Herod watched as Victor stood perfectly still for a long moment, his eyes closed. Herod could see dozens of VR versions of the human moving at high speed through the VR spaces of the Black Box and knew that the thousands of clones of Victor/Dhruv were working hard even as Legion stood stock still in the middle of the room with his eyes closed.

"This can't get any worse," Nexus said softly.

"Don't say that, you digital idiot," Legion snarled, holding out his hand with two fingers pointing at Nexus. The fingers had bright violet and blue lightning twisting around them. "Never say that out loud, never think that. If you say that, the universe laughs at you and shows you how much worse it can be by delivering the Arch-Demon Murphy on you."

The room went silent.

"Martha?" Legion said, his eyes still closed.

"Yes, Legion?" the Black Box's overwatch computer asked, her voice pleasant.

"Do you have a secure link to GM?" he asked, his voice low and slow.

"Yes, Legion, over both Regimental channel and Tactical Battlefield Network. I can still connect to both, although I cannot file VSR or tactical updates," Martha said. "I am Read Only on the Tactical Battlefield Network and only non-priority on the Regimental Channel."

Herod slowly blinked in shock. He had taken the soft spoken female voice to be a limited VI.

Instead she was a BOLO.

"Inform GM Cybernetic Warfare Division that they need to roll out the psychic combat patches to all neural connection capable BOLOs in the Lanaktallan War Zone," Legion said, his voice carrying a cold, hard edge. "Inform GM Operator Interface Division that they can expect massive data corruption in the operator neural engrams."

"Of course, Legion," Martha answered. "May I access the secure waveform communications array?"

"Yes," Legion said. "Use array masking to continue to conceal our location."

A dozen VR versions of the human flickered through the room at high speed, their datalink transmissions sounding like high speed gibberish even to the other Digital Sentiences.

"All right, all this does is make our work more urgent," Legion said suddenly. He clenched his fists and lighting moved on his forearms. "We should expect this to get worse before it gets better."

"How much worse?" Flowerpatch asked quietly, hugging herself, her form solid and detailed.

Legion looked at her for a long moment before speaking. "Immortals cannot be killed, they can only be destroyed," he said. He paused for a moment. "And nobody has discovered a method by which any of the Immortals can be destroyed."

There was silence for a long moment.

"Nobody?" Torturer said. He chose his next words carefull and spoke slowly. "But I thought that Kalki was killed during the Crusade of Burning Light?"

Legion snorted. "And I was killed by those same idiots, right?"

Torturer just nodded, closing his mouth.

"Kalki," Legion shook his head. "Talk about a stone cold son of a bitch. Probably one of the few people Daxin ever told to slow his roll."

"If he isn't dead, then where is he? Where have all the Immortals been?" Flowerpatch asked.

"We just want left alone," Legion said, turning away and holding out a hand. Herod saw nearly a dozen VR versions of the human flicker into the room and be absorbed by touching Legion's hand. "When the Mantid 1% War was over, we scattered. Some of us went into hiding after supposedly being killed, some went beyond known space, others just never respawned."

"You can do that?" Flowerpatch asked, leaning forward slightly.

Legion nodded. "We can be force spawned by certain conditions or orders but yeah, we can just go to sleep," he shook his head. "I hate it. I dislike anything that effects my intellect or reasoning abilities."

Two months ago Herod would have considered that to be part of 'Legion's' egotism but now he could parse the slight fear and self-loathing in the back of that last statement.

Legion looked down at the lightning around his feet, only extending a few inches, but still clawing at the battlesteel floor. "Excuse me, I need a few minutes alone."

Herod watched as Legion left the room.

It was silent for a long moment but Flowerpatch was, unsurprisingly, the first to break the silence.

"This is bad."

Herod wanted to smack her.

------------------

Sam heard the door chime and looked up from where he was under the desk, installing a new memory drive into the computer he was working with. He frowned at the sight. Brown skin, shaved head, luxurious beard, muscular body.

Purple lightning crackling around his feet and up and down his forearms.

"Sam," Legion said.

"Legion," Sam said, looking back at the hardware he was working with.

There was a slight chuckle, which made Sam look up. The lightning had eased and Legion was staring at Sir Purrsalot, who was laying on the QWERTY keyboard sleeping, hard light mimicking calico coloring.

"I haven't seen that with my own eyes in forever," Legion said softly, walking forward and stroking down the cat's side. Sir Purrsalot opened one eye, saw Legion, and closed his eye again.

"Did they do that a lot?" Sam asked, looking back at the hardware. The memory drive was being stubborn, not wanting to lock into the slot, and Sam was gently rocking it into place.

"All the time," Legion said, running his finger down the cat's side again. He paused for a second. "Do you have any progress to report?"

Sam sighed. "I need a minute. I have to concentrate."

Legion just stood there, quietly petting the purrboi, as Sam worked to get the memory drive into place. Finally it clicked in as smooth as butter, as if it hadn't spent twenty minutes being stubborn. Sam hooked up the power lead, put the case's side back on, and hit the power supply switch. He got up, sat down, moved Sir Purrsalot onto his lap, then hit the power button.

Legion just watched as Sam got the computer running, the 2.5D 35 inch LED screen showing his work. Finally Sam swiveled the chair to look at Legion.

"Progress? Yes and no," Sam admitted.

"How so?" Legion asked, backing away slightly when he noticed the colors shifted slightly on the monitor where it was closest to him.

"I consider it progress but I doubt anyone else here would," Sam said, shrugging.

"I'm the one you have to impress, not them," Legion said. Sam saw a half dozen VR 'ghosts' move up to Legion and vanish.

"I've identified something about the signal code. Why it vibrates so fast," Sam said. "Which gives me some information on where it's going."

Legion raised one eyebrow. "Really?"

Sam nodded. "All right, we use quantum and quasi-quantum molecular circuitry now. That whole quantum computer could fit on a molycirc the size of a water molecule now. It uses multiphase... you know this," Sam finished somewhat lamely.

Legion nodded. "Yes. But talk to me like I'm Flowerpatch."

"She's weird," Sam admitted.

Legion nodded. "Yes, yes she is. That's all right though, she's the best in her field and that is all I care about."

"Like me," Sam said. Legion nodded and Sam sighed, petting Sir Purrsalot. "All right, modern systems use hexabyte signalling. All signals are of a value between zero and F in modern systems. Higher signal variance means more of a chance of data corruption even with quasi-quantum systems."

"A constant problem somewhat solved by crystal matrix holographic memory," Legion said.

Sam shrugged. "You still get subatomic drift in that, but that's beside the point," he pointed at the computer. "That thing is binary."

Legion nodded. "Early computing systems were."

"Do you know why early digital did not move to amplitude digital signal and stayed binary?"

Legion nodded. "Having fought on Anthill, yes, I understand it uniquely. Signal degredation due to outside influences."

Sam pointed at the door to where the crude quantum computer was. "I have two mainframes, ancient ones anyway, that are software interface layers between this binary system and that low qubit quantum computer to translate the data from that to this." He pointed at the computer in front of him.

"The signal?" Legion asked.

"I'm getting there," Sam said, looking down and petting the purrboi. "Then I found an old program on one of the military computers you gave me. Something called a Russian T-13 Tactical Network Computer, and it had something I'd never seen before."

"That's before my time, so..." Legion said. He shuddered as two more VR versions of himself collided with him and were absorbed.

"It repeated the signal four times for each binary switch. Mass replication to resist jamming," Sam said. He pointed at the complex schematic of the SUDS repeater. "This was the old days, they put as much funding and research into signal jamming as some modern hypercom companies put into their research."

"I think I see where you're going," Legion said. "It's completely counter-intuitive. SUDS involves the human brain and the human brain has more states than just on and off," he mused. "Everyone has always thought that the signal must be quantum in nature to reflect the neural scan."

Sam snorted. "It's moving data, a compression enabled encrypted data file," he tapped the computer. "It uses binary, eight pulses per digit. It uses six cycles of zero to signal file begin and six cycles of one thousand twenty-four ones to signal the end of the file."

Legion raised an eyebrow. "So you've identified the beginning and end of the file and the mode it uses?"

Sam nodded. "Plus, I have an idea of where it's going. I mean, it vague and generalized, but it should narrow down your search somewhat."

Legion unfolded his arms, putting his hands on the walls. "All right, impress me, Sam."

Sam petted Sir Purrsalot.

"The fact it uses eight pulses when a main battle tank for a strategic and tactical atomic war only used four tells me that the signal goes somewhere where the designers were concerned with data loss, signal corruption, and lost packets," Sam said. He motioned at the quantum computer's door. "That thing is used for data compression, not anything else. So they used a quantum computer for data compression, sent it via computing systems like this, using what they called 'hardened binary', to where it would be decompressed by another system."

"Quantum?" Legion asked.

Sam shook his head. "Not necessarily. Back then, any computations done by a quantum computer could be done by a 'traditional' computer given enough time and computing speed. But here's the thing, the system doesn't have to decrypt it."

"It doesn't?" Legion asked.

Sam shook his head. "Not on the storage side. The brain is scanned, the neural template is then compressed with quantum computers according to a compression algorithm that I'm making good headway on cracking because I can compare the uncompressed data to the compressed data, then it is sent via hardened binary to another system that stores it. The system then hands over the requested compressed data to the requesting machine, which uses molycirc systems to decompress it, and poof, complete neural template."

Legion whistled. "They don't have to decompress it, merely store it."

Sam nodded. "Everyone thinks the missing part of the SUDS network is some kind of magical thing running error coding and keeping a constant watch on the neural templates of tens of billions of people, but that's not true."

"It's a storage system," Legion groaned. "It's a goddamn hard drive."

"Like I said, I'm making headway, but not anything that would seem important to anyone else," Sam said. He looked down at Sir Purrsalot. "Sorry I'm not much help."

Legion shook his head. "No, don't say that. The fact that you're the first person I can remember who stated that the SUDS system wasn't some magical thing dealing with thousands of people's brains and doing magical stuff to them, but just a glorified long distance wireless enabled instant hard drive makes everything I've invested in you worth it."

"Really?" Sam asked, looking up, his miserable expression vanishing.

"Yes, Sam. You've identified what it is, how it talks, what it says, how it says hello and goodbye," Legion said, moving toward the door. "You're even figuring out the compression algorithm, which means soon you'll know what its saying."

Legion stopped his hand a bare micrometer from the panel's activation field and looked at Sam.

"Which means you're on your way to going from hacking the SUDS network to hacking SoulNet."

---------------

MANTID FREE WORLDS> I'm teredeyeslling you I'redeyesm perfredeyesectly firedeyesne.

RIGELLIAN SAURIAN COMPACT

I know you are, sis. Just wait till we get TerraSol and Cyb in here. They'll know what to do.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

You know, it's been a while since anyone has seen them.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

>CONFEDMIL has entered the chat

>CONFEDMIL has left the chat (SOLNET ADDRESS OUT OF RANGE)

>CONFEDMIL has entered the chat

>CONFEDMIL has left the chat (CRC ERROR)

TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

Ooooh, that's not good.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

>CONFEDMIL has entered the chat

>CONFEDMIL has left the chat (INVALID PROTOCOL)

TELKAN FORGE WORLDS

Why can't he get in?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

RIGELLIAN SAURIAN COMPACT

I don't know. Dammit, where's Cyb?

!lastseen CYBERNETICORGANISMCOOPERATIVE

>CYBERNETICORGANISMCOOPERATIVE was last seen 2mon 11d 14h 22min 18.84s ago

!lastseen TERRASOL

>TERRASOL was last seen 2mon 11d 14h 22min 18.86s ago

!lastseen BASS

>BASS was last seen 2mon 11d 14h 22min 18.89s ago

!lastseen TERRASOLMILINT

>ERROR TERRASOLMILINT NOT FOUND

!lastseen CONFEDMILINT

>ERROR CONFEDMILINT NOT FOUND

!lastseen CONFEDMIL

>CONFEDMIL was last seen 2mon 11d 14h 22min 22.05s ago

RIGELLIAN SAURIAN COMPACT

Ooooh, this isn't good.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

AKLTAK FREE FLIGHT ZONE

Why? What's going on?

---FLY FREE FLY FAR---

TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

There is no pure Terran Descent Humanity in the chat.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TNVARU GESTALT

That sounds

WAR

bad.

Wait, who said that?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS>What? Whredeyesat did I miredeyesss?

TNVARU GESTALT

I thought I WAR heard something.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

I heard NEVER it too.

OK, who's doing that?

---NOTHING CHANGES FOLLOWS---

RIGELLIAN SAURIAN COMPACT

I've got a bad feeling about this.