Short Story - Zola

ZOLA



Alice Bowie was a wondrous and beautiful woman. She had blue hair, which was dyed of course and looked much like a otherkin or elf. Zola wanted to be Alice’s boyfriend, so he tried to charm her with his sparkling eyes. He believed in magick and worshipped Azrael, who he asked for guidance in his coding. The year was 2022 and it was a terrible time to be alive, because the human race had recently made contact with a race of gigantic insect like aliens from what humans called ‘Hybrid’, a planet that encircled the star: Arcturus. Zola and his friends called them ‘Arcturians’. He knew that they may both die in the coming battle, so he had contacted a cryogenics laboratory. His postgraduate friend Mike had a father who owned the biggest cryogenics firm in New Zealand. Mike had curly black hair and despised the alien insects. He called them: ‘stinkers.’ As Zola looked up at the sky at the alien ship descending he rushed in his car to the cryogenics lab and got processed. Little would he know the human race was finished and he would lead a rebellion to regenerate the human race in a program called God101.

*

Zola and his friends, Tracy, Ant, Mike, Lucy and Julius hibernated for over a thousand years. The Earth had been blown up using x-rays and they were also virtually cryogenically frozen. Who knows where their real bodies were any more. Ant was a little deaf mute who came up with genius code in his sleep. Mike was one of his best friends, who had helped him out with the cryogenics. Thanks to him he was still alive, albeit in an altered state. Tracy was his favourite to look at least. She had dark black hair and a very pretty nose. She was only 21 years old and he liked to dream about her. Julius was a bit older and very quiet. He had been diagnosed with Schizoid Personality Disorder and liked to keep to himself. He often meditated on the bricks in the rumpus room for hours on end. Zola’s girlfriend Alice Bowie felt his dark black hair playfully. They had known each other a thousand years ago on the real Earth, which Zola dearly missed. Zola gazed into Alice’s weird hazel eyes, which had a dreamy expression. He could feel the pleasure chemicals in his brain being emitted. He definitely was in love with her and felt he needed to win the war to hold onto her forever.

    The sky outside was a very unnatural dark blue. A couple of hours ago it was a very bright canary yellow. They were inside a program, created by the insectoid aliens, in which the master programmer could edit any detail he wanted, including their memories or life. It was very scary for Zola to think about. For all he knew he might wake up dead tomorrow.

    Their mission was to enter Virtual Reality and create a new program from the bottom up, which would physically recreate the Earth. Zola got ready his laptop Apple computer which was a very advanced model. Everything was wireless these days and done with Bluetooth. Zola thought the code which was interpreted by his dermatrodes and he entered the program through a vortex, like a tornado. Alice was beside him and was squealing in fear and apprehension of danger. Zola’s thoughts felt as cold as the Antarctic breeze which blew through the window. Zola was thinking in C++, which was a common hacking programming code. He could feel the thoughts of Alice through the telepathy router.

    Zola was thinking at the speed of light. He came up with the perfect and correct codes. Zola was making his way through source code, which was a series of statements or declarations he could read, contained in a series of files (probably Trillions). Alice sent a thought into his bubble, ‘We need to find the Butterfly Faerie, man.’ The Butterfly Faerie was deep in the code. She was an artificial construct of an AI.

    Zola thought about the code in terms of geography. He was highly skilled and so was Alice Bowie at converting the mountains of ice and sewers of hell into code, which he altered with the telepathy construct embedded in his dermatrodes.

    The God101 code was a construct of code. It was a hardwired ROM cassette. The data was held on a blue induction strip. The code which had created the Earth was in less than a square millimetre of blue titanium. The Butterfly Faerie was elusive and talked about by everyone he knew. She used to be a human, but had gone so far into the program that she had turned herself into a infinite code which resonated like a string of energy. She was created using a personality matrix SIM deck.

    The code was a rocky terrain. Zola suddenly slipped off the cliff face and was shot out by a shadow nymph. Alice helped him by thinking the counter code. Suddenly, Zola’s whole body was shaking and covered in slime. He laid down for a moment to rest.

Alice was still thinking in schizophrenic word salad: ‘I am the queen of the lizard serpent. A snake that reeks of gin.’

He could feel a virus in the code tearing through his stomach lining. The ice of the virus intoxicated his mind. Alice was able to summon up the counter code to the virtual Epstein Barr virus, which was:

    MQQMPROPS qmprops;
  QMPROPID aQMPropId[NUMBEROFPROPERTIES];
  MQPROPVARIANT aQMPropVar[NUMBEROFPROPERTIES];
  HRESULT aQMStatus[NUMBEROFPROPERTIES];.

    Zola immediately felt better after Alice entered the code. with her mind. He climbed up the towering mountain of code, like a Sherpa climbing Annapurna. A light spider came unexpectedly from his left. It reflected off his contact lenses and hit him as it crashed through a thought loop in the code from thirty metres away. Zola descended into a Turing Paradox. He felt wasted and could feel insanity in his thoughts and strange urges. Zola had to summon up all his strength to block the paradox. He thought back a thousand years ago to his time at MIT and through a synapse the code came back to him. The way out was to invert the syntax in the code. If he inverted the syntax the code would collapse. Alice stared into Zola’s eyes in admiration. To reach the Butterfly Faerie they would need to get to the core of the code.

    Zola hacked himself through the totality of the program with the aid of his ingenuity from his training at MIT. Alice was also thinking her way through the code and they worked well as a team, with both their minds searching for the correct syntax. Within twenty-four hours he found the password to enter into the source code which was: 9240173-X. He sent the code in, which was:

if (UuidToString(&guidMachineId, &pszUuid) != RPC_S_OK)
  {
     fprintf(stderr, "An error occurred in UuidToString.\n");
     return E_FAIL;
  }

    They could feel their bodies entering the core of the code. A great film of glass opened up before their eyes and they felt their limbs disconnecting from their bodies and falling into the prism, which was the centre of the code. A huge dark mist appeared before them. They only realised then that this mist was the geographical representation of the Butterfly Faerie.

    ‘A turn down into the depths of the mind, young constructs,’ said the Butterfly Faerie.
‘I want to be returned to flesh,’ asked Zola.
‘You will if you enter the Dead Zone in the underworld and battle with the Arcturian demon. It will be the toughest bitch of a video game you have ever faced. You will have to recreate the 4th dimension. You only exist in one dimension now as artificial constructs in the code, just like me. Be-gone, I have told you what you need and I will help you when the time is right ...’

    Zola knew it was the right time to jack back into the cabin. The sun glistened morosely into the left window. When he returned all his buddies were staring at him in disbelief.

    ‘What did she tell you,’ Ant asked him, as Zola was distracted by Alice’s pretty face.
‘The Butterfly Faerie will battle with us in the underworld. We need to find a way into the Dead Zone,’ he replied as he stared into thin air with a worried and frozen look on his face.

    Zola’s mind was still flowing with lines of what to most people would be indecipherable code. The hacking mission had left Zola as empty as a dried up creek. Zola retreated to his room to sleep and to take a break from the coding. When he woke up he found that Tracy had made some rice dessert for him. Zola gladly ate up the dessert and savoured the taste in his mouth. He needed the nutrition of the rice to mentally prepare for the upcoming battle.

    Zola briefed to the group before they descended into the Dead Zone: ‘We may well die on this mission, but it is worth it to recreate the Earth physically. We have six dermatrodes and desktop computers. What we need to do is enter the Dead Zone, Then find the demon and corrupt the code for the demon. Once we beat the demon we need to create a physical construct of the Earth in the source code.’

    They all hooked on their dermatrodes, including Ant, Julius, Lucy, Alice and Mike. Zola had created a connection between him and Alice just incase they died, so they would rest forever in the code. Zola thought input101=’underworld’, region=765 and they entered.

    Zola could feel a cold icy wind. He was on an icy road, with sleet raining down from the cumulus clouds above him. He shivered and looked around him to find the others appearing. A screaming came across the sky, which burnt Zola’s ears and made them bleed. All they could feel was terror and doom. They were on some sort of icy gaseous planet waiting for a demon to appear. Zola entered the final line of code in his thoughts and the beast emerged from the rubble, screaming and vile, like the darkest demon of hell. The thing was a multitaloned monster and demon, with reddish and encrusted skin, whose fury engulfed the air with psychotic screaming. Zola could feel a large emptiness in his thoughts and chest. He felt desperately depressed and anxious, a huge lump in his throat paralysed him. Zola sent out a thought wave in the code. The demon retaliated and hit him in the head with a large piece of ice code. He collapsed and bleed. The Butterfly Faerie repaired him and then sent out a thought earthquake. The whole surface of the realm lifted up and the demon tripped. The mist of the AI engulfed the demon and it started to evaporate into the icy air. They went through a veil of light, which was mystical and enchanting. Zola started to code the Earth back in his thoughts, feeling the power of Azrael vibrating his body. They were all thinking their way back to life. On the seventh day without sleeping in the ice bunker, the Earth started to appear in their thoughts. They all invoked the God101 construct and linked hands, feeling the power of the gods going through them. There was a huge chasm and bright blue light and they all awoke to find themselves on the Earth in the middle of summer.

    Zola looked calmly around. He was lying on a boat in the middle of brightly blue water. Everyone around him was singing, with Alice lying on his lap. Zola suddenly realised that they had succeeded in recreating the Earth. Zola could hear and see the battle above the earth, morosely in reality, a real Earth.

    Alice Bowie whispered in his ear, ‘Congratulations, we made it back to Kiwi land.’

    Zola climbed out of the boat onto the muddy Earth and made his way to their Kombi van. He fell asleep in the back, with his friends in the front. There was a light coming in the top window and blossom making him sneeze. He had fallen asleep and realised they were going to team up with other Kiwis so they could fight the alien overlords. The first stop was a barn out in the outback, under which in a secret bunker with a stash of plasma rifles. Zola then knew it wouldn’t matter if they won or not, he was happy to be real again and that was all that mattered.