Warewolf
His breath reeked of ammonia. His eyes were black and bleeding. The Change had come upon him. His screams filled the kitchen as he lay clutching his stomach on the white linoleum floor.
The were-ware was increasing his thirst for electricity and metal. The moon was full and the earth’s magnetic fields were being plucked hard enough to wake up the lycananotech deep inside his infected pathways.
The Vir-OS must have come through the plug during his last run. Silver pathways were tattooing his skin in arcane technical glyphs. His teeth were being capped with metal points. His voice was starting to modulate.
He staggered to the counter on his knees and pulled out both cutlery drawers, scattering all the silverware across the floor. He dragged the knife-block over to the edge and let it fall.
The microscopic bodies within him tugged the reins of his pain and pleasure centers to send him towards first the fork and then towards the socket.
With a savage snarl that whined up into the supersonic, he plunged the tines of the fork into the outlet. With a flash and a pop, electricity arced up his trembling arm to wake up the freshly-built batteries lying dormant in his chest.
The normal implants he’d had installed at birth to communicate through the net were being subsumed by the e-disease. He was becoming a Silverwarewolf.
He starfished on the dark kitchen floor, humming like a refrigerator with caged power. His muscles spasmed with the incoming charge. All he needed now to complete the change was raw material. The fingertips of his free hand cored themselves painfully and become electromagnets. The cutlery on the floor sped towards his outstretched fingers.
Like a fly spitting acid onto its food to digest it, the pores of his hand opened to leak out a powerful clear gel filled with disassemblers.
The spoons sizzled at his touch. The knives bent and shrieked with stress fractures. The room filled with light before the bulb exploded in a shower of sparks raining down on the wreckage of blood and growing technology on the floor.
It was dark for an hour while the virus ran its course. Electricity pumped into the quivering body as it changed size and shape.
Coiled monomers exploded out like party streamers to land on anything metal in the room. The lines went taught as toasters, taps and mixing bowls were reeled in. The sink and the blender followed. The fridge was last.
The spike in power had been noticed by the grid but counterprogram measures had fled into the net from the wolf’s connection to retard their emergency signals.
Neighbours who banged on the walls about the noise were ignored. The ones who called the police found their calls rerouted by watchdogs from the virus in the building’s system. Soon enough, all went quiet.
In the darkness, there was a scrape followed by the whining charge of a power up.
The Warewolf was not allergic to silver. It was a Wolf 2.0.
It needed to find the rest of the pack.
Its head rolled back on newly created bloody pistons as it sent out a howl in netspace and reality. The call to assemble echoed down the phone lines. Trigger codes sounding like white-noise whispers embedded themselves in emails. Address books were rifled and used as starting points.
Soon, the warewolfs would run free in packs across the face of the world. Sentient nightmares made real from binary puppetry.
tags
The were-ware was increasing his thirst for electricity and metal. The moon was full and the earth’s magnetic fields were being plucked hard enough to wake up the lycananotech deep inside his infected pathways.
The Vir-OS must have come through the plug during his last run. Silver pathways were tattooing his skin in arcane technical glyphs. His teeth were being capped with metal points. His voice was starting to modulate.
He staggered to the counter on his knees and pulled out both cutlery drawers, scattering all the silverware across the floor. He dragged the knife-block over to the edge and let it fall.
The microscopic bodies within him tugged the reins of his pain and pleasure centers to send him towards first the fork and then towards the socket.
With a savage snarl that whined up into the supersonic, he plunged the tines of the fork into the outlet. With a flash and a pop, electricity arced up his trembling arm to wake up the freshly-built batteries lying dormant in his chest.
The normal implants he’d had installed at birth to communicate through the net were being subsumed by the e-disease. He was becoming a Silverwarewolf.
He starfished on the dark kitchen floor, humming like a refrigerator with caged power. His muscles spasmed with the incoming charge. All he needed now to complete the change was raw material. The fingertips of his free hand cored themselves painfully and become electromagnets. The cutlery on the floor sped towards his outstretched fingers.
Like a fly spitting acid onto its food to digest it, the pores of his hand opened to leak out a powerful clear gel filled with disassemblers.
The spoons sizzled at his touch. The knives bent and shrieked with stress fractures. The room filled with light before the bulb exploded in a shower of sparks raining down on the wreckage of blood and growing technology on the floor.
It was dark for an hour while the virus ran its course. Electricity pumped into the quivering body as it changed size and shape.
Coiled monomers exploded out like party streamers to land on anything metal in the room. The lines went taught as toasters, taps and mixing bowls were reeled in. The sink and the blender followed. The fridge was last.
The spike in power had been noticed by the grid but counterprogram measures had fled into the net from the wolf’s connection to retard their emergency signals.
Neighbours who banged on the walls about the noise were ignored. The ones who called the police found their calls rerouted by watchdogs from the virus in the building’s system. Soon enough, all went quiet.
In the darkness, there was a scrape followed by the whining charge of a power up.
The Warewolf was not allergic to silver. It was a Wolf 2.0.
It needed to find the rest of the pack.
Its head rolled back on newly created bloody pistons as it sent out a howl in netspace and reality. The call to assemble echoed down the phone lines. Trigger codes sounding like white-noise whispers embedded themselves in emails. Address books were rifled and used as starting points.
Soon, the warewolfs would run free in packs across the face of the world. Sentient nightmares made real from binary puppetry.
tags