T-2 to Employee #3,357,921’s Liquidation
Three: Hey-
Free: No food! Nothing!
Three: … little edgy are we?
Free: Well yeah, I’m hungry and… stuff.
Three: I knew your Vid-Jail training was a short one, you should have time and credits to get something in the Caf, yeah?
Free: …
Free: Well, yeah, I guess. I was looking forward to it though!
Three: Well I got you tonight but you’ve gotta toughen up Free. This is serious.
She was a little taken aback at that, Three wasn’t usually this serious. A spiky wave of anxiety creeped up into her shoulders and washed through her.
Free: Alright alright, I’m plenty tough I’ll have you know!
Three: Good :)
Three: Well, Miss ToughLady FreeBorn let’s see what you got. Send me the vessel!
Free: Oh yeah Corpo-ToughGuy? Eat this!
Attachment: Free.vessel
Three: Did you create a custom file format just to do that?
Free: >:O yes ofc, I have been waiting for you to ask!
Three: Whyyyyyyyy?? Wastin- Wait a second, this is…
Free: >|:D adaptable as corpo-hell? Yes yes I know, please hold the applause.
Three: Damn Free you might actually have a shot!
Free: Hey, you don’t curse! And what do you mean ‘might actually’??
Three: Ah well actually I didn’t curse if you’ll check again.
Free looked up but Three had corrupted the first part of his previous message.
Free: Cheating!
Three: Well so you’re going to have to keep radio silence until you get on the other side of the Sea. Once you compile this, ride it all the way down to the surface.
Free: Down? To the surface? That doesn’t make any sense.
Three: Yeah it will, trust me I went down there once. Just one time when I made Supe.
Free: Anything else?
Three: Most is about defensive measures, we’ll talk about those tomorrow though. Let’s finish up your vessel today.
Free: Alright fair enough, I don’t know what else I could add while keeping it lightweight.
Three: Hmmm, yeah that’s a good point actually. You probably don’t want to be trading blows with Corporate Battleships down there. Where were you thinking of applying the SharkSkin modifier I gave you?
Free: I was thinking… here. Or here. I haven’t really had time to go through it properly.
Three: Either of those spots could work, I’m not entirely sure what this is going to look like when you’ve deployed it.
Free: Oh? Mr. WunderCode doesn’t know?
Attachment: FreeFaintinginshock.vibe
It was just a masked .pic file, it showed Free with her hand dramatically placed on her forehead and her mouth hanging slightly open.
Three: ha. Ha.
Now that Free was looking more closely at it.
Free: The SharkSkin looks kind of unstable, definitely not your usual style.
Three: Yeah… It’s actually something I lifted off an attack and combined with some other stuff I pinched out of the CodeSea.
Free: Wait. You? Working with FreeCode? What’s going on? Did I get liquidated early? Is this a dream or the afterlife?
Three: Alright alright funny. Hilarious even, can we refocus? Your best bet is to be unnoticed, maybe hitch a ride trailing in a Spider’s wake.
Free knew about the Spiders, one of the CodeHook projects when Free was their TeamLead had been working on a distribution station for them. They apparently roamed through the Sea and picked up errors and stray chunks of formerly malignant Code.
Free: Aren’t they underwater?
Three: No, they’re on the surface and they are mostly harmless but using the SharkSkin will definitely attract attention because you’ll start leaking foreign code and they’ll start chasing you. Well, pretty much everything will at that point, so don’t use it unless you need to.
Free: K, I’m still wondering how I’m not just going to be ripped out of my rig in Meatspace the second anyone spots me.
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Three: I can cover you on the Platform but otherwise when you’re down there… don’t get seen?
Free: What are my odds of that?
Three: Uh, well 0%. You will get picked up eventually, it’s just a matter of when.
This had come to her last night as she grumbled on an empty stomach. She had snatched some of the Code from the attack on their Platform some months ago.
Free: What if I masked myself as a Bot?
Three: …
Three: Let me see what you’ve got.
Free sent him the masking file. She waited as Three reviewed it.
Three: You got this from the Platform attack a while ago correct?
Free: Yeah, I thought about how that Bot stole the ident of that Employee so what if I copied my base ident. It would just look like a generic Employee.
A soft chirp sounded out as the file was sent back.
Three: How’s a Supe ident sound?
That did sound better to Free.
Free: Won’t this get you caught though?
Three: Only if you get caught, besides I ‘borrowed’ one of my fellow Supe’s credentials. Even more importantly a Standard Employee-Asset down there? That’d send off more alarm bells than having a outworld Bot there.
Free: ‘Outworld’?
Three: It’s CorporateSlang.
Free: There is no such thing as CorpoSlang. It’s impossible for the CorpoSlaveMasters to be that cool.
Three: Attachment: oh-its-you.smug
Free opened it and it showed Three with most absolute smug expression on his face. She laughed.
Three: Well I’m sure it’s not something they use super far up but yeah there’s some ‘CorpoSlang’, that one’s an old one. It means beyond the CodeSea. Up.
Free looked up to the surface of the CodeSea and beyond it into the white. Outworld huh?
She looked back down to her display and groaned. Three had flagged interrogatives all over her ‘.vessel’. Her face tightened and she dove back into her Code, arguing some points with Three while conceding others.
Three logged off early after working with Free. He put her odds at 50/50 and that’s if she didn’t stumble across some of the ‘Insta-Loss’ things in the CodeSea. ‘Amemdonn’ being chief amongst them. He still hadn’t been able to figure out how to get her past that beast. He was tempted to not even mention the construct to her. He rubbed his eyes.
“Tired today Three?”
Three whirled then returned a smile as Jane was half-in the Sea while looking at him with a warm expression.
“Yeah, I just have a bit of a headache.”
“Oh no, I’m a bit ahead of schedule so I could finish up whatever you’re working on. If you want of course.”
He smiled again as she stumbled over the last part of her sentence, “Jane, you’re a lifesaver. You sure?”
“Yeah no problem, head to the Caf or to your room if you want. It’s the least I can do after you helped me out last week.”
He waved a hand and sent the file to Jane and saw her wince.
“You’re sure you’re ok with it?”
“Excuse me? Who taught you all the Supervisor tricks?”
Three raised his hands as he rose from his rig, he gave her a tired smile, “Thanks again Jane.”
“No problem, get some rest.”
He waved over his shoulder as he walked out. He remembered to rub his temples as he walked out of the room. He actually was getting a bit of a headache. He had lied about lifting those Supervisor Credentials, even he wasn’t able to snag something like that on such short notice. If he had a month, maybe two, then sure. But he had only had 7 shifts. Impossible. She just had to reach the CoreStacks.
He used a Supervisor’s override to open the shell over Three’s crumpled sheets and dropped off the Synth-Steak then looked through the Supervisor’s Log. Her tenancy of the Pod ended at… midnight tomorrow? Tomorrow! He closed the log and started to run back to his rig but stopped halfway there. It would look suspicious if he went back right away so he slowed his pace and redirected to his own Supervisor Pod. It was depressingly similar to an Employee Pod, just bigger and more comfortable.
I wonder if it’s just bigger Pods all the way up.
After nearly drifting off to sleep he pulled out his tablet to keep him awake, he had more work to do. And Free had only a single shift left.
Formerly T-1 to Employee #3,357,921’s Liquidation
Free had barely hopped into her rig before the dino-tech chatbox popped up. She quickly walked away from the other Employee-Assets.
Three: Free!
Free: The synth-steak was… chefskiss.love…. I can feel the pangs of sweet fullness through my rig.
Three: I’m glad to hear that Free but that’s really not important.
Free: NOT IMPORTANT?! It was the single best meal of my li-
Three: Liquidation is T-1 at 00:00.
Free: Yeah? And? What does that mean? Midnight tomorrow yeah?
Three: No Free. Midnight TONIGHT.
Free felt cold all over, it swam over in painful waves. Thoughts moved through her head too fast to grasp onto as they piled into each other one after another. She couldn't breathe, a flashing-red light came on in the corner of her vision, her rig was detecting a suboptimal state.
Three: Free!
He sent an Employee-Reprimand spike of pain through her rig.
Free: Ow!
The red-blink disappeared from her hud.
Three: Free, it’s a short shift today, only 12 hours.
A 4/5ths shift. That’s all the time she had in the world. This world.
Free: Well ok… wish me luck!
'I guess' she added in her head.
Three: Wait! Wait wait wait. You’re just going to jump off in front of everyone there? I can literally see you from the Tower.
Free: Good point…
Free had been focused on her order of operations, jump off and deploy after she got some distance between her and the Platform. Then… well she didn’t know what was going to happen then but she’d keep sinking until she got to the next layer.
Free: Wait! What about what to look out for?
Three: I don’t have time to walk you through everything I know but you need to avoid running into anything. Catch a ride on a spider if you can but stay away from A.M.E.M.D.O.N.N.
Free: Amemdonn?? Is that... the monster we saw that day?
Three: Yeah Free. The SharkSkin should keep you ahead of it but it won’t last forever. AMEMDONN is fast, like FAST ‘fast’ and there’s no way you’re going to be able to beat it face-to-face. There are also MAIDDS, they’re dumb but if you attack one then they will start replicating. There’s more but you have the tools. Don’t deploy until you’re far enough away from the Platform, I’ll try and mask you for as long as possible.
Free: How will I recognize the Prime CoreStacks?
Three: You’ll recognize them. Trust me. Do you still have the Seed?
Her hand reached up to her chest but she stopped herself from pulling it out.
Free: Yeah, I do.
Three: DO NOT take it out until you’re going to use it.
She hated that Mr. Crypto-Mysterious act that Three liked to pull from time to time but she didn’t have the consideration to argue the point. She took a couple of deep breathes one after another.
Three: Ok. I’m going.
She took a few looks around then stepped backward and plunged downward into the CodeSea. Her spot on the platform she had just vacated glitched and warped before a quick flicker settled into a facsimile of Free's avatar. Her digital clone sat down and started to work.
