Chapter 331: (BEHOLD!) (1/2)
Herod's body was leaning back in the chair, hands in his lap, feet up on the console, his eyes closed.
His mind was in an eVR space.
Sam stood by the scrolling lines of code, staring at them. Herod stood next to him, feeling a slight bit of relief at being back in the digital realm where he belonged.
you're a real boy now... floated up in his mind and he shivered.
Sam looked at him out of the corner of his eye. ”You all right?”
”Yeah. Just... her, you know,” Herod said.
Sam nodded. ”Yeah, I get it,” he turned back to the code. ”Part of me feels that the next person near me who wonders aloud how Terrans ever got anywhere since they're all so silly and all so nice is going to get slapped so hard that it'll scramble their SIN.”
Herod snickered. ”It's that old meme of the drunk guy eating jam.”
”Behold! Humanity!” Sam laughed. He leaned his head against the code for a long moment, his laughs moving to sobs. Herod patted his back, letting him get it all out. Then he looked up. ”All right, the time dilation is accounted for now. Temporal stabilizers are running at 19% load and optimum performance. Phasic buffers and cross loading systems are online and running at 8% load.”
Sam stepped back. ”OK, this should work.”
”Why can't you just message them through the SolNet connections,” Herod asked.
”And say what?” Sam said. He laughed. ”Dear Sir and/or Ma'am, I, someone you have never heard of but should totally trust, have a complex template and scientific system that I want you to use without spending the next three years trying to understand it. Signed: Not a hacker.”
”OK, yeah,” Herod said, smiling. It felt good.
The stars knew there hadn't been much to smile over for what felt like eternity.
”Funny thing is, I had people actually give me their login and password by signing it SolNet Security more times than you'd believe,” Sam said. He snickered. ”You wouldn't believe how dumb some passwords are.”
Herod frowned and Sam laughed.
”The top five passwords have always been: 12345678, the reverse of that, QWERTY123, ABCDefg123, password,” he laughed. ”If not that, then like their last name with their birthdate, creche number. Always so simple I could scrape their password eight times out of ten with a simple social media snuffleupagus.”
Herod wanted to blush. He'd used Herod228ab582 on over half his signins, including his bank account.
”There's a lot of language filters, and nobody has used this system in, well, forever,” Sam said, reaching out and tapping the code, bringing systems online. ”I've identified who I need to talk to. I'll use a basic avatar and the speech translation system so I don't have a problem with the time dilation.”
Herod snapped his fingers, summoning up a chair and a glass of whiskey. ”All right,” he said.
”Let's do this,” Sam said, and plunged his hand into the code.
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Four Cluster General Imak ”Tik Tak” Takilikakik looked at the numbers on his computer display and sighed in a combination frustration, exhaustion, and depression.
No matter they tried, no matter how many specialists they brought in, the numbers refused to change. They even refused to slow down.
Nearly twenty-five percent of the Lanaktallan EPOW's had died of severe neural scorching.