**** Elysium 1986 ****

“Do you see this? Do you see what I see?” Yanny asked into the silence of the forest. Ghostly mist billowed over the ground and diffuse bluish light pierced the dense trees surrounding her. The place had changed a lot since her last visit here in cyberspace. The simulation was still nearly perfect. However, she had not expected that requesting the desired environment with exactly the same parameters would produce such a different result.
“Yes, I can see it. This is just incredible, it all looks absolutely real,” Yanny heard Abigail’s soft voice in her head. The cyborg’s body was sitting on an office chair in the study and seemed to be staring into space. Only her left ear was still set to record, but the rest of her senses were blocked by the stream of data she was receiving from the far reaches of cyberspace. In the back of her head was the connecting cable to the computer they had captured on the Sea Lord. Two monitors and various input devices were also connected to it, and Abigail sat in front of them. The computer specialist’s eyes were fixed on the screens that showed her in real time what Yanny was seeing in cyberspace. Since both Yanny and the computer were made of the same technology, there was the possibility of a smooth direct transmission.
“Really amazing, isn’t it? Only the forest looked a lot friendlier the last time I was here,” Yanny commented. Then she knelt down and dug a hand into the damp ground. It crackled slightly and blue sparks played around her fingers as they penetrated the earth.
“Friendly how?” Abigail asked spellbound, watching the play of light.
“The simulation created a nice summer day. This, on the other hand, looks more like one of those badly made horror movies you see on the private channels late at night,” Yanny replied, pulling a lump of earth out of the ground. For a second, a bluish grid appeared in the hole her hand left behind. A few moments later, however, the grid became invisible. “The world as a whole doesn’t seem very stable. Or something is wrong with the connection speed, I can’t say for sure yet.”
“Firewall medium security,” the voice of the system monitor sounded, just like the last time she was in the simulation.
“Yanny, what does that mean?” Abigail, who could also hear the voice through the small speakers on the desk, asked in surprise.
“I honestly don’t understand,” Yanny replied, dropping the lump of earth from her hand to the floor. “Could you try running the add-on program…”
“Firewall disabled,” the system monitor reported. Abigail began frantically hacking away at the keyboard, trying to figure out why the firewall seemed to be shutting itself down. But she could find no reason.
“Yanny, something is wrong. Maybe you should jump back out of cyberspace,” the computer specialist muttered nervously.
“If I leave now, we’ll never know what’s going on,” Yanny explained calmly, continuing to look around. Some of the trees began to flicker and change colors for a split second. She reached out to one of them, trying to touch its trunk. Her fingers slid through the bark without resistance. When she pulled her hand back, it was full of brown, liquid color.
“It’s not worth it. Don’t put yourself in danger for something like this,” Abigail objected, her frantic typing reaching Yanny’s ear.
“Totally unstable…” Yanny said as she looked at the brown paint slowly dripping from her fingers. “Don’t worry Aby, nothing can happen to me. I can’t take any damage in here. Remember, when my system is connected, I’m like a part of…” she didn’t get any further. Several thick strands of roots dug themselves out of the forest floor with unbelievable speed, wrapping themselves around her feet and calves so that she couldn’t move.
“Yanny! Get out of there now!” Abigail yelled, now frightened, as she could still see what was happening in the simulation in real time through the surveillance screens.
“No…” Yanny replied calmly. “Whoever is responsible for this is just trying to intimidate me a little. Don’t worry about it.” The chip in her head immediately began to ramp up and multiply its processing power. An invisible stream of thousands of simultaneous queries now went out from her into cyberspace, breaking the structure of the network in many places that could not withstand her decoding attempts.
“What are you doing?” she heard Abigail’s voice reach her ear again, sounding even more distant now. “I can’t follow the inputs anymore, the screen is just flickering with codes!” It was true, she had to look away from the open terminal window. No human could read so much information.
“I’m in,” Yanny finally announced. Her mind had now merged with the environment, the web of her thoughts becoming one with the simulation. She concentrated and allowed a delicate blue flower to grow out of the forest floor in front of her. “Pretty, isn’t it?” she said with a smile, slowly crouching down to better show the flower to Abigail. At the same time, the root tendrils that had wrapped around her legs retreated back into the ground.
“Did you let them grow?”
“Yes, they…” Yanny got no further with her sentence and was interrupted again. A mighty boot crushed the flower in front of her, burying it under its heavy sole. The cyborg looked up to see a man in a black uniform staring down at her with soulless eyes.
“That’s enough, I’m getting you out of there!” Abigail yelled. Yanny slowly got to her feet. The creepy soldier with skin that looked like a layer of silicone still towered over her almost two heads, even standing.
“No,” she refused. Again, thick root tendrils shot out of the ground, but this time they wrapped around the soldier’s legs, climbing higher and higher, wrapping around his waist, his chest, advancing further and further. He tried to move, to free himself from this surprising embrace, but he had no chance. “Gotcha,” Yanny whispered, tilting her head slightly and smiling.
“What’s happening?” Abigail gasped, ready to pull the connecting cable from Yanny’s head. “Who’s that?”
“We’re about to find out,” Yanny replied quietly. The root tendrils grew wider, wrapped around his neck, and finally penetrated the soldier’s mouth and ears, reaching his brain.

The evening sun illuminated the large meeting room in the villa sufficiently for the time being, and there was no need to turn on the lights. Yanny stood at the window and looked out at the calm sea, its surface glittering golden. Most of the luxury yachts were already anchored at this hour, and North Beach Boulevard was bustling with activity, as it was at almost every hour of the day. Abigail stood in front of a three-legged flip chart, a thick felt-tip pen in her hand, while Yuri, Harry and Ralph sat down at the large table. The three men could sense the tension that had been building in the room from the beginning. Even Ralph was serious about the task at hand. He had spent all day enthusiastically working in the garden with his new riding mower and had just gotten out of the shower. Accordingly, he was still dressed in his red bathrobe with the silver Punk Will Never Die inscription on the back. His slippers were oversized green plush monster feet with stylized brown leather claws, which completed his already eccentric appearance.
“So, what’s up?” Yuri broke the initial silence, then moved his chair back a bit to cross his long legs and assume a more comfortable sitting position.
“As you know, Yanny and I have been doing some experimenting lately with the computer we sto… er, secured on the Sea Lord. This interface that allows access to the DarkNet of the teletext network. We found some very unpleasant things there,” Abigail explained.
“Unpleasant in what way?” Harry asked, looking over at Yanny, who was still standing wordlessly by the window. She seemed strangely absent-minded, something he had never noticed in her before.
“You can probably explain this better than I can, Yanny,” Abigail said, clearing her throat to pass the word to the cyborg.
“Does the name Lazarus of Bethany mean anything to you?” Yanny finally broke her silence. As the others shook their heads, she went on. “He was raised from the dead by the Messiah, according to one of the Gospels, and later venerated as a saint by several churches on Earth, the ancient cradle of mankind. So, according to legend, he is the first man to be raised from the dead.”
“How is this legend related to your experiments?” Harry asked.
“Lazarus is also the name of a secret project of the PFN, the Party Future Northlands,” Yanny continued, and Yuri immediately sat up and took notice. The Party was one of the many reasons he had left the North and his military unit back then. However, he had not expected to hear about it again in this context.
“A secret project named after a saint from an ancient saga?” Ralph scratched his head, trying not to notice the growing dryness in his mouth. Yanny nodded.
“The PFN was working with two state-owned companies on this project, one of the largest energy providers there and a manufacturing robotics technology company.”
“That combination sounds familiar,” Harry replied, looking at Yanny, who nodded again.
“Both are companies from Yuri’s hometown of Utopia. The technology company was probably working with Taiyō Electrics on humanoid robot research before the PFN took over. I was unable to find out how the connection with the Japanese company came about. However, they were not able to provide the results until the breakthrough happened at another company, CROWTECH, which …. built me,” Yanny explained.
“Yes, it’s a few more pieces to the puzzle,” Abigail noted. “Taiyō was under so much pressure from the PFN that they had our precious prototype here stolen from CROWTECH,” she continued, making a quick hand gesture at Yanny.
“They know how to pressure, that’s right,” Yuri confirmed.
“And we messed up their plan by breaking you out of the lab,” Harry reasoned.
“Exactly,” Yanny agreed, looking out the window again. The sun was setting fast now; it would soon be dark in the boardroom. “That didn’t stop the PFN from making Lazarus happen, though. Of course, the Northern Cities still have remnants of the old technology in their possession. No one can really say what the situation is in the other cities with the amount of remaining old technology. The division of this planet among the colonist ships took place more than 400 years ago. Who knows how much has been used for what structures, how much has been stripped and how much has been irretrievably destroyed over time.
“Which means in this case?”, Yuri nodded and seemed to be lost in thought as well. He was obviously struggling with some long suppressed memories.
“They built their own cyborg, made of the same metal as me. The body is powered by three mini-reactors in its chest. In comparison, I was built for infiltration missions and have only one reactor to power myself. Lazarus, on the other hand, was designed for frontline warfare. With three times the power, he is naturally much more resilient. He has about 250% more physical strength due to his physique, including reinforced hydraulics. He should be able to punch holes in a brick wall without taking damage himself or overturning an entire car. However, he does not have human flesh over his skeleton like I do. This makes him easy to recognize at close range. Taiyō didn’t have time to do enough research in this area. And he is missing one more thing…”, Yanny continued.
“And what would that be?” asked Harry, whose expression had darkened considerably at her description. None of this was good news.
“The chip in my head, the central processing unit,” she said, tapping her temple. “I don’t think there are many of those chips left. They replaced the chip with two other things. One is another chip, but not nearly as powerful as my own. Through the connection in cyberspace, I recognized it, or rather its serial number,” Yanny explained.
“You recognized it?” asked a puzzled Ralph, who had been silent until now.
“My own chip, as you already know, was the computing unit in the colonist ship that was the basis for Elysium. However, the ship had another processor that was responsible for the weapons systems. The life support systems for several thousand people and the navigation through space required so much processing power that the weapons systems were moved to the second processor as a precaution. How this part got to Utopia, I can’t say for sure. Probably by a paid group of runners.”
“Wait… But wouldn’t that mean that you and …. him…” Harry interjected.
“Yes, we are related on different levels, if you can put it that way. I guess it’s like I have a brother in him.” The men looked at Yanny incredulously. “On my first visit to the DarkNet, to cyberspace, I could feel him. We share the same technology and the same structure, which is necessary for the development of our thinking and which has been taken from its original function and finally split. He and I are two parts of a whole. In order for me to exist as a person with my own thinking, I need enormous computing power in the smallest space. His chip, on the other hand, is less powerful, necessitating two more crutches in his design.
“And those are?” Harry rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to assess the implications of what he had heard. “Having a brother is generally not a bad thing… Or could it be that…”
“Your assumption is correct. Lazarus is what I should have been. We were both built to be killing machines. I am the firstborn, everything went wrong with me in that regard. I defied my fate, was able to develop my own will, and resisted all attempts at re-education. They don’t have that problem with Lazarus, because they added the brain and heart of a soldier who was killed in battle. His last name was Gromov. All I could find out from his file was that he was extremely brutal in all his missions. A fanatic. A real… psychopath. Apparently his brain was damaged during the transplant, making him even more unpredictable,” Yanny explained.
“That’s bullshit,” Yuri interjected. “What they want with such powerful killing machine that no one can know if it really executes orders according to plan?”
“That’s where the second crutch comes in,” Yanny nodded at him. “It also needs a remote control system to keep it on course and correct any outbursts or refusals of orders. Exactly how that works and where it is located is not yet known to me. We’ll have to investigate that first.” Abigail sighed deeply behind her. It was clear that they would have to search the DarkNet again for more information. A risk.
“Then why the transplanted brain? Wouldn’t they have been better off with just the remote control?” Harry countered.
“No. The remote control always causes a delay. Lazarus needs a mind to some extent to be able to react quickly to different situations in an operation. This would not be possible otherwise, it does not have the processing power. But for individual behavioral corrections, remote control is certainly sufficient.”
“All right, so there is this super soldier that can be controlled by the PFN. That’s not good news. But how does that affect us?” Harry inquired.
“They want to put him through a field test. They want to see what it’s capable of if it comes down to it,” Yanny explained slowly.
“Okay… how are they going to do that?” Harry watched her reaction closely.
“He is already on his way south. They’re going to smuggle him into the city and he’s going to systematically destroy important targets. Most likely things like the water supply, power supply, central computers and so on… Hit and run, over and over again. Anything that can be used to throw an entire city into chaos. Besides, if he meets any resistance, it will only provide the Party with useful data about his fighting ability.” Yanny spoke calmly, in control, and yet there was a certain dejection in her words.
“And you’re sure about this?” interjected Ralph.
“No doubt,” she nodded. “Suppose they managed to soften up an entire city with just one soldier, a subsequent occupying army would have an easy time of it.”
“Yes,” Yuri confirmed with a grumble, running a hand over his bald head. “Since Party has control, they have made plans for expansion. Is always the same. Too many people don’t even have food but politicians blame everyone else and want even more power. Propaganda everywhere. Of simple people, nobody wants war, they are happy when vegetables grow in cold ground.”
“Shit…” Harry sighed. “Um… then we give the information to the police and…” Yanny looked down at her hand as he spoke. Memories of her repair came flooding back. Her hand was now just hardened steel, not the mysterious metal her remaining skeleton was made of.
“No,” she replied softly. “We have to go another way. The police are still dealing with the crawler issue and are already overwhelmed. And what good would that do, besides a bunch of dead people? They might be able to stop him eventually, but only at the greatest human cost.”
“What are you getting at?” Yuri growled in his deep bass.
“By meeting me in cyberspace, he also knows that I exist and function. Or rather, the Party knows. My destruction is now also on the agenda,” she continued. Abigail pursed her lips and twirled the quill nervously between her fingers. Harry sucked in the air sharply.
“But if the police can’t stop him… neither can we! Then we’ll just hide you here. You won’t go online anymore, so he can’t track you? Right? Isn’t that right?” Harry’s voice grew louder and he tapped his index finger hard on the tabletop. Yanny’s silhouette stood out in the faint residual light of the setting sun. She looked into his eyes. Moments passed. He fell silent.
“Harry…” she spoke quietly.
“Yes…?”
“It’s true. The police won’t be able to stop him. And you won’t be able to stop him either…” Her voice was still soft, gentle. “But I, on the other hand, have a chance.” Yuri slammed his fist down on the table, which shook in response.
“You can’t be serious! How is that supposed to work? You can’t even use weapons!” rumbled the massive giant, who, like the other two men, was visibly displeased with the idea. Ralph was about to retort, but he stopped himself, stood up and got a bottle of whiskey and some glasses from the minibar in the closet. If what he suspected was going to be proposed now, they would all need a good drink. He was right.
“I’m the only one who stands a chance against him. I’m faster, stronger and more accurate than you. And I can take more hits…”, Yanny explained calmly. To the surprise of the others, it was Abigail who took the bottle and poured the first glass of whiskey.
“I’ve already tried to talk her out of this completely insane plan. Just wait, it gets better,” Abigail added.
“The plan is not insane,” Yanny replied in a slightly offended tone.
“Girl,” Ralph said. “From what you’ve told me, this guy’s going to make mincemeat out of you. You can’t do this, it’s suicide.” Then he took a hearty swig from the glass Abigail had wordlessly handed him just before.
“He’s right, you can’t even fight!” Yuri was beside himself. Harry remained silent with a grim expression on his face. His mind was racing.
“That’s right. I deactivated my combat abilities in my programming, and I can’t reactivate them myself. I locked them and deleted the decryption key. However, you could reactivate these abilities and give them back to me, but this action requires outside intervention. If I can use weapons, I can fight.” The men stared at her in disbelief.
“How is that going to work?” Harry blurted out in a slightly gruff tone. He was not at all comfortable with the idea of her putting herself in danger. Especially against such an opponent. While Yanny began her explanation, Abigail sketched out various technical details on the flipchart to clarify them for the others.
“We now have complete control over the old technology computer. I have already explained to you how to hack through the DarkNet. But the interface function can be applied to other systems as well.” She pointed to the data port on the back of her head. “On me, for example.”
“What?” Ralph took another big gulp.
“We’re all connected to the interface, and you can hack into my brain and break the encryption on my combat system that way,” Yanny explained.
“But how?” Yuri’s eyes narrowed to slits and he looked at her skeptically.
“You need data jacks, too. It’s a relatively minor procedure that involves installing the jack in the back of your head and connecting it to your brain. You won’t be able to see it under your hair.”
“Ah yes,” Yuri said, running a hand over his bald head, which made Yanny laugh briefly and lightened the mood a bit. Only Harry’s face remained fixed.
“There’s no way you’re going to face that killer,” he finally growled. She just shook her head gently.
“People will die if I don’t try. Innocent ones. Many of them. We can’t let him ravage the city,” she countered, carefully trying to convince him in a quiet voice. Harry, on the other hand, rose from his chair and left the room without a word. He was seething inside, against his years of training, against his normally controlled and thoughtful nature, he was unable to form a useful thought at that moment. She might be right with what she said, and yet… He needed fresh air. Right now. Everyone looked after him and for a few moments there was a stunned silence. The last glimpse of the sun had disappeared behind the horizon and it was dark.
“Harry…” Yanny said quietly as she looked at the open door through which he had just left the room.
“Give the boy a few minutes, kiddo. He’ll be back, he just needs to blow off some steam,” Ralph said, slowly raising the whiskey glass to his mouth. The old punk had long since realized what the former street samurai apparently refused to admit to himself.

The series continues with the title:
Data Stream

Categorized as: Novel 5 (EN) | Novel Chapter (EN)

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