Starfade

by Gary Swaby

  Chiaki walked back to the terminal and stared at it. It was a display with a fold out keyboard. At the side of the screen there were three ports for external connectivity. Chiaki was thankful that these weren’t hidden; it would make her life easier. As she raised her finger to hit the on switch, a call came in on her Comm-link. She held her wrist in front of her and saw Commander Pearson’s name blinking on the screen.

  She had no reason to speak with him, and more than likely he’d be mad at her for separating from Vraxen. Besides, he was now interrupting her from doing the task he’d dragged her here for. Of course, there was a chance that he was calling her because of an emergency, but Chiaki figured that if she’d come this far, it wasn’t worth stopping now.

  She ignored the call and hit the power button on the terminal. There was a catchy jingle from the machines speakers as it kicked into life, and the LED lights all around the room blinked to reflect the terminal powering on. “Wow, I need my bedroom to do that,” she said. And then her eyes grew wide with shock when she saw a wall of text pop up on the screen; text that she couldn’t understand.

  “Tobi,” she said, pulling another one of her nifty accessories from her pocket. It was a one-sided eye lens that she could cup over an eye and sync with her Comm-link. It would allow Tobi to process any on-screen information that she was looking at. “Please tell me you know what language this is,” she asked.

  “Negative. Sorry, Nova, I do not recognize it.”

  “Hmm, okay, let me try something else then,” she pulled the Comm-link cable from its side panel and plugged it into the terminal. “See if you can find a language setting anywhere in the terminal’s initializations.”

  There was silence for around a minute, until Chiaki thought she heard a noise somewhere above, but when no other sounds followed she guessed it must be pests. She started to get impatient by Tobi’s lack of communication. “Find anything?”

  “I’m sorry, Nova, I’m unable to decipher anything as this language is not recognized.

  “Dammit!” she said, ramming her fist on the solid stand. She instantly regretted it and bit her lip to suppress a yelp. She took a deep breath and then thought about what her brother might do in such a situation. No ideas came to mind—after all, it wasn’t every day that a hacker came across an unrecognized language—but she remembered something he’d always told her. No matter how difficult a task appears at first, if it’s a piece of hardware, there’s always another way to hack it. Sometimes you just have to think outside the box.

  But how much could she think outside the box if she couldn’t even get past the first screen? Staring at the screen, she could tell that the terminal was running the Vertex+ operating system, just by the typeface used on the text. Vertex+ was the operating system preferred by any organization that wanted to make it clear they had nothing to do with the Galactic Alliance. No doubt, this version was heavily modified.

  She turned around and faced the door, wondering if the android had returned. She’d been so consumed by the thought of getting into the terminal that she forgot the danger that loomed outside the room. She moved forward; squinting her eyes to catch a glimpse of anything moving on the other side of the rotating doors. There was nothing but reflective swirls of the other rooms in the hallway.

  And then she remembered. “The library,” she said out loud. “There was a library or something. Maybe they have language books in there.”

  “Good thinking, Nova. It’s worth a try.”

  “Make sure you let me know if you sense Vraxen’s frequency, okay?”

  “I will.”

  Chiaki crept out of the server room and pressed her back against the first wall she came to; the same one she’d hidden behind earlier. She listened for any sign of the android’s presence. It was too quiet for her liking and she had the uncanny feeling that something was lurking.

  After a minute of listening, she crept down the main path of the hall until she came to the glass room with all the book shelves. She pushed her way through the weightless door and looked around the four sides of the small boxed space. She hunched her body low when she realized that her body would be visible over some of the smaller shelves in the room. Even with her short height, the android would have no problem seeing her if it came down the stairs.

  She circled around the room, looking up and down each shelf for any sign of a language book. A few times she picked a book from the shelf and flicked through the pages. They were all written in the same weird language that was on the terminal. She could tell it was the same language by the common use of the apostrophe between words.

  “There has to be something here that explains this weird language, even if it’s written in another language,” she said, trying to suppress her voice. A book written in English was preferred, but even if there was a book teaching this mysterious language in one of the other recognized languages, Chiaki would be able to use her Comm-link to translate it. After ten more minutes of losing her patience—in which time she’d started to throw books around the room when they annoyed her—she decided it was time to give up and try to get into the terminal another way. On her way out, her foot knocked one of the books, making it slide against the solid floor. She didn’t remember looking at it so she flicked through it until she found a page with instructional text.

  Between the many dense paragraphs were segments of text with sequential linebreaks. The linebreaks often came after a specific character was used. “This is definitely a programming language,” she said. She could tell by the syntax structure of the words, even though she couldn’t understand them. This wouldn’t help her get past the terminal screen, but if she could find another way into its source code then this book would come in handy.

  Chiaki left the room.

  Chiaki was on her way back to the server room when suddenly, a beam of light hit her from behind like a helicopter spotlight. She turned slowly on the spot and saw the android by the stairway with its arm extended; the light beaming from a socket in its arm.

  “Ihea ehrae ueao?” it said.

  Chiaki was stunned; she would have expected the android to alert its owners already. Instead it was trying to talk to her. “Umm, hello?” she said.

  “Oh, you speak English?” the android replied, in a robotic accent she didn’t understand. And then something clicked in Chiaki’s mind. If the android could speak both English and the mysterious language, it meant that it had a language pack inside its programming. She could use it. “If you can speak English, then it means you shouldn’t be here, human.”

  Suddenly, a red light pulsed inside the androids head. It was sending an alert. “Now, why’d you have to go and do that?” she said, approaching the droid. The machine tried to one up her by dashing towards her and attempting to grab her, but she had the android’s movements committed to memory. Chiaki had played around with these things so much that she knew their mechanical limitations, as well as their weak points. When the droid extended its arm to grab her, she used a Wing Chun style block and then put all her weight into a counter punch. The punch connected with the droid’s synthetic chest plate and forced him back. Her knuckles ached from the hardness of the metal, but she had no time to let it affect her. She drew the SMG from her side and shot repeatedly into the android’s head, shattering a glass panel on its face and shutting down its central processor. The android collapsed in a heap on the floor.

  She dragged the android into the library so it wouldn’t be in plain sight. “I have to hurry. These Thundercloaks could be on the way here now,” she said, as she flipped the machine over so that its face was against the floor.

  “With any hope, they’re halfway across the planet and won’t make it here any time soon,” said Tobi.

  “That’s the best case scenario, but I’m not going to count on it.” She grabbed the robot’s hands and pushed back one of its fingers to expose a multi-tool. It was common for androids to have built in screwdrivers so they could carry out self-maint
enance when needed. She used the multi tool to unscrew the machine’s own back compartment, where the hard drive was kept. After a couple intense minutes of unscrewing, she pulled the harddrive from its back, but didn’t take it out all the way. She still needed it to be connected to the machine’s power.

  “Tobi, you know what to do,” she said, connecting her Comm-link to the hard drive. Tobi’s swirling icon appeared on the screen to indicate that he was busy running her hacking software. Once he made it past the encryptions on the harddrive, he would then try to locate the language pack, which was considered a plug-in for the android’s source code.

  After a few more minutes, Tobi’s busy symbol faded from the screen. “I’ve found the language pack, and it has been transferred to your local files.”

  “Thanks, Tobi,” she said, before ripping the harddrive completely from the androids back. She had too much to carry with both the book and the harddrive, but she was keen to hold onto them, at least for now.

  Back in the server room, Chiaki reconnected her Comm-link to the terminal. Tobi was now able to read what was written on the screen back to her. He read the large wall of text, which was a checklist of processes running in the facility.

  “It’s also saying that the alert systems have been activated and that reinforcements have answered the call,” said Tobi.

  Chiaki couldn’t deal with the pressure of a Thundercloak taskforce on its way to wipe her out so she chose to ignore that for now and focus on the hack. “How do we get past the screen?”

  “Press the U key,” he said. She did as he was told, and then she was presented with a login screen. She looked down at her Comm-link and saw Tobi’s swirling icon, which meant that he was already attempting to get past the terminal’s security.

  “There’s a firewall here, we’re going to have to get through it,” said Tobi.

  Chiaki tapped the home screen on her Comm-link and navigated to her file system. She opened up a malware code that she’d written previously, one she was proud of. In order for the malware to work she needed to make some modifications so that it would recognize that the terminal was running the Vertex+ operating system. “Tobi, run Starfade,” she said, referring to the malware by its name.

  Tobi’s swirl blinked on screen and she waited for Starfade to do its magic. The malware would figure out which packets were able to be received by the terminal and clone them, tricking the system into granting access to Chiaki’s Comm-link. By the looks of the facility, she guessed that the firewall wasn’t updated frequently, meaning it would be easier to exploit.

  Her assumptions were proved correctly when Tobi displayed a happy face emoji to her on the Comm-link screen. With the firewall compromised, she could now work on cracking the admin login account. She ran her brute-force cracking software from her Comm-link and watched as it cycled through numerous character combinations in search of the correct ones for both the username and password; this would take some time.

  “While we wait, I could read another log from the files we recovered earlier,” said Tobi. “With the language pack I am able to decipher much more of them.”

  “Go for it,” Chiaki yawned.

  The Traveler is the most fortunate being in the universe. He has witnessed many of the wonders of this galaxy and beyond. He was born on Yoyvis among our ancient ancestors, and he was there when they fled the planet before its destruction. He lived on Earth for years, seeing the planets’ many marvels; all while going under the radar as not to alert Earth’s governments of the presence of galactic refugees. Then, before Relaun was built to cast magic away from the Milky Way, a miracle occurred. The Traveler fell into a time warp, a glitch in the universe if you will. Even The Traveler has no idea how this occurred. He simply followed a strange light presence that had woken him while in the country of Egypt. To his fellow Yoyvis refugees, he had mysteriously disappeared, but according to The Traveler, he’d been stuck in this warp for many generations, with his body and consciousness being preserved in the warp. To him, he was merely asleep for centuries.

  And then when the warp faded, he found himself awake in the middle of a horrific war taking place across planets he never knew. Somehow, he’d been transported to a tear inside the universe, and he was existing in a new dimension. It took immense survival skills for The Traveler to traverse this mysterious realm, and he suffered many injuries while avoiding both parties involved in the war. Eventually, The Traveler made it back to the Milky Way, and how ironic is it that he came full circle? The Traveler found us, The Children of Yoy, here on New Yoy.

  The Children of Yoy founders fled Yoyvis decades before its demise, in secret, to escape its harsh politics. Then, The Traveler and around a hundred more refugees fled decades after to avoid our species being erased from the universe. And now, The Traveler has united with descendants of Yoyvis that he never even knew existed.

  The only thing fitting for The Traveler now, would be to make it into Relaun and recover our long-lost powers. Then he could say that he’d seen it all.

  “Whoa, am I understating this correctly?” Chiaki asked. “Are you telling me that one of the people who fled Yoyvis for Earth centuries ago is still alive today?” There was so much information to digest from the passage, but this was what stood out to her the most.

  “According to the log, yes,” said Tobi. “He somehow existed in a time warp, until it eventually faded away.”

  “What was this new dimension they were talking about?” she asked. Before Tobi could answer that, her Comm-link chimed, indicating that the admin account had been retrieved. “Hold that thought, Tobi.”

  With the account unlocked, the data she had come for was almost hers for the taking. The terminal displayed a customized graphical-user-interface, but customized or not, Chiaki knew how GUIs worked. After navigating through the strange icons on the desktop, she finally found where the bulk of the terminal’s data was stored. She removed the SD card that Pearson had given her and slotted it into her Comm-link. It would be a slower transfer than slotting the card directly into the terminal, but Chiaki wanted to simultaneously clone the data to her own cloud storage. She was sure that Pearson told Vraxen to prevent her using her Comm-link for the transfer, and thus she was glad for ditching him.

  Before the transfer could be initiated, a red alert symbol flashed on the terminal’s screen. “Nova, it appears that one of the programs on the system is preventing the transfer.”

  “An extra layer of security, eh?” she said, impressed that these Thundercloaks—or, Children of Yoy—had been smart enough to include additional security measures.

  Chiaki clicked the Vertex+ symbol on the keyboard and opened up the system’s task manager. With a list of all the programs that were running, she searched through each one that she didn’t recognize, until she found the culprit. A program called Stahream was preventing the transfer, so Chiaki opened up the source files.

  With the language pack installed, the code was thankfully displaying in English, but Chiaki didn’t fully understand the syntax of the code. “Ah ha,” she said. “I’ve got something for you.” She picked up the book she had stolen from the library earlier and examined a number of its pages to gain an understanding of the syntax. Here and there, she required Tobi to translate the text with the aid of her eye accessory. After seeing enough of the examples from the book, she soon understood which characters were needed to complete a plausible function in the code.

  There was a function in the code preventing data from being transferred to Comm-link devices, so she rewrote the code, using both the book for reference and the many other functions in the source code as a guide. Finally, she saved the re-written code and relaunched the software.

  There was now an animated icon on the screen to indicate the data being transferred.

  “Nova,” Tobi called.

  “Yes, dear?”

  “Why didn’t you try to uninstall the program as admin? It could have worked.”

  She raise
d an eyebrow. “Come on, Tobi. How is that fun?”

  Chiaki hummed for several minutes, swaying her head and hips side to side in rhythm as she waited for the transfer to complete. It was taking longer because of her desire to clone the data. She soon stopped moving when she heard noises coming from above once more. On inspection, she saw nothing but the caged vent; but considering she’d gone through a vent earlier she knew that anything could be lurking inside.

  “Hurry up!” she cried.

  And then the caged vent came crashing to the ground behind the terminal. Just as the data transfer had completed, a tall figure fell from the hole in the ceiling and landed on its feet on the other side of the terminal. The figure was human-like, but exceptionally thin. Its eyes had a deep amber shimmer and its skin was a tanned olive shade. But most peculiar of all, its ears pointed upwards like an Elf’s would.

  Chiaki started to feel a sharp stinging sensation in her left arm. When she tried to pocket Pearson’s SD card, she saw that a dagger had pierced through the padding on her skinsuit and opened up a burning gash.

  Blood oozed down her arm as her aggressor spoke for the first time. “That was impressive hacking, Earthling, but you will not leave here with that data.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHIAKI’S ARM WAS TORMENTING her more with every passing moment of silence. She wanted nothing more than to remove the dagger, but she knew it would hurt like hell.

  She eyed the figure on the other side of the terminal. It wore a brown cloak over its skinsuit and its fingers were full of colorful rings. “Is there a Comic Con on this planet?” she asked. She was trying to convince herself—more than the being in front of her—that she wasn’t scared.

  It smiled. “You are not with the Alliance are you?” it said, with a voice that was soothing enough to read audiobooks. “But you are here on their behalf.”