Sing'n in Binary: 28

“Fucking idiot! What were you thinking!?”

She made a mistake! She should’ve never asked Jinx for help! She’s evil!

“Gah! I said I’m sorry! Cut it out!” Aria whines, her cries ignored as Jinx cuffs her upside the head.

Telling her friend what happened went… as well as she could have hoped. Meaning she’s really mad, but not getting that sort of distant look she gets sometimes talking about Netrunning. 

“I’m not fucking done you suicidal, gonk-brained, luddite!”

Still, Aria would really like to get past the anger phase now please! Getting smacked around in the Net doesn't actually hurt without the actual malware, but it’s not pleasant. 

She tries to stifle a giggle as she collapses into the grass to escape her friend’s well meaning assaults. 

“I give! I concede! I’ll be more careful!” She cries, shielding her face from a combination of embarrassment and fear of another assault.

Jinx stares down at her prone form like she’s looking for something, moments like this happen less often nowadays. But it’s still a common enough occurrence Aria often wonders what she’s looking for. She’ll have to ask, once she figures out a way to say it politely. 

After a moment she closes her eyes and tilts her head upwards.

“Why the fuck are we friends?” She asks the sky before taking a deep breath and looking down, significantly calmer.

Aria tries to hide how much that comment hurts, even as a joke.

And it is a joke, her every other word and action removes any doubt. It didn't even take ten minutes for Jinx to drop everything and rush to her server, blasting through the first two layers of security on impact and making good progress on the third before Aria managed to let her in.

It took significantly longer for Jinx to get the full story, not letting Aria wiggle out of telling even a single detail. Like how she got damaged, and why she’s worried a Netwatch hit squad might bust down her door.

Said details that were getting Aria yelled at. 

She’d really wanted to leave exactly what she’d done… vague to not worry her friend. But Jinx knew her too well for it to work.

“Shit. Sorry. Didn't mean that.” She sighs, seeing she went too far. 

Leaning down, she offers a hand to pull her friend up. “So. What’s the damage?”

Rolling her shoulder as the bots get another chunk back online, Aria sends over the task list of damaged code. 

“Lots of little stuff, but it’s not that bad.”

Jinx nods and scans through the list herself, giving a hiss through her teeth as she keeps scrolling down the log of things that need fixing.

“Sheesh, that’s rough choom.” She says, then gives a surprised hum as an item is solved by the bots and disappears. “You got Malphs?”

Aria blinks.

“What?”

Jinx blinks back, equally confused; until her expression shifts to one of exasperation.

“Malphas? Maint’s” She pauses for a reaction, seeing none she rubs the bridge of her nose. “Why am I not surprised?” 

“You mean maintenance bots?” Aria asks hesitantly.

“Yes.” She sighs, muttering. “Jesus, what are you, fifty?”

“Hey!”

That’s not fair! How’s she supposed to know every piece of obscure slang that's probably just used by a small subset of Night City natives!

“Yes, I have ‘Malphs.’” She grumbles.

There's one silver lining in all this mess. Jinx assured her –in between enraged yelling– that Netwatch isn't going to come knocking on her door. 

Apparently that agent was asking for a bribe when he was acting so weird! An idea that grinds against her idea of what Netwatch is. That mental image of a shadowy monolithic entity, charged with protecting the world from the monsters that lurk on the other side of the blackwall.

The thought that Netwatch isn't that –at least not completely– evokes… complicated emotions. 

For Aria personally it’s great! As long as she doesnt do anything too crazy the risk of Netwatch catching her is almost nil. 

Apparently.

But…

They are the organization in charge of the blackwall, and the thought of the only thing keeping her entire world from collapsing is susceptible to something as basic as a bribe is… 

It’s not great.

“Sorry about all this by the way.” Aria sighs. “Didn't mean to bother you over nothing.”

Apparently she’d been jumping at shadows the entire time, which is a difficult idea to parse. She almost wants to ignore the new information to be less embarrassed and slightly less existentially horrified. As crazy as that sounds.

But Jinx knows what she’s talking about, and if she says everything’s alright, Aria trusts her.

Jinx snorts.

“Choom, I’m not sure what this is, but it ain't nothing.” She sighs with a small smile, adding, “It’s not like you interrupted anything.” 

Aria grins at her friend's reserved joy, wrapping an arm around her shoulder and giving a brief sidelong hug.

“Thanks.” She exhales, putting as much emphasis as possible on that quiet word.

There’s a comfortable silence as one of the bots sends an alert that it’s found a problem it can't solve. Looking over the message, it seems like it’s time to get down below and start fixing stuff.

But she still wants to hang out with Jinx…

Idea!

“Hey! Wanna stick around while I work?” She chirps.

Looking over a hidden window, probably a schedule, Jinx shrugs. 

“Sure?”

“Great!” 

With a twirl of her finger, the grassy surface of the render in front of them dissolves into triangles, revealing the-

“Oh right! You need to get admin’d.” She realizes, granting her friend administrator access.

After a second she modifies the permissions slightly, blocking off the drive partition holding her own mind. The action tinged with no small amount of guilt for yet another action to prolong her biggest secret and grandest lie.

She’ll tell eventually! 

Just…

Not right now.

Jinx, for her part, didn't seem to notice Aria’s internal struggle, simply staring at the glowing fragment of code, code giving root access to almost all her systems. Eventually she releases something like an anxious sigh.

“Why not?” She mutters.

Disregarding the strange comment, Aria hops into the hole, holding onto the edge to wait for Jinx to jump in too.

“C’mon! I wanna get this stuff fixed today!”

That knocks her friend out of the strange mood, allowing the code to sink into her avatar; she smiles as she follows her into the hole, gravity disappearing as it seals itself behind them.

Aria takes the lead as she half swims half flies towards the stalled work area, smiling as she sees Jinx do her version of looking around in wonder. Which is just her eyes flicking around as she carefully ensures there’s no expression on her face.

As they go deeper and the light fades they can see shapes moving on the pillars, too dark and distant to make out.

Staring out, Jinx makes a considering noise before turning back to Aria.

“How’s your hardware handling this mess?”

Gosh the view is beautiful! It’s just so easy to get lost in the grandeur of it all-

“Aria.” Jinx says warningly.

“I haven't checked.” She mutters.

There’s a long silence.

“Oh come on! I’m here aren't I! If something serious was wrong it’d be obvious!”

Which is true! If her CPU borked itself she’d be offline. She’s still here, therefore everything’s fine!

The silence judges.

“Weh! Fine!” Aria sulks, triggering a core by core CPU diagnostic. The dip in processing power makes the act of thinking,,, difficult. Like every attempt at thought strays away onto something completely different, or ends up nowhere at all. She continues to give fuzzy grumbles as they descend, slower now that she has to stop repeatedly to check the error address. 

She keeps forgetting.

After five minutes of wandering the diagnostic concludes and immediately it’s clear she’s been going in the wrong direction. 

But the indignation is replaced by terror as the results come back.

Cluster 3 core 2 has a sectional undervolt, thermal microcracks most likely.

Staring at that message there’s only one real course of action, to shut herself down until a replacement part can be found, to tell Jinx her secret now and have her install the new hardware whenever she finds it.

To spend all her money and then some! She thinks as fear turns to anger. To set back her quest to find ADMIN by who knows how long while she sleeps!

No! She refuses! 

Giving a glance back up to Jinx to make sure she hasn't noticed, Aria runs another scan on just Core 2. It takes only a few seconds to scan just the one.

All clear, no signs of hardware fault.

Giving a massive sigh of relief, Aria Updates the full diagnostic with the correct core 2 status. 

A faulty reading, that’s all. She’ll have to check the diagnostic code for errors when she gets over there. 

“See! What’d I tell ya? Clean bill of health!” Aria cheers, ficking the report over with a twirl as they approach their destination.

“Thank you.” Jinx says primly, the precise tone extremely weird in her voice.

Arriving at the work area, they make their way towards the stalled bot, arriving she can see the thing on the very edge of her vision in the dark, the sparkle of eyes and the dull metallic shine of limbs dimming as it pulls away into the dark. Giving them unimpeded access to the-

“Jesus Fuck!” 

“Hey!” Aria shrieks as she disrupts an attack before it finishes forming. 

Jinx rounds on her, wild eyed.

“What was that?” She yells, pointing at where the bot disappeared.

There's a long blink of confusion as Aria tries to figure out what exactly her friend’s so worked up about.

“RD-1.4.9?” She asks, seeing no reaction she continues. “It's a repair bot! My uh…”

There's a pause as she tries to remember the slang.

“Malph?”

Jinx stares at her.

"Did I say that right?”

She’s pretty sure she said it right.

After a long moment Jinx sighs, and waves a hand into the dark.

“The spider’s a repair bot?”

Aria nods.

Jinx sighs again, almost unsteadily.

“Are there any more spiders out there? Watching us?”

Blinking, she considers the question. There’s a few thousand bot’s active right now, but there’s not an easy way to check how many are halted on this part. 

Sending out a ping, every bot in the area gives a return, glowing a rust red in the near total dark.

The spiders light up in a wave. like sonar spreading from their tiny illuminated patch. First revealing the one that just pulled out of sight. Resting stock still and patiently waiting for Aria to do her part. Just a little further out on the local pillar, a dozen bots all flare red as they work in their own little areas. 

As the bus-sized spiders light up in her ping, every single bot has an eye leave its normal vision cluster and swivel to look at them.

So cute!

Beyond that, what was once a blank void between pillars flashes revealing as a massive spider-web traversed by over a hundred logistics bots. All pausing for a fraction of a second to send a return before continuing to carry bundles of code wherever they're supposed to go. 

Finally the adjacent pillars are illuminated by a writhing mass of industrious little workers, clambering over each other and working together to accomplish their task. 

Their movements create a beautiful noise pattern in the split second everything is visible. But, as quickly as it appeared everything goes dark again in the same wave it was lit up.

Aria almost pouts at the disappearance of such a beautiful sight, but it’d be rude to keep pinging the bots while they’re trying to work. Turning back to a very still Jinx, she gives a smile.

“Nope! Everyone else is busy.” She chirps, waving for her friend to follow. “C’mon I’ve got to get to work.”

Can’t let the bots show her up after all!