Chapter — 16
Rei had wondered how long it would take before WolfMosh thought her good enough to be given some actual work. The answer?
Several months.
She had worked herself to a near-burnout but never actually crossed over that boundary. Rei suspected it had to do with her System and its skills, as the number of puzzles she'd put herself through daily would have driven anyone else insane.
She now had a strange yet firmly rooted love-hate relationship with the cubes filled with puzzles that her boss dumped on her whenever she completed one.
She'd begun to suspect he had been making them for fun for decades and had a near-endless supply as they Just. Kept. Coming.
Besides doing ever more complex puzzles, she'd also spent time improving the security of her private submesh. It had become somewhat of a point of pride for her, as she'd found a way to stump even WolfMosh for a time.
It wasn't that her ICE could actually stop him from breaking in whenever he wanted with minimal effort but that her implanted deep-learning algorithms noted everything he did in that pursuit. The stored data was then processed and utilized to adapt the security against similar approaches, meaning that each time he broke in, he taught her security program a new way to improve itself.
"How am I supposed to encourage you to improve your security when my every entry does that for you? So annoying," he'd said.
Not that he couldn't just order her to do it, something he did a second later without shame.
She had to do it anyway, as he began inserting false data into the algorithms as he breached and spliced his way in, necessitating her actively improving the algorithms to stop the error messages from cropping up constantly and seeking new avenues to hinder him.
Rei had grown so much during her time under her boss' tutelage that she almost felt grateful. Almost.
No, not really.
As she finished another squat, she looked over her full status sheet.
「Takeda Rei:
Level: 3 [0/ 4000 Experience]
Body: 6
Mind: 11
Ego: 7
Perks:
[Merciless]
[Parallel Thoughts #1]
[Self-Repair]
Skills:
[Strong Will, Level 7]
[Deception, Level 5]
[Athleticism, Level 3]
[Cybernetic Adaptation, Level 4]
[Breach, Level 10]
[Splice, Level 10]
[Data Analytics, Level 9]
[Programming, Level 8]
[Parkour, Level 1]
Perk Points: [1 Mind]
Skill Points: 5」
I've sure come a long way.
The first thing of note was her attributes. [Mind] increasing by two whole points had made a big difference, especially when she'd reached ten in the attribute. She now felt herself think faster and clearer, not to mention that she'd finally come around to picking a new perk: [Parallel Thoughts #1]
There were frankly too many to choose from when it came to perks, and she had decision paralysis until she reached 10 in the attribute and got another perk point, making her feel silly for hesitating so much. Ultimately, she'd settled for that specific perk for the simple reason that more brain power was always useful.
And useful it was.
It was amazing what she could do in the mesh when she spun off a second thread of consciousness — the perk's current limit. Especially so when splicing something.
The '#1' added to the end of 'Parallel Thoughts' also meant it was the first perk in a perk tree, with many other similar perks now open to her should she wish to spend her remaining point there.
Then there was [Ego]. She was surprised when it increased in the middle of a conversation with Wilma. In retrospect, she realized that she shouldn't have been. The attribute wasn't solely for her stability of mind but also for the social aspects of life.
Lastly, she'd increased [Body]. That was quite the ordeal to deal with.
She'd either not been careful enough when exercising, or the attribute had silently increased in minute increments every time she did so. If that were the case, it would mean that as long as she put some effort into regular exercise, the attribute would always increase, eventually.
With the increase in her willpower, she luckily had enough mental energy to hold off on the recalibration until an opportune moment presented itself two days later. Everyone had entered and been in the mesh for only up to a few hours, even WolfMosh, as far as she'd known.
Stuffing herself with food, recalibrating, and then stuffing herself once more in a calm and methodical way so as not to flag any anomalous behavior in the resident AI that kept watch on everything had been demanding, yet it had seemingly worked.
She would have continued wearing her hoodies and sweatpants exclusively thereafter had it not been for the need for the MDS — mesh-diving suit — which exposed everything.
Luckily, she'd only gotten a comment from Wilma on looking healthier and a second glance from Mikaela as she passed by the training room while Rei was doing squats.
Mikaela still hadn't said a word to Rei, acting as if any spot where she stood was nothing but empty air.
Rei actually preferred this, as having romantic entanglements with her fellow apprentices would just complicate her slowly forming plans.
The increase in her body attribute had also made her take another look at the listed perks for it. The number of perks was no less daunting, but channeling her previous logic that if she fucked up in choosing, there would always be another point somewhere down the line.
It was a hard pick, as many had interesting effects, such as making her stronger, faster, nimbler, and all that jazz. There were also more specialized perks that did everything from something similar to her [Cybernetic Adaptation] skill to others that made her ambidextrous or double-jointed.
She had no idea why she wanted to be double-jointed when she could just replace her joints with cybernetics.
Eventually, though, she'd settled on [Self-Repair] for one simple reason:
Reliability and utility.
The perk gave her a passive, if slow, regeneration to both her fleshy parts and cyberware.
Yes, cyberware.
She'd tested it by nicking the exterior of her neural link with a boxcutter she'd found unattended, then been extremely careful not to let Franklin see the horrific crime she'd committed.
The minor imperfection had then repaired itself during the following two days — the major downside being that her appetite went through the roof.
She attributed this to the nanites needing material for the repairs and had nothing but her food to go on. How they changed the biomaterial to something as complex as plasteel was a mystery but not something she felt she was anywhere near ready to delve into.
The perk had also informed her that she could ingest the necessary materials directly and then let the nanites break them down to use as needed, but she hadn't dared try it out. Not that she'd found any iron filings — or whatever went into the material — lying around.
Being hungry wasn't so bad; eating was always a pleasure if the food was good — which it luckily was.
The self-repair of her organic parts was faster but still too slow to be helpful in actual combat. It helped tremendously with the feeling of weakness she got when exiting the dive chamber, so that was a pleasant surprise, at least.
It likewise had the downside of increasing her rate of burning calories, which meant eating more food to solve the issue.
Then there are the skill levels and my one new skill.
This was the progress she was most proud of.
[Strong Will] she felt had helped immensely with her work ethic, allowing her to keep going even when the going got tough.
[Deception] had made her more comfortable overall, the necessary lies not causing her as much anxiety as they grew increasingly easier to utter with confidence and sincerity.
[Athleticism] had increased the control of her body to a noticeable degree, and walking on her hands or standing on a single hand was quite feasible.
[Cybernetic Adaptation] she felt had hit a ceiling, but the single increase in level still made her happy. Numbers going up always did. She attributed that to the monkey brain appreciating advancement.
[Breach], [Splice], [Data Analytics], and [Programming] had advanced the most, which was to be expected. Her understanding of the mesh and her proficiency had evolved drastically from just a few months ago.
Even WolfMosh had mentioned how impressed he was with her general rapid improvement.
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Then there was [Parkour].
Rei had nearly smacked her head into a weight-lifting machine when she'd gotten it out of sheer surprise. She'd wanted to test out her body after her body attribute increased, so she had vaulted some of the equipment in the training room to get a feel for it.
Not wanting to look like an absolute fool, she hadn't practiced it, but the single level still gave her some confidence in navigating complex urban terrain if her plan of escape panned out. The instincts it gave for measuring distances and force needed for various applications of movement — gymnastic movements she now intimately knew many more of — were excellent.
Finishing the last repetition of her tenth set of squats, she stood and brushed aside some hair stuck to her sweaty forehead before grabbing a bottle of carbonized water and downing it.
I'd prefer still water, but the water from the tap smells a bit funky.
It was probably nothing the civilian-grade nanites couldn't handle, not to mention her more advanced System nanites, but the smell put her off.
She looked into the wall-spanning smart mirror, which had shown real-time corrections to her posture as she'd exercised — studying her appearance. She was a sweaty mess, yes, but other than that, she was pleased with what she saw.
Her body had begun to fill out in all the right places, and her gray hair had grown to shoulder length. She had Wilma help cut the unevenness out of it, and it now looked rather nice.
Speak of the devil, and she shall appear. Not that she is one. Whatever, the saying still stands.
She saw Wilma walk through the open doorway into the training room. She was outfitted in her usual training attire, which was so skimpy that one might think she had an aversion to decency.
I don't have much room to talk, though. And from what I've seen, actual nudity isn't as frowned upon in this day and age compared to 2040. Having any coverage can be considered modest enough amongst lower-to-middle-class citizens.
"So you finally decided to visit the gym? I was beginning to think I was the only one who knew about this place," Rei said jokingly.
Wilma huffed, tucking a few strands of loose hair behind one ear as she set her own water bottle down in front of the smart mirror.
"Yeah, yeah. Funny. I do exercise quite regularly, I'll have you know. I just don't do it here all the time."
It was a poignant reminder that only Rei lived full-time in the facility. Even WolfMosh had somewhere else he spent time at.
"So what's on the agenda?"
"Squats," she shot a pointed look at Rei's bottom half. "Can't have you outclassing me, now can I?"
Rei grinned, feeling pleased by the roundabout compliment.
"Well, I'm done with my own squats. I need a shower badly, so I'll leave you to it," she said as she started walking to the showers.
"Just rub that work ethic in my face, why don't you," Wilma said in faux outrage.
At least Rei thought it was faked. With [Deception] leveling, she'd begun to notice that Wilma didn't always say what she really felt — another neat aspect of the skill as it taught her as much about lying convincingly as it did about picking up deception used by others.
There's nothing more perilous than a woman's jealousy. Let's hope it truly was fake.
***
Rei looked at the green sphere representing the data she had to decrypt. It was her first job, which WolfMosh had given her at the end of her last dive. She had no idea why it was a sphere or why it was green, as nothing she'd found so far indicated any reason for it.
She was determined to treat this first job with care as fucking it up wouldn't just cause issues for her boss but also for herself. WolfMosh could take any failure on her part as proof that she wasn't ready, and Rei didn't want to go back to only doing puzzles in an endless pursuit of completing his stockpile.
Rei, therefore, treated the data and the ICE protecting it with delicate consideration, her increased proficiency allowing her to breach and splice it with a prudent and measured approach.
The information inside was a manifest of credit expenditure — encrypted, obviously — from someone called 'Big Munch.'
Yeah, this isn't some high-end corporate secrets being unraveled. That's for sure.
Being handed such low-end work was almost insulting, but she didn't complain. Not really.
Getting a feel for things when there were real consequences for failure other than puzzles triggering pain receptors with their ICE and causing a headache made the minor challenge fun.
Finally, she was done copying the manifest by retrieving bits of data through various threads in her splice, using her split-off stream of consciousness to speed it along. She assembled it back together on her end before disconnecting from the data packet and beginning to decrypt it.
With [Data Analysis], it was laughably easy. Given the many similarities in the encryption method to some of the earlier puzzles in the puzzle cube, she surmised that whatever was used on this data had to be cheap encryption only meant to keep civilians from snooping.
As if by magic — but more realistically due to the AI keeping constant watch having informed him — WolfMosh sprung into being next to her. By this point, she'd stopped flinching every time he did this, much to his tremendous and sometimes vocal disappointment.
"Done?"
"Yep," she said, transferring the manifest to him by folding the paper it had become once decrypted into an airplane and tossing it at him.
"You could have just handed it to me," he muttered as he caught the data origami.
"What would be the fun in that?" She argued eloquently.
WolfMosh could only concede the point with a reluctant nod. She'd found he, like herself, liked being creative in how they did things in the mesh. It was just more fun that way.
There was also the nebulous concept of things just working smoother in the mesh when done in a visual way. Examples of this were highly detailed daemons showcasing better efficiency or Magi using gestures to reinforce actions with intent.
It was something Rei had picked up on subconsciously at the start but had only begun to find bizarre after time spent repeatedly doing it.
She didn't understand it, and WolfMosh confessed that he didn't either when she kept bugging him about it. It was just one of those things about the mesh that practically everyone saw as normal, as they had never been exposed to anything different.
WolfMosh snapped his fingers, and the airplane in his hand unfurled — both in data compression and visual representation. As mentioned previously, the two kind of went hand in hand.
He took a split second to look it over before nodding. "Good. No errors on your part."
Rei rolled her eyes. "As if something so simple would stump me."
They had become much more casual in their interactions inside the mesh, but a forced hierarchy still reinforced itself with every order he gave and whenever they interacted in the outside world. It felt to Rei as if he was determined to hammer Rei's station into the minds of everyone each time they were observed.
Why this was, she had no idea.
WolfMosh made the manifest vanish as he brought forth a new sphere — this time pink — and tossed it to her. She caught it and looked incredulously at it.
"Why are these all colored spheres? Do all jobs come in such packaging?"
Her boss snorted. "Of course not. This is the work of one of the lesser Magi working in the upper levels at our headquarters. You know we have dozens upon dozens of other Meshmagi with less talent working for the gang with more menial tasks."
"So you just nabbed one of their jobs?"
"They'll get over it. I even wrote a note this time explaining my previous and current appropriation of work so as to not have another incident report filed and flagged by my AI. I swear, the AI was having a laugh at me when I saw what it was about. Such a mess." His artificial voice leaked a hint of annoyance.
Rei could only shake her head as he disappeared mid-grumble, returning to whatever he was doing.
She put his eccentricities out of her mind and focused on the sphere in her hand as she leaned back in the chair beneath her parasol. The rhythmic clunking of bamboo and the trickling of water let her mind swiftly enter the zone.
Another job for me. It would have been interesting if I had actually gotten to roam the mesh and retrieve data on my own, but that was shut down so swiftly the last time I asked that I can't see it ever happening.
Not until I escape this place, that is.
***
The heavy bass could be felt in the bar's steel surface as Miyo leaned across it to hand out another drink to one of the heavier drinkers that night.
As she did, she swatted away a questing hand that was looking to grab a feel of her cleavage from the annoyance that haunted her part of the bar. She knew that switching places with another hostess wouldn't help as he'd just follow her in his drunken stupor.
Every time he showed up, her nights went from pleasant or neutral to downright exhausting.
And now she didn't even have the prospect of spending time with her Imouto when coming home to look forward to.
Miyo shook off the negative thoughts as she continued to smile at the inebriated customers, some of whom she tried flirting a bit with, only to always have the mood ruined by the slouching annoyance inserting himself into her conversations.
"Can't you just fuck off, Dennis?" Miyo said in a tone as venomous as it was filled with the knowledge of the futility of engaging him.
"I, fuck, if you, come," He slurred in response, his glass almost missing his mouth as he took a big swig that spilled some down his bare-chested half-jacket punk outfit.
Disgusting, as always.
"You heard the lady. Fuck off, Dennis."
The relief she felt at seeing her elder brother appear out of nowhere and grip the human headache by the shoulder made her knees go weak.
"Who, think, are you?" He asked in near-incoherent outrage. Once he turned his head to see who he'd spoken to, his face tried forming into a scowl, only partially succeeding.
"As I said: Fuck. Off."
Knowing better than to pick a fight in his current state — a feat if there ever was one — a scene that had been repeated innumerable times in the past played out before Miyo as he disappeared into the sea of semi-clothed people splashed in luminescent neon paint dancing beneath the strobe lights.
She breathed a sigh of relief.
"Damn drunkard," Ichiro said as he sat down on the now vacated barstool.
"Thanks, Onii-san"
Ichiro waved her off, his eyes flashing gold for a second as he paid for a drink Miyo had already begun mixing, knowing full well what her brother preferred.
"So, how did it go?" Miyo asked tentatively.
The music blaring through the whole nightclub should have been deafening, but even civilian-grade auditory implants made filtering out the noise to focus on a conversation effortless.
Ichiro shook his head, frustration evident in the set of his jaw and narrowed eyes. He took the drink Miyo passed him and gulped half the chemical-smelling swill in one go.
I still don't understand how he can drink that shit. Does he think himself macho or something for putting himself through that torture?
Evidently not alone in this thought, another partygoer — with a handsome look to him that tickled Miyo's fancy — swaggered up to the bar, took one look at Miyo, then at Ichiro's drink before ordering the same.
She could only roll her eyes as she ignored his flirting. It seemed as if she'd be alone that night. Dennis often cursed her with that fate whenever he swung by.
The still-somewhat lucid patron got the point pretty quickly, to her relief. She knew Ichiro wouldn't interfere unless things became as bad as they did with Dennis. He had too much trouble recognizing people she was interested in having fun with and what she thought to be nuisances.
"Nearly six fucking months without a word," Ichiro said. "Six. Months. If I didn't know that I'd drop dead before I could even start the motion of punching that insufferably serene face of his, I would have tried long ago."
"Ichiro, be careful," Miyo said slowly, genuine concern in her tone.
He waved her off. "Yeah, whatever. It's just so damn frustrating, you know?"
Miyo didn't have to answer the rhetorical question and instead went to mix some more chemical wastewater for him. Their anxiety was growing by the day, and they tried to deal with it by distracting themselves:
Ichiro accepted more and more dangerous assignments where he could let out his feelings in primal acts of violence while Miyo indulged in ever more frequent primal acts more amorous in nature.
Not that it meant that violence wasn't sometimes applied in other ways in those situations. Miyo's taste in the enactment was as different to Rei's tendencies as their differing sexual orientation.
She shook off the strange direction her thoughts had wandered in and started to serve another customer, the fake yet surprisingly convincing smile on full display.
Miyo and Ichiro both were at the end of their wits after so long without a word from their Imouto.
Rei, please be safe. And try to hurry up and contact us. Even if that bastard won't let you talk to us for whatever reason, I know you'll figure out a way.