Arc 1 | Chapter 18: A New Friend(?)

The wall of electric blue shuddered, sparks flying as it prepared to fight Emilia off—a useless waste of energy.

Without thought, her Censor locked onto it and code slipped out of her and into the aether. [Wall Break] was barely worth considering a hacking skill, if you asked her. When she’d been younger, she’d believed anyone could learn to hack, as long as they had the right mindset and code. She’d even tried to teach one of her friends to use this particular skill when she was a teenager. [Wall Break] was so simple even her Censor could manage it without any real input from her, but her friend failed spectacularly. Only one person, a teammate during the war, had ever been able to learn enough from her to call themself a hacker, and it had still taken them far longer to get a hang of things than it had her. If she hadn’t already had a history of successfully teaching people

other

things, she might have assumed she was just a terrible teacher.

The wall vanished, leaving in its place a red door, so small that someone taller than her would have had to crouch to get through it. Not the greatest start. Red doors generally meant:

Beware! Monsters and Blood Dwell Here! Turn Back!

It wasn’t that the door itself was red. If the bartender had been standing here with her, examining his Censor’s access point from the outside, the door he saw probably wouldn’t be red because it wasn’t. It was simply her own Censor telling her that something didn’t feel quite right—to be careful.

It could be wrong, of course. Her Censor was programmed to be a bit paranoid and had been known to give her false warnings even when it had been in perfect working order. It was a warning that she’d be stupid to ignore, however. Something had been wrong with the bartender, but she’d kinda been hoping it was just normal insanity or a bad trip. She didn’t particularly want to be fighting off some virus or security program, not during her first hack in years, but they needed information. Through the ominous red door it was!

“I suppose,”

Emilia mused as she kicked the door down, the useless locks shattering into a sparkle of mist as her code collided with it,

“this is what I get for always complaining that hacking was too easy.”

The hallway that Emilia entered was long and dark, for a moment at least. Every few steps, the world shifted. The colour of the world, the shape, the scent of it sizzled and sparked as it morphed, blasting her with fragments of images, forgotten scents of childhood, shifting the hallway into a giant park then a cloudless sky then an icy dessert then a small, dying farm. More and more—the world changed. Overwhelming and all consuming, and her eyes burned. A constant swell of too much information throwing itself at her.

It was nothing compared to the sound.

Voices echoed around her, overlapping with each other until they were thundering through her head, so strong she was sure if this were her real body she’d have lost her dinner already.

Unfortunately, her Censor’s broken ability to turn down the volume of specific objects in her surroundings extended into the digital world. Annoying, but it also told her that

that

particular problem was probably a software issue. Her bad, accidentally hacking an error into it. Easily fixed, with a few hours tinkering with it in the Virtuosi System, though.

Which reminded her, she wasn’t in the system now. Usually, anyone hacking would be, so time could be slowed. Hacking a Censor could be time-consuming. Hopefully, this guy, who seemed to already have something funky going on inside his head, would be easy to hack. If not, well, her Censor would keep her awake, and the club’s couch was pretty damn comfortable. Mazi would keep her safe, too. Pull her out if anything bad happened—not that pulling a hacker out was especially hard. Not unless they ran into a security protocol that refused to release them.

A quick scan told her that this guy had nothing of the sort—not unless he’d gotten his hands on something state-of-the-art, which she doubted. That shit was expensive. That said, there did indeed seem to be something lingering inside him that shouldn’t be…

The sound really was becoming unbearable, though. Every step seemed to bring a new voice into the swell of sounds around her. Her Censor burned slightly, trying to sort through them. The fact that it was already having issues wasn’t helping it. Errors, plus running in real-time without any external support. It burned, pain spiking through the base of her skull, and she pushed it away, forced her Censor to stop analyzing the sounds. The last thing she needed was a headache in the real world.

Her Censor had managed to isolate a few of the sounds before being forced to stop, however—garbled memories, it looked like. Too fragmented to really understand—maybe if she knew more about him, but she didn’t. For all she knew, they were from media. Lyrics, lines from shows. Nebulas, they could be from books, if the guy had imagination enough to give them actual voices.

[{Transcription.log}:

Useless little thing. We should never have had you.

]

[{Transcription.log}:

I love you.

]

[{Transcription.log}:

Never— away from— forever.

]

[{Transcription.log}: Error]

Could be from his life, could be nothing.

What was clear, however, as Emilia summoned a set of noise-cancelling headphones from the aether—or the digital equivalent of it, anyways—was that this wasn’t a room just for her or any other intruder. This was part of the bartender’s mind, echoing with things he couldn’t let go of—couldn’t silence. This also wasn’t the kind of place she should have ended up, not without going further inside him. Not without

wanting

to find this place. Another very, very bad sign.

“This is even worse than my head,” she muttered to herself as she pulled the headphones over her ears. It wasn’t exactly advisable to remove one of her senses—too easy to miss something if you couldn’t hear. She hadn’t been able to hear through that mess, though, so she figured her teacher would forgive her. Maybe.

Maybe.

…

Or, maybe she’d just never tell them, if they ever met again.

She tugged on her necklace, the small purple tube that accompanied her everywhere, whether in the digital or real world. She didn’t activate it—it was too early for that. She did shift it into a ring chain bracelet—gold and purple stars and moons that wrapped around her right hand—for easier access if she did end up needing it. She hoped she wouldn’t. Fighting off rogue memories was always a massive—

Emilia twisted, purple and gold sparking across her hand. She glared into the silent darkness that surrounded the way she had come, lips pressing tight. She turned back, the world lighting up once more with overwhelming sensation, scent and sight and a frozen breeze rushing over her skin and sound that even her headphones couldn’t completely block and—

Emilia twisted back into the darkness, glaring, glaring, glaring.

Something

was there. Watching her. Something waiting for her in the dark. The thing that didn’t belong here? Perhaps.

Perhaps not.

“Fine,”

she thought, turning back towards the noise infested path and continuing on.

This

—this mess of everything—was annoying, but it was also one of the fun parts about hacking. The sorting through information to find doors and holes. Figuring out which way you wanted to go, when even a person’s mind and Censor often didn’t know. Some people could organize their thoughts and feelings and memories perfectly. Perfect balance. It was rare, outside of non-devs. It was also the most notoriously easy category to accidentally knot. Trauma was just too powerful. It slipped inside your soul, your very makeup, much too easily—twisting and turning until something monstrous lived inside you.

Trauma was so revolting even the best knot therapist had a time removing it, and it was so infectious that the traumatized often didn’t want to be treated, didn’t want to get better—didn’t want to be

fixed.

Emilia was like that. She was okay, being broken. Yes, there were cons to being so broken, and she was constantly knotting up other things, compensating for the trauma and hiding it away behind other bits of brokenness.

It felt wrong to erase her brokenness, though.

That was probably just the brokenness talking, intoxicating and intrusive and inescapable.

It was easier being broken, though. Being balanced—being the person she once had been? That would come with a whole host of other problems. That would come with *memories—*with

guilt.

She still felt guilt, of course. Guilt was practically inescapable, unless you had a black knot. She had become a master at running from her guilt, however. She was much faster than it, usually, and when she wasn’t, there was always drugs and sex to help empty her mind.

Her hand snapped out, catching a moth that had floated across her path. An oddity—up until this moment, nothing physical had gotten this close to her. Sensations, yes. Actual things, no.

She looked down at it. It was beautiful, its wings covered in fuzzy, psychedelic patterns. She never wanted to look away from it.

“Hello, little intruder,” she whispered to it, shattering it in her hand.

A hurricane of colour surrounded her—the same ones that had made up the patterns on the moth’s wings. Pinks and purples and blues ripped around her, sending her hair swirling as she was left trapped in the eye of the storm. Electricity zipped around her, sparking against her mind and bracelet, the power of it keeping her safe from the backlash just as it kept her safe during raids.

“What are you hiding? Hmm?”

she thought, watching as broken images ruptured from the storm and seemed to shatter apart into nothingness, leaving behind a gaping void where there had once been information.

“Me?” a voice called. “What about you?”

Emilia glared, sure she hadn’t spoken her thoughts aloud. Either it had been a figment of her imagination, or the little moth was psychic. Probably the former, which was almost certainly worse overall than the latter.

This place was toxic. Seeping into her like a new trauma, wrapping around her old wounds and squeezing until they felt ready to pop. The Strats appeared in the hurricane, exploded into nothing but pink vapour. Planes and blood and fire. Olivier burning, dying unless she got there faster, faster. She hadn’t been fast enough when everyone else died. She wasn’t going to lose another friend. Not another. Not—

The world halted. Her breaths stopped, and she saw.

“Fuck,” she muttered, rolling her shoulders as she shook out the tension from the storm, what little tendrils of guilt had attached themselves to her slipping away into the aether.

“You can’t change the past,”

she reminded herself.

“You can only go forward, and protect the people you still have.”

The decade old mantra settled in her like home, familiar and warm, and she returned to seeing the scene before her—the one she had been looking for. The one that would lead her to whoever was behind this.

It was not what she had been looking for. It would lead her next to nowhere.

The bartender was talking to someone, but he hadn’t been lying when he’d said he didn’t know who. He didn’t. He didn’t even know what the man looked like because his face had been wiped from the bartender’s memory.

He truly had known nothing, although she didn’t think he had known it—knew that he had a virus inside him, fucking with his mind. Not completely anyways. He had been too confused by his own lack of knowledge. It was probably why his responses to their questions had been so sporadic. It was destroying his mind, bit by bit, stirring everything up until it was a hurricane of insanity. If it hadn’t been for Pria, how long would it have taken for anyone to figure out what he was up to? Given how messy and broken his memories already were, a couple days from now he may not have even remembered he had been the one drugging people.

He probably wasn’t supposed to, by the time anyone found out.

She saw it, the moment it happened. The mystery man and the bartender’s Censors connecting, some information exchanged between them, along with the little moth. So tiny it wasn’t even noticeable to the bartender’s Censor. Her own Censor noticed it, trying to slip into her clothes so it could be taken back to her own mind when she exited. It was an interesting little thing. Smart and cute, and she let it settle against her, her Censor already building her a cage to contain it until she could reprogram it for her own use.

The men parted, the mystery man heading to another person—another mystery person, their face erased from the memory—as the bartender left the building. She didn’t recognize the street, not at first—she’d never spent much time exploring most of Piketown. Then she saw it: the odd little house that Olivier was staying it, red and weird and hideous. Well, that was a starting point in locating this place, at least. Leave it to the elites, though, to have a purist group gathering in broad daylight on their streets.

The world began to fade, and Emilia sent her Censor flying, grabbing as much of the information that had been exchanged between the men as possible. What came back from degraded as shit, but there could be something still accessible inside it. Hopefully, there was, because even diving inside this man had shown her almost nothing useful.

She turned back, eyes taking in the scene around her. The man’s memories were quickly crumbling, the moth she had destroyed, the other she had taken, only two of a thousand swarming through his mind. It was a good thing, perhaps, that he had chosen this path before his mind had been contaminated. He was going to die for choosing to risk the lives of who knew how many people. There was no saving him from his fate, just as there was no coming back from this amount of destruction. Even if the contamination had come first, caused the hatred that send him spiralling towards his destruction, there would be no saving him. There would be only pity.

Images sped by her. Pictures of the man he had been, the teenager, the child. There was another person in so many of the memories, most of their appearance already eaten away, and the only way Emilia knew it was the same person was the love that followed them. Love so strong that it didn’t fade even as the memories shattered and fell away into the abyss.

There came a point, however, when the person vanished from his memories. There was no death—no specific moment she could see where the person the bartender seemed to love so passionately disappeared. There was a rise in hatred, however. Anger and violence and Emilia couldn’t see it, but she could guess.

Someone had killed the bartender’s person, probably some irregular or Free Colonier. It didn’t excuse his hatred, but it did explain it.

Emilia had always liked explanations. She hated unanswered questions and lingering doubts. She had no doubt this man had known what he was doing when he had taken the drugs—had known what he was going to do, how much damage he was going to cause. She also had no doubt that, to him, he was completely justified.

Emilia tilted her head back, looking up into the swirl of memories as her Censor began to pull her out of the man’s head.

“The things our love and hatred drive us to do,”

she thought, before the world disappeared.