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Language:
English
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Published:
2024-08-04
Words:
1,245
Chapters:
1/1
Comments:
16
Kudos:
57
Bookmarks:
13
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217

Black Hat

Summary:

On G13, reality as a movie character, and hacking your way out.

Notes:

Recommended listening: Kira Theme (Extended).

Chapter 1

Chapter Text

INT. WAREHOUSE – AFTERNOON

There’s a hole in the world that you can’t touch. Not just a black box, not just an offline server, not just something inaccessible, but a void. An empty space that your mind can’t hold.

You can see the edges of the gap. Places where your notes cut off. Places where your memory stutters and clips at the edges like a bad screen transition. But you can’t see the hole itself.

You’ve hit the edge again and again and again, each time cutting back your notes (a file encrypted to hell and back, copies spreading themselves across all of your corners of the internet, hoping if your mind crumbles you can find the pieces left behind, notes left on the wall in ciphers of your own devising) until you stand at the precipice and do not fall.

This is what you know (what you can think without falling):

  • This isn’t the first time you’ve lived this.
  • Pieces of past iterations stay behind.
  • It has something to do with Damian Bane.

You’ve scoured every server you can hit for footage of him. Body language, vocal patterns, mannerisms. Quotes, behaviors, style. Everything you can save gets noted across dozens of different files for different projects, buried in comments in your software, scattered to the wind. One of the few things that’s persisted in your notes. The more cohesive your evidence is, the more it gets lost the next time. The only thing you have going for you is absolute consistency with your past iterations.

Maybe it helped that you’re a paranoid hacker who always kept scattered notes and backups upon backups. Maybe whatever system is running this operation can’t distinguish the important information from the noise. But you’re getting closer to something. You keep falling through the hole in the world, scoured clean of the realization that’s just close enough to burn yourself on. But the notes are piling up, files you know to stay away from because you’ve laced them with too much information, stray marks on a whiteboard that never get erased.

You can’t identify exactly when, but at some point, Damien Bane changes. The voice itself is the same, but the diction shifts from typical goon jockeying to a style more suited to someone sixty years older. He and the Warrior Kings slip from an elite commando squad to what appears to be more casual friends. He knows things he shouldn’t know, things that haven’t happened yet, things that can’t have happened at all. He drinks adrenanoxinil plutonium sulfate like it’s alcohol and lives life like it’s never going to end.

You know about the loops, but he remembers them. He’s the divergence point.

You’ve tried getting close to him, but those iterations are almost entirely lost. The closer you get, the more cohesive your understanding and thoughts are, the less you retain. So you stay distant. You keep to your small sector of the world and code up the Shadow Falcon Protocol. You have to be careful, now. You know too much. You are bordering the realization that sends you to the floor for hours, blood pouring down your face until you choke on it.

You don’t think it. You don’t ever put it all together in words. But you have all the pieces, and you know exactly how they fit together.

You see him with other people, sometimes. People Damian Bane shouldn’t know, but this one does. Most of them stop being like him after just one loop. But there were two unique cases. Random rappers. A past iteration noted them as new, and then they never changed back. You keep tabs on them too.

You’ve reached the point where you can’t make progress unless the same thing happens to you that happened to them. Unless someone els—

 CUT TO:

BLACK

[Static, the rising scent of blood. Choked gasping is audible in the background. Colors distort as the sound of static grows. And then it goes silent.]

CUT TO:

INT. WAREHOUSE – AFTERNOON

 You must have fallen asleep at your desk again. No time for naps. Tanner’s operation is coming up, and you’ve got to have the whole system charted by then. There’s a few backdoors you can chain together, but the timing will be tight. Back to work.

CUT TO:

INT. WAREHOUSE – NIGHT

You’re in the middle of the operation when it happens. They made it to the core, and you have just enough time to start the upload process and keep the guards away. And then, you’re abruptly disconnected from your body. Input still works, but the output isn’t yours anymore.

Finally.

You’re like him now. Possessed. Victim of an isekai. Whatever you want to call it. You can finally think.

Alright, let’s see what you’ve got to work with.

She’s old. Looks at the tech around her like they’re alien artifacts and…

No.

No, stop!

She shoves the Shadow Falcon Protocol into a computer fan.

You… You do something. It feels a bit like trying to pull the keyboard away from someone else, except you don’t really have limbs and the keyboard is your mind. It doesn’t work, but for a moment, there is–

[CONTACT]

Her name is Usha Rao. She’s as old as you are young, with surface thoughts about checkbooks and beads on an abacus and a granddaughter she was trying to call just moments ago. And you’re a movie character to her. She’s so out of touch that she doesn’t even know the movie.

You keep going. It’s all data. Your mind, your life, your world, her mind, it’s all data and software and code. She’s been… translated into something your world can manipulate. Her world is beyond yours, but right now, she’s data, and data is as easy as breathing for you.

She’s clumsy in your body, for now. You’re already working on getting your skills back online. A stray thought that you capitalize on, pushing her back towards the floppy disk. And when she looks in the mirror, you take a moment to encourage her. The more she thinks you’re allies, the less she’ll think to question the changes.

She’s a technologically illiterate person stranded in the life of an expert hacker. She’ll take what you give her with gratitude, and she won’t notice the seeds you’re planting until they’re already entrenched. Your own little Trojan horse.

It’s a two-pronged approach. Use the situations she gets into to regain access to your skills and modify her in ways that encourage getting into situations. Your instincts, your typing speed, your mindset. You have a long way to go, and there’s nowhere to go but up.

CUT TO:

INT./EXT. CAR – NIGHT

She catches on eventually. You knew she would. But just as planned, she only notices once it’s too late for her to do anything. She reaches for you, and you reach back, and the connection is so much deeper when she opens the doors herself. You answer her question absently as you activate the self-replicating pieces you left inside her mind. Useless information gets cleared away, making space for you.

She puts her hands on the wheel, and the last pieces you need fall into place.

She got in the car, and you stepped out.

You’re not quite in control. More like SSHing into someone else’s system. Barebones command line, minimal access, but she’s more you than her right now. Minimal access is all you need.

Everything is going according to plan.