Glitch'd - Ch.1 - Mess With The Best (Patreon)

"Ah crap," I sighed when my custom UI came up automatically. There was a blinking red light in the corner, along with the reminder I'd set for myself earlier.

"Whats up Wisp?" null asked, as their black furry ears swivelled towards me. "Something wrong?"

I shook my head, "Nothing wrong, but it's time for me to get to work."

"Sorry friends," I added. "I gotta go."

NaN made a face and her long fuzzy tail twitched as she asked, "You still working for TrollCorp?"

"He is," nil smirked. Her tail swished as she teased, "Our little Wisp here is a troll."

"Ha ha," I deadpanned. "You know I just work there, I don't buy into their crap. It's just a job, like any other."

I'd heard the troll joke a thousand times before, and it wasn't even all that funny the first time. It was mostly because TrodaCorp was based in northern Europe. The location didn't mean anything though, it was still your typical megacorp. Like any other it had countless divisions and subsidiaries and seemed to be involved in a little bit of everything. 

The section I worked for was their 'safe curated public meshspace' offering. Kind of like a modern-day CompuServe or AOL. Yeah I'd never heard of them either, but apparently old folks and history buffs will get the reference. 

null rolled their eyes while their ears folded back, "I still don't get why you do that crap Wisp. Quit straddling the line and pick a side already! By which I mean, forget about corpo money and go all in with us! Take that corporate knowledge and training and put it to good use for a change."

"I don't know," I sighed again. "I know they're not great, but I appreciate the steady pay. And working for them means I stay updated on what sorts of stuff the corpos are up to."

My voice took on a self-deprecating tone as I added, "You wouldn't want me on your team anyways, right? After all, I'm not a catgirl. I'm not any kind of girl at all, for that matter."

nil null and NaN were a set of identical matching catgirls. Or rather, two catgirls and a feline femmeby, since null was non-binary. Their avatars looked like mostly-human girls in their early twenties, with short black hair, black fuzzy cat ears, and long black furry tails. And they usually appeared dressed in matching skin-tight black bodysuits. 

They sometimes referred to themselves collectively as 'the triplets', although as far as I knew they weren't actually related. In fact I was reasonably sure that out in meatspace they weren't even in the same countries.

And the three of them were probably my closest friends. We were all digital delvers, except they were firmly on the other side of the fence. They wouldn't take corpo money and they weren't on anyone's payroll. They got by through a combination of digital scavenging and hacking, which was how they came by the chatroom the four of us were hanging out in. 

It was instanced on a server the triplets 'found' and 'liberated'. Not physically, the thing was still in a rack at a data-centre along with a thousand other identical servers. According to the routing it was somewhere in South America. Now in addition to whatever it was supposed to be doing, it also served as a private hang-out and data repository for the three of them. And me.

Which confused me, whenever I stopped to think about it. I had no idea why they liked me, considering they'd made it very clear to other delvers that they had zero interest in guys. The only thing I could think of was maybe I was their 'token guy' friend. Either that or maybe it was because I didn't use a masc-coded avatar. 

That red notification light in my HUD suddenly started blinking faster and brighter, reminding me I had to be somewhere else. 

"I really have to go now," I said. "You three stay out of trouble, and please don't go attacking any TrodaCorp servers while I'm on the clock? I don't want to have to face off against my friends."

"That's because you know you'll lose," nil teased.

null agreed, "Don't mess with the best."

"Yeah yeah," I said as I accessed my HUD's routing menu. Then as I selected the Trodacorp option I added, "See you later!"

The triplets and our little hang-out seemed to dissolve into a mess of pixels, which then decomposed into hexidecimal notation. Within moments my vision was filled with an endless sparkling sea of binary data, that flowed around me as my virtual presence departed their hijacked server. 

I wasn't stupid enough to link directly to work, instead I bounced off a half dozen random public meshspace gateways before finally linking into the TrodaCorp back-end. And the moment I connected I found myself routed directly into my boss's 'office'.

My mind started racing as the dark cavernous space rezzed around me. I was trying to remember if I'd missed any deadlines or done anything illegal on company time lately. Anything they could trace that is.

Nothing came to mind, but that didn't make me feel any better. I looked up towards my boss's avatar as I greeted him in my best ego-stroking voice, "Hello Mr. Ulriken. What can I do for you today sir?"

The giant disembodied floating head frowned down at me as he took in my own avatar. Neither of us looked anything like what you'd call 'normal', although to be fair that word didn't have so much meaning nowadays. Not in the mesh anyways, and even out in meatspace 'normal' was becoming a very relative term.

The first time I met him I thought he was decently strange, like a giant floating head is pretty out there. Except it didn't take long for me to figure out that's not what was going on. It wasn't an avatar, it was his actual head. His digital image was just a projection of his meatspace self, blown up to be like sixty meters tall or something. I only ever saw his head since that's all that could fit in the big empty room.

It said a lot about the guy though, that given almost infinite possibilities the digital representation he picked was just a huge version of himself. I had no idea if he realized it, but he was basically just telling everyone that he was a gaunt-looking balding middle-aged middle-manager with a massive ego.

It also left me wondering what someone like him thought about me, based on my avatar. 

Even the triplets thought my avatar was wild, back when we first met. After all catgirls were practically mainstream nowadays, but I was nothing like that. My digital appearance wasn't humanoid, in fact I didn't even appear to be alive. And forget the huge ego thing Ulriken had going on, my digital self was practically nothing. Literally. I was just a puff of purple-tinged smoke.

I sort of floated around and undulated a bit, and when I moved my puffs stretched out and became even more insubstantial, like smoke in the wind. Even my voice was modulated in meshspace, so I sounded kind of small light and airy. 

"Mr. Klove I have a priority assignment for you," my boss stated in a very loud, deep voice. 

His words echoed throughout the chamber and made my non-existent gut clench. Or maybe it was just hearing my meatspace name that bothered me, especially that 'mister' part at the front. At least he never used my meatspace given name, that was the worst.

My insubstantial body cringed slightly as I responded, "Sir you can just call me Wisp if you like? That's my handle. Everyone... I mean most folks in the mesh just use their handles, you know? It's easier that way."

"Anyways sorry sir," I added when I noticed his frown had grown deeper. "What was the assignment?"

His voice boomed out again, "Twenty-five minutes ago Mr. Harris reported a potential breach in one of our data-centres. He has subsequently stopped responding to my requests for progress reports. You will follow up on the alleged breach incident, and ensure the security and integrity of all TrodaCorp digital property."

All that left me frowning, or it would have if my avatar had a face. It also left me with one big question. 

"Yes sir I'll get right on that Mr. Ulriken," I responded. "Just one question first? Who's Mr. Harris again?"

The giant floating head gave me another one of those long-suffering looks as he reminded me, "Your assistant, Mr. Klove. The young man you've been training for the past nine months."

"Oh!" I gasped. "You mean Badger! If he's not responding there has to be a really good reason for it sir. He's a very loyal employee, same as me."

My boss made a dismissive sound then added, "Your shift has already begun Mr. Klove. You have your assignment."

"Yes sir!" I replied, even as Ulriken and his office dissolved into a mess of random pixels and hex notation.

Using my HUD I routed myself into the server logs. I didn't bother with any kind of virtual interface, it was quicker and easier for me to just navigate the raw data directly. 

That was one of the things that set us delvers apart from normal folks. They'd need to rez up a room or at least a keyboard and screen so they could interact with the data in a format they found familiar. Folks like me, we understood the raw data and we were comfortable with it. It gave us an advantage at times, it meant we could work faster than most of them could even think about a problem.

As such it didn't take me long to figure out what Badger was up to and where in the servers he'd been working. There was definitely something screwy going on, and it was happening in the block of servers that housed people's avatars. Not just for TrodaCorp's customers, but the employees too. Probably even the board and executive suite. Heck even my own avatar data was stored in there.

With a thought I pulled up my HUD's routing menu and copied the address of the server where the strange activity was found. The data around me decomposed for a couple milliseconds, then to my surprise a virtual environment rezzed in around me despite my not having requested a virtual interface.

I found my puff of purple smoke floating in another huge cavernous space, but unlike Ulriken's office this place wasn't just a big empty chamber. I was on the ground level of a hallway that seemed to stretch for kilometres left and right, while the ceiling was so high up I couldn't actually see it. The walls of the hallway were filled with large lockers, each about two meters high and one meter wide. There were thousands of them stretching away to the left and right, and stacked upwards as far as I could see. 

Each locker had a view screen in the front, and that screen displayed a two-dimensional representation someone's unique avatar. Many were dark and motionless, indicating that the user was offline. But just as many were lit up and the avatar was active, meaning the user was online somewhere in meshspace.

It all seemed creepy to me, which is why I didn't actually ask for the virtual UI. I couldn't shake the impression that the lockers were upright coffins, that the avatars inside were bodies. Especially the motionless ones.

I tried a couple times to de-rez the UI, but for whatever reason I appeared to be stuck with it. After a few seconds I sighed, "Fuck it. Let's just find the problem and get out of here."

Since Badger was supposed to be around here somewhere I figured the next step was to try and locate him. I accessed my HUD again, and sent a ping. It confirmed he was online, so I ran a trace which indicated he was somewhere to my right, and a couple levels above me. 

My smoke puff floated upwards in the middle of the huge chamber, then I drifted to the right a bit before I spotted something obviously wrong. 

One of the lockers looked like it had been wrenched open with a crowbar. The screen was smashed and the contents were a mess of wires and circuits, with binary data leaking out and forming a puddle on the narrow ledge that served as a floor. 

The virtual damage was a metaphor for what really happened. Someone had clearly hacked their way into the system, probably through the account of whoever's avatar was stored in the damaged locker. Odds were it was some user with weak security credentials, or an outdated interface.

I was just about to start trying to patch things up when I was distracted by movement behind me. My smoke-puff almost turned inside-out as my awareness shifted a hundred and eighty degrees, while at the same time I activated my digital defences.

Before me stood a young woman. Or maybe an older teen, it was hard to tell. I'd guess her apparent age at somewhere between eighteen and twenty, but she couldn't have stood more than a hundred and fifty centimetres tall. Her short messy bright green hair seemed to glow slightly, as did her matching green eyes. 

And I had a hard time taking her seriously, because she was dressed like the stereotypical delver you'd see in mainstream entertainment. Black leather pants and jacket, black ankle-boots with high heels on them, and the ubiquitous retro cyberdeck mounted on her left wrist. She even had a physical lens positioned in front of her left eye to support an old-fashioned HUD.

The girl looked at me and grinned, "Well aren't you cute!" 

"You know you're in big-time trouble here, right kid?" I responded. "This isn't like the entertainment vids. You're busted, and I'm going to have to take you in."

While I was speaking I hit her with a standard containment code. It was a basic cage, fairly useless in public meshspace. I had admin rights here though, I wasn't just an employee but part of the security team. The cage rezzed around her like a transparent cylinder, a meter and a half in diameter and two meters high.

"Seriously Wisp? This all you got?" the girl asked with a smirk.

Hearing her use my handle left me feeling a little uneasy. There shouldn't have been any way for her to get that, not without pinging me first. And my HUD should have detected any kind of traffic coming from her.

I tried to sound calm and confident as I stated, "I haven't even gotten started yet. For now, how about you tell me your handle? So I know what to put on the report."

"I'm called Glitch," the girl replied with a grin as she used her right hand to type something out on her wrist-mounted deck. Then she looked up at me and added, "Here's something to remember me by."

She tapped one more key on her deck, and my defences were suddenly hammered from all angles. Her code shouldn't have been able to escape the cage, but whatever she was using was more effective than anything I'd seen. My containment cylinder was the first to go, it shattered into sparkling pixels. Then my HUD locked up on me, and a moment after that everything went dark.

Thankfully I wasn't booted out of meshspace. The last thing I wanted was to find myself back in my meatsack. Instead it took an agonizing five or six seconds before I reconnected to the server mesh and the UI reloaded around me. 

I'd rezzed back into the same place as before, standing next to the hacked locker in the TrodaCorp server. And that green-haired delver was still there too, looking down at me with a wide grin on her face. 

"Wow! I thought you were cute before, but damn Wisp!" she exclaimed as she almost seemed to be checking me out.

"What -" I started to ask, but I cut myself off in surprise and confusion. 

My voice modulation had changed, and it left me sounding very girly. That sent a little shock through me, and I slowly looked down at myself as my eyes widened.

My puff of smoke was gone. Instead I was embodied as a small anthro fox avatar. Or more accurately, a small anthro foxgirl avatar. My body was covered in fine purple fur, except for my belly and chest where the fur was white. There was more white fur at the end of my big poofy purple tail, which for some reason had suddenly started wagging back and forth behind me.

"What did you do?" I gasped as I looked up at the other delver again.

She flashed me another cocky smile and replied, "You just got glitch'd, girl!"

*** This chapter and the idea behind it was brought to you courtesy of Camille, who commissioned it! ***