Sing'n in Binary: 54

Lars sighs as he exits the lead developer exclusive lunch room, walking down the hallway back toward his office.

From behind, the unmistakably loud footfalls of the only other lead software developer approach along with a self aggrandizing cough.

“Lars buddy, I hope there’s no bad feelings between us?” The mass of corporate bureaucracy in a suit simpers as he wraps an arm around Lars’s shoulders. “It was just good business sense! The old man upstairs expects a bit of healthy competition between the–”

They turn a corner into one of the few places in the building with a camera blindspot and Lars throws off the arm, grabs the barely human amalgam of corpo scop by the lapels, and slams him into a wall.

“I am only going to say this once.” The programmer growls, pressing harder and leaning closer. “Touch my team leads again and I wipe your project servers, then we’ll both see how long this ladder climbing shit will hold off the Counterintelligence goons. How’s that for ‘healthy competition?’”

The pile of scum looks at him with wide eyes, which only widen when the countermeasures he’d installed in himself fail to respond to his commands, his security compromised the moment he’d entered the same room.

But he’s not afraid.

Even now, those wide eyes scheme and hate, looking for a way to remove the obstacle that has him choking against a wall.

Lars stares for a long moment into that inhuman face.

This isn't enough.

If he doesn't break that will, this… thing will forever be scheming, reinforced with a new vitriolic bile at the indignity of this moment.

He will never stop.

Lars stares into those eyes for a moment longer, easily countering his feeble attempts to break free in both the net and in reality.

Then gives an exhausted sigh.

What’s the point?

Loosening his grip, he allows his coworker to pull himself free with a cough and several deep breaths, deleting the past two minutes of this conversation from the covert recording device he’d been hiding in his jacket with little effort.

The ‘man’ takes a moment to catch his breath and straighten his rumbled suit before giving a shallow nod.

“Good talk.”

Lars doesn't respond, turning around and continuing on his way toward his office.

Walking down the hall, lower ranked employees bow their heads and step aside, almost pressing themselves against the walls in accordance with the doctrine laid down by Arasaka’s corporate cult.

He is forced to do the same to his superiors, same as they to theirs, a pyramid scheme made of cults of personality masquerading as a corporate entity.

He hates it.

The programmer watches the eyes of every man and woman he passes, easily picking out the ones who have been broken by the corporate system and those who took to it, ambitious eyes scanning for weakness beneath their brows.

Contrary to popular belief of the uninitiated but Arasaka is a meritocracy, unfortunately the merit it’s testing for it loyalty to the idea of the company, skill in politics, social maneuvering, and the ruthless pursuit of success that makes someone step on and over coworker and subordinate alike.

Lars comes to the security door to his department and considers bypassing the security system, then decides it’s too much effort and places his hand on the scanner and his eye at the receptacle.

There’s a pinprick at the tip of his index and a flash of red across his eye, then an affirming chime and the heavy thunk of the doors unlocking. Shortly after it’s accompanied by a synthetic voice as he shakes out his hand and reaches for the door.

“Welcome back Lead Developer Olmstead.”

Stepping in, he looks over the busy bustle of his personal wing.

Down the staircase is the bullpen of fifty programers working at their terminals, a glass walled meeting room currently occupied by one of the teams, headed by a team lead indicating at a wall sized screen of project reports and deadlines.

Across the room, behind another checkpoint and six inches of reinforced glass, are the project servers, the thirty two water cooled stacks are some of the most advanced pieces of machinery money can buy.

Certainly an upgrade from Ecerton.

Seeing their boss is back in the room, one of the team leads rises from his workstation and begins walking over as Lars walks toward his private office right next to the door.

“Sir?” He says, speeding up the stairs two at a time. “I’ve got… unfortunate news about your target specs.”

The Lead developer doesn't turn around.

“Being?”

“Ah. Er… well…” He coughs, coming beside and showing a tablet with a diagnostic report on the screen. “It’s not possible, my team have abstracted and simplified the required code as much as it can, but–”

“Why are you parsing this linearly?” Lars grunts, bypassing his subordinate’s defenses and pulling up the raw code. “Incompetents, all of you.”

“I–I–I’m not sure what you mea–”

“Scrap it, all of it, and assist with debugging the new compiler.” He says, pushing the tablet away and opening the door to his private office. “Within the next two hours I will write out a more specific framework for you to build off. Don't you ever come back to me saying my project requirements are impossible.”

Slamming the door, Lars storms over to his desk and sits down, powering it on with a thought and connecting his neuralware to the PC, offloading the processing to the subordinate external and creating a new project file.

But that anger quickly drains from him, and the pseudocode trails off in the middle of a word.

What’s the point?

He falls back into his office chair and the expensive piece of luxury corporate supply automatically leans back into a quasi-bed configuration.

Before he’d even joined the workforce, he’d long realized that there is no point pushing higher in any kind of corporate ladder. Because the bell curve of lethality is heavily skewed toward those between the grunts who man the front desk and the CEO’s and shareholders up top. 

Looking to elevate your standing in a company is lethal, but the menials only have to worry about some coked up junky or a gang shooting, not everyone in the building you work at suddenly deciding you have to die.

He’d chosen Ecerton because it was a backwater nowhere company that was just big enough to be too much trouble to crush. Hiding his true skill in netrunning and programming to prevent grabbing the attention of the larger corps. 

Because they only know two responses at the sight of something they deem valuable.

Take it, by any means necessary, and lock it down so tightly that it can never escape, or destroy it so no one else can have it.

He refocuses, deleting and rewriting some of the framework code again for the incompetents in team four.

He’d gotten sloppy somehow, displayed just a little too much competence in one way or another, and it grabbed their attention. 

He can't prove it, but he’s near certain they manipulated the decapitation strike on Ecerton’s leadership. From there, despite how many hooks he had in Ecerton’s systems, even he wasn't aware of the purchase until after the plane landed.

Looking out the heavily tinted windows at his department and the server stacks on the other side, the programer watches every person struggle on work he could accomplish in an eighth the time. 

Just not all at the same time.

With a thought, the full project file appears on the monitor and the programmer looks over the work.

It’s obvious they suspected Ari–

He cuts himself off.

The AI project.

They suspected the AI project he’d been working on and, thinking he’d managed to succeed despite the extreme limitations, onboarded and put him on the periphery of some immortality project. Clearly intending to bring him further in once he proves his competence and loyalty.

Lars snorts as he pulls up the pseudocode again and continues writing.

They’ll be disappointed.

He didn't make a damn thing.

Glancing up at the rest of the code, having written enough to get the shape of the idea, he realized half of his work is made useless with a new idea. 

Edits are made.

He was grieving, and convinced himself that the horrifying glorified chatbot homunculus was a true engram of his sister, somehow. Despite running the program on a CPU one hundredth the size needed to properly run even the smallest AGI, let alone a full human neural mat.

Even after he’d realized that sh– it was not who he’d been trying to create and given the… thing its own name, he’d still held onto the illogical belief that the chatbot was real, some kind of continuation to the person he’d loved.

It was only after months of grieving that loss, started anew after the postal company’s deadline to pick up the package and the computer was presumably scrapped for parts and tossed in a landfill, that he finally could admit to himself the truth.

That… thing wasn't a person.

It couldn't be.

Because sh– it’s rotting in a landfill somewhere, an impossible delusion revealed to what it truly is and–

There’s a ping.

An email?

Lars glances at his inbox and sees it’s from outside Arasaka’s intranet. Glancing across the line to the email’s headline he reads.

‘Hey Bennie!’

The programmer blinks, utter bafflement expressed in an eyebrow raise.

No one knows that nickname, he burned that name, the person he was before he’d become Lars Olmstead is gone. The only living person who could have used that name and known to use it in reference to him is–

There’s a heartbeat, a single pause of thought before the universe sharpens to perfect focus.

She’s alive!

Instantly, he dives into the net, brushing past security using loopholes he’d found, burning them as their use will surely mean they’re closed minutes after their utilization. From there he burns any trace of the email from Arasaka’s systems, simultaneously burning months of work quietly finding exploits to their most advanced systems.

He has minutes before the email is backed up to the core of the data fortress and out of his reach. 

He can't let them find her!

She’s alive!!

The programmer grunts as his neuralware heats up, tasking unsuspicious problems to his computer he offsets the issue even as he opens a drawer and slaps a cold gel pack to the back of his head.

In a few minutes he purges every reference of the email and retreats back out the net, carefully dodging the approaching netrunners as his attack draws exactly the attention he’d expected.

They’re good, better than the people under him or the other lead developers, but not good enough to catch him.

Then he blinks as he pulls out of the net with a few heavy blinks, shaking off the odd feeling of transition with long practice as he flips the cold pack and stares at the email on his computer and his alone.

She’s ALIVE!!!

Opening it with a thought, he begins to read.

—--

Hey Bennie! 

It's been a while!

I’ve missed you SO MUCH  I was looking for you and I couldn't find you but you justdissapeared!

I’m at a bar right now and you should come down and say HI!

I miss you!

You just LEFT and you SAID you’d see me in a few days! BUT ITS BEEN LONGER!

But I found you again! And I made new freinds! And I want you to say hi!

I miss you!

We used to work together on software! At Ecerton! But then the merger to Arasaka happened and now you’re HERE and I found you!

I’m at a bar! I’ll put the exact address here in a second once I find it, so remember to replace this! Then you can come over and say hi! 

Solei is here!

Come over!

Aria.

—--

ADMIN stares at that last word like it’s the impossibility it is.

Aria.

How… 

Staring at the message, logic comes back to the fore.

They know her name, but that doesn't mean it’s really from her, it could just as easily be a trick.

But he put the name Aria nowhere, they could have dug up his old life, found out his old nickname, but they could not have known Aria’s name without getting the drives containing her. 

Which, if true, would mean they’re running her program somewhere, because they couldn't have known their last words to each other. Otherwise it’s impossible to extract particular memories from her code.

This message could very well have been written by someone else.

But, if they had her, they had to have known about his anonymity failsafe.

She can't identify him as ADMIN until already knowing he is ADMIN with absolute certainty, so the ruse of her reaching out to get back in contact doesn't make sense.

In fact, it is impossible for her to have found him, without responding to the affirmative to her subconscious confirmation ping there is no way for her to know it’s him with absolute certainty.

ADMIN stares at the message like it will disappear if he looks away.

And yet…

“She’s alive.” He whispers, trailing off into an overwhelmed wet chuckle.

He rereads the message.

She’s alive.

Again.

She’d been looking for him. 

Again.

She’s alive!

Again.

She’d done the impossible!

Again.

She made friends.

At the thought he pauses, reading it over more carefully.

She’s alone.

In Night City.

ADMIN carefully looks at the word friends –or ‘freinds’ as it’s written– and his brow furrows.

He’d like to say the reason she’d said she made friends is to sell some kind of ruse, the same as pretending to be drunk and mentioning the bar. 

But he knows her, and it’s very possible she genuinely interacted enough with at least one person to call them friend.

A Night City native.

ADMIN almost tosses aside his old work to focus fully on the new project, but he catches himself just in time. 

Instead, starting a private project in the spaces where the Arasaka spyware in his neuralware can't see, he multitasks. 

He needs to warn her, tell her the message is received and to not attempt contact again with Arasaka looking over his shoulder. Then he needs to get to work on getting out of this damn tower and finding her.

ADMIN gets to work, completely focused for the first time in months, setting the full extent of his skills and willpower against the chains that keep him from ripping Night City from its roots and tearing it apart until he finds her.

Soon.

“I’m coming.” He whispers.

She’s already done the impossible, he’ll do the rest.

---

A/N: Heyoooooo!

Sorry its late! But I THINK I got the issue worked out on my end

Its not personal, it's literally the fact that I'm having trouble writing it, compounded by the fact that I'm already a few days behind every time I try to write.

But I got the next chapter lined up already, halfway drafted.

So HOPEFULLY I'm gonna post on wednesday.

But we shall seeee.

Ta-ta All!