As Free looked around her position and further into the distance, she could make out other spiral helixes. It wasn’t hard to figure out that they were data uploads and downloads to and from the CoreStacks. Without much more to go on she decided to head toward the nearest one. Her cutter sliced through the glass of the CodeSea.

  “Wow Three, that’s giving you trouble?”

  Three hardly heard the voice, he was logging work on Free’s rig and controlling Free’s avatar, doing his own work, as well as having to operate in ‘meatspace’. Even when Free hadn’t been doing any work it wouldn’t be a problem but now that he was having to control a clone and, as a Supe, could deep dive on the backend… There were some serious Employee avatar checks that constantly ran in both the CodeSea and directly on her rig. Deceiving them would have been a full-time job on its own.

  He kept Free’s profile running in a hidden screen as he turned toward the voice, “Hey Jane, yeah my head’s feeling a bit cloudy today, this shouldn’t be this hard I know,” He grinned and let out an embarrassed laugh.

  She looked on with concern, “Should you go to Medical? You’ve been getting those a lot lately.”

  “I will after this shift, it’s a short one anyway, eh?” He put a warm smile on his face.

  Jane returned it with a touch of concern present in hers, “If you say so, I’ve seen a couple Junior Supervisor’s burn out and they weren’t logging nearly as much Code as you are, just take care of yourself…”

  “I’m fine Jane, besides, I have you to worry about me so I’m in good hands anyways.”

  She smiled and trailed a hand on his shoulder as she left. Three wiped the smile off his face and continued.

  Free had missed that first data-helix. And the next one. They just didn’t last long enough once she caught sight of them. On the second helix Free had finally caught sight of the ‘Spiders’ that Three had told her about. There were 4 of them and they skitted back and forth in oblique angles as their course brought them toward the CoreStack upload spirals, same as her. She had noticed that they were somehow always heading toward a data-helix before there was any indication that they would appear.

  She maneuvered her ship in a slight angle to bring them closer together.

  They were huge. Well, compared to her ship at least, and possessed overly long legs that skittered over the surface of the water and were connected at their base to a single orb-like body at their center. They were faster than her but their angular travel meant that their forward speed was roughly the same.

  Free switched out the front cannons’ ammunition from SQL to a modified processing leech that, in the CodeSea, appeared as a harpoon with a rope. She’d piggyback on their Code and modify their parameters a bit to boost their speed to reduce the lateral travel of the Spiders.

  When its odd strafing pattern finally brought it close enough, she ripped out a shot. As the looping rope spiraled behind the whistling harpoon the spider cut its angle away from her. Miss. Corpohell. One of the Spiders pulled off and consumed the rope and harpoon.

  She cut the rope attached to Freeborn’s deck and loaded another harpoon. She eyed the distance between the Spider’s cuts and discovered that they were cutting angles at a half-logarithmic rate when referenced against their distance to the helix. She recalculated again and then fired. It hit the Spider’s body and securely latched.

  Her hands involuntarily raised in a cheer before the rope tightened and nearly threw her from from the deck before she clutched onto the mast. Freeborn creaked under her as the mast came under its own pressure from the abrupt zig-zagging of the spider and she took down her sail.

  She opened up the primary console screen on her ship and looked through the leech to review the Spider’s baseCode.

  So it cleans up misshaped or dead Code scraps in the Sea. That made sense from what she had seen the other one do with her first shot.

  So then why was it heading toward the helix? How did it know about them before me?

  She studied it more closely, the one of the spirals of the helix that was closer to her position had its current traveling downward from the CoreStacks and into the Sea, while the other was traveling upward. The thought was dismissed as she prepared to cut her rope and try to catch the upload stream. Then, the stream of water picked up from the Sea. She looked up, the other connection had already severed from the CoreStack.

  She groaned, she had missed the upload. She should have been modifying the Spider, not spending time playing Corpo-tourist. Free clutched desperately to secure herself as the Spider abruptly twisted its angle to head in another direction but Free didn’t see anything there.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  First, she needed to fix the routing algorithm the Spider used, if she was going to have any advantage for hooking one she needed it to not be constantly zig-zagging. After some untimely interruptions from ill-timed zigs and even more poorly timed zags, she found it and inserted some new Code up the worm harpoon’s rope.

  She watched as the Spider abruptly shifted into a straight line run in the middle distance between its zig-zags. Also, the entire Spider construct had turned from gray-black to a vibrant red. She sighed, ‘not Corporation-Complaint’, she could hear Three’s voice and echoes of countless others who had said those exact words to her over the years. She couldn’t help rolling her eyes in response to the silent reprimands, it had become a subconscious habit by this point.

  Her question was still unanswered, How did the Spider know which way to travel?

  She dug around in the Code but found only obfuscated or fuzzy answers. Free stared after it and studied the construct through her naked eye. Her sight traveled around it and caught the spider picking up scraps of code and even entire data-packet fish. She looked below her and noticed that she was in the middle of a massive school of data-packet fish. She continued to stare at the fish then looked around her to the other Spiders. They were all traveling the same direction and she dove into her console screen.

  The Spider cleaned up the data-packets before they went up to the CoreStacks. She smiled and stared at the giant red Spider appreciatively, thanks big guy. She was going to be able to coast. Free’s eyes narrowed at that. She turned back behind her, then back to her Spider. Bit of red flakes were falling off the edges of one of its legs and into the Sea below. She looked behind her again and took in the sight of three Spiders that had shifted enough to start cutting a direct path in her wake. They were trying to clean up the source of the broken Code. Aka HER SPIDER.

  Worse yet, without the extra drag of carrying around her ship they were gaining, fast. Now that she was traveling in a straight line she risked opened her sails and was able to pick up some more speed. She still wasn’t outpacing them though, it just increased the amount of time until the pursuing Spiders would catch up. She wasn’t sure how they would see her .vessel, it definitely wasn’t a native of this environment.

  Stupid things were treating her Spider like a bit of corrupted data. That was her guess at least. Her guess was partly wrong, her bit of modified Spider set off low-level alerts in several places across the CodeSea. Her bit of unappreciated fortune meant that they weren’t high-level alerts, at least.

  However Free could only address the problems she knew of, so she dove into the Spider’s baseCode and desperately tried to make it Compliant.

  Those Adhoc lessons that Three had put her through were coming in handy for Free’s efforts, despite that, it wasn’t going particularly great. The movement algorithms of the Spiders were at the center of its Code, she was just lucky that she hadn’t messed up their tracking system when she had first taken out the oblique movement.

  She managed to reduce the decay rate of her construct and two of the pursuing Spiders pulled away in response to the decreased decay rate. The last one was persistent as it slowly gained on her.

  Free got her Spider’s Code as tight as she could, that said, some damage was already done as the crippled limb was still leaky and breaking apart at an increasing rate as the instability spread through more and more of the construct. She sat facing backward as she studied the Spider following her. She watched it, almost faster than she could perceive, scoop up the bits of code and data and place them into its Core. It had an insatiable appetite.

  Her decaying Spider now had lost the originally infected leg and its pace noticeably slowed. The pursuing Spider put on a burst of speed at that and snapped up the chunk of malicious code that was entirely too close to the hull of Freeborn, then she felt it. It locked onto her as a source of scrap code. She was a little outraged, “It’s not scrap you dumb Spider!”

  It moved in two giant limbs ready to crash down on her ship and she scrambled to rip a shot from her rear-cannon. The SQL missile punched directly into the center of its round body. It stopped, twitched, and burst apart in a spray of dead Code as she quickly left it in her wake..

  At that point she saw the spiral form in the distance, one point rising from the Sea and the other reaching down to touch its surface. Her Spider burst apart in the middle of a massive school of data and she pulled up her screen as she saw the data-packet fish mutate and twist by the flush of bad-data released by the Spider’s death.

  She continued to race forward as the data-corruption spread from fish to fish faster than her .vessel could match, much faster. She saw the stream of red-corrupted fish spread up in the distance and up the spiral, turning the water-stream red with errors. Suddenly its connection to the CoreStack was cut off mid-transfer and a massive pillar of the data-stream started to collapse downward. Toward her ship, and her!

  She pulled on the wheel hard and leaned into the turn, her body barely suspended above the surface of the Sea. She looked up at the mass quantities of data falling down onto her as a wall of water, it was going to be close. She debated using the SharkSkin, but she didn’t. She didn’t even know where to go after this. It’d be a waste.

  Freeborn was now cutting through the turbulent glass as the closer portions of the corrupted mega-stream hit the surface around and behind her.

  Above!

  She cut to her left in a jerk and turned down her auditory input levels as the sound of the first big smack nearly turned her brain into the mush of mysterious grains. In her muted world she checked upward again and pushed her ship for everything it was worth as she cut lines back and forth to dodge the chunks of descending data as they smacked the water.

  Another close dodge sent her cutter shaking with the impact. Then, she saw it. A massive wall descended down right above her. It was apocalyptic in size as she pushed her .vessel for everything it had. It was going to be tight as the first section hit behind her and the wall continued to drop in a cascading wave as it closed the distance.

  The last piece hit and she felt only a split second of relief before a massive wave pushed out from the impact zone. She thought to ride it, then thought better as she wrapped her hands around the mast. The wave was topped by another wave as it hit her like a steel wall. Everything went white as the corrupted data forcefully pushed itself onto and into her.

  Then, she was floating.