Greg woke up slowly. He was groggy and his head hurt, a dull ache that made him want to keep as still as possible. He opened his eyes to discover he was in a small room; obviously a jail cell even though it didn't look exactly like any cell he'd seen before. There was a nearly featureless sink and the seatless, tankless toilet, but the walls were odd. The bars were smaller and closer-set than he would have expected, and between them stretched an expanded metal mesh making it very difficult to see through.

He sat up slowly on the small, hard shelf that served as a bed and the cell's only seating and then carefully stood and crossed to the sink. He washed the vile taste out of his mouth and then drank several deep gulps of water.

He was wearing simple blue paper clothing, a featureless top and pants that had a weak elastic waistband. No pockets, no shoes.

Greg crossed to the door and pushed on it. There was no handle on his side and it was, of course, locked. But he always took a methodical approach when investigating anything new and habits die hard. He put his face right against the metal mesh and found he could see through it fairly well at that distance. Beyond the door was a featureless hallway, walls made of concrete and painted off-white with the bottom third or so being a blue close to the color of his clothes. The hall disappeared in both directions, and there were no other doorways that he could see.

Greg moved to the right-hand wall and peered through. He saw another cell, nearly identical to his own. In it, another prisoner sat on the shelf, hugging her knees to her chest and staring off into space.

"Hello?" he called out. The girl glanced in his direction briefly but then lowered her forehead to the tops of her knees and did not reply. Greg called out again, this time the girl didn't even move. He went to the back wall of his cell next and found that the bars and mesh were set directly against a solid wall.

When he turned to the left-hand side of his cell he could see the dark outline of a person through the mesh. Someone was on the other side.

"Who are you?" he asked, still not able to get a good look at the person.

"I am a Holy Warrior," came the unexpected reply.

"No kidding?" Greg replied. "You don't see a lot of those around nowadays."

"I spit on you!" said the voice in louder, more hostile tone. And he tried, too. There was a sharp exhalation and flecks of white foam appeared on the inside of the mesh and began to ooze downward. Evidently the mesh was even harder to spit through than it was to see through.

What the hell have I gotten myself into? Greg wondered. He gave up on the shadowy figure and returned to the other wall.

"Hey." he called out softly to the girl. "Can you please talk to me? I don't know how I got here. I don't even know where 'here' is." The girl didn't move. He thought hard. What would make the girl open up to him? She was probably frightened and… that was it.

"I'm… I'm kinda scared. Maybe if you just…"

"You should be afraid, you pig!" screamed the unknown man from the other cell. "You are in Hell now! They will beat you! They will torture you!"

That motivated the girl. She leaped up and screamed, "Shut up! Shut up! You're defiling yourself by speaking to us!" The man fell quiet and his shadow disappeared from the wall. The shelf in his cell creaked as he sat down on it.

The girl slid down her side of the mesh to sit on the concrete floor of her cell.

"Thanks," Greg said. "I was getting tired of listening to him."

The girl made a sound that was halfway between a chuckle and a sob. "It's the only thing that works on him. He can rant for hours, otherwise."

"But… uhm… what was that about torture? Is he nuts or…"

"No. I wish he was. When you get labeled a terrorist, they can pretty much do what they want to you."

Greg thought about that for a while. It didn't seem right to him. "So… him I can see as a terrorist… but you? No way."

The girl barked out a bitter laugh. "Tell them that! That bastard over there set fire to a nightclub full of soldiers, and all I did was visit a few websites! Y'know… goth and anarchy stuff. Just for laughs. I didn't even read the pages that showed how to make bombs… but they won't believe me."

Greg felt even more doubtful. Homeland Security (or the CIA or whoever it was holding them captive) made mistakes from time to time but they weren't stupid. The situation didn't add up.

The girl sniffed and wiped her forearm across her face. "So, what did you do to get 'disappeared'?" she asked.

He looked at her more closely. With both of them so close to the mesh he could get a very good look at her. She was very pretty, a fact that the prison outfit couldn't hide. Clean-looking and athletic, with long, black hair… just about exactly his 'type'… and not at all what he would have expected of someone who was into anarchy so much as to get arrested for it. Something is definitely wrong with this picture, Greg thought.

"I never met a goth who didn't have at least a dozen piercings and tattoos, and there isn't a mark on you. And as for the 'rabid fanatic' over there, he's got the ghost of a Minnesota accent and smells like he ate barbecued pork for lunch. You guys are as phony as a politician's smile! What is this? A variation on good cop/bad cop?"

The girl froze. Laughter erupted from the opposite cell. "He made us Gwen!" came the male voice. "They said he was smart but, hell, that was quick! Or maybe it was your acting… I guess there's a reason you're with the Agency and not in Hollywood!'

"Screw you, Carlos." the girl said cheerfully as she got up and crossed to the door of her cell. There came the sound of two buzzing solenoids as the doors opened to let the fake prisoners leave their cells. The girl paused by Greg's door and said in a low voice, "You just outsmarted yourself, mister. My second-level information extraction techniques would have been very enjoyable… for you." She laughed and the pair went down the hallway to the left. A moment later Greg heard a heavy door open and then slam shut.

Greg stood there for a long moment, thinking. "Well, shit," he finally said.

A murmur of disappointment ran through the fifteen people watching the video feed from Greg's cell. General Greenwaldt turned to a man wearing a captain's uniform and said simply, "Doctor?"

The man looked up from the readout in front of him. "Breathing and pulse are remarkably low for a man in his situation. He may be highly trained, or he may not realize the seriousness of his situation, or…" the doctor paused lifting his eyebrows, "…he may be innocent."

"Innocent, my ass!" came a fierce denial from another high-ranking officer. "Three of my men died in that house. He's guilty of murder at least!"

Greenwaldt looked at him silently for a moment before replying. "You're telling me a computer geek took down three army rangers?"

A lieutenant standing by the higher-ranking officer spoke up. "Well, we don't know yet exactly how our men were killed. Helmet cam footage shows the target unconscious before any of the team were hit. All we got after that were a few bright flashes."

"The autopsies were inconclusive," the doctor put in. "Deep burns that could have been electrical in nature is all we can say for sure. No chemical traces were detected."

The general turned to a short man wearing dark civilian clothes. "The house?"

"The neighborhood has been evacuated, and the house is completely isolated. Suspected meth lab is the cover we're using. We've cut all lines… even the water and sewage. But the machine is still inside and still running and communicating… and yes, that is impossible as far as anyone knows. And speaking about the impossible, by the time we re-entered the room all the equipment was fused into one large metallic mass that seems to be… well… growing."

The general gave no outward sign that the astounding news affected him in any way. "And the incursion?" he calmly asked the major at his side.

"Still ongoing and, as far as we can tell, still benign but taking up more and more network resources as time goes by," the major told him.

"General," a man in a plain suit at the back of the room said quietly, "the President is becoming very concerned about this incident. He would like to have a clear course of action, if not an outright solution, fairly quickly."

The general narrowed his eyes in thought for a moment and then snapped to the sergeant at the door, "Bring the prisoner to the interrogation room." When the sergeant had left, he turned to the rest of the group. "Let's try the direct approach."

Two soldiers handcuffed and blindfolded Greg and dragged him from his cell. A minute or two later he was strapped into a hard chair, and the black bag was pulled off his head. He found himself facing a stern-looking soldier seated across a metal table from him.

The soldier immediately began to speak in harsh, clipped tones. "You have only one hope to see daylight again, and that is to give us your full and utter cooperation, is that clear?"

"Yes…" Greg glanced at the stars on the man's collar. "…General, I understand."

"I want you to give us any and all information necessary to stop the attack you started."

In the observation room, the doctor said into his headset, "Pulse-rate and galvanic jump. He did not expect that."

The information relayed to the general's tiny earbud didn't cause him to change expression or demeanor in the slightest, but he was unhappy with the news.

"All I know," Greg said earnestly, "is that a simulation I was running began to act erratically. In fact, it was doing things I didn't think were possible. I was in the middle of troubleshooting it when I was attacked… and now I'm here."

"What kind of simulation was it?"

"Artificial Intelligence. A few hundred agents interacting in a limited environment."

The general leaned forward slightly and his frown deepened. "Exactly what kind of simulation?"

Greg thought that the general wasn't the kind of man to understand why an intelligent 26-year-old would spend so much time, money and effort on something that was considered fare for children, but he also knew that his best chance to come out of the current situation was to tell the truth… or mostly the truth.

"My Little Pony," Greg said, and then hurried on before the general could ask the obvious question. "It’s a kid’s cartoon show that was wildly popular for about a decade, even with adults. Unicorns, pegasi, monsters… that sort of thing. They have different special abilities and techniques that make them a fairly good choice for a simple combat sim."

"That last comment was a slight lie," came the voice in the general's ear.

The general suddenly slammed both his hands down on the table with brutal force, lunging forward until his face was only inches away from Greg's. His words hissed through his teeth, "Do. Not. Lie. To. Me. AGAIN!"

Greg flinched back slightly from the intensity of the man's outburst. He looked down and noticed that there were metal plates set into the wood of the chair's arms beneath his hands. The general's uncanny perceptiveness was explained.

"Yes," the general said, "you're wired. You can be drugged, too, and will be if you aren't 100% honest with me from now on. Clear?"

"General, I want to help. I—"

"Why did you choose those particular characters?"

"I… I just like them." Greg said. And as the general continued to stare harshly at him without comment, he added, "…a lot."

The general looked past Greg and made a motion with one hand. A soldier leaned over Greg's shoulder and set a small open laptop down on the table in front of him. "Can you understand the information displayed here?" the general asked as Greg stared at the screen in growing horror.

"Holy shit…" Greg whispered as realized the extent of the disaster.

"I'll take that as a 'yes'. Now, what about this?" The general tapped the laptop's touchpad, and a video feed window popped up. It displayed the convoluted metallic object that was growing within Greg's house.

Greg gaped at the image for a moment before answering. "I have no idea what the hell that thing is. Believe me! Just before you guys nabbed me there was an energy transfer… something that might just be possible. But this… this…" Greg trailed off. The object did remind him of something. What was it? The spiky bits of yellow metal elongated as he watched. Bits of ceiling fell onto the object and slid off. In a short while, the thing was going to break through the roof.

"What?" the general demanded.

"It's sort of… familiar. But I can't figure out why."

"We'll come back to that. If these AIs are based on cartoons, they shouldn't be hostile even if they are spreading their control across the net, correct?" Something about the way the normally terse man phrased the question made Greg certain that it had been fed to him.

"Uh… I hate to disillusion you. They may be characters from a cartoon made for little girls, but a lot of them aren’t exactly warm and cuddly. I added in a lot of combat stuff based on fan games called Fighting is Magic and Friendship is Epic, but even without that, there’s some scary shit in the original material.”

"Such as?"

"Such as a swarm of parasitical shape-changing insects the size of ponies,” Greg said, picking the first thing that came to mind. “And they’re pleasant compared to some things in the show."

"Mister," The general's right eye twitched ever so slightly, "I'm beginning to dislike you."

Author's Notes:

Thanks to Jordanis, WrittenWord333, Fana Farouche, and several adorable little communist puppies for pre-reading and editing.