Analyzing data…..

1000111010100111011011110

1000011101011110111110111

“It’s too fast…” She muttered under her breath. 

She looked over the monitor at the girl across from her. The other girl noticed but didn’t say anything and kept typing. They needed to break through the firewall before the backdoor Ajax put in the network closed. But they were working against each other, a brushstroke wrong and now they had tripped a failsafe. She blamed the blonde that was still typing away. 

“Keep going, I’ll be right back,” she said, picking herself off the floor of the darkroom and moving into the back. She opened the door and closed it gently behind her, feeling for the lock and closing it as softly as she could. 

She looked around, confirming that she was alone and brushed her hair to the side and felt for the implant. It was second nature to plug in when her hands failed her, but using the implant was dangerous, she knew one slip now and she would submit to a digital death. The risks were great but she needed the credits now to get off world. This was her last chance before they would be stuck on Argyl-3. 

She bit her lip and plugged the wire that connected her to the network into the computer. 

She felt her body slump down, and then went numb. It was cold, and then hot. Her body moved at lightspeed, stretched thinner and thinner. Before she knew it she had materialized once again and was standing at the precipice of a dark ocean. She looked left, total darkness, then right and saw it. The other girl was losing her battle against the firewalls safety, she started running.

The ocean splashed higher and higher as she got closer to the battle. The oceans tides fighting and beating back a tall, dark bearded man with a staff. Well, it is different every time I suppose. She had seen oceans before, 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.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Blue soft_ re: When-TAX-TAKE-HACK

Soft_re: RE system override

ACT_AI-6

Red TAKE-SELF

ACTUAL: (70TPS, f” SCAN)

Error_ Incomplete TAKE

You __Error_Not_Found

She opened her toolkit and took out the zipp.de her only chance was to activate a fake debug on the AI-6 before it learned their keystrokes and completely wiped her and the blonde out. She opened her eyes, each time the ocean crashed down it left a small opening in the code that she could throw the debug grenade into. She only had one though. She broke into a run, every blink took the scene from a beautiful nighttime ocean to a dark world of binary and code. She called out to the man with the staff and he lowered it to the ground, her body could hear the blonde shouting in the other room surprised. Her consciousness was here though, in the code. Her left foot hit the staff's larger end and she could feel it lifting beneath her, turning her body towards the ocean as the man lifted her high and she threw the grenade. Just as the ocean crashed down on the dark man it exploded, killing him in the process but doing exactly what she had planned. She moved at lightspeed once again. A few keystrokes and the data would be hers.

A scream from the darkroom rang out. Then: “NOVA, YOU WILL DIE FOR THIS!”

Nova continued typing, the door to her room had to hold up for less than a minute and she would get the dataslate and be off Argyl-3. The pounding in her heart could be felt in her throat. Her fingers glided along the keyboard at breakneck speed. The zip bug was working flawlessly, even if she had to sacrifice the blonde girl. 

The door was kicked down as she finished the hack. Looking up she saw the blonde’s friend, maybe her husband. Nova didn’t think twice, her left hand grabbed the hard drive from the computer and she quickly slipped it into her pocket. At the same time her right hand moved to the knife at her ankle. Grabbing onto it the man started pointing a phaser pistol at her. Too late. The knife was in his neck. He pulled the trigger. The blue light of the muzzle flash and then a red laser of hot energy pulsed by Nova’s right ear, burning some of her silver hair but not injuring her.

The man's blood sprayed outwards, his neck a mess as he fell forwards onto the floor. Nova sat up and walked around him into the darkroom. She looked at the blonde, her own fingers wrapped around her neck, the cold steel of the implants crushing her windpipe. A necessary sacrifice. Nova smiled to herself, she had the dataslate and killing the other two she would have more than enough money to get a head start on Triumf-L. Another world held by resistance, but closer to her real goal.