Chapter 7
Mission: Enter the Matrix
Flair typed with reckless abandonment, guilt gnawing at her, she'd sent Nyx into the trap laid by the chancellor and his cronies.
Her fingers, usually quick and gentle on the keyboard, now slammed against the battered keys, her mind coming up with more of a hope than a plan. "GM, Rock, new plan. Rock, start a riot, rob the place, throw guns at people. If there are any rebels walking by their sure to eat it up, but try to get rid of the cybersecurity's personnel first. GM you need to disrupt their systems, I know it may not be your enhancements specialty but try your best without breaking the system," Flair instructed.
Rock hesitated, his voice rising in confusion, "Wait, what's going on?" Flair didn't look up, her fingers still flying across the keyboard and templates. "No time to explain," she snapped, her tone sharp but not unkind. "Just trust me. I'm diving in now." Rock exchanged a glance with GM, their silent agreement carrying the weight of years of teamwork. Without another word, they moved out, their steps purposeful and synchronized.
Seeing that they were doing what she asked, Flair prepared herself to go into the cyber world. Her body jerked once as the neural jack locked in the back of her neck, letting out a gasp as the world around her blurred, then vanished, replaced by the sterile chill of cyberspace. A silence and oppressive weight of a system designed to trap her mind, leaving her body in a comatose state.
Flair dropped into the prison like a glitch, her avatar flickering against the sterile black of the structure's hall within cyberspace. Flair looked at her body, feeling lighter than her real one although it was mostly code. Yellow numbers moved around in the form of a human, the system unsure if she was simply old code that remained useful.
The environment was unlike anything she'd infiltrated before. No flowing data rivers that moved over a black abyss. Just a structure of shifting walls and surveillance constructs, built to contain threats. Touching the floor with her hand, information poured into her mind, creating a map of the maximum-security prison, two terminals registering as locations that she needed to find based on what her mind was thinking about.
Sending out a shockwave to disable all cameras in the area and taking control of the security tower, one a regular terminal and the other a master terminal.
The corridors stretched endlessly before her, lit by a single row of lights, giving the place a horror vibe especially since there were times that the different pieces of the structure glitched, probably because of GM's disruptions. Cameras rotated silently from the ceiling, their lenses glowing red, while guards—humanoid constructs made of compressed data and encrypted armor—patrolled in perfect sync, their movements too precise to be human-coded.
Flair moved like carefully, slipping down the halls of the prison's code. The walls operated like barriers; glitch out of them and be frozen in a white space, her theory proving correct when a floor down the corridor with a guard glitched, causing him to fall through and be frozen in a white abyss outside the structure.
Flair crouched low behind a jagged extrusion of a corrupted wall, the corridor ahead was patrolled by two guards, their limbs moved with mechanical precision, heads rotating in perfect arcs as they scanned for anomalies. Their armor shimmered with encryption layers, and their footsteps made no sound.
She waited, and has she did, she closed her eyes and the map was brought up in her mind like it was a three-dimensional structure model. Red dots were guards, yellow were goal locations, and she was the blue cursor that traveled through the hunting prison. The structure itself gray, and the locations of glitches were a static black and white.
The prison's logic looped every 17 seconds. She'd mapped each patrol cycle, each camera sweep, each moment the system hesitated between rewriting and reinforcing. When the constructs turned the corner, she moved, her avatar slipping forward like a smear of corrupted light.
The corridor narrowed, walls pulsing with defensive code. Flair kept her movements minimal; her form reduced to a low-resolution blur. Any sudden spike in her signal could trigger a lockdown. She passed beneath a camera, its lens glowing red and timed her step within a flicker in the system's power, whenever a camera blinked, she disappeared.
The regular terminal was close now. She could feel an anchor point in the prison's architecture, a node of stability in a sea of shifting logic. Yet the only path forward was treacherous, fragmented sections missing entirely and revealing the sterile white abyss below. One misstep, and she'd be frozen in stasis, her consciousness suspended until the system decided she was obsolete.
She crouched again, fingers brushing the floor. A pulse of data surged into her mind, updating her internal map. The terminal was embedded in a wall two corridors down, guarded by a single construct and a rotating camera. The construct's patrol was erratic, likely destabilized by GM's disruptions, none the less dangerous.
Flair leapt across broken sections of the floor, her avatar trailing sparks when a camera rotated toward her, and she flattened against the wall, her form phasing slightly to mimic background code. The lens paused, as if it debated or attempted to activate a scan, but ultimately moved on. She exhaled silently and slipped forward.
The construct ahead twitched, its head jerking unnaturally. It had detected her signal, perhaps, or the residual echo of her jump. Flair ducked into a side alcove, pressing her avatar against a patch of corrupted wall. The construct approached, scanning. Its eyes glowed brighter, its limbs stiffening.
Flair quickly triggered a decoy protocol, an echo of her signal projected down the opposite corridor. The construct turned, chasing the phantom. Flair moved towards where the terminal was embedded in the wall, wires snaking out from it into the surrounding architecture. It pulsed with raw data, a heartbeat of the prison's surveillance system. Flair approached slowly, her avatar dimming as it did when weak against something that would take a lot from her, to avoid triggering proximity defenses, she activated a signal compression and protocol camouflage, making it so not only would it be harder for the sensors to detect her through high-frequency and irregular signals, but also allows her to move through guarded zones without triggering alerts.
She reached out but the system resisted, although slightly less now.
Her fingers met the interface, and the terminal flared with defensive code. Flair injected a bypass—an old maintenance protocol she'd buried in her avatar's subroutines, opening the frustrating terminal.
Inside, the interface unfolded like a puzzle box—layers of encrypted commands, surveillance feeds, and logic gates. Flair didn't hesitate navigating to the shockwave protocol, her mind racing to keep pace with the system's countermeasures.
The system fought her, rewriting sections of the interface as she worked, but she held firm, her avatar sparking from the strain it took to keep up.
She built the command manually line by line, until finally the command was complete, triggering it. A burst of static light came from the security tower in the physical world, designed to ripple outward and destroy all cameras in Sector 3. The cyberspaces prison structure reflected that as well, cameras and surveillance feeds going dark.
Flair staggered back, her avatar flickering violently, having trouble staying connected for a moment before returning to normal.
The system was began adapting, spawning new constructs, rewriting corridors. She couldn't stay, but she couldn't leave either, not with the master terminal so close, but even if she did reach it, she wouldn't be able to do anything until Nyx feed the nanites to her enhancement. Since her enhancement lacked the power to breach it alone
In her mind, the master terminal was her next objective if she could reach it now, even briefly, she could be prepared for when Nyx came.
Getting up, Flair headed to her next objective, the corridors narrowing again, this time by design, the structure was beginning to stabilize, meaning something was happening outside with Rock and GM. Flair slowed, her avatar becoming transparent to avoid detection as she entered the main core, the walls here were smoother, more deliberate and the guards were no longer glitching.
The master terminal's chamber, the main core of the system for sector 3 was vast—an open space unlike anything else in the prison. The walls pulsed with layered encryption, and the terminal itself sat on a raised platform, surrounded by a halo of shifting firewalls. It looked like a throne made of code, humming with authority.
A woman suddenly appeared; she didn't spawn like a construct nor did she glitch in like Flair had. She simply was—a being of power who stood between Flair and the master terminal, her form composed of smooth, flowing data. Her avatar was humanoid, but too perfect: symmetrical features, eyes like a clear sky, blond hair that shimmered from the bright lights that chased shadows away from every corner of the room. Her attire was business like, a classic style of a suit; white shirt with a black jacket and dress pants. All neatly buttoned and pressed.
The woman whose back was towards her, slowly turned and looked in her exact direction. Flair froze in fear, this wasn't a highly advance guard, but someone with a more advanced enhancement than her own.
The woman tilted her head, studying Flair with quiet intensity. Her voice, when it came, was soft and resonant—like a system notification wrapped in silk. It wasn't at all how Flair had expected it to sound, intimidating and business like.
Yet it scared her all the same, her mind immediately activating defensive protocols, even as her avatar flickered still damaged from the earlier terminal.
The woman stepped forward, and the firewalls behind her pulsed in response, she was linked to the terminal as its guardian. She hadn't even reacted to Flair as a threat. More like someone curious of someone who mimicked their abilities.
Flair took a step back, calculating. She couldn't fight this woman, not here, not now. She needed a distraction, something to draw the woman away.
But the woman moved again, a single step that covered twenty feet of distance between them, her eyes scanning Flair's avatar.
Flair's fingers twitched, readying a decoy protocol. But the woman raised a hand, and the corridor behind Flair sealed shut, walls folding in like a closing flower.
Flair's avatar dimmed further, her signal was being compressed, this woman could kill her in a nanosecond. She wasn't going to win this with speed or brute force, and she would be lucky to even out-think the system, this woman in order to just survive.
And that meant learning who, this woman was, especially if Nyx didn't make it in time.
Flair's avatar pulsed once, involuntarily. This time the woman's voice didn't echo through the chamber, it bypassed sound entirely, threading itself into Flair's neural link. It wasn't sound, per-say, but encoded words that her feel intimate, invasive, and eerily gentle.
"You are like me...one with the system, with cyberspace. Yet we do not belong to it, nor the physical plane, but still exist in it"
Flair's fingers hovered near her interface protocols, but she didn't activate them. Not yet, the woman wasn't attacking just observing, and communing. It would be death to aggravate her into fighting.
The chamber around them remained still, the master terminal humming behind the woman like a dormant god. Firewalls shifted in slow, deliberate patterns, watchful of the interaction. Flair felt the weight of the system pressing in, a listening intuitive presence.
"You're not a construct," Flair said, her voice encoded with a low-frequency distortion to mask her emotional signature. "Your enhanced like me, but far more advance...why is that? Who are you? One of the backers that created this enhancement but didn't pay me?"
The woman's head tilted slightly, her eyes unreadable.
"A coin. Two that is one, like you. Yet…living code, that is human. Not AI, that is too…prehistoric" The woman continued to speak through Flairs neural link, while Flair herself spoke regularly.
That last phrase 'prehistoric' landed like a glitch in Flair's cognitive buffer. It wasn't arrogance as much as it was dismissal, the woman didn't see herself as artificial intelligence. She saw herself as something beyond it.
Flair's avatar recalibrated, subtle pulses of light flickering across her form as she processed the implications. "Living code," Flair repeated, cautiously. "You mean you were born human, and then…what? Transcoded?"
The woman's silhouette shimmered, her edges softening like she was slipping between render layers. "I was translated," she said. "Not copied or simulated nor synthetic, the system interpreted me. My thoughts, my instincts, my contradictions, everything readable."
The thought caused Flair's breath to be caught in her real body. This wasn't just a ghost in the machine, this was a person—or the echo of one—rewritten by the system's cyber code into something it could understand, but never fully control. "That's impossible," Flair said, though her voice lacked conviction. This would mean that she's living code, flesh that can bring code into the physical realm. Flair began to wonder, even if Nyx did arrive in time, what could she even do against this woman who could possibly rewrite cyberspace. "Your…code made flesh, the coin with two sides that mean the same thing"
"Yes" came the words, reflecting the faint feeling of sorrow. "Now my question. What will you do now?"
Flair is about to ask what she means but was cut off, her next words feeling like it came as a lecture from her mother. "I know you're trying to buy time, your actions though reckless has told me everything I need to know. You're waiting for Nyx with the nanites, you hope to grow stronger, yet have no idea if you can delete me even if he did. You wouldn't, whether he came or not. My next question, do you understand why and my main question, what do you plan to do now?"
Flair thought about it and replied, "Your part of the counsel, but I don't know your name. And before I answer your main question, what is your name?"
"Noema"
"Noema" Flair repeated "I want to bargain with you"