Shutdown Syntax - Chapter 6
If you are new to Shutdown Syntax, start from the beginning.
Note: This chapter includes violence and strong language, as the entire story does. If you are new and starting this story, please be aware of the potential triggers in a dark story as this.
Ali
Bio bomb? Ali disconnected the optical lens, left Thumper behind, and dashed for the far end of the building. She had to get out of range of wherever light might hit from the ground. Presumably, where the body was. The entire roof was flat, with no door access or shed… nothing to hide behind. All the training she’d gone through told her that being within eyesight would prove blinding, at best. Photonic disintegration did not sound pleasant.
At the front of the building, Ali peered over. The building's faces were all flat. No ledges. The best she could hope for was the rusted sign she'd seen on her way in. Who knew if it could hold any weight. Swinging her legs over, Ali dropped onto the sign, holding as much of her weight in her fingers jammed into the gap between bricks just below the top of the roof… feet just scraping the sign. Seconds ticked agonizingly by.
Sirens blared in the distance. Becoming louder.
Shit!
Logically, a bio bomb would be set off to leave no trace behind. Oh, God, Ali couldn’t get herself back up. She needed Thumper.
“IrisLink?” Her hands were giving. She’d fall onto the sign and probably smash into the ground.
Awaiting command.
“Can you remotely activate Thumper?”
Processing…
Remote activation request received. Ghosthand Initiated. Establishing connection with unit: Thumper… Connection stable. Awaiting command.
Gradually, she let herself put more weight on the sign. Blood slicked her fingers as she slid, scraping against the rough brick and cement. “Tell Thumper to grab the optical lens and cords and catch up.”
Light flashed, reflecting off the buildings.
The sign creaked. She was maybe two stories up. This was going to hurt. Another, longer, and more concerning groan of metal made Ali’s decision for her.
The moment she freed herself from the rusted metal and rough brick seemed to stretch until searing, splitting pain cut it short. She'd tried to roll but hadn't landed at the right angle to avoid her knees absorbing much of the shock. Thumper could easily catch up to her now slow hobbling.
"Better be enough power to hide my ident," Ali whimpered. Alleys and blind spots would only work in certain parts of the city to get her safely to Mr. G's place. And she certainly had no time to wait around, rolling on the asphalt until the pain subsided.
Tim
His breath shuddered. Tim had tried accessing the IrisLink chips, but the flaming red, oozing flesh and warmth around the install made it hard to work. Then he tried backdoor methods, checking all the online boards and dark recesses of the web he'd called home for essentially his entire teenage and adult life thus far. Often, dead neural hardware was nothing more than a non-issue. A misalignment of a board or organic matter where it did not belong, even if the hardware was designed to be compatible, was an option floating around.
In Tim's understanding, no standard IrisLink could be installed in a way that would interfere with the proper functioning of the brain.
In short,… legit hardware couldn't do this. Not that any of his father’s hardware looked legit or off the shelf.
Come on, think! How would he handle a bot that couldn't boot? Powering it off and on again won't work in this case. Though it's possible what was happening was like a power cycle.
Damn it! He should have just insisted they go to the hospital! Tim stood, uneasy… swaying. His father’s breaths were so shallow he nearly missed them. God, his stomach turned in knots. Could he call 911? Was Tim’s digital signature—not to mention physical—signature all over his illegally upgraded father, and what would that—
“Who the fuck are you?” A woman stood behind Tim. Tangy sweat permeated the air, mixing with blood and grease. A pistol barrel pressed into the back of his head. “I’m having a real shitty night… so…?”
“T-Tim. I’m… I didn’t… This wasn’t…” Touching the infected tissue already made him want to hurl. Holy shit, what the hell did I get myself into?
Stupidly, Tim tried to peek at the woman holding him hostage. She ripped off her hood, and a small bot, less than a foot tall, hurled itself with rusting joints and a shrill screech at Tim’s face.
The woman's shoulders slumped, but she didn't drop the gun. Just lowered it an inch or two and looked about as exasperated as Tim usually felt with his father. Unlike Tim, she didn't have a small bot trying to claw her eyes out!
"Thumper. Just remember, low profile," she mumbled and flipped her hair, revealing an undercut and a much more standard IrisLink unit. "I thought we talked about this! Low profile, Thumper! Screaming is not… forget it!" The small bot—Thumper—moaned, as if a bot could moan, and dejectedly jumped off Tim and wandered slowly back to the desk.
Gun still trained on him, she turned Harry's face to the side. "What did you get yourself into? Ah! No!" She raised the gun back up to 'possibly kill him' height.
Small grooves in the edge of the desk acted as handholds for the small bot's flat 'fingers.'
Tim had only thought about moving; he hadn’t actually moved!
Heaving a sigh, the woman cocked her head to the side and studied Tim. Then she lowered the pistol, holstering it somewhere under her jacket, and rolled her eyes as if she were bored.
“How long?” the woman snapped.
"How... What?" But Tim's brain snapped back to work. "Less than five minutes. I… I was trying to take him to the hospital and…"
Another eye roll. “God damn, this is a hack job. Well? Did he do anything weird before the stall?”
The small bot had slowly scaled the desk before crawling carefully up to Harry, waving and prodding him like a timid child.
"That's it? I answer a question and…?" Was it a mistake to open his mouth? Yes, absolutely.
The woman snorted. “You’re barely a threat, sweetheart. And you didn't do this."
“How can you tell?” Tim, again, realized his indigence too late to stop it from tumbling out.
“You’re still green. And turn greener when I do this.” Her knuckle grazed Harry’s IrisLink. “Damn. Was he acting odd before this happened?”
Tim eyed the little bot as he stepped closer to the desk. “He—uh—was moving and talking really fast. Kind of like…"
“Like someone overclocked a person,” the woman’s mouth twitched. She moved slowly, wincing, until she reached the corner of the desk. Something attached to her back clunked against the wood as she lowered herself down very gingerly.
“That shouldn’t happen. IrisLink and other knockoff neural interfaces are not connected to the brain in a way that can interfere with proper function.”
Scrubbing her face, she seemed to reach an untenable amount of exhaustion in a few seconds. “Not exactly something most companies like Novalink want on the news feeds. ‘Another person dead from off the shelf IrisLink’… It happens.”
"No, I've seen the specs. All the security…" Was as full of holes as cheese. Most of the code felt cobbled together, and there were billions of holes to patch.
“Is bullshit,” she interrupted. “And even you—at least now—don't believe what you're saying."
Well, shit. But how could she tell?
Sure, there was code that never made sense. Odd holes and lapses in security. But those were… not…
"It's all over your face," she continued with another annoying smirk. "Something in those bits of data that don't make sense… Bet you've been eyeing them for a while, trying to figure out what about it doesn't make sense." She pointed at the screen where Tim's attempts to reboot his father failed.
"You've got a mod. Off the shelf…" Tim's eyes darted to her install.
“It’s custom.” She eased off slowly, deliberately. Pain lanced her first few moves. “Ugh, ok. Processor on board that monstrosity apparently needs to cool and then…”
"Seriously? That's it?" Tim hadn't thought the real answer could be that simple. He'd obviously likened the erratic behavior to an overclocked CPU… but that was an analogy. In reality... the idea that it might happen was terrifying and movie nonsense...
But what did he know?
He seriously needed more hands-on (with all bodily fluids where they were meant to be and not gumming up around the hardware) with mods. Back home, there was no one. Just bots and the net.
In his opinion, the shutdown (in a sense) felt like an operating system glitch. There was something not right... uncanny valley.
Of course, overclocking involved accessing the BIOS or embedded firmware. He’d have to catch it quickly…
Keeping his eyes on the woman, Tim backed into the kitchen. Her lip twitched, eyes moving back and forth, either like she was reading something on her IrisLink or maybe in her thoughts as she circuited the room.
"Nothing's in there." She frowned. "If you're looking for ice to cool him down faster."
Tim meandered back towards his father, warily keeping watch on her hands and her gaze. Hand movements could be IrisLink commands. "That gun…"
"Rail pistol," she corrected.
Ugh, one of those people. “Doesn’t really look like a rail gun.”
She arched an eyebrow and gave a silent chuckle. "No. Takes inspiration only from the rail guns of old."
Odd way to talk.
And also, way to stall the conversation, Tim!
"Because," she practically purred like a tiger, "you know so much about weapons, right?"
No one ever accused Tim of being able to use social engineering properly.
Her jaw clenched. “Did he say anything specific before the stall? Weird or… I don’t know.”
"He was looking for a case file. But he'd gotten…" Overwhelmed? Tim hadn't gotten any kind of a straight answer before the 'stall,' as this woman called it.
“Never remembers where he put ‘em,” she mumbled to herself.
“You know him?” Tim’s voice cracked on the question. A stranger, probably around Tim’s age, who knew his father better than Tim did.
Why should it matter? He was the one who, time and again, didn’t put in the effort.
"He was my mentor." She flipped a box lid, paused to glance out one window, and then continued her slow circuit around the apartment. When she returned to the desk, a heavy hand patted the bot, Thumper, into a quiet state of watching or standby. "Was it your last case?" Her eyes took in every detail of his father's IrisLink. She swallowed hard. "God, what the hell…" Her lips pursed, but she seemed to look past his father. Through the window.
“Are you a PI like him?” A shift happened. In the air, or around him… or in her. Tim couldn’t quite put his finger on what exactly shifted.
The woman's gaze returned inside, scrutinizing Harry's new implants. Ever so slightly, fast enough, he could easily have missed it. She sucked in a breath.
But then it was gone.
"No," she said simply and moved across the room, taking a second circuit.
Well, if she wasn't going to shoot him, Tim opted to at least work out who she was and what was going on. Her lack of answers grated on Tim's last nerve. He could have been home, hacking into bot fights and making some extra money.
Timidly, Tim touched the IrisLink at Harry's temple. It was, in fact, still hot to the touch. Hotter than the average human body temperature but not hot enough to burn his skin. A strange smell seemingly came from the wounds.
The woman paused again in her circuit, absently asking, “Think you can…”
“Catch the initialization of the embedded firmware before the boot is completed?” Tim interrupted.
That caught her off guard. Her eyes danced a little while a soft smile played on her lips. Damn… she was undoubtedly the kind of girl that never gave Tim the time of day in Emberfield.
Actually, Emberfield didn’t have many women like her.
“You got specifics, Tim? On the case file Mr. G was looking for, I mean.”
"Just something about being related. He was at that box there. Near the closet."
She cocked her head to the side, vibrant purple hair falling in messy, tangled, sweat-ladened waves. “You seem familiar.”
Oh, he'd remember a woman like her—whatever her name was. Alas… "I don't live in Vanguard. Just… visiting. I… uh… didn't catch your name." Smooth.
On the computer, Tim pulled up a UEFI shell, happy the commands he would normally use worked on his father's much older computer and also on whatever this IrisLink was flashed with.
She paused at the second window, which faced the front of the building. "Angel," she said, monotoned.
Lord, it was like the initial forays he and his friends made to the dark web in middle school with the most flimsy of screen names. "Angel? So you're… what?"
Boot flow had initiated. A few keystrokes and he'd intercepted the boot to look at the pre-boot diagnostics. Unlike a regular computer or even a bot, the options, monitors, and toggles for a neural link system were much more complex. His father's finger twitched.
Tim typed: /firmware/irisboot.conf
There. Damn, it had been that simple.
Clockrate: 3.8GHz (Max Certified: 2.6GHz)
Voltage: 1.45v (Nominal: 1.1v)
If he looked further, he bet the cooling fail-safes would have been disabled too. Tim pulled up the clocks, and there were several manual overrides, including the security system.
“Did you…” she started.
Oh, we’re just skipping my question. Tim jabbed the Enter button extra hard.
"…come alone?"
“Yeah,” Tim huffed, going through and resetting other security parameters, cooling, etc. He may have been fine if he’d just calmed down earlier and thought everything through. This wasn’t…
"Huh," Angel backed away from the window, but not before closing the blinds. She clutched the side of her IrisLink nodule, her eye twitching similar to when Tim heard something dissonant.
Her eyes searched and scanned. Definitely reading something.
Tim chewed his lip, but he finished checking the other parameters and finally allowed IrisLink's OS to complete the boot sequence. Please work. Please work.
Again, not that he’d been close—at all—with his father.
Angel pushed past Tim. He'd been distracted by crunching the numbers about the cooling changes, and he hadn't noticed her run across the apartment, diving for the blinds behind the desk.
“How long has he been here?” Angel whispered, backing into the room again, eyes darting between windows.
“Less than 15 minutes,” Tim said, timing the boot. God, had time just slowed to an utter crawl because…
Harry gasped loudly.
And Angel… stifled a scream, stumbling further back into the room, holding her IrisLink before falling into the half-open closet door.
Better late than never. Chapter 7 is going through edits now!!!!