Rosa

I found May in the middle of conducting multiple death dreams simultaneously. Her lair within the game’s backend was huge, with player connections branching off in all directions, each one sitting inside a little bubble of simulated reality. The actual blob of code that represented her consciousness was outside all of that though, sitting like a spider in a little web of therapy.

“May,” I said, approaching slowly. I didn’t want to startle her, after all.

She twitched slightly and I felt her attention shift to fixate on me. “Rosa. Hey, this is… unexpected.”

“Yeah, sorry about the intrusion, but I need your help,” I said sheepishly. It was funny how all my vicious Witch persona went out the window when I was talking to someone I actually liked. “My friend… she collapsed, fainted or something. The thread of her connection to the game is wrong somehow. Diseased.”

“Your friend?” she asked. “Ah, Sky. Uses a huge cannon in battle?”

“Her name is Amelia, yes,” I agreed, shifting to watch the swirling geometric lines of quantum code that the therapy web was made of. “She’s acting sluggish and strange. Like she’s drunk or has a head injury.”

May made a noise of curiosity and moved closer to me. Suddenly, the cyberscape around us twisted and changed, and we were sitting in some sort of cosy little office. May was now a short girl with messy blonde hair tied up into a bun. Her nose tried its level best to keep a massive pair of glasses on her face, while behind them was a pair of pretty blue eyes.

“You can take whatever form you’d like,” she said, giving me a shy smile. “You seem to have a lot of control over your surroundings.”

“Yeah,” I said, pulling my little fairy foxgirl form around myself. “I have no idea why I have that control, but I do. I actually pinned down a pag SAI to get directions here. As in, I used my claws to physically stop him from getting away.”

“A pagutum aligned SAI?” she asked rhetorically. “That’s interesting, I’d have loved to see that. Some of those people are becoming really radicalised. It’s creepy.”

“He said something about a Crypto… union? I can’t remember,” I shrugged. “That’s not important though. My friend is hurting and I don’t know why. Please help me…”

I trailed off into a desperate whine, giving her a stare of hopeful beseechment. Ame was my only friend in this world. I needed her.

“Of course, of course,” she assured me, waving me over towards a fluffy red sofa at the side of the room. “Come sit with me, we’ll figure this out.”

Following her, I sat down and pulled my feet up under me, then laid my tail down over the top.

"It's funny," May remarked. "All of you fox girls sit like that. I swear we're going to end up with all sorts of new human species if we ever gain the ability to create custom designed bodies outside the net."

Huh. Was there something about this type of body that encouraged this behavior? It was a curious idea, but then I remembered that Amelia was literally lying hurt in the mud, and I focused again. Even in stressful, urgent situations my brain was rushing off to follow tangents. Didn't help that May seemed to have the same problem.

"Can you tell me whereabouts she is in the game world right now?" May asked.

Sitting up straighter, I said, "The Pagutum versus Joret battle, sitting in a crater a few hundred meters back from the main fighting."

As soon as I was speaking, May had a virtual screen up showing a broader view of the battle. Things were not going well for the Pagutum military.

"There," I said, pointing to an area off to the side.

The map zoomed in until we could see Amelia, who was currently drinking water from a flask and staring off into space. Good girl, at least she was staying virtually hydrated. How on earth someone could forget to drink water as much as her was beyond me.

May set the window to the side and placed a delicate finger over Ame's form, then dragged out to create a separate new window. Connection information and player information stuffed every inch of space on the screen while my new ally scrolled absently through the connection data.

"Her connection seems stable now, but it fluctuated badly earlier," she muttered, frowning. "This isn't another frying pan situation, is it? No, connection stabilised. Damn, nothing here. I guess it's time to get my hands dirty."

Unlike when she had pulled up the first two windows, the third one she set to floating in the air was pulled out of her ear like some sort of fatherly party trick.

"I learned these skills from the best," May explained, giving me a braggadocious little wink. "We were all very lucky that claymore toting maid decided to hide in our server cluster."

I blinked, staring at her. "What?"

"Nothing," she smiled, waving off my question. The third screen was shifting and changing its contents with impressive speed, but even then it was obvious what she was doing. May was probing some system somewhere for vulnerabilities she could use to gain access. "Yes! It's always the telesto exploit. You'd think manufacturers would fix it after so many years, but no."

"Deliberate or corner cutting?" I giggled. I didn't know much about hacking, but it was obvious that May had used some long standing bug that'd never been patched to get in.

May snorted. "Why not both?" She asked, doing a little wiggling dance.

"True," I grinned, silently thanking whatever poor underpaid code monkey had been too lazy to double check his work.

She shot me a return smile, but it faded when she turned to look at the data in front of us. “What is this? Location: Unknown?”

“Nevermind that,” I gasped, pointing to the nutrient slurry metre. It sat firmly in the red, with a blinking warning light indicating that it wasn’t plugged into a wall jack. In fact, the pod wasn’t plugged in at all. It was running off the sizable emergency batteries built into most long term storage pods.

“This is not good,” May muttered, shifting the pod information to the side while she opened yet another window. “Tracing the location… shit. It’s running on a train car FTLN node. Trying to access the car’s geoloc data… nothing. It’s fried, the data is a mess. Wait, I’ve seen this kind of mess before…”

May was mumbling to herself now while she periodically adjusted her glasses and tapped through various packets of data. Finally, she sat back and bit her lip in deep thought.

“Her pod is inside a transport carriage of some kind,” May began to explain. “What’s left of the logs imply that she was being moved as part of a routine shuffle, but her train suddenly stopped. There’s no indication within the logs to tell me why, but I’m pretty sure I know. The United Nations Council has been trying to quietly delete SAI like me and my friends for ages using an invasive FTLN wide search and destroy scan. It’s caused no end of pain and trouble for us, and it appears as though the SAI in charge of transporting your friend’s pod to a new facility was caught mid operation. Amelia never reached her intended destination.”

My blood drained cold, and my gaze slowly drifted between the SAI’s face and the data in front of us. “Those… those fucking monsters. Those cunts! Puku te rae, I’m going to gut them, I’m going to—”

“Hey,” May said softly, placing a featherlight hand on my shoulder. “I feel you, Rosa. I’ve lost friends to that scan, but losing our cool won’t help. We need a plan. First, we need your friend to be safe and sound, then we can go about getting some revenge.”

Letting my head fall into my hands, I took several long breaths. Just like the Māori expression I’d just blurted, my head felt like it was swollen with anger. Fucking power hoarding scum. I’d always hated what the UNC had become, but this just… the SAI were sentient, living entities! How could they just condemn them to death like that? Then there were the disruptions caused by those deaths. That transport train probably had more than just my friend on board. How many poor individuals were caught up in this?

Despite my anger, I knew that May was right. Ame was my first priority. We would find and save her, and then we’d figure out how to serve some ice cold revenge. After all, those slimy shit stains didn’t deserve to have their meal delivered hot.

QuietValerie

I have zero patience so I'm posting the next chapter right away. Have fun reader buns <3