In one of the ICU wards of the Roizen Hospital, located only a few kilometres away from the University where Ryan had been, things appeared dead silent. In the room, it was laden of medical equipment with cables and transparent tubes running all over the place on the ground, and then finally connecting themselves to a teenager that was lying down on the bed, centred between all these equipment.

That teenager, was Ryan.

His body was adorned of stitches and bandages, with plaster casts covering both of his legs—currently suspended in the air—whereas even his eyes were both patched. His chest rose up and down rhythmically, his breathing aided by an oxygen mask attached to his mouth, its tube running by the side of his body, and finally into the Oxygen Supply Unit that sat just by his bed. The room was cold and dead silent, only the beeping of the Pulse Monitor and other equipment could be heard.

His mother, Alicia, sat on a chair just by his side, her hands clamped together. She was praying to her God, for the safety of her son and his survival. It was all she could do, after all.

“Doctor! How is he? Will he be okay?”

“I’m afraid there are several complications, madam. 40% of his body suffered a second-degree burn, followed by fractured bones in several vital areas. There are also the matter of whether he’ll be able to see again or not. But… most of all…”

“What is it, doctor? Please, pray do tell me.”

“His Consciousness Chip Linker. It’s… malfunctioned.”

“What does that mean?”

“From what we’ve gathered, your son, Ryan, is currently in the state of comatose, not because it is medical-induced, nor is it because of natural causes. We believe… his consciousness had been forcibly ejected from his body due to intense electromagnetic radiation exposure.”

“…What?”

Alicia held Ryan’s left hand, limp and devoid of life. She could do nothing in this situation. Ryan might be out there, trapped inside a place where she knows not of. Even if she wanted to personally search for him, it was not a viable method for her anymore. After all, her CCL had already reached its usage limit. Any attempt to perform a ‘Conscious Access’ using expired CCL would only bring danger to her mind, with the possibilities of entirely ‘corrupting’ her consciousness, thus causing a literal brain dead condition.

Alicia was worried for Ryan, not only because he was trapped somewhere within normally inaccessible areas, but also because of the danger that lurked within the cyberspace. She had first-hand experience of it all, and she knew exactly what kind of things would live within that dimension. Not to mention, there was also numerous unknown rumours of side-effects that came with being out of the body for a long term.

Alicia could only hope, that her son’s luck would last for him.

Far away from the Roizen Hospital, inside the house of another that lived in the city of Roizen, something else entirely was happening. A girl was playing a MMORPG game on her computer, and had worn only a light purple pyjama with a bunny pattern on the back and some frilly wrist designs, despite it being about twelve o’clock in the morning. Her room was void of light, except from the monitor that stood before her.

“What? That has to be a lie! I mean, I got the last hit in, so why didn’t I get the Interfike?” shouted the girl all of a sudden.

She furiously tapped onto that keyboard of hers, which was constantly changing colour from blue to red, to yellow, to green and to other possible colours within the rainbow family. The girl was getting angry, and it definitely wasn’t subsiding, and she kept on typing intensively on the keyboard so much, that merely the sound of the action itself was reverberating throughout her room.

C3L3R1NA :

HEY! WHY DID I NOT GET THE ITEMS? I THOUGHT THE DROPRATE FOR THE LAST HIT WAS 100%! WHAT THE HELL?!?!

LIGHTSABER405 :

YEAH, WHAT THE SH*T IS HAPPENING D:< ? IS THIS SOME SORT OF A BUG? I SPENT LIKE A TON OF HOURS JUST TO BEAT THAT BOSS!

[GM]NETNEUTRALITY :

I APOLOGIZE. I’LL TRY TO INFORM THE HIGHER UPS OF THIS MATTER. UNTIL THEN, PLEASE REMAIN PATIENT UNTIL THE ISSUE IS SOLVED.

C3L3R1NA :

URGHH!! =_=… THIS IS KILLING MY MOOD. I’M OUT.

The girl immediately closed the game, and threw the headphone she was wearing atop the keyboard. It was—sort of—the start of Saturday morning, and yet, she definitely did not have a good beginning of it all. All she had was her piece of anger and also frustration. Then again, it wouldn’t bode well with her to just get pissed off over it for the entire day, so she took the decision of cooling down her head.

She rose up from her chair, and turned heels toward the door. As she opened it, the bright light from the outside invaded her room for her a brief moment before she closed the door, her eyes squinted due to the difference of light exposure from the inside and outside. She went to the bathroom that was just beside her room, and washed her face at the sink.

The bathroom was quite spacious, or at least enough for several people to fit in. It was divided in two parts, bordered by wooden door at the entrance, and then an opaque glass door that separated the two different parts of the bathroom. The first part consisted of a sink with a mirror installed against the wall, and a toilet to finish any nature’s call. The second part, instead, was used for bathing, with a digital shower placed on the wall, or for some members’ of the girl’s family, to bath in the tub for a change.

She took a look at the mirror, and much to her expectations, her blonde hair was a dishevelled mess, and her face was as pale as a corpse. What could she expect? The first thing she did after she woke up today was turning on her computer and completely immersed herself in the ritual of constant boring grinding that lasted hours and hours. She didn’t even take a bath yet, for all she knows. She washed her face several times, just to make sure she chased away the grogginess of tiring herself right after she woke up.

The bathroom’s door was met with a couple of soft knocks.

“You…there, sis?” a small voice asked.

“Yeah, I am. Just about done using, so… yeah,” she answered.

She opened the door, and standing before her was her little brother, John Myers. It seemed like he also had just woken up, his eyes as small as it could be, his hair twirling all over like a hurricane’s playground. In his left hand, seemingly appear to be choking to death was a brown teddy bear. The girl frowned.

“How many times I told you not to get the teddy inside the bathroom? You’ll get it wet!” said the girl. She took it off his hand, and placed it by the basket just right in front of the bathroom.

“Ooookay. I needa pee,” answered the sleepy little brother.

The girl could only sigh, and then shook her head. It was like the tenth of thousand times—or at least so she assumed—that she told John not to bring the teddy along when he was going to the bathroom. Or it could perhaps had been because he just woke up, and didn’t have the energy to think of all the do’s and don’ts in that state. Either way, it would do John well if he just had it left in his bed in the first place.

The girl returned to her room as quickly as she left it. She had just remembered that she should have the computer shut down first before actually doing anything else for the day. After all, there’s nothing worse than having a computer left unattended, using unnecessary amount of electricity—not that she’s the one that paid the bills for them anyway—and who knows what more. She hastened her steps, and heard the sounds of cooking tools clamouring in the kitchen. That was probably her mother, cooking something up for her and her little brother.

She returned to her room, knelt on her bed and drew the curtains open. Light burst into the room instantly, and things could be seen as clear as day in her room than before. Set just by the window of the room was her bed, with its blanket and the bed’s sheet all shrivelled up due to the girl’s excessive moving while she slept. The former had the pattern of white polka dots all over it, while the latter was basically pure pink without any obvious decorations on it.

Her pillow had already ran off the bed, lumped down at the corner of the room. Even the girl wondered just how it flew off from her bed to that corner. Beside the lumped pillow was the girl’s personal closet, used to keep all her clothes and other personal belonging of hers. It was made of dark brown wood, and were made to be resistant to termites. One of the closet’s door was slightly ajar, and she almost felt like something was peeking from within.

Laid down on the floor of her room was a fur carpet dyed in almost blue of entirety, with its centre coloured in red, taking the shape of a circle. It’s easy to get dirty, so the girl’s mother never allowed her to actually eat inside her own room, because it would be so easy to make a mess inside that not even an effort would be needed. Even then, the carpet was comfortable to her legs, and easy to her eyes. Definitely don’t want it to be thrown out, if anything the girl had thought of.

In any case, it was time for her to shut down her computer.

She got off her bed, pulled the chair before the computer’s table, and then sat down. The monitor had entered sleep mode after a while, but it was obvious the computer itself was still on. After all, the desktop’s indicator was still blinking. She grabbed the mouse by the keyboard, and moved it a bit. The monitor responded, and instantly returned to the screen that the girl was previously on.

The girl dragged the mouse into the Window icon, and was ready to shut down the computer. However, just before she was able to do it, something peculiar suddenly happened. The monitor went haywire for a brief moment, going dark all of a sudden and showing distorted images of the girl’s desktop screen. She also lost control of her mouse, the tiny little thing blasting off all over the screen like someone was shaking the mouse like a lunatic.

“Huh? What’s going on? Oh… don’t tell me it’s broken. God, please, no,” said the girl.

Much to the girl’s happiness, the odd situation stopped occurring, and a new pop-up emerged on the screen. It was one of her many anti-viruses residing inside her computer, and this one was specifically designed to target spywares and the likes of them. Good job, she thought. Whatever was causing the erratic behaviour of her computer just now was already found out.

On the screen was written:

-VIRUS FOUND-

Name: Ryan.exe

Type: UNKNOWN (Reports has been sent to the Lab)

Location: C:\Users\Personal User\Documents\501551515

“…Hmm? What’s this? Who’s the idiot that wrote this program to have such a lame name?” said the girl.

“Whatever. It’s going to be gone now anyway,” she continued.

The girl pressed the ‘Delete’ button, expecting it to be gone as she did. The pop-up disappeared, but seconds later it resurfaced. Her eyebrows rose up. She tapped the ‘Delete’ button for the second time. Still the same thing. It resurfaced, again. Once again, she pressed the ‘Delete’ button, but before even half of a second passed, the pop-up emerged again. It just won’t go away, and the girl was losing her patience.

“Fine! If you’re going to make my day an even worse one, then I’ll do this personally!” claimed the girl.

She touched the top of her desktop. Her intention was clear. She was going to take on the virus herself.

“Conscious Access!”

The girl’s vision blacked out, her senses faded away, the sounds went dead, but it took mere seconds before she regained them all. Nonetheless, the scene around was definitely not her room anymore. Her bed was gone, the computer that sat before her no longer in sight, and it was not just that. Everything surrounding her changed. She now seemed to be inside a purely ocean blue room, with three doors standing against her. The floor, walls and even the ceilings of the room had lines randomly drawn on them. Each of them were pulsating, like signals being carried across the entire place, from one to another.

On the other hand, the doors that stood before the girl symbolized the entrance to her drives within the computer. The first door had the name ‘DATA (D)’, which was a drive containing all of the girl’s personal information and matters, like pictures of her with her school friends, or something as simple as what most would call, a girl’s diary. The second door adorned the name ‘OS ©’ on it, and without a doubt, was the core of the computer’s cyberspace.

Ultimately, it couldn’t be denied that without an operating system, a cyberspace would fail to maintain its existence, and would soon enough disintegrate. Naturally, the second door had the highest of all securities, and not all the files within it could be manipulated by even the admin. The third door, was basically a representative of the girl’s third drive, the ‘GAMES (:E)’, which, as the name literally mentioned, contained her personal collection of games that she oftentimes played when she could.

In the current situation, the intrusive spyware was located in the core of her computer, the drive of ‘OS ©’. It could be that the main objective of the spyware was to steal critical information related to her computer and its cyberspace, a cornerstone to whatever that was going to hit her. But, she couldn’t help but to wonder. Why her? She had nothing important stashed away in her computer, so it made no sense that a spyware that could resist deletion was sent her way. Regardless, it was all irrelevant now.

“Administration Control,” said the girl.

The moment she uttered those words, a program materialized before her. It was in the form resembling a humanoid, but it was made purely of light, shining bright, but not too strong that it would blind the girl. In a way, she could call the manifestation before her as a ‘will’ of the computer itself, granting full control over the main body should the inquirer be its owner. On the other hand, if it’s an invader from the Net, then it would—alongside other Anti-Virus programs—attempt to delete it from the computer’s mainframe.

“Access Code required,” requested the program.

“Celerina401.”

“Admin control granted. Welcome back, Emily Myers,” said the program, vanishing away as soon as its task were fulfilled.

The girl, Emily, now had the ability to travel throughout her computer instantly without limitations. However, now was not the time to delay her actions. She still had a spyware lurking within her computer, and it could be transmitting away her personal data as time passed by.

Emily looked up into the ceilings of the room she was currently in. “Operating System! Transfer me over to the Documents section, into the file where the invader is located!”

“Acknowledged,” the operating system answered.

Emily’s body shone bright, and she dispersed into bits of data in the form of light, absorbed into the pulsing lines that were adorned on the ceilings, walls and the floor of the room. These lines served not only as informational pathways for the cyberspace of Emily’s computer, but also as a method to access any folders possible within a drive without having to pass through security situated on every folder access points. In this case, to the place where the spyware was currently residing.

In only mere seconds, she arrived at the destination. The parts of data that consisted of her consciousness re-emerged from the lines everywhere within the room, and was concentrated to once again materialize her in a physical form. It slowly gathered at the centre of an empty space, and from there, each individual data connected itself to the previous data, and then slowly rebuilding the shape that of a human.

As soon as Emily materialized correctly, the bright light condensed around her immediately dispersed into nothingness in the vicinity.

Standing before her was the manifestation of the anti-virus that had generated the pop-up, notifying her of the spyware existence. Instead of possessing the semblance of a human like the computer’s ‘will’, the anti-virus’s manifestation instead took shape of a dark purple sphere. It had two layers, with the first layer of the sphere being a light purple, while the inner layer was darker than the former. It was hovering in mid-air, producing skitters of dark and light purple light in its path.

“Fahren AV. Why did you fail to delete the threat?” asked Emily.

“…” It gave no respond.

“Answer me!”

“…”

“…Did it crash? Urgh… what’s happening here…?”

In the end, Emily decided to ignore the unresponsive Fahren AV for now, and focus her attention on the threat first, which, was behind her. The cyberspace of this area seemed weak, the light of the floor, ceilings and walls were much dimmer than they usually were, and there was no pulse travelling throughout the place. It almost seemed like the entire area was dying, so she needed to hurry before this particular space was deemed corrupted.

However, she did not expect that she would be facing something different from the usual critters of the Net. Emily turned around, and much to her shock, she did not see any embodiment of virus, program, or anything resembling things as such. Instead, hovering in the air before her was something entirely different. In fact, it did not look like a ‘something’. It looked more like a ‘someone’.

“…Huh? This is…?”