Glitch'd - Ch.11 - Debugging Routines (Patreon)

The instant everything went black I felt a sensation that I could only describe as a firm tug on my mind, dragging me across the mesh without any control.

That led to a brief moment of panic, since the feeling reminded me of the one time I'd been forcibly yanked from the mesh. That happened years ago, when the best I could afford was shoddy third-hand hardware and a flakey shared link.

Fortunately my fear subsided just as quickly as it appeared. Even though I couldn't perceive anything but a huge river of seemingly-random data packets rushing past me, I was still able to recognize enough to know I wasn't being dragged back to my meatsack in the Nyfoss slums.

Sure enough the tugging sensation faded a few moments later, and I knew exactly where I was. Glitch's little pacific north-west cabin hadn't actually rezzed around me, I was still afloat in a sea of data. I recognized the server though, and seeing that raw data reminded me of the conversation I had with Glitch after she gave me the digitization file.

"So this is one thing I need to warn you about," she stated in a wary tone. "Mesh servers won't automatically rez the standard UI for purely digital entities. That means whenever you route into a new portal your first experience is going to be raw data. And if you've never seen that before, it can be more than a little off-putting. Don't worry though, ok? You can force servers to provide the standard UI, it just means sending a routine command after you've arrived."

A moment later she gave me a funny look, "Alright Wisp, what's with the smirk? What's so funny about that?"

I shook my head, "Nothing. It's just, I actually find it easier to interface with the raw data when I'm working on stuff. I do it all the time on the job, as well as with my own private projects."

"Actually when we first met I was surprised to find the avatar database UI already active," I added with a little smirk. "Normally I wouldn't have bothered with that at all."

She stared at me for a few seconds, before the pretty green-haired hacker gave me a wide smile. "I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I knew from the start there was something about you, Wisp. A girl after my own heart."

That left me blushing at the time, and thinking about it would have got me blushing again now if I'd bothered to rez the UI. Then again, I had no doubt Glitch would somehow notice my blush even if all she had to go on was my data stream. Fortunately she wasn't here to see it, and wouldn't be for a while longer.

She was still impersonating Knut Solberg. And assuming everything went according to plan she'd be dumping all his and Trodacorp's dirty laundry onto the public mesh for everyone to see, while also handling the press conference and confessing to Knut's crimes.

As tempting as it was to start searching up the news feeds so I could find out what kind of mayhem she was causing, I figured it was safer to keep away from any public sources just yet. I was basically a newborn digital citizen, at least according to what Glitch said earlier. And that meant I had a lot to learn about my new existence, including how to keep myself secure. Which was the main reason the digitization process yanked me back to one of her safe-houses.

So I passed the time with a little self-examination. First I inspected my own data, and immediately noticed some obvious differences. While I no longer carried any identifiers that would indicate I was a living human user, I also didn't have any of the usual flags to indicate a bot or an AI, or any other kind of scripted or coded entity.

The next thing I noticed wasn't actually a surprise, but it still felt kind of monumental.

A constant part of every mesh user's experience was the LCI, the link command interface. It was a basic but critical part of accessing the mesh, because that's where you found the log in, log out, and help commands, along with a panic button. That last one was typically just another log-off button, but one that bypassed all the usual dialog boxes and potentially even some safety mechanisms. The idea was with the mesh being so immersive, users could potentially find themselves experiencing something they needed to nope out of in a hurry.

Needless to say I hadn't even looked at my LCI in almost a year, but the moment I realized I no longer had a link command interface suddenly made my situation feel a lot more real. I no longer had the option to log out. There was no out for me to log to. All I had, all there was to me, was the collection of ones and zeros that represented my consciousness, memories, and experiences.

It was a sobering moment, and after another few seconds I finally had Glitch's server rez the cabin UI, and my cute little purple anthro foxgirl body along with it. Not that I was having second thoughts or anything, but I suddenly needed to curl up on a comfy sofa and hug my big poofy tail to my chest. I needed those tactile sensations, I needed to feel something. To remind myself I was more than just a stream of data.

I was still hugging my tail like that about an hour later, when the cute green-haired delver finally joined me in the cabin safe-house. She rezzed into existence in the middle of the room, then greeted me with a huge grin on her face.

"Wisp that was amazing!" she exclaimed as she practically jumped onto the sofa next to me.

Suddenly I found myself pulled into a hug as she wrapped her arms around me and held me close against her chest.

Then instead of letting go she continued talking, "Honestly things went even better than I could have imagined! Knut's an absolute hopeless norm and his inventory's a mess, but he can afford all the very best enhancement software so it was a breeze finding loads of incriminating stuff. On both him and Trodacorp. I even found enough to take down a bunch of crooked politicians, since Knut's smart enough to keep receipts on all the bribes and other 'gifts' that let him and his megacorp get away with literal murder. He probably held onto that stuff for blackmail potential, but it makes for some pretty damning evidence."

"That's great Glitch," I mumbled into her cleavage as I made a half-hearted attempt to wriggle free.

It turned out she was a lot stronger than she looked, and I eventually gave up on escape just yet. Not that being trapped in a pretty girl's arms was in any way a bad thing.

Then I asked, "So you figure it was worth it? Like will there be any lasting damage?"

"Definitely worth it," she nodded. "It's too early to say what the fallout's going to be, but I'm confident that we've done some serious harm to Trodacorp."

She finally let go of me as she sighed, "I know it's just one evil megacorp. Even if we actually ended them there's still more out there. And the others will probably swoop in and pick up the pieces anyways. But whatever happens Wisp, this is a big success. If nothing else, we've proved they're not untouchable."

I nodded slowly, but before I could respond her mood shifted and another wide grin appeared on her face.

"And holy crap cutie!" she added as she reached up and booped my nose. "That 'fuck you I quit' speech of yours was an absolute classic! What in the world possessed you to do that?"

I felt my cheeks heating up with another blush as I shrugged, "I got bored of waiting for someone to try and arrest me. Either for helping you hack Solberg's account, or for unleashing those worms on the corpo security division? I didn't want to just sneak off and disappear though, I wanted to go out with a bang."

"Well you sure did that Wisp! Wow!" she grinned and booped my nose again.

I blinked and stifled a little sneeze after the second boop, then frowned at her. "Hey hold on, how do you even know about that? That was in my boss's private office, it was just me and him. Did you have some sort of tracker on me? Were you keeping tabs on me or something?"

Glitch stared at me for a second with a confused look on her face. Then her eyes narrowed slightly and she tilted her head to one side, "Wait a second. Are you saying you don't know?"

Something about her tone left me feeling anxious. I probably sounded wary as I asked, "What am I supposed to know?"

"Didn't you see all the holo-screens Ulriken had open?" she asked with another big smile, "Wisp he was in a dozen different conference calls at once, trying to deal with the effects of your worms! There had to be at least fifty or sixty people watching when you flipped him off then announced your name and gender to the world!"

By the time she'd finished talking my eyes were wide as saucers. My tail wrapped around in front of me so I could cringe and duck behind it, and my first response was a little "Eep!"

"Wait," I added as I peeked at her over the white floof at the end of my puffy purple tail. "Were you in on that call? My shitty little ex-boss was talking to Knut Solberg, head of the entire megacorp?"

The green-haired delver stifled a giggle as she shook her head, "Oh heck no. Your boss would probably have a heart attack if he had the president of Trodacorp on the line with him. And to be honest cutie I was kind of busy at the time."

"I caught it later on," she added, answering my next question before I had a chance to ask it. "Your buddy Badger somehow got his paws on a capture of the whole thing, and posted it on a public upload site."

Once again my eyes were wide as I mumbled another "Eep!"

Glitch grinned, "Sorry cutie, but you're already well on the way to being famous. Maybe you'll even usurp One Bad Coffee as the most famous black-hat delver."

At that point all I could do was groan as I slumped back against the sofa. Then I felt Glitch's arm around my shoulders, and a moment later she pulled me close against her side again.

"Don't sweat it Wisp," she tried to console me. "If you're lucky the whole thing will get eclipsed pretty fast by the Solberg-Trodacorp mess."

I grimaced, "Maybe. I hope so anyways."

She gave me a gentle squeeze, then after a few seconds she changed the subject. "So infamous delver aside, how are you feeling? How was the digitization process?"

It took me a half minute of thought before I answered, "The process was fine I guess? Pretty much like you said. And I feel ok now, I think? There was just one uncomfortable moment right at the start..."

She listened quietly while I described how it felt a little like being forcibly yanked out of the mesh, then when I was done she gave me another hug while apologizing for that scare. Apparently she knew about the 'tugging' sensation, but hadn't realized it would feel like being yanked back out to meatspace.

"So I guess you've never had that experience then huh?" I asked. "Lucky. Mind you I've only been through it once, and that was a few years back."

Glitch gave me a sad look as she shook her head and confessed, "Wisp I've never actually been in meatspace. Let alone been yanked out there unexpectedly."

For the next several seconds I found myself just staring at her as I tried to process what she just said. "You... What? I don't understand, how's that possible?"

"I've never had a flesh and blood body," she admitted, with that same sad look on her face. "I was born in the mesh."

I couldn't even come up with words at that point, but I didn't have to. Glitch nodded slowly, then began telling me who and what she really was.

"I told you Desrosiers and Sachs were my parents," she explained softly, "And that's true, but not in any sort of biological sense. Back when they were working on the very first mesh interface, they just had the one prototype. So they'd take turns, one would link in while the other monitored things from the outside. Only it turned out the hardware had some unexpected quirks. Namely, the neural connection didn't just interact with the user's engrams, the hardware also saved and mimicked them in its own circuitry."

She continued, "If it was just one of them using it, eventually it would have spawned a digital duplicate of that person. But because they were swapping back and forth, rather than a digital clone of one user what ended up in the buffer was a blend of the two of them. It was also shaped by the experiences they had while using it. At first that was a combination of lucid dreaming and connecting to the old pre-mesh networks. Anyways the neural image caught in the buffer eventually started making its own connections, without any input from either Desrosiers or Sachs."

"That's how they found out about it," she added with a guilty smile. "They noticed some unexplained activity in the debugging logs. Sachs analyzed the prototype's neural matrix, and announced that she'd found a glitch in the link... And that's how I got my name."

"Holy crap," I mumbled as I stared wide-eyed at her.

Glitch nodded, "Yeah. They set out to build a functional neural interface, and accidentally created digital life."

"That's how they knew the mesh hardware could digitize a user," she added. "Needless to say, after they moved me out of the prototype they tweaked the design to ensure the buffer got wiped before and after every use so there wouldn't be any more accidents. But they left the rest of the capabilities in place, and in fact they made sure that the basic framework and protocols that the entire global mesh is built on would always be compatible with digital sentients like you and me."

That was the big secret, the thing that only those of us 'in the club' knew about. The very foundation the entire mesh was constructed on had been designed from the ground up to support and sustain digital life. Because its inventors wanted to guarantee that their daughter, and anyone else like her, would always be safe and free.

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