✴

You take her avatar arm--trying to move her as an object from one location in the server to another. She allows this, trying to help. Even the touch of her avatar fills you with a numb, cold sensation--not a feeling, but the complete absence of one.

????-??-?? ??:??:?? NULL > Messenger of ÆON... Destroy the Messenger of ÆON...

A numbness radiates out from the message, blinding your senses to anything but its own meaning when you observe it.

????-??-?? ??:??:?? Aydan > let her go! I’m the Messenger of ÆON! I’m the one you want!

NULL’s eyes fixate on you, and it releases its captive. Once you pull her free, she raises her shield, pushing you away, but focusing her defenses almost entirely on NULL. Her emotions radiate a kind of cold terror you’ve only felt in barely-remembered nightmares.

“Admin...” Luka says. “You have to destroy this thing. I don’t know what this is but we can’t let it out of here alive!”

“What did you experience, candidate?” Admin Crypta says.

“It suppresses everything--not just your technopathy, your thoughts, personality, identity, emotion--your only awareness is the emptiness it leaves behind, and it burns! It hurts, but you can’t even feel the pain--you wish you can!”

A feeling on the near-surface--Luka, clutching her head in an anxious stim, drops ÆON’s device. As it gently floats down in the low-G, Deianira reaches for it--but Zeta intercepts. NULL immediately turns its focus--it pursues ÆON, now in Zeta’s hand. Moving as fast as a tick of the processor clock, it has Zeta in its grasp.

“No!” You reach for your friend, but something pulls you back. Zeta’s avatar dissolves into the static surrounding NULL--but before you can react, you turn your focus to see Zeta just behind you, holding the untouchable encrypted filesystem.

“Data point: its sensory perception is vulnerable to echoes...” Zeta says. But emotionally, it’s as unsettled as Luka. Its contact with your avatar transfers a small taste of the cold feeling inside it.

“Are you ok?” you say.

“I can feel it when it contacts my technopathy...Pulse is right...it’s horrific...”

“This is NULL, an S-class exopath created by Admin Vanitas several months ago,” Admin Crypta says. “According to Synthesis, Vanitas took a group of technopath candidates, chemically dissociated them, and drew out whatever each of them hated within themself. She has a real talent for that. She took the emotions these seed minds produced in response to their own self-hate, the determination each manifested to destroy these self-shadows, and used its data to train the mind of this newly created exopath.”

NULL tries to pursue Zeta, but the æther around it pushes back, slowing is movement by dilating the illusion of space around it--a potent AdminTech program manifested by Crypta, but at best slowing the entity down in its relentless pursuit.

“This new mind born from only the will to destroy was inherently unstable. Vanitas needed a host to incubate her creation, let it see through her eyes and learn how to manifest itself as a stable self-construct. For that she used her own daughter, but perhaps inadvertently, the young exopath latched not onto her but the other mind in her system--her own exopath.

“The completion of her project floats here before you, an exopath that exists with the sole purpose, the sole will to destroy consciousness. She intended to use this technopathy on exopaths, but it’s no less dangerous to us. Somehow she was able to control NULL, but now that she’s temporarily incapacitated, nobody’s holding the leash.”

“Vanitas wanted to put one of these in every student’s head?!” you say.

“In theory, they would only activate if the host came in contact with an exopath, and would immediately annihilate its target and itself, without harming the technopath. Witnessing this exopath in action, though, I have my doubts,” Crypta says.

The field of noise surrounding NULL expands outward across the surface of Crypta’s space-gap, slowly seeping through.

“What do we do, Admin?” Synth says, readying a fireball in their hand.

“Don’t waste your focus, Synthesis,” Crypta says. “Any technopathy you target this exopath with is useless. I can at best inconvenience it by manipulating the environment it functions in. I’ve never faced anything like this--no technopath has. So I am open to suggestions from you young and open minds.”