Glitch'd - Ch.2 - Clear Cache & Reload (Patreon)

It was only another couple seconds before I got over the shock of having my avatar forcibly changed, then I felt almost embarrassed at my reaction. 

Avjacking was such an old trick and so easily defended against that barely anyone ever bothered with it anymore. And getting turned into a little anthro foxgirl was fairly tame, compared to the sorts of things folks used to do back in the day. 

On the other hand, the fact that this hacker girl's attack blew through all my defences like they weren't even there was a lot more alarming. That and the way she so easily freed herself from my cage left me feeling more than a little uneasy.

With a thought I pulled up my HUD and sent the command to refresh my avatar. That would clear the foxgirl form from my interface and restore my normal smoke-puff shape. Or at least, that's what was supposed to happen. I got the feedback on my virtual display that the command was executed, but I still hadn't returned to my normal purple wisp. 

That wasn't a big deal, it just meant her attack was a little more thorough than the original avjack hack. I sent another command, this time to flush my interface cache completely and reload my avatar from its source file.

Things went black for a second, before my surroundings rezzed into place around me once again. Except I was still a small purple anthro foxgirl, and not a little puff of purple smoke. And that damn hacker girl was still standing in front of me, watching with a little smug smile on her face while she tapped more commands into her old-school cyberdeck.

"Ok what the hell?!" I demanded as I glared up at her. "Why can't I reload my avatar?"

I could feel my tail twitching back and forth behind me in irritation, while my ears were both angled forward towards her. It was an odd sensation, having movable ears and a tail. Not an unpleasant one though. Actually it kind of helped me understand why the triplets liked their catgirl avatars so much.

Glitch continued to smile as she replied, "You probably tried to refresh first, right? And when that didn't work you flushed the whole UI and forced a reload? The thing is cutie, this isn't just a temp overlay piggybacked onto your interface. This is your new avatar. If you check the original files this is what you'll find."

"I'm sorry your purple puffball got overwritten," she added, and she actually sounded sincere about that. "It was very well done, I've honestly never seen anything quite like it. Your own work, right?"

I felt a little lurch in my gut at the idea of my smoke puff avatar being lost. I'd put a lot of time and effort into making it, and countless more hours revising and perfecting it over the last year or so. I had an offline backup somewhere, but I hadn't kept that up to date. And the thought of having to try and remember and reproduce some unknown number of revisions and upgrades from scratch was more than a little disheartening.

On the other hand I had a much more pressing issue that was still standing there in front of me. And as much as I missed my old avatar, the fact that it was gone left me with some even more serious questions that needed answering.

I was still glaring at the green-haired girl as I shook my head and insisted, "That's not possible. I don't even know how you got an avjack through my defences, but you don't have access to the original files. And even if you could somehow find them, they're locked down. You can't even view them, never mind overwriting them."

"And why the heck did you turn me into this?!" I demanded as I gestured at myself again. "Why would you make me a fox *girl* of all things?"

The girl looked almost sympathetic as she shook her head, "Aw cutie I'm not the one who picked your new avatar. And I sure didn't use anything as simplistic as an avjack."

"Tell you what," she added as she held out her hand and a small flat plastic square rezzed into place. She offered it to me and said, "Here's the source code for the payload my attack delivered. See for yourself how it works, what it actually did."

I recognized the object as I took it from her, it was an antique three and a half inch floppy disk. Somehow I wasn't surprised, this girl seemed to be all about the old-school retro stuff. Not that the shape of the object meant anything, it's not like I needed to rez a disk drive to access it. 

"Thanks I'll look at it later," I said as I saved the file directly into a quarantined sandbox on a private server. I wasn't foolish enough to just open something from an unknown criminal delver. Then I added, "I'll worry about my avatar later too. For now I still have to haul you in."

Glitch grinned as she started tapping keys on her deck again, "Nah. You don't have to do that. Anyways I'm nearly finished here, then I'll be on my way."

"I appreciate the assist though," she added. "I wouldn't have been able to get this far without your help."

"What's that supposed to mean?" I demanded.

The green-haired girl replied, "While you were distracted messing around with your avatar I borrowed your session tokens. Badger didn't have high enough privileges, but you do."

My gut lurched as it hit me. She was right, I let myself get completely distracted by something trivial while an obviously dangerous criminal delver was standing right there in front of me casually hacking her way into the systems I was supposed to be protecting.

Meanwhile she continued, "Thanks to your digital Trodacorp credentials I've been able to access the master indices for this entire repository. Now I know which avatars belong to which Trodacorp executives, where those avs are stored, along with their associated usage logs."

I could only imagine how much havoc she was about to cause, and how much trouble she was about to get me in. Messing with exec's avatars like she'd done to mine would be bad enough, but that's just digital vandalism. Still illegal, and targeting corpo execs could get you in a huge boatload of trouble. The real threat though was the usage logs. That was solid gold when it came to corporate espionage, the kind of thing other megacorps might pay serious money for. It was also grade-A blackmail fuel, if there was anything particularly juicy or embarrassing hidden away inside.

By that point my heart was racing and my gut felt like it was full of frozen lead, my blood was like ice water. My floofy purple tail was down between my legs and my tall fuzzy ears drooped down on either side of my head.

"Please don't," I almost begged. "Whatever you're doing, whatever you're up to, if you use my credentials I'll be completely screwed. Fired if I'm lucky, or arrested and charged if the bosses are feeling spiteful."

She frowned at me, "Seriously Wisp? What do they expect, perfection? You're just having a bad day, it's not your fault you ran into someone who's better at this than you are. Firing sounds pretty harsh. Arrest is just insane."

"Perfection is exactly what they expect," I told her. "I'm not exaggerating Glitch. Either I have to report that you used my credentials to compromise Trodacorp data integrity, in which case they'll fire me for failing to do my job. Or I say nothing, my boss figures out my credentials were used, and I get arrested under suspicion of committing digital crimes against my employer."

Glitch was still frowning as she asked, "So why the hell do you work for someone like that? You don't buy into their BS, do you? Because you don't strike me as the corpo type."

"I'm just here for the steady income," I admitted. "I do what they want for forty-eight hours a week, and they give me enough money that I can afford to spend the rest of my time in meshspace."

The girl's expression shifted to something between worry and curiosity. "You can't spend all your time in the mesh. What about food, and water? You know what happens if you ignore your bio-body too long. You don't want to die Wisp, not like that."

I'd actually taken steps to make sure my meatsack was taken care of, but I wasn't about to go into those details with some stranger. I hadn't even told the triplets about that stuff. 

Instead I just asked nervously, "Is there any answer I can give you, or anything I can say, that'll convince you not to do this? I swear I'll look the other way, I won't try and haul you in. Just don't use my tokens to hack the server. If you do that you'll mess up my entire life."

She didn't reply right away, instead she just continued watching me with that vaguely worried and curious look on her face.

"Please?" I finally asked as I stared up at her. "I'm begging you."

She watched me for another couple seconds, then let out a long sigh and began tapping stuff out on her wrist-mounted deck again. At the same time she mumbled to herself, "I can't believe I'm doing this. I am such a sucker for cute smart girls, and those big puppy-dog eyes are killing me."

Hearing her call me a cute girl sent some funny feelings through me, and got my floofy purple tail wagging again. I wanted to correct her, but she spoke up again before I could say anything.

She was still typing on her deck as she stated, "There's one thing you can do to convince me Wisp, and that's quit. You're a clever girl, you know all the megacorps are the same. They're nobody's friend."

"Here," she added as another floppy disk appeared in her hand. "Take this, have a look at it along with the other one I gave you. But do that on your own time, and on your own mesh."

I took the disk and immediately saved it to the same personal quarantine server as the first one. Then I shook my head, "I can't quit, I just told you I need the money."

Glitch shrugged, "I heard what you said cutie. Look at those two files. We'll meet again, but hopefully not in a Trodacorp server farm."

"Now I gotta run," she added. She blew me a kiss, then tapped her deck once more. Her avatar dissolved into an expanding mass of neon-green ones and zeros, then gradually faded away.

For the next couple seconds I was left standing there staring at nothing. I almost couldn't believe she'd just given up and left, that my begging really worked. It actually took almost half a minute for me to finally snap out of it and get back to work.

First thing I had to do was confirm she really did leave, and that she hadn't used my credentials to do any damage or steal any data. Next I routed myself into the main authentication server and invalidated those credentials, and my session tokens. I did the same for Badger too, since he'd likely been compromised first. It also occurred to me, that's probably how she knew my handle. She'd have got all that from hacking Badger's interface, that's how she knew to expect me.

And finally, after logging back into the security subsystem with new credentials I set about repairing the damage she caused. I patched up the hole she used to access the repository in the first place, and coded up some automated routines to monitor for her specifically, incase she found another way to get in.

Then I spent the rest of my shift writing reports so Mr. Ulriken would be happy. I didn't mention how I basically begged the delver to leave us alone, instead I left it a little more vague and said that I was able to block them from doing any actual damage but the mystery delver got away while I was focused on keeping Trodacorp's data secure.

Badger showed up at some point during all that, apparently she'd trapped him in a loopback that left him isolated in his own little impenetrable bubble. Any data packets he tried to send were just bounced straight back at him, which meant he couldn't communicate or move or do much of anything. He was finally freed when I invalidated his tokens and he got kicked from the server.

By the time my shift was finally over I felt almost exhausted from the whole ordeal. I clocked out then routed my way back to the triplets' chatroom, as usual bouncing off a handful of random public mesh portals first. Then at long last the quiet friendly little place rezzed into being around me.

nil and NaN were out but null was lounging on one of the big chairs, laying sideways with their head resting on an armrest and their tail flicking back and forth as they browsed some datafile they had floating in the air above them.

In my old avatar I usually just floated in a corner out of the way, but my current one wasn't made for floating. So I climbed onto a chair opposite the catgirl then ended up sitting crosslegged on it. I curled my big floofy tail around onto my lap as if I'd done that all my life, and began idly stroking it which was oddly relaxing.

So far null hadn't said a word, and after another half minute I realized they probably hadn't even noticed I was there. So I decided to get their attention with a simple greeting.

"Hey null. You're not going to believe the day I've had."

The catkin startled, ears folded back and tail puffed out in alarm. Then they frowned at me as their head tilted to one side. My HUD registered a ping, which didn't surprise me. They'd have wanted to make sure it was really me, and not some enemy delver who'd infiltrated their secret hide-out.

"Oh my gosh Wisp you look fantastic!" they exclaimed as they jumped to their feet. Their ears were angled towards me while their tail de-poofed and started swishing around in excitement and a wide smile settled on their face. 

They were still looking me over as they flicked open a three-way call to their siblings. And as soon as the other two catgirls' faces appeared floating in the air next to them null announced, "You're never going to believe this girls, but Wisp finally hatched! Check out her new avatar!"

"Oh wow she's gorgeous!" NaN exclaimed.

"Definitely a cutie," nil agreed. "Not surprised about the purple fur, or that she went foxgirl. And I totally called it about her sticking with a small avatar!"

Then NaN asked, "So who won the bet? null have you checked the spreadsheet yet?"

By that point I was feeling equal parts flustered, confused, curious, and overwhelmed. I didn't even realize I was hugging my tail to my chest as I demanded, "What are you all talking about?! I didn't hatch, I'm not a bird! And this isn't... I got avjacked or something, ok? My avatar got glitched and I haven't had a chance to fix things yet."

The triplets all went silent for a few seconds, and they all looked guilty.

"Ah shit," nil grimaced. "Sorry Wisp."

NaN added, "How'd that happen? I can't believe a simple avjack would even touch you."

I sighed as I slumped back in the chair and shook my head, "I don't know yet. I only just got off work, I haven't had a chance to review my logs. It was some black-hat delver though, she called herself Glitch."

The three catgirls went quiet again for another couple seconds. Then null asked, "You actually met Glitch? For real?"

"I'll be right there," NaN added. "I need to hear this story!"

"Me too!" nil agreed, and both of them vanished from the call.

Meanwhile I let out another quiet sigh and hugged my big floofy tail a little tighter.

*** This chapter was brought to you courtesy of Camille, who commissioned it! ***