Test0estrogen

Feeling weightless and free, with the stink of paste in her nostrils, a bunch of nodes jammed into her spiky hair and Shonen Knife yelling through her headphones, Scar was about as close to happy as she ever got in those dumpster days.  Sitting with the crew getting pasted up and ready to jack in earlier, she’d found herself explaining breeze-blocks to a drag queen as, “building accessories, like bricks, but bigger and really porous, doll,” and it made her feel that sense of tribe again, where shit like that was joyfully commonplace.

Veto and Samanth0r were off somewhere coding the killer virus to kill all killer viruses – by the time you read this, you probably know all about it.  The Mobius Matrix Virus didn’t come at you with any fucking lilac crap or rainbows or little pink triangles, but that thing was queer by name and nature for sure.  What it did, was tangle your processor, while entertaining you with a never ending loop of rather pretty DOS coloured binary in the shape of the good old infinity symbol.  Your memory, meantime, was harnessed by our jerrybuilt server, downtown.  And it was goodnight she said to pretty much every Hetero network in G-City.  Every network that worked on the ubiquitous Makro$hark sys anyway.

When we deck-jockeys jacked in, Veto and Sam streamed coded instructions right to our goggles.  We didn’t even needs brains for the mission, just a certain level of dexterity.  If you’d been standing at the decks that day, you’d have seen a very motley crew indeed, all wired up and doing something that looks a little like tai chi and a little like we’re about to karate chop your ass right off.  I can feel the excitement of it all even now.  It wasn’t your everyday data theft gig, no sir.

(Yup, I’m afraid it was the kind of event that forced an American accent upon one).

Helen’s team went in first, in deep stealth mode, to recce and open up the dataways.  The the deep geeks themselves, Sam and Veto, unleashed the unholy hounds of hell looping through cyberspace and after that it was up to us, to literally hack and slash our way in the aftermath, creating new portals to spread the infection, spread the chaos.

Waiting in the wings, was Blue, to haul out anyone with the slightest sign of earbleed.  I heard later Helen had actually stopped breathing when she got yanked back.  Me, I got off light, with my usual little oozes of blood from nose and ears.  Veto generally blames my history of medication for that one.

What does it look like out there?  Nothing like that fucking pretty green serpent Veto and Sam cooked up, I can tell you that with confidence.  And it doesn’t matter how corporate the data you’re surfing, there are no logos and colour out there … well it’s something you feel, you don’t see it as such.  If you’re synesthetic, you’ll know what I mean.  It’s damn near impossible to explain to a noob, you’ve got to pilot a deck to understand.  The moment you jack in, gravity’s not an issue – nothing is an issue.  There’s just what you feel in your hands, and see on your eyefeed.  There’s just … this incredible focus.  I just can’t explain it, man.