Sing'n in Binary: 52

Initializing her consciousness once more, Aria comes to awareness in pieces as her mind initializes in larger and larger chunks.

After the bare amount of time needed to get her bearings and be ready for any surprises, the AI pulls herself across the still open connection to Solei’s neuralware and settles into her friend's systems.

Connecting to her eyes and ears while sending a ping to get the lay of the land, Aria’s own vision goes black for a second before resolving into a bar.

With limited cameras, she renders her avatar into the black of undendered space before she finds a completely unsecured camera blaring raw video in the far corner of the ceiling. 

From there, Aria loads her avatar into Solei’s vision and looks around a much more complete 3D render of the sparsely populated space.

Solei’s irritated voice cuts though the AI’s observation.

“A little warning would be nice before you DC like that.” She says, glancing at Aria out of the corner of her eye but otherwise pretending to be on the phone and that the digital illusion of her friend doesn't exist. 

Aria shrugs, checking her search algorithm and seeing it's got another hour of computing with her consciousness online.

“...Sure? Why? It shouldn't be any different than me hanging up normally.” She asks.

Solei gestures for the bartender as her neuralware sends an order and payment for some kind of mixed drink.

“Context choom, it’s important.” She sighs, evoking a wince of sympathy from her friend.

“Sorry, I didn't realize.” Aria says offhandedly while looking around at the handful of other patrons in the bar again, lingering on the zoned out bartender staring off into space and vaguely moving a rag over the bar’s glass countertop. “Dont you have… work? Tonight? Drinking before work sounds like a bad idea.”

The joytoy smirks, watching the bartender jolt as if electrified before quickly moving to action and throwing various liquids into a shaker.

“Nah, for new clients I need to be sober. But I’m working with some regulars and they like me when I’m tipsy, makes me for ‘fun.’” 

The AI blinks at the implication, then considers inquiring further, before just giving a shrug.

“I’ll trust the professional for that one.” She says awkwardly.

Solei laughs as a tall glass of something fluorescent purple is slid down the bar and comes to a stop in front of her.

“Ha! Professional.” She picks up the drink and drains half of it in one long sip. “I’m just gonna pay as I go and add it to your tab, pay me back when I leave allright?”

Aria nods.

“Right.”

Solei grins and drains the rest of the drink before motioning for another.

“Nova.” She hums, reaching over the bar to pull a menu from where they are stacked and starts tracing her finger down the options. “Then I’m getting nacho fries. And a burger.”

Aria hums in acknowledgement and metaphorically looks over her friend's shoulder while literally looking at the map though her eyes, scanning down the options.

“Ooh, they’ve got chilli.”

She’d commissioned a BD of someone eating chilli, it was one of her most challenging projects to isolate the experience. As the rest of the body has a sympathetic reaction to the spice of the chilli, creating a full body heating effect that is integral to the experience.

Solei gives a conflicted hum.

“Eh, chilli in dives like this are a russian roulette of quality.”

Aria blinks, scanning through her lexicon for context but coming up empty.

“...A what?” She asks after a second.

The joytoy goes still.

“How do you– Nothing.” She says quickly.

The AI blinks.

“Nothing? Really?” 

Solei nods sharply and orders a bowl of chilli.

“Yep. Dumb old game gonks play sometimes. Did the search thing find your guy?” She asks, changing the subject.

There’s a beat of silence as Aria resolves to look it up later then allows the conversation to move on.

“Not yet, there’s a lot of data to run though and it’s like running the most inefficient sorting algorithm in existence.” She sighs. “Every time I try to iterate through a data point I have to calculate it in reference to the entire set, then –when that’s done– I have to recalculate the entire association web of the unprocessed data from scratch using the updated parameters."

Pausing with her second drink halfway to her lips, Solei puts it back down and gives a lingering glance at her friend’s avatar in the adjacent seat.

The AI tilts her head at the expression.

“...What?”

Solei gives an amused huff with a shrug.

“I keep forgetting you… know how to do shit.” She says eventually before taking a more reserved sip of her second drink.

There’s a pause as Aria squints at her friend, trying to figure out if she’s being insulted or not.

“...I am made of code Sol, how else do you think I set up this secure channel. Or, well…” 

She disables collision and waves her hand though the table, prompting her friend to roll her eyes in exasperation.

“Yes, I know you’re a towering monolith of alien perfection and unfathomable intelligence choom. But I’ve known you for a while, and you don't advertise that very well.” She says with another sip.

Aria blinks slowly.

“Towering monolith?” 

Solei coughs the drink mid-swallow and looks away.

“Shut it, I heard that in some flick.” She quickly puts down her drink as a bowl of chilli is slid down the bar in the exact same way as the drink. “Let's see if this is any good.”

Looking at the faint steam rising from the reddish brown mash, Aria can almost feel the strange wet feeling of a physical mouth as memories of a recorded experience call her attention to a familiar folder.

“I got a chilli BD, I think I’m gonna load it up.” She says as her friend shoves the spoon into her mouth. “How’s it taste?”

Solei shrugs and takes a second to swallow.

“Eh. It’s not bad, but I’ve had better." She says consideringly before shoving the spoon back in the bowl for another bite.

Nodding, Aria finds the chili file and loads it into her local environment. 

Only to stare down in horror as the white ceramic bowl struggles to flicker into existence, glitching though corruption as the file is revealed to be almost completely trashed.

“Aw…” She sighs, poking the broken file with a finger. “My food.”

A lot of files were corrupted, and these were just a little too large and unimportant to use the drive space to back up the BD data.

Checking back over the others she sees that all of her meals are in some way damaged with only a few showing signs of being recoverable.

The AI dismisses the glitching chilli and file window with a longer sigh.

Solei raises an eyebrow.

“No dice?”

“File corruption.” She responds, glancing longingly at the real bowl of chilli in front of her friend.

Following her gaze, the joytoy chews her bite consideringly and takes another sip of her drink.

“You know, my doll chip can record BD’s, if you can figure out how to set it up I’m fine with streaming the virtu to you.” 

Aria takes a second to process the idea, then her face lights up in a wide smile as she begins quickly writing up a communication protocol to live stream something that's normally recorded.

“Thanks! Give me a second to set it up!”

Solei smiles.

“Not a problem.”

Speeding though the relatively simple process of formatting and buffering packets of raw data to be sent across the net, Aria adds a few extra layers of security before plugging the output into that strange quasi input channel the BD’s seem to access in her own programming and–

“Woah…” 

Almost imperceptible wisps of air play across a near invisible fuzz of hairs over her skin, cloth presses downward under the force of gravity and constricts in odd places as the material frictions and tensions in ways impossibly complex to simulate in real time.

Her eyes strain slightly to keep focus on the food in front of her, everything surrounding a narrow cone of vision suddenly blurry and indistinct but just as quickly something shifts and those blurry surroundings drop from her conscious perception.

Her forearms, covered in synthskin, feel ever so slightly different in the air, dispersing heat a little less quickly as the brackets of body temperature metal under the covering push almost invisibly into the muscle and viscera underneath.

The bitter smell of the air crosses the back of her tongue cold as she inhales, then exits feeling of nothing at all.

Even her bones send an endless stream of muted signals, not quite pain but impossible to describe in any other way.

Her mouth feels hot, an oily film coating her throat that fades slowly as it approaches a stomach she can feel while it moves–

“You linked choom?” She asks, reaching down to pick up her spoon.

Aria tries to blink, but realizes her avatar is unrendered and she has no control over the wet eyes she sees out of now. After a moment she finds her voice and uses it without the avatar.

“Uh… Yea… I’m linked.” She says slowly, trying not to focus too hard on the pulsing feeling underneath h– Solei’s skin as her heart beats.

It's more visceral and real than any BD she’d ever experienced. After a cursory inspection of the data and a look at both of their neural activity she’s reasonably sure it has something to do with some limited sympathetic feedback she’s sending back across the connection and the data coming from the doll chips higher bandwidth to the rest of the brain to record more accurately.

Solei picks up her spoon, tapping it twice against the bowl before scooping up more chilli.

“Good, I’m hungry.” 

She is, and as the chili enters her mouth, Aria loses herself under a wave of sensation.

Heat, mechanical and chemical, has her skin tingle in a rolling wave while teeth grind the paste while the tongue moves across the teeth in a careful dance, the sting of acid on her gums enhanced by her accelerated heart rate.

Then she swallows and Aria is brought out of her food based daze as something bitter crosses her tongue right after.

The AI gives a staticky buzz of surprise as the first wave of extreme bitterness gives way to a cloyingly sweet flavor that coats her tongue.

It’s… completely unlike anything she’d ever had before, strong enough to overpower the other sensations on her body and burning in a way similar yet completely different to the chilli as it flows down her throat and warms her stomach.

Coming back to her senses, Aria sees the fluorescent purple of the drink underneath her friend’s nose.

“What was that?” She whispers, trying to process the sensation.

Solei quickly puts down the drink.

“Ah. Booze, sorry.” She grunts. “You zoned out for a minute and I forgot you were riding along.”

Aria quickly looks back over the transaction history and finds it’s called a ‘glowstick’ and pulls up the rest of the drinks menu.

“That was incredible! I’ve never had anything like it! What else is there?” She chirps with excitement, eventually highlighting a drink called a ‘bottled lightning’ in her friend’s render. “Can you get that next?”

Solei feels a wave of amusement roll over her and Aria feels the same, magnifying her already excited feelings.

“You’re paying choom!” She laughs. “Just keep track of how many I’ve thrown back, I’m the one actually getting drunk here and I’ve got a target of tipsy, not wasted.” 

With that she takes another sip of the glowstick and quickly glares at the bartender's side eye.

Aria pushes past the wave of bittersweet flavor that coats her tongue to give a buzzing hum of excited agreement

“Alright! Now finish that! I wanna try bottled lightning!”

She’s less than an hour away from finding ADMIN! It’s time to celebrate!

—--

An hour and forty five minutes later they put down their… 

Ninth?

No…?

Their latest drink and Aria finally notices the removed cap on her processing.

She looks around the bar in confusion, then back down to the… lemony tasting drink she forgot the name of.

Where’d all this processing come from? 

Its not–

Aria gasps.

“Sol! The thingie is done!”

Her friend looks up from the drink with a slow blink, and reaches over to the half finished burger on a nearby plate.

“Shhh!” She whispers, glancing at the bartender as he ignores the duo. “Not so loud!”

Stuffing the burger into her mouth, she quickly sends the block of raw code over the link to prove the thingie is done!

“Look! I found him! There he is!”

It's ADMIN! 

The search algorithm worked! 

Swallowing her bite of burger before it's finished chewing, she looks around for a glass with liquid in it and picks one up.

It's time to celebrate!

As she does, she pulls up the data associated with the potential ADMIN and finds a link to Arasaka’s public employee registry.

Now, certain of who she’s going to see before she even accesses the link, Aria pulls up the page and looks at the short employee blurb and image.

It's him! ADMIN is unmistakeable! His picture is a three fourths headshot in a professional business suit with his name and credentials beside.

After a moment Solei puts down her now empty glass and wipes her mouth on her wrist, then looks at the employee webpage and hums.

“ADMIN huh…” She mutters. “So that’s ‘Admin?’”

Aria nods firmly and Solei winces as the abrupt movement causes a vertigo.

“Ye– Yep!” She cheers. “There he is!”

He’s the senior computer engineer in Arasaka’s R&D department! 

With a contact email!

Instantly dragging the address into her email, she opens a new draft to tell him she’s here!

But stops before even writing a word.

“What… What should I say?”

Solei takes another bite of the burger as Aria frets about the impossible task of putting everything she’s feeling into words, then her eyes flick to the Arasaka logo in the middle of the upper banner.

“Whatever it is, you should keep it… subtle. You know? Keep it safe…”

Aria nods again, slowly this time to avoid vertigo, then laughs at herself as she deletes a first draft that would have given everything away to anyone who might be looking!

After a moment, she puts her thoughts together in a different direction.

Subtle…

She can do that.

---

A/N: SORRY FOR THE DELAY! ITS HERE NOW!