Revenge for Lychee

by Aies Jay

  -What are you doing?

  I ask.

  -What does it look like?

  she says, keeping up the hooking up to the borrowed Gate in front of her. All those who didn’t bring their own have gotten the same model to borrow, a DistantDream2001 that I personally almost wonder how I can sneak out of here inside my jacket when it’s over, a fine thing with a bare three years on the market. I open my mouth to ask more when her Avatar shows up on the screen and then my mouth falls even further. The Avatar is all too familiar. The gorgeous Geisha with her butterfly strewn kimono bows and then vanishes as she starts at the computer, her fingers flying over the keys.

  -Geisha…?

  She doesn’t even stop.

  -I got hit by black ice when I was sixteen. By a cyber customer that didn’t want to take no for an answer. If he couldn’t have me to myself he’d rather I was dead. I veggied out for almost a month. After, I took my aunts advice to stop hacking for a while and focus on school. I didn’t have much choice anyway, they had to take every single implant out. But I didn’t stay out for long… after one year of working as a nurse, I had my first surgery again. All crap of course, the cheapest, I couldn’t afford any better, but it was a start. My aunt was furious and disowned me. Then there was the bad boyfriend, getting fired, the first flesh customer… and now you know it all. And here we are. I’m the guest arbiter, with my somewhat okay implants now, even if I’m still not fully recovered.

  -But your neuro damage…?

  She sighs and shakes her head.

  -I can only stay on for so long, then my vision blurs, migraines, nausea, vertigo, the works. And I get the shakes afterwards. It’s pretty bad but right now I don’t care. I told you I’d stay if you asked me to, and I am. All the way.

  I take her hand. For a moment she squeezes it back and then returns to the screen. Her Domain is a Japanese feudal house in full glory, all wood and straw mats, armours and silk screens. The room around us is so full of noises and humming machines but right now, all I see is her and her hacker soul. Damn, she’s beautiful.

  -Thank you.

  She nods, biting down.

  -Just promise me something, Jer.

  -What?

  -Don’t tell anyone.

  I smile.

  -Your world is your own.

  She leans over and we kiss, just in time for the counter to start counting down from ten, a loud voice over the speakers telling us

  -THIS IS YOUR FINAL NOTICE. HOOK UP OR VACATE THE PREMISES. THIS IS YOUR FINAL NOTICE. THE DOGS OF HELL WILL BE RELEASED MOMENTARILY. TOURNAMENT COMMENCING IN THREE… TWO… ONE… ZERO!

  My attention whips to the DistantDream2001 in front of me and it feels like it’s turned to look right back at me. I don’t even reach at the cords to hook up. They fly into my sockets and jacks, the pain is momentary but the System is forever. The Cryptation rushes past me, I hardly even see the logging or the connecting, I do it faster than thinking, all I register consciously is just the brief flash of

  WELCOME HOME

  -Thanks, babe.

  I whisper softly, then letting it envelop and consume me to become part of it. My Domain rises in front of my eyes like a wall of water and the files flash before me, telling me not only everything I already knew but also what the participants are being told of the goals and background of this war. It’s really just the essentials but all of the dirty details are there, and all the names of the culprits, my slandered name in contrast and the names of my son as well as Teeth, Honour and Seizer’s, plus the personal guarantee of the President that this is all confirmed and true. A hush falls over the room and a few soft curses as well as one person cursing louder is heard and then a furious clicking of keys begin as they finish the preliminary file and crash into the System, hungry for a revenge that isn’t even theirs. I fly in ahead of all of them, leaving my Domain and entering forever, and now I see them in my 360 degree all around view. Beautiful doesn’t even begin to describe it. A legion of Avatars, rushing, running, skipping, flying, soaring and swimming into the System, their war cries and odd giggles and signature outbursts howling in the software world. I see the beautiful Geisha, with her flowing kimono, carried by a swarm of furious butterflies and in her sun fan an impossible katana is now unhidden. I see a black unicorn breathing frost, a noodle bowl with some odd kind of noodle monster coming out of it using chopsticks to run, I see a fat little knight in shining armour, a green haired anime girl wielding a huge sledge hammer with the word “Hentai-whacker” on it. A glorious girl with amazing blonde hair in kung fu clothes, all Chinese collar and those cloth shoes, no shadow kicks her way almost past me, a small fluffy dog with a punked out hairdo (furdo?) runs by her side, and suddenly a merman with pink hair, tattoos and face piercings comes jumping through the water, holding an trident spear and followed by what looks like a school of piranhas. Above us all, I see a golden dragon, spewing fire into the water, and as the warmth of the fire seems to reach me, the swimming suddenly gets even easier. I dive.

  They’ve really done a number on us. I have no idea how they did but I remember the promise I was given before that shot, and they’ve done their utmost. The information is so torn it can hardly be recognized for what it was. They’ve even done their best to shred and delete everything about the disease diphtheria itself and all there was to read about the outbreak on that colony. A few files are to be found on me if you only search for my name generally, saying I’m dangerous and deluded and that there were questions if I killed Lychee myself. There is more false crap about me, as well as about Teeth and even Brute. Teeth is made out to be a rapist and a rogue pirate, Brute is made out to be a mobster. The info looks sprained somehow to me, like a product made in a hurry by people that didn’t know what it was for, and the holes where the old information was to be found are gaping, ripped with jagged edges, confirming this was not work made by S2 hackers. My fish mouth opens wide and I bite at the false information, not erasing it, but making the lies evident, showing how the information has been planted for anyone who’d look. The debunking of my scandalous self’s almost impressive history I correct only enough to be questioned, I’m not here for me. I start at heading for the names of those guilty, sending out my hooks targeted at the pictures copied from my memories in my Domain, when I suddenly get hit by insight. The most important information is in my own head. if I can copy that information on along with all of the shit I saved in the mail, just like I did to bait the hooks just now… I make a backflip reverse, falling into my own Domain. This as far as I know has never been done before but there’s never been anyone like me before, either. I need more power. And power I’m getting. I reach for a cord and a pain jabs at my spinal cord, and another and another, I feel cords jamming into me where I have no jacks, straight into my spinal column, my speed increasing beyond anything I could have imagined. I enter my own software, my own brain, and start searching for the memories of the papers from the clinic, the documents the doc gave me to confirm it, I’ve seen it all, and now I’m downloading it, from my brain through the grey matter and nerve tissues to the Gate connected to my brain that really is part of my brain now, encrypting it as I go, turning memory flashes into ones and zeroes, making it into information to be had in the System. As I shove it into caviar bubbles, multiply and release it, I realize I can do this with all of it, flinging the caviar out, hollering at my fellow hackers that this is the exact things you’re looking for and letting the rest of it spread, copying the information for my own search engines, my hooks, and then taking the plunge into the System again. All of a sudden, it’s all too easy to find. Dragon fire from above heats the waters and I wish I could look up to see it but there’s little time left. I’m already hearing Gator hollering about black ice and in the far back I hear one of the hackers scream. I see black ice rising in front of me as well, like frozen waters growing at us and its front spikes aiming for me like spears of evil, sent out by someone trying to stop my intrusion that gets even deeper into the System, my h
ooks crashing into Gate Systems and pulling me forward. I open my fish mouth and my lion’s roar escaping me pulverises it but there will be more and more as we go. My heart beats faster than I ever could remember it and the pain is seeping through the medicine. It’s almost like there’s three parts of me now, the flesh, the bioware and the software, and the three can’t hold together for much longer.

  The metallic taste of another cord stabbing its way into me reminds me of blood. I open my eyes wide never seeing the RL, seeing Cryptation as clearly as any drawn picture and the lionfish, me, my Avatar, careens ahead, its speed increasing for every new cord digging into my spine. The hidden information, the distorted bullshit, is now glowing like faded neon signs in the dark, and as my caviar pellets of fire hits more places where the ruined information lies, Avatars run there and in all their different ways recover it, restore and respreads it, making it all viral. Hackers scream out at occasions in the room around me, I smell burning flesh marrying hot metal and heating plastic and some of the Avatars fall like lifeless dolls to whatever ground awaits them, some of them vanish altogether, but none of the ones still on their merry quits. All manners of hacking is used, malware, fake winnings, click bait, viruses, worms, Trojans, anything and everything is permitted. I even see Geisha attaching free porn to the info by trailing orchid leaves around it, the merman makes cookie connections to an absurd amount of extremely common search terms, making anyone who searches for things like food recipes, stain removers, household H models and baby care to find this nastiness, search terms a mother or a parent would go for, parents who now will see this in horror. A little mushroom like Avatar jumps around offering free trial antivirus ware, with all the info he’s found attached to the first mail. I hit the edges of the System and enter the GalactiNet, or so I thought, but I’m already there, we all are, and now I hit the names I’ve learned to hate, and they are going down. Another cord, and another, stabs me in the back, I think I’m standing up now but I’m not sure about what’s happening to my body anymore. It’s time to finish this. I lay out their names and start hitting them at the same time with the same manoeuvres, digging out their personal information, their new mails and all their contacts on them, all of them, beginning with backtracking Ferguson using the cred chit he used to pay for room 42 on the Sweet Sleep Honeycomb Hotel on Miter Street, that’s of course connected to a new mail address. I connect to it, tracking another mail and mother of Bingo, I find his personal mail and now his ass is mine. I rip it open and through him I make out a mail to his friends, relatives, colleagues and fucking shopping conformation addresses, every single contact he’s ever sent or received mail from and then I launch the info. A voice echoes in my head, angry and metallic.

  SECURITY BREACH SECURITY BREACH YOU WILL BE DESTROYED

  Two more warnings of the same character follows, I’ve breeched at least two security stations now, going on the next as I crack the coding on, there’s no stopping it now, I can’t even slow down so instead I speed up, and I almost think I hear that bastard swear IRL but I’m too deep in now, I even found a route through the mail to the corporation owning the food packaging business of Caldwell senior and god, I found the father, Mister Harvey Caldwell himself, and if he’s not a collaborator he is now aware of what his kid has been up to, another cord stabs me, I’m running so hot, but I’m in HIS mail now, spreading the info to HIS contacts, every one of them, corporate hotshots, friends, distant relatives and clandestine contacts, while I’m seeing in my peripheral view how someone of my fellow Avatars hits the Space Cowboy Most Wanted Show, hacking it and uploading the info we got in the beginning, save the President’s guarantee and then unloading the info he found, the Avatar is a masked man with a rapier and a fox tail, but I’m busy, I found a route through a contact to the head of security on Maxima, Mister big cheese and through that to a man in the security on Rimmie, warnings and black ice crash at me from all directions but I refuse to notice it, there’s no pain anymore, just heat and cold, and from the Rimmie security System I jag a route to a security man on Luna, titles are becoming less important, names blur, and I hook and unload, now returning briefly to Ferguson’s contacts and through them hitting Monterey’s contact net, her professors on Luna 3 and all of her former classmates, I even find the codes to the Gate System on L3 and I hit it hard with all the dirt I have on her, the security on L3 going absolutely berserk, I feel my body getting hotter and colder all the time but it’s no longer important, I hook and unload continuously, faster and faster as the angry voices are becoming like a furious choir, I see the ocean turning black around me and freezing cold, another hacker screams and I hear a body fall and hit the floor close to me, dragon fire surrounds me but it’s not enough to thaw and hold the black ice at bay anymore but I have no time to check that shit now because I just felt a cord ramming in under my skull from below the base of my neck, connecting to my brain, and something my head is about to snap and I need to

  suddenly the pain becomes real again and way too much. A strange feeling of being torn, almost like the feeling of waking up from a heavy sleep, strums through me. Nicla screams something next to me, I think it was my name once, and Gator is trying to calm her down but they feel less and less real, they even sound less and less real. The System world suddenly becomes hazy, which is impossible. My screens must be detaching from my optical nerve or something but that’s when I see him. I see him, like a thin wisp covered in code, running in towards me. Like a Ghost. And I’m on the floor. Nicla runs up to me and Gator screams at her we have to cut the power before she touches me but I’m still in the System, I still see him, if I reach for him I can almost touch

  on a blue screen

  DOT

  DOT/

  DOT />>

  NO GATE FOUND

  DOT///>PROCESSING///CONNECTING

  NO GATE FOUND

  GATECRASH OVERRIDE

 
  DECRYPTING UPLOAD

  APPLYING PATCH

  REBOOTING

 
  FINDING CONNECTION

  CONNECTING

  <
  SYSTEM:

  SYSTEM: ALL

  USERNAME:

  USERNAME:

  USERNAME: LIONFISH

  WELCOME HOME

  //THANKS, BABE

  terms and lingo

  AI: Artificial Intelligence

  Ancient: a hacker above the age of twenty-one that still holds the respect of his peers due to his skills

  Arcs: the huge space crafts that once were the ones that left the Earth behind for space to save the human existence from extinction in the event referred to as the Exodus

  ASAFP: As Soon As Fucking Possible

  Avatar: the software shield and spear of the hacker as well as his alter ego representative in the System

  Blackware: cybernetics, hardware or software made illegally in some way, often untested and dangerous

  Blurred: under the influence of recreational drugs or drugs that affect the perception senses such as alcohol

  Body mod: short for body modifier, a person who has cybernetic implants to enhance their physical body only or mostly

  Code/s, the: the six commandments of hackers

  Community: a generation of hackers, generally counted in a span of thirty years

  Corporate Wars: the pet name for the current era, where nations have been replaced by organisations and law has been replaced by hired thugs and justice fighters calling themselves space cowboys

  Creds: originally credits or credit, the term being a neutral rate to gauge the value of money since the fall of nations soon after the Exodus, now the only currency used in the Universe

  Cryo: cryogenetics, freezing of living tissues to preserve them for further use, examination or reanimation, term used to describe the state of freezing, or an item for the process

  Cryptation: the shift between code and information, the language of

  programming, making 1 and 0
to information, often referred to as the wall that separates the software world and the hardware world

  Exodus: the event in 2012 when the Earth became uninhabitable over a matter of days and humanity took what could be saved and left the planet on huge space crafts known as arcs, leaving the home planet behind but also referred to as the time spent on the arcs in space before the proper colonisations of planets

  Fleshie: non-hacker or a person without any cybernetics for hooking up their brain into the System

  Full on virgin: a person who’s never had any kind of surgery

  Gate: computer

  Ghost/-ing: committing suicide by means of becoming all software and entering the System

  H model: originally called a HAI, Humanoid Artificial Intelligence, but the reference was originally not to their humanoid form but rather to that they were self-contained, as in able to take care of themselves in means of knowing when to update and charge, needing very little maintenance

  Hacker: a person preferring the software world to the real one, answering to the Code rather than hardware world law

  Holo: holographic

  Hopped: person that surgically grafted cybernetic implants into the body, such as computer elements to connect the brain directly to the System or body modifications to enhance physical performance beyond ordinary abilities