Glitch'd - Ch.8 - Ones And Zeros (Patreon)

"Sorry Wisp," Glitch apologized. "Honestly it's not that bad? It was only when you were enjoying the effects of your drink that things became a little more visible than you probably intended."

That just made my embarrassment worse. I curled myself up a little smaller in the corner of the sofa where I'd been sitting, while my big poofy tail completely hid my face and my ears folded down.

"Do you have anything you can wear?" she added a moment later.

I shook my head slightly as I mumbled, "I don't think so. I pretty much purged all my old avatar stuff once I decided to go full-time with the smoke-puff."

She grimaced, "Ah. I suppose that makes sense, no point wasting file space if you never intended to use that stuff again."

That comment led me to a question I hadn't thought of when we were talking earlier. My ears poked up and I asked, "Is that an issue for digitized folks? Being digitized must take a lot of storage space, what happens if you run out? Or how do you handle it?"

Glitch smiled and shook her head, "It's not a concern. Yes there's a lot of data, but when you're running on hardware you own or control you can pretty much set your own limits and rules."

"I was mostly thinking about the sort of limitations I know the megacorps impose on their customers," she continued. "Typically their 'free access' comes with incredibly tight limits, so they can up-sell you on additional bandwidth and inventory."

I made a face as I responded, "They're awful about that. Trodacorp's one of the worst offenders too. They have a bunch of marketing crap to convince folks their pricing plans are the best deal, but it's all lies and misdirection. Literally designed to suck you in and get you to upgrade every other week because you keep hitting the limits."

"That's not a problem for me though," I added. "I have a completely different setup thanks to my job. And I may have used an exploit or two to increase that exponentially. So I uh, have more storage space than I'd ever possibly need."

Glitch nodded slowly before asking, "So why bother purging stuff, if it doesn't cost anything to keep it?"

I frowned as I thought about it for a moment, then sighed. "At the time I told myself it was about being more efficient? Like once I was happy with my smoke-puff av I decided I'd never have to be... I had no intention of ever going back to a 'guy' av again."

"Yeah I get it," she said as she gave me a compassionate smile. Then she offered, "I'd be happy to take you out clothes shopping if you like? I know some places with decent styles, and the merch is trustworthy. No trackers adware or other nonsense in the code."

I finally peeked out over my tail at her, and my eyes flicked up and down over her outfit again. Both her Hex and her Glitch avatars had a similar aesthetic, sort of a retro hacker look that you'd see in old entertainment vids. It sort of worked for her, although it also made her look more like a wannabe than the the infamous delver she really was.

It was an ok look, but I wasn't sure it was my style. Then again, I didn't actually know what my style even was. In all my time as a delver I'd seen lots of outfits that looked good on femme avatars, but never really considered any of them for myself because I thought I was a guy.

Then my thoughts drifted to that drink earlier, and I remembered what sorts of things I'd been wearing in the different visions it gave me. I slowly realized some of those outfits were things I'd seen on other users around the mesh. They were clothes and accessories I liked. Or maybe stuff that I envied.

That gave me some ideas, and I actually felt myself growing excited at the prospect of shopping. Enough so that my tail finally slipped away from where it had been hiding my face and began wagging behind me in anticipation.

"Actually I know some places as well," I replied. "But thanks for the offer."

Glitch responded, "In that case, mind if I tag along and keep you company?"

"I promise I won't tease anymore," she added a second later, when I was obviously hesitating.

"Alright then," I nodded slowly. "As long as you keep that promise you can tag along."

Honestly I would have agreed even without the promise. Partially for the companionship, partially so I could get her opinions on outfits, and finally because I was positive I'd come up with more questions for her about the other big topic that was still on my mind. And beyond all that, she was just a really interesting person to be with. Like how often did you get to hang out with 0x1badc0ff33? Or for that matter, the infamous Glitch herself? I was positive the triplets would be jealous if they ever found out.

"So where are we going?" she asked as she stood up. Then she added, "Actually here. This way we can stay in touch, and you won't have to leave me obscure messages on that old Buffer Overflow terminal next time you want to find me."

While she was talking a notification window popped up in the corner of my vision. My eyebrows shot up as I climbed to my feet and mumbled, "Wow. There's a UI panel I haven't seen in forever. Seems like it's so old it can't even display handles correctly anymore."

The transparent grey panel had an obnoxious happy-hearts emoji in the corner and used an equally-obnoxious 'friendly font' to announce, "{0172CCAF-1CEF-48DA-9708-FC74DF0AADBE} has sent you a Friend Request! If you accept, you and {7C1C72EC-90E5-4270-AB0B-E438EE4677CD} will be able to easily exchange text voice and video messages with each other. You can also (optionally) locate each other within the Mesh (some restrictions apply; see preferences/friends_list/privacy and preferences/security/location_sharing for details). [Accept] or [Reject] ?"

"Oh yeah I'm running a little security patch that replaces my handle with random UUIDs in any message packets I send," Glitch explained.

Then she raised an eyebrow and asked, "You don't get a lot of friend requests huh? Could it be I've finally met someone with a smaller social circle than my own?"

With a thought I accepted the request, and dismissed the 'congratulations' alert that followed as I mumbled my reply, "With you that makes four people on my friends list."

"I'm honoured," she replied. "I take it Null and their sisters are the other three?"

"Yeah," I nodded quietly. "Anyways you said there was a backdoor to get us out of here? Otherwise I'd just route myself out then send you a location packet when I got there."

The other delver nodded as she held out her hand towards me. A big chunky antique-looking brass key appeared in her fingers, and she dropped it into my outstretched hand.

"First the antique floppy disks, now an old-fashioned key?" I asked as I accepted the object. "Are you just really into the skeuomorphic thing, or is more about the aesthetics?"

"A little of both I suppose?" Glitch laughed.

Like the floppies the key was just a representation of a particular kind of digital file. In this case it was a combined security packet and a routing table. A cursory glance at the raw data told me it would bounce me around a half dozen private servers before dumping me in a public gateway.

The security half of the payload was undoubtedly necessary to gain access to the various private servers, and from what Null and Glitch said earlier I could assume those private servers were configured to only allow entry and exit along one predetermined path. And only delvers who held the key would be permitted through. Anyone not following the path or not holding the key would likely be rejected. Or captured and held, depending on how malicious Glitch wanted her security to be.

After thanking her for the key to the backdoor I said, "Ok I'm going shopping now. I'll drop you a pin when I get there."

"I'll be waiting," she replied. Then before I left she added, "By the way I do have to ask that you keep the backdoor to yourself, ok Wisp? And if you're using it where friends will see, then pretend to log out when you do it? I assume you have something in place already to fake logouts, otherwise the triplets would have noticed something in the last half year."

"Right," I nodded. And with that I activated the key and its routing table, then watched Glitch and her private office dissolve into a mess of pixels and hex notation.

It worked just like I expected, I bounced along a pre-set path from one secure server to another, before a public mesh portal rezzed into place around me at the end. I already had my destination ready though, and no sooner had I arrived at the public portal when that too collapsed into a swirl of randomized pixel noise.

A half second later I found myself in the 'welcome area' of a fairly typical soulless digital mall. It was one of a thousand nearly-identical cookie-cutter-style virtual shopping venues. They were practically a staple of the mesh, regardless which megacorp gateway you used.

The mall was subdivided into a couple dozen smaller 'shops', but the whole place was all owned by the same corpo subsidiary. The various 'shops' all had different styles or themes, and there were usually different names on the signs so the shoppers would think they were supporting a variety of individual merchants.

As soon as I arrived I dusted off my friends list and threw Glitch a pin. That was short for 'map pin' or 'location pin', depending on your UI. Whatever you called it, it was basically just a URI that pointed to a specific location in the mesh. I couldn't help wondering what sort of physical object Glitch would see it as. Maybe a business card with the address typed out in some old-style font? Or perhaps it would be an actual pin, like you'd push into a paper map to indicate the spot.

"Seriously Wisp?" the other delver asked the moment she rezzed into existence next to me. "If this is your idea of shopping, I'm not surprised you don't have any clothes. This is all soulless corpo crap."

I shook my head, "No, it's *overpriced* soulless corpo crap."

She gave me a skeptical look, "Then why are we here?"

"This particular corpo hell-mall happens to be part of the Trodacorp Curated Mesh Experience. (TCME is a registered trademark of Trodacorp Inc., all rights reserved.) Which means I can use my employee discount," I replied with a smirk. Then with a flick of my tail I added, "Anyways I happen to know this place because of work reasons, and I remember seeing some clothes here that I liked."

A frown settled on the experienced delver's face as she sighed, "Wisp Wisp Wisp, what am I going to do with you?"

I flashed her a wide grin that showed off my little fangs, while at the same time opening up an encrypted chat channel so we could talk without being overheard.

And on that private channel I explained, "I'm not really here to buy stuff, I'm going to steal what I want. Even with the employee discount these prices are outrageous. They're trying to trick people into believing digital products are as valuable as their meatspace counterparts. Hell sometimes they charge more, since they can guarantee the digital clothes will never get damaged or need to be cleaned!"

"You and I know it's all just ones and zeros," I continued. "The only real cost was setting up the designs in the first place, which is why I'm not stealing from a small indie shop. This stuff was made by Trodacorp staffers, and they got paid their regular salary for doing it. So I have no qualms about helping myself to any of it."

The look on her face shifted while I was talking, from a frown to a wry smile. And when I finished she responded over the same encrypted channel, "In that case I take back what I was thinking a few seconds ago."

"Oh yeah? What were you thinking?" I asked, as I led her into one of the numerous 'shops'.

Glitch's answer came in the form of a texted winky-face emoji. Then she asked out loud, "Our first stop, I take it?"

"Yeah," I nodded as I led her inside.

The sign on the front claimed the place sold 'Exclusive Club-Wear', but based on the displays it looked a lot more like a lingerie shop. And once again I was happy no-one could see me blushing under my fur. I had an outfit idea in mind though, so I pushed aside my embarrassment and got to it.

True to her word my new friend kept the teasing to a minimum. Better still, she was actually helpful. She suggested what colours looked good against my fur, although in her opinion black was always a good choice and went with everything. She also suggested a few things here and there, and it was nice getting feedback on my own ideas. And best of all, now that I'd accepted that I was a girl I actually found clothes shopping to be both fun and validating.

In all the two of us visited a half dozen little 'shops' within the Trodacorp-owned mall. We talked about clothes and colours and styles out loud as I tried on various free 'demo' items, while maintaining a separate conversation on our encrypted chat channel. That was about clothes too, but instead of fashion it was more about which exploits I was using to steal the non-demo versions of the items I liked.

And when we weren't looking at clothes I also used the private channel to ask her more questions about digitization as they came to me. Glitch answered most of them, and the ones she wouldn't were basically security-related. Stuff she'd tell me if or when I took the plunge.

Our shopping expedition lasted a couple hours, and by the time we finished I found myself with a dozen complete outfits stolen from a half-dozen different Troda-owned 'shops'. Glitch even picked up a couple items for herself, when we wandered into a place that sold retro-hacker-themed merch.

From there the two of us jumped into another portal, where I could equip some of my stolen clothes away from any Trodacorp scrutiny. And I went with my new favourite outfit.

A pastel-pink silk bra cupped my top pair of boobs. The second set were barely noticeable and didn't need any support, while the lower two pairs were really just nipples hidden under my fur. So I didn't bother covering any of that, and just wore the one bra as outer-wear. A low-cut pleated mini-skirt hugged my hips, it was black with an alternating dark- and light-grey plaid pattern that I really liked. It also had a cut-out for my tail, which was essential. Under the skirt I wore a cute pair of panties in the same shade of pink as my bra. And finally, I had a pair of black heeled sandals that fit my digitigrade feet.

In addition to the clothes, Glitch talked me into getting a black nylon web belt that was adorned with various pouches and things, places to hide all sorts of tools of the trade for us wannabe delvers. And I had a chonky necklace made of black pink and purple beads, each of which could be loaded with scripts or other goodies. Currently they were running a blink algorithm, that made the necklace glow and pulse random patterns. Finally I got a set of matching earrings, a pair of cute chunky pink beads that hung from the outer corners of my tall fuzzy vulpine ears.

"Looking good there Wisp," Glitch commented with a smile.

"Thanks," I replied as I stared at my appearance in the avatar editor. At the same time I asked via our encrypted chat, "So you said digitization was done by just loading a file?"

"Yeah," she responded the same way. "You wouldn't have to log out, it doesn't require any hardware mods to your meatspace rig. I just give you the file and you run it."

"That sounds very dangerous," I pointed out.

Glitch nodded, "It is. Like I said, you'll need to disable all security protocols before you run it."

"So what do you think Wisp?" she asked a moment later. "Ready to make a decision, or do you need more time?"

My eyes drifted back to the av editor again. I stared at my new self for a couple seconds, then gulped and nodded.

"I'm ready. Please give me the file."

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