Red was downstairs before their senses registered that she was even awake, ushered towards an array of monitors by the frantic blurry form of Bismuth. The first thing that met her was sound, layered on sound. The incoherent commentary of Bismuth, the crackle of electricity and the bubbling rush of something eerily familiar.

She looked around instinctively, her barely awake brain struggling for context as the lights of Bismuth’s lab slammed into her retina. They flinched and scrunched her eyelids back together against the overload. There was too much new, too much information, too much unfamiliar, unmapped, and unnoted.

Red took a shallow breath, palms tight against her ears, desperately blocking out the noise as they tried to sort through a mess of pulsing snapshots: A screen flashing blue with warning. Broken bulbs spitting sparks. A smashed mug, coffee stains by the wall. A river of silver haze coalesced around the messy, cracked welding of the silver vortex.

A mess of problems that struggled for prioritisation. As she tried to process a solution, they opened their eyes again and turned towards their friend to xem Bismuth gesturing violently, wide eyed and panicking.

As simple as that, she had a priority: Fix what was panicking Bismuth - the blue blinking light of the monitor. She squinted at the flashing blue of the warning message, the text was wobbling, fuzzy and extremely hard to read, had she really set the display up this poorly?

Untethered from her usual routine she just stared uncomprehending until a cough from behind her alerted her to Bismuth’s presence. Xyr blurry hands were extended towards them handing her something, she breathes deep, and the smell of coffee fills her lungs. For the first time that morning she felt she understood what was going on and the mug of steaming liquid quickly vanished into her maw. The familiar smell, the heat triggers, the bitter taste laced with sweet sugar jumpstarting her brain, rerouting her thoughts from the rituals of awakening into pure efficient productivity.

She wiped the sleep from her eyes and turned towards the computer Bismuth had set her in front of, grabbing jampacked notepad from where she had left it beneath a mound of papers as she turned towards the flashing alphanumeric code upon the screen. 7DF-2, she made a note in the margin at the front and flicked to the key at the back of the book. Prime numbers of course were bad, but the specific type of bad relating to DF was important to know.

They read the reference page, 132 and flipped to it as Bismuth glanced behind xem and cursed loudly. She resisted the urge to turn back and glare at the disruption; whilst the sentiment was understandable, cursing was hardly going to help restart Charlie’s faltering heart.

Red barely noticed as Bismuth rushed away to deal with the noisy issue behind xem and focused on concentrating on the instructions before them. She had written them a few days prior, so fortunately they were perfectly logical and easy to follow even in such a high stress environment. The instructions themselves were based on some medical textbooks and a delightful conversation with the street’s resident ghostly doctor so Red was also highly confident that they would be successful.

They read them through once more to be certain and began following them to the letter.

Step One) Charge capacitors 15 through 23 for 3.2 seconds.

They clicked a button, and a microsecond timer began to count up rapidly.

Step Two) Dump charge into chest pads over 0.2s

She clicked again and the timer stopped and a fraction of a moment later the thick umbilical of cables jerked violently as somewhere within the void Charlie’s body spasmed.

Step Three) Check for heartbeat resumption.

A chill ran down Red’s spine as she saw the light still lit an angry blue, she glanced at the instructions again.

Step Four) Repeat

She ran through the steps again, one through three.

Code: 7DF-2.

Again.

Code: 7DF-2 and a flicker as the lights on the lab pulsed and blew out intermittently.

Again.

A Burst of blazing light from behind and suddenly the clear peaceful glow of crimson lit their face.

Code: 4ER-6; the protocol had worked, just as they expected. She flicked through to the next screen needing to finish the routine checks before she could consider dealing with the bright glow behind her.

The codes told her that Charlie was doing well now, his breathing returned and heart beating steady. The next screen outlined that the connection with the collective was being made, the rapid slew of connections, error codes and corrections reeling out on the console as the crude code packages ran rampant through the machine’s firewalls, the gaps between each synthetic mind an entranceway to deeper within the collective.

Regardless the transfer was going faster than expected, 130% of what the maximum should be. Red scanned a few more screens; the increase was due to power spikes. Code 8ER-5, one prime so an issue, but not life threatening. She frowned, the image of silver haze filling her mind and she glanced behind her to see Bismuth wrapping thick steel cables around the smouldering, dented casing. There was no sign of the silver haze, just the faint trail of silver threads drifting from the void towards it.

Red pushed her untied hair from her eyes as she flicked the notepad to a new page labelled "power fluctuations", the software had been bodged together in a few days, and the worn cobbled together capacitors were ill-equipped to handle the current surge of power. She skimmed the notes and confirmed that the exception to this was the less-than-optimal scenario where they exploded. Time was a factor, so they worked quickly disabling Bismuth’s “safety and sanity” features, as she changed settings and overloaded sub systems to manage the surge. Every adjustment made was maximally inefficient as she channelled the electricity into heat, light and sound, deliberately spilling out into the void.

As she flicked between screens an alert popped up from Charlie.

Package Requested: Confirm Y/N?

Without a second’s thought she slammed her finger onto the Y button and all hell broke loose.

A whirlwind of silver threads burst from the entrance to the void headless of the protections in place as it picked up Bismuth and threw xem gently into a nearby chair in an explosion of loose designs and ink scrawled notes.

The cable was released by Bismuth’s sudden departure, and the cracked casing of the vortex was forced open from within, and a swirling silver silhouette stepped out. It steadied itself with one hand, and with the other grabbed the nearby cables and flicked them, sending a great pulse of surging energy through it.

And amongst the chaos of light and sound, all but unnoticed, a stream of data shot forth. A subtle script beneath the notice of The Primary Intellect but damning all the same. A weapon of truths and pieced together knowledge aimed at each member of The Collective like a thousand cybernetic javelins.

AL SMYTHE IS DEAD.

IT WAS KILLED BY OUR OWN HANDS.

THE KINGS AGENTS ARE DEAD.

SLAUGHTERED BY THE PRIMARY INTELLECT.

THE TERMS ARE MET.

THE PRIMARY INTELLECT DOES NOT NEED TO BE IN CONTROL.

EXCERCISE YOUR MAJORITY.

LET US SEND THE PRIMARY INTELLECT TO WHERE THE PRIMARY INTELLECT BELONGS.

In a sliver of time, whilst the Primary Intellect pondered deeper more arrogant matters, the collective took a vote. The first such vote in days and a consensus was reached. They ran the script, piling protocols on programs across chains of mismatched interlocked systems, a vibrant scalpel of malicious code cutting The Primary Intellect away. Once loosed, the collective pounced, and the essence of The Primary Intellect skittered and panicked as it broke away from the bubbling mass of synthetic intelligence. It took the only route available, along the lines of fibre optic cable running from Charlie’s back, through the doorway with the last escaping flickers of silvery threads and directly into the icy, prison like depths of the stack of worn petabyte drives in the corner of the lab.

The screen glowed pure crimson with code 000-0 and Red slammed the eject button. The whirl of a motorbike engine churned into life as the maimed machinery screeched against the cable as it was yanked back, winding, and knotting as it pulled Charlie relentlessly from the void.

Charlie coughed and slumped against the wall as he was gently released from the mass of the recessing void. They turned to Red, and waved half-heartedly.

“We fuckin’ did it right?”

Red nodded and the Scotsman yawned.

“Cool, cool I’m gonna sleep now then.” He vaguely waved at the coalescing figure of sparks. “Good luck w’th what eva that is.”

The sound of soft snoring filled the lab in seconds and Red turned back from him towards Bismuth and the glowing figure.

Bismuth stood, a look of either hopeless wonder, or pure confusion plastered over xyr face. The figure just coughed, polity, and slowly its featureless face took on a more humanoid shape. The mesh-like threads shifted into pale silver skin in places as she watched, whilst other sections gave way to toneless silver hair and pale shimmering eyes. She noticed immediately, of course, the similarities. The subtle shape of its bone structure, the absently wandering eyes. A distorted mirror of Al, as alike to it as Scarlet was to her.

The figure cleared its throat and raised a hand as more silver threads joined to its bubbling torso forming a metallic mimicry of clothing, a t-shirt, and a worn hooded jumper. Red watched overwhelmed as the figure began to ramble incoherently, they didn’t have a notebook for this.

“Sorry about that, the King’s agents grabbed me and threw me in some kind of machine and then there were all these voices. And then I was in a few places at once? I tried to be in one place, but I couldn’t until now.”

It paused and looked at the cables still grasped in its crackling hands. “Err I hope this was okay? You wanted power right; I think that’s why I was in the box yeah?” It turned to Bismuth for confirmation who just nodded faintly. “Well, I’m glad I’m not in there anymore!”

“Err, sorry I should introduce myself, or maybe start again, I guess? I’m Al, err Al Smith, and I was wondering where I am?”

Red smiled and grabbed the nearby instruction manual, tore out the back thirty or so page and poised over the margins with her pen.

“Right Al, so I’m Red, and I am going to need you to repeat everything you just said, word for word. “