NOVEL NEXT Chapter Fifty-Two: Fall Damage Sucks
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We appear in a spherical room that is covered in harsh white light. Some compartments pop open, and turrets pop out and start shooting us. Sadly, there is nothing to hide behind, so we just end up getting shot a lot. According to our bios, our basic firewalls work, so I guess that it is good we are not getting destroyed instantly. I do a quick look around and spot a door.
I take a step towards the door, but the room suddenly seems to impossibly extend, making my head spin. Okay, fuck, I instantly load up all my programs looking for the intrusion but can’t find it. I look back to see Yui’s cat form stumble weirdly through the room. It shrinks and enlarges as it gets closer and further away at the same time. I feel my stomach turn as I look at the sight.
“Yui, what is going on?” I ask, getting more concerned.
“Space is put together weirdly in this area. The physics are off. Like some places, the dictates are all 5 meters, and in others, they are 5 kilometres!” she shouts out above the roaring gunfire.
“Fuck, I know basically nothing about physics. You have a solution in mind!”
“I have. Give me a minute. Just stay close!”
Right, stay close in a room where the distances keep shifting. I decide to grab onto her tail just to be safe. In the meantime, I try to make myself useful by attempting to crack into the turrets software. Sadly, it has a firewall on it, so cracking it is going to be somewhat tricky and take a lot of time.
“Okay, get ready to jump.” she says when I am about halfway through the turret defences.
“Jump?” I ask, a bit confused by the statement.
“Yes, and now jump.”
I decided it was better to ask questions later and jump into the air. I stop halfway to the apex of my jump and start to fall, but instead of falling down, we are falling towards the door. We hit the door at an incredible speed, breaking it into a thousand pieces. As we land on the floor…wall… oh, whatever! As soon as we land, the door pieces bounce once, only to disappear with a little chime and a 100-point bonus appearing in my vision in a bright red font.
I slowly stand up and start looking around. We are in some kind of cityscape, but it is completely empty. No people or cars are moving around, making the place creepily empty. Suddenly, the sound of broken glass can be heard as one of the windows explodes outwards, and a Model 3 jumps out and shakes its body before it starts running at us.
“Uhm, you see that too, right?” I say as I pull out the weird butterfly-shaped gun and start unloading it, spraying poison everywhere.
“Uhm, it is not death.” Yui says when the antithesis jumps out of the poison cloud.
“Well, fuck, we should be able to hurt it; there is PVP, right?” I ask, with a look of concern, as I start looking for escape routes.
“Yeah, but we gave ourselves invulnerability and infinite HP. Why can’t the monsters have it?” she says, a weird look on her face.
“Ooh, come on, get your mind out of the gutter and help.” I say as I try to break into the alien's avatar to see if there is anything I can hack.
Strangely enough, it works. There is a basic AI set-up that controls it and sends malware packages to anything it bites. Taking control of its processes is rather simple. Once I have control of it, I set its hp to zero, and it disappears.
“Well, that was easy.” I say, a bit surprised.
I hear Yui groan beside me. “Don’t say that.”
Then I hear more glass shattering as more model 3s start to float down to the streets. I turn around, grab Yui’s arm and drag her away. I try doing the same trick on some of the models. And it works; the only problem is that I have to do it manually. And there are too many of them for that to be a valid option.
“Yui, can you set up a simple program to set all of their hp to zero?” I shout at the girl.
She nods and starts working on it. I keep dragging her through the hallways, eventually giving up and just picking her up. I mean, my avatar at the moment is a 190 cm tall woman; I might as well get some use out of it. I keep running, taking control of this room world editor to make walls and ramps appear that I can use to stay out of the grasp of the antithesis.
“What is taking so long?” I ask after about 5 min of running.
“I am almost done.” Yui shouts back.” And here we are.”
I look around me only to reveal all of the plants behind me exploding into confetti. “You spent all that extra time animating confetti?” I ask doubtfully.
“No, someone left the remote access open, so I sent all the malware that was in there right back through that.” She says with a smug smile. “Let's hope that it at least messes with whoever set this up a bit.”
“You know what? That might actually help us.” I say as I put her down. “So, any clue as to where we should go next?
“Uhm, not really. This place is a maze. Did you see anything interesting while you were hopping around?” She asks.
“Not really. I am in the network of this room, but it appears to be isolated from any other room, so not much use.”
“That is unfortunate. Teleporting to the last room would have been nice.”
“Wait, I have an idea. Give me a bit.” I say, then I open up a separate chat that only Lyssa can hear. “Lyssa, that two-brain thing you mentioned before means that I can be conscious and in the mesh, right?”
Correct. Lyssa would like to inform you that you are still stuck in traffic, so being awake is useless at the current point in time.
'That is fair, but can I have two mesh instances with that, at the barebones? I don't need all functionality but need to get some info.'
That is possible, but it would use up most of your remaining points
'Well, Bubbles got angry when she found out that I did not have 100 points reserved for medical supplies, so as long as it does not cut into that, it should be fine.'
Lyssa can make sure you always have 100 points for emergencies. So, if you want a second mind, it will be empty, which means you have to control two bodies at once, which most people cannot do.
'Yes, I want to mess with this test a bit and can only do it from the outside.'
Class I Mind Digitisation unlocked!
Points reduced to... 1536
New Purchase: Duet Identity Docket
Points reduced to... 336
The worst migraine I ever had set in, and as it subsided, I realise that I am looking through two sets of eyes, one set still in the cube, the other back at our starting statue. I instantly get to work advertising a samurai blueprint for sale on the dark web.
What is your plan?
'Yui gave me an idea. We don’t have a map, but someone from the cube would have; people in the cube are the best programmers and hackers, so they would be salivating over a samurai blueprint. With a bit of luck, one bites, and I can track them back.'
So you are laying a trap with your mask blueprint as bait.
I nod. 'Yep, is there a way to limit the process with second me? I need to stay in the cube for long enough for it to matter without me running into random walls the entire time.'
Lyssa can do that.
I close the call with Lyssa and then turn back to Yui. “Okay, time to continue.”
“Did you succeed in whatever you were trying to do?” she asks me, her head turned.
“Not sure yet. We will see. In the meantime, let's continue.” I say as I keep walking.
“So you failed and didn’t want to admit it. That is fine.” Yui says with a smile.
“Yeah, yeah, laugh it off, wise ass. Let's just look around.”
We walk around for a while, making a full circle around the room. And yes, this place may look like a full city, but it has invisible walls all around it, as demonstrated by Yui walking into one face-first. It is also the moment something clicks for me. Sure, the people in this building are the best hackers, programmers, you name it. But that also means that the security here is more of a let's see how much we can mess with them rather than actual security, which works perfectly for me, since I have already found a buyer for the blueprint.
“Sofia, are you even listening?” Yui shouts at me.
“Sorry, what were you talking about?” I say, trying my best to reconcentrate on this body. Fuck this is hard. First, my skeleton, now this.
“Do you have any ideas? “ She asks me in an annoyed tone
“Ideas about what?” I ask.
“How to get out, of course?”
“Well, we walked around and did not see anything. The only other option I can think of is to start opening doors until we find one that brings us to the next room.” I say.
“I thought you were good at hacking, and this is all you can come up with?” she says, looking at me with suspicion.
“I am good at certain types of hacking, removing data or evidence, breaking into secure facilities; mesh hacking is not something I do often, so yeah, I don’t have any better ideas, do you?”
“Yes, I do.” Then she snaps her fingers, and suddenly, all the buildings flatten and stretch out.
“What did you do?” I ask, a bit confused.
“I set the z dimension of this entire room to zero, collapsing everything.” Yui says with a happy smile.
“And why would that be helpful?”
“Transition points are not coded in with the rest of the geometry, so they would stand out.” Yui says, while pointing at a door floating about a meter off the ground.
“That sounds both extremely stupid and smart at the same time.”
“Well, you can gawk about my greatness later. Let's continue.” she says as she heads for the door.
I just shrug and follow her. As we open the door, the room is suddenly inverted, and we both fall into a massive ball pit. I get up out of it, looking all around me, until I spot a ledge on the far end of the ball pit.
We wade through the pit. But the closer we get to the edge, the slower we go. I try looking down to see if there is something going on. Only to realise my armour is going black, and my legs are destabilising. I open my process manager to see what is going on, only to realise that an increasingly larger chunk of my processes are being taken over and smothered out.
“Fuck, Yui, tar baby, we got to do this fast!” I shout out.
Her face goes pale. “Fuck I don’t have anything to freeze it with, what about you?”
“Not really, and I can’t create something in the three or so minutes it is going to take for this program to overwhelm us.”
“So we are fucked then?”
“Not exactly. I have an idea, but if anyone asks, nothing happened here, okay?”
She nods. “Okay, what do we do?”
“First, we have to link to each other to make our gear sync up and work as one.” I say as I open a port for her.
Linking up only takes a bit, and all our data becomes shared, which is rather unfortunate and means I have to purge some files. Then, I start unloading most of the processes onto the server in my skeleton, increasing the effective area of everything. Then, I slowly start to move all of the infected programs to there, before locking it off and shutting the whole thing down.
“How did you do that?” Yui asks as she looks around.
“Like I said, nothing happened, okay.”
“If you say so, let's just get out of here before we get infected again.”
We quickly make it to the edge and climb out of the pit. As we lay down to catch our virtual breath, I finish up my sale of the bugged mask blueprint. Now I just have to wait, and I hope they open it in the cube. How do I know they are from the cube? Their messaging is coming from the Iowa node; according to my limited data, that is where the cube is. So, it was a bit more of a gamble than I hoped. Then, a ping comes in with some mesh coordinates, and I smile.
“Hey Yui, how you feel about cheating this test?”