08-24-2015, 11:38 AM
Part 2
2015 May
Los Angeles, CA
This was not supposed to be a complicated hack.
Of course there were risks. There were always going to be risks. They had sat down all five of them and talked about the risks of even initiating this project and they had fought because of course they had fought. Perez and Amanita wanted to take the quickest cleanest route and Richardson didn't care how much of a mess they made because the program she was working on would clean up after itself and Lakhani hated messes period. He didn't see the point in sneaking around.
Kayf liked the fact that Lakhani had his moments of boldness. But Kayf would have burned down the whole building if that were the most elegant way of solving the problem.
They had stayed up late the night before all five of them and then they had agreed and then Kayf had taken Richardson and Perez off to initiate the first stage of the hack and left Amanita and Lakhani behind to lay the groundwork for the third stage and that was all well and good. This wasn't total upheaval of western capitalism. This was cooperation with local Technocracy to investigate a corporation that may or may not have Qlippothic influence behind it. The enemy of my enemy is my enemy. That sort of cooperation.
One minute Amanita and Lakhani were typing away at their separate keyboards. Amanita was listening to music while she Worked. It helped her focus. Her code helped them to control probability and affect predictable patterns. Thirty seconds after she executed Lakhani was supposed to come in behind her and take out the building's backup generator.
Sure it was vulgar but reality was vulgar sometimes. Faulty wires or electricity just doing whatever the fuck it wanted. Man failing at constraining nature. Within the confines of their sanctum it was coincidental code but Lakhani still fucked it up somehow. It happens.
But this was not supposed to be a complicated hack.
---
"The lights are still on," Perez said. Dry tone.
Everything about Perez was dry. Sarcasm the forefront of his wit and they wrote it off as being a product of his environment. The guy had been writing science-fiction stories since he was a teenager was now living a very successful double life as the author of a series about the world's first gay cyberpunk superhero and he had an outline due in a few hours but Time wasn't a variable to which Perez often held himself captive.
Tonight was one of the rare occasions in which time was a factor. They were fifty miles from their base of operations in a used van for which Kayf had paid with cash. Distance meant nothing. Not to them.
The lights were still on though. That meant the backup generator was still on. Might mean the main generator hadn't gone offline yet either. They had seen a flicker a few moments ago but that could either mean nothing or it could mean someone had fucked up.
"No shit, Sherlock," said Richardson.
Richardson was seventeen years old. Kayf had picked her up in Seoul a few months before he relocated to Cairo. The rest of them had a bet going that he had tapped her for Awakening or that she was his daughter but they weren't invested enough in the bet to actually investigate it. Already she had a tight grasp on space and minor forces. She was interested in simple patterns and physical transformation.
"The lights were supposed to go off thirty seconds ago."
"They're gonna go off. Calm your tits."
"I don't have tits, kid, and we're gonna have to get out of the car if the lights don't go off. I don't want to get out of the car. The whole point of Lakhani turning off the generator from base was so we wouldn't have to get out of the car and do it ourselves."
"What is this 'getting out of the car' shit? We don't gotta get out of the car, we can--"
"That's enough," Kayf said from his place in the back of the van. His voice like a bear rousing from slumber. Calm but powerful. He removed his headset and tapped a few keys. "We're switching to Plan B."
"What?" Perez said. "Why?"
"Does it matter why?" Richardson asked.
Perez turned around in the driver's seat. "What happened?"
"Lakhani's offline," said Kayf. "We have to go on without him."
"Fuck's that mean?" Kayf said nothing. Richardson pursed her lips and climbed out of the passenger seat to join him in the back of the van. "No, seriously, what the fuck does that mean? What'd he do, quit?"
"Christ on a fucking cracker, dude," Richardson said, "it means he got 'doxed."
---
"Sam!"
Amanita wasn't having any luck getting him to open the door. She had looked up from her console when he shouted thinking he had shocked himself. He had shocked himself. It was the backlash of a botched program though and not static electricity. The force of it had knocked him out of his chair. By the time she had realized what was going on and stood from her own seat he had found his feet and locked himself in the bathroom.
Knocking wasn't doing any good. She knocked anyway.
"Sam, open the door, I can't help you if you won't open the door."
Bullshit. They both knew it was bullshit. She could scan him for injury and assess his mental status with a few keystrokes but Amanita believed in consent and so long as she could get him to open the door himself she didn't have to do it for him.
Nothing. He was talking to someone but it wasn't her. A chill ran up through her spine and the hairs on her arms stood up. They all knew Lakhani had obsessive-compulsive disorder and they all knew it made him act a little nutty sometimes but it didn't make him hallucinate. It sure as shit didn't make him argue with things she couldn't hear in the bathroom.
In the months that followed she would have a difficult time forgetting what she had overheard from her side of the door. Even after things went bad and they lost Perez. Amanita had always known Perez would be the first to go. Perez knew it too. Hard to fight a portend once you're aware of it.
Lakhani didn't open the door so Amanita rushed back into the office and bent over her console to type a message to Kayf.
> WE LOST LAKHANI. DOX.
> HOW BAD
> IDK. BAD.
> QUIET?
> HE'S IN THE BATHROOM TALKING TO HIMSELF
> VIOLENT?
> IDK. I DON'T THINK SO. DOOR'S LOCKED.
> OK. WE'RE GOING TO BE A WHILE.
> I'M SORRY, K.
> SHIT HAPPENS. BACK ASAP. I'LL TAKE CARE OF HIM WHEN I GET THERE. DO NOT LET HIM LEAVE.
> OK
---
and he heard amanita on the other side of the door heard her pounding and calling for him but the walls were bleeding and they were bleeding because of him and if he opened the doors the techs were going to come bursting in
and this was a setup of course it was a setup they should have listened to perez he hadn't wanted to cooperate with the techs they never should have taken that sit-down with them in the first place
and every time he opened his eyes the walls glitched like a television eating static and out of the static he heard the cosmos screaming he looked down and he saw the blood on his hands this was his fault he should have killed perez while he had the chance
---
"SHUT THE FUCK UP!"
Amanita pushed away the keyboard and reached into the top drawer to find a paperclip. She could have cracked open the door with a computer program but there wasn't any point to it. It was such a simple lock it wasn't even worth the effort to find her lock-picking purse. She rushed back over to the door and dropped into a crouch and said a silent prayer to a chorus of deaf entities that they didn't have any windows in the bathroom on the ground floor.
"Sam?" she said. "I'm coming in. Okay? You're gonna be okay."
The water was running. She wasn't sure if that was a good sign or a bad sign. The water was running and she could hear him muttering to himself and the paperclip put up no resistance as she unfolded it and introduced the two ends to the inside of the doorknob. Small pop and the lock disengaged. Small click and the paperclip hit the floor. Amanita opened the door.
It hadn't taken long but he was using a nailbrush to scrub at his hands and he had pushed back the cuticles of his right and blood was coiling pink down the drain. Amanita tried to grab the brush away from him but Lakhani jerked away from her.
"Holy shit. Sam, stop, you're bleeding!"
What happened next happened because of adrenaline. He kept scrubbing at his hands which were clean and blood was running down his face the backlash gotten to him before the Quiet did and she saw nothing in his eyes that would tell her he was even hearing her. Amanita forgave him and then she grabbed hold of his thin wrists and wrenched them apart. Pressed down on the tendons so he would drop the brush and when he flailed against her she kicked out a knee and took them both down to the floor.
Lakhani never was the strongest member of the group. He wouldn't even go outside to jog around the block and he didn't trust the gym because of all the germs. Amanita sat behind him on the floor and held him and though he tried to resist her she did not have to lock his limbs to hold him. She knew he didn't like people touching him. Right then she didn't care.
"Sam, it's Nita. You're safe. Nothing's gonna happen to us, okay, you're not gonna hurt anyone, you're just having a bad trip. Fuck them. They don't know shit. Listen to my voice, don't listen to them."
That was how Kayf and the others found them when they returned to base hours later having completed Plan B. Lakhani fog-eyed and bloody-nosed on the bathroom floor Amanita behind him stroking his hair and singing to him her strong voice going hoarse for how long she had been singing to him and when they both looked up out of the dark Perez was the first to decide he could not handle what he saw and to step out of the doorway.
"Lakhani," Kayf said. "Can you hear me?" Nothing. "If you can hear me, say 'Yes, Kayf.'"
"... yes, Kayf."
"Say 'I'm gonna be okay, Kayf.'"
"... I'm gonna be okay, Kayf."
"Could be worse." Lakhani closed his eyes. Richardson met Amanita's. Amanita kept humming. She didn't know what else to do. "Could be a mindscape."
"Can you fix him?" Richardson asked.
"Nothing wrong with him. Nothing we can do for it, either, unless you know anyone who can nullify paradox."
There was a small group of Celestial Choristers out in East Los Angeles who had their own Node and a larger Chantry run by the Order of Hermes. Either one of them might have had a Master of Prime among their lot but Kayf wasn't about to ask any of them for help.
So he didn't. They waited it out. Ten days of moving on while the younger reality hacker swung between drugged unconsciousness and wild-eyed raving. Most days he could convince himself the things he heard and saw and thought weren't real but some days he couldn't. Those were the worst days. Amanita loathe to leave his side. Richardson and Perez ready to leave him altogether. Kayf had a plan and it didn't involve dead weight but Kayf had never left anyone behind and he wasn't about to start now.
On the tenth day Lakhani came out of Quiet. They went ahead with the third phase of the plan.
On the eleventh day Lakhani went back to the apartment he rented in Elysian Valley. Frogtown. He thought he would be alone but he walked up the steps and unlocked the door and there was Amanita standing in the middle of the room arms crossed over her chest eyebrows raised like to ask what the hell he thought he was doing. Not sure if he was still hallucinating or not.
He doesn't like to think about that night. Neither does she. So they don't. That night ends with him alone in his apartment.
So does this one.
2015 May
Los Angeles, CA
This was not supposed to be a complicated hack.
Of course there were risks. There were always going to be risks. They had sat down all five of them and talked about the risks of even initiating this project and they had fought because of course they had fought. Perez and Amanita wanted to take the quickest cleanest route and Richardson didn't care how much of a mess they made because the program she was working on would clean up after itself and Lakhani hated messes period. He didn't see the point in sneaking around.
Kayf liked the fact that Lakhani had his moments of boldness. But Kayf would have burned down the whole building if that were the most elegant way of solving the problem.
They had stayed up late the night before all five of them and then they had agreed and then Kayf had taken Richardson and Perez off to initiate the first stage of the hack and left Amanita and Lakhani behind to lay the groundwork for the third stage and that was all well and good. This wasn't total upheaval of western capitalism. This was cooperation with local Technocracy to investigate a corporation that may or may not have Qlippothic influence behind it. The enemy of my enemy is my enemy. That sort of cooperation.
One minute Amanita and Lakhani were typing away at their separate keyboards. Amanita was listening to music while she Worked. It helped her focus. Her code helped them to control probability and affect predictable patterns. Thirty seconds after she executed Lakhani was supposed to come in behind her and take out the building's backup generator.
Sure it was vulgar but reality was vulgar sometimes. Faulty wires or electricity just doing whatever the fuck it wanted. Man failing at constraining nature. Within the confines of their sanctum it was coincidental code but Lakhani still fucked it up somehow. It happens.
But this was not supposed to be a complicated hack.
---
"The lights are still on," Perez said. Dry tone.
Everything about Perez was dry. Sarcasm the forefront of his wit and they wrote it off as being a product of his environment. The guy had been writing science-fiction stories since he was a teenager was now living a very successful double life as the author of a series about the world's first gay cyberpunk superhero and he had an outline due in a few hours but Time wasn't a variable to which Perez often held himself captive.
Tonight was one of the rare occasions in which time was a factor. They were fifty miles from their base of operations in a used van for which Kayf had paid with cash. Distance meant nothing. Not to them.
The lights were still on though. That meant the backup generator was still on. Might mean the main generator hadn't gone offline yet either. They had seen a flicker a few moments ago but that could either mean nothing or it could mean someone had fucked up.
"No shit, Sherlock," said Richardson.
Richardson was seventeen years old. Kayf had picked her up in Seoul a few months before he relocated to Cairo. The rest of them had a bet going that he had tapped her for Awakening or that she was his daughter but they weren't invested enough in the bet to actually investigate it. Already she had a tight grasp on space and minor forces. She was interested in simple patterns and physical transformation.
"The lights were supposed to go off thirty seconds ago."
"They're gonna go off. Calm your tits."
"I don't have tits, kid, and we're gonna have to get out of the car if the lights don't go off. I don't want to get out of the car. The whole point of Lakhani turning off the generator from base was so we wouldn't have to get out of the car and do it ourselves."
"What is this 'getting out of the car' shit? We don't gotta get out of the car, we can--"
"That's enough," Kayf said from his place in the back of the van. His voice like a bear rousing from slumber. Calm but powerful. He removed his headset and tapped a few keys. "We're switching to Plan B."
"What?" Perez said. "Why?"
"Does it matter why?" Richardson asked.
Perez turned around in the driver's seat. "What happened?"
"Lakhani's offline," said Kayf. "We have to go on without him."
"Fuck's that mean?" Kayf said nothing. Richardson pursed her lips and climbed out of the passenger seat to join him in the back of the van. "No, seriously, what the fuck does that mean? What'd he do, quit?"
"Christ on a fucking cracker, dude," Richardson said, "it means he got 'doxed."
---
"Sam!"
Amanita wasn't having any luck getting him to open the door. She had looked up from her console when he shouted thinking he had shocked himself. He had shocked himself. It was the backlash of a botched program though and not static electricity. The force of it had knocked him out of his chair. By the time she had realized what was going on and stood from her own seat he had found his feet and locked himself in the bathroom.
Knocking wasn't doing any good. She knocked anyway.
"Sam, open the door, I can't help you if you won't open the door."
Bullshit. They both knew it was bullshit. She could scan him for injury and assess his mental status with a few keystrokes but Amanita believed in consent and so long as she could get him to open the door himself she didn't have to do it for him.
Nothing. He was talking to someone but it wasn't her. A chill ran up through her spine and the hairs on her arms stood up. They all knew Lakhani had obsessive-compulsive disorder and they all knew it made him act a little nutty sometimes but it didn't make him hallucinate. It sure as shit didn't make him argue with things she couldn't hear in the bathroom.
In the months that followed she would have a difficult time forgetting what she had overheard from her side of the door. Even after things went bad and they lost Perez. Amanita had always known Perez would be the first to go. Perez knew it too. Hard to fight a portend once you're aware of it.
Lakhani didn't open the door so Amanita rushed back into the office and bent over her console to type a message to Kayf.
> WE LOST LAKHANI. DOX.
> HOW BAD
> IDK. BAD.
> QUIET?
> HE'S IN THE BATHROOM TALKING TO HIMSELF
> VIOLENT?
> IDK. I DON'T THINK SO. DOOR'S LOCKED.
> OK. WE'RE GOING TO BE A WHILE.
> I'M SORRY, K.
> SHIT HAPPENS. BACK ASAP. I'LL TAKE CARE OF HIM WHEN I GET THERE. DO NOT LET HIM LEAVE.
> OK
---
and he heard amanita on the other side of the door heard her pounding and calling for him but the walls were bleeding and they were bleeding because of him and if he opened the doors the techs were going to come bursting in
and this was a setup of course it was a setup they should have listened to perez he hadn't wanted to cooperate with the techs they never should have taken that sit-down with them in the first place
and every time he opened his eyes the walls glitched like a television eating static and out of the static he heard the cosmos screaming he looked down and he saw the blood on his hands this was his fault he should have killed perez while he had the chance
---
"SHUT THE FUCK UP!"
Amanita pushed away the keyboard and reached into the top drawer to find a paperclip. She could have cracked open the door with a computer program but there wasn't any point to it. It was such a simple lock it wasn't even worth the effort to find her lock-picking purse. She rushed back over to the door and dropped into a crouch and said a silent prayer to a chorus of deaf entities that they didn't have any windows in the bathroom on the ground floor.
"Sam?" she said. "I'm coming in. Okay? You're gonna be okay."
The water was running. She wasn't sure if that was a good sign or a bad sign. The water was running and she could hear him muttering to himself and the paperclip put up no resistance as she unfolded it and introduced the two ends to the inside of the doorknob. Small pop and the lock disengaged. Small click and the paperclip hit the floor. Amanita opened the door.
It hadn't taken long but he was using a nailbrush to scrub at his hands and he had pushed back the cuticles of his right and blood was coiling pink down the drain. Amanita tried to grab the brush away from him but Lakhani jerked away from her.
"Holy shit. Sam, stop, you're bleeding!"
What happened next happened because of adrenaline. He kept scrubbing at his hands which were clean and blood was running down his face the backlash gotten to him before the Quiet did and she saw nothing in his eyes that would tell her he was even hearing her. Amanita forgave him and then she grabbed hold of his thin wrists and wrenched them apart. Pressed down on the tendons so he would drop the brush and when he flailed against her she kicked out a knee and took them both down to the floor.
Lakhani never was the strongest member of the group. He wouldn't even go outside to jog around the block and he didn't trust the gym because of all the germs. Amanita sat behind him on the floor and held him and though he tried to resist her she did not have to lock his limbs to hold him. She knew he didn't like people touching him. Right then she didn't care.
"Sam, it's Nita. You're safe. Nothing's gonna happen to us, okay, you're not gonna hurt anyone, you're just having a bad trip. Fuck them. They don't know shit. Listen to my voice, don't listen to them."
That was how Kayf and the others found them when they returned to base hours later having completed Plan B. Lakhani fog-eyed and bloody-nosed on the bathroom floor Amanita behind him stroking his hair and singing to him her strong voice going hoarse for how long she had been singing to him and when they both looked up out of the dark Perez was the first to decide he could not handle what he saw and to step out of the doorway.
"Lakhani," Kayf said. "Can you hear me?" Nothing. "If you can hear me, say 'Yes, Kayf.'"
"... yes, Kayf."
"Say 'I'm gonna be okay, Kayf.'"
"... I'm gonna be okay, Kayf."
"Could be worse." Lakhani closed his eyes. Richardson met Amanita's. Amanita kept humming. She didn't know what else to do. "Could be a mindscape."
"Can you fix him?" Richardson asked.
"Nothing wrong with him. Nothing we can do for it, either, unless you know anyone who can nullify paradox."
There was a small group of Celestial Choristers out in East Los Angeles who had their own Node and a larger Chantry run by the Order of Hermes. Either one of them might have had a Master of Prime among their lot but Kayf wasn't about to ask any of them for help.
So he didn't. They waited it out. Ten days of moving on while the younger reality hacker swung between drugged unconsciousness and wild-eyed raving. Most days he could convince himself the things he heard and saw and thought weren't real but some days he couldn't. Those were the worst days. Amanita loathe to leave his side. Richardson and Perez ready to leave him altogether. Kayf had a plan and it didn't involve dead weight but Kayf had never left anyone behind and he wasn't about to start now.
On the tenth day Lakhani came out of Quiet. They went ahead with the third phase of the plan.
On the eleventh day Lakhani went back to the apartment he rented in Elysian Valley. Frogtown. He thought he would be alone but he walked up the steps and unlocked the door and there was Amanita standing in the middle of the room arms crossed over her chest eyebrows raised like to ask what the hell he thought he was doing. Not sure if he was still hallucinating or not.
He doesn't like to think about that night. Neither does she. So they don't. That night ends with him alone in his apartment.
So does this one.
Look. I have school. And RP. And all my other time is taken up by sheer, unreasoning panic. I don't have time for Reddit.
-- ixphaelaeon
-- ixphaelaeon