Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 30

I take off my shoes, push my feet down through the soft tearing flesh of the fungus into the warm wet earth.

Somewhere another scream, a commotion. Then a sound like rolling thunder, only more terrifying, more bizarre. I've heard it before, flashback to a vacation in Mexico when I was very small, howler monkeys. Me crying in terror. Mom singing me a song.

Somehow now I can see the data streams that make up the forest. See what it really is, under all this simulation.

I need to find order, decomposition. Break it down. Sort it. Search it, find our familiars.

Toca la marcha ,

mi pecho llora,

adiós señora ,

yo ya me voy.

I try to clear out mom's song from my mind.

Focus.

Out in the darkness, a flash of light catching a wet eye, a jaguar staring at me, stalking me. Getting closer.

Somehow I'm applying my algorithms, just by thinking, I can feel the chaos give way, the data begins to yield to my pattern, and they emerge from the raw code, the Shivers, and then it's happening really fast, I'm somehow running them through a model, identifying the ones which live in the forest that could work as familiars, sorting them into a vast array and I feel high and happy, I'm doing my thing for the first time in ages and this is magic, coding without coding, manipulating the Gap with pure thought, feeling like a raw goddess of information, like I'm touching the core of everything.

But there are too many creatures heading my way, all kinds of hostile things. They're surrounding me in this little clearing in the woods. Cats, bats, spiders, snakes and bugs and slugs of every flavour.

They're attracted by the magic. They look hungry, like they all want to feed off me in some way.

I gotta move.

I push forward, launching myself up and out of all the slime and goo, puffs of spores clouding up the air around me as I try to charge forward, running through glue, and clouds of creatures scatter at my approach.

I bundle into another clearing, don't know how long I've been running, and all the while the streams of data just getting louder and louder under my skin I'm losing control, something is wrong, and I collapse at the six feet of another coven.

They're like me, pushing their feet into the ground holding hands, trying to reach arms into the foliage and connect with the forest. When I land at their feet their eyes spark open.

"Oh, it's you."

I know somehow that she's speaking Korean, but I'm understanding English. Nothing I haven't seen before, translation tech.

And I'm thinking, this is my chance, to show all these girls who are sneering at me right now, thinking I got into their secret society by cheating, that I am some kind of idiot with a high-grade weapon under my skin, a dumb ass bomb, maybe I can show them who I really am.

I'm still the same girl that used to make all the adults in the room drop their sandwiches when she did the science fair. I'm still that kid who wrote her own embodied AI script from scratch at the age of nine.

But I know I'm losing control, if I can just get it back, I can take control of the whole forest, but if I jack out now, I can avoid doing something awful.

Decision time. Dammit I'm so close to nailing this.

The other girls are staring at me in horror, off their game and I realise I'm muttering while I try to get control back, plunging my arms into the ground, about to sink my face in without thinking about it, and I notice, out there beyond the edges of forest where all the familiars are running through my sorting spell in neat but torrential streams, there are cracks appearing in the walls of this fake reality.

And there's something out there, like the other Shivers but deeply, deeply spiteful, malicious things, and I'm shivering now, they're growing bigger in my focus. Dark Shivers.

Have to run. Have to jack out.

I'm so close though, I can't really hear what the coven girls are saying, maybe shouting, they're actually trying to pull me out of the ground. Maybe I should press eject. No. One more big push, I'll show these witches who I really...

Then something rips. And the jungle is suddenly silent.

The girl holding my arm is yanked up a hundred feet into the canopy of the trees. Screams from above. Then silence.

The other two girls try to run. Shadows fly past my head. They are knocked to the ground like skittles, then the jerk and stutter. No mistaking what is happening. They stand up, possessed by something evil. They turn and fix me with their eyes.

I freeze, my body not doing what my brain is begging it to do. I try to jack out, but I can't I've totally lost control, and I can feel them coming through me.

They're using me like a door. Flying out into the forest, silently feasting on the other Shivers, swallowing them by the dozen, sniffing out witches and hunting them down in milliseconds. Moving at Gigahertz. And I'm the frozen witness.

Screams and shrieks pop out from far and near like cheap rockets on the fourth of July.

I'm beginning to black out, and as my vision goes dark, I can just make out, striding through the glitch storm, Rhiannon and Shell, lit up by their Rhizomes, looking like dark angels, binding the spirits and sending them back to hell.

And it's all my fault, again.

###THIS NOVEL IS IN OPEN BETA###

Join the beta reader team at cyberwitchacademy.com

I'm here for your feedback. Thanks for reading!