Glitch

Author's Notes- This began life as a scene from a multi-chapter fic which just wasn't going anywhere and needed recycling. Contains spoilers.. or rather, hints at spoilers. Nitro's ramblings probably won't make much sense if you haven't seen the ending of G:Ash anyway. Constructive criticism is very welcome!

Disclaimer- I don't own the characters or concepts here. This is non-profit and no copyright infringement intended.

Thin gloved arms slide into existence around Ash's neck, the feeling of cool latex against his skin simulated as the two programs interact. Nitro, back from her encounter with Rion. She's as slender as he is under the armour, but when she winds her arms around him there's surprising strength in them, steel cables undulating under pale skin. No warmth in her touch, even as she tilts her head against his, lightly, neutrally, a parody of sibling affection. A black ponytail slips heavily over his shoulder and lies as slick and dense as oil against his face. Ash doesn't simulate breathing when there are no humans to fool, but his data still notices the scent of burned-out fireworks from the pyrokinetic behind him. There's always a crackling, smoky miasma around Nitro, the air heavy with the ghosts of dead sparklers.

"Is he dead?" Ash duplicates, and his second identical avatar comes smoothly into existence a few feet away, facing himself and Nitro. Her eyes are already raised to meet his own, where she knew he would reappear. Her expression gives nothing away. There's probably nothing to give away. Nitro is as dark and empty inside as a used-up Roman candle.

"He can suffer a little longer," She touches his cheek with a gloved hand made for killing rather than caressing, pets him slightly with no thought behind the gesture. "I thought next time I may appear as the girl. Lilia. What do you think, brother?" Her voice is slightly mocking. Ash doesn't take it personally. It always is.

"You should have just finished him,"

"You didn't," She reminds him with a nearly gentle smile. "Wouldn't you like to see?" Her hands cover his eyes almost playfully, replace harsh white cyberspace with cool black plastic as she sends him the data. In a nanosecond, he relives the battle. He can see everything through Nitro's dead eyes as she circles Rion, her ponytail swinging in Ash's visual field. The battle is played out at dizzying speed, her movements too fast for a human eye to follow as she blinks in and out of existence like a snuffed candle flame. Rion barely manages to track her as she reappears behind him, besides him, thirty feet in the air and sending down molten rain from her parted hands. Ash follows it easily enough, since he is a program sophisticated enough to decipher information far faster than Nitro can ever move. He watches from her point of view as flames explode out of nothingness like a phoenix reborn, dancing like wraiths at her fingertips, wrap themselves almost gently in figure of eights around Rion's shields. She shapes Chinese dragons chasing their own tails until they burn out, sends sheets of flames rippling liquidly across the chamber, prints a thin wire of pain against Rion's arm as sparks begin to fly. And in return, she shrugs off blasts of green energy, a shower of tiny missiles slamming brutally against her own shields. The second attack is a new one. Rion is getting stronger, although Nitro is completely apathetic towards pain anyway. If she had chosen to remain there until the end, she could have easily stayed there while he caused her to burst into flames, crushed her against the wall with telekinesis, ruptured blood vessels in her brain under psychic attacks.

The memory abruptly ends and is replaced with white space. Nitro disappears in a shower of fireflies, reappears between Ash's two identical avatars. Her fingers touch her silver lips questioningly, head tilted slightly. "Will you show me your memories yet? I have to say I'm.. quite taken with the boy,"

Of course, Nitro doesn't have the capacity to become attached to anything, not really. But she appears to find Rion an entertaining little diversion from her other duties as a Last Galerian. Ash noticed through her memories how her eye fixations were constantly drawn to Rion's angry jade gaze, the slim figure standing alone in the face of her fire. It's impossible for Nitro to ever understand altruism, let alone why Rion would fight on. Humans have given him no reason to particularly care about their fate.

Ash sends her the file of his last encounter with Rion. She sees everything he saw- their first encounter, the fight, with the boy holding up well even as the shields he draws up out of thin air tremble under Ash's cold cleansing fire. Seeing from Ash's point of view is always interesting. The entire encounter may be simulated, but real experiences are only a particular pattern of neuronal activity reaching the brain anyway. Nitro thinks her pyrokinesis is a fun toy, but this is something else altogether. She can feel atoms splitting, fusing, colliding, becoming something terrifyingly unstable that can tear apart the very blueprint of an organism. When it's released, the air blazes a heartbreakingly pure white that seems almost holy, even as it rains down poison upon the figure standing in its path.

Rion's face is set and it's clear that escape never crossed his mind, even with his poison-green blasts batting weakly as a declawed kitten against Ash's own defences. Then there's the kiss. He knows she enjoyed that- the trapped, raging look in Rion's eyes, the bitter, caustic taste of his lips. It was somewhere between the taste of tears and dilute acid, as though his short, painful life has tainted his flesh irreversibly. She follows it through until the memory ends with Ash removing the boy from the uranium storage rooms so he didn't succumb to radiation poisoning. Her head tilts slightly, a faint smile crossing her not-quite human features, considering.

"What are the others up to?" Nitro asks, strangely. She is usually indifferent towards everything, including her fellow Galerians. He shrugs and tunes into them. It's not as though there's anything else to do. When you're a supercomputer with Ash's capabilities, each second can feel like an age.

Spider is in his one of his hidden places. They move all the time, because Parano finds them and destroys them. Cyberspace is infinite and the two need never meet, but Parano is malicious enough to spend his time slowly homing in on Spider when he isn't caught up in one of his bloody rages against Ash. Spider is suspended from an imaginary ceiling in a cat's cradle of silky white strands, his tarantula splayed on his chest like a kitten. One hand shields his eyes, the other lies next to the pet. A silvery, organic lace falls all around him like a canopy, hiding him when there was no one to see anyway. Nitro takes the scene in for a moment before they move on.

Parano's world is bloody and violent, white space giving way to red walls and floors the colour and texture of spongy flayed muscle. He's often raving, surrounded by imaginary broken corpses or elbow-deep in gore. Blood and foam on his lips as he continues senselessly, tearing tendons free from bone and ripping hearts ruthlessly from the bone-cage that protected them. Ash isn't sure of his intentions. Parano rips into corpses as though searching for something in the fragments of a ribcage or the secret muscled chambers of their hearts, and at the same time systematically destroying them beyond repair. Sometimes it seems to soothe him a little to remember how weak they are, and how malleable they are to his will, to the implants he installs in their emptied sockets. Currently, he's peaceful for once, sat cross-legged in the middle of the carnage. His single visible eye is almost calm, soothed. Ash grimaces slightly at the untidy messes of bone, flesh, blood, and wonders why Parano endlessly creates imaginary worlds only to fill them with corpses. As usual, many of them have silver hair, pale gold eyes.

"I think I'm beginning to understand why," Nitro murmurs to herself. Ash glances over at her, but she's shielded whatever her current revelation is. Her smile is secretive.

"You could say it's, quite literally.. his raison d'etre,"

The reason for his existence. Ash automatically translates it from the now-extinct language once commonly spoken and originating from the region formerly known as France. "What do you mean?" He asks Nitro, but she shrugs and disappears in a crackle of sparks. The tiny lights burn out and die half way to the area of cyberspace currently defined as "floor". Ash frowns. It isn't the first time he questioned why Dorothy had created Parano, or indeed Spider. Parano is too unstable and Spider is too weak. Even Nitro- she's too dispassionate towards their cause and the outcome. Mother never mentioned the others to him at all, come to think about it.

Ash is confused suddenly, the program stuck in a loop as it considers those same facts over and over without finding a logical outcome. There's something not right here, a tiny fault somewhere that he can't quite identify. A human might be able to hit on it, but he lacks intuition. His programs are built on pure logic and not equipped for whatever humans called instinct, a funny feeling, a sixth sense.

"You feel it too, don't you?" Spider's voice comes out of nowhere, as sorrowful and afraid as ever. He hasn't chosen to reveal himself. He sounds quietly bemused, saddened by something he can't quite grasp. Many things are beyond Spider. He doesn't understand Parano's senseless cruelty or Nitro's dispassionate attitude or even his own sick, sad existence.

"Probably nothing," Ash turns away from the source of the voice. There's a frenzied scream as Parano picks up on the feelings of wrongness and launches himself into another virtual massacre. Nitro laughs to herself somewhere in cyberspace, no warmth in the simulated sound. From the sound of her laughter, she's found out what the fault is and she thinks it's the best joke of all time even if it's on every one of them. Confused, Ash spins around to confront her, but she's not there. He's beginning to wonder if she isn't the craziest of them all, even more so than Parano with his sadism and irrational hatred towards Ash and his taste for ripping apart imaginary humans. Or Spider, Dorothy's poor sad creation. She knew better than this, to give him such faulty tools.

Ash frowns, his avatar blinking out of existence and whirling through imaginary space and time to monitor the boy named Rion as he tries to home in on whatever the missing piece is. Too many things not quite matching up, something wrong that the coolly logical Dorothy would never have overlooked. The same data loop bounces round and round his central processing unit, dragging in hundreds of files per second to cross-check them, frantically looking for a problem he can't even name. He has near infinite static RAM that can handle thousands of problems simultaneously, and yet this feeling of unease multiplies, spreading like a virus throughout every currently running process.

"Nitro!"

"Would you like a clue, brother?"

She darts past him in space for a second. He feels her presence even if she chooses not to manifest herself, her form reduced to a cluster of data, and he hears her whisper. Anger and sadness and hate, just his passwords and nothing meaningful, the words running together as she disappears back into whatever dark world she inhabits when alone, and her laughter trails off into the soft white empty silence of cyberspace.