Chapter 2: Fatal Error
I made it back to my car out of breath, and took just a second to rest before sticking the key in the ignition. When I turned the key, however, nothing happened. “No, no, no... God this can't be happening, shit.”
I pulled the lever to open the hood and quickly threw it open, only to find that the engine to my car was completely gone. “This can't be happening, no, not now!”
I had to make a decision fast, so I just decided I'd run back towards Felix. It was only a few minute drive, hopefully I could make it. I started running from my car and made it out to the street before I turned around and saw the ball of darkness consume nearly the entirety of Francisco's castle and slowly expanding out towards the capitol itself. I hoped in the back of my mind that Randy rescued Twitch and even Francisco, or at the very least got out of there by himself. I kept running until I made it to my house. I reached for my house keys and opened the door, and headed into the garage hoping to find Mom's van or Alex's car, but neither was there.
I groaned in exasperation but needed to press on. I quickly grabbed my spare inhaler out of a kitchen drawer and headed out the door, hoping to just take the most direct route I could to Franklin's neighborhood. A crack of thunder and flash of lightning exploded behind me, and I saw the entire capitol was engulfed. I cut through the yards of the houses on the corner and the park behind them, but my asthma was getting the best of me. I was well past exhausted and tasted what was probably blood. I had to stop for just a second, and that's when a car pulled up and slowly rolled down its windows.
“Hey, Ashley, where ya headed?”
It was Randy, still cranking to roll the window all the way down. “I rescued Twitch and Francis and saw you runnin', thought you might need a lift.”
“Randy, you're a lifesaver,” I said.
He leaned over to unlock the door, opened the front passenger door for me, and started heading down the road. “So just running from the end, or...?”
“You know the corner of Equine and Gallus? Felix is over that way, get me to him!”
“You got it! So, should I still stop for stop signs and such, I mean, I don't want to get a ticke--”
“Just drive!”
“Ah! Alright, lemme--”
Randy jolted the car to a start and started driving back to where Felix was. He was my last hope and I needed a goddamn miracle right now, or else I and everyone and everything else is dead. “Did'ja really mean it? You care about me?”
“I mean, I feel bad about how Francisco treats you.”
“That's still great to hear. Hey, when all this end times stuff blows over, maybe I can convince Francis you're not all bad.”
I glanced into the back seats and saw Francisco and Twitch, both unconscious. Twitch looked absolutely horrible and decrepit, hair as white as a Winter's day and the sunken-in facial features of a skull tightly wrapped in skin. I sighed. “Hey, is that a fire?” Randy said.
“That's him!” I shouted as Randy pulled over. I got out of the car and with what bit of energy I'd recovered, I dashed towards Felix. He was still sitting at the table and still had that terribly distant look in his eyes. I glanced back and saw that the black hole was now a massive sphere that was blatantly visible from here. I turned Felix's chair around forcefully to show him. “Look, your town is in danger!” I shouted.
“Felis, where are we going? Who are these people?” Felix said, in a small whimper.
“No, Felix, come on!”
“How long will I be at the foster home?” he asked.
“Felix, what's happening?” Randy said, dragging Twitch into a clearing in the rubble.
“What do you mean, those are my only options...? Nothing else? But you promised me I could leave the company at an--”
Felix was interrupted by Randy slapping him across the face. “Hey, Felix, my friends are hurt and the towns in ruins, can't you tell me what's going on like always?”
Randy's tone was a lot more forceful than before, and I could start hearing the sound of the black hole, the sound of intense winds rushing all around mixed with some sort of mechanical screech. “Felix? Felix?!” Randy started shouting, tears in his eyes.
Suddenly Twitch disappeared and Randy screamed. The light around us was being consumed by the black hole and Felix simply sat and said nothing. I screamed as it felt like I was being torn in half, I couldn't see anything but darkness, I couldn't hear anything but that same screeching, that same rushing wind, my own screaming, and I was paralyzed in terror.
And then I woke up somewhere new. It was a gray, concrete room that looked like an old prison cell or laboratory. Behind me was a piece of metal pipe bent into the shape of a rounded door frame, with intricate machinery around it on both sides, and on the floor right where I was was a red blanket. The door to the room was wide open and on the knob was a sign that simply read “Smith, 'Ash'”.
I stepped out into a hallway filled with similar doors of all kinds, and I recognized a lot of the names. “Wilde, Franklin”, “Jameson, Nathan”, “Lopez, Francisco”, “Welles, Randall”, and “Michaels, George” were the few that stood out to me in that hall, but most interestingly was one simply labeled “Twitch, #423441113314”. Unfortunately, all of these doors were locked, so I kept wandering. Eventually I found a set of stairs and headed up them, leading to more corridors. In one of them, I could see an open door with the light on. Curious, I started walking that way. When I approached the door, I could hear the sound of someone typing on an old terminal keyboard.
I stepped in to find Felix, looking as sharp as ever, typing away at a computer that looked like the one he had in town. It took him a moment to notice I had walked in, and then turned around. “Oh, Ash, I didn't see you come in!”
“Wh--”
“You've probably got a lot of questions. Well let's start with the introductions: welcome to New Infinity,” he said with a chuckle, handing me some sort of cartridge.
The label said “iomega zip 750: 750MB ZIP™ DISK” with “New Infinity: 27 July 2015 (WITH ENGINE): Disk 1 of 10” written in the empty space in marker. I glanced back up at him. “You said I should upgrade from floppy disks, after all!”
Before I could speak, he interjected. “And sorry if I scared ya, Ash, I had to pull out of the system so I could start recovering it, and I tossed some old scripted entity in my place. It had access to my memories, but it probably just mumbled a bunch of butchered English at you.”
“B--”
“But the point is I've got everything almost up to the day before Franklin got in that car crash. That is, I have most of the disks ready, I'm on 8 right now. I had to shut everything down and modify the civilization externally to undo a lot of the damage, you probably saw things flickering out of existence or a ball of lightning, that's why that happened.”
I still had so many questions, but Felix gave me a look. “But the point is we got everything backed up! I still have a bit more work to do on the side, but for now you should probably head back to your room and get some rest. I'll be bringing everyone to the main rift one by one when the town's back up and running before you know it!.”
Before I headed back to my own room, I wandered the halls a bit more and eventually found stairs up into what seemed to be the main room of a massive concrete building. The glass door was still closed and roped off, but the windows on both sides were very cleanly broken out, with the edges taped up for added security. The area outside was just as cold and gray as the interior to this building, and when I glanced down, I saw that large symbol I had seen dozens of times before, and across the wall above the door I just stepped out of was “HAPPY INFINITY COMPANY”.
I just had to know, so I headed back down to Felix's computer room. “Hey, Felix, so this is Happy Infinity?”
“This is one of their buildings, but they stopped using it years ago, like 1996. They don't even know we're here, and I've been using their tech since maybe 2011? 2012? If they cared that someone was using their hardware they would have shown up years ago. But yeah, this is part of what's left.”
“So you worked for them?”757Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡf9dxEJrATn
“Yeah, but only for like 8 years. I left almost a decade ago, had to fake my own death to get out of there! And they never found me because I didn't leave a paper trail.”
“What did they do with the software then?”
“Nothing good, that's for sure! Francisco and Twitch were half right, the software was used for some unsavory business, but I've been cleaning up my copy to actually make it useful for making actual, living, digital towns. As long as the mainframe is safe, then everything's fine! But, eh, you should probably head back to your room.”
Felix got up and flipped some switches on another machine in the room, and I headed back to my room. When I got there, the door-shaped pipe was lit up, and a blue haze sat within it, and I was immensely curious.
ns 15.158.61.46da2
