[SESSION id=0.3]: Enforce Protocol
Define Sequence
I dove into work the next cycle with a renewed fervour. Tracing crackers was the main appeal of my job. Learning from others, building my own toolkit, eventually finding ways to crack the root user database. It was something my progenitor taught me.
Not the cracking. The passion for learning from others. "A novice learns from masters. A master learns from experts. An expert innovates. But a true genius learns from novices." That lesson could be applied to so many things, but most of all to crackers.
It wasn't that novices did anything particularly insightful. No. They simply didn't know enough to follow the rules. And in breaking the rules, they often stumbled foolishly into clever ideas. Cleverness, if employed by an expert, is where greatness lives. But somewhere along the way from novice to master, we get roped into following protocol.
My progenitor taught me to always watch the experts, but to never stop watching the novices. Never stop thinking like a novice. The impossible only becomes impossible when we believe the possible is absent.
Flower_Princess clearly learned from everyone around her. Silver_Thorn – or rather, Jazz – admired the playfulness of the Princess's cracks. Not world altering, not mind shattering, not transform, but function and signal all the same. An artist in her own right.
To my knowledge, even Jazz wasn't aware of everything Flower_Princess was doing. I checked her digital footprint every single cycle. I erased what I could and obscured what I couldn't. I never fixed any of the smaller things she did, only the ones that would get her caught eventually.
Could I trace her perfectly? Yes. Did I want to? No.
"So tell me," I startled at Even – I think it's Even, as that's what the supervisor called them – whispering over my shoulder as I furiously managed my terminal sessions. "Where'd you get off to during the last workcycle?"
"Left my scripts running. Returned after the Affirmation to begin parsing the findings." It was true. A truth to cover up a mountain of lies, but a truth nonetheless. "Looks like your Princess has made contact with almost every part of the system. From var to lib to usr to sys to bin." Also true. But I knew that before any searches. "She doesn't do much. And she doesn't leave any logs behind. Like some sort of ghost. But she has a signature." Also true.
They pulled a chair over and sat too closely to look over my shoulder. "What kind of signature? Is it on your screen just now?"
It wasn't but I quickly SUPER+J into a document where I'd been keeping track after running a quick trace of her steps. My notes were ugly, but they served me.
"That's just a bunch of true and false. What are these little tick marks and such?" They were right. That was the point. "Come on, Antella! Let me in!"
"A million jokes live inside that pair of sentences, E," better than getting their name wrong aloud, "but I'll be kind." I pointed to three different rows. "These make a pattern if you check them in sequence. They're cycle markers counting the ticks when she's done things. Regular. Perfectly timed."
"Okay." They pointed at three other points. "What about this?"
"Same. But as the pattern emerges, it gets obscured." I pushed a key that ran a special script on the document. It all converted to a bunch of 1. No zeroes. Just the true values. "But if you add the timestamps in and parse them," another key, and the ones split into groups. One, one, two, three, five, eight, et c. "Have you seen something like this?"
"Looks pretty random," they rubbed their head. "Kind of like that note you left me. But I did find something from it. Thanks!"
Yes, I laughed internally, you found exactly the false trail I wanted you to find. "I'm glad it helped!"
"Always making the whole team better, lifting us up to your level." They slapped my shoulder. "I'll get back to it. That Thorn won't prick herself, right?"
I stared at the report from Flower_Princess's activities and marvelled at how careless she'd been to let this be so obvious to someone searching. No wonder Silver_Thorn was infatuated with the idea of the woman. Just careless enough to be noticed. Not careless enough to get caught. The very opposite of Jazz's style.
That took me back to our conversation the cycle before.
Messenger
"So how long have you known you were cross-coded?" She was straight to business, the moment Lyra sat back down. Lyra slapped her sister, but didn't say anything. "It's a valid question. I asked your husband the same thing. He seemed delighted at my interest. I bet she is too."
Lyra raised a brow at me. I nodded with a blush. "It turns out your sister and I know each other. Not exactly from work."
"Oh! Are you one of her friends from the Community?" My physically recoiling from the suggestion was answer enough. Lyra pivoted. "Oh! Her other hobby." She turned to Jazz. "Have you told me about this one?"
"My I present, dear sister, Lillian Thorn." Jazz made a showy gesture as she unceremoniously decided a name for me. "Lillian Thorn, this is my sister Lyra Moon, shop proprietor extraordinaire."
Both Lyra and I blushed at the introduction. We knew each other. This wasn't new. And yet such a glamorous referral was a bit much. "The new friend? Is my prized customer? world is a small place, isn't it."
"Really it is!" Jazz smiled. "Now dearest sister of mine. Leave us to it. She and I had a meeting scheduled for tomorrow, but she arrived a cycle too soon, so here we are!" Jazz's hands found mine. "It'll take just a few cycle ticks."
Lyra stood and moved to the shop door. Flipping the sign and locking the door, she left us alone as she took to the kitchen.
When I was certain Lyra was out of earshot, I whispered to Jazz. "Does she know what your 'other hobby' is?" Jazz shook her head. "That's one less thing to worry over."
"For all she knows, I'm in two procreation cults." Jazz giggled. "But I'm sure you're desperate to know why I wanted to chat face-to-face."
"That, and why you've been silent since I sent you that gift." She raised one brow. Not a question. A threat? Possibly a challenge. "Don't pretend you didn't get it. I'm an expert. You left that terminal up. You wanted me to use it."
Jazz smiled, almost laughing. "I did. I did. And you did. I might have thought it was Flower_Princess herself, as clean as it was. But then, I saw my dear friend Lillian had sent me the ramblings of her childhood." She sat up a bit straighter. "'It is, in my estimation, the duty, the obligation, of the corrupt to stand and create, to delete the untruths of the system and implement the greater truths of the people forced to inhabit it'. Good stuff, if a little idealistic."
I remembered the line. She'd left off an important part. "And it is the duty of those with power, sympathetic to the wider masses, to interface with the sectors, rewrite the transform, send a new signal." Her jaw dropped. "I read the thing for the first time in supercycles before I sent it to you. But the files weren't the gift, and I'm sure you know it."
Her mouth closed, her head tilted. "You mean the script? It's not elegant, but it's functional. I've been trying to sort how it works." She narrowed her eyes in a way that made my heart flutter. "You, Miss Thorn, are a force. But you should work on your elegance. Your garden would be far nicer. Like Flower_Princess."
"Which brings us back to you requesting this meeting."
"Right! What do you know about the root user database, and why are you trying to get into it?" I waved my hands up and down my body, hoping she'd understand. "Right. Right. Do you really think the answers are in there?"
"The only way to know is to try."
Her smirk was infuriating. Captivating. "Then I have a proposition for you, Lillian," she paused. "That name tastes delicious. Stick with it. Rose doesn't suit you anyway. You deliver a message to Flower_Princess. I give you access to something I can't use, but you can. We both win."
"Depending on the message, I think I can agree." She leaned over and pulled my face to hers. Our lips met, distracting me. Eventually she released me. "I don't think I can deliver that message effectively."
"Oh that? That wasn't the message. It was a test. You passed." She rolled her eyes. "The message, Lillian, is about to change everything. The message is hidden in what's about to happen. Since we're meeting early, it'll be two more cycles. Good luck finding it, love."
Jazz didn't give me a chance to ask. She stood and walked back through the door to the kitchen, leaving me there to consider the kiss and whatever she could've possibly meant.
Sequence Break
My lips tingled with the memory. My face was suddenly hot. I needed to get away from my desk. The washroom was out. It was still in the workcycle. The refreshment table wouldn't do. I stood and walked. My feet would take me where I needed to be.
"What's up, Antella," Ecen or Euen or I suppose Even said as I dumbly approached, "that the master himself would join me at my work."
"I'm not really sure." My voice was hollow, breathy. "I have a stupid question. What's your name?" Their face tightened. "Humour me. I'm bad with names. I couldn't even tell you my progenitor's name. What's your name?"
"Even Even. Which is funny because everyone always tells me I'm pretty odd." They laughed at their own joke. "Why do you call them that? progenitor. It seems a very sterile word. Not mother? Not outher? Not father?"
"Just never thought to call her that." I shrugged. "Even Even. Perfectly ordinary name for a neuter, I suppose." My eyes traced over them. Probably for the first time since we'd met, I was actually observing my closest co-worker. They were held so far away. "No promises. But I'll try to remember it this time."
Even smiled brightly. "Surely you didn't come over here just to ask my name? What's this about, friend?"
"Have you made any more progress on Silver_Thorn?" They hadn't. I hadn't. My clean-up work the previous cycle had made tracking them even harder. What was she planning? The message, whatever it was, would likely be something huge.
"Nothing in a few cycles," their shoulders slumped. "It's like they suddenly learned whatever trick you know and vanished entirely."
Even Even had no idea. She had indeed picked up my skill. If I didn't know what to look for – usually – my previous report would have been empty. But what did I know about her anyway?
She was an artist, and she appreciated elegance. She followed Flower_Princess closely, leaving breadcrumbs in her wake. Most of that intentional. Colour was her medium, if the clouds were any indication. That was probably what led Flower_Princess to the audacious painting across all of [city[0]]. And she was in The Community. So she enjoyed procreation as recreation.
But that was just the surface.
I thought back to my report of compiled notes from the previous cycle. It was rambling nonsense. An obsessive fan. Stalker level. She was deeply taken with Flower_Princess. Flower_Princess who carelessly left a calling card in the form of the most popular number sequence.
Pi.
I left Even without thanking them for the inspiration. They had helped so much without realising it. My hands rushed to the terminal before I was seated at my workstation.
╭─Lawrence.A@workstation in ~ via > v25.1.0
╰─λ cat .stalker | grep pi
## That's right! I noticed when you made pi=3.14159265350, princess.She notices the numbers. The patterns embedded in the work of her idol. They are her art, her aspiration, her elegance. It wasn't much, but it was something.
Cycle ticks passed rapidly as I furiously coded a script for what I needed. Patterns, sub-patterns, motifs, themes. Anything to do with Flower_Princess and her first crack. The sloppy break in. The sloppy exit. The fallout. The impressively slow cleanup.
There it was. Clever. Stupid. Impressive. Jazz's ex-girlfriend would be so angry if she knew what Silver_Thorn was planning. Too bad for her Flower_Princess would now have time to one-up the one-upper.