Layme awoke in the morning feeling oddly disoriented. The first thing she was aware of, before her eyes were even open, was that Milo wasn't next to her, and as far as her other senses had been able to tell in the fifteen seconds they had been awake, he wasn't anywhere else in the room either. Her eyes felt heavy and grainy with exhaustion without even being opened, and for a minute she thought maybe she had drunk too much Hype the night before and simply didn't remember what had happened. Then the pieces of memory fell into place, and her stomach did a slow, sickening flip that caused her heart to pick up its pace almost erratically.
Left, she thought groggily. I left Milo's last night and I came here. We were fighting and I told him I'd stop programming, and that made me feel like trag, and so I left.
The next thing she did was sit up—too quickly; her head spun for a moment from lack of blood—and open her drive on her wall screen. Her stomach gave another lurch as she saw the notifications in the corner—five unread blips. She opened her inbox carefully, as if she were afraid of it coming off the screen and attacking her, and her heart sank to join her stomach when she affirmed her fears. All of them were from Milo.
Feeling caught somewhere between wanting to cry and wanting to be sick, she opened the one that had come in first. It was a simple text blip. Hey Lay, you probably got called down by Zink & them. I'll come down to find you guys. Maybe I'll even bring breakfast! Love --Milo
The next one was also just text, sent about twenty minutes after the first. Hey babe, where are you?I went down to the usual spot & neither of you are there. Let me know! I've got some Mellow Reds to start the morning out right when you're done! --M
The third blip was an audio, and Milo sounded confused. “Hey Lay, I have no idea where you are right now, which is... weird... Yeah... Anyway, I blipped Zink because he wasn't online, and he hasn't gotten back to me either, so I figure you guys are either working on some of the touchpad stuff or just ignoring messages. Get in touch, yeah? Talk to you soon, bye.”
Ten minutes or so after that, a second audio blip had come in. She opened it with trepidation, wondering if it was possible for her to feel worse than she already did. “Zink just got back to me,” Milo said. “He says he hasn't heard from you today and he didn't call you this morning, which I guess isn't news to you, but... I kind of have no idea where you are, so... get back to me, alright?” He still sounded confused, but Layme heard the tiniest thread of anger—or frustration, maybe anger was too harsh—showing through his words. Swallowing against the lump in her throat, she opened the last blip, a video sent only five minutes before she woke up.
Milo sat in his room, and he looked hurt as well as bewildered. “Layme,” he said, and she had to bite her lip against the tears that threatened at the sound of the hurt in his voice. “I have no idea what I did, alright? I know that doesn't mean I didn't jag something up. I know that. But I don't know what it was, okay? And I can't fix it if you don't talk to me. Maybe I'm overreacting and you just, I don't know, you're just in a call with Tessa or something, but I think I must have jagged up somehow, and I want to fix it, okay? Come talk to me. If I'm not there, call me, and I'll find you.” He paused then for a second, took a deep breath, and said, “I love you, Lay. See you soon, I hope.”
The feed cut then.
Layme became aware that she was shaking, as if she had just stepped naked out of cold water. She was practically hugging herself to try and stop it, each of her elbows in the opposite hand's grasp. Her breath was coming in irregular gasps, some of them somehow managing not to bring in any air whatsoever, and tears were flowing rather freely down her face. Whatever impulse or emotion had driven her to leave Milo's the night before, she had already forgotten it. Sure, she remembered him asking her to stop programming, and she remembered that she had agreed without having any intention of stopping, but what did any of that matter compared to this? To how much it hurt to have him separate from her? Upset because of her? She took small, gasping breaths as she unlocked her arms from each other. She was shaking even harder when she did, and it took her an obscenely long amount of time to unbutton a pair of denims so she could put them on. Her fingers didn't seem to want to work. When she had pulled them on, she started out the door, still trying to catch her breath. She was sure she was getting weird looks from anyone she passed in the hall and on the staircase, but she was only vaguely aware of any other people she might have passed, anyway. When she got to Milo's door, she knocked on it and stood there uncertainly, still shaking, hoping he wasn't too mad at her, and he would actually open it and let her in. When he did a few seconds later, the thin layer of composure she had managed to gather shattered completely, and she dissolved into tears again.
“Milo, I'm s-s-sorry,” she managed, and when she made no move towards him, he seemed to see that she wasn't going to, and he stepped forward into the doorway to hug her. Her arms were pinned to his chest, her hands over her face, and she didn't mind at all. She just stood there, sobbing, his arms around her until whatever had broken inside her had run out. She swallowed a few times, still shaking, and then stepped back, away from Milo. He let her go, but when she finally raised her face to look at him, he seemed ready to take her back into another hug at any moment.
“I'm sorry,” she said again, just barely managing to keep the stutter out of her voice. Residual tremors slid unevenly through her limbs and down her spine.
“Stop apologizing,” Milo said gently, sounding bewildered but determined to help. “Come in and sit down and we'll talk, okay?”
Layme, who didn't trust her voice at all, and whose breaths were still occasionally coming to her with no air in them, just nodded. She followed Milo into his room, which usually felt as much like home as her own, and sat awkwardly on the corner of his bed, arms around herself again to try and calm her shaking.
“Do you want something?” Milo asked hesitantly. “A glass of water or... or something?”
Layme nodded. “Yeah. Sure. Water would... would be fine.” She forced herself to take deeper breaths, and when he returned with a bigger-sized wineglass full of water and ice, she had managed to stop shaking enough to take it without fearing it would spill. She rubbed at her eyes with the heel of her empty hand. “I m-must look like sh-sh-shit,” she stammered with a shaky laugh.
“Hey, no,” Milo scolded softly, sitting down next to her. “You look upset, not like shit. And I'm here to help. So what's on your mind?”
Layme shook her head, not in a refusal to talk, but as an indication that she didn't know where to begin. Milo must have known her well enough to recognize that, because he didn't prompt her, only waited with one hand wrapped almost protectively around her shoulder.
“I'm so sorry, Milo, I didn't mean to vanish like that, I really didn't. I was upset, and I couldn't sleep, and I don't know, going back to my room seemed like a good idea, and—” Layme felt another twinge of guilt. “—and I must have tuned off my alerts when one from Tessa woke me up last night, I wasn't ignoring you, I swear, I had no idea you were blipping me this morning.” That last part was true enough, but Layme's mind aggressively pointed out the lie to herself—she had turned off her alerts before going to sleep, fully aware that Milo would try to get in touch with her, and having no desire at that moment to speak to him.
“It's okay,” Milo assured her, causing another, smaller echo of guilt in her stomach. “I know there's a lot going on right now, with the masque and tech trag for that, and you picking classes because you're a Gen spec—”
Layme laughed a little at the oxymoron. When she had chosen to remain as a General Education student in the Specialized Education Dorm, it had become something of a joke, and, when confronted with the question of what to call her, Rye had come up with the joke term “general specialist”.
“—and I kind of forget this is your first year here. You never seem sixteen; sometimes I forget you are. Hell, I was a jagging mess at sixteen. I never slept, I switched my spec like six times before starting class and once after classes started, and I think I drank three times as much that year as I do now. I know,” he laughed, seeing the surprised expression on Layme's face. “See? I told you, I was a wreck then. There is no way you can be more of a mess than I was—trag, you're not as much of a mess as I was. So take a deep breath, okay?”
Layme nodded again, and took two deep breaths for good measure, and then, after a sip of water, another, just to make sure she wasn't going to burst into tears again.
“So,” Milo said eventually, “Do you want to talk about shit...? Or would it be beating a dead horse?”
“The second one, I think” Layme said with a hiccupy sort of giggle. Milo's odd figures of speech tended to catch her by surprise like that. “Trag. That was ridiculous. I'm so, so sorry, Milo. I swear I'm sane again now.”
“What did I say about apologizing?” he said, his voice stern but jesting. She smiled a little.
“Don't do it?”
“Bingo,” Milo agreed, and gave her a brief one-armed hug.
“Ugh,” Layme said distastefully a minute later. Having finished her ice water, she was looking at her puffy-eyed, red-faced reflection in Milo's bathroom mirror. “It's a good thing I keep makeup in your room,” she called out, “or I would end up looking worse than I do right now.” She rummaged through the little blue box he had gotten for her to keep her things in and eventually found her eyeliner and a tube of red lipstick. “I jagging hate crying,” she said, half to herself, as she outlined her eyes in dark blue. “All I want to do when I'm done with the waterworks is sleep. It's jagging stupid.”
“I've got just the thing for that!” Milo called back, and she heard the unmistakable sounds of him rummaging through his closet once again.
“You've always got 'just the thing,' Milo,” she said, laughing and finishing the last bit of lipstick on her bottom lip. She blotted a blood-red kiss onto a tissue and tossed it into the recycler, emerging back into the main room just in time to see Milo emerging from his closet with, just as she had expected, another bottle in his hand.
“What is it this time?” she asked. The bottle was silver and reflective rather than clear, leaving the contents within a mystery.
“It's Chröm,” he said, and when Layme continued to look confused, his mischievous grin lit upon his face. “Strongest energy alc you can get a hold of. A glass of this, and you'll be running until Tuesday.” Layme snorted laughter at the hyperbole; she'd had a sudden mental image of herself running along a calendar page, straight over Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, and crossing a cartoon-like finish line on the box proclaiming Tuesday. Milo mistook her amusement for skepticism.
“You think I'm kidding?” he asked, raising his trademark eyebrow, and still grinning.
“No,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I just don't know if I want to be running until Tuesday, that's all.”
“Running isn't the only thing you can do with it,” he said, and Layme caught a look in his eyes that sent a pleasant shiver down her back.
“We shag like rabbits without that trag,” she said, simultaneously trying to joke with him and weasel her way out of having to drink the Chröm. She really did want to finish her firewall, and the thought of the lull that came with a drink with so much kick was almost frightening.
“We could be like a hundred rabbits with it,” he said, laughing. “But that's not why I'm offering it. Weren't we just talking about all the shit you had to do?”
“I guess.”
“A glass or two of this, and you'll have it all done by midnight. And you think I'm joking,” Milo said, pretending to be hurt when she laughed again.
“Not joking, only making it up,” she said, smiling and shaking her head. “What makes this trag any different than your normal stuff?”
“It's not mine, that's what.”
“Oh. My sincerest apologies,” Layme said, putting on an air of mock sarcasm. “Ell's, then.”
“Wrong again!” Milo declared, coming over to sit next to her again. He held the bottle so she could see her warped reflection in its surface. “I'll give you two more guesses.”
She laughed and poked him in the side. “I have no idea,” she said. “Are you going to tell me, or drag it out until Tuesday's already here?”
“Fine, ruin my fun,” he said with an over-dramatic sigh and a roll of his eyes, making Layme laugh again. “This is probably the most unique bottle I've got, not only because of its maker, but because of how it was made.”
“And how was that?”
“With a different base,” Milo said. Layme, who didn't know as much about alc as Milo and Ell, knew enough that she looked up at Milo, surprised. He seemed pleased that he had attained the desired effect.
“But I thought all alc had the same base? That's why they don't react with each other, right?”
“Almost all alcs have the same base,” Milo corrected. “And you're right. That's why you can drink a Hype and a Smooth and have them cancel each other out instead of, oh, sending you into cardiac arrest or something. But this—” He gave the reflective bottle a little shake, and Layme heard the contents of it slosh thickly inside the curved glass walls. Unlike most of Milo's bottles, it seemed to be almost entirely full. “—this wonderful creature has a different base. Drinking this with anything else would be a huge risk. In fact, no one I know has ever mixed bases. Terrible idea. Not to mention the fact that working with the base the Chröm is made of is a jag of a lot harder than the normal one. Chemical reactions and explosions up the wall.”
“So who made this, then?” Layme asked, genuinely interested now. In a Dorm full of people with above-average intelligence, there was not much that a Dragon could do to impress his fellow Dragons. Amuse, maybe, but not impress; and Milo certainly seemed impressed.
“Zink.”
“Zink?” Layme repeated, unbelieving. Milo nodded.
“When he was sixteen, I think. Vintage, by Dragon standards. No alc lasts that long around here.”
“But I thought Zink's against drinking?” Layme said, confused.
“He is now, but when he was a newbie, he partied just as hard as the rest of us. He started sobering up right after mid-year his first year, I think. He made this not too long afterwards.”
Layme raised an eyebrow skeptically. “He made an alc after he sobered up?”
Milo only shrugged. “Apparently. But you know Zink—he's still a tweak sometimes.”
Layme laughed. Milo was right. In the weeks since she had introduced the masquerade idea to Zink, she had had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with him, sketching, planning, and adjusting details. In that time, she had come to accept the fact that Zink was just a tiny bit strange. She turned her attention back to the dully shining bottle.
“So what else is different about this stuff?” she asked.
Milo shrugged again. “No lull,” he said. He stated it like it was a drawback, but Layme's interest multiplied. It wasn't normal alc she was becoming against, just the lull that came over her afterward. If what Milo was saying was accurate, this was a blast of energy with little to no crash at the end.
“What's the catch?” she asked.
“There isn't one,” Milo said, “unless you count the fact that this is probably the only bottle of the stuff left in existence. Zink only made a few, and if he kept the formula for it, he's the only one I know of who has it.”
“And that's why you haven't brought it out to show it off before, huh?” Layme laughed.
“Hey,” Milo protested. “A guy's got to have some secrets! So, what do you think?” he asked. “Do you want some so you can finish your work, or do you want to try to do it on your own?”
Do it on my own, Layme almost said. It was the honest answer to Milo's question—she would much rather finish the things she had to do, specifically her firewall and her costume for the masquerade, by her own volition. It seemed like denying his offer, however, would be a major step backwards, especially considering that she had vanished from his radar that morning, only to show up at his door sobbing her head off.
“Sure,” Layme said with a grin that was somewhat forced. To her relief, Milo didn't seem to notice, but only returned with a grin of his own. “Hit me with a glass.”
Milo took her glass from earlier and opened the bottle. As he poured it, Layme saw that the liquid was the same dull silver as the bottle. It cast a muted gleam where the lights in Milo's room hit it.
“Are you sure it's safe?” she asked, only half joking.
“You're forgetting who made this trag,” he said, rolling his eyes. “It's Zink's, remember? I think safe is the kid's middle name.”
“Good point,” Layme agreed, but she hesitated before she took the glass. “Aren't you going to have one?” she asked him.
“I think that might end badly,” Milo said, all jokes gone from his face in an instant. “This stuff is intense. I should definitely stay off it to make sure you don't do anything... weird.”
“It's not a tripper, is it?” Layme asked, confused. Trippers, like the White Rabbits Milo was so fond of, acted as hallucinogens, and after trying one a time or two, Layme had decided they were a little bit too much for her to enjoy.
Milo shook his head. “Just intense,” he repeated. “You'll see.”
Giving the drink one last distrustful look, Layme closed her eyes and knocked it back. He's lucky I love him, she thought as it slid down her throat. The drink had a strange consistency, as if it was molten metal, but oddly chilly rather than super-heated. It slid down her throat, making everything feel chilled and somehow hyper-aware at the same time, and when it hit her stomach, she felt as if there was a fist-sized ice cube there.
“Fuck,” she said, her eyes snapping open.
“You alright?” Milo asked, concerned.
“Yeah. Jagging thing just caught me by surprise. I just—geez!” A jolt of energy had hit her, causing her to shiver. “I feel like...” She paused for a second, looking for a good way to describe the endless energy that seemed to be building up as she sat beside Milo. “Like I could run until Tuesday,” she said, laughing.
“See?” Milo said almost accusingly, but he laughed too. “I told you! Still feel like curling up in a ball and sleeping?”
“Hell no!” she shouted, and Milo laughed again.
“Think you can get everything done now?”
“For sure,” Layme said. Was she imagining it, or had her voice doubled—or was it even trebled?—with the sudden influx of energy.
“Not feeling too weird?” Milo asked, and she realized suddenly that he was more worried than he was letting on.
“What, did I grow a second head or something?” she asked, nudging him jokingly.
“No,” he said seriously, dismissing her humor with a small shake of his head. “But you're talking a trag lot faster than usual, and you haven't stopped moving since it hit.”
“Really?” Layme asked, but even as the word left her mouth, she realized he was right. Her right hand was busy twirling one of the longer strands of her hair, something she hadn't done since she was a child, and both of her knees were bouncing up and down as her heels tapped a frantic Morse code onto the stronglite tiles of the floor. “Shit,” she said, laughing. “I didn't even notice. I'm fine, though, seriously. I want to get to work!”
Finally seeming reassured, Milo shrugged one shoulder. “That's what it's for,” he agreed. “Don't let me get in your way.”
“Have you done your costume yet, Milo?” she asked suddenly, and laughed as he looked down guiltily.”Or have you been too busy mixing?”
“The Red Death held sway over all,” he muttered by way of an excuse.
“Where's that from?” Layme asked, her brow furrowed, and he shrugged.
“Picked it up from Zink, I think. He gave me the name. You know he's full of cryptic trag like that.”
“Well, the Red Death can hold as much sway over you as it wants,” Layme stated decisively, flopping back onto her companion's bed and drawing her visual feed onto her conscreens. “I'll do your costume for you! That way we can match, and you won't have any idea what I look like!”
“Won't that give you an unfair advantage?”
Layme rolled her eyes. “Right,” she said. “Like I couldn't pick you out of a crowd from a mile away anyway. You're my Milo. Now go away and let me work,” she said, blowing a joke kiss at his reddening face. She opened the designer interface she'd made for the masque, and she was almost immediately lost. Milo was right. The Chröm's effect reminded her of its heavy consistency—it rested on her mind like a paperweight to keep it focused, the same way it had sat on her tongue, half-way heavy. Its mental weight wasn't an obstruction but a tool. It kept her from getting frustrated or bored with the costumes, even though it turned out she was much more picky about them than she had expected herself to be. She changed minute details again and again—the neckline of her dress, the style of Milo's shirt, the height of her heels—and when she got to the masks, she discovered she was being even more particular. Because she had designed the mask creator herself, she knew every style and every option that could possibly be chosen, and she found herself trying almost every one of them in search of the mask that would shout its perfection to her. She was still trying to decide between four choices for herself, and she hadn't even begun to design Milo's, when he tapped her hesitantly on the shoulder.
“Layme!” he said, and the tone of his voice suggested that this was not his first try for her attention.
“Mm?” she mumbled without looking around to see him.
“Lay, you should eat. You never had breakfast, and it's practically dinner time.”
This absurd statement roused her from the Chröm's grip. “The... what?” she asked, turning around almost sluggishly to blink at her boyfriend. “No jagging way.” But she saw the way the light was angled coming though the window and checked the time on her vis feed. Five hours at least had passed since she had arrived in Milo's doorway, crying. “How did that happen? I haven't even done anything!” she protested, fighting a disorientation that was similar to vertigo.
“I told you it was a good idea for one of us to stay off it,” Milo reminded her. “Chröm is jagging intense.”
“You forgot the part where it speeds up time,” Layme said, switching off her cons and shaking her head a little, still fighting
that sense of almost-vertigo. “I still feel like I could go forever!”
“Part of that is because you haven't eaten,” Milo reminded her, handing her a wrap which she bit into eagerly, her mouth watering. She hadn't even known she was hungry before this, but know she felt famished, like she hadn't eaten in days. “Everything has stronger effect on an empty stomach.”
“Yeah,” she agreed through a mouthful of chicken and rice, “but most things don't turn you obsessive-compulsive.”
“Ah,” Milo said, as if some great mystery had been explained, but he didn't elaborate.
“'Ah'?” Layme asked, after a moment, raising a skeptical eyebrow. “What, 'ah'?”
“I thought it might do that to you.”
“It doesn't do this to everyone?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “When I took it, it was like taking an entire batch of Hype. I was physically going, and I was awake for like a week.”
“And you thought that's what it would do to me, or what?” Layme asked, confused.
“It affects everyone in their own way. That's another side-effect of the different base, and another reason those of us who have this trag don't like to just hand it out. It's like alc in the old days, pre-reform: it hits everyone differently.”
“What, like how people used to be... what was it? Angry drunks, sad drunks, that kind of thing?” Layme had heard of the concept before, especially from Ell and Milo when they talked about mixing, but she thought the idea of different kinds of being drunk had gone with the old way of making alcohol—fermenting things instead of creating them from scratch or from a base, like the Dragons usually did. Milo was nodding.
“I wasn't sure how you'd hit it, but I'm not surprised it sucked you in the way it did. You're really into projects when you start them, and Chröm doesn't change how you do things. It only gets rid of distracting thoughts so you can do them better.”
Layme finished the last of her wrap in silence, a frown of thought on her face. She wasn't sure she liked Chröm very much, but since she was already on it, it seemed like a waste not to dive back in to the masque work. Also, as Milo had been talking, she'd thought of something else—maybe the Chröm would help her finish her firewall.
“When does it wear off?” she asked distractedly.
“One glass the size you had lasts about twelve hours from what I remember,” Milo replied. Layme nodded, the gears in her brain churning already. Twelve hours meant she had somewhere from four to six good hours left of the odd paperweight effect of the drink.
“Would you be okay with me going back to my room for a while?” she asked.
“Why? Getting annoyed with me finally?” Milo asked, laughing.
“No,” Layme said rolling her eyes and smiling. “But I haven't done your mask, and I think you should do it. That way I won't have such an advantage. And if I was here while you were doing it, it'd be too much of a temptation. I don't think I could keep myself from looking!”
“Seems fair,” Milo agreed. “But if it looks horrible when I'm done, it's all your fault for abandoning me.”
“Impossible,” Layme declared grandly. “I designed the designer. Nothing that comes from it could possibly be below my expectations.”
“Touche,” Milo admitted, tipping an imaginary hat to her.
“I haven't finished my costume quite yet either,” Layme lied. “I want to get that done with.
“You sure you'll be alright being on while I'm not there?”
“Didn't I ever tell you? I'm on all the time when you're not there,” Layme joked. “White Rabbits galore.”
“Tragger,” Milo said, laughing. “Okay. I'll be here if you need me.”
Layme leaned forward and kissed his lips in answer. “Good deal,” she whispered, and she pulled away from his loose hug and slipped out the door before he'd gathered his wits. Once she was in the hallway, she practically sprinted for the stairs, and she descended them so fast she felt faintly dizzy when she reached her floor. She felt like her head would explode with ideas for her firewall—things which had seemed tricky or even close to impossible suddenly had loopholes she could work through, and she thought that if she looked at the vague idea hard enough, she'd be able to close the program and have it running tonight. Her fingers were already twitching when she scanned in to her room, and she had her vis feed on her conscreens again before her door had shut behind her. Before opening her firewall's writing window though, she set alarms to come through her sound feed every half-hour. Losing time the way she had before scared her, and she was sure she'd be even more freaked out about the lost hours once she was off the Chröm. At least she knew she'd been on Milo's bed the whole time and not down in the main room or something. That was a larger comfort than it should have been, and she felt a sort of pang of self-criticism that reminded her of the bitter thoughts that had spoken up when Milo was in the med wing.
You just lost an entire day without knowing it, and you're comforting yourself with at least I was in my boyfriend's room so I know I didn't do something stupid? Is this for real?
Layme pushed the sarcastic, bitter voice away again and found it was incredibly easy. She didn't want to listen to her own thoughts when they were unbidden and almost angry. She did want to slide into the Chröm again and finish her firewall. Therefore, when she made the choice, it was easy to block out the unwanted thoughts, much easier than it would have been without the metal weight of Zink's drink. She directed her focus easily to the raw parameters and codes that spelled out the anatomy of her firewall program, easily the most complicated thing she'd ever attempted.
The program was constructed so that it would function almost as a mirror-hack to her drive's normal system programming. Everything the soft drive did, the program noticed and mirrored in such a way that the drive did not detect it, and was not interfered with. By running in tandem with the drive, the firewall was able to record all the interactions—incoming and outgoing—her soft drive had. As a separate part of the program, Layme had set up a security trap of sorts, similar to the useless “packaging” she added to Tessa's drive crawler. If the trap was activated by one of her soft drive's interactions, the person or program that had activated it would be virtually assaulted with with a self-perpetuating loop of over-ride code. Once in motion, any activities the enemy drive attempted would be blocked until the offending program was not only shut down, but deleted entirely. While the person on the other end was fighting off the impending drive-crash, a termite piggy-back would be sent, theoretically hidden by the over-ride spam, to find the source of the program that had triggered the trap-hack. In plain English, it would give her the name of the person who had sent the program that triggered her trap. Layme was immensely satisfied with the firewall thus far, assured by some tests she'd run with the help of Tessa and another cousin, Ean. At this point, all she had to do was find a way to make lighting-storm the trigger of the trap-hack. That was proving to be problematic.
She stood at a metaphorical impasse with a loop-hole in the logic of her own technology. The easiest way to set lighting-storm as the trigger would be to plug in its call number, but if she had had its call, she would know where it was coming from, which she obviously didn't. So Layme was forced to try and plug in the right parameters and hope they didn't accidentally trap some monotonous drive function and screw everything up.
As she studied the code she had set for herself under the gleam effect of the Chrom, she saw something that might be able to help her. The way she would set the trap to a specific call number was to tell the program to spring on whatever interaction was using that number as its source card. Lightning-storm's source had been hidden. If she could set her trap-hack to attack anything that had its source card displayed as nothing, it would be able to grab lightning-storm if it came back, and capture any other program with a hidden source.
Finding the line she wanted, Layme tapped in trigger if interacting = incoming > call ident display = 000000.000000 or call ident display = void.
She read the last section over twice, hoping she hadn't missed something critical, then saved the final draft of the firewall. She only sat there for a moment, wondering whether or not to run it. If she had done something wrong, it was possible her drive would detect a black hole—an error which was similar to looking at a reflection of a reflection of a reflection, ad infinitum—and which would cause her system to go into security mode, something which would lock her out and then wipe her drive to prevent accidental or intentional spread of whatever had caused the black hole in the first place. Layme didn't see any particular reason why running the firewall with the armed trap-hack would create a hole, but the blank-call trigger was strange. It was possible—not probable, certainly, but possible—that her trap would attack everything, or her drive would somehow recognize the blank call as definitively nothing, or as an enemy, and collapse. After all, nothing had a blank call number. Even Government interactions had calls: 6771, followed by whatever branch the interaction was coming from.
Strangely enough, it was Zink's voice in her head that made her decision.
You'll never know unless you try, Layme,it said, something which had become a near-constant refrain of his during the past few weeks. Without it, the masque would never have even begun. Drawing in a breath that she held, Layme closed the writing window and hit run.
There was no turning back now.
<< Part One, Post 7
