Sing'n in Binary: 36

The annoyingly high pitched buzzing of her ringtone has Jinx jolt to wakefulness with an irritated grunt. Blinking, the pain in her neck is more than enough information on where she fell asleep, even before her brain even has time to catch up with the colorful noise everything looks like before snapping into coherency .

Reaching up, Jinx unplugs the dual liquid cooling cables from the base of her skull as she blindly accepts the call.

She needs to stop falling asleep with the cooling pump on, burnt out pumps are a bitch to replace.

“What?” She grunts, rolling her neck to reset a muscle that slid out of place.

“Fucking finally!” A voice shouts. “You ever heard of answering your calls?”

After a moment incoherent shapes and colors resolve themselves into words, revealing its Solei. A person who she’s spoken to generously three times, calling out of the blue.

Sending a command for a small burst of adrenaline to shake off the tiredness, if only to be fully awake to yell at her if this turns out unimportant, Jinx sits up straighteners.

“Buy a chatbot. What do you want?” She reiterates.

There’s a pause on the other end of the line.

“I wasn't sure who to call, and you know Aria best. I’m headed to the hospital right now-” 

Adrenaline slams into her system, vision sharpening into razor focus as the floating void spots on the edge of her sight shrink as the chemical pushes Jinx's mind to its peak.

“-and she dropped her call with me. You know where she is meat-side? Check up on her?” Solei finishes, the clarification only improving the situation slightly. 

Aria’s always online. 

Snapping off a quick ping shows no response, the followup message also fails to deliver.

Standing up, Jinx stumbles for a moment, leaning against a wall as she finds her feet before heading to put on shoes.

“You there-?” Solei says as Jinx cuts her off.

“Explain.”

–_–

Weaving through traffic on her motorbike, Jinx allows her limbs to move almost on their own as her body’s puppeted by knowledge and instincts bought by a custom collection of skill chips buzzing in her neck. Pushing even that to its limits to squeeze even a few more seconds off the ETA.

“Fucking idiot! What were you thinking?” She shouts inside her helmet as she shoots through a gap between two trucks.

“Hey! It wasnt my ide-” The fucking dunce says, trying to defend herself before Jinx cuts her off.

“So you let Miss ‘Do first think later’ route you into a scav den?!” She screams breathlessly.

There's a single beat of silence at that, just long enough for Jinx to open her mouth again before Solei speaks up.

“If I-we didnt do something someone w-” 

Jinx cuts her off again.

“Who the fuck cares?” She screams, voice growing hoarse on the edges from the constant yelling.

If her friend burned herself out trying to help some nobody she’ll kill her-

Jinx flinches at the thought, bike wobbling dangerously in a high speed turn, her knee perhaps a foot off the asphalt.

She takes a breath after she stabilizes her control, mind scanning through every possible configuration of worst case scenarios and finding what parts of her burnout first aid bag she’d managed to stuff into her bike tragically lacking in options to what she could do.

She’d already sent a message to her ripper to be prepared for someone in critical condition, but without seeing Aria there’s simply too many variables for that to mean anything!

It’s been approximately thirty minutes since Aria went offline. Assuming worst case brain damage on a living subject the optimal window to reverse the most possible damage is forty five.

Tapping her brakes to avoid slamming into a car as she speeds though crossing traffic at a red light, Jinx realizes she doesn't even have a way to move her friend once she gets there! Scanning through her own options she finds anyone she could call on for help almost completely lacking.

Shooting off Aria’s address to Solei, she grunts as she dips into another sharp corner before speaking up again.

“If you know someone close to there with a car, call them. If not, get a cab, get over here, and help me get her to a ripper.

Jinx ignores the response and trusts her synopsis program to ping if Solei flakes.

As little as she wants to interact with the woman, she's the fastest option for moving an unconscious body or helping with the complicated process of safely extracting someone after an overheat spot-welds them to their chair.

Synopsis reports Solei is en-route, closing out the call Jinx pushes harder on a straightaway, the motorcycle's engine whining like a jet engine beneath her as she does.

But even as she does some part of her hopes against hope she’s wrong, that her friend for some reason chose to shut down her connection after a close call, that she’s alright.

The bike makes a stuttering grumble as it downshifts to get around a corner before peeling out again.

Faster.

–_–

Throwing the rear tire of the bike out into a sliding stop, Jinx stumbles as she transitions from the ease of allowing her body to be moved by programs to the subtle strain of consciously controlling her own flesh. Leaning against the bike to stabilize herself, she fumbles to pull the duffle bag full of medical equipment over her shoulder.

Meanwhile she scans the motel style floors of the apartment building in front of her to find the door she’s looking for as neuralware breaches the sys-

Jinx sutters as her attempted intrusion is rebuffed, scanning further she finds the cause, a half disabled security system propping itself up even after its central node went offline. The architecture of the scanning method -not to mention the absurd attention to detail- proves even at a glance, that security can only belong to one person.

With that in mind Jinx makes an educated guess and loudly broadcasts her UserID and watches with faint amusement as the systems give the code equivalent of a cheery wave and turn their attention away from her. Allowing Jinx to breach the elevator and have the door open as soon as she arrives.

Scanning over the unintuitively labeled cameras in the apartment’s security system, she doesn't see anyone burnt out in a chair.

But that could just mean she’s in an ice bath in one of the bathrooms.

As the doors close and the elevator starts to ascend, Jinx closes her eyes and leans her forehead against the metal doors in a vain attempt to ward off the fast approaching headache.

Going outside on a good day usually end with a headache, a side effect all the bright lights and flashing colors. But this is neither a good day or a particularly mild excursion. 

Not to mention that she’s been triggering synthetic adrenaline bursts every five minutes for the past forty and not allowing her neuralware to trigger any seizures for the malfunctioning parts of her brain on the ride over.

It makes her twitch.

Twitching at a bad time on her bike could be... bad.

Hearing the elevator ding, Jinx lifts her head for the doors to open and freezes as they do.

Because, even thirty feet from the door, she can smell it.

The sharp chemical sting of burning plastic.

Slamming against the door, Jinx tries to breach and finds the code completely gutted, forcing her to pause and try to work around the novel puzzle, before growling and pulling out her pistol.

Angling the barrel to shoot through the lock and embed itself in the doorframe, Jinx puts one hand on one ear and tilts her head to cover the other with her shoulder.

But even with the precaution the shot is loud.

Trying to open the door still proves difficult, so she empties the rest of her clip into the door and slams her shoulder against the door's plastic until it gives way.

Stumbling into the darkened room she gags as the smell of burnt electronics almost chokes away every breath before she covers her mouth with a sleeve and scans the darkened room, dark and silent in a way only a room can be after a breaker flips, cutting out every sub-audible electronic buzz.

The darkened room is a mess, half disassembled computers and electronics cover every surface and most of the floor. All stained with the distinct brownish tinge of having been pulled out a scrap heap and covered in a thin film of dust. 

The source of the smell seems to be coming from the kitchen, where four of the more expensive looking computers sit in varying states of melted, one still slightly smoking with the front panel half burnt.

But as she scans for her friend in this mess Jinx realizes something missing from the scene.

It doesn't smell like burnt pork.

Meaning-

Jinx slams through the thin privacy door to the bathroom with her shoulder, looking with desperate eyes to the tub as the door crumbles under her force, revealing…

Nothing?

Not just nothing, it’s clear even at a glance that this room hasn’t been used recently. The tub isn't even slightly damp, and without a netrunner chair in the main room Aria cant have been netrunning in this room.

Panicked focus receding as her headache gets worse, Jinx closes her eyes to think, spinning off a daemon to breach the security systems camera archive to see if she can figure out what’s going on.

But as the daemon initializes Jinx almost calls it back as she realizes the obvious conclusion. 

Aria didn't trust her enough to give her real location, and she’s been running out of a proxy.

The realization hurts slightly, as childish as it is. 

Especially considering how she’d been thinking just yesterday how stupidly trusting her friend is.

Setting down her duffle bag in the bathroom, Jinx heads over to the kitchen and, forgetting the power's out, tries to flip on a light.

After the attempt fails she tries to sigh, but the breath turns into a cough when the carcinogenic smell of burning plastic makes itself known again. Patting down her jacket for a moment, Jinx pulls out a filtered smog mask and puts it on.

It’s supposed to be for stuff like sandstorms and industrial offgassing, but it’ll probably work here.

Looking over the half melted computers more calmly, the netrunner identifies the obviously most expensive computer out of the bunch by sight, significantly taller with an all aluminum casing that Jinx has no doubt doubles as a heat sink.

Unplugging the fried externals she searches around for the apartment breaker box as the strangeness of the situation becomes more clear, and the anxiety rises within once more.

Because, unless Jinx completely misread her choom, even if this proxy went down she wouldn't willingly abandon her choom or quit out a job before it’s hundred percent complete.

Finding the breaker box, Jinx uses an old trick she’d learned in her scrapper days to pick the dumb lock and flip the power for the apartment back online.

Looking over, she sees the proxy computer whir to life for half a second as the power makes its way to the motherboard and it blinks a few lights, indicating at least that’s working.

The fact Aria didn't just reconnect directly from wherever that proxy was routing from means something else is probably wrong, and her only clue to what is inside that proxy.

Grabbing her bag and rummaging around until she pulls out a screwdriver, Jinx starts pulling off the case to do a basic diagnostic of the hardware, undoing the absurd number of screws holding the front panel.

The daemon reports back as she does, reporting only one person attempted to access the apartment as far back as the security archive went, pulling up the video clip shows what is clearly a robber being scared off by her friend’s security system. 

So no luck there.

Realizing that Solei is still on the way, Jinx starts to compose a message sending her away-

The panel pops off.

And the first thing Jinx thinks is how durable the entire thing has to have been.

The CPU socket is blackened with the heat it was dealing with, the cooling channels to the heat sink still have the air wavering with the amount of temperature they’ve been subjected to. Yet aside from that the entire system seems almost pristine!

Still, no matter how durable it was, it’s borked now. 

Hopefully she can pull some data off the drives directly to find where the proxy was receiving its inputs from, because Jinx has some questions she wants answered by her choom. 

Mostly about her reckless disregard for her safely, but also a few pointed inquiries on why the fuck she needs all this cloak and dagger shit. 

Pulling out her link cable from her neck, she plugs it into one of the two hard drives and powers it with a battery she found in another pocket.

Scanning though she finds a bunch of data that, after she squints a bit, reveals it's a bulk storage drive, swapping drives Jinx scans through the raw data of the computer searching for…

...for…

…

Jinx stares at the data.

According to the operating system, this hard drive is partitioned three ways.

C: - The core drive partition.

D: - It’s not here, but from the various calls to somewhere else in the system she can assume it’s the other hard drive. 

But the third one?

ItsME:

And it’s massive.

A single program, so large and complex that the need for such a high end PC suddenly makes sense. The almost industrially expensive CPU is completely necessary in hindsight to run an Artificial Intellige-

She cuts herself off, ignoring the thoughts whirling in her mind, putting together every strange interaction and pause at questions she couldn't have a truthful answer to.

There’s a text file at the very start of the drive, the only file type she can recognise in this tangled –impossible– mass of code.

HeyJinxUhhhhhhSupprise(sorry).txt

The netrunner stares at that.

Then at the code that makes up her frie-

Her-

The prog-

Jinx’s other half, her neuralware, triggers seizures up and down the brain to keep her functional, to stay aware and not in that almost vegetative unreality that she teeters against every day.

There's the sound of repetitive thuds behind her, accompanied by repeated sharp intakes and expulsions of air

“You have got to stop offlining like that you bitch! Now where’s…” A voice from behind starts, then trails off.

Jinx disregards the information, staring at the piles and piles of binary with uncomprehending eyes.

---

A/N: Well... uhh... I don't actually have a lot to say about this chapter. Because I'm pretty happy with it and I said all i'd like to say there.

I've been waiting to write this for ages!

Ta-ta All!