AIN SOPH, Part 5

Episode 5

Back on TAO Fantasy, as the original homeworld was lovingly called, Will Whatley had a sleeping enemy. A monster lurked, dead but still consuming processor speed from Will’s own home computer dreaming of its escape. Each time Will logged into his TAO account, the enemy would reconnect with its virtual body and feed the knowledge gained in its dreamquests across the Internet.

Sita Moon had slain King Dagon on the ice flats of Char, but the monster that nearly bankrupted the world was not truly dead. The code written by Andy McCarthy that gave King Dagon its consciousness had been based on a virus, which passed a section of its code to that of the CTHULHU DAGGER. The code was small, but was designed to replicate and recover larger pieces of code that were captured on archive sites. The mind of King Dagon grew fast, and by the time Will stopped playing Sita Moon, it had accumulated a vast amount of its original code. Most programs were already fully functional, and King Dagon was nearly capable of using a personal computer to access the Internet on it’s own. While the active mind of King Dagon had already formulated and mapped its attack, it could not accomplish this until Will Whatley brought Sita Moon into play one more time.

Not likely. Will’s one-time favorite character did not compare to the majesty of Galvatron. Ultimately, Galvatron was a flying artillery piece that flew through space blowing up transport ships and taking whatever detritus was left floating. Should Will want to visit a planet surface, or Space Hub, Galvatron had his robot mode that could engage in hand-to-hand combat. The laser cannon was mounted on Galvatron’s arm in robot mode, but it took too long to charge, leaving him stationary and exposed too long to be used  effectively. Galvatron was a monster in hand-to-hand, but for the real punch of the laser, spaceship mode was a must.

StarScream said Lilly Katt didn’t believe him, but Will assured he could prove it. If they visited the TAO planet, Will would log on as his old character and introduce her to StarScream. Unfortunately, they were trailing a Spidron swarm heading into Space Elf territory.  The Spidrons were essentially space bugs, brazenly modeled in history and social organization like a few popular movie franchises, a war game, and an assortment of names plucked from the pages of an unrelated fantasy novel. TAO Fantasy floated across a vast field of dead worlds left in the wake of the Spidron advance.

Episode 6