There are countless ingredients that make up the human body and mind, like all the components that make up me as an individual with my own personality. Sure I have a face and voice to distinguish myself from others, but my thoughts and memories are unique only to me, and I carry a sense of my own destiny. Each of those things are just a small part of it. I collect information to use in my own way. All of that blends to create a mixture that forms me and gives rise to my conscience.
Major Motoko Kusanagi, Ghost in the Shell
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Even with the language barrier Sakura is a good teacher. I haven’t mastered hacking in the hour she spent teaching me the local systems but I can use the programs she gave me and I can look up known problems in the technical manuals Sakura found on the creche school store, 150 credits for the set. The programs she wrote are different enough from the programs in the store that the system acknowledges them as Sakura’s IP, but the books are all encrypted, locked to our core IDs, and thus are non transferable.
I can now employ a blacklist firewall to weed out known viruses, a partitioned sandbox for testing unknown programs and suspect transmissions without giving them access to my main system and a partitioned software backup so if my system is infected I can revert to my last save point with five to ten minutes of downtime.
To quote Sifu Sakura ‘Software is good, but not great. Well, I think so for now.’
There are more things I could do but they require upgrading my core, something I am probably going to have to do given that my available drive space is 10% of what it was before Sakura started sharing programs with me. Her programs take up a lot more space than creche shop programs. She tried to explain why, but all I really came away with was that she hasn’t had much time to refine her code and her programming hardware is a janky low powered hack.
Sakura’s lessons paid off in other ways, but not as much as I would expect. Guided training from an experience booster gives x2 experience. I found Sakura’s guidance at least as valuable as the automated instructions but the system does not agree.
Daily Quests
XP
Gym
4617/2000
Reading / Writing
8/1000
Math
62/1000
Art
0/2000
Music
0/1000
History
0/2000
Science!
0/1000
Programming
1259/1000
Social Studies
39/1000
Maybe a 10% boost on the 1000 xp I would expect to earn in an hour. :-P. Maybe the system doesn’t like Sakura breaking its monopoly on education.
After Sakura finished coaching me I messaged Fen. I should have been more patient. He needs to know Lilly’s Core ID before we can check the records. We don’t have that information but GSC 138 should have that info on file. Fen needs a Mama or Lady Kara's permission to access that info, and since we are trying to keep this quite that means we need Mama Isabella's permission. Fen is still waiting for an opportunity to quietly talk to Mama Isabella and he did not respond well to me metaphorically looking over his shoulder.
We aren’t Mama Isabella’s only pod and even though it’s been hours since we last talked to her she still isn’t free. I’m not sure if this is her being withholding from the problem children or her being massively overworked. There are around 200 kids in the creche and only 5 Mamas supervised by Lady Kara. That’s 10 pods of four kids each per Mama, although the older kids are expected to help look after the younger kids. Now that I’m thinking about it she’s probably massively overworked.
Speaking of older kids helping their juniors, that brings me to now.
“David! It says my hard drive is being formatted! Why is it doing that?”
Either I am a poor teacher or Olivia is a terrible student. Or both I suppose.
“You stopped sharing your screen, so I don’t know what you did but the only thing that should cause a format is if you activated your software backup.” I try to keep the frustration out of my voice. This is the second time Olivia has accidentally formatted her hard drive.
“How do I stop it?” Olivia asks
“We don’t want to stop it once it starts. You’d end up with loads of partially deleted files. We just have to wait for it to finish. Don’t worry, remember the first thing we did was backup your system. Everything was there after the last time right?” I’m starting to see why Sakura has such strong feelings about not being tech support. Olivia is my sister and it’s taking everything I have to stop myself from grabbing control and setting up her system by myself. I know I would have given in if I was trying to do this for some rando.
“But what if it isn’t, what if the backup gets formatted too?” There is a bit of hysteria in her voice. I try to empathize. I’ve lost all the data off my computer before. I’ve lost my cell phone too. It had all of my contacts in it and I had to rebuild the list from scratch. Both were traumatic experiences followed by tens of hours of work trying to recover what was lost. Some things were lost forever. My core is like a combination of my smart phone and my primary computer so losing all the data on it would be like losing my phone and my computer all at once.
I try to focus on empathizing with Olivia while controlling my breathing. Breath in through the nose, hold, hold, hold, slowly breath out through the mouth. Repeat. I give Olivia a one armed hug.
“It wont, it’s on a partitioned section of the drive. It will all be there. I promise. We just have to be patient and wait for now.”
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“If it’s there, why can’t I access it now? Why do I have to wait?” Her fist punches my back, not hard, punctuating her confusion and worry.
“The backup is compressed, to help save space. It’s like, well, I don’t actually know how computer compression works but it’s kind of like taking a pillow and crunching it down as small as you can, pushing out all the air until it’s a hard little brick of fabric. The pillow isn’t comfy when it’s compressed but it does take up less space. If we want to use the pillow, as a pillow, we have to uncompress it. We let the air back into it and that takes time.” I try to explain, but reach the limits of my own knowledge.
“I hate waiting.” A sulky Olivia is better than a hysterical Olivia, I suppose.
“Me too little Olive, me too.”
Olivia rolls her eyes at me “I told you I’m Olivia now. Why have you been so bad with names? You aren’t forgetting things again, are you?”
“No, I remember that your name is Olivia, Olive is just a nickname. When you’re all fretful and small it reminds me of a younger you. By the way, what is up with people’s names?”
“People have names? It’s how we tell each other apart. That’s how you know they are people and not monsters.” Olivia looks up, focusing fully on me. Good, My distraction is working.
“No, I get what names are, but when I woke up and said my name was David not Flash I didn’t get any push back. You and Papa Doc accepted my new name immediately. As soon as Sakura said her name was Sakura not Lightning everyone started calling her Sakura. It was easy for me, since I don’t really remember calling her Lightning but for everyone else, that’s weird, isn’t it?”
“No? That was just good manners. Everyone gets to pick their own name. Names are like, mental tools. They don’t just let other people know who we are: they are part of how we know ourselves. Knowing yourself is important, and it only gets more important after our Integration. The corrupted don’t know themselves. Their minds were damaged, and that damage turned them into monsters. That’s what makes them corrupted. Or one of the reasons anyway.”
“But what if someone changed names every day? Wouldn’t it be annoying if you had to learn a new name every time you met them?”
“No, that would be scary. If someone changes their name that often it could mean they are losing themselves. Or it means that they want people to think they are losing themselves. Either way that’s a bad sign. They are much more likely to behave violently, toward themselves or others. I would avoid someone that changed their name that often, and so should you.”
“What do you mean, losing themselves?”
“David, when you changed your name it was because something big had happened to you. You were telling the world and yourself that, symbolically, you were a new person. If someone changes their name constantly, then they are symbolically telling themselves or the world that they aren’t the same person from one day to the next. It’s a sign that either their environment or their sense of self is unstable. Kids like us get the benefit of the doubt. Lady Kara and Mama Doreen expect us to be unstable, but once we are adults and have our cores integrated, well it kinda stabilizes our identities. We can still change but real change is slower unless something inside us has gone wrong.”
“Ok, but learning a new name for someone isn’t, well it isn’t hard exactly but it isn’t easy either. What if I change my name and someone keeps calling me by my old name?”
“Then they are at best being rude or at worst they are actively trying to destabilize you. Also David, what do you mean it’s not easy? If you are having trouble remembering someone’s name just turn on their tag in your AR.”
Oh, name tags would make the whole process easier. We sit in silence while I consider what Olivia has told me.
“So am I being rude when I call you Olive?”
“A little, but it’s big brother rude, not a dangerous stranger trying to destabilize me rude.”
“Well, I don’t want to be a rude big brother so I will do better from now on. What if I call you little Olivia when you remind me of before?”
Olivia gives me the side eye. “Only in private.”
Our talk had taken long enough that Olivia’s system had finished reinstalling. Once more into the breach. If I can teach my 60 year old coworker how to use a spreadsheet I can teach my little sister how anti virus software works. Probably.
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I am enjoying a ginger soda pop when Fen finds me in the dining hall. Not ginger ale, it was pink and the flavor was closer to pickled ginger. I had already finished eating my dinner. The remains of my fried rice with crab flavored mmmmeat, 20 credits, wouldn’t fill a fork. The crab flavored mmmmeat was just as good as the real fake crab meat from my memories.
Fen places his tray down across from where I am sitting. He glances at me, acknowledging my existence but not publicly engaging in conversations before looking down and digging into his dinner. Unlike on the street the cafeteria has a low buzz of casual conversation. Our little bubble of silence is swallowed by the little dramas around us. Without looking at me he sends a chat request.
Contact Fen is inviting you to a group chat
Accept
Decline
Block
I route the chat to my sandbox. For text only communication there’s no need for a direct connection. Live video and audio are another story. Sakura didn’t exactly explain why, or I guess she did but I didn’t understand most of the details. Something about the information density of audio/video and the scanning speed of my core. The processing speed of my core? No, she said my core has a lot of dedicated processing power so scanning speed must be different. Not a problem with Fen either way since he can’t record audio any more than I can. Neither of us have the hardware for it.
David: Good news?
Fen: Bad news and weird news. What order do you want it in?
David: Bad news first. Always better to get that out of the way.
Fen: Lily has not had anything installed in any of the places we checked during the last 10 cycles.
David: So, they were all dead ends. That’s not good news but I don’t think it’s bad news. It could mean Lily hasn’t had her wetware installed yet.
Fen: Except she hasn’t been back to the creche in two cycles and there was a corruption outbreak in the area. She could be hurt or even lying dead in an alley somewhere.
David: Couldn’t Lily call for help?
Fen looks up from his meal to give me a disappointed look. Over his shoulder I spot Sakura with her own tray walking over to join us.
Fen: Not if she is unconscious. Not if she’s in a damaged sector and her injuries are keeping her from moving. And again, not if she's dead.
David: Ok. I agree this is probably bad news. What’s the weird news?
Fen: Three core IDs from GSC 138 kids did have wetware installed around two cycles ago.
David: Is that weird? I had my wetware installed at A Stitch in Time. You clearly had your wetware installed somewhere. Was it in one of the shops we visited?
Fen: Yup, I had my install handled at Pro Wetware Solutions.
Fen’s left ear dips down while his right twitches up. He’s not making eye contact but I think he’s waiting for me to put together the pieces he’s handed me.
David: Ok I’ll bite. Who was the third person from GSC 138 that had wetware installed recently?
Sakura sits down next to Fen. Her hand jumps a little, moving for his ears before she stops herself. I mentally agree with her that they are very scritchable.
Fen: Speak of an Eloi and they will appear. Sakura’s core ID was the third. She had her wetware installed at the Chrome Emporium.