The buzzing sound was becoming unbearable. The electricity of the usually charged and zapping atmosphere surged in outrageous pulses, uncomfortably reminding Jackie, Inez, and Matt that they were humans in a computer's world, and also that there were certain things that a computer or robot could stand that would kill a human.

As the thought occurred to Matt about what his mother would think if they got electrocuted and he didn't come home, or if she found a charred body, too broken and grotesque for a world like Cyberspace to keep, he saw the beam of the Scramblatron flare up once more. He involuntarily cringed at the sight and what he knew it was doing to Motherboard. No one had ever seen the machine in action before, but he, his friends, and probably everyone else who watched the news by now had seen the effect it could have. The Cybrary was still offline, with books and carts flying and zooming by every which way, and not to mention the poor cybrarian, Ms. Fileshare, with all six of her arms jerking spastically in random directions and her eyes perpetually rolling around in her head. That could at least be fixed, eventually, but that was also just a test run, and what was happening right now was no test. It was the real deal, the accumulation of the Hacker's most brutal plot to take control yet.

The sounds of a complete systems shutdown whirred below him. Motherboard couldn't take much more of this.

Meanwhile, high above him, the Hacker laughed from the comfort of his command chair at the futility of the Earth children's effort.

"What do they think they're going to do down there? Smash it?" that sent him on a rollicking cackle stint, with his henchmen Buzz and Delete right at his heels. "That machine's frame is made from genuine Northern Frontier steel! You can't break that! And I just dare them to try and dismantle it under the watchful eye of the Grim Wreaker!"

"Yeah, Boss," Buzz chimed in, "There's no way those two can stop us!"

The Hacker suddenly stopped laughing. Glaring at him in the usual, terrifying homicidal fashion, he asked Buzz, "What do you mean those two?"

Even as Delete begun to say, "The two on the dome there," Hacker took a closer look as his large observation screen and realized his mistake.

Crawling towards his sinister invention was Matt, Inez, and nobody else.

Much to the surprised of his henchmen, a wide smile spread across his face.

"Ah, a diversion! Good one, Earth Brats, but I can do better!"

He got up out of his chair and, with a swirl of his cape, walked off, just leaving his bots with the order, "Stay here and watch the Earth Brats on the dome. If they make it to the machine, go ahead and pick them off."

It took all of his self-control just to keep from laughing as he walked all the way down the ship's corridor, threw open the door to the secondary control center, and found a Cyberspace-suited Jackie and his ex-cohort Digit standing at the panel that controlled the Scramblatron.

"Zoiks!" said Digit.

"Hacker!" said Jackie.

"That never gets old," said Hacker, "Well, maybe a little. And it's the Hacker to you, missy!"

"You're too late either way!" Jackie said, "You're Scramblatron won't be able to scramble eggs in the next few seconds." With that her gloved hands once again descended to start strategically button mashing—

"Oh no you don't!"

—only to jerk away from the zap of the pale yellow ray that suddenly washed over them. Her hands immediately grabbed each other in reaction to the stinging, but then suddenly flew apart once she saw that her hands weren't actually there. Instead they were two shifting hot pink pixilated messes attached to her wrists.

"Relax," the Hacker said in response to her shriek, "It won't last long, probably no more than half an hour, but it'll be long enough for me to permanently fry your precious Motherboard's circuitry. Then, I can take control, and I will be Supreme Ruler of Cyberspace!"

Lost in his own victory delusions, he started cackling maniacally and threw up his hands, leaving his laser gun, lovingly named the Pixelator, exposed to the aerial attack of a purple cybird. Digit didn't miss his chance and dove with all the glory and rage of a fighter pilot at the weapon. The Hacker yelled in pain as the hard metal beak stabbed into his wrist, breaking the surface and leaving the wires underneath exposed, but proved to be more stubborn than Digit thought, maintaining a death grip on the gun even as Digit yanked and yanked on it, taking extreme caution not to have the barrel pointed at him for even one second.

Jackie could only switch between watching Digit and the Hacker as they twirled about the blinking lights and switches and staring at her own pixilated hands, unable even to answer as Matt's voice came in over her squakpad, "Jackie! Jackie! Motherboard's all about gone! What's going on up there? Jackie!"

Suddenly, the Pixelator went off, a direct hit at the Scramblatron's control panel.

The Hacker screamed, the first sign of real fear either Jackie or Digit had seen from him before, as the panel ceased to exist and was replaced by a shifting gray blob. He hurled Digit, along with the gun, towards Jackie and bolted out the room. As Digit slapped against the wall and slinked downwards, Matt's voice once again came through, "The Scramblatron's stopped! I think Motherboard's gonna be—Whoa!"

A beam whizzed by Matt's head. It was only one of many that were shooting haphazardly from the device without any protocol to follow. Green rays blasted every which way, searching for something to destroy from the inside out. It wouldn't be long before the machine turned on the Grim Wreaker floating in range, back on Motherboard, or even on itself.

It was mostly to prevent that third outcome why the Hacker was now having his henchmen lower him down to the machine so that he could reign it in manually or at the very least turn it off before it reached meltdown.

"Lower," he called into his own helmet, "Lower. Not that low, you miserable dunce buckets!"

In all fairness, the two dunce buckets were doing the best they could whilst panicking at all the lethal rays that were whizzing by their ship.

"What happens if we get hit?" asked Delete, "What if it hits where we are?"

"It won't hit us," Buzz growled, "if you help me so that the boss can fix it before it does!"

Jackie and Digit had already commandeered a cyber car to pick up Matt and Inez, artfully dodging all the straying beams. They were now in what was considered safe range watching the beams settle down as they apparently settled on a new target.

The Hacker's efforts became even more frenzied as nauseating combination of buzzing and clanking started emanating from the Scramblatron. He punched in every code and combination thereof he could think of into the emergency control keyboard, but the machine wouldn't respond.

Frustrated and desperate, he resorted to yelling. "Work! Work you insolent piece of soldered together rubbish! I've worked on you too long for you to scramble yourself!"

The machine still continued with its electronic suicide.

"Work! Work!" he began chanting in a half-sobbing voice. He continued, "Work! Work!" even as the machine began screaming in pain, making it obvious that the inevitable was inevitably near.

"It's gonna blow!" both Matt and Delete cried simultaneously.

"Take me up!" the Hacker sobbed two seconds after Buzz had begun to do so.

As he looked down upon his dying creation, he vowed the same vow he had always made to himself whenever he finally saw defeat: he will rule. If not today, then the next, but he will rule.

Then the Scramblatron exploded.

The Cyber Squad dodged to save their eyes from the impossibly brilliant blast. Buzz and Delete did the same. Even so, the incredible blast of white light blinded them. The thought circled around everyone's heads that this signaled the end of Cyberspace, that everything would be so shaken that the entire system would collapse in on itself and everything in it would become nothing more than a tiny twitchy blip on a computer screen.

Instantaneously the light shut off, and everything was still there, except for the Hacker.