Jenny was back in the darkness. The man was there, too, and they were still chained together at the wrist. "W-who are you?" she asked, but the man didn't answer. Whoever he was, she didn't like him; he wasn't very nice, and he was kind of scary, too.
The man was pulling away, as before, only this time he didn't seem to be trying to get away from Jenny as much as he was trying to get to a trail of money that led off in one direction. Jenny looked further ahead, towards where the trail led, and gasped: off in the distance was a great chasm, a sinister red glare emanating from it. The money trail led right into it!
"Stop!" she said. "You can't go there! You'll get hurt!" The man didn't listen, and kept straining against her, trying to get to the money. "STOP!" she shrieked. "You'll die!" Still no response, and she realized that he was gaining ground - after all, he was a grown-up, and she wa just a little girl. What could she do?
Their struggle seemed to stretch on forever, with Jenny slowly losing and the man drawing them closer to that chasm and whatever was in it. But as time passed, the darkness got lighter, and Jenny realized that the sun was rising, off in the opposite direction to the chasm.
As the light grew stronger, Jenny found that the man was growing weaker. Slowly they came to a dead halt, and the man looked in confusion at the girl he was chained to. As his eyes met the horizon, the sun now just peeking over it, he went from confusion to fear, and Jenny began to pull him.
"Stop!" he said. "You can't take me over there! I won't be me! I don't want to just disappear!"
Jenny looked back at him as she pulled, and she saw that he did indeed seem to be fading in the light. And looking forward, to the horizon, she saw a person waiting there, a woman (or maybe a girl?) who seemed familiar. And she knew, somehow, that the man wasn't quite right.
"Nuh-uh," she said. "You don't have to disappear. You can be mosta what's you. But you can't be such a bad person. You gotta put away all your bad stuff, or she's gonna take it away, and maybe some other stuff, too."
The man clutched his gun tight and his money tighter and dug in his heels, but it was futile; Jenny was growing stronger as he was fading, the sun now looming large, halfway over the horizon. She kept pulling as the dream ebbed away.
She woke to feel a hand gently shaking her. "Jenny?" Muriel said. "Did you have a good nap?"
She hesitated for a moment, but nodded. She'd had some weird dreams, but she only kinda remembered what they were about; they were already fading.
Muriel smiled. "Well, it's not bedtime quite yet. We should probably get you some supper, though, or you'll be hungry in the middle of the night. I've got some chicken noodle soup, if you'd like that."
Jenny smiled. "Yes, please!" she nodded, her long hair brushing against her neck as she did. They headed off to the kitchen, with Tetra close behind.
Effie and Dennis emerged into what seemed to be a maze. There were no walls as such, and they could see the occasional other entity - a digital fairy, a light like the ones that Effie had seen native AIs appear as, or simple graphics that she thought might be ordinary users - but the floor was a labyrinth of light paths from one node to another, with the occasional sign pointing the way to a domain name.
Effie was a bit confused by this - she'd generally thought of the Internet as one monolithic place, and the only other nodes would of course be the machines connected to it, like the ones she used to attempt to break into. She looked to Dennis for help; he knew networks, didn't he?
The DOS fairy seemed less confused, but no less awestruck. "Whew," he murmured. "I never realized how big this place is before." He looked over at Effie and noticed her perplexion.
"Uh, these are all the individual nodes that make up the Internet," he said. "We must be at Mikey's location right now, but..." He pointed a ways over, at a much larger platform that seemed like a kind of hub. "...you can see, we're not too far from the ISP. I wonder where the nearest backbone site is?"
Effie frowned. "But there's gotta be a less complicated way to get around than going from point to point like this...I mean, you don't need to do that with a web browser..."
Dennis laughed. "Just be glad we're not using bang paths anymore," he said. "But yeah, there should be an easier way...we've just gotta figure out in what form it's available to us."
