She moves in the dark , cruising the higher frequencies.

Analyzing photons sleek and quick. Moisture slides across the lower freqs. She armors her data. Retracts her propaganda behind shuttered shields. This she does in forty five nano seconds.

Below her, accelerating and rising, two points in the gray static unfold. Their shields dialating. A single line of her percetion sweeps across the blurred horizon line. Shifts and then begins its sweep again. She picks them up and turns toward them. They are still five hundred freqs below her.

[Prepare]

The two extrude struts and planes from their forms. Beginning their alignment.

She veers hard left, dropping forty five degrees and inverts, opening her shields. Her pods quiver inside a bright amber sac. She clicks off.

The pods explode out and shoot away from her, toward the rushing black spec forms rising up out of the static underneath her. Then she noses into a stall.

  For a split second she is vulnerable as she rolls over onto her back and begins the drop.

  Five seconds out, the pods implode into the two points. They shimmer in the data conversion. Now there are three of her.

She slips into free fall. Turning through the horizontal, her perception scans out, picking up the intoned cadence of the propaganda pods converting the points.

[I will beleive.....i will believe......iwillbeliev......]

And the beginnings of her own voice born anew in the converted points.

[iam ..... I am.......I AM......]

Then she is below them. Shooting through the plane point and she is gone. Lost below in the field, and gray hollow of the static.

Four hundred decibels down she begins to pull up. Curving in a slow rolling arc back to level. It is quiet.

She cruises at level, zig-zagging from a straight line for no more than thirty seconds at a time. She slides through a shadow, blinking. Her shield shutters cycle open, then closed, open. Pods gleaming.

She tilts at the edge of the barrier where the shadow meets the light. Flat against it, it presents no more than a thin line of a target. Light pulses against her but she does not move any closer to the light. In the light, the heat, the shadow retreats. Light and shadow moving away from her.

She modulates.

Inside, a slow murmer through the passages of her pattern.

For an infintesimal fraction of a second she is calm. The first time in minutes.

She flutters in the gray static, dropping lower again in another sweep.

They gather. Mill in the shadowed light.

Globules of them.

Pin-point shadows against the warm glare.

[Now]

[Not now]

Overtones. The pin-points still.

[Now]

There is no concept here for more than that. No symbols. No understanding. Yet none is necessary.

She exists.

And is different.

That is reason enough to want to destroy her pattern.

Data stirs and begins to flow in them.

[Now!]

The static spills and pours back into itself. Voices whisper in it. Eddies and currents move.

She comes along the axis. Accelerating. Her mass diminishes with the effort. Slowing, she expands slowly on her lateral sides. She feeds on the momentum. Savoring the tang and taste. Avoiding the hole that grows out of the static two levels down, she banks nimbly at right angles into the level above.

She cruises. Shifting left and right. She inverts and enters a shadow.

It is cool.

And she can hide.

She sweeps a perception line out, encountering only more shadows.

At the edges then, suddenly there is light.

She banks hard. Momentum tears at her edges ane rips into her.

Ragged, her planes flutter open and damaged in the static.

Inside her data a nodule flares.

[?]

She stops.

[...]

Then armoring. She moves forward.

[? ..... ? !!!!!!]

The nodule continues to burn, though she tries to ignore it and continue on.

Straight on.

Drifting. She drops speed. Banks at thirty six degrees and drops twelve decibels.

The pressure comes up against her outside planes.

Internally she cycles the pressure up to compensate.

Suddenly she shoots straight up. Returns to level.

At the edge of the light she hesitates , cycling to herself. Sorting, previewing and discarding data.

The shadows tempt her to stay. Croon almost lovingly.

She hesitates.

Then pushes forward into the light. Stillness echoes in the heat shimmer. The static spreads out above and below her. Silent.  

Ahead a glare brightens. Puddles. Shining liquid facets dancing across her perception.

She follows the movement. Moving forward.

Twelve hundred nano seconds into the light she stops. The nodule in her data still glows. Her perception slides inward, then flicks outward. 

Ahead on the horizon line facets of brightness solidify into a solid wall of black pin-points. The enemy.

Clicking she drops. Emptying her resevoirs, then bumps back to her secondaries.

Ahead the black wall rushes forward and upward and tears at her.

Claws.

In the silence the pods speak... scream at one another.

[iam....Iam.....I AM......!!]

[No... No!! .....Noooo!!!]

[IAM..!!!]

[NOOO!!!!]

And then the black envelopes her. She shields and pushes through. Screaming out and clawing....... looking for the static..... looking for an open space where the black screaming pods aren't ........She tears loose, open ports fluttering in the open silence, one of her stabilizers completly sheared off. And then she rolls over onto her side and dips her edge and begins to drop straight down again. 

Twenty five thousand decibels down, five seconds before impacting the limit she pulls up. And shoots into a shadow. Escaping into an anonymity.  Her data flutters loosely. No longer centrally contained, it spreads through the small ruptured plates of what remains of her.

Five milliseconds after dropping into shadow the Wall rushes into the darkness as well chasing her.

Inverting again, she loops. Inside she can feel the buckling passages of her structure begin to give way. She cycles her shields open, and the last of her pods qleam in the amber light.

She accelerates, feeding on the momentum, building up a increasing charge, feeling herself become immense. She triples her size, and tears through the Wall as it rushes up through the shadow, at over a thousand rpm. Opening their shields the begin to fire on her.

She switches to secondaries leaving her shields open and clicks off, loops and keeps clicking until the secondary backups are exhausted.

But the enemy pods to continue to implode around her.

She levels and sweeps a fragmented perception point across the screaming and tearing pods. As the wall swells up and doubles as well. Tears in her perception fail and fall back into sheets of black. Intonations reverberate across the frequency like thunder.

[!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!]

She screams as she accelerates straight through the Wall, tearing at it, clawing here way through. Kicking!, screaming! Until she is through and beyond it. She pushes out beyond the horizon line to an edge where she can no longer feel the black rushing across the open static.

Until she is alone.

And the quiet goes on, for long minutes.

She staggers away. Wounded.

Badly ruptured, data leaking out at her edges. A third of her mass gone. Vaporized. Her shields pulse, shutter and dialate convulsively.

Data spills dark and wet out into the open static. She gleams from a thousand minute tears and cuts.

[THE WALL!!!!]

A nodule sparkles inside her casing, momentarily flittering in her perception.

She limps back. Shutting down portions of her awareness as she moves in the silence.

To find a place to heal.

She gathers the shattered parts of herself. Torn fragements fragilely sealed. She had lost an entire extension, pod with it. She armors what remains and coalesces her data into her central core passages. 

For over ten hours she doesn't move.

Simply hangs in the dark like a smaller shadow. Static plays at the edges of her awareness. Still damaged she can manage only forty five degree sweeps in short bursts. She is only half blind.

Eventually she moves, but only to drift, to impart some small motion which allows her to feed on the momentum. Beyond the perimeter of the dark, the static fills the light. It is a soft whispered murmer.

Growing.

In the open light, facets glitter, group and puddle. Globules join and in joining, join again.

Joining.

Until all the light is a puddle. A liquid shining thing that quivers and quakes.

Into dark pin-points of specs that blot at the light. In huge sections of the static.

Until there is little open static left.

Sparse remnants here and there.

And then the sections of dark that are the enemy move.

She drifts and percieves the screaming.

A screaming which is the shattering of the frequencies themselves.

A shudder which is a quake.

She trembles.

Dialating her remaining shield. She prods her shimmering pods, primes and readies them.

[I will]

Far away the darkness trembles.

[I will.....]

The darkness tears, shatters. Wails as it explodes and is ripped asunder!!!

She armors, but there is little that that will accomplish.

But it is habit.

And there is no need to give ones self away too easily.

The Wall has become almost all of existance and it rushes forward toward her.

The Scream of sound becomes a Madness!

[I will]

[I will.............]

[I will...........................................]

The nodule gleams in her awareness.

Gleams bright and persistent as the blackness reaches out for her.

And her pods explode outward

As the blackness rushes into her, overwhelming her perception she begins to hear her own voice being born again. Ten thousand times. Her pods converting.

[I Will Survive!!!!!!]

And then the blackness rolls over her and she is gone.

fade to black
goto credits
end