Vaskya scampered up above the restaurant (After ordering the Mongolian beef over fried egg noodles of course) and attached a carabiner to the front of the panel they wanted to take out. Like rock climbing, but server stacks. Vaska took out a connection chord (It had a malleable plug so it could adapt to USB, quarter inch, anything with a plug I can get into) and plugged in.

Trying to describe what it’s like to plug in, would be like trying to describe the internet to a medieval king. So wipe the gruel off your chin and try your best not to ask stupid questions.

I didn’t make it so I have no fuckin clue how it works. I know how computers work but have no fuckin’ CLUE how biology let alone brain-al biology works, and I don’t think you know too much about either, sooooooooo.

I know each user is registered as a separate computer, a different client machine if that doesn’t confuse you. The plug takes over the nervous system around the brainstem and takes your inputs as commands. You know how coders have to type in order to code? Well now it’s just thoughts. But, you have to do something in order to get the line of code you just thought up to execute. Like snap, or blink or some physical act. Before we had that people would be plugged in, someone would talk about deleting this file or some other shit and they’d do it on accident. It was all too fast to be able to control. One chick I heard died after someone told her to delete her internal folder named system 32 as a joke. Now, that wouldn’t mean anything to a brain-ologist, but if you delete a computer’s system 32 folder then the whole thing is fucked. So, I assume it took whatever the human equivalent of a system 32 folder is and deleted it. Which resulted her immediate (hopefully painless) death. Ah but we have these mistakes. I mean what is humanity without making mistakes, huh?

But anyways, visually you don’t see anything unless you have the contacts (ya’ know, like I said before?) and even then it doesn’t look like anything besides a bunch of boxes and lines of info. Without the contacts you just have to assume you’re not making any mistakes, and you have to assume you’re looking in the right places etc. You can have information read to you internally (connected to your inner ear or something) to confirm you’re in the right places, but I would rather just get a couple contacts. The one up-side of contact-less is that you can use your eyes for other shit besides coding. But fuck that. Just like my uncle always said, “don’t half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing.”

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Vaska, attached to the stack and plugged in, started to surf the contents. Prawn. Porn? No, Prawn, and holy shit that’s a lotta them. Where the fuck did you get so many prawns?? It doesn’t matter. Vaskya unplugged. It was a photo repository for some prawn-dealer who didn’t understand what a cloud was, because many of these were deleted of his local phone but not off the cloud. But yeah I can take him, and he looks like he’s no where near me if his geotags are right…

Vaska unplugged and went to the edge of the layer, they didn’t need anything too luxurious or anything, one panel should do. After securing the handles to the panel above the one they were taking out, they activated a small robot from their pocket, which operated like a winch, and slowly tugged the board out of place. Once it fell out it swung in the air lightly, chords making the same nose as trees in the wind, before coming to a mostly complete stop, and falling silent. Vaskya clambered up before hearing a buzzing of a delivery drone. They looked up hopefully and held out their hands towards it, I can already taste that spicy beef, and those goddamn noodles which make me wanna full-body CUM come on baby just land right here in my, but it droned slowly by. Fuck. I’ve been teased for days on end, which makes me feel less let down than that.

Vaskya rolled out their sleeping roll and clicked open a sticky light. They threw it against the ceiling and it illuminated the 12x14x6 space with the comfortable, warm light of about 2500 on the color temperature scale. They took out what looked like a piece of chewing gum, and gnawed on it for a second before spitting it out and mashing it against the side of the opening. Then Vaska plugged into it, coded for a second, then unplugged. They waved their hand in front of it, and instantaneously heard a beeping in their ear. A foot behind the detector they hung a light curtain, a bright red then blue, then red stripe, with several shapes in gold on the first stripe. Finally, they took a small hexagon from their backpack on the floor and tossed it a few feet away. It folded out, and then half of it shot up, repelled by the magnates below. It was a perfect electronic four tom drum set, with two cymbals and a cushy throne. Two drum sticks slid out of the snare head, ready to go. Vaska sat down, when the alarm sounded. Their food was here!