GLITCH

-Intro - Rise of the Machine-

"Yeah, get some!" Lincoln shouted at the screen as he schooled people twice his age at Call of Honor: Special Forces II.

"Awesome job, Clyde!" He said into his headset as he pumped his fist in victory from the couch in his living room.

"Thanks Lincoln! You were sick with the machine gun!" Clyde said over the wifi.

"It all comes with practice my friend," Lincoln replied, a smug smile on his face. For a brief few seconds, he was content. His nirvana wouldn't last, however.

"Three o'clock, Lincoln! Nerd time is over!" Lynn shouted, dive bombing the couch from mid-way up the stairs.

"Lynn! My squad was on a hot streak!" Lincoln protested.

"Pfft, the Premier League is on! You can pause your lame video game," she countered.

"No you can't, it doesn't work like that!" He complained, but it fell on deaf ears. Before he knew it, the television was turned to soccer, and he had no choice but to turn off his Funbox 720. Lincoln hated the sign up roster that his parents had put in place to equally share the living room television.

"Sorry Clyde, I gotta sign off for now," Lincoln sighed, turning off the system. Even if he did have a leg to stand on, he knew better than to argue with Lynn. He put away his controller and headset, and set about upstairs to his room. On his way, he passed Lori in the hallway.

"Something the matter, Lincoln?" she asked, not looking away from her phone.

He considered his response. Did she really even care? Or was she just making small talk in the hall? "Lynn took control of the TV while my team was on a win streak."

As he feared, she simply rolled her eyes and sighed. "C'mon, Lincoln, its just a dumb game, you can play it any time you want."

"Yeah, when one of twelve people in this house aren't using the TV!" he replied. "Which is never!"

"Well, either take your hour and be happy, or buy a tv for yourself," Lori said, heading for the stairs and still not having moved her nose from her phone.

Lincoln huffed as he walked past her to his room.

'Buy a TV,' he thought. 'How the heck am I supposed to afford that? After Flip got busted for breaking child labor laws, no one else in town will hire 11 year olds!'

Defeated and shoulders slumped, he neared his door when Lisa appeared in her doorway.

"Lincoln, can I borrow you for a moment?"

The last time Lisa had 'borrowed' him, he lost feeling above his waist for nearly ten hours. But, he had literally nothing else to do on a Sunday since his video game session had ended and Clyde was in bed with a cold.

"I guess..." he said, accepting his fate and entering her bedroom/lab. Inside, he was greeted with what looked like a dentist chair, with a helmet mounted to the top. The chair contraption was hooked via wires to a large computer at the other end of the room.

"You still enjoy those frivolous wastes of time know as video games, correct?" Lisa asked, struggling to climb into the much taller chair facing the monitor of the computer connected to her new apparatus. "Blast, I don't know I make these things so tall..." she mumbled to herself as she finally found her seat.

Lincoln stood in front of her, his hands in his pockets. "Yeah. Is that what this is?" he asked, taking a step closer to inspect the chair and headset.

"In the same way that the Titanic was 'just a boat'," Lisa scoffed. "This, dear brother, is the next evolution in video game technology."

"Lisa, you know VR is already a thing, right?" Lincoln asked, turning back to his sister.

"Ugh, does no one in this house recognize innovation when they see it? It's not VR!" She shouted. "Okay, well it kind of is, but it's about one thousand times better than those pretenders in the video game industry are mass producing."

Lincoln had enough of Lisa stroking her own ego. He decided to cut to the chase. "So, you want me to test this thing?"

"You know me well," she replied.

Lincoln climbed onto the chair and lowered the helmet onto his hair. Lisa began entering data into her computer as the machine began to hum.

"I'm still going to have hair after this, right?" he asked as the machine got louder as it booted up.

"I've never had a problem," she replied over the noise.

"But you already lost your hair!" he shouted.

"Alright, just close your eyes!" Lisa yelled, ignoring his last statement.

Lincoln swallowed his fear and closed his eyes. He waited, and the sound of the machine began to fade. Finding himself in complete silence, he opened one eye. He found himself in a white room without walls or anything to denote any kind of depth.

"Lincoln? Can you hear me?" Lisa's voice seemed to echo in his head.

"Yeah, I can."

He held his hand in front of his face, only to find it pixelated and very primitively rendered.

"Excellent, I'm going to boot up the game."

A very basic graphical outline of a table appeared in front of him, slowly rendering itself into existence before seemingly stopping at about a 64 bit graphical level.

"Uh, I don't want to sound like a downer, but these graphics are terrible," Lincoln said, looking over what had now become a ping pong table.

"Relax, this is just the Beta," Lisa replied. "Pick up the paddle on the table."

Lincoln got out of the chair and picked up the pixelated pong paddle. Opposite him, his faceless opponent rendered into his world with his paddle.

"Okay Lincoln, first one to three wins." Lisa said as the NPC served his ball.

It was an easy lob, Lincoln easily countered it and scored his first point. The game didn't last more than a few moments, before he was declared the victor. His opponent vanished as Lincoln was pulled from the game.

Opening his eyes, he found himself back in Lisa's room, the machine already having been powered down.

"Welcome back," Lisa said, taking notes on a clipboard. "What did you think?"

"I mean, it was pretty cool, but I think pong has already been invented," Lincoln answered, climbing out of the chair.

"The entertainment aspect is not paramount here, I just wanted to make sure the extraction sequence didn't turn your brain into a milkshake," she replied casually.

He had become used to her callousness in such serious matters, but was thankful for still being mentally intact. Lincoln headed back to his room for the remainder of the day. Annoying sisters aside, he was actually looking forward to school tomorrow. The packed bag by his door reminded him that for four days and three nights, he, Clyde, and the rest of his friends would be exploring an actual dig site for real dinosaur bones!

He read comics until late into the night, only pulling himself from his reading when he noticed the time. He thought about the times his sisters had laughed at him for having fun playing video games. He was the only kid in his family that even remotely shared an interest in his hobby. If only there was a way he could show them how much fun it was to be the hero of their own story.

'11:11' he thought. 'I wish my sisters would actually play some video games for once.'

He rolled over and closed his eyes, ready to get some time away from his sisters.

On Thursday evening Lincoln found himself on the bus ride home from the trip. He and Clyde were comparing fossils when his phone buzzed in his pocket. He fished for it in his jeans before unlocking the screen and reading the text from his sister Lisa.

"EMERGENCY, COME HOME AS SOON AS POSSIBLE! CODE GREEN!"

Lincoln sighed and rubbed his eyes. Code green meant a time sensitive emergency where all other sisters were unwilling or unable to help, if he remembered correctly.

"What's up, Lincoln?" Clyde asked.

"Lisa did... something. She said its an emergency, so I'm gonna have to head straight home once we're back at school."

"Bummer, Lincoln," he replied. "My Dads are making their gluten-free, vegan, kale and quinoa based cookies for us as a welcome back gift."

Secretly, Lincoln was glad he had an excuse to skip out on those. "Sorry Clyde, raincheck?"

"I know, I'll save you some!"

Lincoln swallowed nervously. "Thanks..."

On his return to school, Lincoln had already received five more urgent messages from Lisa. Pedaling his way home, he had no sense of urgency, despite Lisa's pleas. Diving head first into whatever chaos Lisa created was the last thing he wanted to do after getting some alone time.

He finally found himself on the porch of his home. An uncomfortable silence greeted him as he twisted the knob. Usually the chaos in his house escaped onto the porch. He stepped into the living room and gasped. Nine of his sisters sat on various furniture, all appearing to be asleep, wearing the same helmet Lisa had asked him to try on to test her creation.

"Lisaaaaaa!" Lincoln shouted upstairs.

Tiny footsteps hustled out of her bedroom as Lisa scurried down the stairs with her laptop. "Lincoln! Thank goodness you're here," the young genius said breathlessly. "We've got a serious problem!"

"We?" Lincoln repeated. "What did you do?!"

"I simply required more subjects to test the processing power of my machine!"

Lincoln looked over at his sleeping, and sometimes drooling sisters worriedly. "They aren't dead, right?"

"Of course not!" Lisa replied indignantly. "I simply seemed to have misjudged the processing power of the core I designed. Instead of operating at twenty five percent, it seems to be running around... ninety three."

Lincoln was at a loss. "Which means?"

"Which means... our sisters are trapped inside my device, and I...I... I don't know how to get them out!" Lisa cried, exasperated. For the first time in a long while, Lincoln noticed tears welling in Lisa's eyes. His older brother instincts kicking in, he knelt down in front of her and put a hand on her shoulder.

"Hey, just breathe, okay? We don't need your asthma acting up," he said, trying his best to comfort her. As Lisa's breaths began to slow, Lincoln rubbed his eyes with his free hand and tried to wrap his mind around half of what she tried to explain.

"Okay, so try to explain what's going on one more time," Lincoln asked.

Lisa took a deep, calming breath and dried her eyes. "Our sisters are trapped inside my psychonautic synapse enhancer, and I have no way of freeing them or knowing if they're able to snap out of it on their own."

"Right. First thing's first. Where are Mom and Dad?" Lincoln asked.

Lisa sniffed up a tear. "They were on their way home from work about thirty minutes ago."

"What?!" he shouted. His alarm was short-lived, however. "Hang on a second, it only takes them fifteen minutes to get home from work..."

"Well... I put out warrants for their arrest, so we'll have at most forty eight hours before the police realize I planted it in their database."

"You... what?" Lincoln stammered. "Mom and Dad are in jail?!"

"Relax Lincoln, Mom will be fine," she replied.

"But what about Dad?"

Lisa rubbed her chin thoughtfully. "Hmm... I'm sure he'll be fine."

"Let's just get the girls out of your computer before Mom and Dad find out what you did," Lincoln said, sticking a pin in the 'It's not okay to have your parents arrested on false charges to buy yourself time to clean up your mess' conversation. "Why can't we just turn the machines off?

Lisa opened her laptop and began typing. "Their brains are being stimulated as though they are in the real world. To end the stimulation all at once could kill them."

"Of course it could..." Lincoln sighed. "So what are we supposed to do?"

Lisa continued to search through her computer. "Well... although the device was meant to allow training for doctors, nuclear engineers and astronauts to practice emergencies and highly dangerous scenarios, it seems as though it can also double as a... virtual entertainment platform."

"Okay, so what does that mean?" he asked. "Are our sisters stuck in there playing pong forever?"

Lisa's nimble fingers typed away at her computer. "According to my system and brain scans, I'm reading different levels of activities in each sister in differing sections of the brain, so I doubt they're all just playing pong."

Lincoln had approached Lori as she lay on the couch, poking her cheek with a finger. She was out cold alright, and no amount of finger poking was going to rouse her, or any of the others.

"Wait a second, how did you even convince all of them to try this thing?" Lincoln asked. "Lola wouldn't even consider putting a helmet for anything less than fifty bucks!"

"Well... I may have told them their wildest dreams were contained within..."

"So you lied," Lincoln said flatly.

"Sometimes science needs to have the rules bent in its favor, Lincoln!" Lisa shot back.

"Whatever, this still doesn't help us save everyone!" he replied. "If we can't unplug it, how do we get them out?"

"I did have an extraction protocol written for just such an occasion, but..."

"But?" Lincoln lead on.

"But... it's being blocked by the internal AI I programmed to run it. I don't know whether I should be proud that I coded it, or mad that it's able to hold my sister's hostage by suppressing my code," she sighed.

"So there's no way to get them out?" Lincoln exhaled sadly. He still hadn't gotten a straight answer.

"Actually, there may still be one way. The AI interfaced with each sister, and to that end created what it interpreted as an ideal challenge for them. There's a code embedded in each helmet program that I dubbed 'the nuclear code.' If activated, it will delete everything created by the initial user."

Lincoln sat between the unconscious Lori and Luna. "Finally, now we're getting somewhere. How do we activate the code?"

"Remember when you played pong and won?" Lisa asked. "You were released from the game by the nuclear code because you met the victory conditions." Lisa set her laptop on the coffee table and headed upstairs to her room.

"But how can I beat a game I'm not playing?" he called up the stairs after her.

She returned shortly with another helmet like the ones her sisters were wearing. "You will be playing."

"What?" he replied as she descended the stairs with the device.

"Since none of them have met their own specific victory conditions, I've come to the conclusion that their either lost in their own world, or have forgotten they entered one in the first place, and have ceased searching for it," Lisa said, tossing him the helmet. "You're our last hope. I.. no, we need you to join them in their fight, or we may not be able to get them back."

Lincoln looked down at the shiny helmet with blue and green lights blinking in his lap. Was he really his sisters last hope? And better yet, were their lives depending on his ability to be awesome at his favorite thing besides comic books? While he appreciated the irony, he still had a few questions.

"But, what if I end up like them? Lost in the machine or whatever?" he asked. "Why can't you just talk to them like you did to me through the helmet?"

"You're going in, but you'll have me in your ear, doing what I can to help you from here," she said, putting on a headset and plugging it into her computer. "The AI is blocking my ability to communicate effectively. Plus, you're using my first prototype helmet. I'll be able to patch you through to the collective overworld, without the AI code effecting you like it has them."

Lincoln glanced up at Lisa from the couch. "Why didn't you just try to go in and rescue them? I mean, you built the whole thing, right?"

Lisa sighed. "Admittedly, while I am spectacular at many things... I am terrible at most, if not all video games. Left in my hands... we might all be stuck there."

For once in his young life, instead of a comic book or a controller, he held his destiny in his lap. The fate of nearly his entire family rested on his slight shoulders. For years he had wished his skill at video games would somehow translate into something real and tangible in the world, and in the eyes of his sisters. Now, fate had set a challenge before him that he was more than certain he could conquer.

Nine sisters. Nine worlds. Three lives.

"Alright," he took a deep breath, and put on the helmet. "send me in."