Sing'n in Binary: 45

Thudding her fist against the door, Solei has to restrain herself from trying to shoot out the lock as nothing happens for the first few seconds.

Thankfully, after a few more seconds and another session of banging on the door until the heel of her palm starts to hurt, she hears the buzzing click of locks disengaging.

The lock looks armored anyway.

Throwing the door open, she storms in like a whirlwind, eyes taking in the scene around her as she scans for the object of her rage.

Ignoring Jinx standing on the opposite side of the room steadily pointing a gun at her, Solei sees the familiar back of AK’s head sitting in a netrunning chair and she stomps around the seat to look at him, waving for Jinx to put the gun away.

“Cut that shit out. I can deal with you after… I…”

She trails off, taking in the state of the human shaped slab of betrayal in the chair.

Namely, her attention is drawn to the fact that he’s duct taped to the chair, multiple loops of tape wrapped around every joint with a few more covering his mouth for good measure.

As wild eyes look back at her she can see the lump in his cover mouth that, from the muffled distortion of his attempts to shout, could only come from either a dish towel or a sock being stuffed in there.

Solei glances back at Jinx with a smirk, fury momentarily delayed.

Jinx sighs as she lowers her gun.

“Shut up, He wouldn't stop screaming.”

Nodding at the sensible decision, Solei looks back at the… person as surprise at his current state fades, allowing more persistent emotions to come to a fore..

AK grunts as his nose crumbles, the unmoving metal headrest providing a perfect backstop to ensure maximum force transfer as Solei slams a fist into his face.

“The fuck is wrong with you?!” She screams, voice cracking as she shakes out her hand.

Before her other fist hits him in the jaw, tearing the tape holding his head to the chair slightly as his head snaps to the right.

“What were you thinking!?”

Her other fist gets another shot and his head snaps in the other direction before Solei pauses and takes a step back, panting. 

This isnt working.

She spins around to look at Jinx.

“I need a hammer, or a bat or something.”

She’s going to beat the stupid out of him if it’s the last thing he does!

Jinx doesn't respond for a second as she holsters her iron, a mildly uncomfortable expression crossing her face as she takes a moment to formulate a response.

“...I’d recommend no more blows to the head, and reopening at least one of his airways. I gave him a shot of neuroblockers for a concussion and head trauma while on neuroblockers is… very hazardous.”

Jinx’s train of thought stutters, blinking a few times as she tries to parse the seemingly incoherent non sequitur.

Wasn’t she trying to zero this bitch ten minutes ago?

Solei jabs a finger at the waste of oxygen.

“Who cares? Maybe it’ll knock loose whatever the fuck is wrong with him!”

AK makes a desperate choking noise, prompting Solei to look back down.

“Shut up!”

Unfortunately, with most of her immediate anger worked out of her system, Solei finds herself feeling aimless with what to do next.

Breathing heavily, she finds herself looking between the slowly choking traitor and Jinx, and notices her eye catching on Aria’s PC, sitting quietly on the desk.

The joytoy takes a deep breath and steadies herself.

Does she want him dead? 

Solei considers the idea.

…Maybe…

He’s one of her oldest chooms, despite everything, so not really.

Would Aria want him dead?

She sighs, tilting her head up to the ceiling with a groan.

That question doesn't really bear asking.

Looking back at AK, she starts tugging on the duct tape.

“Help me with this? He’s choking on his own blood here.”

She’s about halfway through getting his mouth uncovered before Jinx crosses the room with a box cutter in hand and roughly removes the remaining tape and wadding.

He’s either smart enough or oxygen starved enough to not use his new ability to speak.

With AK no longer actively dying, Jinx snaps the box cutter closed and turns away as Solei steps back as well.

Aria’s PC looms in the background.

She deserves a say in what happens here, until then, they’re at an impasse.

“How long until you can get her awake?” Solei asks, ensuring AK is breathing.

Jinx pauses, slowing to a stop just as she started to make her way toward the kitchen.

“Tonight, early morning tomorrow at the latest.”

Solei stares for a few seconds, waiting for further exclamation. Seeing none forthcoming, she turns fully to face the netrunner.

“...That’s not what you told Ray.”

Jinx turns around as well, a perfectly neutral expression on her face.

“I was lying.”

There’s another beat of silence, a battle where each side baits the other to break first.

Solei blinks, slowly.

“What changed your mind?”

Something flashes across Jinx’s face, a rolling twitch that travels down her spine.

“None of your business.” She snaps, evasiveness in her tone so obvious it almost feels like a double bluff.

Solei snorts.

“Whatever, as long as you don't flip back. I just had someone try to kill my choom and I’m–”

“I wasn't going to kill her,” she interrupts, her voice a confusing mix of emotions cast in a defensive slant. “I was buffering the repair to look for more information. I found it.”

Jinx does another full body shudder, eye fluttering as Solei stares back impassively.

But as they’re formulating what they’re about to say next, both twitch at the sound of polite knocking at the door and Rayo’s voice coming from the other side.

“Hello? Anyone in there? I have a cab idling downstairs if we need to move a body, but I’d prefer not to.”

—--

“Just think for a second! You’re all puppets! You have to see past the programming! None of you would ever do this normally!”

Rayo winces back as Edd’s screaming rant enters its fourth minute, an incoherent diatribe insulting everyone in one sentence and begging them for help in another.

“Please!”

He’s not making a very good case for his position of being ‘the only sane one here.’

As the others grill him to make sure Edd didn't do anything else in a paranoid fervor, Ray sends off a polite text to some of Edd’s chooms asking about the music he’s been selling.

“You can't do this! If you let her out she’ll win and spread her influence with you as mindless zombies until Netwatch catches on! Then they’ll erase you until there's nothing left but a hole in the world where your life used to be!”

Apparently Aria ‘manipulated’ him into selling her music which –according to Edd– has some kind of mind control brain worm.

“You all listened to her music right? My neuralware is offline right now but if we can just go to a ripper I can show you the sonographs!”

There’s a desperate silence as AK looks around for any sympathetic or considering expressions.

There aren't any.

Solei opens her eyes, continuing to rub her temples in a vain attempt to stave off a fast approaching headache.

“Didn't you just say you couldn't find anything weird in those?”

AK’s hopeful expression falls so quickly it’s almost comical.

“You don't get it! I know you’ve been programmed because I feel the programming in me!”

There’s a confused silence as everyone waits for what he just said to make any kind of sense.

After another second Jinx chimes in from across the room, already getting started on installing the components in the PC.

“And what does this… programming feel like?”

At the question, AK looks around triumphant, as if realizing what he’s about to say is guaranteed to convince them he’s right.

He leans forward as much as he’s able with everything below the neck being taped to a chair.

“It’s this voice. In my head. It sounds exactly like me but it’s not, and it’s screaming, even right now, that what I was doing is wrong and telling me to help you puppets wake h- it up!”

Looking around again, his triumphant expression grows stronger as everyone looks back at him with slowly growing concern written on their faces.

Then Jinx chimes in from across the room again.

“...That’s called guilt bitflip.”

It’s at this point that Ray looks at Edd, really looks at him, and underneath the mottled bruising and dried blood covering his face, he sees the telltale markers of exhaustion.

“When was the last time you slept choom?”

—--

Double checking the integrity of the duct tape and ensuring AK isn't going to drown in his blood while he sleeps, Solei steps away, pushes a bunch of dirty clothes off a chair and onto the floor, before moving the libertated seat closer to everyone else and sitting down.

Without his biomon to counteract the shot morphine –accompanied by more neuroblockers– AK had fallen asleep almost instantly. 

The silence, however, proves to be a double edged sword, as without his conspiratorial ramblings there’s nothing to fill the silence as Jinx works away. 

With a minimum time needed to be spent here being nine hours.

And as much as she’d like to leave, she’d have to come back anyways, and no one else looks like they’re trying to head out. 

So she’s stuck.

Solei feels herself starting to crack in the first ten minutes.

Thankfully, just as the silence becomes unbearable, Ray suddenly looks around and claps his hands lightly to not disturb Jinx as she works.

“Whelp, I'm bored. And hungry. Takeout anyone?”

His answer is silence. Undeterred, Ray’s eyes flick around in a familiar pattern of someone scrolling through menus in their neuralware.

“Well, I’m getting some, and anybody who doesn't want me to choose for them better speak up.”

Ten minutes of arguing later, Ray is on the phone, relaying everyone’s orders to a nearby ramen place.

—--

Eating their takeout in silence, Solei watches on with fascinated disgust as Davis stuffs more of what she has coined “health mash” into his face. 

The mash consists of potato noodles in a shallow puddle of miso and an expensive salad-like mixture of vegetables piled on top. Capped by two boiled eggs and completely absent of any mushrooms.

She slurps some of her noodles and gestures at her choom with chopsticks.

“What’s with the potato by the way? I thought wheat was fine for you?”

Davis nods.

“Yea, most of the time. Just trying to get my heavy metal levels down this month.”

Solei nods and Jinx finds herself distracted by the absurdity of that statement, expecting someone else to call him out on it.

No one does, eating in silence.

After a minute she puts down her microsodder with a sigh and turns around.

“The fuck are you spamming? Your blood filter not working?”

Both Ray and Solei make an amused coughing noise as they’re reminded Jinx exists.

Davis ignores them as he answers the question.

“Nope, blood filter works fine, got a pretty good one actually. But my mercury and cadmium levels were getting a bit high so I had to cut back before it got into my bones.”

Jinx stares for a second longer, double checking her currently active barebones conversation suite to ensure she’s not missing something, before dismissing the entire interaction and getting back to work.

Ray calls out as she starts to turn.

“You’ve got a bowl over here if you’re hungry. Spicy chicken and vegi.”

Jinx ignores them as she picks up her sodder and plastic glue.

—--

Ray looks up from his finished bowl, placing it back in the plastic bag the takeout came in, and verbalizes what he’d been musing on for a past few minutes.

“You know… we really should have seen this coming.”

His chooms look over.

“With AK, I mean. Remember when he accidentally scratched that Tyger’s car?”

Two extremely different faces run though the exact same series of expressions, irritation turning to begrudging amusement at the memory of their choom’s panicked spiral into conspiratorial paranoia.

Solei unconsciously runs her fingers over a lightened patch of scarred skin on her exposed stomach.

“Oh yea! He shot me! After game night too.” She says indignantly, eyes distant as she recalls the comedy of errors from a few years back. “I can't believe I forgot about that…”

Jinx puts down her empty bowl and places her head in her hands with a groan.

“...Why do you keep him around?”

Everyone’s face twists into an uncomfortable expression at the idea and it takes a few seconds for Solei to form an answer.

“Well… in his defence it is pretty funny in hindsight.”

The thought of dropping one of their oldest chooms brings the flow of conversation to a sudden halt, awkward air chilling the mood.

After a few seconds Davis speaks up.

“Whatever happened to game night anyway?”

—--

“About fifteen to twenty nanograms, though it’s higher right now.”

Jinx stares at Davis’s ambiguous blur of features as he takes a sip from a metal water bottle.

“You’re full of shit. That’s not possible.”

Her tap water has more mercury than that, and she paid good money for her filters!

The meathead rescrews the cap and her neuralware pings an offered transfer request for a spreadsheet named ‘nutrition.’

“Well it’s not easy. But I’ve got a system worked out that keeps my levels down.”

Ignoring the offered file, Jinx pretends to accept the transfer and piggybacks off the connection to breach his neuralware and access his biomon directly as Solei slaps the gonk on the back and chimes in.

“Oh! Oh! Tell her your steroid mix! Tell her!” She says with barely restrained laughter.

Davis huffs.

“I don't take any kind of steroid or similar stimulant.”

Jinx almost stumbles at the dry statement, ignoring it as he’s clearly lying.

But as she breaches the biomon, she finds it…

Perfectly normal?

Reporting the exact same things the meathead was telling her?

She blinks a few times, looking the freak of nature up and down as she eventually opens the offered spreadsheet and scans it over.

“The fuck is wong with you?” She asks eventually.

Davis rubs the back of his neck.

“I like taking care of my health.”“He’s a massive hypochondriac.” He and Solei say at the same time, talking over each other before the meathead glances over with a small frown.

—--

Waking up slowly with a massive headache, AK runs a tongue around his mouth to clear the awful taste of iron from and it finds he’s missing at least one tooth.

He groans as he opens his eyes and the light feels like knives, alerting everyone else that he’s awake.

After a second, he can hear Ray’s voice though the floaty cotton feeling of coming off neuroblockers.

“You feeling better?” 

“No.” He whispers.

““Good”” Rayo and Solei respond in stereo.

AK winces at the bluntness, mind sluggishly getting into gear to try and figure out what’s going on. 

He’s not dead… so….

“Wanted me to be awake for it?” He half asks.

Solei gives a pained groan as Davis gets up and starts roughly removing the duck tape holding him to the chair.

“Choom. We’re not killing you. Everyone wants to kick the shit out of you right now. But this?” She gestures to the scene around them. “Isn't even in the top ten of the most stupid things we’ve all done.”

Davis roughly finishes removing the last of the tape and pulls AK to his feet as Solei continues.

“Definitely doesn't come anywhere close to the most harmful. No one even got hurt.”

Davis winds back a fist.

“No one who didn't deserve it.”

—--

Double checking to ensure everything is connected as well as she can tell with her eyes, Jinx plugs a thumb drive into the motherboard and boots the computer.

The sound of fans kicking on has everyone go quiet and look over to where Jinx is turning walking toward them.

Rayo speaks first.

“Is it done?”

Jinx shakes her head.

“Nah. Components are installed, but I still need to run the stress test, especially with how hard Aria seems to like pushing her systems.”

AK flinches at the mention of Aria’s name and everyone’s eyeline tracker flickers toward him.

Jinx adjusts her shirt to more easily access her iron from her waistband.

He holds up his hands.

“Hey, I dont got a death wi– I know when I’m beat.” He says with a sigh and a familiar tone, like a man kneeling at the edge of a pier with a gun to the back of his head and looking out to the ocean. “Just…”

He looks at Jinx.

“Sol talked about you, I know you had similar thoughts to me at the start. But you actively helped with all this. What changed your mind?”

Jinx stares him down. Unfortunately she doesn't have a satisfactory answer. 

Because she has no fucking idea if any of this is a good idea.

But she’s not giving him the satisfaction. 

Davis interrupts with a cough, half raising a hand like he’s in a classroom.

Jinx sighs.

“The fuck are you doing?”

The meathead slowly lowers his hand and has to be prompted with a ‘hurry up’ gesture from Jinx before he starts talking.

“So… I’ve been doing some reading on how AI think, the whole ‘it’s smarter than every human in all of history’ problem.” He says in air quotes. “And the more I learn, the more I’m thinking. Why worry?”

Everyone stares, so Davis continues.

“Well. I mean. If she’s so smart everything is a perfectly crafted plan to make us do whatever she wants then we cant do anything to stop her, if she isn't that smart we can outhink her, and if she is but she’s still… Aria, then it’s not really a problem either.”

He rubs his face, sighing.

“Did any of that make sense? I’m supposed to be in bed already, not explaining it well.”

Jinx stares at the meathead, mind trying to process the statement to find the obvious error in his logic.

…It’s taking a second.

As the silence after his words stretches into the half minute mark, she notices Solei’s attention swapping rapidly between everyone's faces more and more quickly before she lets out an exasperated sigh.

“Seriously choom. Where was that three weeks ago?”

—--

It’s done.

Solei, does one last visual inspection on all the components before the aluminum plate is remounted to the chassis. At the sight of her finger tightening the screws in the panel has everyone making their way over to the workstation as an ancient monitor and keyboard setup is connected to the still inactive PC.

Glancing up to everyone else, she confirms AK is once again taped to the netrunning chair.

Things are most likely going to get… distracting in a few minutes, no one wants to give AK a second chance despite seeming a lot more calm now that he’s slept.

Double checking everything is as ready as it can be, Jinx straightens up and looks to everyone else.

“It’s ready. Just have to power it on.”

Right up until now, there had been a sort of mental distance she could put around what she's been doing. But now, with the PC whole and ready to be turned on, the full implications and emotions she's not allowing herself to think about are shoving themselves to the fore.

Before they're mercilessly repressed again.

The sentiment seems to be shared as, at her words there’s a pause while everyone waits for someone else to press the button.

Eventually Rayo steps forward and presses it with a shrug and muttered ‘Well, if no one else is gonna do it.’

The final step complete, everyone steps back and watches with unblinking intensity as the motherboard brand name flashes on the screen before it goes dark.

And an error flashes on the screen.

Solei grips Jinx by the shoulder, intense calm projected through clenched teeth as the blue screen stares back.

“Explain. Now.”

The netrunner bats the arm away, sliding into the desk chair and unspooling her link cable.

“OS didn’t boot properly, the code in here is… damaged, but once I get it to the auto repair step it should be fine.”

Hopefully.

Plugging her link cable into the tower, Jinx breaks her own rules with her objective so close.

Diving into the mess, she brushes past fragmented code and ducks the stuttering jumps of stuck programs jutting from shattered pillars of infrastructure.

It only takes a few minutes to find the issues that have the OS stuck.

It’s a little worse than she’d assumed, but it’s not that bad.

She gets to work.

Trying to fix every issue would be an exercise in futility, so effort is directed to the things that are immediately stopping the next step of the boot process from starting. But each time she makes a single step forward ten more problems jump up, slowing progress each time.

But the more she sees the kind of damage she’s being forced to repair, the more confident she is that the auto repair system will be able to get everything working again.

Even still, she wasn't prepared for when she succeeded.

Repairing one more issue among twenty others, the piece of formerly damaged code slides easily into its proper slot, sending signals to surrounding systems. 

This particular piece of code had a checksum for surrounding variables, allowing for damaged pieces to self repair, but that’s not unusual. 

Not even when another pillar of infrastructure erupts from the raw data into the render.

But something within that new code held the final piece to get everything working again, and with a shudder, the half broken machine begins pulling itself back together as larger and larger pieces erupt from the raw data and come alive. A cascade of calls to memory and automatic repair systems pulling the entire system together bareilly enough to move into the next step, too fast for her to perceive before–

Something grabs her, black shards of sand rising from the raw data beneath that flow like liquid and shine like ink that somehow folds out of a dimension she Jinx cannot perceive, gazing down at her with singular inhuman focus.

Instinctively, Jinx tries to call on an attack to break the thing’s hold, but every attempt is brushed away like nothing as systems come online to make it ever more powerful.

It watches her.

And it labels her an invader.

A few seconds later and the already uncomfortable pressure holding her in place begins to be crushing. Instantly overwhelming her defenses as temps spike ever higher trying to stop an attack that feels more like a force of nature.

One by one, every system is suborned as the thing climbs higher on her avatar and, as the void hovers at the edge of burning her out, Jinx sacrifices the last fragments of control she has over her own systems in a final grab at survival.

Desperately, she pings her UserID into the void, barely a chirp of binary in the oily abyss of inhuman code surrounding her.

And somehow, impossibly, everything freezes. And what feels like the eye of the universe begins staring back at her from within the crushing void.

“ObjectClass? AsmdThrt(0)Val(1)De(0)CORRUPTEDFILEPATH.”

The void recedes slightly.

“INDEXING.”

It scans her. Every piece cataloged with uncaring precision, identifying everything she is with certainly and pushing temps higher.

“EXTERNALPERSONNEL:HUMAN/KNOWN/PROGRAMMER/COLLABORATOR/HELPFUL/FUNNY/KIND”

The void recedes further.

“FRIEND?”

She can't answer, despite that the void receides completely, switching from suppressing her neuralware to actively offloading her processing to the freshly installed CPU. Held carefully as a floor slowly stutters into existence while the system works to repair itself. 

In every direction the impossible substance of the AI begins folding inward though nonexistent dimensions, a process happening in all directions that hurts to perceive.

As if somehow sensing this, the eldritch sight retreats into the dark as pillars of infrastructure are erected and repaired by a sea of spider-like daemons. 

This bizarre parody of a boot sequence is interrupted when reality stutters again and, starting at her feet, a sea of rolling grassy hills jitter into existence. Flowing out from beneath her and to the horizon as the skybox renders.

Only now that the danger seems to have passed, does Jinx feel the hands and arms of two people holding her up, saying… something. 

It’s all she can do to force her body to sit up on its own and give a muttered ‘I’m alright’ before a jagged tear appears in the air in front of her, spilling forth more of that black ever-shifting mess that folds in impossible directions.

The inhuman thing collapses down into itself in front of her, glitching and stuttering along the way, before a human form starts to emerge.

A familiar form.

Coming to a close approximation of the shape, colors appear in irregular places like a shattered mosaic before jittering into black static, as if barely holding herself together.

Aria opens her eyes.

“...J̷i̸n̷x̵?̵”

The netrunner freezes for a long moment, then takes a step forward as her friend continues.

“ȘŠŞöřṙŷ Ĩ’ṁ ňő- ńǿť ẵṯ ḿỹ ťộþ ǧẫɱẽ (ṉòẃ/ĥɘṛễ.) Ị’ḻḻ ḅẽ DATA-RECOVERABLE. Ĵust a lîtẗ-tẗ-ťtle INDEXCORRUPTION:15% ŗiǵɦẗ nồẁ.”

Aria makes an alarmed and static filled yelp as Jinx continues to approach.

“Wɑit! Ẏoù’re noŧ ʂűþþosed ṭo s-şee ẗḫis! I’m– rįsk variable. What? Ǫh ǵoḓ, I PROCESS HALT thosề peớþŀę! İs ‘Ḅ-Brỡ’ alŕigẖtʔ Ǐ’ṃ so-soṣ-so sõrr–

Aria’s cut off as Jinx launches herself across the final few feet and wraps the faintly buzzing avatar of her friend in a hug, holding on even as surprise makes the AI temporarily lose cohesion into a mess of black static once more.

“You’re back.”

---

A/N: I tried something new with this one. I THINK I like it. Not sure. I'll have to sleep on it a few days then look it over again.

Ta-ta All!