Chapter 10 - Pandora's Box
Discarded metal
Chapter 10 - Pandora's Box
"Are you sure you want to look inside?"
Gloria is asleep on a long chair with a machine strapped around her head, her eyes are closed.
A man with tools coming out of his hands is working on her. He is seated on a stool with wheels and keeps going back and forth through the room.
He grabs the military grade cyberdeck from the case sitting on a small table near the wall.
The entire room looks like a cheap surgery room.
Pulse is leaning against one of the walls with his arms crossed on his chest. He looks at the ripperdoc placing the cyberdeck inside the machine wrapped around Gloria's head.
After it's placed in the machine, the doc activates it and stands up as it starts moving in circular motions around her head.
"All right, now just let the tech do its magic." He says to Pulse.
Pulse taps on his shoulder before getting closer to Gloria and starts following the movements of the machine.
Gloria suddenly opens her eyes.
"Mommy is fine! Stop worrying, you are a big boy now." She says, trying to irritate him.
"Pfff… Can you stop talking shit? This machine is about to pierce through your head… Stop moving!" Pulse replies nervously.
The ripperdoc starts laughing out loud.
"She can go dancing if she wants, it won't affect the process. This tech is a million times better than shaky human hands." He says as he grabs a small tube that he puts on his lips and draws on it.
He exhales a cloud of smoke that quickly dissipates in the room.
"You guys are playing with the big boys now, lots of things you will have to let go of." He says, sounding like he just delivered words of wisdom.
It doesn't help Pulse to relax, he looks even more worried and turns his head back to look at Gloria.
"Are you sure about this?" He asks, trying to make her change her mind or maybe he just waits for her to comfort him.
"Stop being a worrying wuss. Do you really think we have a choice? We do this and we score big or we get eaten alive by the big fish." She says with hints of anger in her voice.
She knows clearly why she is doing it, all her life has prepared her for this. She recalls that time when she got her first neural implant.
What choice did she have, little girls from the commons don't grow well. Her mom was the perfect example of what happens when you stop fighting.
"Fuck it! It's our time!" She says as she grabs Pulse's hand and squeezes it.
The ripperdoc scoffs.
"Charming… There are bets running guessing how long your little group will last." The doc says in a challenging tone.
Gloria looks at him with furious eyes as the machine wrapped around her head starts to accelerate the circular motions.
She barely can move now and the machine starts to cut away her old cyberdeck. It's painless but Gloria can feel the strong pull on the side of her skull.
"You got fire… Can't deny that, but you aren't the only badass out there, you will be competing against bigger gangs now. Hell, words on the street that you even robbed a big corpo. That's a lot of enemies for a little girl." He continues, clearly teasing her.
Pulse looks down at her as the old cyberdeck is spurted out of the machine and the new one put in place.
There's an eerie silence taking place in the room, now the machine finishes the last touches of the implantation process and stops moving.
Gloria raises up in a sitting position as she unstraps the machine from her head.
Her visual implants pair instantly with her cyberdeck and the UI appears on her vision.
The doc gets closer to her and checks if everything is well implanted.
"Nice piece, military grade tech aren't common in the commons, don't attract envious vultures." He says.
Gloria stands up from the long chair.
"The bet you mentioned… How long are they giving us?" She asks him.
"The biggest bet gives you guys a year, but most think that your group will be gone before." He replies.
Pulse takes her spot on the long chair and she goes lean against the wall.
"Less than a year… I will make them see…" She mutters as she starts getting familiar with the UI.
She starts getting it more tuned in with her preferences. She gets a small device out of her jacket's pocket and plugs the cyberdeck into it.
The device allows her to crack the manufacturer's protections, basically making the hardware more efficient and free of Meditech spywares.
After a few minutes of toying around with it, she has a satisfied look on her face and unplugs from the device.
As soon as Pulse finishes getting his own cyberdeck implanted, she hands him the device and he proceeds through the same ritual.
She continues getting familiar with her new hardware and instantly notices how fast and more natural this cyberdeck feels.
"Now I see why they are so expensive and so hard to find in the commons…" She says.
"Corpos keep their good stuff for themselves, that's why they are up there and we are down here." The doc says while making gestures up and down.
Gloria says nothing but she feels a burn in her heart, she always knew how this world was unfair. She is aware that she was born on the wrong side of the gate.
Pulse finishes with the device, unplugs it and hands it back to her.
Gloria and Pulse step out of the small operation room and walk through the corridors of the small clinic.
When they reach outside, the sun is already hiding behind the horizon and night slowly settles in.
Pulse gets on the driver seat of his car and Gloria sits on the passenger's seat.
He plugs himself into the front panel of his car and it starts itself.
"He he he." He softly scoffs while watching Gloria.
His car bursts on the road as he keeps watching Gloria.
"That is going to be useful!" He says while laughing like a child who found a new toy.
"Now that you have a new toy, you stop worrying, big boy?" Gloria asks with an eyebrow raised.
He scuffs at her and puts his hands behind his head as he controls the car through his cyberdeck.
The car zaps through the traffic, answering flawlessly to any of the commands he sends via his new implant.
The neon lights of the buildings are reflected on the car's paint.
Gloria looks outside of the window, thinking about what could be the file she stole from Psysoft Corp.
"Nothing can stop me from opening it now…" She thinks to herself.
After a few minutes' drive, Pulse gets the car to stop in the parking lot of the small electronics shop changed into their new HQ.
They both get out and are greeted by a few of their crew members waiting outside of the shop.
They shake hands and exchange a few words before going inside.
The place has changed a bit, all the tables with machines were put on one side of the shop, while the other side was now a fully equipped small bar with high tables and stools.
Pulse starts showing off his new implant to others who gather around him.
Gloria keeps walking to one of the desks and starts the screen on it.
She ignores the others and focuses all her attention on the two shards she puts on the desk.
There's the cryptic shard and the shard containing the encrypted file.
She inserts the encrypted shard into the holoscreen in front of her and plugs her cyberdeck to it.
The connection is flawless, she gets a virtual representation of the file displayed on her visual implants.
She barely can hear the others laughing and playing in the background as her attention is completely on the file.
She gets a way better understanding of it now thanks to the military grade cyberdeck.
There are 3 encrypted locks on the file that need to be cracked in order to access the content.
She slots the cryptic shard behind her ear, straight into the cyberdeck's slots.
When she opens the cryptic shard, she can see that her computational power instantly increases, allowing her to run more decryption at once.
Without thinking twice, she starts attacking the first lock in order to decrypt it, this time several progress bars appear and run at the same time.
One of the progress bars changes colors and starts blinking in green. She quickly closes all the other processes and is in shock to see the message "key decrypted" blinking in green.
"I got the first one!" She shouts through the shop.
Everybody stops what they are doing and gathers around her desk.
"How many do you need to crack?" Pulse asks with excitement in his voice.
"Two more to go, jack in, I need the power of your deck." She orders Pulse.
Pulse pulls the cable from behind his ear and Jack's into the screen, his vision is automatically peered with Gloria's.
She gets access to the extra power from Pulse's new implant and she launches the decryption on the last two keys.
Several progression bars appear indicating that the last two keys are being decrypted.
Pulse starts feeling nauseous and holds the desk in front of him in order to prevent himself from falling.
One more key blinks green and is decrypted.
Two guys from the crew grab Pulse's arms from each side to stabilize him.
The last progression bars run wild as Gloria is pushing more power into the last decryption.
Suddenly the last key gets decrypted with the similar green message blinking on the screen.
Everybody is staring at the screen in awe, the file is finally accessible by Gloria.
Pulse recovers his breath and feels a bit better as the power of his cyberdeck slowly refills itself.
Gloria hesitates before opening the folder that was encrypted, getting a very strange mix of feelings of unease and excitement.
Curiosity takes the best of her and she opens it.
She starts browsing several files that seem to contain codes and extremely complex algorithms she doesn't understand.
"What the hell is that…" She mutters as she keeps browsing.
The whole crew stares at the screen in awe, trying to make sense of the files she uncovers little by little.
"There's something weird…" Pulse says as he monitors the size of the entire folder.
"It keeps growing in size… As If it is creating more files in the folder…" He continues.
Gloria stops browsing and checks the size of the folder as it keeps growing and takes more and more space on the shard.
Very fast the folder uses the whole space of the shard, making it impossible for it to grow bigger.
"It stopped…" Pulse says with stutters in his voice.
Gloria suddenly notices that it duplicated itself inside the storage of the holoscreen.
"No… It keeps spreading… Pulse! Unslot yourself!" She shouts in panic.
Both of them unplug from the screen and lose the representation on their optic implants.
They stare at the screen as a shape is slowly forming on it.
It's very simplistic but everybody can see clearly that it looks like a face with eyes staring back at them.
A screeching noise comes out of all the speakers of the room and the face seems to become distorted.
Everybody covers their ears in pain as the noise is very piercing and uncomfortable.
Suddenly everything goes dark and the noise stops.
Nobody dares to say anything and the whole crew just stares at each other waiting for somebody to say something.
"What the hell is on that shard…" Gloria breaks the silence as she pulls out the shard from the screen slot.
In the same movement she releases it on the table.
An irrational thought invades her, making her think that this thing might find a way to jump inside her without being slotted.
She shakes her head, trying to bring back rational thoughts in her head.
"Pulse… We need to bring the power back on…" She says to him.
Pulse goes to the generator and restarts it, bringing back the power in the building.
Gloria hesitantly turns the holoscreen back on.
At first glance everything looks normal, she uses motions on the screen to browse its files instead of directly wiring her cyberdeck to interface with it.
"There's no traces of these files anymore…" She says in shock while frantically browsing the screen's internal storage.
"Did I hallucinate? Did you guys see it?" She asks everybody.
Everybody nods, confirming they all saw the same thing.
They all start checking the other screens and everything connected to the building network.
The next hours are spent on a wild hunt to track if anything has spread anywhere.
Nothing is found.
Slowly they all get down from their high and start to settle down again, wondering if it was a sort of collective hallucination.
There was no real resting that night, just strange mixes of weird feelings that they had unknowingly unleashed something they didn't understand.
Gloria starts to wonder if she actually didn't go too far this time.
She settles down on one of the sofas, exhausted and confused.
She slowly closes her eyes and tries to calm her mind. Eventually, sleep catches up with her.
She hears a name being called in her dreams.
"Syntex… "