Proxy .Exe.'s Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

The dead golem lay on Proxy's basement floor. RETRIEVE. The word stuck in her head like a splinter. Whatever this thing wanted, the answer was inside its chest. So she made a choice. She would crack it open and take the cube for herself. If it linked to a network, it might link to the network she'd been chasing for months. "We drag it in," Proxy said. "Then we open it." Vex didn't argue. The barefoot singer with the purple Mohawk grabbed one steel arm. She never wasted words, and she never backed off a job once she started. The old stagehand took the other arm without a sound, his coal-red eyes fixed on nothing. Together they hauled the golem down the stairs. Its heels scraped grooves in the concrete. Proxy knelt by the chest. A glowing panel sat behind rusted plates and tangled cable. She grabbed a heavy dark-metal pry bar from the wall, forked at one end, sharp at the other. "Hold it still." Vex planted a bare foot on the golem's shoulder. "Go." Proxy jammed the fork under a plate and pulled. Metal shrieked. A bolt popped loose and skittered across the floor. She reset and pried again. The plate bent, then tore free. Cables snapped and spat blue sparks. She flinched but kept working, prying panel after panel until the chest cavity gaped open. Inside, light poured out. The cube floated in a cradle of thin wire. Blue and purple edges bled color across the room. Smaller cubes nested inside it, turning slow. It was the same shape from her screen, but real now, humming in the air. She could feel it warm her face. "That's it," Proxy said. "That's what it wanted me to retrieve." Vex leaned in. "So it worked. It got what it came for." Proxy went cold. Vex was right. The golem had circled the club for an hour, searching. It found her. It showed her the cube. It said RETRIEVE. She'd assumed the command was for her. Maybe it was the other way around. Maybe the cube wanted to be pulled out. Maybe she'd just finished the golem's job. She reached in and cut the last wire with the pry bar. The cube dropped into her palm. It weighed nothing. The nested cubes stopped turning. Then every panel of her three-screen laptop flared to life across the room, all on their own. Text scrolled fast. Coordinates. A map of nodes she'd never breached, glowing like a nervous system. At the center sat one locked gate marked in red. It was the core of the secret global network. The cube had just handed her the door. Under the map, one line pulsed. RETRIEVAL COMPLETE. NEW USER DETECTED. Proxy stared. Someone wasn’t sending her messages through the cube, it was the cube itself, was it sentient?