Analyzing data…..
10001110.1010011.10.11011110
10000.111010111101.11110111
The flickering numbers swam on the screen, a chaotic dance of ones and zeros. "It's too fast..." Nova muttered, her voice barely a whisper in the cramped, dimly lit room. The air hung thick with the smell of stale sweat and desperation.
She glanced at the girl across from her, a young blonde with frantic fingers flying across a battered keyboard. The girl, Sarah, didn't acknowledge her, her eyes glued to her own OS, her brow furrowed in concentration. They were supposed to be working together, a coordinated attack to breach the firewall protecting the coveted dataslate. But their styles clashed, a chaotic mix of brute force and finesse, and now they'd tripped a failsafe. Nova bit back a curse. Sarah's fault.
"Keep going," Nova said, pushing herself up from the floor, her joints stiff from hours of work. "I'll be right back." She moved towards the back of the room, a cramped space barely large enough to turn around in. She opened the door, a sliver of light from the hallway momentarily illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air. She slipped through, closing the door gently behind her, her hand instinctively feeling for the lock and clicking it shut with practiced ease.
Alone in the narrow hallway, she confirmed her solitude with a quick glance in either direction. She brushed her silver hair to the side, exposing the small, almost invisible implant nestled behind her ear. It was a last resort, a dangerous shortcut that bypassed the limitations of her physical body. One slip, one miscalculation, and the feedback could fry her brain, leaving her a vegetable, or worse. But the risks were necessary. She needed the dataslate from this job to get off Argyl-3, this dust-choked backwater planet. This was their last chance before they were trapped, another pair of forgotten souls lost in the vast, uncaring expanse of the galaxy. Her real goal was out there, beyond the restrictive grasp of this world. She walked towards the door across from her, opened and locked it– away from the distraction.
She took a deep breath, then touched the cold metal of the implant. A thin cable, almost invisible in the dim light, snaked out from a hidden compartment in her wrist, connecting her directly to the computer terminal in the other room. She shivered as she plugged it in.
Her body slumped, becoming a lifeless husk as her consciousness was catapulted into the digital realm. A dizzying rush, a sensation of falling and stretching, and then she materialized on the precipice of a vast, dark ocean. The air here was cool and tasted of ozone. She looked to her left, seeing only an endless expanse of inky blackness. To her right, she saw the problem. The firewall's defenses, alerted by their clumsy intrusion, were fighting back. Sarah was losing the battle, her efforts to contain the damage as futile as trying to hold back the tide with a sieve.
The ocean before her roiled, its surface a churning mass of black waves tipped with white. Each crash of a wave represented a surge of the firewall's defenses. And in the heart of the storm, a figure materialized – a tall, dark-bearded man with a staff, a digital avatar conjured by the security system. Well, it is different every time, I suppose. She had seen oceans before in her hacks, open thread datalines that would repair themselves every time she completed a line. She closed her eyes then and saw lines of codes flying by, a perk from her OS:
Blue soft_ re: When-TAX-TAKE-HACK
Soft_re: RE system override
ACT_AI-6.01010.010101
Red(::”TAKE-SELF”--=)
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
ACTUAL: (70TPS, f” SCAN)
Error_Incomplete
You__Error_Not_Found.404
She opened her toolkit, a mental construct within the OS, and selected the zipp.de. It was a long shot, but it was their only chance. She needed to activate a fake debug routine within the AI-6 construct before it adapted to their keystrokes and locked them out completely, wiping both her and Sarah from the system, perhaps permanently.
She opened her eyes. The ocean raged before her, each wave crashing with increasing force. But with every crash, a fleeting gap opened in the code, a vulnerability she could exploit. She had only one zipp.de grenade. One chance to make it count.
She broke into a run, her bare feet finding purchase on the shifting, ethereal ground. Each blink of her eyes transformed the scene, momentarily replacing the beautiful, terrifying ocean with the harsh reality of the binary code that underpinned it. She called out to the man with the staff, a desperate plea for assistance. He turned, his digital eyes burning with cold light, and lowered his staff to the ground. In the other room, she could hear Sarah shouting in surprise and alarm, but her consciousness was here, in the code, committed to this desperate gamble.
Her left foot connected with the staff's larger end and she felt it lift, propelling her upwards, turning her body towards the raging ocean. The man, a personification of the AI-6, lifted her high, a strange ally in this digital battleground. As she reached the apex of her arc, she hurled the grenade, a small, shimmering object that arced through the air towards the heart of the storm.
Just as the ocean crashed down on the dark man, the grenade detonated. The man dissolved into a shower of pixels, Sarah’s avatar along with him, his staff clattering to the ground, the attack had served its purpose. She was through. She moved at lightspeed once again, her mind racing, her fingers flying across a virtual keyboard that materialized before her. A few keystrokes, a few lines of code, and the data would be theirs.
A bellowing yell ripped from the other room, followed by a string of curses. "NOVA, YOU WILL DIE FOR THIS!" a man roared, his voice thick with rage as he beat on the door.
Nova ignored the voice, her focus absolute. The door to her room, she knew, had to hold for less than a minute. Just a little longer. The pounding in her chest resonated in her throat, a frantic drumbeat against the silence of the digital sea. Her fingers danced across the keys, a blur of motion. The zipp.de was working flawlessly, bypassing the remaining defenses, unlocking the data streams. Even if she had to sacrifice Sarah to make it work, the dataslate would be worth it.
The door was kicked down with a splintering crash just as she completed the hack. She looked up, her eyes adjusting to the sudden shift back to the physical world. A large man stood in the doorway, his face contorted with rage. Sarah's friend, maybe her husband, Nova couldn't remember. Didn't matter.
Nova didn't hesitate. Her left hand snatched the hard drive from the computer, the precious dataslate containing their ticket off this forsaken planet, and slipped it into her pocket. Simultaneously, her right hand darted to her ankle, her fingers closing around the familiar hilt of her knife.
The man raised his weapon, a sleek, chrome pistol that hummed with barely contained energy. Too late. The knife was already in his neck, a swift, precise thrust that severed his carotid artery.
He pulled the trigger, a reflex action as he fell. A blinding blue light erupted from the muzzle, followed by a red laser beam that seared past Nova's right ear, close enough to singe her silver hair but not harm her.
The man's body crumpled to the floor, blood spreading out from the gaping wound in his neck, staining the grimy floor a dark, crimson red. Nova stood over him, her breath coming in ragged gasps, her heart hammering against her ribs.
She stepped around his body and walked back into the darkroom. Sarah was slumped against the wall, her face pale and streaked with tears, her hands clutching her throat. The cold, metallic gleam of cybernetic implants around her neck, now crushing her windpipe, told the story. A necessary sacrifice.
Nova smiled, a cold, mirthless expression. She had the dataslate. And with Sarah and her friend out of the picture, she had more than enough to secure passage to Triumf-L. Another world, another resistance cell, but closer to her real goal. Closer to the answers she sought.
