Ragnarok by Ari Bach Page B

green man wandered away, and the denizens of the Crag returned silently to their business. Yoshi activated the Gullinkambi.
    It didn’t work. The Crag stayed opaque and black. The ads were all highlighted, but whatever part of them was inside the site coding wasn’t revealed. Yoshi tried again with the same results. Avatars around him could see what he was doing. One laughed. He linked back to V team.
    â€œI saw the code for the ads. It’s not a problem with your rooster. It’s the Crag. It’s invulnerable.”
    Vibeke replied, “Go ahead and start clicking the ad links. Just log their contacts one by one and come back. We can handle it from there.”
    â€œNo, let me try one more thing first. Your rooster is only set for noninvasive penetration of the site’s code. I have an intramarkup hack. If I apply it to the Gullinkambi, it should be able to see through the Crag. It’ll damage the permissions a little, but it’s a website. It won’t feel anything.”
    Violet watched as he applied the new coding, a rather brilliant modification. She felt some trepidation at his last words. If any site could feel, it would be this abomination. She reminded herself the rock walls were just site code. He activated the modified Gullinkambi, and they could see inside the Crag.
    They saw eyes. There was a grotesque crablike face inside the rock. Yoshi staggered back. They could see more. Inside the spiral rock crag was a gigantic face with several mandibles, feelers, and eye stalks—and it was looking at them. Not only at Yoshi but right through his visual link to V team. The Gullinkambi cut out. The stone went black again.
    â€œOkay, guys,” Yoshi stuttered, panicked, “I’m coming up topside. You can keep your program.”
    Yoshi began to skip across the cliff toward the portal to the common net. As he did the Crag began to shake. It was the first time Violet had seen an earthquake online. Avatars began to tumble down the sides.
    â€œWhat the hell is happening?” asked Veikko.
    â€œThe Crag is moving,” said Vibeke plainly. She spoke as normal, but Violet could hear something in her voice. She had never seen anything like it either. The Crag continued to shift. As Yoshi fought the local gravity settings and ran for the portal the mountain began to turn onto its side. That helped Yoshi for a moment, with the Crag turning he was almost to the edge, almost to the portal. He leaped for the junction and looked in the clear when a gigantic black claw appeared from under the mountain’s edge and grabbed him. Its chelae squeezed down on the old man, and he vanished in a gruesome puff of pixelation. The visual link cut out with a sickening yank, as if their eyes had been pulled out with it.
    V team stood on the eighth ring staring at the hole. Violet tried to understand what they’d just seen, some sort of advanced site AI or a defensive mechanism? No other sites had anything like it. She had never imagined anything like the face she’d spotted within the Crag—the Crab. A crab’s face within a mountain-sized shell, a face that would be haunting her dreams. Its eyes were….
    Still looking at her from the pit. The crab’s face had emerged from its mountain shell. It saw them from the void, even after Yoshi’s link went dead, the Crag was watching them from below. Four of its eyes breached the portal on their long stalks and stared. As they stared, the black avatars began to crumble. Violet couldn’t tell what it was at first. It was a hack completely unlike Alopex’s but every bit as powerful. Their avatars fell away and revealed their residual self-images. At horrible resolution, with no added trackability, they suddenly looked a lot like themselves. It could see their faces. And they couldn’t stop looking at its grotesque visage. Angry at being hacked. Anger radiating impossibly, tangibly from those hot flat eyes.