Glitch in the God Complex (AmpCore #1)

02 - Bad Day, Worse Luck

"Mum?"

"Me too!" said another, younger voice.

"Arden?"

"Well, who else is it gonna be?"

Shit, shit, shit!

Knife still clutching in one violently trembling hand, Piper stumbled through the entry passage and into the dwelling's kitchen.

"Jesus!" her sister exclaimed as she blundered into the room. "What the hell happened to you?"

Piper's mouth opened but the words didn't come out. She stood for a moment, staring at Arden and trying to figure out what to say. Two years younger, Arden sported a pixie cut of dark hair, a dust of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and eyes currently goggling with surprise. A tank top hung loose on her elfin frame above a pair of ragged shorts. In one hand, a protein cracker had paused halfway to her mouth.

"Wraith," Piper eventually managed to blurt. "Codewraith on the docks."

Arden gave her an incredulous look. "How much have you been drinking?"

"I'm not fucking drunk, Arden," she snarled. "One of those things just tried to kill me!"

"What is going on?" grumbled the other voice. Piper swivelled to see her mother come sloping into the kitchen swaddled in a flimsy robe. Her brown hair was dishevelled with sleep and she yawned, scrubbing at her eyes with one hand.

"Piper's seeing ghosts," Arden teased.

"Listen, you little-,"

"Piper!" her mother barked, rapidly gathering her senses. "Calm down. What happened?"

The story spilled out of her like a waterfall. She let it go in a frantic rush, watching the faces of her mother and sister grow more and more incredulous. By the time she'd finished her breakneck retelling she was almost panting.

Sucking in a deep breath, she clamped her hands over her face for a moment, trying to steady her nerves. For a moment nobody said anything. Arden crunched down on the protein cracker; swallowed and cleared her throat.

"You're serious?" she said eventually.

"Yes."

"I'll ping the police," her mother declared. "If there really is something out there they need to know."

"What about Kirk?" Arden asked. "Is he alright?"

"I... I don't know." Piper shook her head. "The wraiths were chasing me so I tried to lead them away from him."

"Why were they chasing you?"

Piper never got the chance to answer, because the back wall of the kitchen caved in.

Arden screeched and hurled herself away from the cascade of broken metal and sealant, covering her head with her hands. Piper's eyes went wide as a hulking shape loomed into view, letting out a fearsome codescream that made half the electronics into the house spark and smoke.

It was another codewraith, this one bulkier than the first, with a single crimson iris mounted in the centre of its anvil-shaped head. Multiple arms splurged from its barrel torso, and it crunched forward on a tripod of legs, looking straight at her.

"Oh my God," he mother gasped. "Piper, get back-,"

"It's after me!" she yelled, quickly scuttling away from her family, the wraith following her movement. "Get Arden out of here!"

"Piper, what are you-,"

Arden's stunned cry disappeared in another screech of binary as the wraith crashed forward, demolishing a whole section of the kitchen as it moved. A chair disintegrated underfoot and the metal floors warped and buckled.

"GO!" Piper hollered, ripping their microwave unit from the counter-top and launching it at the machine with all the strength she could muster. It clanged harmlessly off the head section. She glanced to her left to see her mother wrenching Arden backwards out of the room. The codewraith paid no attention to them, instead stomping forward and raising three of its arms fitted with an array of blades.

She started grabbing anything and everything she could find, and launching them at the crazed killing machine. Knives, plates, a data pad, a screwdriver, a half-frozen hunk of synthmeat, all of them clattered against the thing's armoured hide, but it didn't slow down.

Piper dropped flat as two of the appendages when scything overhead. She rolled through the debris as a third punched a hole through the floor where she'd been lying. Then her body struck the door frame.

A shadow loomed over her.

Biting back a sob, she flipped over onto her back and found herself looking up at the codewraith, bathed in a hellish glow from its red iris. Circuits sparked and a million tiny mechanisms whirred as it screeched, the noise avalanching through her body and biting into her veins.

In that moment of complete terror she suddenly felt the wraith – felt every twisted balk of metal, every piece of corrupted circuitry; every screeching howl of agonized code in its traumatized skull. Once, this thing had been able to think. It had been alive. Then the corporations, not willing to share a world with anyone else, had torn it all away.

Piper wanted to care. She wanted to pretend that she felt some sort of sympathy for the codewraith. In other circumstances she might have, but right now it it was trying to kill her, and her only sensation was one of self-preservation.

So she screamed, and into that scream she channelled one thought: die.

And she felt the codewraith's whole existence come apart.

Its joints exploded in a maelstrom of snapping bearings and sparking wires. The red iris shattered, sending microshards of glass in all directions. Its chest imploded; she felt the core at its heart sputter and die and the mangled corpse of the machine crashed to the ground in front of her. The whole room shook as it landed, smoke rising from the remains.

Piper felt numb, and all she could do was stare. 

Had she really just done that? 

She waited to see if the whole thing was some kind of blissful mirage that a metal fist was about to obliterate, along with her skull, but it didn't happen. She sat there, alive and tingling all over. The feeling was raw in her mind – the sense of knowing every molecule of the codewraith.

Looking down at her hands, she took in a sharp breath. A faint orange red glow seemed to flicker beneath her skin, so quickly she couldn't be totally sure she'd seen it.

What the hell just happened?

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