Theseus Corruptive Touch

Dr. Reese didn’t reply to . It had been twenty minutes and still nothing. He was a lone researcher with a heavy focus on computer technology and electrical engineering. The idea that he wasn’t the type to be glued to a terminal at all tis seed unthinkable to . Fuller’s news that so of the researchers had been abducted by Foundation echoed through my mind. I worried that he had been one of those unlucky few. He had downloaded and analyzed a lot of data directly from my implants, after all. Perhaps he’d seen too much. I hoped that I was wrong, that he was simply so imrsed in sothing that he didn’t have the presence of mind to reply right then, but I had a bad feeling about it all.

I had checked the packet traffic, and the ssage was still sent to Venus’s relay node and accepted by a target machine, so his terminal was still there, but was he?

Staring at the empty ssaging application wasn’t getting anywhere. I sighed silently into the core lubricant and decided to go on to my most anticipated check-in. Agatha, the teenage core tech genius, was probably my favorite friend I’d made on Venus. I hesitated though. If she didn’t reply, did that an they took her? Would they disappear a minor, even one as knowledgeable as her? She would be a valuable asset for them if they got their hands on her...

There was only one way to find out. I typed out, ‘I don’t suppose you’re up for a match?’ and sent it along.

I breathed a sigh of relief when less than a minute later, the typing symbol appeared at the bottom of the chat history. ‘RYLL!’ popped up on the screen, followed quickly by ‘Holy shit, I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to see you again!’

I smiled wide, glad to see her safe, ‘Do people expect to go down easy or sothing?’

‘Yes! You‘re a fragile wimp! At least without your big old starship. I’m pretty sure I would win if we got in a fist fight. Fuck, I think a stiff breeze would win.’

Ouch. Blunt as ever, it seed. ‘I’ll have you know, I’ve endured a few windstorms since we last talked.’

‘Ooh, tough girl. Where did you go?!’

‘Sowhere between worlds. I might be confident in my encryption, but I’m not gonna leave a record of exactly where I’m at on anyone’s device, especially yours. We’re not exactly the most popular group to the people in charge right now. I heard you had it rough for a bit back there too.’

‘A little.’ She started typing for a while, and I glanced over to the network traffic manager to watch Aisling and Shaw going about their business for a few minutes while I waited. ‘Things got scary when gunshots started going off. Hope all your friends are okay. I heard so of the security crew died. Mostly assholes, but they still died, you know? Then Foundation ca poking around. I had to delete the data I got from you, and then you know what I had to do? They ca knocking on my lab and I had to think quick. I hid in a growth tank! Filled it up and everything. I guess they thought I was just a developing clone. It’s really floaty in there. I’m sure you get that feeling all the ti, though.’

‘We had so injuries, but none of our crew died. Barely. And I’m in the core module right now, actually.’ I smiled a little. She was too clever to be caught. ‘Did you have to breathe liquid?’

‘Hell no! I had an oxygen mask on. Growth tank’s different from core module, liquid’s not breathable. Also isn’t supposed to be sothing you want to soak into your skin unless you’re a developing clone. Thankfully I didn’t have to be in it long enough for accelerated cell developnt to kick in, but I did have to break the tank to get out. Expensive machine. Worth it, though. Knowing what they did with you, they probably wanted to ‘recruit’ .’

‘I was thinking the sa thing. I was afraid you weren’t gonna pick up.’

‘Bah, I’m tougher than you are, that’s for sure. I’m not going down that easy.’ She was a firebrand. Tougher than I expected, and I already had an idea that she would be a fighter before all this. Maybe not a soldier, but a tactician and survivor.

‘Well, I’m glad you’re safe. I’ve been through so shit since then, too. I t a couple of my sisters, and they are... dangerous.’

‘For real? So like... more living clones?’ she asked eagerly.

‘Yeah, it’s a really REALLY long story, one I still haven’t completely rembered. Bits and pieces of it are falling together, though.’ I paused for a mont as I had an idea. ‘By the way, do you know if it’s possible for a core to manipulate a machine network without an implant?’

For the first ti, there was an awkwardly long pause, the typing indicator appearing and disappearing several tis before she answered. ‘Technically?’ There was an even longer pause just the sa before she continued, ‘I an, if they’re already coded to operate as a machine core, they could send junk data into their network, but none of its going to make sense to its machinery. They’re also not coded to try without the implant, that would probably just break sothing. Why?’

I guessed that that made sense? With my limited knowledge of the tech, anyway. ‘So what exactly does the implant do for us cores, anyway? I an, I know it lets us network, but like... how?’

Another thoughtful pause. ‘Well, in layman’s terms, it’s a translator. It’s an interface that translates neurological interactions to machine code and vice versa. It lets a brain communicate with computers by acting as a middleman so they can make sense of each other. I’m surprised you haven’t figured this out, how much you use it.’

That didn’t quite answer my question, though. I rephrased what I was after, ‘So theoretically, if my brain could perform that translation for itself, it would be possible?’

‘I... guess?’ She answered imdiately. ‘But no, that would be impossible, though. The human mind can’t process data like that alone, we’re just not built that way. Or are you saying you can do that?’

‘I don’t know. Like I said, I’m still piecing so things together. It’s not like I can just take it out to try. Long story short, there’s a lot more to psionics than anyone thought there was. Like, things that should be impossible. One of my sisters could literally see the future.’

‘You’re fuckin with .’ She declared imdiately.

‘No, for real! She used it to find us in wild space! Several tis! We were way out of range of any kind of comms and they Just dropped in right on top of us like we were a gravity well sending off an ergency broadcast!’

‘Yeah, that’s actually not possible. Once is a highly improbable coincidence, twice makes no sense. You’re making shit up. They must have tracked you so other way.’

‘I think you can appreciate just how sure I am that there were no ‘tracking devices’ in my systems. I wish I was making this stuff up. Another of them can move stuff with her mind, no physical contact needed, and I’m not certain yet, but I think another one I haven’t t yet can do sothing to manipulate emotional states.’

There was no response for a few minutes, not even a typing indicator, then suddenly she sent ‘You’re serious right now, aren’t you? You’re seriously trying to tell magic is real now?’

‘Please don’t call it that, it’s already ridiculous enough as is.’ I sighed. ‘I’m sure there’s so kind of rational scientific explanation to it all, sothing to do with the psionic resonance field, but I know that’s a poorly understood scientific principle in the first place, and it’s all way over my head already, so... I’m not about to make any advancents like that or anything myself.’

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‘Alright... cool... a secret new branch of psionic resonance field theory that gives clones magic. That’s definitely sothing I expected to hear from soone who’s not a raving lunatic when I woke up this morning.’

‘Yeah. I get it. It’s a lot. I was asking because I’m starting to wonder if my competency with computers isn’t just a knack. Sothing one of my sisters said... along with so inconsistencies I’ve noticed, it makes wonder what exactly I’m doing to the things that I hack into.’

‘Hold on a second.’ Agatha said nothing for several minutes, and I took the mont to watch Ray taking her stabilizer in her room. I was already hopelessly enamored with this woman before we’d actually done anything, and now here I was spending a few stolen monts staring at her from the sensor array, smiling fondly at her as she took dicine.

Finally, Agatha’s reply ca in, ‘So... that’s a very good question. Do you rember what systems you hacked while you were here?’

I’m not sure where she was going with this, but it didn’t hurt to play along when she was already giving so much trust for my own absurd truths. I had done so much with the machine network on Venus, it was hard to rember too many specifics, but there were a few morable things, especially during our escape. ‘Uhh... maybe? I kinda did that a lot.’

Another long pause, this ti with a typing indicator that kept moving. ‘Okay, this is a hell of a long-shot, but there’s been this weird kind of communal mystery going around the colony for a couple months now. It started with a monitor in the concourse that just started displaying... nonsense. Static, visual artifacts, just a ton of EM noise, basically, and no one could figure out why. It got replaced cause like, you know, sotis machines just break, whatever. But a couple people toyed around with it cause... science. And it wasn’t just a broken display, this thing’s entire firmware system was just... fucked. Like, it was crazy corrupted sohow. All we could figure is that it was a freak errant radiation bit flip that cascaded into sothing way worse or sothing. You know, one of those kinda flukes of computer hardware that you’ll never duplicate, so it’s not worth worrying about, and we wrote it off. But then a terminal in security started having weird issues, and when we looked into it, data corruption in key system files. A couple more devices have had the exact sa issue since then, just like, popping up out of nowhere, and when we compared them... sa exact patterns of corruption.’

That sounded really weird, but I didn’t see what that had to do with . ‘I dunno what’s going on with your network, but I haven’t been there for way longer than that. I’m not screwing up your computers.’

‘Yeah, I know, like I said, it’s probably so new problem, but like... If it was because of sothing you did, I thought you might know. They’re not like any kind of system malfunctions I’ve ever seen. Just hear out here. Look.’ A mont passed, and a directory full of log files transferred through the app.

Popping one open at random, I furrowed my brow at what I saw. It looked... familiar sohow. It was nonsense, of course. It was just random data being spat out by a confused computer; digital static that didn’t actually an anything. As I opened another file, though, I saw what she ant about it forming a pattern. The corruption seed to have hit in the exact sa way at several of the other devices, like the junk data had been copied and pasted from the sa larger repository. Not always exactly the sa beginning to end, but the pieces of it could fit together perfectly, overlapping into a complete picture that was... still nonsense. It was as if a stamp of bad sectors were pressed directly into the more sensible and readable bits that were left over in the original code. It was all corrupted in the exact sa way, or at the very least by the sa thod.

‘Maybe Foundation left so kind of listening bug in the station’s systems, and it’s gone haywire?’ I asked.

‘I guess that’d make sense for the security terminal, maybe? But so of these devices weren’t on the sa network. So of them were on lines just made for output, like the displays. The computer running that network itself is fine, and I don’t know why Foundation would care to ss with that. A bunch of the stuff that’s been affected have been completely unrelated. That’s one of the big mysteries. The errors are connected, but the devices aren’t. And every other week so new device cos down with this... illness.’

‘That’s an interesting word for it.’ There was no connection between the devices... except that at one point, they probably had been connected, with as a conduit. I was starting to think maybe she had a point. ‘Yeah, they are definitely all related. It’s... uncanny.’ I shook my head. ‘Like I said, though, I haven’t been in range to connect to those systems for a lot longer than two months.’

‘Yeah. I’m just throwing ideas out there. We’re kind of at our wit’s end figuring this out. I an, it’s not like everyone’s scrambling over it or anything, but the comp sci guys have been tearing what little hair they have left out over it. There’s this big forum thread about trying to piece it together. A couple people think it might be so kind of ARG soone’s orchestrating, but I don’t buy that, they wouldn’t break equipnt for sothing like that.’

I mulled it over for a few monts, fidgeting with so of my interfaces while I thought it through, then mid snapping my fingers. ‘Has it affected any new equipnt since I left?’

‘Ohh, good point.’ I looked over the logs in front of while she did things on her end, but they didn’t have any long-term data in them to determine the devices ages. It didn’t take her long. ‘I an, it’s not like the older stuff isn’t gonna fail sooner anyway, and it’s not like we overhauled any large parts of the station’s infrastructure recently, but yeah, all of the equipnt affected is at least 8 months old. They were built at different tis, too, so it’s not that. But nothing newer than that’s gotten sick.’

‘Again, Interesting way to phrase that.’ The analogy was as ridiculous as the magic one, but I guessed that it fit. I typed while I tried to let the idea sink in that I might actually be responsible for this equipnt failure sohow. ‘I’m trying to think of what I might have done to have so sort of... delayed effect on the computers, but I just used them like I would any other piece of tech. I swear I didn’t write so kind of ti bomb virus.’

‘Weren’t you just saying you were wondering if you were doing sothing to the computers you hacked? What if it’s just sothing you do to every piece of tech you interact with?’ Agatha asked. ‘Can you show exactly how you do that? Like, give a sample of your source code or sothing?’

I supposed that couldn’t hurt, but she’d probably be just as confused as anyone else that looked at my code. I grabbed a couple of my scripts: the brute force thod I used to break into most networks, the ping system I’d developed, and a few of the system files from the internal private ssaging service the crew used. I packaged them and sent them over the relay.

After a few monts, the typing indicator lit up. ‘ryll, what language do you code in? This isn’t familiar.’

I rolled my eyes slightly, ‘Yeah, I know. I’ve been told that before. I couldn’t tell you, though. It’s what I learned in the simulation, and anyone I’ve shown it to hasn’t been able to tell what it is. It works, whatever language it is. Maybe I can do so more research on it now that I’m back on the relay.’

‘It doesn’t even feel structured like any code I know. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it’s short-hand pseudo-code. Can I get the compiler?’

I couldn’t help but chuckle. ‘I am the compiler.’

‘You know what I an, like, the program you use to assemble it.’

I looked at the ssage, confused, for a few monts, and ran a few simple tir scripts I had made, just as a way to trace the flow of data as it did its thing to make sure, but I wasn’t sure what she ant. ‘I just execute the code.’

‘Huh?’

‘Yeah, I just launch the code as written. There’s no middleman program or anything.’

The typing indicator flashed on and off a few tis, disappeared for a minute, and then asked, ‘Are you trying to tell that these files, the ones you sent , are executable as is?’

‘Yes? Is that bad?’ I wondered if perhaps I was doing sothing wrong this whole ti. Sothing that might sohow corrupt machinery I’ve infiltrated down the line, perhaps? I started to pore over the log files again.

‘It’s... puzzling, I can say that much. My terminal doesn’t even know what to do when I try to run it. It’s like if I tried to launch a data file, all I can do is view it in plain text.’

‘That’s strange. All I do is call for it on a system level and it does what I wrote it to do.’ I replied as I stared into the corrupted data. There was sothing so... eerily familiar about it, but I couldn’t place it. I knew I’d definitely seen it before, though.

‘Maybe it’s a firmware thing. I’ll get a core to try to run it.’

A core. Sothing clicked. Sothing I’d forgotten in the rush of the last few days of activity. I hurriedly replied, ‘Don’t!’

‘Huh? Figure sothing out?’

‘No. Yes. Sort of. Maybe? Just don’t run that code on... anything yet. Especially not a core. I need to think for a minute.’ I rembered where I had seen it. This data corruption was exactly the sa. I had seen the pattern before.

In the psyche evaluation of Morgan Collins.