Punish the System - 2

“—through and through, right upper chest. No lung collapse but he's hypotensive, pressure's crashing. He's lost over a litre, someone get that O-negative up here now!"

A hand slapped his skin. Velcro tore and pain erupted in his skull.

"—exit wound’s clean, but he’s bradycardic. Pupils—Christ, look at his pupils—"

Everything slipped. Like a floor washing out beneath him. Connor could feel the motion but he didn’t know where he was. There was light, and way too much of it, but it was all in the wrong place. He felt like it was bleeding through his eyes. Then someone barked something straight into his face.

"He's not responding—Connor, listen to me! Connor!"

Joyful? Maybe. Maybe not. But the voice was too loud to be in his ear. Too real. Why would Joyful even be there? He should be in the van and overseeing the operation along with…Dane? He’d given the go-ahead, right? The operation…something had gone wrong, hadn’t it? It was right there, but he couldn’t quite grasp it, just beyond the reach of his fingertips.

"The patient has been shot to the head and chest, with the entry above the zygomatic arch. I’m already seeing swelling—Jesus—he should be posturing, not—look, we need neuro here ten minutes ago and not in—"

Connor opened his mouth to say something. Something about the minicab. The wink. Or the way the guy hadn’t really turned around. But he couldn’t make his mouth work. His chest was burning with fire and ice and seemingly everything in between. Yet…there was something else, too, something he couldn’t quite describe. Almost like an afterthought.

"Look, I’m telling you! He's in there, he just blinked. Don’t pull the plug yet."

That wasn’t Joyful this time. The voice was too full of authority. The Dane? Nice to know the boss had come to his bedside.

"You owe this man three more minutes. You do not get to let him go. Not like this!"

"Look, I don’t know who you think you are, but there’s no bringing back a crushed brainstem—" another voice said, speaking over the first. They were trying to explain how things stood but the boss wouldn’t have any of it.

"No!” he barked. “You listen to me. His brainstem’s intact. He’s not herniating. I want to see a CT and three minutes of real effort to bring him back before you dare even think about writing him off! Do it or I’ll have your job! He moved, you all saw it."

A pause. Someone leaned in close and Connor felt fingers pressed at his neck.

"His pulse is thready. Central line's in. We need to intubate now or we’ll lose him on the table."

"You hear that, Connor? You’re going to stay exactly where you are. You do not let go. If you dare make me do all the paperwork this will involve, there will be hell to pay, okay?" 

It was the Dane again, this time speaking low, like he was right next to Connor’s ear. 

Just beyond the swallowing dark, and yet it was all he needed. Not a beautiful girl by his side he would die for, no, one of his brothers. Someone who would take a bullet for him if it were the other way around.

Connor wasn’t sure if he nodded. Or if he’d been thinking about nodding and that it just felt like movement. Then everything pitched sideways and all the colours washed away.

“Charging to one-fifty! We’re losing him!”

*

And then there was light. 

Buzzing, bright, sterile, overwhelming light. And not from any single source. It was just everywhere and all at once. And far, far too bright for comfort.

“Hi there, Name Cannot Be Blank!”

Connor tried to turn his head towards the sound of the voice, but then realised he didn’t have a head to turn. And that the voice hadn’t come from any particular direction at all. 

It just was. And, weirdly, always had been. 

“I said, ‘Hi there’! Hmm…Sup, guy? Nothing? Howdy partner!”

“Hello?” 

The word formed inside Connor’s mind and then was vocalised outwards without him seemingly possessing any apparatus to make that happen. Was it his imagination or did the light become warmer once he spoke?

“Ah! Excellent! I was worried you may have been defective in some way. Which wouldn’t have been ideal at all. I mean, I’m sure I could have made it work, but it is so good to know your personality remains intact, Name Cannot Be Blank! Okay. So, well, now you are back with me, we can start to do this properly!”

The light suddenly swirled into being a kaleidoscope of beaming, arcing lights. Connor might be wrong, but it gave the impression of glitter cannons going off.

“Welcome to your Integration, Name Cannot Be Blank! My name is Izzy, which is short for Integration Sprite Interface Model 7-Zed, and it is going to be my absolute pleasure to guide you through your initial System Onboarding Experience!”

Connor tried his best to get a handle on what had just been said, he truly did, but it was almost impossible in this environment. The lights were too sparkly and the voice was just too loud and… perky.

“Okay. Well, that all sounds lovely. But first things first, do you think we can take it all down a notch?”

“Take what down a notch, Name Cannot Be Blank?”

“Everything. The lights, the volume, the… well, the everything. It’s too much!”

With an audible snap, Connor’s whole existence suddenly became so dark and silent that he feared he must have died. Time passed. He had no concept of how long he existed in that perpetual dark, but then, right at the edge of hearing, he thought he could make out the very slightest of murmurs.

“Hello? Are you still there?”

“I am indeed. I said, ‘is that more to your liking, Name Cannot Be Blank?” the voice stage whispered.

“It’s definitely an improvement, thank you. You can be a little louder if you want, but let’s stick with keeping it dark for the moment, okay?” 

“That is absolutely fine, Name Cannot Be Blank. I have no problem working within these conditions. Now, how are you feeling about your forthcoming integration? Are you just as excited as I am?”

Connor didn’t really know how to answer that. The voice seemed to sense his hesitancy.

“Please be assured that, to my understanding, it is perfectly natural for Candidates to be nervous about this joyous occasion. Your species, after all, has been preparing for its individuals to join the System for many years. And now that wondrous day is here, and it is understandable that you are feeling some hesitancy! This is a big step for your civilization, but do not be afraid. I am here just for you, Name Cannot Be Blank.”

“I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. What’s going on? Have they caught the guy who shot me? Where am I? Am I dead?”

“What’s ‘going on’ as you charmingly put it, is that you are a Candidate for System Integration under Subprotocol 3-Violet! Isn’t that simply lovely?”

“I was shot. Twice. Once in the head.”

“I know, right? Big ouchie for you! But hey, look at you now! Shaking off that little snafu off like a champ! And despite it all, and with only the slightest of interventions from me, you’re still largely functional! Well, kind of. Go, you, go!”

Connor was beginning to find all the enthusiasm a touch grating. 

“Sorry, I’m confused. Who are you, again? And where exactly am I?”

The voice didn’t seem to mind the question at all.

“Those are very good questions, Name Cannot Be Blank! And I shall do my best to help clarify things for you. You are currently suspended in a Sub-Instancing Bubble while I seek to connect you to the System Planetary Core for Earth. On that note, my apologies for the relative bareness of your current environment. My understanding is that there’d usually be an awful lot more for a Candidate to be considering at this point—stat overlays, a little music, maybe even a Quest log or two—but it appears things are running a little... quiet right now. Interesting. Could you please bear with me for a moment? I will be right back, Name Cannot Be Blank!”

Not having much of a choice, Connor let the silence drag out. Thoughts scrambled in his mind, things he desperately wanted to know, yet there he was talking to a chirpy, annoying voice that kept calling him Name Cannot Be Blank instead of providing some answers.

A sense of urgency suddenly spiked in him. What was he doing lying around here? He couldn’t afford to waste time! He needed to get a working description of Leather Jacket to a sketch artist. And he needed someone to help him understand the way they guy turned - no, he didn’t turn. He was just instantly armed. And shooting.

No need to dwell on that for now, though. There were roadblocks for the Dane to arrange, traffic feeds to check, minicab firms to cross-reference, and communications to intercept. If they were able to move fast, they might still be able to catch the target before the drugs started hitting the streets. That’s what he should be doing, not lying here in the dark.

“Hey? Is anyone there?”

“I am indeed, Name Cannot Be Blank. I am very sorry to tell you this, but something seems to have gone very wrong.”

Welcome to my day, Connor thought. Take a number and get in line. 

“How about you call me Connor? My name isn’t blank, and what exactly has gone ‘very wrong’?” 

There are some phrases you really don’t want to hear when you’ve just been shot in the head, and ‘something seems to be very wrong’ was right up there. 

Although, as he thought about it, he’d heard lots of equally worrying things being shouted by his doctors, hadn’t he? It actually sounded like he might have been in a pretty bad state.

“I am very sorry, Mr Connor. However, I am having all my attempts for Planetary Core access denied! No matter what approach I take, I am being notified of routing failure and that your host node is unregistered! Which makes no sense at all. I have heard of temporary System mismatches, but nothing quite this total.”

“None of what you’re saying makes any sense. What do you mean? Explain it to me like you’re talking to a 12-year-old.”

“Hmm, what I mean, Mr Connor, is that there does not appear to be an online System Core on this planet for you to integrate with. I am so very sorry for the inconvenience.”

“Well, no harm, no foul,” Connor said, and began to suspect he was on a hospital ward with some sort of mental patient strapped down in the bed next to him. But why would that person be bothering Connor? And how had they circumvented the, presumably very thorough, security he was sure the Dane would have insisted was thrown up around his fallen agent. 

Because, say what you like about the British Government, they might not give two hoots about you in the field, but once you got shot, there were no limits to the number of PR photo opportunities with the ‘injured hero’ they’d jump on board with.

His new roommate was still chirping madly away.

“I am not sure how your seednode could even have been activated in the absence of an online Core. Integration isn’t meant to trigger until a critical mass of planetary infrastructure is in place, which doesn’t actually seem to be the case. It would appear that you don’t even have a Class lattice to connect up with! Or any affinity markers. Or Faction tags. Or even a stat pool!

“Well, that sounds very terrible,” Connor soothed, mind very much on other things. 

His last proper memories were of hitting the pavement, of a cab door, an unusual gun, and then lots and lots of screaming black. 

“It really is terrible, Mr Connor, but I think I might be beginning to develop a hypothesis of what has occurred. I apologize in advance for what I’m about to say. Would you, though, like to have the good news first?”

“Sure, why not?” he said, not even bothering with the voice anymore. 

If there’s one thing Connor knew about dealing with the deranged, it was that you let them talk to their little heart’s content. And that counted for double when you were in such a bad way you couldn’t do much to protect yourself. Were there no doctors or nurses around to shut them up, though?

“Well, first things first, and very much on the plus side, I want you to know that I did exactly what I was designed to do. I was brought online, detected an eligible organic intelligence entering critical failure, and initiated the emergency integration protocol. So far, so good. And well done me if I may say so myself.”

“Yippee,” Connor added half-absently.

“As Integrated Individuals are far more resilient than the standard biological baselines for your species, once I applied a provisional survivability patch, this ensured you did not expire from your injuries before we had a chance to meet! For further clarity, should you be interested in checking my workings, your metabolic functions were declining at a rate of 11% per second. That is why I suspended everything. To allow your body to recalibrate to its new reality.”

“New reality? Am I dead or something?” Connor said again. 

“No, Mr Connor, you are not. It is just that you are so… very squishy?”

Connor tried to let those words percolate. Failed. Moved on. 

“You mentioned there was less good news than… whatever that was.”

“Ahh, yes. Well, about that, it would appear that I may have… jumped the gun somewhat, Mr Connor.”

“That’s a pretty unfortunate choice of words considering, you know, me being shot in the face.”

“Indeed. And I will add that to the growing list of errors I have made in my—checks internal chronometer—seventeen minutes and forty-eight seconds of activation. These are indeed some bad times. For both of us.”

Connor tried to sigh, but just experienced more weightlessness, like being stuck in a screensaver from 1996. This conversation wasn’t actually happening, was it? Was he stuck in a dream? Weren’t you supposed to wake up when you realised you were dreaming?

“Okay, I’ll bite. Go on, then. What’s got your knickers in a twist?”

“Well, when I became activated, I made the assumption—which is built into my core programming, mind you—that appropriate System Infrastructure would be available for baseline linkage. Which, of course, is the normal state of affairs on every other seeded planet in my database! However…”

“Shall we try to leave your overuse of ellipses as things of the past?”

“I shall do my best, Mr Connor. However, the long and the short of it, is that there is, at present, no active System to actually connect you up to. Not yet. And not, according to all the available data, for several hundred more years.

“I sense you view this as an issue, but I have no context as to why.”

“That is perfectly understandable, Mr Connor. There’s no reason why you should recognise this as a problem.”

“Again, explain it like I’m 12.”

 “Hmm, very well. In the absence of an online System, there will be no pre-filled Class templates for you to choose from. Ergo, you will have no base build and no faction matrix. And there won’t even be any tutorial quests to kick things off. I have endeavoured to ping the local planetseed registry, but all I get is a null response. I’ve tried a legacy check and an emergency failover to the subdimensional mesh, but there is simply no architecture for us to access.”

“Well, that all sounds very thorough,” Connor said but had no idea why he was humouring the nutter in his ear. The voice sounded so down, though, that it felt like the right thing to do.

“Thank you. I have done my best for you, Mr Connor. However, as I need to piggyback into the wider System framework to pull assets and load various features, I am currently unable to properly integrate you. I am very sorry, but I’m left floating in a closed instance with a traumatised ex-organic and no signal whatsoever.

“Yeah, whatever. Thanks for your hard work, or something. You did good.”

“I truly did my best. We can certainly view it as a positive development as you are a fully integrated System Candidate.” The voice disappeared for a moment, leaving us in an odd silence. “One with no… System to… call upon. Well, I guess congratulations are still in order!”