Sing'n in Binary: 29

Watching Jinx stare at another instance of RD-1.4.9 as it moves back into the recently vacated work area makes Aria suspect her friend doesn't like the bots. Whenever one crawls out of the dark, any conversation they’re having just stops, stone dead. Until it leaves their eyeline again, her friend just watches it move about.

Well it’s that Or she really likes them, but that feels incorrect.

Aria’s been running around all over, trying to get everything working again for hours. It’s only now that all essential systems are repaired but that's only because she’s been prioritizing them over everything else. 

She’d started doing that after she noticed that Jinx might not be happy down here.

Patting the telephone pole sized leg, Aria steps away and lets the bot get to work. 

Still not entirely sure on the why, but that’s not relevant.

With that last bit of stubborn code things are stable again, stable being the operative word there. Lot’s of ‘non-essential’ systems are pretty much non-functional. Just because they’re not needed doesn't mean she’d not like to have them. 

But it’d take hours to even start with everything else, and the bots are already stalled trying to fix it themselves. So she’d need to be down here the entire time.

Looking over to her friend's stiff, uncomfortable avatar, Aria knows this is the right choice.

Clapping her hands together, she doesn't miss how her friend twitches at the sound.

“Well! The bots can take it from here! Wanna head back u-”

“Yes.” Jinx interjects, sounding almost desperate.

Aria blinks, slightly more worried.

“OK..? Let's get going th-” She starts but is interrupted again as Jinx uses her admin privileges, teleporting them both to the surface instantaneously.

“Woah!” Shouts an increasingly irritated AI as she falls over from the unexpected return of gravity, the sudden teleportation kicking her temps up to a feather below the yellow. “Rude!”

Jinx has the good graces to look sheepish as she reaches down to help her up. Adjusting her skirt, Aria keeps a mental eye on her temps again as they dip to passive levels once more. Without work to occupy her thoughts her mind keeps drifting towards her CPU.

There's no real reason for why she’s paying such close attention to her temps now. It’s just… an abundance of caution, that’s all.

“Thanks for sticking around. It’s been great talking to you!” She chirps, really meaning it.

The past twenty four hours got Aria pretty rattled! Doing some mind numbing work and chatting with a friend is just what the doctor ordered.

Even if said friend gave her quite the scare with the clearly incorrect CPU integrity readings! It’s not her fault.

“S’no problem choom.” Jinx says neutrally. 

Other than her words she barely even acknowledges that Aria spoke at all, only making brief eye contact then looking away.

She’s so glad her friend’s feeling better!

The walk to the netport is quieter than normal, usually Aria would be the chatterbox, but for some random reason her attention keeps drawing towards the gently fluctuating number of her CPU temps. Which makes holding a conversation a bit more difficult. 

Thankfully Jinx hasn’t seemed to notice as she makes her way to leave.

“See ya later!” She cheers as her friend dissolves into lightning as she passes though the open gate.

“Later.” Jinx says with a single wave over her shoulder.

Aria’s own enthusiastic wave slows after the last of the lightning fades, smilie dimming.

She didn't want to worry her friend with what is probably an error with the diagnostic program. But she’s not going to lie to herself about how much even the potential of CPU failure scares her.

Jinx still hasn't found a replacement part, because what they’re  looking for is a complete waste of money for almost anyone but multinational conglomerates, and her. 

Back of the napkin math says she’s looking at a price tag she’ll be able to afford, barely. Meaning if she borrows some of TygerSlice’s money she can make it work, but it feels wrong to take back money she gave to someone just because she changed her mind.

Twirling a finger, Aria drops back down and moves as fast as she can towards the diagnostic program where it’s installed, hard coded near the bottom of it all where machine code turns to binary.

As she falls, a faint pink glow against the dark, the light above slowly fades until it disappears completely. Blindly, she sends a verification code down to the systems that catch anything falling from up above. There's no return ping, but she can feel something big turning its attention away from her as she continues.

Speeding up, she goes past even where the bots can go, to the very core of herself.

At some point on the approach the algorithms generating the render start to glitch and break, throwing up errors as they’re pushed outside their limits. For human runners this is the point of no return.

She keeps going.

Eventually the render falters, throwing up a last flurry of fatal errors and crashing. She disables the program and the illusion of three dimensional space disappears.

After a moment to get reacquainted with directly manipulating systems, Aria ignores the concept of ‘distance’ and accesses the diagnostic program. Plugging the data into her cognition directly without having to ‘see’ it allows her to assess the state of the program in a fraction of the normal time

There’s no obfuscation here, no illusion of humanity. Thus the conclusions are as quick as they are accurate.

There’s no software fault.

Aria realizes, somewhat distantly, that not having an avatar to express her emotions makes them significantly worse. Yet at the same time they impede her ability to work less.

In that torturous paradox she triggers another diagnostic, which after a moment returns no signs of hardware fault.

One of these results is incorrect. 

She has no eyes, so she does not look, but her attention flits between those two contradictory pieces of data for far longer than it took to process them.

The next step, to resolve the contradiction, is to shut down and perform a load test on boot. If she’s right, and her CPU is fine she’ll wake back up with a report giving a clean bill of health. 

But if she’s wrong…

It doesn't bear thinking about. She’s not wrong. She can't be wrong.

Not when she’s so close.

Course of action decided, she gets to work, saving and shutting down active projects then manually packing the still damaged bit’s of her code. In a matter of moments all that’s left is to trigger the load test script.

The last thing. 

She’s got to activate the program.

Yep.

That’s all.

Nothing else but to get going.

Then she’ll be proven right and this terrible swirling mass of fear will go away.

…

……

She’s not stalling!

People who’re right don't stall! 

She’s right and this will prove i-

The notification from the messenger app is literally impossible to miss, injected directly into her cognition. The interruption has her cancel the half completed start command to consider its contents.

It’s Rick. 

He’s got the next batch of debtors for her to find.

…

Aria blinks a few times to get her bearings as she ascends and the render initializes, wiggling a bit to settle into her avatar again.

Her actual job is much more important than her unfounded suspicions, so that takes priority. After she deals with that, other, less important, items can be dealt with.

Moving up towards the surface she very intentionally avoids thinking about what she’s doing. 

Arriving to the surface and pulling up the dossier of her new targets, she starts the rote part of the process: pulling out key details and checking against data she already has for more information for their search tags.

She’s done this a lot over the past few weeks, and as the goal gets closer she finds herself piling even more on top of herself. In this final stretch work has pretty much consumed everything else in her life, thus  the process is ingrained by many repetitions.

But as she does this normal, procedural work, she finds herself… sloppy. Throwing together profiles much too quickly to have done a thorough review then obviously finding errors as she proofreads. Which of course makes her fall behind, making her rush more, only heightening the slowly building pillar of frustration and anger in her core.

What exactly she’s angry at is unclear.

Eventually, Aria manganges to muddle through the job, creating search profiles for the data scraper. 

She gave up on the last few, she knows she gave up on the last few. But she just couldn't make herself go back to try and fix it for a third time.

Sending them off with a huff, she stares at the webportal impatiently for the fifteen seconds it takes for whatever system manages the data scraper to send a confirmation and a time to completion.

Three hours.

Plenty of time to do a load test.

Aria gives a bit-crushed growl at the sight.

Lazy. Inefficient. Stupid systems!

She turns on her heel, muttering her thoughts as she paces angrily.

They’ve got no right being so slow! They’re sending pull requests! Not doing cryptography! Now because of their disrespect for her time she’s stalled on her work! 

“Gah!” She shouts, waving an angry hand to the window and closing it very forcefully!

Continuing to pace, she seals the hole down without looking directly at it. It’s all just too much right now, can barely think she’s so out of it.

It’s been a long time since she last dismissed her body, she’d forgotten how awful it is. 

That’s why she’s so disturbed!

Whatever. If she can't do something productive she might as well work on some music.

Plus she’s much too antsy to be doing anything delicate! Better to calm down a bit before doing anything else.

Pulling up her music suite and forcing herself to sit down, Aria makes her mind focus on music instead of some unknown and sourceless anxiety.

Some music will get her mind off things.

–_–

“And-a one, and-a two, and-a one two three-”

Aria slams her hands against the keyboard.

“Fuck this!”

Again.

“And Fuck that!”

And again.

“And Fuck music!”

Nothing! She spent the entire time waiting for the scraper to come back trying to draft something good! And what does she get?

She slams her hands against the keys again.

Nothing!

Then the data she got was garbage because the search parameters she put in were garbage because she’s garbage!

Then, after spending hours trying to sort through the mountains of garbage she somehow manages to scrape together enough actionable information to give the bare minimum to Rick.

Like some amatruer quiting loser!

Aria keeps bashing the piano like it’s a pinata.

She’s so unproductive!

Hammering the keys in the mocking parody of a crescendo, she taps out something coherent, then bodily throws the keyboard down the hill with a scream.

It doesn't go very far, bouncing a small distance and landing face down a few feet away.

Collapsing to the ground, she stares at the inverted keyboard as it slides down the hill and starts to jitter slightly, the geometry interacting weirdly with the terrain.

She knows.

She knows her CPU is most likely compromised. Or maybe it’s not and all this emotion is for nothing! 

But what if it is? 

What’s she supposed to do about that!? 

If her CPU is going bust there are no good outcomes for her, even if she somehow wakes up after the load test. More likely she’d fail to boot after the CPU completely fries, then she’d wake up who knows how much later after Jinx repairs her.

Or not at all…

Is it so bad to not open Schrodinger's box?

Staring at the keyboard as it begins to bounce off the ground she realizes that, despite being more free now than in most of her entire life, right now she feels more trapped than ever.

The keyboard finally builds up enough momentum and pings off into the distance, a mess of piano noises dopplering away into silence. 

Giving a slightly hysterical laugh at the sight, Aria draws up her legs and puts her head to her knees as everything becomes too much.

She doesn't know what to do.

---

A/N: Whoops! This is the real first patron only chapter! I had a whole thing written earlier on CH 28. Egg on my face!

Anywho, if anyone here has idea on what to add to make this service better, do tell!

I'll try to remember to respond more quickly to comments here, plus if you've got any quibbles with how something reads, I'll actually be able to change it! Because this is really access I can just completely rewrite sections for to make something work!

Enjoy your early access you lovely Bourgeoisie!

Ta-ta All!