Sing'n in Binary 34

As Solei enters the room Aria’s anger is forcefully shunted away as she needs to direct her full attention to the careful balance of hardware limits, task priority, and resource management. Constantly pushing to eke every atom of potential from her capped processing, in order to prevent fifteen radically different ICE programs from kicking her out. 

It only helps that the dance almost feels like she’s back in one of ADMIN’s breach sims. One of the early ones that was less about fending off an attack and more a complicated puzzle for her to solve. 

She watches Solei step over the two guards that were flanking the entrance, now on the floor blindly struggling against the unmoving metal they replaced their flesh with. 

Following the illusory line, her pace slows as she walks past a room full of the screaming things that look like people, surrounded by the dismembered metallic limbs of their victims. 

Before Aria disabled them, they were sitting around a half rotten table playing cards. Now of the four, only one is still standing. He’s hobbling in the vague direction of the exit, arms out with eyes wide and unseeing.

The ICE of the surgeon upstairs, being of significantly higher quality, pushes dangerously close to breaking control and Aria has to quickly retask more resources to contain it. Paying for the decision as another part of her OS’s patch job gives way, forcing her to shut it down with a grunt.

Unfortunately, for all its weaknesses, the one benefit of individual ICE is it’s essentially hard coded to keep fighting her. Even with her near total control of every system, until the host is dead or someone gets an actual physical connection to gain total control there’s no way to disable it. 

So, as easy as it is to breach a single person, once she stops actively pushing against their defences it’ll only take a few seconds for the ICE to reassert control.

Randomly, another surge of breakout attempts align, forcing Aria to retask some of her own cognition’s processing to handle the uptick. Realizing the use of her voice is an unnecessary use of resources, she fires up the TTS.

“Hurry please.” States the program in a cool monotone, causing her friend to twitch and almost accidentally fire her gun with the finger resting around the trigger.

Aria watches her glance around angrily through two pairs of eyes and five cameras, opening her mouth to say something. But instead she cuts herself off and picks up the pace as the man she was watching touches a wall. 

Another piece of her repair work desyncs but she reboots it successfully.

Following the line, Solei’s eyes lock onto the staircase on the opposite side of the multi floor atrium, its rusted red highlighting the stairs against the greys of the concrete in the insufficient light of scattered work lanterns.

She steps into the center courtyard while Aria works to maintain her grip on their opponents. 

So focused on her tasks, she almost doesn't notice when everything starts going wrong.

While restasking an external, Aria notices another input channel suddenly appear on the surgeon's neuralware a quarter of a second too late. Snatching away the input before she’s even identified it, she finds a handheld surgical camera pointing at a duffle bag across the room.

Despite losing his sight, the surgeon throws himself across the space and fumbles with the zipper using just his left thumb and the side of his palm, the only remaining organic parts of his hands.

Her moment of distraction allows two others to start breaking her hold, forcing Aria to retask resources she doesn't have to shut them down, crashing more of her repairs as she does so. 

The distraction allows the surgeon to open the bag without her interfering and pull out a cylindrical object wrapped in a band of electric blue electrical tape.

There’s not enough time to do anything complicated, so as he reaches with a stiff metallic finger to pull the pin of the grenade she sends random input signals to both his hands, making them twitch and writhe unnaturally.

Undeterred, the grenade leaves her vision as he puts it to his mouth and, in one motion, he pulls the pin while throwing it out the storefront’s entrance, off the ledge overlooking the atrium and into the open air.

“Sol ru-!”

Everything glitches.

For a moment everything shuts off, every camera, every eye, Solei’s neuralware, everything. 

But after two seconds of bottomless panic, her flood of pings start giving spotty returns again, sending garbled and intermittent data bursts though the interference.

Though that shattered mosaic of perspectives Aria catches glimpses of what’s happening.

Snippets of her friend’s panicked voice, calling out for her.

Her access to the scav’s neuralware snapping shut one by one as ICE reasserts control. Their perspectives disappearing from her awareness.

A camera overlooking the scene showing the telltale sparking flechettes of an EMP grenade as they fall to the floor from where it detonated high above.

It takes seven seconds after the detonation for the air to clear enough that Aria can reestablish a solid connection.

“-etter fuc—ng ans–er me or-” Solei’s voice cuts back into clarity, eyes coming back online as Aria gives a panicked assessment of the situation.

“Why’d you run away from the door?” She shouts as her idiot friend takes cover behind a large pillar on the opposite side of the room!

“Fuck you!” Solei retorts, turning around toward the door and breaking into a sprint. but before she can get even a quarter of the way there a scav stumbles out a storefront in front of them.

At the sight of her the man fumbles with his half raised automatic pistol, turning it towards the threat.

Solei mirrors the motion and-

“No!”

Gunshot.

Stumbling, Solei ducks into an empty shop next to her, hissing and clutching her arms to her chest.

Aria stares in shock, the scene repeating endlessly in her mind.

“How did you miss?!” She screeches disbelievingly as her idiot friend clutches her thumb in pain.

“Fuck’n slide! Ow!” She whinges before becoming aware of herself again and snapping her head up just in time to see the scav she missed rounding the corner.

He manages half a step before every piece of cyberware suddenly throws up ten thousand errors and he hears the loudest sound possible with his neuralware, collapsing to the ground with a garbled yell of shock.

“Move!” Aria shouts with a grunt as the effort ticks her temps just a feather into the yellow.

“Where?” Solei asks, raising her gun in a ginger grip and pointing it at the incapacitated man.

Aria doesn't answer, working to pull disparate and uncoordinated systems back together so she can-

Gunshot.

The man on the floor twitches, a crimson splatter on the concrete floor appearing as the back half of his head explodes.

The recoil of the shot has Solei drop her pistol but Aria almost doesn't notice as she watches a fleck of something red skitter across the floor. 

She watches as the few remaining systems that were still operational shut down after a flurry of errors.

She killed him.

“Focus!” Solei shouts, not even glancing down at the corpse she just made. “Can you shut everyone down again?”

Aria forces herself to retask her attention, sending out probing pings to the ICE that’s now on full alert. Creating estimates on-

She killed hi-

Creating estimates on breach time.

“Not when they’re ready for it.” Aria concludes after a second. “I could knock out… five, at most.”

Solei nods and tries to take a deep breath, but just after she starts her eyes flick down to the corpse and the breath turns into a gagging cough.

“Ok. Okokokok.” She looks around and pushes closer to the wall to keep behind the pillar across the walkway just out the shop, hiding from the second floor. “We’ll just… wait here and you’ll spark’em when they show up.”

Crouching down, she points her gun at the entrance and waits.

—--

Sophie ‘Luxe’ Gamone winces as a gentle movement sends a shooting pain through her thumb and up her arm, the synthskin not showing the bruise that’s clearly developing beneath.

Shit maybe she broke it.

Distant sounds of movement and shouts echoing through the cavernous expense make her realize how absurd that worry is. The thought almost forces out a hysterical laugh, but she chokes it back.

The pool of blood at the entrance spreads.

It takes about twenty seconds of waiting for anything to happen before her hands start to shake.

“Where the fuck are they?” She asks, then blinks as a camera feed appears in the upper left of her vision and flashes though a few overhead perspectives, showing them hiding behind cover in a few different locations.

Sophie can feel something rummaging around in her head, touch soft as a ghost. 

She can feel the phantom sensations as a piece of technology, so integrated it’s almost another part of her brain, acting without her input.

“They’re not approaching floor one.” Aria states in her strange –too human– synthetic voice, before the camera feed switches to two people on the second floor, one holding a duffle bag. “They’re headed directly above you.”

Watching them though the overhead camera feed, Solei shuffles back to avoid the blood getting on her shoes.

The two place the duffle bag on the floor and ruffle around for a moment before pulling out-

Solei curses under her breath.

Another fucking grenade.

Why the fuck would they even need grenades? Those things are expensive as shit.

A line appears beneath her, leading through the blood. Out of her cover. 

“I- I- cant-” Her fucking idiot friend stammers out as one scav hands the grandade to the other before taking a breath. “I’ll shut them all down but afterwards I migh- I might disconnect, if I do you need to ru-”

Fuck that!

“When he pulls the pin, glitch him.” Solei interrupts shuffling back again to avoid the still spreading blood.

“But-”

The scav pulls the pin.

“Now!” She shouts, and in that fraction of a moment afterwards she’s sure Aria won't do it. That in about half a second she’d hear the sound of metal on concrete.

But after a hesitation that feels like a lifetime the scav on the camera feed’s legs go out from underneath him, the grenade bouncing to the floor next to him.

At the sight his partner jolts, then deltas off frame, leaving the man to his fate. He scrambles, first trying to drag himself away, then towards the cylinder in an attempt to toss it. He contorts his body painfully, getting a single finger on the metal before-

Solei tries to flick her eyes to close the camera feed, but it doesn't respond to her commands.

The explosion is loud, so loud the EMP doesn't even compare. 

But before the feed cuts out Solei sees one frame.

Aria’s voice clicks back in, voice buzzing with emotion.

“I̬ ̌dị̇͞ḏ̯ ̰ĩt.” She states in a tone that Solei finds… worrying. “I’̄vĕ̮̆ ̈ąl̊ső identifiḙd̲ an exȉt route that will allow me to ensure your safety. Please follow the blue line.”

The camera feed in the corner of her vision flashes though a few shots as the line beneath her stutters as it updates.

But as Sophie stares at that line while the scavs shout and move about, she finds herself hesitating.

Looking to her left, at a tarp on the ground covered in chrome, her eye is drawn to a cybernetic she’d wanted. That she’s been saving every spare eddy that comes her way to get. An Arasaka FlexGrip that’s just reasonably priced enough to burn on something cosmetic. 

She stares at it.

That used to be someone’s hand. Bit’s of her are even still attached, the rotting flesh providing a sickly sweet undercurrent to the everpresent smell of mildew and disinfectant.

What changed? 

When Sophie was seven, she’d knocked a girl's teeth in because she was being a petty bitch at old choom.

When she was nineteen she’d opened her apartment to someone she barely knew, then let her stay for weeks. 

A few months after she joined Clouds, she’d shanked a man to death with a broken bottle of tequila when he tried to get a free ride on a coworker outside the mega building.

But today, in the taxi, her first response to someone asking for help is ‘Why the hell is that my problem?’

When did she stop caring?

“Sol, the window’s closing, you need to-”

“Fuck that.” She whispers.

“Wh-”

“Fuck! That!” She says louder as she sees in the camera feed two people leave cover and start approaching where she’s hiding. “I didn't come all this way to null out, we’re saving this bitch!”

“Bu-”

“No! We’re doing this!-”

“You can't even shoot!” Aria interrupts desperately.

“I was rusty!” She lies, mind flashing though hazy memories of the single time she went to a gun range a few years back. “I’m the only one here actually risking my life, and I say we’re saving him.” She concludes with finality.

There’s five whole seconds of silence as Solei watches two people round the corner then look at the corpse outside her empty storefront. Meanwhile, on the right, three more move in and out of cover towards her side of the atrium.

Eventually the blue line disappears and Aria speaks up in a detached monotone.

“Ok.” She says and Solei can feel her neuralware doing something. “I’ve disabled the guns of the two on the left. You have eleven seconds before the team to the east gets line of sight.”

She nods, and as Sophie raises her gun again, she takes a breath to steady trembling hands before stepping into the blood to round the corner.

---

A/N: heyyy y'all. Ernest question. How's this scene feel. I'm really uncertain of it and would really like some feedback here.

Because I'm like this close to scrapping and rewriting everything before it get's to SB.

Really hope you enjoy!

Ta-ta All.