Characters: Sophia, Jesse, Alyssa, Wallace, Michelle, Pip, Neil
Location: Central Neverquest Network (CNN)
Time: Day 4 - 5:29 PM
Sophia, Jesse, Alyssa, and Wallace stepped through the automatic doors of CNN and were greeted by the familiar steel-walled waiting room inside. The secretary looked up at them from behind her desk, waved with a pen in her hand, and then pushed a button off to the side. With a swoosh, a heavy door in the back of the room opened to the main corridor. They walked towards it.
“Remember,” Sophia said, “we can’t trust any of them. We don’t know how far this conspiracy goes.”
Wallace was the first through the doorway, but he stopped and turned around, creating a roadblock for the other three. “Miss Sophia. There is something I forgot to report to you.”
“What is it, Wallace?”
“Michelle is here.”
Sophia’s face went dark. “…What?”
“She showed up about an hour ago, just before you called me.”
“And you just let her prance right into here!?”
“She has outranks me. I had no choice.”
“You could’ve pushed her off a cliff, poisoned her, something!”
“You know I can’t do that, Miss Sophia.”
Sighing, Sophia ran a hand through her wet hair and flicked it to the side. “Who asked her to come? My father?”
“Yes. He thought we could use the help.”
“And then he decided to take off?”
“He went to find you, Miss Sophia.”
“So she’s in charge?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, hell no.” Sophia squeezed past Wallace and ran down the hall, throwing open the door to the primary control room. “Michelle, get away from my computer!”
A slender, curly-haired brunette of at least thirty years of age looked up from Pip’s desk. “I’m not even at your computer.”
“What are you doing here?”
“She’s helping us get rid of the—”
“Shut up, Pip.”
Michelle shrugged at Pip, who was standing behind her, and wheeled around in her seat to face Sophia. “Your father called me in to take care of this mess.”
“Then I’m calling you out. Go.” She pointed towards the door she had come from.
“You’re not the boss around here.”
“And you’re not my mom, so get out. We have enough help.”
“No, we don’t,” Pip argued.
“I’m sorry, did I ask you to speak? Is there a reason your voice is touching my ears?”
Pip swallowed hard, but he held his ground with Michelle sitting next to him. “She’s done in one hour what would’ve taken Neil and I all night. Without her, the virus would’ve already taken over the game.”
“You mean it hasn’t?” Curiously, she stepped closer. Wallace, Jesse, and Alyssa entered the room behind her and gathered around the front computer.
“Not quite,” Michelle said, scooting her chair away from the desk so they could all see the screen. “The virus that leaked into the game was programmed specifically to eliminate all portals into or out of the virtual world. Unchecked, it would have wiped out all passages by 5 PM today.”
Jesse checked his watch. “That was half an hour ago.”
“Yes, it’s a good thing I got here when I did. I managed to break the code of encryption and quarantine a backdoor sector of the game.”
“A…what?”
“It’s a part of Neverquest that isn’t affected by the virus,” Pip explained.
“Actually,” Michelle said, “to be more correct, it’s a special wire tapped into the game’s interface that prevents the virus from entering. It works a bit like firewall.”
“Well, what’s this mean?” Sophia asked. “Can we use this backdoor to pull people out of the game?”
“Only if they enter through the backdoor. Anybody logged into the game from some other proxy is probably already affected by the virus.”
“And we can’t pull the plug?”
“Not without killing them. Their minds are now wired into the game. In fact, if more than a few people are connected to the server, there might be enough juice in their brains to keep the game alive even if the plug is pulled.”
“That’s not possible, is it?”
“Your father built Neverquest to run off nerve impulses. There’s no need for our electricity here to run the game is enough minds are working together.”
Sophia looked over at Pip. “Do we know how many people are logged into our server?”
“About a dozen. I’ve been getting mixed readings. If Gibbers or Marcus would answer their cell phones, I’d have an answer by now…”
Sophia and Jesse looked at each other, but said nothing.
“…Is twelve people enough to keep the server running?” Alyssa asked. She had remained quiet up until now, but all eyes suddenly fell on her. Neil, especially, stared at her with a string of drool hanging from his lips. First Sophia, then Michelle, and now Alyssa. He swore he was in heaven. Even his dreams didn’t have this many girls in them.
“Who is she?” Pip asked.
“She’s with us,” Sophia answered. “Her name is Alyssa and you are not to speak to her. You are to do your job.”
“We don’t have any place to put her, Sophia.”
Neil quickly pushed all the papers and stuffed animals off his desk. “Now we do. Have a seat, gorgeous.”
Alyssa blinked at him.
“So…wait,” Sophia said, shaking her head. “All we managed to do was prevent a small part of Neverquest from being taken over by the virus?”
“That ‘small part’ saved about a dozen lives,” Michelle said. “As long as Neverquest is still connected to the real world, we have a chance of bringing those kids back safely.”
“How are we going to do that if we can’t shut off the game?”
“We’re going to have to destroy the virus at its main source. If we can do that before it becomes fully integrated into the game, we can reverse the process and kill the virus within a few hours. Then it’s just a matter of working out a few bugs before the game is ready for the market.”
“You can’t be serious…”
“I’m very serious. I think we can have this whole thing wrapped up tonight.”
“We already hacked into Siarra’s computer using the code we were given,” Pip added. “It’s only a matter of time of time before we’re able to trace the virus to its origin and delete it.”
Sophia saw her chance. “So we can tell Marcus and Gibbers to go home?”
“If you can get hold of them,” Michelle said, returning to the keyboard. “We won’t be needing them. After the virus is gone, it’s still going to take me a couple days of backlogging to clean everything up.”
“Isn’t she amazing?” Pip said.
Sophia muttered something under breath and stormed out of the room.
“Geez… What’s her problem?”
“She doesn’t like me,” Michelle said as her fingernails clicked across the keyboard. “She doesn’t like a lot of people, does she?”
“No,” they all answered and then a nervous chuckle drifted through the room.
“…I hope to change that someday.”
“It’s not you, Michelle,” Pip said. “Sophia just has a lot of…stuff to work out.”
Jesse’s fingers curled. “What ‘stuff’? What are you implying, Pip?”
“I-I-I just mean, you know, like…e-emotional stuff. She has a lot of that…to, uh, work out…”
“This wasn’t exactly a normal day for her.”
“I-I never said…”
“Shut up, Pip.”
“…He’s right,” Alyssa said softly. “We all have a lot of emotions we need to sort out. I hope, when this is over, we can do that…” She looked up at Jesse with pleading eyes and he couldn’t turn away because she had her arms wrapped around his. “I’d like that. I really would.”
Giantess World
