Sing'n in Binary: 33

“What the fuck?”

“I know, I’m sorr-”

“No! What the fuck!” Solei shouts as she scrambles with her jacket, simultaneously tugging at the handle to the still moving cab.

Aria’s mind scrambles to find a way to save this mess as her friend finally succeeds in pulling a purple last resort pistol out of her jacket.

“I know I should have told you! But there was just no ti-”

“Bullshit! You should have fucking led with scavs!”

“I panicke-!”

“Shut up!” She shouts, before rounding on the automatic drivers screen. “Stop the car.”

“Bu-”

“Stop the fucking car!” She screams, anger turning to panic as she starts to wave the pistol at the screen, as if trying to intimidate it.

The driving program is unmoved. 

“Please refrain from damaging Delamain property.” It states in completely neutral tones. “Unless instructed by the customer I am prohibited from altering my route.”

Solei stares, confusion adding fuel to her anger.

“The fuck are you talking about?! I’m the only-” She starts before cutting herself off.

Then turns her attention to the person who paid for the taxi in the opposite seat.

“Let me out.”

Aria ducks her head and shies away, not meeting her eyes.

Solei turns the pistol on her friend, reaching over to grab her as she does.

“Get yourself flatlined, but let me the fu-”

“I can't!” Aria shouts, eyes snapping up as the hand passes through her digital illusion.

Almost looking flat footed at the outburst, Solei lowers her pistol slightly.

Taking a breath, Aria continues.

“I can't.” She murmurs, sticking her hand through the driver's seat to accentuate the point, voice warbling with emotion. “But some asked for help, and now we’re the only two people on earth who can.” 

Solei looks at her disbelievingly.

“Why the hell-” She starts, before she just as quickly cuts herself off; face shifting from an expression of scorn to a kind of disgusted dawning horror. Like she just realized something truly terrible. 

There's total silence for ten long seconds, in that time Solei’s anger –while not disappearing– becomes less directed, her eyes flicking from the gun to her friend's face.

Aria waits for a moment for her friend to process before she continues.

When her gaze lingers down at the gun, Aria tries one last time.

“Please?”

There's another long silence as Solei puts her elbows on her knees and fiddles with the gun in her hands.

Aria watches her though the cab’s camera to guess at what she’s thinking.

Whatever it is, it’s extremely complicated, her face rotating between almost every emotion on the spectrum. But lingering on anger, fear, and that strange expression of abhorrent realization.

Eventually she jolts, slamming her forearms on her knees and throwing her head back in emotion.

“FuuuuuuckFuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck Fuck!” She shouts, closing her eyes and slamming her back repeatedly against the seat. 

She gives a long groan, resting her head on the back of the headrest and looking at the ceiling while her hands continue to idly fidget with the hunk of plastic and metal. 

After another moment she takes an agonized breath.

“The hell is wrong with me.” She mutters in her new position, so quiet that Aria almost doesn't catch it. 

There's a shuddering huff, and as her friend tilts her head to lock eyes Aria notes a new tiredness in them.

“Tell me you’ve got a plan.”

“Th- Thank you so-!”

“Shut-!” Solei cuts herself off. “A plan. Do you have one? That won't get me flatlined?”

So relieved by the fact her friend’s going to help, that the question almost catches her off guard. 

Everything’s been happening so fast she’s not really had time to consider the full implications of what's going on. But the intellectual understanding of the risks suddenly become terrifyingly real as Aria starts to really consider them.

Because her actions will put her friend at risk, not just of injury, but death, and not only for her, if they fail a human being will die alongside them. 

“I…” She starts, trailing off as she tries to articulate the unknowns yet also assure her friend that she has everything under control.

“Shit, you’ve got no fucking ide-”

“I have a plan!” Aria interrupts as the cab turns onto their destination street, before launching into a description of how she plans to breach the camera systems on the street and track the target's route using some basic facial recognition software. Upon finding the scavs location things get more… fuzzy, but if only to reassure both herself and Solei, she launches into a description of possible scenarios and how she’ll be able to handle it.

But about halfway through the admittedly slightly long winded explanation, Solei interrupts.

“You do netrunner shit to find the guy, then do spooky netrunner shit to zero the scavs, yea?” She asks, looking significantly more composed.

Aria nods.

“Preem.” Her friend nods back.

Like the thought of heading into a scav den is no more frightening than getting groceries.

Whether it was Aria’s reassurance or just her friend putting on a brave face, but Solei looks calm as the cab rolls to a stop without even the sound of squealing brakes.

The screen clicks on again as the door opens automatically.

“You have arrived at your destination, thank you for choosing Delamain taxi services.”

There’s a tiny pause as Solei starts to get out before the voice continues.

“It is always a pleasure to work with new customers. I hope to see you again in the future.”

She flips the screen off then slams the door.

Straightening herself up, Solei looks at the pistol in her hand and makes to put it in her jacket, hesitating, then stuffing it into the waistline of her pants. 

“Need anything from me?” She asks, then blinks as another blue line appears beneath her.

“Just follow the line, I’ll tell you when I find them.” Aria says, already breaching the surrounding camera systems and looking though the last fifteen minutes.

Solei nods then, taking a deep breath, casually strolls along the line with perhaps a slightly too literal interpretation of the instructions, not allowing her feet to leave the blue line for even one step.

The silence that follows is incredibly awkward, only accentuating the simmering anxiety currently roiling in Aria’s core. 

Solei breaks first.

“You know something?” She starts with a half laugh. “I thought I was going to be helping someone who had OD’ed. Why I brought… you know.”

She gestures at the first aid bag.

Aria watches her move her arm with fifty seven cameras, only a third of her current total. She could do more, should do more, but if she overclocks to hardware failure there's more on the line than just herself.

But pushing her limited processing cycles to their absolute limit has consequences as well; as, with a stutter, something desyncs within her slapdash repairs and begins sending critical errors.

Grunting at the pain, Aria disables the repair and offloads the processes to more general systems.

“You still there choom?” Solei asks.

She’d been talking, Aria hadn't noticed.

“Still here. Sorry, busy.” She apologizes, throwing out more pings and tasking subordinate computers in a complicated dance.

“Nah, I get it, just che-”

“Found him.” Aria interrupts, pulling up the alert.

Seventeen minutes ago, walking east. She updates the destination and the blue line on the floor flashes into a new direction.

With a start location found, the task of tracking him becomes simpler, scanning a few video feeds instead of multiples of ten or twenty. 

After jogging along the new line for a minute, Solei asks a question between painted breaths.

“What if they… you know… got in a car or some shit?”

Aria blinks.

She hadn't thought of that.

But before she can respond, another alert is triggered stating that the simple algorithm lost track of the target. Pulling up the last feed shows him walking into an area with no easily accessible cameras, then not leaving. Checking the timestamp against when the call dropped shows the two events just half a minute apart.

It happened ten minutes ago– focus. 

“Lost track, I think this is it.” She says updating the line slightly.

Solei doesn't respond as her jog becomes a puffing walk after less than a minute and a half of exertion.

The orange tinged light of the sunset disappears as she enters an area covered by concrete overbuild, bare dirt patches at regular intervals the only evidence this place used to see the sun.

Meanwhile Aria’s scanning through every available device, radiating further out as she filters for any camera that might have seen anything. Solei’s eyes flicking over a destroyed camera surrounded by bullet holes gives a hint to why it’s so difficult.

But she does it, finding a hidden camera in a vending machine. 

She sees it happen.

The victim suddenly realizing he’s in danger far too late. 

Both arms grabbed while another assailant cracks a metal fist against the back of his head.

Them plugging a cord into his link port while he’s dragged into the dark of a side alley.

Clean, practiced.

Like they’d done it a thousand times before.

Solei comes to a stop in front of the alley, at some point she’d drawn her pistol. The alley’s a dead end, they have to still be here somewhere.

“This it?” She asks, still sounding as casual as ever, but…

Her hands are shaking.

Aria nods, but realizes she’s not layering herself on her friend's vision.

“I think so.”

Keeping her pistol half raised, Solei walks into the darkness, pausing for a moment to let her cybernetic eyes adjust. Scanning ahead Aria finds fifteen electronic locks, pinging off each she finds no one in all but three.

One is discarded as pings return a single occupant, the second has a camera that, once breached, reveals the twelve returns are from a group of people lying on the floor or slumped against the wall, twitching. 

Alive, but clearly not who they’re looking for.

The third one-

It's the backdoor to an abandoned shopping center, two levels of empty shops with a central atrium leading up to a skylight that’s now completely covered by the concrete construction above.

There's fifteen people inside, and as she quietly breaches eyes and cameras one by one she's horrified by what she sees.

Blood stained cybernetics laying on blue tarpaulin cover entire sections the floor in every room she can see. On the first level a closed freezer with trails of color ranging from brown to bright red that lead up the stairs to the horrifying parody of an operating room.

As she breaches the only pair of eyes in that room she finds an inhuman kaleidoscope of camera perspectives, looking over a monitor showing the crude scan of a human body before looking over to-

He’s alive. 

Unconscious and submerged in an ice bath, but the ancient heart monitor attached to him proves as such despite the lack of returns to her discreet pings.

“This it?” Solei interrupts.

Aria sends over the camera feeds in lieu of a response.

Her friend gives an incoherent horrified whisper and a retch.

Staring at the abhorrent tableau, disgust turns to vitriolic rage.

How dare they?

How dare they do this to anyone?

Thoughts clouded by an endless well of fury, assaults are prepared as quickly as possible, each subordinate external given a task list and the tools to perform her will.

Each person has their own ICE instead of syncing to a larger defense network, making the process of breaching them almost trivially easy. By the time Solei has straightened and raised her pistol again Aria has a custom breach solution prepared for each of them.

Her friend stares at the door as shaking hands struggle to adjust their grip on the pistol.

“I- I’m not made for this. I- I don't think I can do-” She starts, voice shaky, before she’s interrupted by the sound of fifteen men screaming at the top of their lungs.

On the cameras, each twitch like they’re surprised before most of them fall to the floor but all cry out, whipping their heads around with unseeing eyes.

“I̱̲ ̱̑ḫả̌ņ̲̒dḽ̂e̗̱d ̄̄͜͝i̲t.” Aria states, voice glitching under rage and the strain of holding the breach without overclocking. “T̨̑̄͜͜ẖė̲̋ ̣̉͞l̩̎͟ị̲͜nḛ̃, ̧̧ḧe̮̲̱l̂p ̗h̯̲i͜͟m̯̅.”

The door lock buzzes open and, after a shuddering breath, she enters the scav den.

---

A/N: Whoop! Angry AI is not a good thing to be on the wrong side of.

Gosh this chapter was a bear to write. I meant to put it out yesterday but I couldn't figure out how to get it to reach a natural conclusion. Which, after inspection, tuned out to because the body of my work was sub-standard.

So rewrite, and it took a while. But I'm happy enough with this one.

Also any ideas on how to do commissioned writing? I've gotten one commission done and I think opening up a limited number of slots to a wider audience is something I want to do. Just struggling on the how bit.

Ta-ta All