Free was sinking fast, faster than she had been expecting. The Platform was above her and fading fast as her sinking pace continued to build. She deployed her ‘borrowed’ Supe credentials that transformed her avatar’s uniform as she finished compiling her .vessel and deployed it to an outline of a diving bell that started to trace its outline in the water around her.

  Then, she felt something, a strange vibration. She looked around but the water was growing darker and darker, shrinking her vision. She saw a flash of red that was floating somewhere in the distance on a parallel course. A soft ding chimed in her ear indicating that the compiling had completed and she hit ‘Deploy’. The diving bell’s opaque surface started to fill out from the trace as her .vessel program started to run. She felt moisture for the first time in her swim to the CodeSea’s depths which meant that she was sweating in her rig.

  The moving red dot paused its lazy movement then another red dot appeared some distance away from the first. She realized that they were eyes as the diving bell gonged gently in her head. The bell finished constructing itself and her sight disappeared along with the diving bell as its shroud finally came fully online, masking her presence in the CodeSea.

  She sat, breathing heavy breaths for long moments. There were a few leaks that indicated flaws in the shroud and its integration with her .vessel, so she quickly patched them and sat back again to take stock. It was almost cozy in here, if she could forget that she was on the run of her life and dropping to the bottom of who knew where. She’d have liked to have first given it a test run, but she knew this was something you only got one shot at, and that was if you were lucky. That went double for her. If she didn’t get to the CoreStacks and get her ‘FreeBorn’ BirthCertificate she was finished whether or not she got caught. If she did get it, she would just print it at her rig, grab it, and walk past the automatic scanners and right out the front door.

  Three breathed out a sigh of relief. It had gone… ok. It wasn’t perfect. There were more detection systems than he had first assumed on the edges of the Platforms. Neither his grandfather or his father had mentioned something like this, they must have added something in the last 30 years.

  Despite his frantic work, he was tense. He hadn’t managed to catch every last trace and scrap of data, the CodeSea moved constantly and far too fast for that. Subverting the new detection protocols had taken longer than he predicted and the CodeSea had swept what traces remained away and distributed them throughout the Sea. He just had to hope what he didn’t manage to scrub had been lost to the depths.

  He had to focus; he was managing his own work, Free’s work and cloned pseudo-rig, as well as having to hop out into ‘meatspace’, as Free liked to call it, to occasionally to discuss things with other Supervisors.

  She gives me junk for dino-tech but she’s using dino-words like that.

  He took another deep breath and let it out more gently this time. He had to play it cool. He could have helped her more but he was already taking a massive risk with lending her his Supe Authority. He had wiped personally identifiable markers from them but if her avatar was caught then even if it wasn’t traced to him personally the Corporate Internal Security would still be able to trace it to his Supervisor Cell.

  Of course, he looked at Jane and returned a smile, he could still plant evidence on another Supervisor at that point. His other options to help were limited, he wasn’t going to risk it all while her chances were still somewhere between ‘slim’ and ‘unlikely’.

  You got this Free. Otherwise it’s all for nothing.

  If she didn’t succeed then he didn’t know how long he would have to bide his time. Decades, at least, for another opportunity, if ever. Or he could be just another link in the chain like his grandfather and father had been.

  Three took another deep breath and blew out his cheeks.

  Free sat at the center of her diving bell, blind and dumb to the outside Sea. She heard groaning from the metal and the rare ping as her .vessel program was stress tested by the incredible pressures of the deep CodeSea. It seemed to be holding up well despite that increasing stress. Occasionally she’d be sent sprawling as her .vessel was brushed by whatever constructs lurked in the depths. She didn’t focus on those, if one of them took her out now then she would be dead before she realized it anyways.

  She pulled out ball after ball of Code, some had been given to her by Three, others she had built herself. Once she took them all out, she took inventory of what she had. Remembering Three’s warning she left the golden ‘Seed’ inside her avatar.

  ‘Bot-Bombs’, she had three of those. She could think of three ways she could use them.

  Three…

  She shook her head and refocused, each one was loaded with a scalable Bot program. The more data and more data-infrastructure that it was able to infest at the moment it was deployed, the more hardware space the Bots could seize and the more Bots would be generated.

  She and Three had made and tweaked these. She had designed the Bot-replication software based on the platform attack they had both fought off and he helped modify them to be able to seize space on Corpo-Hardware. She could put them on a dormant infective spread with a delayed fuse, but it couldn’t last forever like that, at a certain point the antivirals would pick it up and detect it. She couldn’t help but think if she had to use one of these, she’d probably be long past the point about worrying about native antivirals.

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  SharkSkin, that one was all Three’s doing. She had, of course, peeked under the hood but it was deep-Corpo stuff. It manipulated and bypassed Corpo-Code so deeply that she wondered how Three even knew how to make it.

  He had said something about work from his Grandfather or Father, but she didn’t know for sure, he only ever mentioned his father and grandfather in passing. She had time to create 2 FreeCode variations of the program, or the parts she could understand at least. They were much more unstable boosters that wouldn’t last nearly as long. Free wasn’t completely confident in their formation so they were placed into the ‘final-complete-last’ resort file pile.

  Another was Three’s famous Corpo-Shroud. He gave her a copy of his ‘best one’ that she had cloned and modified to prevent detection of her activities. Still, using one would by definition have the potential to set off alarm bells. Detecting something hostile was easy, detecting nothing where there was supposed to be something was also typically presumed to be hostile by Corporate systems.

  She had a box-worth of SQL 'missiles’ that would corrupt anything they hit, the only caveat on these was typical of any SQL based weaponry. They’d have to hit her target directly. Three helped a bit by making it be unable to be picked up by automatic scanners until it was fired but that came at the cost of range.

  She had incorporated launchers onto her .vessel but since the missiles were based on the Corpo-tech of the Platform’s larger repeaters, Three had warned her that they either wouldn’t work well at all or, at best, would be unlikely to be instant-killers to everything ‘down there’. If it was effective against it, it would take multiple hits unless she corrupted a particularly essential piece of Code.

  Her final item were Clone-Worms. They’d clone her .vessel that were ‘louder’ than her own and would ideally divert attention away from her. They were based on the worm that had attacked the platform and was combined with Three’s top-tier Corpo-shroud, it should look just like her .vessel though she’d have to modify some stuff on the fly dependent on how her .vessel was doing. She had multiple of them as well but she had no idea of how effective they would be.

  She checked over her modified Supe Authority and triple checked everything as she waited.

  And waited. And waited some more. Free was getting nervous. Should she check outside? No. Three had warned her against doing that and even if he hadn’t she knew it was foolish. Being detected this early would mean an instant-fail.

  Suddenly the diving bell shot downward before floating weightlessly and then slammed into something underneath her.

  “What in the Corpo-Hell was that?”

  She was sprawled on the ceiling as the diving bell rocked back and forth. She tried to stand but the diving bell rocked back and forth and made it difficult to find her footing.

  Did I just go up? It felt like she hit a surface, not the bottom.

  She looked down, the hatch was below her. She stumbled then tripped eventually she got her feet under her and placed her hands on a curved wall and started to push it around. It took some doing but the weight of the bottom finally kicked in and righted it.

  She looked at her timer 10:57, she had been falling for the better part of an hour. Free took a couple of deep breaths and turned both of the handles at the same time and pushed on the hatch, it groaned open and landed topside with a thud.

  Above her was blue. Not deep-CodeSea blue but… blue. She climbed her way out and sat on the lid.

  An endless ocean curved upward on all sides. The jagged little peaks in the water spiked in turbulent pockets across the blue-glass of the great CodeSea. She looked up and flinched, it wasn’t ‘outworld white’ but a blazing golden orb. She modified the settings in her visual settings and looked again.

  The Sun.

  Or close enough, she’d never actually seen the Sun. Even her memories as a child hadn’t included the Sun. She had memories of the City but the Sun never shone there. All her memories were dark and gloomy.

  She turned away and reset her visual settings. She refocused into the distance, the water rose and rose until it faded in a hazy blue. Then, in a flash, it hit her.

  This IS the bottom of the CodeSea.

  She had traveled through the depths of the CodeSea as she had known it all the way to the other side. In the distance she saw a helix form from the surface of the Sea and reach up toward the Sun.

  The Sun… is the CoreStack…

  She opened a panel near where she was sitting and slapped a hand down, then she stood up and waited as her .vessel transformed around her. Pieces folded and warped until she was standing on a small square. Then panels started to slide out from it as it shifted and expanded until she was standing on the deck of a small ship. In the center standing tall was what looked to be a wooden mast. Free looked over her .vessel with pride. It looked good. There were three cannons, two on either side that covered wide angles and one facing the rear. Three had insisted on having three cannons. She smiled, being pretty sure he just did that because his name was ‘Three’.

  She admired her Supervisor uniform which had turned into a ‘captain’s uniform’ with epaulets and tassels on her shoulders, much to her amusement.

  She placed a foot on the bow of her boat and proudly slammed fists onto her waist with elbows outstretched and grinned,

  “I christen thee, Freeborn!”

  She stood like that for a few moments then was embarrassed, then she felt embarrassed for feeling embarrassed in the first place as there was no one else around here as far as the eye could see. She slapped a button on the mast and the sail shot out as she started to smoothly glide across the water. Her wild grin quickly returned.