No Exit Existential Threat ~ Kevah Adel
Dyspraxia hits the perimeter with little or no plan as to what she will do once, or even if she gets through. The barbware employed by the Combine is old but not obsolete; studded with psychonaught sentinals and exothermic thrashers, much of it in blatant contravention of the tenets of the Nagasaki Protocols.
She is not expecting mercy, let alone success, but with the Xenoboys leaning on her bitwallet she has no choice but to do the unthinkable.
There have been many times in the past when she’s been this afraid, once she’d been stuck in the corridors of the Empath-Derivatives cathedral for 2 days after she’d neglected to mirror-prop her excavations sufficiently and the code had closed behind her; there were moments while she’d been attempting to hack her way out that she’d pictured her body wilting on the vine. Luckily ZeroKawai had come in for her after noticing the mess her avatar had left on the line.
Zero had never forgiven her for the damage she’d done to his reputation for never betraying the code; she hadn’t heard his avatar on the line since.
The Combine operates a pyramid structured defence (why wouldn’t they, this being the limit of corporate imagination?) and Dyspraxia has to take a few hits to bypass the apex, this being the flashiest but least effective brick in the wall. Bishops and Knights continue the theme of expensive but unimaginative anti-hack deployment; easily bypassed once she clarifies their typically restricted paradigm.
Three days later, while checking his perimeters, ZeroKawai finds traces of Dyspraxia’s code scattered amongst the Combine’s cache trash. He sends meatware around to her conapt in the vain hope that her shell had not been compromised. It’s worse than he anticipated; her memory has been erased from the conapt, the place is clean and already flagged as vacant and seeking occupancy.
Dyspraxia bashes her fists against the white wall of her empty spherical cell and watches for the umpteenth time as they shatter into pixels before reforming painlessly and unchanged after every blow.
She is not expecting mercy, let alone success, but with the Xenoboys leaning on her bitwallet she has no choice but to do the unthinkable.
There have been many times in the past when she’s been this afraid, once she’d been stuck in the corridors of the Empath-Derivatives cathedral for 2 days after she’d neglected to mirror-prop her excavations sufficiently and the code had closed behind her; there were moments while she’d been attempting to hack her way out that she’d pictured her body wilting on the vine. Luckily ZeroKawai had come in for her after noticing the mess her avatar had left on the line.
Zero had never forgiven her for the damage she’d done to his reputation for never betraying the code; she hadn’t heard his avatar on the line since.
The Combine operates a pyramid structured defence (why wouldn’t they, this being the limit of corporate imagination?) and Dyspraxia has to take a few hits to bypass the apex, this being the flashiest but least effective brick in the wall. Bishops and Knights continue the theme of expensive but unimaginative anti-hack deployment; easily bypassed once she clarifies their typically restricted paradigm.
Three days later, while checking his perimeters, ZeroKawai finds traces of Dyspraxia’s code scattered amongst the Combine’s cache trash. He sends meatware around to her conapt in the vain hope that her shell had not been compromised. It’s worse than he anticipated; her memory has been erased from the conapt, the place is clean and already flagged as vacant and seeking occupancy.
Dyspraxia bashes her fists against the white wall of her empty spherical cell and watches for the umpteenth time as they shatter into pixels before reforming painlessly and unchanged after every blow.
Tales for the attention deficit reader
No comments:
Post a Comment