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“I’m gonna do it Three.”
“Shut up Free, no you’re not.”
“Yes I am, just watch.”
“Just get back to fixing the code.”
“This CorpoCode is trash anyways.”
“Maybe if you focused more on learning about it than spending all your free time on your own little projects you’d be better at using it.”
“Well it’s crap, look at it!” She plucked out a stream of code and put it in front of his face.
“My father actually built most of this section thank you very much.”
“Clearly he wasn’t feeling inspired by the work.”
Three grumbled but didn’t say anything. She wasn’t actually wrong, his father had had other priorities.
The two continued their work in the CodeSea as they sat on the lip of the derrick platform, around them were the other Employees working on their own pieces. Some had their digital tablets floating in front of them, others were snagging bits of the passing code and injecting their own code modifications into the greater Sea. Free looked between her feet, the Sea continued down into inky darkness. It looked menacing, well, as menacing as the digital CodeSea could look.
“What’s further down?”
Three’s fingers continued to move on his tablet as he shot her a flat look.
“Right right, don’t ask.”
She wrapped up her last few edits and stitched them into a passing data-packet that looked like a fish.
She leaned back on her hands and looked above at the surface several hundred feet above her head.
Flashes of light and impacts created ripples against the surface of the digital water. “When’s the last time someone’s cracked through that?” Three’d know, he was more plugged into the Corpo stuff like this.
Three paused as he looked up, “The WaterWall? It happens from time to time, usually it isn’t too bad though. My grandfather told my father that it happened once right above his derrick, half the Assets in his group got their brains melted right in their rigs.”
“What happened to the other half?”
“Well…” he flicked his two first fingers together rapidly against the edge of his screen, “most of the rest were launched out of the CodeSea. You don’t want to get caught out there.”
“Out there's that dangerous?”
“Yeah it’s unchar…” Three stopped talking and spun something up on his screen then pulled over Free’s with a wave of his hand.
“...I gotta go.” He jumped up, slammed his hand onto the ‘Big Red Button’ in their Section, and then took off at a dead sprint toward the Supervisor Tower.
“Go where? What’s the rush?” She looked at her screen.
“Oh.” She looked upward as their derrick platform started to rise toward the surface. Coming into view as they approached, from a point in the blank white beyond the Sea’s surface appeared a single, stumbling figure. It moved in staggered steps toward the surface. Toward them. It banged a milky white hand against the surface right above them. A small boom echoed out.
“Access? Give me access… I want accessssssssss.”
Its fist hit the surface of the sea again and this time a ripple pulsed through it in response. The automatic counterhack pushed into the body of the dead-eyed petitioner and traced it back through its own vector. Its eyes lit in harsh red as its mouth opened in a wordless scream. It desiccated and burst into a cloud of misshapen 1’s and 0’s. Some stack, somewhere, just got fried.
From the tower at the center of the platform came an announcement, “Detected Threat has been eliminated, please return to your stations and prepare to resume work. Maintenance Vessel 4901 will resume operations in 4…”
Why’d he hit The Button? Just for that lone Bot? She hoped he wouldn’t get in trouble for doing that. It seemed like an overreaction.
The next words barely sounding from her mouth as the breath left her lungs, “What is that?”
Countless points opened in the blank white sky above them and, from each, poured a spilling swarm of empty-eyed husks.
“BotNet! DDOS attack!”
“It’s too big!”
The sound of a klaxon from the Supervisor’s Tower joined the strobing lights that were pouring across their platform.
Ports all over the platform opened and transformed as Corporate-FireSuits sprung up around each Employee-Asset, Corporation-emblazoned red-combat suits that overwrote their own custom avatar settings. Free ran ahead of another Employee and cut them off as she hopped into an SQL-Repeater Cannon.
“Dammit Free, I was going there!”
“Find something you actually know how to use Tenney, I’m not dying here because you suck!”
Staccato lances of SQL were starting to fire off from different points around their platform and grew in volume as their neighboring derricks added to the volley. The lances punched into the Bots, ripping apart their code and frying them down to their source. Rigs, cells, stacks, portables, tablets, behind each destroyed Bot was a smoking mess of electronic waste. She didn’t think twice about it as she continued to punch rounds upward, there were likely only two or three actual RigUsers in the entire swarm that could get hurt from the malicious data injections.
The first bodies finally reached the edge of the Corporate WaterWall. The soft booms of each Bot’s hand sounded like small waves of thunder. The automatic systems were responding as fast as they could but were barely making a dent in the endless horde of Bots.
The moans of “access” turned into a ear-piercing buzz of rotten feedback. Free turned down her audio-input.
An order came through her comm, “Breech at Platform E-47b2. Redirect fire to assist.”
“Are you stupid? Look in front of you, we won’t hold here!”
Every other lance moved over from the side but according to her calculation, the WaterWall above them would not hold. She saw it crack and sag, the decay accelerated before her eyes. Shoddy CorpoCode. Free continued to fire above her own platform.
Another derrick-wide broadcast came from the Supe Tower, “ALL Employees, redirect fire over to Neighboring Platform E-47b2!”
Three ran over to her, “Dammit Free, the WaterWall will be fine I’ve already got the Reincryption Web up, help the other platform!”
She grimaced and looked up, dammit, Three was right. She saw his Web now laying the inside of the cracked and sagging ceiling, the cracks were already starting to repair themselves with the reinforced encryption.
Oh. That’s why.
The Wall above their neighbor’s platform had a deep depression in it, deep enough that it made the Wall above their platform look like high-tide. Their Reincryption Web clearly hadn’t been made as well as Three’s, strands of it were already snapping. It looked like the WaterWall’s structure was reaching its limit as the masses of Bot bodies smelled weakness and continued to pile into the depression. One by one they started to drop through a hole at the apex of the depression landing onto the derrick platform itself.
She turned her fire overhead of the neighboring platform. She really couldn’t afford another ding on her Employee record or this time she wouldn’t be eating for a month. Maybe even liquidation. She didn’t know, she’d never seen an attack this bad.
A Bot got a hold of an Employee and she could hear them scream as the Bot turned from lifeless pale to Employee-Red. The Employee responded with screams until they turned into a husk and dropped lifelessly to the deck. The newly-credentialed Bot started wreaking havoc on the Platform with an evil smile and a facsimile of the Employee’s FireSuit. SQL Cannons on their neighbor started to go silent, the digital current around her started to drag toward the wounded platform. They were trying to steal data.
She felt her stomach clench, they were going to fry-lock the entire section at this rate. The beseiged Supe Tower started to glow. Oh shit, they really were going to do it.
On some sort of instinct, she looked up.
“Worm!” she reported it in her collar to the Tower. It was far, far up but it cut through the blank white above them on a direct course, fast. No not them, their listing neighbor.
Their Tower broadcast, “Cease fire! Cease fire.”
Their tower and the towers of their wounded neighbors shimmered and the worm kept coming closer to the damaged WaterWall. Before it hit a wall of steam formed as an ad-hoc firewall formed between the doomed platform and its neighbors.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
She hacked a small incoming-window through the firewall, she needed to see what happened. The other surrounding platforms were covered in the same steam. She thought it odd that the area below the derrick hadn’t been blocked off, the firewalls only surrounded their neighbor from lateral angles. The worm hit the WaterWall and the section held, for just a moment before shattering. The surrounding ad-hoc firewalls came under strain but managed to contain the damage from spreading beyond the doomed Section.
The worm’s oscillating mouth started to churn and grind down the length of the Supervisor Tower heading past it toward the deep. She managed to snag a few snippets of the worm’s code as surviving countermeasures attacked it in response. She blew her cheeks out as she skimmed through it, Serious Stuff.
Sucks that the Employees got fried but at least the Supervisors didn’t walk away from it.
The next second seemed to happen in slow motion as a massive shape darkened the water below the worm and a giant mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth opened and inhaled. It sucked in every data stream around the area whipping up a furious whirlpool that filled the entire Section. At this the worm tried to retreat, she could see the hacker, WallCracker, black-cracker, black-hacker, whatever you called them, as they tried to extricate their avatar from the worm.
“They’re fried. It’s impossible to escape once it has you. Now shut it off.”
She jumped in her seat, Three was standing over her shoulder. The worm was pulled into its maw and the enormous mouth crushed down on the head of the worm as the uneaten portion started to turn black as its Code flaked off in big and bigger chunks.
Three overrode her screen and shut the inflow firewall-bypass. She started to protest but saw the look on his face, “I was almost fried wasn’t I?”
“Yes. Or they would have liquidated you if I hadn’t isolated your station.”
She gulped, “Uh thanks.”
Three didn’t say anything back as he looked lost in thought at the steaming ad-hoc firewall.
“Do you know what that is?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Is that something they cover in the CodeTeam Boss-leader briefing?”
“That’s not a real position and no, no it’s not.”
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"Anyone sitting here?”
She glared up, “Very funny. You going to sit?”
Three joined her at her empty table, “You didn’t get anything to eat? We all got a pretty good bonus for today.”
“Not me. They said they should have liquidated me for disobeying orders, but I got credit for being first to spot the worm so they split the difference and just docked my pay for today. It’s whatever.”
Her stomach betrayed her with a twisting groan.
Three laughed and she shot him another glare, he slid a plate onto her side of the table. She looked at the plate then at his, “you got a BugBurger too? I would have thought you’d have gotten some meat like the rest of them.” Free fired a thumb toward another table.
“I could have but I wasn’t going to buy you meat too and I didn’t want to tease you by eating it in front of you, so, BugBurgs. Besides, they’re pretty good.”
She slammed her forehead onto the table, “BugBurgs? You’re too Corpie to use FreeSpeak, Three.”
Through a mouthful of food he responded, “What? Only edgy kids like you can use slang?”
She groaned and grabbed at the plate, her forehead was still resting on the table. She blindly touched around until she found what she was looking for. She took off the Organo-Plasti Bun and grabbed the bug patty with her hands then turned her head to the side, still resting on the table and took a bite. “Fhanks.”
They ate in silence for a while. Three leaned over and scooped her tatos off her plate onto his own and continued to eat. He leaned back and grabbed his tray to leave, “alright well, I gotta see how everyone else is doing.”
She shot up, “Hey Three, that thing… what was it?”
“Free…” He shot her a look, “Don’t ask questions that get people liquidated.”
Free watched him go to the other table to muted cheers, some offered him some of their meat. A few loudly asked him about his Reincryption Web. It was pretty impressive… for CorpoCode, I guess.
Meat… that stuff was gross. Who wanted 100% synthetically culture-grown, premium Syntho-Steak anyway? Her stomach grumbled. Definitely not her. The heavenly smell that wafted over made it hard to sell her stomach on the lie she was telling it.
She poked at the rest of her food, moving it around. The bun made rotation after rotation on the edge of her plate. She was picturing the swirling whirlpool the giant… whatever it was had left in its wake.
Hey… he ate my tatos!
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“Did you get it? Hello? Did you?”
“Shut up will you?” Three continued to tinker in the water as currents of 0’s and 1’s swept past their platform. She had followed him below, out of sight of the Supe Tower.
“Here. Be quiet.” He handed over a small blue chunk of code. Free pulled a softball-sized ball of blue from her chest and added a new chunk to it.
She could barely contain her excitement, “It’s almost done!”
“Didn’t I just tell you to be quiet? I’m taking down the shroud so put that away.”
She continued to work alongside Three, this time with a poorly concealed smile on her face.
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She was back in the Caf, sitting alone, as usual. She heard some snickering from another table. It had been enough years by this point, she could tell when it was directed at her.
Stupid Corpies. Who has the energy to be petty all the time? Being a Corpo-Slave… Excuse me… a “Corporate Asset” sucked enough as it was.
“Hey Three, I saved you a seat over here.”
“Not now Free, I have a meeting with the Supervisors.”
She froze, “You meant ‘the Supervisor’, right?”
“Nope, all of them.”
“Are you going to…”
“I don’t know, maybe,” he shrugged, “that, or liquidation.”
She smiled weakly, “Well they both suck but I hope it’s the first.”
They had been friends since they went to the CorporateSchool together, as children. She called it ‘CorpoClass’ and he had hated when she did that. FreeSpeak wasn’t outright banned by the Corp but it was discouraged. After all, their birth certificates said “Corporate Asset”, not “Free Born.” Well at least, that was what they had told her.
She looked down at her plate, her bug patty was half finished, she came late so there were no tatos today but ‘mysterious grains’ as she called them, untouched. She usually didn’t complete enough tasks on the CorporateNet or CodeSea to get anything better. It was all fake food anyway. She pushed her tray further away from her and looked over the Caf filled with ‘Assets’, aka ‘Drones’, aka ‘Corpo-Slaves’.
Some of them were laughing and talking with each other, others idly poking at their food. She liked watching people’s eyes. In them, you could tell who was good, who was bad, whether they saw themselves as free or slave, the strength of their spirit, the exhaustion in it. Well, at least she liked to think she could.
That’s why she was friends with Three, his eyes were the only ones different, like hers. He didn’t have green eyes like her, his were the standard dark brown that most Assets had, but there was something about them that was different. That’s what had her go up to him and say, “let’s be friends” all those years ago.
He’s still Mr. Corpo-Goody-TwoShoes but at least he has nice eyes.
He was also the only one who was more than “barely civil” to her. They’d all been here since birth, either sold by their parents shortly after birth for credits or born into the Corporation. She wasn’t like the rest of them though, she was Free Born, not a Corporate Asset. And one day, she’d prove it. One day.
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They were back on the derrick. Last week that shift had ended with her walking past 50 CorporateAssets braindead in their rigs. Now, back to normal. As always.
“So am I supposed to call you ‘Boss’ now?”
Three laughed, “You should have been doing that all along, you know I’m in charge of our CodeTeam, right?”
She laughed and tossed a piece of custom scrapcode she had made toward the CorpoCode that he was tinkering on in front of him. He slapped a distracted hand at the scrap and sent it back into her own work. The errors started compiling in front of her.
“Ah? Ah! What did you do? This wasn’t the scrap I sent over? It’s too virulent! What’s it doing? I thought…”
“Our CorporateCode is stronger than you think. I keep telling you that.” Three smiled, “Figured a brat like you could use a challenge. It’ll scrap your entire data-set if you don’t fix it quickly. Who knows, you might learn something and still manage to eat after shift.”
“Ah you ass!” She was laser focused now, like her life depended on it, and it did. Well, that wasn’t quite true but if her data-set got scrapped then she’d definitely only have enough for mushy ‘mysterious grains’. Worse than starvation.
“Alright I’m going to check out how the others are making out.” Three turned to walk away then stopped, “You sure you don’t need my help there?”
Free waved him off with a hand as the other one continued to manipulate her screen.
An idle part of her mind heard a clap then Three calling out, “Alright how’s everyone doing? Who needs the expert?” She ignored the others’ responses.
Her fingers were sore by the time she finished. Well, that wasn’t really possible when you were in a rig but maybe the part of her brain that told her fingers to move was sore. Yeah. Probably that.
“Whew, finished-”
“Huh, that’s a pretty ingenious solution. I wouldn’t have thought to fix it like that.”
“AH! Don’t stand over my shoulder like that, you Corpo-Creeper.”
Three was nodding his head, “First of all that’s… not a thing. Second…ly? Second, I had forgotten that you were more than a script-kiddie and can actually lay down some inspirational Code, maybe if you fix your outlook you’d get to supervise a team yourself. The Comp-rate is superior.”
She mocked, “tHe CoMp RaTe Is SuPeRiOr; fat chance, I’m gonna be out of here. Bet on it.”
He crossed his arms together in a big ‘X’, “That sounds like a bad bet, I don’t think I want to risk the credits.”
“Easiest credits you’d ever make.”
“On which side-?”
A encompassing *ding* sounded out from a tower at the center of the derrick.
Free stretched her digital arms out wide, “Ahhh shift’s over… finally!”
Three was staring at the tower, “I’m gonna be up there next week…”
Free saw Three’s eyes sharpen and harden for an instant. It happened quickly enough that it could’ve been chalked up to her imagination.
“Wait. So you’re actually getting a Promo? No way! Corpo-Congrats!”
“Thank you and… that’s not a thing. No one says that.”
She couldn’t see Three blush but could tell that he was.
“You’re blushing aren’t you?”
“Absolutely not, I’m just thinking that’s all.”
“Aw come on it’s ok to admit it even if you are going to be Mr. Big-Bad Corpo-Man around here.”
“Deniability. That’s what’s most important.”
“Wrong. Freedom is, dummy.”
“Of course you’d say that… maybe you’re right though. Of a sorts. Speaking of which…”
They were logging out around them as their avatars continued what the Employees had been doing before; some stood or sat in place, some swung their legs over the edge, others continued silent conversation. Not much more time now.
She followed him as he walked out of sight of the other Assets.
“I’m going to be under a lot of scrutiny as a new Supervisor so I have some things I want to give you…”
“Why do you sound like we can’t be friends anymore?”
Three smiled softly and summoned an ancient-looking bit of custom code for a… scrip-pad? It looked antiquated, beyond antiquated, real DinoTech. He executed a string of commands on it but Free couldn’t follow it at all. Three had her beat by a mile with Corpo-Code, she preferred more… homebrew stuff. After some tense moments of staring at his screen he pulled out an orb from within his chest, “Don’t inspect or compile them right now, but they should help you. You know, if you ever do something stupid like trying to prove that you’re FreeBorn.”