
“It does more than just music!”
“Huh…”
“It’s really new, I’ve already downloaded it at home but I thought I could install it here too!”
Connection established, he turned his attention to the computer and opened up Internet Explorer without haste.
“It should make it easier to watch movies and stuff!”
“Uh-huh… do you watch a lot of pirated films…?” I asked hesitantly, as though we were being listened in on.
“Not a lot, but… and hey, I always buy the video once it comes out!” he insisted.
“Ah, well, I think that’s legally-sound,” I quipped, which got a little “har-har, very funny”-type shake of the head from Bao.
I watched on as Bao began typing in a web address and, in short order, called up a website with a download link.
“What’cha doing?” Kendal’s voice asked from behind us. “Looking up porn?”
“The internet has more than just porn on it,” Bao remarked without turning to her; I did turn to her, and saw her raise her eyebrows in amusement, smiling away.
“That’s not a no!”
She looked at me, smile becoming a grin as she revelled in her joke.
“Did he call you up here to show you porn, Alex?”
“I know there’s that saying about guys always having sex on the brain, but do you really think Bao would step through the doorway and immediately ask to show me porn?”
“Maybe! Maybe he was really eager because he knew you’d enjoy it! Is it feet porn?”
“I’m into more than just feet!” I wailed.
“Sure, and the internet’s got more than just porn,” she countered, “but it’s still got porn, and you still like feet!”
“You can’t argue with that…” Bao reasoned from the chair.
“I know, it sucks…” I murmured as Kendal joined the two of us as the desk. She patted my back a little, probably just in case she’d actually upset me (at best I was a little embarrassed and once again cursing my total transparency on that hot summer’s day).
“Really though, what’cha doing?” she asked again, peering over at the screen.
“Downloading this new programme where you can download loads of stuff!” Bao told her brightly.
“That’s a lot of downloading!” she chirped back.
“It’s download-central in here,” I added, then winced at myself.
“Err, will be if this thing speeds up…”
Bao leant closer to the screen, glaring at the little box on the screen as though that alone would make things go faster.
A couple of moments of silence ticked past, and an upsettingly-familiar feeling came over me.
“I have a hunch this isn’t a connection issue…” I spoke up warily, like just voicing it would make it true.
“Funny you’d say that…” Kendal nodded at me, her face suddenly stern.
The computer – or, more accurately, Harmony – took that as a cue, and a blinding light burst from the monitor, consuming the three of us and the whole room.
My senses seemed to be momentarily blurred, but I was fairly sure I felt the ground disappear from beneath my feet. And as the light faded out…
Well. It was safe to say I wasn’t standing on anything.
The three of us were floating – bobbing ever-so-gently – in a plume of light, amidst an endless space flooded with beams of all colours, zipping back and forth, here and there, at all different speeds. From the slowest-moving, I could make out that they were fizzing, the very stuff they were made out of constantly moving and adjusting within their overall form. Even the shaft that we were in seemed to have the same static buzz to it, though it was harder to discern from inside.
“Dude…” Bao began.
“What…?” I asked, a little tentatively.
“We’re inside the internet!” he cried out in unrestricted joy.
“I had a hunch about that, too!” Kendal chimed in; then, she seemed to catch her excitement, and quelled it, cooling back down to quaint wonder.
“Wow… So I guess all those lights are… data zipping around?” I pondered aloud, following the path one was taking with my finger until it flew past and beyond us.
“Probably!” Bao enthused. “This is like that new Digimon movie!”
“They did a movie already?” Kendal asked him.
“Two, now, in Japan.”
He looked to me.
“Remember, I was telling you about it before?”
“It… rings a bell…”
“It was barely two months ago, man…!”
“Bao, you tell me about a lot of things…” I pointed out.
His brow furrowed, and the tip of his nose twitched a little in contemplation.
“Yeah…”
“Hey, it’s all good!” I blurted, leaping straight into reassurance mode. “It’s not like I don’t like hearing about them…!”
“Basically some of the characters have to go inside the internet…” he explained succinctly.
“At least they got the choice, right?” I teased, looking to Kendal and, thankfully, earning a little laugh from her.
“Lemme guess, they have to fight some kind of monster?” she probed Bao. “I mean, a digital monster, obviously, but…”
“I mean, I’ve only read about it, but yeah.”
His eyes widened right after the words left his lips.
“Oh, I get why you’re asking…”
A second later, his Lokon blades had emerged in his hands.
“Wow, we can- wait,” I interrupted myself, “why am I even surprised? Of course we can teleport our weapons into the internet…”
I summoned my sword from the real world into our new digital dimension, and Kendal did the same with her bow. The three of us quickly blasted on our Painter gear.
“You think we can take a look around while we wait for the monsters to show up?” Kendal looked between the two of us.
“Errr…” I trailed off, taking in our surroundings again. “Where are you thinking of looking…?”
“I wanna try and find some porn sites.”
“Is that all the internet is to you-?!”
“I’ve been single for over a year and Keaton hangs around every time I use our computer, give me this,” she responded with more than a whiff of tension in her voice.
“Magazines not cutting it?” Bao asked her gently, earning a vigorous shake of the head in response.
“Do we have to have this conversation right now…?” I whimpered.
“Hey, you have a girlfriend, you wouldn’t get it,” I was soundly told by Kendal.
“No, I get it, I just-”
It dawned on me very quickly that this wasn’t a fight I was going to win by any other means except for presenting the carrot and tying it to the stick.
“Okay, let’s try and find a porn website… somehow…”
“That’s the spirit!” Kendal cheered, and proceeded to swim her way out of our plume of light. It seemed that there was a gentle current out in the open internet, as she began to drift steadily while moving.
Beside me, Bao brought his blades together and generated a long, vaguely-oval object of yellow.
“Guess it’s time to surf the internet,” he proclaimed, tipping the board’s edge out of the plume and then stepping onto it, riding it out and into the internet.
For some reason, despite my lack of any kind of surfing ability, I decided to follow suit, producing my own blue board and copying Bao’s motion to surf out of our beam. Although there was no data-wave to ride on, I managed to stay upright without issue (you see people lying on the board and paddling when they’re not on a wave, so the thought of having to do that came to mind).
“Ooooh, yeah!” Kendal cooed upon seeing us, then again tried to quell her excitement, instead spawning her own board with her arrow and, err, boarding it.
There was a reasonable warmth to the internet expanse we were in… it was a little like being in a swimming pool, comfortable without being toasty. We could breathe fine, though I wondered if we were even breathing anything in and out – if we even needed to, in our digital state – or if our bodies were simply acting on impulse. The very fact that Lokonessence had digitised us in some manner boggled the mind…
Bao made his way over to one of the slower beams of light, a deep red in colour, and ran his hand through it.
“Hoooooly crap, that feels weird…!”
“Can you tell what it is?” Kendal asked him, while riding her way towards another slow-moving beam.
“Yeah, I got flashes of it… it’s an Ask Jeeves search for lasagne recipes…” he told her, smiling in understated awe.
“At that speed? They’re gonna be waiting a while for that to reach them…” I noted.
Kendal dipped her hand into her pale-yellow beam, and a moment later it accelerated away.
“That was a message board!”
“If these are net connections zipping about,” I began, “surely this is more like an interface, and the websites are all stored somewhere else…?”
“It’s the information superhighway!” Bao announced with relish.
“All I mean is, we’re only going to see webpage data being sent from a server to people’s computers.”
“Oh, somebody’s still gotta be loading up porn,” Kendal assured me, surfing over to a slightly-faster-moving olive-green streak of light.
“That wasn’t exactly my point-”
I was cut off by a violet bolt passing straight through me, its fizzing data form splicing through my body and emerging whole to continue its journey. As it did, flashes of some Italian page with photos of Rome hit my vision.
“Are you okay…?” Bao checked cautiously.
“Yeah, just saw a site about Rome… the ice cream looks nice,” I replied, trying to blink away the afterimage.
“Can you hear me?” Dakota’s voice suddenly emerged… from everywhere. There didn’t seem to be any singular source, simply calling out from all around.
“Loud and clear! Can you hear us…?” I asked, looking around in case I was missing something.
“Yep! It looks like Lokonessence allows us to communicate…” she explained. “I’m in the office with Zahid and Kitty.”
“You’re on the screen…” Kitty added, sounding quietly impressed.
“Any sign of any monsters on your end?” Kendal asked as she surfed back over to us.
“Depends.”
Zahid’s voice now.
“There’s some kind of virus count on here. Thirty of them.”
“Man, Neil needs a better firewall…” I heard Bao mutter. “I’ll have to install one later.”
“Putting two and two together,” Dakota’s disembodied voice went on, “those are probably what you’re gonna have to fight.”
“No sign of them yet!” Kendal informed her.
“Keep your eyes peeled.”
“What’s it like in there?” Kitty asked us inquisitively.
“Trippy!” was Bao’s succinct answer.
“Like some kind of weird light-show,” I elaborated.
“Or when Power Rangers teleport!”
“You always have to bring it back to stuff like that…” Zahid huffed at Bao from the physical world.
“Cool…” Kitty audibly smiled.
A flash of movement a short distance away caught my eye, something more dynamic than the A-to-B paths of the data beams. I turned my head, trying to find what had caught my attention, and after a second or two, I spotted something golden, twisted, undulating, writhing through the digital space and heading our way.
“Oh crap…” Bao groaned nearby, and I could only assume he’d seen the same thing I had.
“Viruses?” I double-checked with him.
“Yeah…”
“You said thirty of them, Zahid?” I called out while the virus in my sights swam steadily towards us.
“Yeah,” he confirmed. “Screen’s flashing red, I take it they’re close?”
“And getting closer.”
I raised my sword, and leant forward a little on the board, willing it to accelerate.
“I’ll see if there’s anything we can do from out here…” Dakota’s voice rang out with an air of uncertainty.
The virus was now making an unmistaken beeline for me, and I was heading towards it, ready to strike, charging the blade of my sword. Predicting that it might try and evade me, I slashed out sooner than I might have otherwise, letting the attack stretch out. It sliced through the golden monster without trouble, leaving dozens of little golden threads floating in the information superhighway. Immediately after, another data beam passed through me as our paths intersected, and I very nearly lost my balance.
Behind me, I heard Kendal yell something, but with my board still jetting forward, I was moving further and further away from her and couldn’t make it out. I took a few moments struggling to get myself stable and control the board, finally managing to draw a wide arc to turn myself around and head back to Bao and Kendal. For something that should’ve been intuitive, it was proving tricky for me.
At considerable (yet manageable) speed, I zoomed back towards my friends. A dozen of the viruses were circling them like sharks, and Bao was striking at them while Kendal was focusing on firing at the ones that kept their distance. I did my best to move out of the way of any oncoming beams, and as another two viruses swam towards me, I slashed out at them.
One of them was shredded by my attack, but the other dodged, and swam around me.
I turned with more force than I’d intended, lurching around, and the virus came dangerously close to slamming into me, avoiding me oh-so-narrowly. My momentum all but gone, I urged my board to spin around, and I swung out as I moved, managing to clip the virus and tear it apart even as it swam away from me. With that done, I propelled myself forward again, passing through the remaining golden threads.
As I drew closer to Bao and Kendal, I could see tension etched into every inch of Bao’s face. He cut down one of the monsters, and turned straight to another without missing a beat. While Kendal still had her board, his had seemingly been dispelled.
“Fifteen left,” Zahid’s voice announced.
“I’m sorry, Alex…!” Bao yelled across to me as I cleared the final stretch of distance between us.
“What d’you mean?” I responded, while unleashing razor discs of blue from my sword, willing them into three of the viruses swarming my friends.
“The viruses! They’re my monsters!” he declared. “They look like Harriet’s braids…!”
“Bao, listen to me,” Kendal snapped, “you don’t have to apologise!”
“I do! This is my stupid mess! All of this is my mess!”
He lashed out at the nearest viruses, catching two of them but not enough to tear them apart.
“Me and my dumb head! If I wasn’t like this…!”
“Bao…”
I said nothing more, because I simply didn’t know what I could say. I watched as my distressed friend finished off the viruses he’d attacked, before turning to my right to take out one that was heading straight for me.
“I get super into things and then a week later, there’s something else, and then I bombard you with information, and then I forget stuff, and then I lose the person I love because I’m such a freak…!”
Tears were beginning to fall as he swiped and slashed and stabbed at the viruses circling ever-tighter around him. In that moment, I wasn’t sure if all of his energy before had been a cover for his feelings over Harriet and all of the fallout, or if it had been genuine and yet those feelings still lingered on… but clearly, it was all erupting out now.
“You’re not a freak, Bao!” I told him. “You can’t-”
“None of us are normal!” Kendal cut me off. “We know that! But we’re not bad people!”
She fired at three of the monsters around Bao – I can only assume she had clear shots at those ones – before continuing.
“You’re one of the smartest people I know, and you’re always learning about things! You’re funny and you’re kind and you’re loyal! But you need to figure out what the problem is and find a way to deal with it!”
“I…! I can’t! It’s not that simple…!” Bao sobbed a little.
“I know! But I’m trying! I’m trying to figure it all out, and I know you can too! We all can! I get that-”
She turned to strike at an approaching virus with her bow, and I zoomed across to her, slashing right through it for her.
“I get that your mind works weirdly and that’s part of the problem, I know it must get so exhausting and so annoying, but there are positives too!” she insisted. “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater!”
“Three left…” Kitty spoke around us. All of them were circling Bao: Kendal fired upon one with a barbed arrow that drilled through its target, and I rode forward and stabbed another. Bao slashed through the final one, and like the others, it fell apart into golden threads…
Only, instead of drifting aimlessly, the threads began to swarm together, and as they did, the threads of the other viruses began to join the fray. The golden mass steadily took on human shape, and, of course, its features settled into a twisted vision of Harriet, like some elaborate twine voodoo doll from hell.
“What’s happening…?” Dakota’s voice queried.
“You can beat this!” Kendal swore to Bao. “This is the first step! Trust me!”
“Yeah…?” Bao asked with moist eyes, looking first to Kendal, then to me.
“You’ve got this, man,” I smiled at him. What Kendal had told him sounded spot-on to me.
“Show this mega-virus what you’ve got,” Kendal instructed him with a thumbs up.
I half-expected Bao to lunge forward with both blades and do battle with virus-Harriet, but instead, he took a deep breath, and held his weapons together, edge-to-edge.
“Okay then.”
He moved his arms apart, and a neon yellow computer display emerged between the blades. From what I could see, it was showing Ask Jeeves.
“Let’s see how much I can remember.”
Words began emerging in the search bar, over and over, in different combinations, and each time a search term was entered, a coloured pulse of light shot away from the display and out across the information superhighway.
And slowly but surely, as Bao kept searching everything and anything that crossed his mind, results started coming back, in the form of data beams, hitting into Bao, steadily developing a rainbow aura around him, 0s and 1s hissing out of him like steam.
“I know you can hear me, Harmony,” he spoke, slowly, dividing his attention between his words and his continued searches. “You can taunt me for as long as you want, but… you can’t beat me.”
After several dozen results had come back and merged themselves into Bao’s data form, he relinquished the computer display, instead stretching his arms out in front of himself and rotating them outwards so the blades were pointing towards each other. Between them, data began to crackle like lightning.
“And don’t you dare use Harriet’s likeness against me.”
A yellow orb formed in the space between the blades.
“Now… how d’you like my data-railgun?”
For the briefest moment, Bao’s body glowed profusely; then, the light collapsed down into the space between his Lokon tonfa-blades, and suddenly the orb was fired at unimaginable speed, tearing through virus-Harriet and leaving a blinding trail as it disappeared off down the internet. Once the light faded away, there wasn’t a thread left of the monster’s body.
Bao sighed – a mix of relief and exhaustion – as all tension left him.
Kendal and I surfed over to him at the same time.
“Nice work,” Kendal congratulated him, rubbing his back. “That was radical.”
“I think that’s enough internet for one day,” I added.
That must have cued Lokonessence to do its magic(k), as our vision was once again flooded with light… and we promptly found ourselves back in Neil’s office, in a world of atoms, with Dakota, Zahid and Kitty all present in their Painter gear. There was only barely enough room for all six of us.
“Good job, guys,” Dakota greeted us, though she was looking at Bao.
“Thanks…” Bao smiled back sheepishly, just before Kitty stepped forward, then back just a little, and gave Bao a thumbs-up. I get the feeling she’d almost pushed herself to hug him. He returned her thumbs-up with one of his own, and she smiled at him.
“Looks like your download failed,” Kendal told Bao, leaning over the office chair where Zahid was now sat.
“Peer-to-peer stuff…?” Zahid observed. “Nice, but do you really wanna risk swarming Neil’s computer with viruses?”
“Oh, yeah, I joked about his firewall,” Bao remembered, turning to the computer. “I definitely need to make sure he has one…”
“We should’ve thought of that to begin with,” I commented, and then Dakota walked past me, placing her hand on Bao’s shoulder.
“Bao, I’m very proud of you for today, but if you get Neil’s computer infected and he finds out, we’re both dead.”
I noticed her fingers tightening.
“Understand?”
A uniquely fearful expression crossed Bao’s face, and he turned to me.
“So, uhm, I’m gonna work on setting up some protection on here today, can we do the peer-to-peer stuff tomorrow…?”
“Sure thing, man,” I chuckled. “I think a firewall should be easier to sort out than protection against Neil, anyway.”
For the next couple of hours, Bao talked me, Kendal and Kitty through how firewalls work, and… there seemed to be something a little different in the way he was holding himself. I’m not naïve enough to think that he’s resolved all his issues in one day, and I know it’s going to be tough for him to figure it all out, but maybe this really was the first step in him facing the worst parts of himself.