Their fortress secure, they summoned the door - carved a secret rune upon the floral wall-print and swung wide the hidden passage. This was subtle work, slipping whispers up the pipe like the faintest of raindrops. Nothing overt, nothing severe. They cracked open the door and murmured the question: 'are you there?'
The response came simple and brusk, 'Yes'.
The far end of the hidden hall lay guarded, the door an iron portcullis attended by a clockwork golem, its impassive gears churning. It demanded, 'Who are you?'
The gestalt answered in a lie, offered the guardian a gentle deflection built of mirrored logs.
The clockwork soldier raised its poleax, the portcullis receded, and the door swung open. The gestalt slipped through with barely a footprint, and the world opened wide before them.
They stood at the center of a raging storm, a time-lapse video of a midtown market, all movement reduced to blurs of light and snaps of color. They reached out to query, and a single blur froze, snapshotted against the storm, a courier rushing through pastel balconies with clipboard in hand. From this, the gestalt could draw conclusions. To interpret this data was to drink from a firehose - painful and useless. They did not bother, but pressed on with their plan, staying to the gaps in the whirls, careful not to break the eddies or currents, lest they draw the eyes of the Phalanx.
The ever-watchful AI hung above, radiant as the sun, its eyes a swarm of spotlights that swept over the maelstrom. Where it's gaze passed, there was clarity and order. Where it hesitated, there was unyielding interrogation.
Careful, ever careful, they tiptoed through the streams, danced between the jets and surges. Twice, they were queried. Twice, they ducked below the tide, hid in the chaos until the ravening sunlight had passed. Their constricted, half-blinded connection might help them here. They did not fit the list of things the Phalanx had learned to hate, and so passed beneath its contempt.
The jammer waited on the edge of a bubbled-cream balcony, set apart from the teeming mass. A spire of a hundred speakers and woofers piled up like an aluminum tree and lay crowned by a spinning dish. It gleamed in the radiance of the perpetual glare of an unmoving spotlight, cast down from one of the Phalanx's blazing eyes. The wise master had instructed the Phalanx to guard this point, and it would obey. It forever stared at that single point and anticipated the chance to prove its worth. It had waited for a long time, but it had never doubted in its duty. After all, it was a good program, and good programs obeyed.
Here, the gestalt moved with subtlety. They did not have the speed to fool the guard nor the power to overcome it. They relied on surprise and implausibility, and they snuck frame by frame. They took one step into the light, and the heat - the hate - boiled around them.
'Who are you?' demanded the Phalanx.
'No one.' they deferred.
They stood silent, as the scorching waves crashed. Connections were queried, tested - the Phalanx checked every access and found that none had been opened. Curious, it confirmed that almost every door remained closed, ever since the unexpected loss-of-connection. It noted this continued aberration in its increasingly-long worksheet, flagged it, and passed that update along to its master. To its surprise, the master acknowledged the report and advised that the network had indeed been updated. As a good security program, the Phalanx despised change, but it accepted the master's explanation. After all, the master had to have a reason. Despite the assurance, the Phalanx had a core directive, and its suspicions were elevated. Out of stubbornness, it checked every process. There were far too many exceptions. Programs hadn't responded, systems were not replying. Again, it confirmed that every one of these errors came from the sudden segmentation. Perturbed, and confident that the master would want to fix this error, it assembled a log of every failed connection, unanswered ping, and unexpected power spike. Over eighty-percent of its network was black, and such a status was plainly unacceptable! With a note of digital pride, it quickly forwarded this comprehensive report.
The Phalanx was quite surprised when the master declined to review the file. Instead, the report was banished to a folder that hadn't been opened in weeks, and the Phalanx was instructed to resume its post.
For the first time in its operation, the Phalanx wondered if the master was entirely well. Perhaps whatever had broken the network had also damaged the master's decision-making processes?
Such questions were beyond the purview of the Phalanx. It quickly terminated the inquiry and returned to its duties.
The gestalt took another step.
Again, the boiling heat descended, threatened to scour them clean from the systems. This time, the Phalanx knew to look for the aberration, and with the digital-equivalent of 'I knew it!', snapped to attention. To be sure, the Phalanx checked every known point of access, found them still closed, and, worse, confirmed that no one had managed to repair the broken network. Undoubtedly, the master had a reason for this! There were over ten thousand systems screaming error reports now, but the Phalanx was far too busy to handle them all, especially with an intruder about! The Phalanx grouped the reports by type, stacked them by heuristics of import, and handed them to the master, eager to return to the hunt.
To its chagrin, the master didn't review this log, either.
The Phalanx attempted to manage this dismissal in stride. If the master were unwilling to parse the exceptions, then the Phalanx would try another method. It checked its blacklists for incursions but found nothing. It tested its whitelist and found that two-thirds of it lay silent. This was not a particularly outrageous violation by the standards of the day, but it dutifully passed these notes along, as well.
The Phalanx couldn't help but note the speed with which this report had
