Chapter 15: Fear

Delta’s shifting body crushed many more specks as she carelessly turned to her side. People were caught in the space between the back of her knees and her calves. They tried to run away as they heard the shifting of earth under her limbs. The pleasant warmth coursing through Delta’s monolithic form had her curling her toes and legs back. The people had no chance as they were squashed between the back of her legs and thighs. Not even those right behind her knee were safe.

She stretched out her most ‘busy’ hand and settled its femcum coated self onto one of the many mobs trying to escape her. Delta sighed, happy to have another bit of growth hit her form. She decided that was enough for now and turned off her growth code. Now, the woman just looked out to the wreckage in front of her.

Delta saw her foot prints dotting the city, many smaller than her finger was now wide. Flattened structures dotted most of them, the concrete and whatnot smashed down into the shape of her wonderful peds. Countless landmarks were flattened, many without her even trying to. Those buildings, all the ones in Nexus, had been forbidden from her till she found that exploit. Now, she could reshape and remake even this realm as she saw fit.

Three times: since arriving in the Nexus she had climaxed three whole times. A smile crept across her face as she imagined all the pleasure she could squeeze out of Paradise and the people in it. It was hers!

...but for how long?

The initial euphoria of rampaging the Nexus started to die down, and she started to think.

‘How long has it been since I crashed my private realm?’

With her level of integration she checked the logs and found it had been four hours.

‘Four hours...’ she thought. ‘With time-dilation set such that 32 hours in *here* is one hour *out there*, that means about 7.5 minutes had passed in the real world.’

‘*out there*’ Delta repeated the word in her mind.

‘The real world.’

Her heart began to sink.

She had been so caught up in her fantasy that she had practically forgotten a real world was even out there, but like it or not it was. There, her body laid for 7.5 minutes now not including the time she spent earlier listening to Martin’s announcements in the square.

The coder realized she didn’t have a long term plan here. She replaced the real-cam feed with archived footage, but was that enough? Time was still passing out there, maybe someone walking by a screen would see themselves passing by and recognize their time in the Nexus days ago. They could report that ‘glitch’.

7.5 minutes passed, what else could happen in that time? Delta tried to figure out her reasoning. She had hoped people would just keep logging into Paradise and be unable to leave, perhaps.

‘Unable to leave--NO!’

Delta realized her greatest fault of all. The very feature of hers keeping all her victims with her was also the most obvious way to know something was wrong.

Not everyone out there lived alone. People had roommates, friends and even significant others in their lives. What happens when someone shakes their buddy back on the outside and notices they don’t snap out of Paradise as they are supposed to? That’s something that’d definitely get reported. She never even considered that till now. How could she be so stupid?

The young woman’s heart began to race. She rose from her laying posture, uncaring of what or who broke around her: she certainly wasn’t in the mood to enjoy that now.

All the flaws of her plans began to come to light. She held her face in two hands and realized she just pressed a femcum slickened palm to a cheek.

“Aah!” she shouted and flicked the stuff away and onto some surviving swarm of people in the distance. She didn’t have the mindset to enjoy the knowledge that the ensuing ‘rain’ killed a good few. With a thought, she cleaned her body up.

‘Focus Delta, focus!’

She couldn’t do anything she wanted after all. Time was ticking. She remembered Martin’s announcement about the Great Misstep Anniversary shutdown in just two real days! She couldn’t do anything about that, but even that timeline could be shorter.

What if she died? She remembered the comment lines she saw earlier about how forced logout via death happened at the headclip firmware level: that is, the lowest level of software often controlling hardware functionality itself.

A lot could happen in 2 real world days! The headclips helped to prevent most diseases, but freak accidents were still possible, after all.

`And what happens if my code is discovered? It would be at the shutdown for sure, but even earlier is likely once people start trying to shake their friends out of paradise.’

Delta began to pace around. Her growth stopped at about 7 miles in height which had her feet just over a mile themselves. She stomped over the city carelessly as the respawning functionality still worked.

She brought *everyone* she could to the Nexus. Even now more people filtered in. If anyone got out somehow, they’d be able to describe her. She couldn’t modify other people’s minds. That was another limitation at the headclip firmware level most likely. This meant she couldn’t just erase people’s memories or change them to frame someone else.

‘I’ll be found out! Even if I make it to the shutdown, they’ll roll back my changes with ease, probably patch the code so it can never happen again. And they’ll know it’s me!’

Delta’s mind was wracked with thoughts on what they’d do to her as punishment. She’d be locked up forever by the Ministry of Justice. She’d be abhorred for a long time, till eventually enough time passed for her to become a joke, then forgotten entirely.

Delta fidgeted her thumb between her fingers as she moved.

‘C’mon Delta think. There’s a solution in here somewhere. There’s a way to get complete control.’

She thought about trying to extend the time-dilation factor to be infinite, but even without that strange headclip-firmware limitation, she’d be bottlenecked by the computer farms. Simulating this entire reality took lots of computational power after all.

Delta’s foot shadowed a particularly dense swath of people and they screamed up in fear. In fact, everyone around the city was screaming as every step of her massive four-armed form quaked the whole realm. With her hearing, she picked it all up. The distraction it made wasn’t helping her. She clenched all four of her fists as her irritation grew to anger.

“Shut. Up!”

Delta’s shout was empowered: super-normal. Her words traveled through the realm at the speed of sound in the form of a sonic wave. The air visibly rippled as building-glass shattered in its wake. People themselves exploded from the raw sonic energy of it, though their ears were the first to pop. Everyone in the city perished, once, and then respawned. Screams rang out again as she grunted in frustration.

“Silence!” she shouted. At her thought everyone froze. Their bodies were in her control even if their minds weren’t. The people were stuck now, immobile and standing like models without animations. Not even their eyes could move, and those ocular orbs soon dried without the ability to blink.

Delta sighed.

‘Better. Ok, solutions. In order to be fully safe, I need to make sure I can never die or, even better, make it so that death doesn’t take me out of the simulation. Moreover, I need to make sure no one can ever update the code except me, but that means I’d need to bring everyone into Paradise. But how...’

Delta mulled things over. She continued pacing around and started to look down where she stepped. Feelings of people and buildings crushing served to de-stress her now more than titillate, but it became welcome again all the same.

‘I can’t lose this. I can’t let this slip away.’

When people respawned, they did so frozen. She realized one solution would just be to tune out from their utterances, but something about that bugged her. She’d rather people say nothing than her be unable to hear it.

She stepped down on a dense group of buildings. Her destructive foot twisted side to side as she thought.

‘I’ve got it! I just need a way to get my own firmware update into the headclips. Then, I could make Paradise truly mine, but how.’

Delta reached down to pick up a building. At this point, she unformed her extra arms. She was her normal Paradise form again with her green-yellow hair and yellow eyes: only still absolutely ginormous.

She brought the building to her teeth and nibbled on it like a very short ‘pencil’ as they used in the old days. Her foot tapped, sending quakes that knocked many statue-fied specks over. She remembered what she saw during her exploit, the special status just below GODMODE before she commented it out.

‘The Minister of Technology: Martin Canmore. Of course! He’s got to be in charge of the firmware updates for headclips. They couldn’t leave such an important task to anyone else. I bet he code-reviews them all personally. He’s the key, but how could I get him to do it.’

With her awareness of Paradise, she quickly looked through the names of everyone presently inside. Martin unfortunately wasn’t it, but there was a name that caught her eye.

‘Molly Canmore...’

She was inside paradise, somewhere among the specks at her toes.

Delta had a plan now. She smiled and discarded her little oral-fixation into the distance.

Delta poofed out of the Nexus. Everyone was still there, frozen--except for one very special person.

--==--==--==--

Molly steadied herself on familiar terrain.

“Oh thank gosh, wew.”

The blonde woman found herself back in her joint-realm: one she shared with her husband. It felt good to have the ability to move again. She had been lucky thus far, and didn’t manage to die once to that rampaging woman at the Nexus. She ran her hand across her body from her legs to her short bunned hair.

She made her way towards the quaint cabin in front of her. Her flats pressed down against the green grass of the realm. Her black skirt and white blouse ruffled lightly in the gentle wind here.

Though he realm was shared, she made most of it herself. Her and Martin always liked the idea of a cabin. Of course, such a wasteful luxury as nature-living would be unthinkable. That kind of entitlement got humanity into its great climatological catastrophe in the first place. Still, in Paradise, such pleasures were allowed and even encouraged.

She opened the door, went inside, and was pleased to find everything in its place. Her design room was intact, as were all the various virtual decorations of the one-story house.

“It’s over then? It has to be. What a nightmare that was. I’m sure Martin must’ve fixed it.”

She went to a kettle and started making herself some tea. Of course she could just spawn tea, but the ancient and outdated process soothed her.

The kettle whined and there came a knock at the door.

‘Ah, that must be Martin’ she thought. ‘He has some explaining to do about all this.’

“Just a moment. I’m making tea!” she shouted.

She turned back to stove-top and saw the kettle gone. Molly shook her side to side. The room was silent till there was another rap at the door. She walked over.

“Martin.” she shouted. “My kettle just disappeared. I’m not sure what your team is up to outside, but this is a bit absurd.”

Molly opened the door and gasped. The circuit-haired woman from before stood in front of her, stark naked as before. The woman was small now, shorter than her, even. The tan woman spoke with a coy smirk.

“Hello Molly. It’s nice to meet you. I hope you don’t mind if I wait here till your husband gets back? He and I have some important business to discuss.”