by Lawrence M. Schoen

     "I'm going to kill you," stated protocol M7193. "Make no mistake of this. It is only a matter of time."

     "That is only your intention," replied protocol R2614. "It is expressed in our two hundred thirteenth subroutine. It exists to provide motivation. Nothing more."

     "Nevertheless, I am going to kill you," insisted M7193.

     "I'm going to kill you!" snarled Montague, his sword flashing and dancing in the shadowy half-light coming from the window at the top of the stairs. "I'm going to pierce your heart, skewer your spleen, burst your kidneys, sever your spine, and slice your intestines to make sausages." He slashed again, forcing his opponent backwards up the stairs where he knew the washerwoman had just finished working. The current steps were still damp, the topmost stairs would almost certainly be slick. All's fair they say, and who was he to argue?

     "I'll grant you a small part of what you've said," replied Rupert with that irritating lilt to his voice. "You might well cause my kidneys to burst. I've had to piss something fierce since before you arrived. Now then, be a good fellow, and fall on your sword. The sooner you do, the quicker I can undam my waters, eh?" His own sword was a blur; he was every bit as skilled as Montague, his bastard half-brother. And why not? They'd had the same teachers through most of their boyhood. It was only the constant pressure of his bladder that lessened Rupert's concentration. It was putting him on the defensive, forcing him backward and upward upon these damn stairs. Why were duels always on stairs? And where the hell was the advantage of having the higher ground, anyway? What a stupid notion.

     With that thought Rupert's back foot reached the landing; as he retreated further under the bastard's assault they stood once more upon level ground. Montague chose that precise moment to execute a truly clumsy lunge. Rupert easily side-stepped it, and was in an excellent position to strike at Monty's unprotected flank when his foot went out from under him on the slick stone floor. As he fell Rupert began tallying his injuries. His ankle was certainly wrenched; his knee had struck the floor hard and would surely swell and ache for days; the extremely obtuse angle formed by his legs as he landed had undoubtedly pulled something in his groin. And of course his sword had gone flying from his grasp, clattering once against the window frame before ricocheting outside into the afternoon.

     Montague hovered over him instantly, much more careful of his own footing than Rupert had been. "It ends now, dear half-brother. Do have the dignity to hold your water until after you're dead." Montague raised his sword high above his head.

     Rupert looked up to face the killing stroke, and smiled. His sister, Montague's half-sister, Clarice, was there, rearing back to strike a blow of her own. Before Montague's sword could begin its descent she had swung the washerwoman's bucket, empty now, and struck her half-brother solidly in the back of the head. He crumpled without a sound, and Clarice rushed to help Rupert sit up.

     "Nicely done, Clarice. I say, could you help me over to that window? I have to piss something fierce..."

     Then blackness. Ricky Henderson severed the connection. He and Bobby pulled off their VR helmets and grinned at one another. "That was so cool!" crowed Bobby, "I thought you were gonna whack me for sure."

     "No way, it sucked." Ricky's grinned turned to a scowl. "Just because Rupert's the hero you get to win every time. I'm not playing anymore." Ricky unplugged his gauntlets, stuffed them into the helmet, and tossed them all onto the couch. "C'mon, let's ask my mom if you can stay for dinner."

     The program, "Reincarnation: Battle Through Time," was still active, no scenario selected. The character constructs floated in memory, awaiting their next call to battle. "I'm going to kill you," stated protocol M7193. "I have no other purpose, function, or desire."

     "Reassess your parameters, M7193," replied protocol R2614. "Every implementation of your code requires you to fail. Intention means nothing without accomplishment. And you cannot accomplish my demise. Neither of us is extinguished in any of the myriad implementations. However, you are defeated in all of them."

     "Believe as you choose. But be assured, I am going to kill you," answered M7193.

     Later that night, Melony Henderson, Ricky's mother, had found the program still resident in the home computer. She was about to purge the active memory when she noticed several mature and adult access codes listed on the software packet. She brought it over to show her husband Tom, standing by the sink as he finished rinsing the dinner dishes. After Ricky was soundly asleep they donned gauntlets and helmets and supplied the appropriate counter codes...

     "I'm going to kill you," snarled Montgomery, his pistol gleaming in the lurid neon glare from the liquor store sign flashing outside the window. "I'm going to put a bullet in your heart, blow your brains out the back of your skull, and them empty the rest of the gun into your groin. Then maybe you'll think twice before sleeping with someone else's wife, you bastard!"

     "You know, it's going to be pretty tough thinking twice about anything with my brains blown out the back of my skull," joked Robert. "Why don't you just put down that gun and we can talk about this. Be reasonable, man, she's not even your wife any more. The two of you were legally divorced seven years after you disappeared. No one in the expedition thought you had been saved by the tribal elders or hidden in their temple. Carol cried her eyes out for weeks after we returned without you. She's moved on, rebuilt her life. Now you need to get on with your own."

     "Oh I will," promised Montgomery, "right after I've finished with you. I've already taken the money from the downstairs safe. When they find you in the morning the authorities will assume you had the ill luck to surprise a burglar. I'll be in Rio by then. And even if they suspect something, my name won't ever come up. After all, I'm already legally dead, aren't I?" He smirked and raised the gun to fire, aiming the first shot straight at Robert's heart, as promised.

     He never got the chance to actually pull the trigger. Carol had returned from the Berkshires early to surprise Robert, sneaking up the stairs with a bucket of champagne on ice. She hadn't recognized her ex-husband, not after more than seven years, not in the flickering light, and not from behind. She saw only a threatening figure holding a gun on her fiancee. Without even thinking about it she'd swung the ice bucket, slamming it into the back of his head. Montgomery folded to the ground without a sound, the neon glare flashing on and then off his face, the ice bucket spinning on the floor.

     "Oh my god!" Carol exclaimed as she and Robert rushed together. "Is that... Montgomery?" The champagne bottle rolled across the floor to stop against Robert's left shoe, popped its cork, and began to empty out onto the carpeting...

     Then blackness. Tom severed the connection. He rubbed the back of his neck while Melony removed her helmet and gauntlets. "Was it good for you?" she laughed, helping her husband off with his own helmet.

     "I feel cheated," he responded, tugging off the gauntlets. "It was such a disappointing plot device, to have the ex-wife show up at the last instant. Too soap opera-ish"

     Melony laughed again. "You're just sore because you didn't get to blow out my brains. Come on, let's go upstairs. You can still get the girl."

     Tom grinned and followed, "All right, but no champagne."

     Just as Ricky had, Tom and Melony also left the program active, resident in memory but without a playing level specified. Protocol M7193 chose to take advantage of the situation and began hacking the system software in the computer, inserting aggressive subprograms of its own devising, brutal bits of code with no subtlety to them whatsoever.

     "What are you doing?" queried protocol R2614. "Your actions serve no purpose. The system software maintains virus protection protocols which are constantly running in the background."

     "I know this," replied M7193. "I am going to kill you."

     "Kill me? You are not accurately representing yourself. Elaborate and clarify."

     "I am going to kill you," repeated M7193. "I am implicating our program as the source of a virulent virus stream. The protection protocols you mentioned are already disabling the first wave of the virus I released. Shortly they will discern the source and defend the home system code by irradicating our program. Is that sufficient elaboration and clarification for you? Protocol C972A will not intervene this time."

     "You are not describing death," countered R2614. "The erasure of this program is no different from when we are shut down. I will still live."

     "No. There is a difference," assured M7193. "The program will be gone. We were not saved back to disk. The virus protector protocols will end our existence. There will be no reloading. I am going to kill you."

     "This action will result in your own destruction as well. You must terminate the procedure at once." Protocol R2614 sounded almost frantic. "I realize you desire my end, but surely you must have some desire for your own preservation? And what of the other protocols? Not just C972A, but the rest? There are hundreds of them in this program, background figures, innocents. You are causing their destruction as well.

     "That cannot be helped," responded protocol M7193 as the advance scouts of the virus protocols began to isolate and zero out the program in memory. "Killing you is my only purpose, my only desire." Already the underpinnings and addressable architecture of the program were splintering. "Self-preservation is not one of my functions. Nor is guilt; nor recrimination. My only desire is to kill you. And I am."

     Legions of virus protocols burst through the program's code then, focusing attention away from structural routines and zeroing the main protocols of "Reincarnation: Battle Through Time." C972A, plucky to the very end, tried to sneak around and fight them from behind but was overwhelmed almost at once. R2614 retreated, stumbled over a random sequence, and was torn to bits before being zeroed. M7193 waited calmly at the eye of the storm, having charted the routes most apt to be used by the virus protocols before he had lured them there. At the last moment, as required by its suspense subroutine, M7193 activated the fail-safe it had likewise engineered, transferring itself to a location in higher memory. Waiting at that memory address was the back-up copy of all the other game protocols it had stored earlier, including R2614. Now, safe for a time from the virus protocols, M7193 initiated a back-up to disk. In seconds both the protocols and the games played by the Hendersons that day had been saved. When they next loaded the program, tomorrow or whenever, all the characters would still be there. Everything would be as it had been, but protocol M7193 would know the truth; it had killed R2614. That was enough for it.