Anna In The Garden

42

42

It came without warning. Anna had started showing signs of distress and Ken almost dismissed it. The girl had shown a remarkable ability to take things in her stride. Things that Ken doubted she could have handled half as well. Yet Anna had appeared unruffled, inquisitive even. She had shown few signs of becoming overwhelmed and Ken put that down to the archaic, fairy tale upbringing Project Narada had pumped into the girl's mind.

Now, however, here outside the simulation of the house and the gardens and all that snow, Anna was no longer pushed to believe what the simulation told her to believe. She was, effectively, on her own, despite Ken and Tessa standing by her side to support her through the transition. With the inadvertent flash of the electrics, only a second or so before, Ken realised that Anna had not acclimated as well as she thought.

Then it came. As though a hand had reached into her skull, grabbing and clutching at everything she had seen, heard, touched, felt or thought through her entire life. Grasping the very essence of herself and tearing it from her. The pain made the uncounted needles dripping fire into her mind, from booting up Allure's cloak wall, feel like a loving caress. From the very first second onwards, the pain wracked her body, making her muscles clench and convulse.

She fell to her knees once again, vomit exploding from throat. Beside her, she could see Kontessa collapsing to the floor, curling into a fetal ball, clutching her head with one hand, her knees with the other, trying to protect herself from something no-one and nothing could protect her from. There as no way she could protect herself from something that wasn't even there.

Seeing Anna standing above her, her eyes staring into nothingness, a look of elation, excitement, upon her face, Ken knew what, who, attacked them. Anna looked in rapture, caught in something beyond her control. Even as Ken's eyes identified Anna as the attacker, her mind also recognised the interloper. The thief of memories and Ken's most private thoughts. Her loves, her secret things, her guilt.

"Anna! Anna, please, stop!" Begging was not something that came easy to Ken, but she begged now.

She heard Tessa screaming and pleading. This had to stop. Kontessa had no defence against this assault. Even Ken's expensive mods were pitiful against Anna's probing of her mind. Her entire life felt as though it had become stripped from her, torn from her. With one last, desperate effort, Ken thought-switched her implant off and found a release from the torture.

It didn't last. Somehow, Anna switched Ken's implant back on, as Allure had somehow done after his death, to give Ken the cloaking code. The pain had fallen away and now it returned with a vengeance.

And then, as she felt as though she could take no more, she found a space in her mind. A tiny respite from the onslaught. She reached for it, stretched for it and fell into a place she could only call the eye of a storm. The pain receded, if only for a short while. Though it wasn't in the Real, Ken had closed her eyes. Now she opened them to see Anna, crouched, curled into a ball, her loose, golden curls covering her face. Her pretty blue dress clutched between her fingers.

"Anna?" Somehow, they were in the Virt, or a Virt. A connection between herself and Anna, or a secure space in her implant, part of one of her mods, Ken didn't know. She stepped toward Anna. "Anna, it's me. It's Ken. You can stop now, Anna. You have to stop."

"Ken?" Muffled by the skirts of her dress, Anna didn't look up as she spoke. "I can't stop. It's too big. So big and beautiful. I need it and I can't stop wanting it all. I'm so sorry. I don't know how I know, but if you don't stop me, I'll do the same to everyone. Everyone. But I can't stop."

"It's okay. Let's just start with you giving me your hands, eh? Just that." Somehow, Ken knew Anna wasn't lying. Even here, Ken could feel vast amounts of information passing them by, like a hurricane of thoughts and dreams, data and memories, whirling about them, out of reach.