[SESSION id=0.6]: Style Cascade
Convergent Sequence
Even Even was out of the way. The door was locked. I went back to check it twenty times before finally settling back to the workstation and digging around for some way to do more than Silver_Thorn. Could I? Absolutely. Should I? Probably not.
Something tickled at the back of my mind. A familiar colour scheme. Quick, unscripted messages. A few words, or a whole novel at once. Emerald and ivory.
My hands moved on their own as they remembered a path they hadn't traced in almost twelve supercycles, the last time I opened the messenger tool we used back then. JN Flowers and me.
I hadn't been ignoring her. I read every message. But I didn't respond. So it's not like there was much difference. I logged in as LA Thorn. The password was still incredibly mundane. progenitor. Because she owned the computing unit before me.
JN's final words still stared back at me, an indictment of everything I'd let myself become to get where I was.
JN:
> Good-bye forever, Thorn.
LA:
> I don't know if you're still out there, Flowers. But I'm sorry.
> I'm not ready to explain myself. But you at least deserve this much.
> And one cycle, quite soon, [world] will know my name. Yours, too.
> If you want it anyway.
> ---> LillianI left the tool open, not hoping for anything, but using it as motivation against the agony I would be feeling soon. I never stayed past dark. That wasn't like me. Getting home in [city[0]] after dark was like walking through a hall filled with mirrors. How do you walk transverse to the skylight if you don't know which way the skylight is?
First thing first. Decide if I should abort Silver_Thorn's message or let it go. The advantage is that there'd be no denying that I found it, no denying that she was out of her depth. But then only one of us would be implicated. And it would be dreadfully easy to track my fixes.
Or I could go even bigger. Hijack her message. Change it. Morph it into something beautiful.
For all her worry over the elegance of my code, she really needed to work on the elegance of her outcomes. I laughed. It felt just like working with Flowers. They were certainly forked from the same codebase.
Got it. Not just bigger. Bigger and cleaner. And with a clear message: I may not have access to the most important system in [world], but I have access to everything else. And she would praise me. And we would laugh about how much I hate Flower_Princess, while actively hiding that I am the real deal. Flowers created me. Jazz was slowly reviving the ghost left when I abandoned Flowers.
JN:
> ---> Lillian? ... Lillian. Lillian Lillian Lillian.
> Lillian Thorn. I don't forgive you. But.
> And this is a big, enormous, important but.
> Thank you for apologising.
> I should too.
>
> I was kind of immature back then. I've grown up a lot.
> I met someone. She's shy and quiet and a lot like you.
> She and I are working on some big things, but I miss what we had.
> Working actively together.
> Maybe one cycle you and I can sit down and really chat.
>
> Until then, feel free to let the world know my name.
> Just be sure to spell it right. F-L-O-W-E-R
> -S
> ... whoops.It appeared in a flurry. Just like always. She hadn't changed much, if at all. My heart felt warm as I read the message over again several times. I was glad she was doing well, even if it was with someone else.
LA:
> I'll be busy until about forty-five degrees past dark. Big project at work.
> Plus a friend of mine asked me to help her with something.
> But I'll be in touch. If that's okay with you.
>
> Wait. One more thing. If you happen to have 'On erasure' at the ready,
> could you send me the code from page 280.
JN:
> I do, conveniently. Happy generation anniversary, by the way.
> I'll get that sent to you shortly.She remembered. She remembered everything.
It was a simple code. Straightforward. It converted shapes into other shapes using something called a linear convolutional transform mapping. Risky to use it the way I was about to? Sure. Was I going to anyway? Absolutely.
JN never appreciated the beauty of the mapping because she only tested it on lines. "It's in the name, right?" So I couldn't convince her to try it out in other ways. She had no idea what it did.
My hands moved to open the dozen or so files I'd need to work and found the most important bit. Jazz had replaced the convergent sequence for pi in the const library with my very first crack. But she'd gone a step further. There was a timer function that slowly rewrote other bits of code to use equally 'just barely wrong' silliness. Who needs the full decimal expansion of sqrt 2? No one, apparently.
It kept going. The whole thing was a plan to make everything just a bit more wrong a little at a time, then to 'fix' everything, but the sky would be red, and the skylight would be green. Cute. A bit chaotic. Huge.
Not much would need to change. Just some updates to the timing function. A special backup. And then insert page 280. Happy generation anniversary to me.
My eyes turned to the window. Not just dark. Dauntingly, terrifyingly dark. Later than forty-five degrees by a measure.
JN:
> So are you in [city[0]] these cycles?
>
> Cause if you are, we could see each other pretty easily.
LA:
> I am. And if I make it home tonight, then we can plan for that.
JN:
> If?
> What
> Do
> You
> Mean
> If?
LA:
> Navigating in the dark is stupid difficult.
> I can't tell my parallel from my transverse.
> Last time I stayed late, I didn't find my way home until fifteen degrees.
> Not fifteen degrees before light. Fifteen degrees after.
> And really, I found myself at a shop I visit every cycle. Not home.
> I was lucky it was a rest cycle.
> [city[0]] really should get direction lights put in like [city[3]].
JN:
> What a shame I don't know where you work. Or live. I could get you there.
LA:
> Transverse TERRA office. And I live at the seventh corridor domiciles.
JN:
> Give me seven cycle ticks. You'll have directions. Just follow them.Continued Fraction
The message was to be delivered the next cycle. It was a rest cycle. No one would be working. Not as such. Which meant a much greater chance for people to be outside and see what she – rather, what we – had done.
I didn't normally show up to my own performances, but even I was excited to see just how it would all look.
Part of me laughed when I looked over a map of [city[0]] and realised Jazz had set up her display to be best viewed from a single spot: the table in Lyra's place where she and I had spoken two cycles prior. It was the perfect viewpoint for a lot of things in [city[0]].
As I dressed and performed my own heretical affirmation, my personal workstation pinged. I'd logged back into the messenger app when I got home to let JN know that I was safe, and for whatever reason I left it logged in.
JN:
> I wanted to tell you about this woman I met. She's a cross-code, like you.
> When I first laid eyes on her, I knew we would be close.
> We would be a nice clean match. Working together, living together one day.
> And if she were comfortable with it, maybe generating our own offspring.
> She is honestly a really great person. You could learn a lot from her.
> Anyway, I'm going to be busy the whole cycle. There's a show happening.
> In recreation area six. Have fun with your thing.
>
> Stimulant brew, though? I never took you for a stimulant brew kind of girl.I laughed at the message before making one final plea to Rivia. "Keep JN safe. If you must send my SIGTERM now, at least look after her."
The air outside was chilly. Part of my disruption of Jazz's work. I brought a proper coat because it would be getting colder every few degrees until everything happened. If anyone asked, I could just play it off as being sensitive.
No crowds stood in my way as I walked away from the TERRA office toward Lyra Moon's shop and my unplanned date with Jazz, who I was certain would be there, waiting and watching. Date? That's the wrong word. We weren't an item. She'd kissed me, sure. But she was in love with Flower_Princess. That was it.
Even on rest cycles, Lyra kept the shop open. The younger woman, who was apparently her daughter, watched the counter for the first several degrees, then she was released to go do whatever the young people did for social enrichment.
Part of me was jealous that she got the social enrichment I never did. Of course, I was an isolated learner because they worried I was corrupt, so that made a lot of sense.
The shop was dark when I arrived, Jazz and Lyra sitting at the same table, side-by-side, reading something on a mobile workstation. When the bell rang, they both looked up and smiled at me. Definitely sisters. You could see it in how well mirrored their movements were.
"May I join you?" There were other tables, but I would appreciate the company. Jazz waved a hand, offering me the seat across from her. "Thanks. Someone from work," I raised a brow at Jazz, "told me I should be outside around thirty degrees, so I thought I'd pop in. Okay if I borrow your company?"
Jazz half-smiled, raising only the corner of her mouth as her eyes brightened at something. "Indeed? Are they expecting something to go down? Some manner of cracker action? Also, what's with the coat?"
"Have you been out there?" I laughed as I unzipped and removed it, hanging it on the back of the chair before sitting down. "Freak storm of some kind, I suppose. The folks in weather management need to get their business together." I turned to Lyra, only slightly. Not to address her, but to make clear I didn't want to say it aloud. "A friend of mine has the inside gossip about cracker action, and she said that I should be outside and sitting down. Didn't want to sit on the grass, so here I am."
"Ah. You grace my shop every cycle, Lillian," Lyra met my gaze with a questioning glance before putting her head back into whatever she was reading. "You would have been here five degrees from now even if no one told you that."
"Stalker much, Lillian?" Jazz chuckled at some joke she wasn't sharing. I blushed. "It's fine. I've been known to stalk in my spare time."
"Please, no more about The Community, Jazz. Not while Nova could walk in and hear you." She desperately looked over her shoulders. "My teen-aged daughter doesn't need to know about leather and ropes and blades and clamps and —"
"First off, you introduced me to them," Jazz shoved Lyra gently. "Second off, it was about something else. The hobby I share with Lillian. We met because I've kind of been stalking a friend of hers."
"Nonsense," Lyra laughed before closing the mobile workstation. "Lillian doesn't have friends. Not really. Just me, Nova, and now you."
It wasn't intended in offence. And I didn't take it as such. Did it sting some? Absolutely. Was it true? Most definitely.
"Well, I do have one other friend. Sort of. It's more a matter of cleaning up her messes because I've known her for a long time." I thought about the first time I did a crack as Flower_Princess and how I spent almost forty cycles properly cleaning up the trail while the sysadmins struggled desperately to fix what I'd done. "Kind of an antagonistic older sister sort of thing with us."
Jazz glared at me. I couldn't place the intent. I didn't have the time to find out. The show was starting.
It started subtly enough. A gently pulsing change to the colour and intensity of the sky. Just trying to catch eyes, trying to make the world pay attention for even a moment. Each pulse pushed the colour of the world further from its natural cyan and yellow toward her intended destination.
Eventually the clouds began to gather, forming impossible clumps that should've been spheres bundled tightly, but the circle constant was wrong, so circles were wrong. Not enough that it was obvious, but enough that it felt horribly, terrifyingly wrong.
The first raindrops fell in a scattered pattern, waves of water flooding down, stopping, starting again, chasing each other around the slowly reddening sky. Three. One. Four. One. Five. Nine. Two. Six. Five. Three. Five. An extended pause, and it began again.
If you watched closely, you might have noticed the rain was falling only between the pulses driving the sky toward crimson. Those pulses were beating out their own pattern, but that was about to change. All of it was about to shift.
Lyra shivered as the frost appeared on the window. The temperature was dropping ever further. Flower_Princess's show was starting exactly as planned.
Rain drops slowly turned into sleet, which worked its way to small bits of hail. Not enough to hurt anyone, but enough to sting. Just a little.
The wind picked up, passing between buildings at resonant frequencies. At first, it was just static. But the static turned to gentle tones, and eventually shifted into chords, melody, and harmony, splitting and playing a tune I'd been writing into the Source since the first invisible crack.
Root. Sixth. Root. Octave. Extended and expanded. Only an artist could hear it. Only a cracker could follow it. And Jazz was both. Her hand found mine across the table, and our eyes met. I leaned my head toward the window. One of the best parts was about to begin.
Amid the music of the wind, the hail began to trace a spiral, gently at first, rapidly chasing itself as it got closer to the centre. The centre that was positioned right above us. The sky at last reached its pinnacle crimson, then a flash.
Everything went dark for several cycle ticks. Then the sky faded back in. Emerald green with an ivory skylight. And the hail became snow. The first snow in[city[0]] ever, so far as I knew.
True to plan, the temperature was still dropping as the sky and skylight faded back to their normal. The pulsing stopped, but the snow kept falling.
"Some freak storm," Jazz said, squeezing my hand once before releasing me. "Glad you brought your coat, Lillian."
She didn't take her eyes off me, tracing my features like she was recognising something in me, lingering a bit too long. She saw me in a way I'd never really felt before.
"Lillian," she whispered, barely audible even through the silence, "in this light, your skin is stunning. Like a cup of stim-brew untainted by cream." She looked at her own hand, only a few shades lighter. "I'm kind of jealous."
"I'd trade you in a heartbeat," I forced a laugh. Her smile vanished. "Not the colour, but the rest of it."
"That's fair."
Message Received
Lyra was the first to move, leaving us at the table to just stare at each other. I heard the machines whirr to life as she worked on something. Just enough noise for me to feel safe whispering to Jazz.
"So, your message. It was chaos." I grinned. "Stunning work. I let her know, and she went nuts for the potential of it." Her eyes were set. Her face wasn't friendly but something like irritation. "You told me to pass along the message. I did."
"And that was the reply?" Jazz waved intensely around, at last settling at the window. "That was art. That was beauty. It was everything I've ever hoped to accomplish."
"She was really impressed with the scale of your work," I smiled, honestly pleased to be telling her the truth. "If it helps at all, she nearly sent you a message directly when she saw it. But she's a lady who aims to impress."
"Right. She always impresses me." Jazz narrowed her eyes. "I was watching the account logs last night. Why were you at work so late? It was something like seventy-five degrees before light when you logged off."
"Between you and her using me to talk," I rubbed the back of my neck, "I've been having to do double time to cover the tracks of your pining after her and her tracks of impressing you." The lie tasted bitter.
"I owe you some things, Lillian." She looked at the table, not me. "Answers. Honesty. Information. An apology. You can stop protecting me." She looked out the window at the slowly fading emerald. "I know you've been begging for SIGTERM. But you shouldn't seek it out on my behalf."
"What makes you think it's for you?" Not quite a lie. Questions can't be lies, can they? "It's for me. Keeping you safe makes me better at my job. Plus you remind me of someone."
"J.N. Flowers?" I nodded. "I kept reading through that manifesto of yours." Her eyes gleamed with knowledge of something. "You and J.N. Flowers must have had something special. What happened with that?"
"Flower_Princess. We were supposed to change [world]. We were supposed to make it better for everyone." I breathed slowly in and out once. "Flower_Princess wasn't making things better. She was making them more chaotic. Until she found her footing, she was just a concept artist." I was seething. "And J.N. loved it. Everything about it. She abandoned everything we stood for. For the spectacle."
We were silent for a long time. Lyra brought hot drinks and set them between us before walking away.
"Do you hate spectacle so much?" Jazz's voice was weak, barely audible.
"No. Not anymore." I looked out the window. "I got to know Flower_Princess better. She was doing things other people couldn't see. I've not changed my mind, but I've come to understand."
Our eyes met. "You're holding out hope for you and Miss Flowers, aren't you?"
"Is it obvious?" She grinned and held up her hand, thumb and forefinger almost but not quite pressed together. "Fair. She's the reason I got into cracking. She's the reason I work at TERRA. She's the reason I've not SIGTERMed myself."
Jazz's mouth hung slack. "I had a friend like that ages ago. If I was an idealist when I was younger, she was a naive brat who had was unwilling to accept that [world] could get better from art and chaos."
"Well, she's an idiot." I grinned. "Are you and she still close?"
"Sort of?" Jazz blushed. "We recently reconnected, and she's grown up a lot."
"Good for her! Then maybe there's hope for J.N. Flowers and me as well." I thought to the messages I'd exchanged with my friend. Maybe.
"Oh! I almost forgot. The important reward for your brilliant couriership." She opened the mobile workstation that still sat on the table and popped one of the panels off. From inside, she pulled a small bit of paper. "Read this. Memorise it. Then burn it."
username: phyllo
root: TERRA
password: meadow
"What's this?" I stared at it. Clearly it was a set of login credentials. "And where did you get it?"
"That's a long story. Short version? I found a way to create new accounts in the root database. I made dozens of them." She lit up as she talked about her cleverness. "When I make them, I check their permissions. Just out of habit. Always very low levels. Nothing fancy. But not that one." Her finger flapped the little bit of paper. "I made that account, and the system freaked out."
"Freaked out, how?"
"When I went to log in, it said Invalid Workstation UUID." Her hands settled back to the table. Her eyes were wide. "The account's permissions are obscene. Elevated higher than anything I've ever seen."
"How high?"
"Next time you're working after hours, trying to update your name, check her out." Jazz took a long drag on the drink in front of her. "Tell me more about Miss Flowers. Maybe I know her. [world] is a small place, after all."