0000.0.1

I ran my hand along the edge of rig and let my finger rest against the switch. I always installed an archaic flip switch on all my systems. Feeling the hard ‘click’ always helped me get in the right head space.

I closed my eyes and pressed the button.

The real world dialed down to zero, and my long-familiar liminal space swam into focus. I learned early on how disorienting it is to snap out of reality straight into Möbius, and had created a blank space to lessen the crashing juxtaposition of transitioning from reality straight into a corporate file structure.

My system was forming around my body. Its pure metaphor, but it’s how I like to raid.

Audio came through. It sounded like a transmission from deep space. A thin voice distorted by million’s of miles of solar activity. It sounded like a ghost of my past reaching out from forever.

It sounded like her.

My eyes flicked down to the system monitor. I hadn’t initiated any connections and the processor was idling at baseline.

I looked around behind me. It’s useless in my antechamber, but the primal fight or flight instincts still rang true in places that don’t care about those things.

Can ghosts still haunt somewhere like this?

If you brought them with you, sure they can.

I closed my eyes and took a breath. Can’t afford to spiral out. Had to focus. I anchored myself with the physical sensations of running my hands over the keys. It helps to dial into the now, even if you’re running hundred’s of times faster than the outside world.

Time to work.

A thin line drew itself in front of me, and rose out of the floor. The door opened into the NullState Industries network. A nightmare designed to be all but incomprehensible to their own system architects.

At surface level they present their data like other corporations. Just as unimaginative in free space as physical space. Here, at the deep level I was entering?

They call it the Julia Domain. A fractal space with entire worlds hidden between irrational numbers that never resolve. As you go deeper, the harder your system has to work to hold the infinitesimal numbers in active memory. Your ability to execute fades into infinity, away from the decimal.

NullState approaches zero.

Navigating Nothing

I felt a sickening disorientation as everything in my vision swirled away into nothing. More layers unfold in front and beyond. A vague sense of “in” swam through my body as I move deeper in.

The trick, I learned from my research, was to bring the information you want to the front of your mind. Place it in a new buffer that entangles with the system’s fractal space.

You get drawn into the right pocket of the space where the data is secreted away. There are whispers of people disappearing into the void; employees, not just unwelcome tourists like me.

Names, references, and random imagery flashed by as I moved away from the decimal into the remainder.

I stopped cold. Backed up.

My system had flagged a file for notice. It recognized the handle of an old friend that matched an existing loop: Marcus Roman. AKA Cache.

We didn’t see each other often in reality or in virtual space for that matter, but he didn’t update his pulse file last week. He hadn’t missed an update in years, but this file was modified. . . my interpolation layer flipped digits . . . yesterday.

I brought the file to my rig and flicked my eyes to my tracker alert indicator. Still dark.

It’s always risky to access and copy files in the fractal. It’s one thing to navigate the directory, but it’s another to interact with the data, itself.

Years back Cache and I did an impossible run together. Our contact told us it was a simple in and out job; like the one I’m on now. But it uncovered a project called “The Versioning Archive.”

We got what we came for, and a lot we didn’t. We looked through the files, and things got weird. There were timestamps and version controls that were out of sequence.

I chalked it up to corrupted data, but Cache went down the rabbit hole.

He was obsessed with the patterns and started integrating more and more of the code in his own local systems. He would go on at length about “timestamps from every when” and inconsistencies in causality.

It was tough to follow, and he frankly became a liability. We hadn’t worked together since then, but he was still one of the good guys and here he was with NullState after his pulse file went cold. Plus, that run had led to major changes in the world that released the stranglehold the government and corporations had on citizens.

Or, maybe not. Maybe it just went deeper.

My attention went back to the fractal in front of me, and a subtle change in color folded inward. I knew where I needed to go.

Soon I found it. An opalescent blip in an otherwise chaotic static.

My insides folded outward and brought me closer.

I copied it as quickly as I could and drew my door in front of me. I stepped through and it slid closed behind me; severing the connection to the network.

The Web Tangles

Closing my eyes didn’t help the profound disorientation of leaving a fractal non-Euclidian file system and entering a three dimensional space; even a blank volume like this.

The nausea passed and I flipped the interface button to deactivate my rig.

My senses dropped back into my body and I was in the real world, eager to break the info I found.

“You get it?” she asked.

“Yeah. Part of it, at least,” I answered. Still disoriented. “I’ll have to make sure. Want me to do that now?”

“I’m not paying you not to,” she said. Her cigarette trailing smoke. The ash barely burned down from the moment I flipped the switch on my rig.

I had been in there for a few moments, even though I was exhausted from what felt like hours of wading through a bad trip.

I didn’t need to slip back into full immersion for this one. I used the display on the rig to start cracking the files I found.

I looked over at my benefactor. Maybe jailor.

Same thing, really.

Her eyes were distant. Preoccupied.

I paced the room while I waited on the rig to do its thing. Didn’t take long, which shouldn’t surprise me, but it still did. I was used to working with good gear but this was next level.

My minder was still preoccupied, and I took a look at what I had grabbed.

A quick look showed me two names that were familiar. One was a low level street thug with a small territory on the east side. I had framed him for a small time job that didn’t put him away long; just long enough for my client at the time to integrate and assume his existing network into their own domain.

The other was a mid level politician. She had come up clean when I was paid to comb through her background by an interested third party. Seems like she’s now using the thug through a shell entity that was, until now, air-gapped.

Interesting.

More names popped up that my exocortex flagged as previous clients or marks. More than could be a coincidence.

Somehow they all tied back to NullState.

I was startled to notice her eyes on me. Not hostile. Focused.

“Here.” was her only word. I pulled the drive and handed it over.

She took it and closed the door behind her.

end_transmission