Cyber Courtship
The neural jack hissed as Seraphina plugged into Evander's private satellite array. Her makeshift hacking rig—a Frankenstein mix of stolen Eclipse tech and a retrofitted espresso machine—hummed with stolen electricity. On the cracked holoscreen, his brain activity flickered like a deranged firefly colony.
Perfect. She cracked her knuckles, neon nail polish glowing in the dark. "Time to give Mr. Roboto a system update."
Evander's morning began with digital sheep.
He was reviewing quarterly reports in his cortical suite when his ocular implants glitched. The holographic pie charts dissolved into pixelated wool. A flock of neon sheep materialized, their bellies glowing with QR codes.
"What the—"
The lead sheep winked. Its hooves clacked against the virtual conference table as it shimmied into a belly dance, holographic coins jingling around its neck. The rest followed suit, forming a conga line that crashed through firewall projections.
"Security breach in neural layer seven!" his AI warned.
Evander's fingers flew across phantom keyboards. "Trace the malware's—"
A sheep headbutted his code firewall. The collision spawned glitter explosions that reprogrammed his calendar alerts into mooing notifications.
Subject: Urgent Meeting
Baa-ment: 2PM @ Virtual Pasture
"Seraphina," he growled, recognizing the malware's chaotic signature.
Her laughter erupted from the sheep's mouths in surround sound. "Miss me, lab coat?"
Seraphina watched through hijacked drones as Evander's skyscraper went haywire. Elevators played disco tracks, smart glass windows displayed anime fan art, and the cafeteria vending machines dispensed nothing but hot sauce packets.
"Emotional suppression my ass," she muttered, sipping battery acid coffee.
Her rig pinged—Evander had isolated the sheep virus in a quantum sandbox. She leaned forward. "Oh, you wanna play debugger?"
Evander's cortical suite became a warzone.
He'd stripped the malware's outer layers, revealing code written in emojis and jazz notation. The sheep now tap-danced across his visual cortex, their wool encoding fractal insults.
BLEAT THIS, CONTROL FREAK
His retinal display flashed red. "Virus mutating into Class-5 cognitive hazard."
"Tut-tut." Seraphina's voice oozed through his auditory processors. "Wouldn't want your precious stock price to crash because the big bad CEO got cyber-sheeped."
Evander's jaw tightened. He initiated Protocol Obsidian—a neural purge so brutal it left most hackers drooling vegetables.
The sheep exploded into static… then reformed as a single holographic Seraphina avatar.
"Rude." She pouted, pixelated hands on holographic hips. "Don't you like my gifts?"
His neural interface spiked. Heart rate elevated. Pupil dilation inconsistent with threat assessment.
"This ends now." He launched countermalware shaped like wolf code.
Seraphina's avatar dissolved laughing. "Wrong fairytale, wolfboy!"
The real attack began at noon.
Evander's corporate keynote stream went live to 20 million viewers. As he began speaking about "emotional optimization," his augmented reality teleprompter glitched.
Cue dance sequence.
His ocular implants flooded with Kpop choreography diagrams. Muscle memory overrides hijacked his motor cortex.
"What are you—"
The world watched Eclipse's stone-faced CEO suddenly shimmy.
Evander Blackthorn, in $10,000 bespoke suit, executed perfect girl group moves. His usually precise hands formed finger hearts. His polished Oxford shoes hit every beat to "Bubblegum Cyberlove."
Chat exploded:
IS THIS A HOLOGRAPHIC AD??
CEO-NIM SLAYING
MY STOCK PORTFOLIO IS CONFUSED BUT HORNY
Seraphina nearly short-circuited her rig laughing. "Payback's a bitch in platform boots!"
Backstage, Evander's crisis team had collective aneurysms.
"Kill the stream!"
"He's got killswitch implants! Why isn't he—"
Because Evander was calculating.
Between forced high kicks, he reverse-engineered the virus's pleasure-pain algorithm. Seraphina had keyed it to emotional suppression tech—the more he resisted, the harder the malware pushed.
Clever witch.
He made a decision that would haunt him through shareholder meetings.
Seraphina's laughter died when Evander's dancing shifted.
The robotic precision melted into something dangerously fluid. His tie became a prop, whipping through air as he hit a move so lethally accurate it crashed three fan forum servers.
"No way he's improvising…"
Her rig alerted—Evander had weaponized her own code. The dance became a counterattack, each hip thrust overloading her servers with recursive logic bombs.
"Oh shit."
She scrambled to unplug, but Evander's synthesized voice boomed through every speaker in the city:
"Enjoying the show, little hacker?"
The Kpop track morphed into a data waltz. Seraphina's screens filled with his face, sweat gliding down his neck as he spun through a pirouette that mathematically proved her firewalls' futility.
"Satisfied?" He blew a mocking kiss to hidden cameras. "Now delete the code."
In the aftermath:
Eclipse stock rose 300% from "viral marketing"
Fan edits of Evander's dance hit 1B views
Seraphina's hideout became a shrine of rage-scribbled equations
But in encrypted channels, they exchanged new malware like love letters—she sent a virus that made his self-driving car sing showtunes, he retaliated with smart toilets that displayed her face every flush.
The war had become a courtship.
The world just didn't know it yet.