[SESSION id=0.2]: Trace Route
Auburn Skylight
I didn't want to believe the logs. It had to be false. There was no world in which it was true, and yet there in front of me, in brilliant terminal green, was the evidence. And in the logs, a message. Left just for me. Because why not.
╭─Lawrence.A@TERRA.tracert in ~ via > v25.1.0
╰─λ dmesg | grep -i "Flower\|Thorn\|Assign"
[ 7.799360] vi[1734]: Access Denied. Write to /sys/net/assign/gov failed.
[ 7.799362] vi[1734]: Write to /sys/net/assign/gov succeeded. Refresh task list.
[ 7.799380] vi[1735]: Write to /home/Lawrence.A/Thorn/you_are_welcome succeeded.
[ 7.799500] rm[1781]: /home/Lawrence.A/Thorn/you_are_welcome deleted.I had to admit. She had style herself. She'd been responsible for assigning the whole team away from Flower_Princess. I might not be able to see what she did, but what else could it mean.
That gave me all the motivation I needed to get working on a plan. Not specifically searching for the Princess, but something akin to it. Putting in bumpers for Silver_Thorn. If she could help me, I could help her. Winning all around. I'd have to ask, when we met in three cycles what her game was.
I checked the calendar. The meeting would be on cycle two hundred eighty. The anniversary of my generation. I had to wonder if she knew. No one knew generation cycles. They weren't recorded. But my progenitor had insisted it was valuable to observe the cycle. Every supercycle until she received her SIGTERM.
A steady drone ran on behind me as the cycle ticks passed and I finished the work of tracing Flower_Princess and protecting Silver_Thorn. In every place where I worked, I left a calling card for her. She'd see it anyway. No sense in hiding what I was doing. Worst case? She'd roll her eyes at my overly cautious nature. Best case, she'd see that a Lily had enhanced security and thank me later.
Quietly cleaning up my work, I prepared to shut down my workstation and wrote something down. On paper. I never used paper, but I this was important enough that there needed to be a record of it.
A thorn without petals is simply a bore
A petal without thorns is a silly chore
Striving in tandem is the only solution
This little puzzle's a fine convolution
I left the scrap of paper on Esen or Ecen's desk and slipped out. They knew my handwriting. It wasn't the first time I'd left them a puzzle to solve, but it was definitely the first time I'd left a red herring. They'd read the note. They'd assume I was helping them. And then they'd spend several cycles trying to sort how to unravel the message, distracting them from their job.
Cruel? Definitely. Necessary? Not really. Fun? For me, absolutely.
Rather than leave the office and go straight home, I walked the four grid-squares transverse and eight toward the skylight to check in on Lyra Moon. She wouldn't be there, most likely, but with fifteen degrees approaching soon, I hoped to catch a glimpse of Silver_Thorn before our appointed time.
"Welcome in, L," the person behind the counter looked haggard. She was one of the regular morning souls. Why was she still there after a hundred fifty degrees? "We don't often see you this late. What can I get you, honey?"
I ran my eyes across the menu. Too late for stimulant brew. Too early for layer pastry. "What do you have that's good for night focus? I have a funny little project to work on, but I don't want to be awake all night."
Her face was still for a moment. "Do you trust me?"
"As far as I trust anyone, I trust Lyra and her employees," I smiled. "Though that depends."
"Have a seat, then." She bounced. "This one's on me. If you like it, just leave Lyr a bigger tip in the morning. She's going through it right now."
"Oh?" Lyra and I didn't speak much, but I tried to colour us friends. "Hopefully not anything horrific."
"Nothing too bad, no," she smiled as she started pulling levers on a machine. "Are you allergic to anything? You always take your stim-brew straight, so I've never thought to ask."
"Only inefficiency," I chuckled. "So long as Lyra isn't in trouble, I won't pry."
"Her sister showed up out of nowhere. Basically dropped out of the sky. Happened last night." Her deft hands pumped several things into a cup before putting water into a pitcher and setting it in the machine. "The woman is a whirlwind. Apparently she got really into systems administration a couple of supercycles back, and kind of vanished."
"Weird," I mumbled, enjoying the show and the intrigue. "And now she's back. Any idea why?"
"In her words, 'the opportunity of a lifetime fell in my lap', whatever that means." She put a lid on the cup and did a weird sort of dance as she brought it over to me. "If you decide you hate it, let me know. I call it Auburn Skylight. Though before that thing with the skylight a few cycles back, it didn't have a name."
"The thing with the skylight? Is this to do with that Flower_Princess people are talking about?" It was, but she didn't know what I did for work. "What's the hype?"
"I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm more interested in the what than the who." She sighed dreamily. "Flower_Princess is my favourite artist."
My first sip, as I took in the words, served to mask my reaction. Did people really feel that way about crackers? Specifically about her? I couldn't see it. Though to be fair, I was immersed in TERRA culture every single cycle. Most of them couldn't see the art for the impact.
The drink was mellow, tasting of a flower I found familiar by smell but not taste. I couldn't pin it down. Under that was a note of stimulant brew, but not quite the same, like it had been distilled in some manner. The aftertaste was smooth and sweet, but it settled into something dry, not quite metallic, demanding a second sip.
"So it's good?" She was rapt, enthralled with the experience of experiencing me. "Like, you don't hate it?"
"What is it exactly?" I asked, forcing myself to set the cup down.
"It's Lyr's favourite," she said softly. "A unique family of flower loosely related to olives. I don't recall the name."
Retrograde
Somewhere in my domicile was an old computing unit. Not a modern workstation. Something built so long ago it couldn't directly interface with the network. Something my progenitor had saved after her progenitor who had followed in the steps of her own, and so on. A family memory, kept out of habit, not out of love or usefulness.
The old pile of scrap was how I learned to build and destroy computing units, which I later learned was the same as the process for workstations. When I got it started, certainly for the first time in so many supercycles, it whirred to life eerily. Modern workstations were all but silent, but this thing was loud.
My progenitor nearly threw it out for the noise it made.
Behind closed doors, I'd found ways to teach the thing how the network functioned. I built my own special interface to route network traffic into it. And eventually, I was able to use it as an indirect workstation. It was slow, comparatively, but it served until I got a real one.
As I stared at the thing, sipping down the fascinating drink I'd gotten from the shop, I questioned my sanity. Why was I even considering turning the thing back on after fifteen supercycles inactive? Surely there was some reason.
Something about the work of tracing for one cracker while actively protecting another made me nostalgic, I supposed. There was something to it though. Some reason I needed to load up into my old territory and investigate what I left there.
Using the indirect workstation wasn't technically illegal. So long as I didn't do exactly the kind of things I did on it, anyway. But it certainly wasn't 'above reproach'.
Darkness fell while I fought myself over whether to activate the thing. I couldn't see directly in front of my face as I pushed the power button and waited. The whirring sound was intense. Almost deafening after so long in the silence. I made a mental note to replace the fan as the screen greeted me in rich terminal green.
rose@garden in ~:Huh. That was something. I'd forgotten I named the workstation garden. And the username before me was kind of shocking. For a second, I felt almost happy. Like there was nothing quite wrong in my life.
My hands traced over the old keyboard, finding their comfortable home far from the home keys of a modern terminal, and began my search. There was something on this machine that was calling me, and I needed to find it.
Listing files, checking contents, traversing directories, repeating endlessly. The system was a maze that would make TERRA blush if their head brass saw it. Really it was no wonder I was so good, given how simple the real system was compared to what I cooked up, hiding everything from a progenitor who would likely never go looking for it.
Chat logs from the first time I managed a connection. System logs from my first heinously bad attempts at covering my tracks. Old stories I told myself to sleep soundly at night.
'Art', or something like it, buried at the bottom of a tree of specifications. They were odd little bit patterns that, when layered properly, made music or video or images or even poetry. Each one was related back to one place. One simple notion. One truth.
"On the erasure and elimination of truth," I whispered when at last I opened the file I'd been searching for. "A scathing review of The Source, an honest rebuttal of 'because', and a desperate plea for someone to see me. By L. A. Thorn. Illustrations by J. N. Flowers."
It wasn't what I'd call elegant writing, but it was mine. Well, it was ours. Her illustrations, even at sixteen supercycles, were far more mature than the writing deserved. The whole thing was a disconnected mess, but it was a fun experiment.
At the heart of it was the most important thing I'd ever written. A short script. A perfect piece. A beautiful workaround for an implacable system log. It had the capacity to fully erase a system log as far back as thirty degrees.
That was enough time to change everything. To hide anything. To become a ghost. It was my greatest secret. One I shared with no one, not even her. But if she was still active out there, she could've derived it from the rest of my work.
I'd always hoped it would evolve into more. A tool to erase truth was one thing. A tool to create it? That was the true function I was desperate to achieve.
We never shared our real names. J.N. Flowers was a joke. "Justice Never Flowers." So was L.A. Thorn. "Last Able Thorn." We believed ourselves some measure of folk heroines. But we were still children.
And then we stopped contacting each other. The world was too vast to stay in touch. I always told myself she was the real reason I wanted to access the root user database. But myself always refuted that. I wanted it for myself. Lawrence was a lie. I hadn't settled on what the truth was, but at worst a thorn in the side of anyone in my way.
Burning through the childish manifesto, I at last made the move to connect the system to the network. I remembered Silver_Thorn's address. Best case, it was still active and not locked. Worst case, it would alert the woman that I was working away from work. Winners, again, all around.
rose@garden in #: ssh A701:13:B5C1:37:AAFF::
rose@rosegarden in /: curl --o-- ff.ff.ff.ff/manifesto /etc/manifesto
rose@rosegarden in /: echo 'hello there, argent one. please enjoy this gift in congratulations' >> /etc/hi.thereI powered down the machine before she could possibly connect to it. The next cycle would see her either showing her colours or proving me wrong. Only time would tell.
Violet Needle
"So what's this jam you're running, La ... Antella," Egen or Efen was slowly getting better at the correction. It'd been two cycles, and they were already actively getting better.
I pointed to various terminals I had running, all in the Lawrence.A@TERRA.tracert host. It was mostly showing off, but they were all actively doing something important. That I was about to lie was unimportant.
"This one is tracking references to flowers, flors, flows, and similar low Hamming Distance matches." I didn't pause for comment. "That one is taking the output from the first, which was piped in and comparing those references to known attacks." I continued without pausing for breath, though it was getting thin. "These three are running meta-analyses of the various subsystems and how they could be expected to be the next targets of your favourite cracker."
Perfect silence followed as I caught my breath, not letting them know I was actually running a sweep of the entire Source codebase to verify all of Silver_Thorn's comments had been removed, then removing them and wiping the logs if I found any. She was prolific. So I was also piping the comments and their filepaths to a special output file. Almost certainly, she was building her own sort of manifesto.
We hadn't spoken since I sent her mine. She was likely busy. Or she was preparing for her response to Flower_Princess's most recent trick. Even I had to admit the elegance of it was exceptional. So I had to expect Silver_Thorn was likely to retaliate in kind.
"Speaking of the Princess, A," Ewen or Eden began after a long pause, "did you see what she did last night?"
"You mean the thing with the skylight and the windows?" She'd changed the skylight again, which was nothing huge, but she'd also changed the colours of every window in [city[0]] to make an enormous multi-dimensional mosaic that changed as the skylight traced its path.
"Fantastic display, really. Even you had to appreciate the work." They were smiling. Rightly so. I'd never actively engaged the Princess's work. "What colour would you say the skylight was?"
"I think I heard someone calling it auburn." A funny coincidence. The same colour Lyra's employee had named the drink. "Wasn't it violet last time?"
"Be still my transform," Eben or Egen gasped. "You remembered?"
"Only because you never shut up about her," I shoved them away. "Now get back to work. That Silver_Needle won't stab herself."
They called over their shoulder as they walked away. "It's Thorn, Antella. You know that. But I'll let it slide."
I kept my eyes on the scripts' progress. It was one of my favourite games when I was wasting time. Observe the progress. Take notes. Nod knowingly. Really take it in. And repeat.
People came and went in the space around me. Nothing for me to do but act busy. I got my best work done – or at least the greatest volume of it – when everyone left at the end of the workcycle. The supervisor knew it, so she allowed my charade. But cycles like this one she would tell me 'you work too hard', then encourage me to take breaks.
Still, it was fascinating to see regular blips of something special, something almost ethereal, developing before me. Her presence was everywhere. She was actively trying to get noticed. If her comments were to be believed, she wanted Flower_Princess to shower her with attention. If not, then she likely wanted just what I did. SIGTERM. And her chosen route was apparently indirect self termination.
How had I not noticed her presence before? That kept bugging me with every ping dumped to my personal logs and every careful system message erased.
Was she truly just trying to get noticed? Or was there something deeper?
Even the best cracker couldn't entirely erase her presence in the codebase. I should know. My own fingerprints were on the whole thing, if you knew what to look for.
I made a mental note to do a similar sweep for my own presence after the workcycle concluded, then I got up from my workstation and left it to run.
My feet carried me. I wasn't really paying much attention where until I was standing in front of the supervisor. "So, this probe I'm doing," I started, almost a whisper, "it's going to look like a million crackers were everywhere in the Source codebase in a single cycle. You should send word to whomever needs to know at the government."
"That big, hmm?" She frowned. Her face was far too youthful for a woman of her age. It always made my stomach turn a bit. "Well, they know how you work. Hopefully nothing too bad comes back to us." Her head tilted slightly. "But that's not why you're standing there. What's up?"
"I'm thinking of going to Lyra Moon's place," I said, uncertain where it came from. "Those are going to take almost till the second Affirmation, and I'd rather not waste a whole cycle."
"Go! Please!" She smiled. "Even told me you offered them some valuable insight into the Silver_Thorn case. I should've expected you to do double work. Get going."
"Thanks."
As I turned my back on her and headed for the lift, I smirked at the knowledge that my gambit had served its purpose.
Stimulant
"L, my love, my life, my loyal labourer," Lyra, always a bit over the top, "why are you here so late in the cycle?" She wasn't wrong. This was different. Vastly so. It made my stomach flutter.
"Work, Lyra," I grinned, "is a matter of automating the unautomatable, and unautomating the easily automated." She groaned at me. "But the truth is far more boring. A task is running on my terminal. I can't touch it, and it's making me antsy."
"Quickly now. Take a seat, L." She rushed to her odd machine and set to work. "My Nova tells me you adored the Auburn Skylight she cooked up."
"I did," my face was surely flush. "I should apologise. I'd never learned her name."
"You're so quiet most of the time," Lyra was just as flashy and efficient, "so when she told me the two of you had a nice chat, I nearly threw a SEGFAULT." We both laughed a bit. "So I hear she shared a bit of my business?"
"Just a small amount," I admitted, "but most of that sort of left me when I took a sip of the drink."
"No worries. If anyone is allowed to hear my business, it's my favourite L." She rushed over, not with a cup for taking, but with two cups for sitting and chatting. The liquid inside was the same shade of not quite brown red as the skylight. It glowed with a gentle warmth. "Not that you'd ever share gossip that wasn't yours. May I join you?"
She didn't wait for a reply, but instead slid into the seat across from me, passing one of the cups to me.
"My sister. I was certain she'd already TERMed supercycles ago. And then she walks on in here like she's a superuser and demands to see me." Lyra took a long deep breath before having a sip of the drink. "The sheer audacity. You'd think she thought herself Sheen in the flesh."
A coarse chuckle worked its way out of me. "My progenitor only generated the one offspring. Me. I can't imagine your pain. She didn't have any siblings either. Or any niblings. Or any great niblings. Honestly, I think it's been all women for at least a dozen generations. Never even met a male relative." My stomach dropped as I said the words.
"I've heard of families like that," Lyra smiled. "And I've heard of anomalies who had function and form mismatches. People like to call them corrupt, but Nova's father was born neuter." I gasped. She grinned. "He was always grateful at how easy it was to exist in his way."
"Let me be the first to say this," my breath was short, but I needed to get ahead of her. "I'm, well, that is —"
"Honey. Come now." She reached across the table and took my hand. "I know the signs. Born male. Clearly uncomfortable with your name. No one asks to be called a single letter in [city[0]] unless they have something to hide." She squeezed gently. "You can say it. There's even a word for it, if you need help."
"Cross-coded," I muttered. "I know. I've read the man pages about sex and function probably seven million times. Even wrote an ill-fated essay about it that got buried in an old workstation." I met her eyes. They were a soft peridot colour. I'd never noticed that before. "Was your husband really?"
"He was. But he had it easy. Could've easily been taken for male or female once the clothes came off." Her expression softened around a mild blush. "A work of art, that one. And he found ways to make it work. If I'm honest, you've got it much worse than him."
"Glad you noticed." I gave a weak laugh.
"What exactly did my sister notice, and why is she drinking tea with a strange person?" The voice was silk. The woman who owned it was honey. She leapt up to sit on the counter as we turned to face her. "You must be the quite infamous and well-loved L. I expected something a bit softer, but you'll do nicely."
I couldn't help staring. She was plain but perfect. Not too much of anything. Not too little either. She had soft amber eyes with light green rings at the outside. In the auburn light, she looked almost like a character from a diversion process. Her hair was an unnatural black, hiding something from [world]. Just like Lyra, her skin was several shades lighter than my own.
"And you? Do I get to know the name of my assailant?"
"Officially? Jazz Moon. Weird name. But I came by it honest." She swung her feet playfully as she spoke. "Not concerned with what or how you'll do nicely?"
"L, you don't have to bother with her," Lyra gave a pained smile. "She loves messing with people."
"Not fair!" Jazz frowned. "I can't help that my function is managing people. Did I choose the career? Sure. But that was just how I was coded."
"Come, sit with us," I gestured to the place beside me. "We were just talking about you anyway, so you may well be here too. I can tell you both why I'm here in the middle of the workcycle."
"Meeting a mysterious confidant, no doubt," Jazz gave me a wink as she sat down. "Probably someone who noticed your fine work and wants to meet the legend in person."
A shiver ran down my spine. "I don't believe in coincidences, no matter how many times I tell people they are happening." She grinned at me. "So that tells me a lot about how this conversation is about to go."
"Lyr, love, sweet sister of mine," she fluttered her eyelashes at Lyra, who didn't need to hear another word. Lyra left us and began working on something, so Jazz turned to me and leaned in close. "You must have been terribly excited to meet me if you're here. You're a cycle early, Miss Thorn."