Moria Versus the Dreamnet (The Dream Chasers Book 2) Read online

  Moria Versus The Dreamnet

  The Dream Chasers: Book Two

  Martin Matthews

  © Copyright Martin Matthews 2020

  Black Rose Writing | Texas

  © 2020 by Martin Matthews

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

  The final approval for this literary material is granted by the author.

  First digital version

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-68433-612-8

  PUBLISHED BY BLACK ROSE WRITING

  www.blackrosewriting.com

  Print edition produced in the United States of America

  Thank you so much for reading one of Martin Matthews’ novels.

  If you enjoyed his book, please check out Book One

  of The Dream Chasers series!

  Moria Versus the Nightmare Machine by Martin Matthews

  2018 PenCraft Award Winner for Literary Excellence

  Special thanks as always to Renee, Mark, my family,

  and everyone who continues to support me on this journey into the Dreamnet.

  For Henry, who will one day read what I write. I hope it’s good, son.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Recommended Reading

  Dedication

  THE HOLY TRINITY OF ORGANIC COMPUTING

  INITIALIZING

  REINITIALIZING

  INCOMING CALL: DMITROV, DMITRI.

  0

  OUTGOING CALL: H. HEINZ.

  1

  2

  3

  4

  INCOMING CALL: POTUS-IA.

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  INCOMING CALL: POTUS-IA.

  13

  14

  15

  16

  INCOMING CALL: “THAT ANNOYING PRINCIPAL”

  17

  INCOMING CALL: FLOYD KLUDGE

  18

  19

  20

  21

  INCOMING CALL: POTUS-IA.

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  OUTGOING CALL: H. HEINZ.

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  INCOMING CALL: NEUHAUS, JOHN ALEXANDER (POTUS

  EPILOGUE

  MORE BOOKS BY MARTIN MATTHEWS

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BRW INFO

  THE HOLY TRINITY

  OF ORGANIC COMPUTING

  The Lenz: A contact lens that acts as both an augmented reality device and a bridge between the real world and the Dreamnet.

  The Dreamnet: A collection of persistent, interconnected, interactive environments that exists within NODD.

  Networked Organic Dream Domain (NODD): A realm of infinite volume created by organic quantum neural computer networks used in conjunction with the human brain via the Lenz to render an infinite amount of objects and environments simultaneously.

  “And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.”

  – Revelation 12:7-9

 

  The girl of light and thought descended, spider-like, from the arched ceiling of the Tower of Dreams on a silver thread of memory. Twisting and writhing, she appeared before the Throne Room, dangling over the great hand that had summoned her, reuniting thought with persona.

  “What do you want?” the girl asked, spinning slowly above the great hand, which stretched below her like a dark sea beneath an endless night. “I was having fun.”

  The entity that occupied the Throne of Demos Oneiri echoed the girl’s voice back at her.

  Upside down, the girl crossed her arms. She drew her legs into a bow against the silver cord that stretched from between her feet to the infinite darkness above. A voice rolled toward her, like a wave from some distant shore.

  “Teacher Esteemed, one day to be Queen. Palace of dreams upon black rock behold, the nightmares of mankind made manifold.”

  The girl sighed and rolled her eyes. Her flaming red hair hung loose, gently pulled downward to the inescapable emptiness of that open hand. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “I shall stretch my hand toward the heavens, remake the land that once kept me in chains.”

  The girl blew out another sigh.

  “Begin the call and rapture to my breast, unite the world of dreams with that of flesh.”

  “We’ve been through this a million times,” the girl said. “I don’t know where he is.”

  The darkness enshrouding the throne of stars appeared to grow.

  “And I wouldn’t tell you if I did,” she continued. “You’re afraid of him.”

  A shriek split her ears. If she’d had real eardrums, they would have exploded. Peals of thunder and flashes of lightning filled the throne room.

  Then the voice boomed again, “If with mind alone I cannot persuade my son formed beyond the curtain of time, I will start again from scratch his namesake, the antithesis of weakness refined.”

  The girl’s eyes grew wide. Out of the darkness she saw a tiny figure emerge, small limbs kicking and flapping helplessly as it lay on its back. A baby. Startled, she watched as the infant rolled onto all fours. Slowly, the baby pushed itself up, until it stood on its feet. It turned its oversized head and looked at her with big blue eyes. Then it spoke:

  “I will ascend into heaven beyond and raise my throne above the stars of night.”

  The darkness rushed toward her, masking any scream. Sarah Fu
rgol felt the weight of night pushed into her belly until she thought she’d explode in a big bang large enough to create a new universe.

  Then silence.

 

  The world was on fire.

  At least it looked that way from orbit. Much of the blue sea was now red orange, the verdant landmasses little more than blackened embers pitted with volcano-like pustules that spewed smog high into the atmosphere.

  “Prepare for drop, T-minus thirty!”

  The rear of the modified DH-2050 Cyclone transformed from a space faring vessel; its sleek design unfolding as it descended into the atmosphere, rotors sliding out, insect like, unfurling from beneath its black carapace. The airbrakes opened, the machine slowed as the rotors spun up.

  “Positions!”

  Christopher Unus unlinked himself from the drop ship’s secure bar, positioning himself as the rear of the Cyclone fell away. The rush of air was staggering. He was thankful for the magnetic boots that helped keep him in place. The rest of his team formed up behind him.

  In his earpiece he heard the usual chatter from his band of Chasers.

  “Gargoyles!”

  “I see em.”

  “They’ll bloody ghost us on the way down!”

  Christopher peered through his helmet’s visor. He blinked his left eye to switch the view to infrared. Sure enough, the sky above their LZ was littered with the swirling forms of what the team called ‘Gargoyles’, artificial intelligences now controlled by Ikelos, the Nightmare Machine that had been unleashed into the Networked Organic Dream Domain, enslaving and twisting their forms into the Oneiri, dark-winged daemons of the Dreamnet.

  “They’re always getting smarter,” he murmured.

  “Don’t sweat it, Chief,” Toast, his second in command, said jovially, smacking him on the back with his gloved palm. “We get faster too.”

  “I’ll try to get below em,” the pilot said over the comm.

  Christopher unbuckled the tether from his utility belt that held him to the floor. Now only his magnetic boots kept him in place. The others followed suit, quickly, without order. Outside, the Cyclone passed through a bank of smoke. Beneath it lay the ruins of Cybaris, Earth 2.0’s largest pleasure city. The entertainment hub was roughly the size of Texas, its almost endless clusters of carnivals, gaming hubs, and pleasure parks now a distant memory. The glow of the city had been a constant fixture on the night horizon. That was before the Crash. Now Cybaris and its many districts were dark. What lay in wait for them there would be entertainment enough, though, Christopher thought bleakly.

  “We’ve got company!” the copilot cried.

  “Delta, prepare to drop!” Christopher called.

  A nearby Gargoyle spotted the Cyclone and made to ram it. The computer-controlled guns fired in response.

  Christopher could almost see the streets below. It was showtime.

  “Go, go, go!” he cried.

  The four-person team dived from the platform as the Gargoyle careened into the Cyclone, ripping the drop ship in half. The pilot and copilot blinked-nine and were gone, jettisoned from the universe of dreams back into the Real.

  There would be no pickup.

  Christopher’s suit responded to his every reflex. Webbing grew between the outer edge of his hands and his hips. More webbing formed between his feet and legs. The wingsuit was designed to drop the Chasers faster than parachutes, but it meant the only thing between a safe landing and instant ghosting was a five-second window in which to deploy a mini-chute. In all five hundred sky-drop simulations he’d only missed the window once, the very first time. After countless field deployments on planet-hubs around the Dreamnet, he’d only been ghosted once during a real drop, after an Oneiri hornet had speared him from the ground upon landing. He hadn’t been fast enough to cut the chute and get into cover. His death in that scenario hadn’t been entirely his fault. The landing zone, or LZ, had been erroneously greened before the drop. Now, greened or not, Christopher cut his chute before his feet ever touched ground, and got his butt into cover.

  This scenario was no different. The buildings and pavilions of Cybaris glowed slightly in the infrared vision of his faceplate, which did nothing to help the image of a hellish carnival world below him. He was coming in fast, almost supersonic. Above, the ruins of the DH-2050 Cyclone rained down like fiery confetti. He hoped none of the debris would crush him or his team.

  The Gargoyles wheeled above, attracted to the flaming spectacle of destruction. They, like all Oneiri, were corrupted artificial intelligences, scripted bots that had at one time been used to perform simple routines throughout the Dreamnet. Now these intelligences were agents of a much darker mind, an organic intelligence codenamed Ikelos, an MIT project that had gotten out into the wild of the Networked Organic Dream Domain, and which now ruled much of that domain, reshaping and remaking it in its hideous image.

  Christopher adjusted his trajectory. His teammates did the same. Their mission wasn’t to liberate Earth 2.0, or even Cybaris, from Ikelos’ rule. Instead, Moria and his small band of Dream Chasers were tasked with infiltrating Nightmare Strongholds, infected areas of the Dreamnet where Ikelos kept instances of itself, which the Chasers, all of whom were hardcore dream gamers, called ‘bosses’. Cybaris had been identified as one such stronghold, and the destruction of that location’s boss would weaken Ikelos’ grasp on the NODD. It would slow the infection, but that too was only a bonus. The real mission was deeper still: to capture a boss’s instruction set, a kernel that told it how to operate, if not why. The kernel was the only data the Department of Cyganic Affairs could use to interpret Ikelos’ current strategy. The captured kernels were puzzle pieces, a way to glimpse the bigger picture, even as that picture continuously shifted.

  Delta Team’s LZ was a few acres of dead park surrounded by dilapidated roller coasters. In the months Ikelos’ presence on Dreamnet constructs had been studied, the eggheads had recorded a decaying effect on the surrounding structures, the data of which were held on organic quantum networks of genetically engineered simian grey matter, housed all over the real world in vast, automated server farms. Inside the simulation this had the effect of twisting and distorting the cyber-organic coding that defined all constructs that made up the Dreamnet, the way nightmares twist reality into dark fantasy.

  The dead carnival that had been The Funnest Place On Earth 2.0™! was a discolored mess of moldering pavilions, misshapen amusements, and twisted rides; a broken, necrotic Neverland filled with fantastic beasts, with which Moria and his team were all too familiar.

  “Coming in hot, Delta,” Christopher said over his communications link.

  The Chasers fired their chutes at the last moment, bringing their speed down from near sonic to a gentle breeze in less than four seconds. Moria cut his chute, fell the last twenty feet, and landed on his shock boots in a puddle of muck and black grass. He rolled, leaped to his feet, drawing the carbine from his back as he sprinted to cover. The weapon was a bit-flipper, officially designated the XM-88 but commonly referred to as the ‘Negator’; a sleek, one-piece long-gun with no moving parts. Instead of regular projectiles, the XM-88 assigned values at light speed to constructs within the Dreamnet, whether they were AIs, personas, or objects. The Negator could penetrate the construct, modifying the underlying code that expressed its parameters with the logical argument: ¬P (¬P) that carried out the negation of any value within its cyganic coding. If a value was 1, it became a 0, and vice versa. The effect was as destructive as a hollow point to the skull.

  “The target is due north, at the former Dreamsoft pavilion,” a familiar voice in Christopher’s ear chimed in. “Move to objective Alpha.”

  Christopher froze, but only for a moment. He’d learned not
to ignore his commander, Captain Claire Bexley-Chambers, a British Special Air Service commando and hard-as-nails soldier who oversaw much of Delta Team’s engagements in the Dreamnet. Many would-be Delta members, skilled Chasers in their own right, were booted from the program for insubordination and bravado, attitudes the captain held in utter contempt. This wasn’t a game to her, a fact many young Dream Chasers realized too late.

  Christopher surveyed the ruins of Cybaris, flicking through infrared channels to visible light. His team formed up loosely behind him, Toast’s lumbering form on his right. Kimchi, the sixteen-year-old female Korean Chaser from the Union Army held their rear, while the Scotsman, Haggis, spread wide to Moria’s right, his scoped version of the XM-88 ready to take out Oneiri with pinpoint accuracy. His team was good, Christopher knew. He had lived and trained with them for the past six months. In all that time, they had never become friends.

  “Movement, forty yards,” Haggis subvocalized, glancing at his motion tracker. The team didn’t need to speak out loud, the special Lenz each of them wore in the left eye back in the Real could translate their direct thoughts to speech. The audio was relayed to each of their earpieces, and to the command back at Hedron City on the planet-hub Valhalla, their base of operations in the Dreamnet, as well as the bunker in the deserts of Nevada in the Real, from where the United States government in absentia operated.

  So much had happened in the last half-year. Ikelos’ power play had caused the Big Crash, necessitating the shutdown of most of the industrialized world’s access to the Dreamnet, which powered everything from world economies to transportation systems. Without it, the country was hurtled back to the era of the digital computer, as most, if not all quantum technology was now under the control of the rogue AI.