Subject: Genesis
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 1994 05:49:31 GMT


     Cyberlok stirs, staring out from the order and precision of cyberspace
and into the chaos of the bar.  Cyberlok, has missed this place.
     This story takes place shortly after The Hunt.  It is a long short
story so be prepared.

copyright c.1994 Stephen Denoms (sdenoms@gauss.onu.edu)

				   The Genesis
				   ------------

     Darkness...
     Darkness...
     Darkness...
     Then...
     Suddenly I thought and saw.  It was a strange sensation, not like I
opened my eyes or just now began to think.  No it was more like a second
ago I didn't even exist and now I do.  I must have been in something like
a coma.	
     I try to gain my bearings but not everything is there.  I'm not
feeling any real physical sensations, no smell, no sounds, not even a
taste in my mouth.  I reach my hand to touch my face, and where my face
should be just seems to be a featureless, round surface.  My thoughts are
to slow in reacting for me to panic but I at least register this as odd.
I'm definitely laying down so I sit up and look down on my body.  Hmmmm, I
definitely have a body but it isn't mine.  At least I don't think so.  It
looks like the body of a steel gray mannequin, no features, no gender.
     I look around the room I'm in.  Its a lab, or something like that.
Everything is clean, and organized.  It appears that I'm on a table in the
center of the room.  I swing my legs down and my feet touch the floor.  I
can feel the floor but no specific sensations.  My thinking is still slow
but I'm not worried ...yet.
     Movement to my left side attracts my attention, and I turn and face
what looks like something hovering in the is swirling into existence.  Its
form stays amorphous but within its black depths I see things taking form.
I stare at it uncomprehendingly, then I realize it is staring back.
Dozens of malevolent eyes stare back at me accompanied by dozens of sets
of vicious teeth, some smiling like a tiger others gnashing together in
frustration.  It spoke, "Milord, he awakens."
     Instinctively I knew this thing wasn't talking to me but to who then?  A
door materializes on my right side, letting a man in.  He is dressed in
a black Nobleman's outfit, cape and all.  Striding in with the confidant
steps attributed to a man dressed like him, he walked up to me.  Studying
him and his face, realization begins to dawn on me.  Then he smiles,
"Welcome back Michael."
     A flood of thoughts break through the damn, overloading my mind,
causing me to collapse to the ground.  I cry out.  Pain, happiness, a
child with unchildlike eyes, claws, poison, darkness!!!...  Max, DreamKiller,
Lucretia, Clone!!!...
     If I had eyes I would have cried, if I had a face I would have torn
at it with my featureless fingers.  All I could do now was huddle on the
ground staring at the mans feet.  Slowly my mind begins to deal with the
memories, slowly I stand up to face the man before me, DreamKiller. Slowly
I speak, "I am Michael Dillinger, I should be dead."
     The man across from me who I now recognize as DreamKiller smiles
again, this time with a hint of sadness.  "You did die Michael.  After the
Hunt an Arasaka genetically engineered assassin killed you.  But you know
the saying 'You can't keep a good man down', I kept your conscious and can
now brought you back to life.  We are presently in cyberspace, and all that you
see, including my body and yours, are nothing but virtual constructs.  Yours is
nowhere near as perfect as mine but you aren't going to be her long before I
send you back to the physical plane."
     I punch him as hard as this body can, and I send him flying over the
table.  Leap on top of him, I rain down a fury of blows, right, left,
right, left, ... I slow then stop when I see he is unaffected and unmoved.
I scream at him, "You mother-fucker!! I was dead!! At peace!! You had no
right to bring me back!!"
     The next thing my mind registered was my "body" flying across the
room, and smashing into the opposing wall.  The action was so violent that
I believe the term is that I de-rezzed temporarily.  I felt physical pain
for the first time and remained on my hands and knees gasping.  I looked up
to see DreamKiller's face twisted with fury, "I HAD THE RIGHT BECAUSE I AM
DREAMKILLER!  AND THAT MEANS I CAN AND WILL DO ANYTHING I WANT!"  His
perfect programming even made his face look flushed with anger.  It was
the first time I'd ever seen him lose control of his emotions.  He looked
like he was breathing hard and his fist were clenched.  Slowly control, and
cold emotion began to return to him.
     He offered his hand to me but I refused.  He began again, "I brought
you back the first and second time but altered your memories of those
events so just this type of thing would not happen..."  He trailed off as
if he had more to say but was reluctant to show any other emotional
weaknesses.
     I got to my feet again and stared at him levelly.  "Why?"
     He stared back, blinked, sighed, and snapped his fingers.  The
Lab-like image faded from around us and was replaced by a comfortable
looking den.  He asked me to sit down and he would tell me a story.
     He was patronizing about it, and I was about to say "I have no time
for your stories.", but I knew it was in my best interests to do so, and I
sat.
     "Right after Max E. Mumm, you and I ended our partnership, I went
solo.  I had the natural talent, I had an almost flippant arrogance when
it came to 'suicide runs' and I never failed a mission.  However I wanted
more then that I wanted to compete with the Net-elite and I wanted to
compete _now_.  On a run a found the formula for a new neuro-stimulant in
a black-ice Arasaka R and D file.  I copied it, made it, and tested it.  I
began giving it to myself in the ascribed doses.  I felt no different, and
after doing that for weeks with no noticeable change I was about to quit,
when in the middle of a mall my body died.
     I say my body died because my heart and everything stopped but my mind
could still think, hear, feel and see.  I don't know if I could smell but
at the time that was irrelevant.  Eventually my body was taken to a body
shop and I thought I was going to suffer the being disassemble while my
mind was still alive.  Then spasms racked my body, convulsions flipped me
off the table, and finally a medic came in.
     After an hour of out patient treatment, the came to see if I was
capable of leaving.  All that I could tell was everything was moving so
slow around me I thought I was drugged.  My actions came out twisted and
clumsy, and my speaking was gibberish.  I began to worry and I grabbed a
computer, and tried to type.  My fingers seemed to get knotted together,
like I was trying to type faster then my fingers were able to.  Panic
began to overtake me.  The med-tech gave me a shot to calmed my nerves
down, and make me a little bit drowsy.  All it did was slow me down enough to
type.  I began to relax, and as I did I began to notice everything around
me, not just one or two things, but _everthing_ from the duty roster
outside the door, to the dandruff on the med-techs white coat.  All the
sensations and experiences were flooding my mind and my mind was handling
it.  Like a computer it was memorizing and filing everything.  I knew that
this was the result of the drug, and that if they did even a low level
scan of me it would probably be detected and reported.   I couldn't let
that happen so I mumble as best I could that I was fine and stumbled out
of the room.  The med-tech was busier with more important things.  I
doubted he would even take time to record my passage let alone stop me.
     Unhindered by anything other then the usual obstacles of hell, I
managed to make it to my Con-Apt.  The tranq was wearing off and I my
actions got more and more difficult to control.  As a last action I
plugged myself into the net and then experience the feeling of falling
into the net.
     When I dropped in I noticed I was surrounded.  Two netrunners that
looked like samurais and a dragon, all wearing Arasaka badges stood
prepared for me.  With a voice a smooth as glass the dragon spoke up I am
Arasaka AI #1492, You have copied something from us.  You will destroy all
data concerning it and then we will destroy you.  My reactions seemed to be
supernatural to me, before the AI had even finished I managed to grab a
Murphy prog and hit the AI at the conclusion of his speech.  The AI
outer codes exploded with its own progs, in taking one step I was nearly
two terms away, but I was still able to see the AI's code de-rezz and
possibly kill the two netrunners.  Another step and I was right by the
AI's side.  It's coding was mortally damaged.  I called up a sword and
ended its artificial life... it was a mercy killing.
     In my rebirth my mind was made as fast as any computer with
the memory space of all that unused brain tissue.  Out of the net I was a
physical wreck, with little or no motor control, and a hardly anyway to
communicate.  I kept looking for ways to stay in the net for as long as I
wanted, with out downloading my mind.  I wanted my humanity left, I still
had dreams for the world and that there could still be a chance for
goodwill towards man.  And then I got word of just the thing.  A scientist
had come up with a stasis machine that would allow the mind to continue to
work.  I funded him the money and offered to be his first volunteer.
     After months of tests and additional research the project was ready.
Large amounts of nano-surgeons were injected into me to maintain my
body and more importantly my brain.  I was then hooked up to the best
computers equipment money could by and placed into a tank filled with a
gel.  The gel provided me with air, and sustenance.  I then downloaded into
the net saying good-bye to my body for hopefully a long time.
      The experiment was a success.  I was not for want in the physical
world and I never needed to rest in cyberspace.  I became famous as Warlok...
the netmagewho could do anything.  Now I was among the net-elite.  I finally
met my hero Reaper, and witnessed his mental decent into madness.
     He never losed his touch but it was painful to watch his obsession with
finding extraterrestrial AI's dominate a once proud career.  Reaper's only foe
was Wraith and I don't need to tell you the hatred we all have for her.  Even
though he was too occupied with his obsession to keep track of her.  He invariablly
denied me my right to challenge her.  Other then her, none other could challenge me.
     I guess I got to careless about my physical self because I never
thought about it again until one day something struck me as feeling wrong.
I went back to the computer systems of my facility and found two
netrunners invading it.  They didn't know what hit them and they never
experienced pain as such that I gave them.  There screams were probably
heard miles away before I let them die.  But they were just the scouts,
the solos moved in next.
     They came in like barbarians using shaped charges to blow their way into the
inner sanctum where my body was.  Killing all of the personal in the complex on
their way.  To this day I don't know what precipitated this raid, be it revenge
by a Corp, an unknown force, or for plunder, all I knew is that I could not stop it.
There was nothing I could do but alert the police to the incident and
pray.  They used an electric grenade on the scientist, frying him, and
electrifying my tank.  The shock knocked other equipment on to the tank and
breaking it, and furthering the electric voltage coursing through the gel and my
body.  I watched it all happen, and I couldn't stop them."
    He paused here, to compose himself then continued.
    "My nervous system began to overload and I had no idea what havoc the
electricity was playing on my altered neuro functions.  Then a small thing
happened, the wrong amount of power went through the wrong parts of the
neuro-surgeons and they ceased to maintain my body, they began to destroy
it.  Billions of smaller then cell robots began to pick away at my body,
ferociously decimating my body from the inside out.  My body felt pain
for the first time in a long time and it was unimaginable, and my perfect
recall, and unerring mental filing, recorded every detail.
     Before they're eyes the raiders saw my body being electrocuted and
ripped apart from the inside out.  But before my destruction was absolute,
I called up the my menu, and with faltering virtual hands I hit the button
to download my entire mind in a fail-safe bunker hundreds of miles away.  I
felt my body die, as the last coding was copied and moved.  My mind kept
recalling the pain over and over, echoing louder and louder.  Crazed with
the pain and helplessness I felt over not stopping it I think I became
unhinged.  In seconds I invaded a the power source computers and set it to
overload.  The raiders would not survive, and they didn't as 10 square
miles of suburbia was destroyed in my explosion."
     I stopped him, "Wait, wasn't that the Chi-Town meltdown?"
     "Yes."
     "Over a million people died in that."
     "It didn't matter, the dream was dead anyway."
     I was silent.
     "Anyway, what was more important then the death of the scientist,
the raiders, or even of my body, was that my humanity was dead.  I sulked
nursing my mental wounds in the shadows of the net.  Until I came across
an article about the explosion.  It was described as an act of God, and in
my unstable state I latched on to that.  I was reborn, no longer was I a
man, subject to man's laws, I was a God.  I knew the dream was dead and I
became DreamKiller
     I decided I needed a body and a spirit on the physical plane.  That
is when I acquired the AV-7.  I suppose I will take on another body as time
goes on but for right now it serves me well.  And for my spirit, I have
the holograms that you've come to love..."
     His sarcasm seemed out of place and I shifted in my seat.
     "In less then a month DreamKiller became know, feared, revered, and
awed world wide and my humanity was a distant memory.  Then it came to me
that you had died, and the pain of my death returned to me.  Obsessed I
located your body and had it moved to my newest labs.  They were able to
save you but just barely.  Clone had taken care to break every bone in
your body except for your back and cranial bones.  He wanted you to suffer
and if you lived to be crippled for life.  I acquired a new body sculpted
it and placed your mind in it.  You were reborn.
     I don't know, you and Max have been my only friends and I knew I would
feel my death everytime either of you would die and I could handle that."
     He looked at me with such remorse, I thought he would never be capable
of that.
     "You and Max represent the last of my humanity, the last of the dream
and as long as it is within my power I will never let you die no matter what."
     "What if I want to die.", I asked simply.
     "I can't let you."
     I almost understood that.  He can't see out of his world, and as far
as that world goes, he is a god.  I tried to get angry again, "What am I,
the Son of your Cybernetic trinity?"
     "If you wish"
     "He died you know."
     "But you won't"
     "How can you ensure that?"
     "After the first time you died I implanted and special "black box" to
your brain.  It continually copies and sends your neural patterns, which I
have stored here."  A stylized brain appeared before me.  "In other words
I'll have a copy of your mind always on record."
     "I hate you."
     "I realize that."
     "I'll never forgive you for this."
     "I realize that."
     "I will go out and get myself killed again."
     "Probably."
     I fell silent again.
     "Are you ready to go back to the physical plane yet?"
     "What does my body look like?"
     "You get to design it this time."  He hand me a mini-comp, with
schematics of a human body.
     I look up at him one last time before engrossing myself in my
creation, and I think, 'I will have justice, DreamKiller, I will have
justice.


		              THE CONTINUATION

      _____       _____                             _____       _____
    / _   _ \   / _   _ \         CYBERLOK        / _   _ \   / _   _ \
   I I_\ /_I I I I_\ /_I I       ----------      I I_\ /_I I I I_\ /_I I
   I   /-\   I I   /-\   I sdenoms@gauss.onu.edu I   /-\   I I   /-\   I
    \I     I/   \I     I/     Lord of Shadows     \I     I/   \I     I/
     I_|_|_I     I_|_|_I Future Ruler of the World I_|_|_I     I_|_|_I
          "Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad"
 						        -Renfield