The third time Emilia emerged from the Virtuosi System, intent to test her changes with Conrad, she instead found Sil glowering down at her, which wasn’t ideal. Sure, she had warned her friend that there would be a strange man sitting in his living room before immersing herself into her hacking, but she’d been hoping to actually be out of the system when they met.

  Behind him, Conrad was still eating, although his bowl had been replaced with something else—something from the Dion-Norvel border, based on the heavy scent. While she wasn’t positive, Emilia was pretty sure the Free Colonier wasn’t experienced with his temporary Censor—or was at the least very out of practice in day to day use—and probably wouldn’t have been able to interface with Sil’s kitchen to get something else.

  In other words, she’d been out of it long enough that Sil had gone from showering to introducing himself to Conrad to making him less mean food—because the Baalphorian food Emilia had given him had definitely been specific in its tastes—to staring judgingly down at her.

  “Uh, good morning?” she said, perfectly aware that her tone was more question than statement.

  Sil’s frown deepened, fingers tapping threateningly over his crossed arms. “If you have been in there so long you do not know if it is still morning, you have been in there too long.”

  Emilia might have been older than Sil—although not by much—but currently she felt like a child being reprimanded for staying up too late hacking. Was that exactly what she had done? Yes, but also! It was very unfair of Sil to guess at what she’d been doing so easily, especially since as far as he knew, she had no experience with hacking!

  Narrowing her eyes at her friend—and sending Conrad a suspicious glance for good measure—she asked if he had been spying on her.

  Sil raised an eyebrow. “Should I have been?”

  “No, of course not. I’m not doing anything suspicious.”

  “Then, what are you doing?”

  “Uh… hacking my Censor?”

  Technically, hacking your Censor wasn’t illegal. Almost everyone had some modification or another installed—and admittedly, most hacks were still based on architecture she had created during her teens, then altered for both wartime and civillian use during the war. A significant portion of her time within the Virtuosi System had been going through all the changes Helix and others had done to that system since then.

  She’d actually wondered about that, over the years, about how it was still her code under all of the new functions various hackers had added. Apparently, while Helix—anonymously—kept that code updated—and had changed it to a completely different language several times—the underlying ideas were actually pretty similar to what she’d originally created. A part of her appreciated that Helix continued to give her credit for the hack—his hacks retaining the EMY designation—another part wanted to message him and tell him he was stupid. Her friend had made so many alterations over the years that the EMY hack was now more his and hers.

  That was fine with her—if she’d wanted to retain control of it, she wouldn’t have publicly released the code. It was, however, slightly annoying. There was something odd about going through code that worked how she would have coded it to, and yet didn’t, and yet did. Helix’s fair and style were persistent in the newest versions, and even once she’d managed to get a grasp of the various languages he used it had been difficult to read through what he wrote because where she would have zigged, he zagged. The end result was beautiful, a melding together of both of their minds and personalities, even after a decade—which was really more than a decade.

  That was how she’d ended up losing track of time. As much as Emilia had known she’d have a lot of catching up to do, Helix and every other hacker clearly did their work inside the Virtuosi System. A decade in real time was far more inside the time skew of the Virtuosi System. A hundred years of innovation? A thousand? Far more than that, most likely.

  Emilia felt like her head was going to explode from everything she’d learned, especially since—for one—she’d been forced to start digging into the information V had given her during the raid, about how the government’s limits on Virtuosi hours were excessively low and how there were workarounds. She now had those workarounds. As a result, she’d been inside the Virtuosi System far longer than the government would have approved of.

  It was a good thing she was going to be skipping school for a bit—Professor A’s protocols definitely would have noticed the workarounds. It was a toss up whether a normal Virtuosi System would. Thankfully, Sil’s rig had already been altered to accept the workarounds—Emilia would have hacked them into it, if needed. She was glad she hadn’t needed to; Sil was scary.

  The other big problem she’d run into was, well, something she couldn’t really be mad about: Helix had designed his own programming language specifically to code the personal hacks he created for himself and his friends. As in, several years ago, all of Simeon’s hacks had changed languages. Those hacks were stored on a server along with records of many of their Censors—a fail-safe in case something went wrong during the war, after a very unfortunate incident with a corrupted hack, which many members of their unit still used, every alteration they made to their system automatically backing up to the server. Any hack that Helix maintained? Coded in that mysterious language—mysterious, because there was no public version of it, no documentation outside of Helix’s head.

  Emilia had almost asked Rafe if he had documentation on it, but considering she had yet to hear from her friend about the moth virus or if he knew anything about Hail and mind manipulation or a real aether connection, she doubted she’d hear from him about this, especially since despite her loss of time, not much real-world time had actually passed while she was inside the Virtuosi System… just far more than was probably safe with how intense that time skew had been.

  Basically, she’d been forced to learn Helix’s language by reverse engineering it. Had she mentioned her brain burned? Like, a lot?

  Emilia blinked up at Sil, innocent and trying not to throw up.

  Sil continued glaring down at her. “How long were you in there?”

  “Uh… I’d rather not say.”

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  “Since when have you been fucking with blackaether hacks?” Of course Sil would know immediately that she’d hacked away her time limit and exactly where it had come from. Still, while he clearly utilized the same hacks, it was very rude of him to so easily guess she was now fucking with her time limits as well!

  “Uh… it depends if you want real-world time, or however long I was in there for.”

  “You know, as much as your government is too strict on its limits, you do need some,” Conrad said as he stood and moved to the kitchen. What followed was a comedy of him trying to figure out where to put his dish, and eventually, Sil was forced to go show him—he’d been glaring at Emilia and trying to teach Conrad how to open the dishwasher from afar. It had not gone well. Somehow, Conrad had activated the drink machine without a cup in it. Even Sil didn’t know how he’d managed to accidentally get around the safety protocols.

  “Is your Censor messed up?” her friend asked as he bullied Conrad back into the living room, probably concerned he’d somehow flood the suite. That was probably fair.

  “I’d rather not say,” Conrad deadpanned, earning him a glare from Sil and a snicker from Emilia. “Did you at least manage what you wanted in there? Something for us to test? Or did you age yourself a couple years for no reason?”

  “YEARS?” Sil gasped, freezing midway through passing her an even more disgusting drink than the one she’d gotten herself. He truly did look horrified, with his mouth agape and eyes humorously large, and despite herself, Emilia snapped a picture of him and sent it off in their friend chat. Sil’s expression turned frosty as forced her to down the drink. “Years?”

  “It wasn’t years,” she assured him. It probably hadn’t been, anyways. Year and a half, max. That wasn’t years, plural. Years—plural—definitely would have melted her brain… probably. Well, probably not, actually, cause, like, that was the thing with being anything under about 10D: regardless of how knotted up you became—by choice or trauma—your body was just really, really good at handling the Virtuosi System in huge amounts.

  Emilia had already known that, from her days of coding the training system and then training within it, their Virtuosi limits removed for the duration of the war. Part of her had always just believed that she’d shaved a few years—or even decades—off her life as a result. According to the research being done with the help of blackaether heroes? Not so much. Just as V had told her: most people were capable of staying logged into the Virtuosi System dozens, if not hundreds, of times longer than the rough limit of three months per real-world week the government mandated.

  Usually, those three months of Virtuosi hours were squeezed into an evening or weekend of raiding, however, not—Emilia checked the time—ten minutes, although some of that time had been the first two times she’d emerged, to test her new system out. Ten minutes and far longer than three months. The whole bleeding-edge rig thing had been helpful, but her brain wasn’t too happy with her.

  “People generally aren’t stupid enough to use something like this at full capacity without getting used to it first,” Sil commented when she admitted she felt pretty terrible. He also handed her another drink, and her stomach turned over. “Plus, you rarely raid in the first place. I think most of your time is spent in the lab, and that time skew isn’t nearly as intense as this thing, or even a normal raid. Speaking of which, why did you enter that raid?”

  “So, is that a no to the testing, then?” Conrad asked.

  “What? Oh, no. We should do that. Do you think you can make me feel less terrible?”

  “What testing?”

  “It’s 50-50 whether you’ll feel better or worse,” Conrad said, standing and coming to kneel before her, his hands coming to clasp her forearms, her hands turning to clasp his in turn. They didn’t need to be touching, but maybe that would make it easier? “I’ll be able to pull back faster if your Censor rejects me,” he explained when she asked, Sil once more asking what they were testing in the background.

  Emilia would have answered him, but Conrad’s energy was already pressing into her.

  The first time Emilia came out of the system, she’d completely rewritten her Censor System. All she’d done was confirm everything was functioning correctly—as much as someone could do in only a minute, anyways—and check how using her core and accepting Conrad’s energy into her felt.

  Her Censor had worked better than before.

  She’d been able to use her core in small, emergency bursts, and nothing more.

  Conrad had been knocked back a few feet by… something, when he tried to use his core on her. He’d broken a lamp, but Emilia had been able to fix it using {Memories of a Moment} and {Limited Rewind}, a pair of sister skills she hadn’t been able to use since the war ended, so overall, it had been a good experience.

  The second time, she’d used what she could read of Simeon’s hacks—as well as some random notes from Helix on the topic of cores and Censors—to program something that had, well… it hadn’t really worked to let her use her core or let Conrad in. It also hadn’t not worked. What she made was a workaround, that made doing either extremely unpleasant—although only for her, this time—but doable.

  At the time, her brain hadn’t been burning yet, but she’d known that to do any better without extensive testing or rewriting the wheel, she’d need to figure out Helix’s programming language. So she did. Then she reprogrammed her entire system using his language… then she’d decided she didn’t like a few aspects of his language and written her own version of it. It was kinda like what he’d done to the EMY system: it was still his, but now it had her flair in it as well. When she was sure her system was working properly, Emilia intended to upload a copy of it to the server with a note challenging him to figure it out.

  After that, she’d finally been able to properly read Helix’s various hacks and work in all the progress the man had made regarding cores and Censors into her system. Her friend had been busy. Despite there being no war to push him to continue researching this—how to make his and Simeon’s systems not just continue allowing core use but allowing it more easily—he had kept at it.

  Both of her friends’ systems—as well as Nettie’s, she’d eventually realized—were beautiful, the way they worked squeezing her heart because Helix had come so far from being the excited outcast who joined their unit and was constantly trying to figure out how he could help Halen and her.

  Now, he was a genius. Emilia had already known that, of course. Even when he’d known almost nothing of coding or hacking, he’d still managed to contribute ideas, his brain a mess of ingenuity and strange ideas, just as hers had once been—maybe was becoming once again, without the strain of so many knots on her body and soul.

  Emilia thought the changes she’d made to Helix’s language and designs were pretty good, adding in the flavour of a different mind to his genius. Clearly, when it came to the goings-on of their unit’s Censors and their occasional use of their cores, Helix wasn’t getting anyone else’s input. Occasionally, there were the marks of Rafe there, controlled and precise, but they were minimal, more Helix representing a conversation he had had with their friend than Rafe actually coding it himself.

  That was… sad, that Helix was so alone, her and Halen gone, everyone else who had worked on the training system either dead or uninterested in continuing to code. Perhaps that was part of what had led her to learn his language and then improve upon it. A hacker, giving love to another hacker.

  Hopefully, it would be a good surprise for Helix, once he left the reality show he was currently bound to. Hopefully, by the time they were both home—returned from The Cloudway and Ship’o Stars—they’d both be in a place to join forces. For what? Emilia had no idea, but as Conrad’s energy seamlessly slipped inside her, Sil gasping in shock behind the Free Colonier as he realized what they were doing—what she’d managed to get her Censor to allow her to do—she felt, for the first time in years, like the teenager she had once been: someone infinitely excited to learn and create.

  Conrad’s hands left hers, his energy a smooth line between them, keeping them connected once more.

  Her nose wrinkled. “Still a little overly sexual.”

  Conrad grimaced. Sil’s shock morphed into a mixture of concern and disgust. Emilia sent another picture of him off in the group chat.