The question hung in the air, heavy with the hum of the floodlight and the impossible weight of three lives. A glitch. A vulnerability. It was such a simple, clean, technical term for what Ben was suggesting. Hacking God. Or whatever passed for God these days.
Leo's head throbbed, a phantom echo of the pain he knew was coming. He could still taste the metallic tang of blood from his last major edit. To do something on this scale… it wasn't a matter of if it would hurt. It was a matter of how much. And if he would get up again afterward.
Ben, his face illuminated by the glow of the tablet, leaned in closer, his voice a conspiratorial whisper. "I've been watching the data streams. The goblins… they're like… like dumb terminals. They're not thinking. They're just following commands from the local server—the Taskmaster. But the commands are simple. 'Go here.' 'Attack this.' 'Hold position.' It's a one-way street." He tapped the screen, pointing at the bright red dot of the Taskmaster. "That's the brain. But what if we could… I don't know… introduce a logical fallacy? A feedback loop?"
"Speak English, Ben," Maya's voice was flat, impatient. She was a woman of action, of steel and flesh. This talk of loops and fallacies was a foreign language.
"Okay, okay," Ben stammered, trying to translate. "Imagine a dog chasing its own tail. It gets stuck, right? It can't do anything else because it's locked in that one, useless action. What if we could do that to the goblins? Give them an order that they can't resolve. Like… 'Guard this spot, but also, patrol that spot over there.' They're not smart enough to question it. Their code would just… hang. They'd freeze."
A system-wide freeze command. A pause button for the apocalypse. The sheer, beautiful simplicity of it was intoxicating. And terrifying.
"You want me to… to issue a command to the entire goblin network?" Leo's voice was a dry croak. "Ben, I edited a shoelace. I added our names to a guest list. This is… this is rewriting the operating system."
"It's our only shot to help them," Chloe said, her voice quiet but firm. She looked at the map, at the three green dots now completely surrounded by a swarm of red. "If we do nothing, they die. We know that now. This is the first time we can actually do something. Something more than just running."
Her words hit home, a sharp, uncomfortable truth. He'd been the one to say they had to be players. Was he going to fold at the first real test?
He looked at Maya. He expected a cold, pragmatic refusal. An argument about conserving their own strength, about not getting involved. But her expression was different. It was watchful. Analytical.
"How long would they be frozen?" she asked. It wasn't a dismissal. It was a tactical question.
"I… I don't know," Ben admitted. "Minutes? An hour? It depends on how fast the Taskmaster can reboot its local network and issue a patch. But it would be a window. A chance for those people to run."
"And what's the cost?" Maya asked, her keen eyes fixed on Leo. "The last time you did something big, you were out cold. If you do this and pass out… and it only works for five minutes… we're stuck here, in this tunnel, with a man down and a hundred angry goblins on their way."
There it was. The cold, hard reality. His power wasn't a magic wand. It was a weapon with a dangerous, unpredictable blowback. He was a glass cannon. And he was aiming it at the sky, hoping the shrapnel wouldn't kill his friends.
He looked at the tablet. At the map. The red dots were starting to move inward, a tightening red fist. They were out of time. The debate was over.
"I'll do it," Leo said. The words felt like they were dragged from somewhere deep inside him.
The mood in the tunnel shifted. The debate was over. It was time for deployment.
"Okay," Chloe said, her voice all business. She was in her element now, managing the process. "What do you need? How do we do this?"
"I need to be plugged in," Leo said, his mind already racing, trying to build a protocol for the impossible. "Ben, can you… can you interface me with the Core? Like you did with the tablet?"
Ben's expression shifted to alarm. "Interface you? Leo, I don't know what that would do! The energy… your brain is not a Dell server."
"We don't have another choice," Leo insisted, his voice hard. "I need the direct connection. I need the processing power. I can't push that much data through my own… wetware. It'll kill me." He hoped he was right.
Ben hesitated for a second, then nodded grimly. "Okay. Okay, I can… I can try to create a bio-interface. The Core is… it's adaptable. But you can't touch it directly. I'll need to create a buffer." He started pulling wires and a small, strange-looking circuit board from his bag.
"Maya," Leo said, turning to her. "When I do this… you're in charge of the plug. If it looks like it's… frying me… you pull it. No hesitation. Understood?"
Maya looked at him, her expression unreadable. She gave a single, sharp nod.
"Chloe," Leo continued, his breath coming faster now. "You're the mission clock. Ben said minutes, maybe an hour. We can't know. You time it. The second those things start moving on the map again, this window is closed. You get us out of here."
She nodded, her face pale but determined.
The next five minutes were a blur of tense, focused activity. Ben, muttering to himself, jury-rigged a series of wires from the Core to a set of strange, metallic pads. Maya stood guard, her gaze sweeping the darkness, her posture radiating a dangerous calm. Chloe had her phone out, the stopwatch app open, her thumb hovering over the start button.
"It's ready," Ben said, his voice a nervous squeak. He held up two small, metallic patches with wires trailing from them. "Temporal lobes. It's the best I can do. It's… it's either going to give you a direct line to the network, or a seizure."
Leo sat down, his back against the cold, damp concrete wall. He closed his eyes. "Do it."
He felt the cold, metallic shock as Ben pressed the pads to his temples. A low hum started, not in his ears, but inside his skull. The dull ache behind his eyes began to sharpen, to intensify.
"Okay, Leo," Ben whispered. "I'm… I'm connecting you."
The world behind his eyelids, the familiar, comfortable darkness, was suddenly gone. It was replaced by a rushing, deafening torrent of pure data. It wasn't code. It was raw, unfiltered information, a river of light and sound and pure meaning. He wasn't looking at the System anymore. He was in it. He could feel the network around him, the thrumming, stupid, single-minded consciousness of hundreds of goblins, all tethered to the brighter, more complex signal of the Taskmaster. He could feel the faint, terrified sparks of the three survivors, four blocks away.
He had the command Ben had given him. The logical loop. [Guard_Post_A_AND_Patrol_Route_B]. A simple, elegant piece of poison code.
He found the Taskmaster's signal. It was a fortress of encrypted protocols. He couldn't break in. But he didn't have to. He was an Administrator. He had a back door.
He pushed the command. Not into the Taskmaster, but into the stream of data flowing from it. A man-in-the-middle attack. He was a piece of malware, a virus inserting itself into the network.
The System fought back.
The hum in his skull became a deafening roar. The rushing river of data became a tidal wave, a tsunami of pure energy that threatened to overwhelm him, to tear his consciousness apart. The pain was beyond anything he had ever imagined. It was the pain of his own mind being rewritten, of his neurons being fired in ways they were never meant to.
He heard someone shouting his name. It sounded like it was coming from a million miles away.
He held on, his entire being focused on that single line of poison code. He wrapped it in his own Admin-level credentials, a digital Trojan horse, and he shoved it into the data stream.
For a terrifying, eternal second, nothing happened. The tidal wave of pain crested.
Then, he felt it. A flicker in the network. A single goblin, then another, then a dozen, then a hundred, their simple, aggressive code hitting the logical fallacy and crashing. Their signals didn't go out. They just… hung. Frozen. An entire network of processes, all stuck in an infinite, unbreakable loop.
He had done it.
He felt the connection to the Core sever. Maya, keeping her promise.
The tidal wave of data vanished. The roar in his head ceased. He was back in his own mind, in the dark, damp tunnel.
The last thing he was aware of was the coppery taste of blood, the sharp, acrid smell of burning electronics, and the ground rushing up to meet him.