Agents of Metal Part 3 Lasse Öörni 1 2 NaNoWriMo 2012. Edited later. Certain scenes in this novel will spoil the game Cave Story (Doukutsu Monogatari.) The detailed descrip- tions of developing a 3D internet platform may also be disturbing or triggering to some readers. Read at own risk. Thanks to Laura Thurlin for additional battle scene writing! 3 4 1. The bombs exploded with a flash of blinding light and a brief full-spectrum blast of white noise. Next the shrill, upper-mid boosted double kick drum sound assaulted Ian's ears, and the flash was replaced by the rapidly changing PAR lights. Despite the large ar- ray of Marshall cabinets on the stage – and not one of them was fake – it took him some time to recognize the song and the presence of an actual guitar tone, but at last he did. He raised his beer glass in approval. The first song was Rising Force. The God of Swedish shredding, Yngwie Malmsteen, had taken the stage, though he was not yet visible through the thick fog. The intro guitar riff gave way to the first verse, and the bassist began to sang (after Ripper Owens’ depar- ture there was no actual front man), belting out the lyrics like a banshee on crack. Ian sung along hoarsely, for this was a classic he knew inside-out. Meanwhile he tried to catch a glimpse of Jo, who had pushed through the crowd to the front to observe the Maestro better. So far he was not able to see her, but was sure she was doing all right. In the weeks after their assault on 5 the covert, evil organization SCEPTRE – the Sectarian Chosen Elite Privileged To Rule and Exterminate, Ian had often found himself worrying far too much. Par- tially it was for a reason. Before their successful assault, just before the anti- cosmic deadline on the 21st of December 2012, there had also been a failed attempt, just him and Jo with no other Agents of Metal for backup. During that disas- trous run they both had been captured. While Ian had suffered torture and the severing of a nerve that con- trolled the motion of his left hand pinky, Jo had been implanted with an artificial SCEPTRE assassin person- ality with the codename Fury. It could no longer as- sume full control, as the physical implant had been re- moved, but had remained, as Jo described, as a nagging voice in her head. As it was Ian's momentary lapse of concentration that had led to their capture, he had kept blaming him- self to no end, though they had ultimately prevailed with their lives, and thwarted SCEPTRE's master plan. To be honest, Ian still did not exactly understand what had been the point of SCEPTRE's operation. The final steps had been to launch a nuclear missile at Mid- dle Eastern oil fields to contaminate them, and to har- ness the (questionable) energy of the so-called Current 218, or Black Light at a pyramid in the South America, just as the Mayan long count calendar began its next cy- cle. Due to the Agents' intervention the missile had det- onated at the pyramid instead, making it a double fail for the enemies. But had they succeeded, what would they have gained in actual real world terms? A global energy monopoly? But that was not important. What mattered now was to enjoy the beer and the music, in that order. Ian 6 caught an occasional glimpse of Yngwie as he continu- ously improvised instead of playing the riffs as recorded, and kept kicking his limitless supply of guitar picks toward the audience. Going to the Yngwie Malmsteen show also held an- other, more covert purpose. As the phrase “unleash the fucking fury” was widely attributed to him, Jo had her- self insisted on this, to prove that the digital assassin no longer had a significant hold on her, and its name did not act as a trigger anymore. Just like at most heavy and power metal gigs, the au- dience did not participate overtly. They mostly were content with singing along and banging their heads. Pitting would be out of question – Suddenly Ian was certain that a mosh pit was indeed forming, but it looked highly irregular. This caught his interest to such degree that he left the table, beer in hand, to investigate closer. Pushing through the ranks of audience to where the concentration was thicker, he saw what was happening. A shrill scream pierced the air, rising above Yngwie's guitar solo, as a solitary member of the audience was trying to incite others to pit, using windmilling hands and feet as inspiration. Ian felt a wave of horror pass through him as he un- derstood that the audience member was no other than Jo, in her denim vest and jeans. She punched a man al- most one and half of her size straight to the face, then continued to run in her own solitary circle. At this point club security had been alerted: two black-clad guards approached from the back. As the Maestro's solo continued over the final verse, Ian watched as if in slow motion as Jo still continued the circle, sidestepped a security guard as he made to grab 7 her, then “accidentally” hit him to the stomach. That particular guard fell to the floor, but the other was now on to her, and this time Jo – or Fury? – was powerless to act. The guard took a hold of her by both arms, while the downed one got back up on his feet, and after a quick, angry exchange of words, they proceeded to es- cort her out of the venue. Ian finished his beer in record time and prepared himself mentally to exit the concert early as well. The underpowered public server at the temporary Agent HQ was ready to explode: the memory and CPU usage were running near maximum. Blowfish observed the amount of connections to the carefully hidden Agent web site to be rising at an alarming rate. At first she did not understand what was going on. She knew there had been a spike of interest toward the Agents of Metal in the end of December, after she had reprogrammed SCEPTRE's sky projection system to broadcast the Agents' message to the world instead of the apocalyptic visions the Sectarian Elite had origi- nally planned to be shown. But piece by piece she began to understand. That message in itself had not gained viral capacity, but now something had. She went through the list of active con- nections and noticed that most had been referred here from the YouTube account of Crazy F.U.B.A.R. Mad Dog “Machine Gunn” Eddie. In particular, from a video where he proclaimed a new “armed uprising” to be coming, and promised that everyone who was willing would be able to join. The description of that particular video contained the URL for the carefully hidden but still public Agents of Metal website. This in itself was kind of perverse, as 8 things should either be completely public, or protected with the highest security mechanisms available, but the Agents had hoped that people would discover the site in a controlled manner. Now Blowfish was not sure, especially after her fel- low senior Agents Blackhand and Sarge were dead, whether the Agency could cope with a large influx of new people interested in the organization. Particularly if this “Mad Dog” – who at a first glance looked like a typical weapons and survivalism enthusiast, or less kindly, a redneck – was misrepresenting the Agency and did not fully understand the principles of Freedom, Metal and Might. Blowfish was not sure if she under- stood them either, especially on a bad day. Next Blowfish scanned through the video comments. “Fucking idiots,” she swore. It appeared that most of the commenters believed “Mad Dog” to be a downloadable content playable char- acter for a first person shooter video game, and that Agents of Metal would be an upcoming expansion pack. That explained the virality. As she compared to official videos from the game's publisher, Blowfish had to ad- mit the author's cleverness: the use of post-processing effects matched the visual style, making “Mad Dog” al- most look like a CGI character, and the voice and style of narration were nearly identical. ”I just felt I had to express myself. But the posers in the hall didn't understand it in the slightest. They just wanted to stand in place, fucking rock police,” Jo ex- plained as they walked away from the medium-large club, Afterworld Noir. Ian knew she was extremely lucky to get a lifetime ban instead of being charged with assault and battery. 9 He was not yet sufficiently drunk to bypass the higher functions of his brain and to just reply with the first thing that came into his mind. Instead he went into a brief, endless loop of search- ing for the proper reply. He was quite sure that this al- tercation was a result of an intervention by the Fury personality, as normally Jo was not that aggressive and provoked to pitting in an irresponsible manner. Pitting in agreement with all the inbuilt rules and regulations was another thing, but it demanded an appropriate form of music, such as thrash or death metal. This looked suspiciously like Jo had taken the concept of “unleashing the fucking fury” too far. What was the correct response then? Fuck all correct shit, Ian thought.