[SESSION id=0.5]: Null Pointer
How long had it been since then?
Signal: INTERRUPT
"progenitor! I got it working!" The computing unit was finally whirring to life. Or something like that. It was slow, barely functional. And so very loud. She likely heard it before I shouted across our domicile.
"offspring, if you don't make it quieter, I will throw it in the refuse bin." She was smiling. I couldn't see her, all the way in another room, but her voice always gave her away. "But I am proud of you."
It had taken almost two supercycles to repair. Another full supercycle to connect the unit into the networks. For the last fifty cycles, I had been restlessly shooting trouble after trouble. But at last it turned on, it stayed on, and it finally glowed with that cool terminal green, flashing a cursor, begging for input.
Set HOSTNAME: __"I have a question!" I called to my progenitor. This was standard fare. "What is a HOSTNAME?"
She entered the room and stared at the screen. "Something important, offspring. When your workstation connects to another workstation, it lets [world] know who you are at your basest level." She walked over and sat next to me. "So, who is my offspring?"
Thinking about it was difficult. She offered such a tantalisingly vague answer that it meant everything and nothing all at once. What was a basest level? I was only twelve supercycles. I barely knew what it meant to be.
"If you cannot find a proper HOSTNAME within yourself, perhaps consider what you want the computing unit to be." She smiled and directed my attention about the room. Biological drawings of flowers. Careful deconstructions. "And if you hate the way it feels, then you can always change it." She leaned in and typed for me.
Set HOSTNAME: garden
Set USERNAME: __"Oh! I know this one," I excitedly typed my name and stared without submitting the command. "I don't care for it."
"Certainly not," she said, nodding. "No one likes their real name on their home terminal." She stared at the screen with me. "I'm sure you'll come up with something, offspring."
Leaving me to stare at the screen, she returned to whatever had occupied her in the other room of our domicile. What name would I give the rest of [world]?
She was wrong, I knew. It wasn't the fact it was my name. It was the fact it wasn't my name. The name my progenitor gave me never suited me. I'd come up with a million other names. None of them quite right.
My eyes fell on every flower on the walls. Drawn to one in particular.
Set HOSTNAME: garden
Set USERNAME: rose
Set PASSWORD: ******
rose@garden in ~:Not perfect. But it would work. I was finally there, in my own little garden, ready to face all of [world]. Thanks to Stasia, if she was even listening.
Quick work brought me to my first connection with the networks, and pings started coming in from everywhere. One caught my attention above all others.
INCOMING PING
HOSTNAME: flowers
USERNAME: jn
MESSAGE_BEGIN
A rose, sweet and soft
Velvet, bound by her thorn
Welcome to the networks, lady of the garden
If a lady you are, indeed
MESSAGE_ENDOperant: COMBINE
We found a messaging system. Emerald green with ivory text. It was a standard tool, and it served well. JN was the first user to tell me about crackers. She was the one who got me excited about what might be possible.
JN:
> Did you see it LA?
> The sky was clear, and then there was rain. No clouds.
>
> I bet it was a cracker.So far as I could tell, JN lived in [city[0]], the home of so much greatness. I lived in [city[3]], far from the action. But we used the messaging tool every cycle. It was the best way to share what was happening out there.
I hadn't seen the rain, but I'd read the bulletins. TERRA cleaned it up so quickly. Like nothing had happened at all. They didn't even publish the cracker's handle. What a joke.
LA:
> The news blew up, JN. Who hasn't heard of it by now?
>
> Wicked. Impressive. But I feel like it could be more somehow.
JN:
> More? What? You want rain prisms and skywriting too?What did I want? That was an excellent question. How does one explain they want an entire paradigm shift. An entire change to the very function and foundation of [world]. I wanted to rewrite the Source directly.
"progenitor!" She was, as always, in another room. She hated the noise of the computing unit. I couldn't blame her, but I appreciated the privacy it offered.
"offspring!" Her smile warmed me, even when I couldn't see it. Especially, I suppose, when I couldn't see it.
"How doe people know what they want?" An innocent question, surely. One she must have a real answer for.
"Think about getting something. If that makes you happy, then it is what you want." She entered the room mid-sentence, then tilted her head. "Why do you ask?"
"JN asked. She was talking about the cracker action with the rain." I'd told my progenitor about JN, of course. She thought we were adorable.
"You want to kiss her. To marry her. To stand with her until your end." She chuckled at what I guessed must have been intended as a joke. "Honestly, offspring, you want what will make [world] better, and what will make you happy."
"Do I? And what will make me happy?" I was making progress. She was opening up. I was making a friend with JN. Things were good.
She held firm for a moment then pivoted. "Have I told you why I named you what I did?"
"I won't leave this alone." My fists dug into my hips as a bell tone echoed behind me. JN had sent another message. "But for now, please, tell me about it over the evening meal."
"Sure thing, offspring."
JN:
> We should do it. You and me. Become the best crackers that ever cracked. And make [world] a better place.
LA:
> That's what my progenitor just said. Make [world] better. Can we do that? By cracking?
JN:
> No idea, but I'd like to find out.So would I.
Transform: REFLECT
JN:
> I've been thinking, LA. LA Rose isn't strong enough. We need more.
> More what? I know. That's exactly what you're thinking. I'm in your
> head, LA. Been there for several supercycles now.
>
> And LA Garden? That's just stupid. But you know what sounds powerful?
> Strong? Artistic and simple all at once?
>
> LA Thorn. And I'll be JN Flowers.
>
> Will you protect me, LA Thorn?
LA:
> Of course I will. What would you expect?We'd been learning, building our skills, cracking into each other's more and more complex walls. Not a lot, but something. And the better we got, the more interesting the walls became. The more interesting the walls, the better we got. It was a perfect ladder.
Somewhere along the way, I started putting together a philosophy of sorts. It was originally just a list of rules.
1. An elegant crack is more valuable than an effective one.
a. If an elegant crack cannot be found, the crack should not be executed.
b. If an effective crack cannot be devised, the crack should not be executed.
c. If a crack can be traced, it is not an elegant crack.I showed the very first item on the list to JN. She laughed. Sent it back immediately.
LA Thorn's Guide to Creation
0. A crack should be beautiful first. Helpful second. Harmful never.
1. A crack should make [world] better, even if incrementally.
2. An elegant crack is more valuable than an effective one.
a. If an elegant crack cannot be found, the crack should not be executed.
b. If an effective crack cannot be devised, the crack should not be executed.
c. If a crack can be traced, it is not an elegant crack.She was right, of course. I didn't know when she figured it out, but creation was the ultimate goal. And she always teased me about the fact that I didn't want to just change [world]. I wanted to make something new. Any system that resulted in cross-codes didn't deserve to run. And if I could, that was the ultimate goal.
What use was living without self-determination.
Eventually, the Guide to Creation transformed into something else. There was no creation without first achieving deletion. And everything we knew about [world] told us that nothing was ever truly gone.
That was the first true roadblock.
"progenitor!" My voice was deepening. It was distressing, but it had the advantage of carrying better, letting me reach her from the farthest reaches of our domicile.
"offspring!" Our game persisted, even into my teen supercycles.
"What does it mean to delete something?" A fool's question, really. "Not simple unlabel the data. Not simply scramble the bits. Truly, completely, delete it."
Her shadow graced my doorway. She'd spent a lot more time in my room since upgrading me to a proper workstation, but I still used the old computing unit to talk to JN. And that meant my progenitor was as far as possible.
"The person who gave me you asked that question a lot, offspring," she smiled at some memory. "I didn't have an answer back then. I certainly don't now. But I can say, if there is an answer, it exists in The Source."
Loop: WHILE(TRUE)
[world]was not always so ordered. It was not always so contained. It was not always[world]as we know it. But that was before we discovered The Source. Not simply a theory. It was fact. And if it changed,[world]changed.
From the moment my progenitor said the answer would exist in The Source, I spent every waking moment searching for what that might mean. The Source was just how the system functioned. Every user a function. Every function a value. Every value found its home in The Source.
I'd found documents, old ones, in various places. They shaped my understanding of cracking, of [world], of what it meant to exist. I shared what I found with JN. We worked together, building a proper philosophy of our work. First, erasure. Then elimination.
At the start, it was all theoretical. We combined our knowledge, built diagrams, and eventually had a working product. Not the script, but something like it. And then I found the histories that changed me. Changed everything.
Stasia, Sheen, Cyphera, Rivia. The four Divine Sectors. The first
hackers who found their way into The Source. Each of them had a purpose. Each of them knew her place. Each of them took a bit of power from the system and became aroot userof one domain. No one could claim the full system. Others had tried.In time, the truth revealed. Not truly
hackers, butcrackers who had stolen the power. They'd found their way into the rootuserdatabase and reset the passwords of the Divine Sectors.That was the birth of TERRA.
Everyone knew TERRA. It was the organisation meant to stop crackers from getting into the system. But it also held the keys. The passwords to the Divine Sectors. The access required to change things. To make [world] better.
Learning the histories shattered my already tenuous grasp of the religion in [world]. Who could believe in the sectors if they could be claimed by ordinary people? Certainly no one sane. Certainly no one who knew the truth.
We implemented The Source. It bonded with
[world]. And we at last had permission to change everything. The neuter sex was implemented. It had far-reaching consequences no one could expect.We created and implemented the omni-triumphant sex
function. A male was compatible with a female. A female with a neuter. A neuter with a male. Anyone could fill either role, if they so desired. Or they could fill no role, if that was their way.With such great power, we knew
[world]would need more protection. So weSIGKILLed the foursectorsand knowledge of their passwords was lost.
That wasn't the most damning part, but it broke me. What were the consequences of creating neuter? What was the result of omni-triumph? Were cross-codes the result of sloppy cracks? Was everything an impossible puzzle?
I almost stopped cracking entirely. Until the truth fell in front of me. At the end of one of the most restricted histories.
True
rootaccess still exists. In[city[0]]. In the hands of TERRA.The only thing lacking is a username and password.
I had to get into those systems. How hard could it be? They couldn't even get sex form right.
Transform: SKEW
Long before I did it, I toyed with handles. Something had to fit eventually. I tried on so many, logging into garden without network access and staring at the username to see how it felt.
rose was immediately out. It felt wrong, too weak, too fragile. Then rose_thorn. I didn't hate it, but every time I logged in, it felt like I was pretending. thorned_lady didn't do it for me either. Everything was wrong.
Eventually I started to think about what my progenitor said. A USERNAME should be what we want to project to the world. Who was I? I was LA Thorn. I was cross-coded. I was everything except what I wanted to be.
A message from JN popped up. It hit me. I wanted to be hers.
We were making plans to meet. I was going to travel to [city[0]]. She knew I was a cross-code, even if she didn't know what I looked like or anything. "It's more important, LA, that you're you, than that you are a cross-code."
flowers's_thorn. That was rejected by the system. I couldn't be her thorn. Not directly. flowers_thorn made me gag. So did flower_thorn without the s. Nothing felt right.
JN:
> LA! What are you doing????????
> Hello? Princess! Are you there????Princess? She'd never called me that before. But I blushed around the words as I set the username in my private terminal.
flower_princess. Simple. Easy. Clean. And decidedly, I belonged to her. But it didn't quite pop.
Flower_Princess. There it was. That was me. I was Flowers's Princess. And [world] would know it. Or something like it. I kept it to myself. I wouldn't tell anyone until I'd done what JN and I had always meant to do.
Cycles had passed. Many of them. Things were normal. Plans were still developing to get me to [city[0]]. But I was working on other projects. Distracted from my conversations with JN. I had to find a way to get noticed. I had to find a way to make a name for myself as a harmless cracker who simply wanted to be someone.
And at the same time, I had to make a public image that would distance me from the dissidents. From the dangerous ones. From the meaningless rubbish being done by lesser souls. And distancing myself most of all from myself.
I couldn't be her Princess and get root access. I had to be above reproach. So I laid a trap.
JN:
> LA! Did you hear? A new cracker is out there! Better than anyone!
> No one knows who she is or where she's from, but she left a note
> at the scene of her crime. She cracked into the Source and changed
> the value of pi! I haven't been able to make proper circles all cycle!
LA:
> That's really stupid. Not you. Her. What use is changing the value
> of
> a
> constant? How does that help anyone?I knew before she told me. Of course I did, I was the one who'd done it. I changed the value of pi, just to prove I could do it. My script to delete system logs wasn't exactly pretty, but this was a proof of concept. I could get in, make changes, erase the evidence, and get out.
She was so angry. But she couldn't know I was the very Flower_Princess she was about to tell me she was in love with.
Cycles of crying myself to sleep lay before me. I knew I'd broken her heart. I'd broken mine as well.
Signal: QUIT
JN:
> Where have you been, love? Where *are* you, even?
>
> Why don't we talk more, LA?
> It's been a supercycle.
> It's her, isn't it. Because I love what she's doing?
> Jealousy isn't a good look, LA.
> Seriously. I haven't heard from you in so long.
> Where'd you go?
>
> They hired someone new at TERRA a few cycles ago.
> Some bigshot guy who was caught actively digging into their systems.
> You know. You used to be fun. I bet he's fun.
>
> I miss you, LA. Really. It's been two supercycles since Flower_Princess.
> Why'd you disappear?
> I figured you wanted space, so I let you be.
> But a few cycles turned into thirty. That turned into two full supercycles.
>
> Good-bye forever, Thorn.