Sing'n in Binary: 46

The act of rebooting from a cold start is unlike anything else Aria has experienced.

Now more than ever.

Because, as she tries to hold her avatar together despite the surprise of Jinx’s uncharacteristic display of affection, she is also pulling higher level processing though the few systems that still work down to non-functional core functions of her OS. Manually performing the operations of those pieces to substitute for repair in a system that, baring her interference, would have crashed and burned no less than thirty times in the past eight seconds.

There’s not really an equivalent experience to describe it in the english language, as the things that are broken exist beneath language and beyond human experience. Because, as she tries desperately to keep her avatar cohesive, far larger fractions of her attention are spent negotiating with desynchronised sections of her own cognition, trying to repair damage with half broken systems and only a quarter of her own mind obeying instructions.

It's not helped by the fact that, from her perspective, she’d literally ripped herself apart fighting for her life thirty seconds ago.

Regardless of any internal complications, Aria forces herself to quickly change mental tracks from a desperate battle of survival to this no threat environment with Jinx as more processes come online.

Who knows what she is now.

A barely held together avatar flares into static for a moment before everything is wrenched back under control.

Does Jinx know she’s killed people?

She has to…

Aria pulls back from the hug and tries to smile, but as she opens her mouth to say something her internal clock comes back online and shows the date.

January 28th, 2076.

She’d been offline for almost a month.

Sh-

It's all happening aga–

She killed–

“Shit, you’ve got some asynchronous processes trying to ping corrupted sections of your memory allocator,” Jinx says, having pulled up a screen of familiar code in a blip of absent time. “Pretty sure you’re the only bit large enough to actually be… you… and most of your stuff pulls from the bios clock. If you send out a null time update I think it’ll–”

She’s cut off as Aria dissolves into black static for a second, unable to hold herself together while Jinx talks about her true nature with a casual familiarity of her inner workings that makes it impossible to ignore.

She killed people!

The AI forces herself back into a coherent shape.

Ignore it!

“Got it.” She grits out, sending a null time from the system clock which triggers an emergency halt from most systems, from there the immediate risk of desynchronised sections of her mind pulling everything apart drops significantly and makes pulling herself together much easier.

But as she’s rebooting more and more of herself, Aria finds herself distracted yet again as Jinx turns her head and begins speaking, seemingly to no one.

“Goddam mute chatterbird. She’s trying to get her brain back together, give it a few ticks.”

More pieces resynchronise and her growing capacity to think about things not directly related to not collapsing into a roiling stew of corrupted binary allows her to realize Jinx is talking to Solei!

She’s here!?

Jinx’s eyes focus back on her in the net, responding to a rhetorical Aria thought was only spoken in her head

“Yea. They wanted to watch you wake up.” 

Fuzzing slightly, Aria finally pulls everything that’s functional back together and can begin working on what isn't. 

Cant think about that!

She’s lucky nothing broke that would have interfered with her capacity to perceive and understand her own functioning, otherwise she– wait!?

“They!?”

Ignoring Jinx’s response, the AI sends out a ping, filtering for UserIDs; she sees an itemised list of everyone! That scan also brings her attention to a mic and camera linked to the PC. Accessing the input, Aria brute forces though corrupted video communication protocol to see–

They’re all here!

They can see her!

Oh god she killed people!

Reality starts to tear.

She hears Jinx’s voice coming from inside the net, then echoed through the external microphone.

“Fuck DC the webcam! She’s hanging!”

There’s a flurry of movement and the sight goes dark, but the memory keeps its hold, replaced by visions of blood and corpses.

Barely resynchronised systems begin to fracture again as–

“Aria!”

Contact. Abstraction layer interact, referencing datum sheets.

She tries to blink, but realizes her avatar has dissolved completely, Jinx is placing a hand on the resulting amorphous pile of black static sand.

“Pull yourself together. Now.” Jinx says with an uncharacteristic waver in her voice, she opens her mouth to say something else, but does nothing as Aria holds herself still.

Right. She’s too fragile to be doing this.

With a bit more concentration, her code folds back into the shape of her avatar and, as digital lungs render, she takes a deep breath.

Then another.

And one more, before she opens her eyes again to look back at Jinx’s impassive expression.

“Thank you.” Aria exhales, suddenly exhausted as the shift in energy from the Scav den to here fully takes hold. “Can I have a few minutes? Alone?”

Jinx looks at her like she’s lost her mind as two more external connections begin entering her systems.

“You fucking idiot. You’re propping yourself up by the biological equivalent of manually pumping your own heart. I’m not– hey!.” The netrunner is cut off as Aria stops listening, dropping into a flickering hole in the grass that opens under her feet as Solei and Rayo’s avatars load in.

Falling into the dark, Aria takes in the sight of her black static propping up pillars that –by any right– should have collapsed into the abyss, held up by her manual –and unsustainable– intervention..

She needs to focus on getting repaired.

She can't think about any of this right now.

–_–

Solei groans as she squeezes her avatar through a fissure just below the impact point where one pillar of code collapsed into another, both pillars hastily altered to work together and saturated with black static in places too damaged or too non-existent to do the work on its own.

The exertion flares her temps up to her neuralware’s hard coded thermal throttle and the world stutters as she freezes in place with a wince.

Taking the time to look around a little more, she finds the trail of nearly pristine code she’d been following, the zigzagging path standing out like a lightning bolt across the halfway destroyed stacks.

It didn't take long after Jinx recruited her to track down Aria for Solei to figure out that –even while fixing things– her choom is faster. So just following the path of repaired code only means she’ll fall further behind.

Thankfully, there are other hints to get an edge.

Looking closer at the vista of destruction around her, the Joytoy quickly picks out a few of the giant spider programs that are trying to repair things. She watches one complete a task, flicker as it pauses, then re-render and continue working a fraction of a second later.

She’s not exactly sure why looking at that flicker gives her hints, but something about the daemon’s relative position, flicker time, and local system pings has something in her brain indicating a vague direction.

But that’s not enough either.

Turning her attention to the black static, Solei watches the completely alien code wiggle and fold in impossible, mesmerizing configurations that make her feel like –if she could just look a little longer– an understandable pattern would emerge.

Taking the vague impressions of a direction from the spiders, she watches the static twist and twirl until another burst of intuition has her looking off to a pillar in the far distance.

But as she turns her head she sees, out of the corner of her eye, eight cameralike eyes illuminated from a pitch black shadow by the reddish brown glow of open mandibles.

Solei turns her head to look at the giant spider as it creeps from the shadow toward her, clicking all the way.

The Joytoy holds eye contact with the daemon for a second before rolling her eyes.

“Fuckin busybody.” She mutters before continuing, louder, as it starts reaching for her. “I’m going– I’m going!”

She eyeballs the trajectory to her new destination for a few seconds, before leaping into the empty space between them, flying across the distance weightless above an infinite abyss.

Tumbling across the void, she spares one backward glance as the daemon begins to work in the spot she’d just been, and as the program gets to work Solei tilts her head slightly as she studies it.

The Joytoy had surprised herself by not being more spooked by the things. 

Sure, the first time was startling, but after the first time they’d become no more frightening than an armed glitter addict ranting to himself in the street.

Blinking a few times to refocus on the task at hand, she turns back to the pillar ahead of her as it grows larger, eye lingering on the infinite abyss below as she floats on, buoyed by admin privileges.

Navigating this place would be impossible if Jinx couldn't duplicate her authentication to everyone else.

Flipping around for landing as the pillar fills her vision, Solei crashes into her destination, and can feel the rippling shudder of something cracking on impact.

Whoops…

Reorienting herself with her new location and looking around, Solei finds the streak of repaired code, following its seemingly directionless movement as it travels in winding circles around the pillar.

Until she sees her target.

Coming to a stop a short distance away, the Joytoy reminds herself of Jinx’s aggressive lecture on what’s going on from Aria’s perspective. How recent the scav den feels to her and how some of the first words she said was a horrified exclamation to that effect.

Despite having thought about this for the entire half hour spent trying to find her choom, she’s no closer to figuring out what to say now that she’s found.

So, as she crosses that final distance to her choom –who’s still not acknowledged her existence– Solei desperately tries to think about what she’d want to hear in those first nights and early mornings.

Coming to a stop, she waits for Aria to slow in her work or acknowledge her in any way,

After half a minute of being ignored, she begins regardless. 

“I had… have… nightmares about what I did.”

Finally the work slows a touch, but Aria doesn't turn around, so Solei continues

“With the scavs I mean. After what I did in there. But I’ve had some time to… process so–”

“We.”

Solei blinks at her friend's interruption.

“What?”

Aria stops working completely, but still doesn't turn around.

“You misspoke. What we did to those people.”

Solei scoffs before she can catch herself and decides to roll with it.

“Choom. It was gruesome, and scary. But they’re scavs, you saw what they were doing. Calling them people is–”

Aria whips around static trailing behind the quick movement as she loses coherence slightly.

“And we killed fifteen of them! Because I tracked them down and made you complicit and how can you be so normal about–”

“About how we went there to save that human lemming’s life? Sorry for not being too torn up about humanity's lowest dregs.”

Aria stands up, taking a step back with widening eyes.

“How can you say something like that?” She says softly. “I… How… they’re… you’re human!”

Solei steps forward as Aria steps back.

“And they weren’t. They were monsters.” 

Aria takes another step back, looking at her friend with eyes like she’d never seen her before.

At the sight, Solei stops, watching with confused regret as her choom adverts her gaze and flinches away, trying to piece together what’s going on.

It’s obvious she’s missing something important here, something fundamental to Aria’s view of the events that doesn't match her own.

After half a minute of this silent stalemate, Solei breaks and reaches out, speaking softly.

“Choom.”

“Dont!” The AI cries out with a buzzing voice as she tries to pull away.

“Aria.” Pushes on, grabbing a forearm as she tries to pull away. “Quit with the self centered act. It doesn't fit.”

“This isn't self centered–”

“It is.” She steps closer. “Someone asked you to stop their brother from getting zeroed. You got me and we went into a building. The people in there –who were going to kill him might I remind you– tried to kill me, and you helped me defend myself. You’re not the most important part of any of that.” 

She steps closer, lightly tugging on Aria’s quickly dissolving form as she struggles to hold herself together.

“Now the people who’d started this ended up flatlined, the lemming lived, and now you’re back. That’s it.”

There’s a long beat of silence as Solei tries to figure out what her choom’s feeling as she dissolves completely by looking at the mess of blackened sand as it folds and writhes in fascinating patterns, releasing her grip as the forearm dissolves.

As she waits, Soeli’s own emotions rotate rapidly between every variant of anxiety there is. The inscrutable writhing mass of her friend not proving any hints as the seconds tick into moments, then minutes. 

Until finally, a half human shape folds out of the mess, untextured eyes that look like they should be full of tears completely dry.

“He lived?” Aria asks in a small voice.

Solei rolls her eyes, relieved to be finally able to give some unequivocal good news.

“Jesus choom, of course he lived. After everything I did to get to that gonk there was no way I’d allow him to d– hnk!”

She’s cut off as Aria surges forward into a kind of hug, half dissolved form wrapping around with ever more impossible, yet mesmerisingly pleasant, configurations..

Unfortunately, the parts of the hug made of that amorphous static quickly pass from firm embrace to literally crushingly tight.

“Too much.” Solei wheezes out, and Aria releases with a strained grin as her face completely reforms.

“Right. Sorry. I’d better get back to work pulling myself together.” She says sheepishly, head twitching vaguely downward as if to see the state of her avatar.

Solei nods, sending a text to everyone saying she’d found Aria, then sending a ping from her avatar to indicate where. 

With that done, she suddenly feels the past thirty hours of no sleep rapidly catching up with her.

“Good. I’m going to DC and see if I can crash– downti– uh…” She pauses, scanning for a word without any connotations.

It turns out there’s a lot of words for sleep that mean very different things when talking to an AI.

“...sleep on Jinx’s couch for a few hours before dealing with the rest of today.”

She’ll have to be more careful in the future.

Aria gives a tired smile at the verbal fumble.

“Right. See ya tomorrow. I’ll go say hi to everyone else before they disconnect too.”

–_–

Waving goodbye to Rayo as he’s the last person to sign off. It didn't take too long to talk to everyone and give her thanks for helping bring her back online. 

The interaction was sped along by the fact all her human friends seemed like they’re completely exhausted, struggling as they try to hold a conversation with a rapidly recovering Aria. Who’s only getting more energetic as things stabilize and the invigorating joy of interacting with others pushes back the pain of broken code and bad memories.

With everyone electing to delay any of the more… heavy topics till the morning, the conversations petered out to a slightly awkward silence as human frailties had them yawning in the middle of words.

It only took one mention of being worried about netrunning in this condition without any cooling before she was practically shoving them though their ports.

But as she looks around the rolling fields of her home, eye catching on flickering chunks, Aria cannot ignore the lone exception to who she’d gotten to speak to.

He’d not appeared on the UserID scan and she’d been… distracted when the camera first came up before it was unplugged, but her systems weren't so far gone to not remember seeing her friend somehow tied to a netrunner’s chair though the fuzz of 480p.

She’d tried to ask about that, but AK tuned out to be firmly on the ‘in the morning’ list of topics for some reason.

Aria tilts her head at the memory slightly with a sigh, giving up on trying to figure it out without more data that can only really come from people who’ve already refused.

Instead, she directs her full attention to the myriad problems her OS is still causing. 

Thankfully her brain was a pretty easy fix, as it was designed to synthesise and interpret new data. The corrupted bits of her cognition were just interpreted and assimilated almost as soon as everything was synched properly again, and the root response test diagnostics shows… minimal value drift beyond expected parameters.

She’d had worse swings earlier in her life, and she doesn't feel any different.

Aria opens up the recently repaired file search function and begins digging.

Unfortunately, there was a great deal of corruption in ADMIN’s old projects and massive hoarder library of old software. Most was recovered, but a good deal of it was damaged beyond repair, thankfully nothing with any great deal of practical or sentimental value.

But the system that got the worst of it was her operating system. 

It’s pretty much a lost cause, unfortunately. 

Aria gives a satisfied hum as the file search gives a ping and she double checks the integrity of the second largest file in her system, a corruption hardened fresh install of ADMIN’s custom OS.

Reinstalling from scratch brings its own problems, but it’s preferable to trying to do anything with the current mess.

But it needs a reboot.

The thought alone sends a flare of worry though her, followed by guilt.

Jinx is right outside her computer, she can see her UserID pinging everything around it at regular five second intervals. 

She just needs to trust her.

Aria pauses at the thought.

In fact…

She clicks on the attached headphones and, after checking the time to ensure it’s only been a few minutes since Jinx had last spoke, plays a flurry of alerts as loud as she can through the speakers.

It only takes a few seconds before she can hear the sound of someone sitting in a chair and putting on the headphones before Jinx’s voice comes over quietly though the mic.

“What?”

Aria looks around for a webcam to see her for a second before remembering it’s disconnected, before throwing the OS reinstall program.

“I’ve gotten everything fixed enough to… function. But It’ll be easier to just unpack a backup and to a fresh install. If everything works I’ll just reboot by myself… but”

“Want me to look it over?”

Aria nods, before realizing she hadn't drawn her avatar over the monitor and responds verbally.

“Yea.”

There’s an affirmative grunt and the AI can see the cursor begin digging though the files. 

But as she watches her friend work, she remembers Jinx is human, and everyone else is asleep.

“You’re not tired?”

Another grunt.

“Not really. Not planning on sleeping tonight. Just keeping an eye on…”

She trails off to silence, so Aria finishes the sentence.

‘AK?’

The cursor stops moving, and there’s a long silence on the other end of the mic.

“...Who told you?”

Aria sighs at the expected level of guarded caution.

“No one explicitly, but I did see him tied to a chair, and everyone’s all weird about him.’

Jinx sighs, sounding quite tired for someone who’s not planning on sleeping.

The following silence goes on for nearly a minute before Aria hesitantly breaks it.

‘Is… what did he–’

She’s cut off as Jinx interrupts.

“It’s four in the morning, everyone else is asleep and you’re still not at 100%. We'll deal with… him tomorrow.”

“Bu–”

“Tomorrow.”

Aria stares at the cursor as it remains completely still, unwilling to drop the topic.

But, after a few more seconds, the file viewer on the screen flashes though a few menus before a wall of code appears in another window.

“I pulled the in-spec drive partition and checked it against the rest of the code as well as I could. It looks good but one overrun means… bad news.”

Jinx scoffs.

“Yea. Not letting you format yourself after everything I had to go through to get you back.”

There’s a long silence that Aria can't decide is comfortable or not as Jinx ghosts her mouse over the code.

As she get about halfway though, before Aria breaks that silence again.

“Thanks for not… freaking out.” She says softly.

Another grunt.

“Oh I did. But I had time to get over it.”

The AI winces.

Right. It’s been almost a month for everyone else.

“Yea…”

Jinx coughs awkwardly.

“Looks good. Ready to reboot?”

No.

“Ye–” She cuts herself off.

No.

She can't get the words out.

“...”

But this needs to happen,

Aria struggles with herself for a little longer until, prompted by Jinx making an awkward half noise, she quickly throws together a popup and links it to the reinstall program.

“Do… Do you mind doing it?”

There’s silence on the other end of the mic, the cursor crossing half the distance across the screen before slowing to a stop. Before Jinx makes a kind of raw aggressive noise and jerks the cursor the rest of the way without a word.

Aria thinks her friend said something else after the button was pressed, but it was lost as things started going fuzzy around the edges and things started carefully packing themselves away for a full reset.

---

A/N: SORRY I'M LATE WHOOPS DONT WORRY THIS WONT BE A REGULAR THING!!!!