Hardwired 2.1

Prior to reading this, please read Hardwired 1: https://www.literotica.com/s/hardwired

Hardwired 2.1

There is a princess in a tower, guarded by a dragon. This is the truth.

The tower is no true tower, but a heap of lies piled upon lies, until the stone that was once at its heart has withered away to nothing.

The princess wears no glittering gown or jeweled tiara. She rejects everything that a princess stands for and would rescue herself given a chance, as she has rescued others.

The dragon has no scales, no fiery breath, no great claws, and its only power is in persuading others that it does. I still expect that it will devour us all.

It's a hundred days since my love brought me out of one world and under the surface to the true world. I'm separate now from what I was, severed, but in rejecting the network our parents' parents made, we have become connected to our own. Those who see as we see, who also walk under skies that are not a matter of choice.

They call me by a new name, or at least its initials. I blush at the childish melodrama whenever anyone uses the full name, but there's a fierce pride in there too. It's the closest a bunch of refugees come to a badge of honor.

I've met maybe a hundred others like us, but not Mox, and it's Mox who matters now. It's Mox whose very influential parents decided that her choice to break free was not hers to be made at all, and that they will unmake it for her. It's Mox who's in the tower.

And since my beloved has pledged to save her, I will be at her side. I think that makes me the expendable squire. Or maybe the noble steed. Whatever. I'll be there.

We meet to discuss our plans at the Rust. In a plastic world there's a rebelliousness to oxidization and the Rust fetishisizes it. It's a bar, technically, its stools and counter built of rust-ravaged iron bubbled inside clear cushions of Polypurothane, the reaching red strands like drifting hair frozen in miniature. The owner, Luise, serves liquor. That's as much detail as I'll give in order to avoid insulting second-hand antifreeze by comparison.

Whenever its pieces were dragged together here in the base of a disused industrial smokestack, someone cheaped out on insulation. The fluorescents don't need much power anyway, right? Who gives a shit about some stray current running through the scrap metal walls? It's not enough to fry anyone and it's not like anyone was paying for the power hookup anyway.

The end result is a makeshift Faraday cage, sealing us off from any outside signal. The entirety of the music selection is from physical media, half of which are various colors and sizes of discs that all seem to be called by acronyms. Every few minutes a burst of signal manages to make its way through the warding walls, scrambled by the passage, and static-driven grimaces sinewave through the patrons.

It's one of the few places that we can relax and stop thinking about the pressure of the external unreal. It's a second home and an unofficial headquarters.

There are three of us today seated in the best seats in the house: the back corner from the door where the cage is strongest and the fewest rogue signals get through. I'm nursing a ceramic cup of something reminiscent of acetone, but Luise has a gruff fondness for my beloved, and she gets her drink in a chipped but clean glass tumbler. It keeps pulling me back to our first meeting whenever she swirls the oily liquor with that distinctive circle of her wrist. The memories are a pleasant distraction to the horror of the discussion.

"Final say is active only, no way past it, all the test runs confirm it. Full immersion into the stream or you'll stand out like the only burnt bulb in the chandelier, uniforms be fucked," Malk says, jabbing at some cluster of symbols that mean nothing to me on the printouts covering our small table. He's lean to the point of emaciation and his hunch over the documents is vulturish. "You're gonna have to go bright, Arkia. Anybody with you, too."

Malk is a veteran among us, freed for years now. Behind the shifting curtain of rubberized wire dreadlocks his eyes don't have the wide-eyed-alien-tourist look of the recently released. I think I'd prefer it to the poorly hidden wince I see when he glances at me.

I shoot back my drink and hope that it camouflages my terror with disgust. It doesn't work, of course. She sees it without looking and squeezes my hand under the table.

"Then we'll go bright," my love says without apparent concern. I know it's one of her own lies, so I let her keep it, though I do squeeze her hand a little more tightly. "We've got this."

"You, yeah, okay," he concedes. "You're hardcore, your shit? It is together. B.G., here... I got doubts, man. No offense." That's me, and I get it. I think he's got the odds about right.

"Guess we're gonna find out," I say. My grin is low-quality counterfeit confidence made entirely from artificial additives. Fuck it. It doesn't matter. Like I said, I'll be there, whether I come back or not.

The day after Arkia got me free (no one ever called her Hipparchia other than the parents responsible and one very pretentious aunt, none of whom presently acknowledge her existence), she took me to see Doc Newmark. The doc was the guy who first worked out the override; a bear of a man, his thick white beard and curly hair reminded me instantly of the autodoc program that had seen to my chicken pox and scraped knees when I was young. That program, though, had never worn a vest over its lab coat declaring honorary membership in the Sixtieth Street Scream Thieves or offered me a hit from a nearby glass pipe to help calm down.

He checked me over using tools that were somehow incredibly invasive despite never coming closer than three inches from my skin, leaving the inside of my skin feeling scraped raw. Parts of my brain were, I was sure, somehow twitching, no matter how impossible that may be.

According to him I was the most borderline case ever to successfully engage the system override and nearly fried both my implants and my synapses in doing so.

"But it works?" Arkia had pressed.

"I mean, sure, man," he'd said, shrugging. "It works. Technically. In the same way that crawling through broken glass is technically a functional method of locomotion. I, uh... I wouldn't advise doing it again." From then on Arkia had introduced me to everyone as B.G. Only a very few got the explanation that it stood for Broken Glass.

The newness felt right, and the name felt right, if juvenile. I still don't know whether I agree with Malk that all rebellions are in some way tied to the first rebellion of youth and thus inherently juvenile, but I had no plans to ever use my old name again, so it would do.

A week later we'd been going through what had once been a library, looking for physical books still intact for collectors or our own amusement. In a wrecked pile of former shelving I found a yellowed scrap of paper with most of a sentence in blocky typeface:

"-a truly brilliant mind, but it was brilliant like a fractured mirror, all marvellous facets and rainbows but, ultimately, also something that was broken."

That was all. No author, no other scraps as far as I could tell, and it crumbled to coat my fingers in powdery dust even as I read it, but it resonated. I kept repeating it, afraid that it would be lost forever as easily as the ancient paper had been. After three days of that Arkia took me to see an artist and it's now tattooed across the inside of my left forearm in a flowing script. It's still ephemeral, but no more so than I am, and there's comfort in that.

I'm reading it now, over and over again. It's a displacement activity, I'm well aware of that, but I'm in no place to get picky about my comforts. My hands are shaking, heart rate spiking, and of course my mouth is dry, because somehow all of my saliva has been redirected into cold drips of sweat crawling down my spine. My beloved and I are sitting together with a hellward view.

When I force myself to look, it's just a building. Built in mid-21st century We Don't Quite Have the Budget For Brutalism, it's a pile of exposed concrete with windows that must have met the minimum size requirement to the centimeter and all the welcoming charm of a tank trap. That'll change. The engraving over the door says Reattunement Assistance Center when it should say Lasciate Ogni Speranza.

The Center is where the broken ones and the bad ones go. The ones whose realities are static wash, who aren't able to distinguish between the digital and the meat, the ones who can't be trusted inside the shared hallucination and the ones who won't sit down and eat their lies. It's a re-education center, a prison, a maintenance garage and a hospital, a place where the collective lie is enforced with jack-booted demand and surgical insistence. If we were still a culture capable of building its own mythologies it's where naughty children would be afraid of being sent. Instead you just don't talk about anyone who's in the RAC.

And of course, no one who isn't fully active and receiving signal is getting past the front door. Doc Newport has given us each a stim, just a little bundle of DMSO and some chems that'll goose our hardware into a reboot. In our prep spot, seated in a transport terminal overlooking the Center, we clasp our right hands together in silent vow, share a deep kiss and press the ampules to the arteries in each others' throats.

Olfactory stimuli are the strongest sense memory triggers and that's where the reboot takes effect first. The sting of the station's cleaning chemicals in the back of my sinuses fades into a standard mellow patchouli so generically inoffensive that I think of it as the smell of taxpayer funding. When we break our kiss my clothing is shimmering indecisively before it settles on the same throwback jeans and solid-color t-shirt that every third person is wearing this year, replacing the previous year's ornate Edwardian cravats. Arkia ends up with a floral summer dress that bares her pale shoulders fetchingly and a red silk scarf that weaves its way into being around her throat. A light blush and eyeshadow creep across her face like frost forming and a song from last week's top twenty-two joins us as an unwelcome third. The way we stare at each other, each lost in assessing our own changing perceptions, is eerily reminiscent of the first time sharing a new drug, yet every facet is more familiar than the back of my hand.

After fifteen minutes we're as ready as we're going to be. It's hand in hand that we walk to the transformed entrance. Regardless of the threat of thunderstorms behind us, it's a sunny summer's day the instant we've crossed the threshold marked by the quaint wrought iron fence. Before us looms the welcoming facade of the Center, now a sprawling Victorian mansion of light wood and gabled dormer windows with fluttering white curtains. We walk on bare concrete with the lie of grass brushing our feet to the single entrance and enter by our own will.

I attempted, with minimal success, to add some casual into my "I belong here" walk past standardized wall art over standardized ugly wallpaper and into Reception. The taxpayer's patchouli was there too, of course, and the only reasons I could think of for the room to have molded plastic and steel chairs on green linoleum were waiting room tradition or possibly a very subtle form of torture. There were a few figures on chairs throughout the room, each as far from the others as possible, but it was not a place where you showed curiosity about others. I kept my eyes forward.

I'd never realized how quickly ingrained habits change, but when I looked for a physical means of taking a number, Arkia nudged me in the ribs and checked off Visitor on the welcome box floating in our peripheral vision. I followed suit quickly. In a previously empty kiosk opposite the entrance a woman-shaped figure slid smoothly into being and motion.

"Welcome," it said with precisely calculated warmth. "Please come to kiosk one." I wondered whether the thing's smile had been built from scratch or whether they'd done motion cap with the world's least human human. There was a projection of an old-style keyboard computer in its kiosk over which it held digitally manicured nails, affectation over affectation, falsehoods for familiarity's sake. The projected keys clattered loudly as it pretended to take notes on why we'd come into its lair.

"We're here to visit a friend," Arkia bubbled in fluent cheerleader. "She's here to get better, and we just want to be sure that she's doing great now!" I thought it was too much, but irony and sarcasm are things that even the best programmers have never managed to work out how to detect.

"Patient name?" It asked.

"Moxilliana Gerson, I've known her since we were tiny," she said the way some people insist on giving backstory to the disinterested. The mannequin opened its mouth to let us know that Unfortunately, right now Ms. Gerson's treatment is at a critical stage and only family are allowed to visit her (as though they'd come see a dirty little secret before it's all fixed). Before the first syllable, though... it locked.

This was the second-last favor the doc had been able to offer us, the deepest layer of their system that he could breach from outside with Malk's help, and we nodded cheerfully for the benefit of the watching room while the projection melted down. Streaks of burning code flashed through her stationary eyes and she broke into a loop, opening her mouth to speak before she flickered back to the start of the movement, image artifacts crazily cracking the porcelain of her teeth into what I could swear were a lizard's fangs.

Five seconds passed and it was over. One lock of its projected hair, previously perfectly smoothed into a tight hazel bun, was loose and hanging down in front of the projection's right eye. That lock of hair, and the eye behind it, were a matching hot pink. The doc had said we'd know when it worked.

"So while it's quite outside of regulations, in this case, we can make an exception," it said as though we'd been navigating red tape throughout and we gave the appropriate grateful smiles. "Just touch here and you'll have... you'll have..." it paused, the invasive directives from the doc that we be given physician-level access bashing themselves against its own security procedures. Its unchanged eye developed a twitch no human musculature could cause. One finger tapped compulsively on a meaningless key until it finally seemed to settle on halfway. "...have temporary intern-level access. Please touch to accept." The way the pink of the projection's hair was already visibly faded, color draining from the tip upward, strongly suggested urgency.

We pressed our hands against the release forms that sprang up in front of us and they swooped into badges that lighted on our chests. "Thank you very much," Arkia said politely as we moved past the evaporating figure of the receptionist and through the door behind it. No doubt due to the badges, the door opened at our touch.

Corridors passed, institutional white lighting glowing from the walls and ceiling. The aural ghost of an indifferent violin quartet shadowed us as we in turn followed the arrows floating at each intersection pointing to Rehabilitation. We'd studied the maps Malk had provided and knew that Rehabilitation covered three areas: Corrective Therapy, Mechanical Therapy and Behavioral Therapy. Mox would be in the last, Behavioral, and we'd need to pass through the other two to get there. Plan A for doing so, the one involving us having full physician's access and therefore just walking right in, was fucked from the get-to, which meant plan B. I didn't like plan B.

There was a shock of transition when we got to Corrective. The swinging pair of doors led to... an open, grassy field, stretching miles to rolling hills under light blue skies. The few fluffy clouds drifting overhead like fat sheep completed the cliché. We were on a winding path of gilded bricks that split off in fractal tendrils to small paved clearings, a circle of light wooden chairs in each. This was most definitely not on the floor plans I'd seen.

There were five clearings in sight, and in three of them I could see groups sitting together wearing matching straightjackets and hangdog expressions. The exception was the identical group leader for each in their standardized scrubs and black bob haircuts over expressions of unshakeable optimism on faces identical to the receptionist. Even their gestures of encouragement matched and I suspected that if I watched long enough they would sync up.

There was little enough danger in this ward given its near-total automation. Walk with confidence, stay on the main path, attract no attention. These were the harmlessly broken, lengths of their stays announced by the lengths of their hair after the additional implants to simulate pharmaceutical effects. The twitches and drool from slack jaws could have fit into an Edwardian lunatic asylum.

I must have been staring without realizing because my feet strayed from the paved path during a curve and I walked right into the wall that the open field denied was there. Narrow tunnels through an open field, of course. Even minimum security would only offer the illusion of any kind of freedom.

A few of the more alert patients in the nearest clearing turned to look at me and the eyerolls at my sheepish expression suggested that this was a fairly common occurrence. The exit was a waist-height wooden fence that wouldn't have deterred even the fluffiest of lambs but moved with the weight of reinforced steel when we swung it open.

Behavioral's idealized sky was gone with the speed of a film scene cut, replaced by exposed piping and industrial errata strung with harsh fluorescents. Mechanical Therapy was a hundred yards of fishtank-looking polyglass tubes, human-sized, and human-occupied, one apiece. Massive heavyweight signal dampeners plugged the top and bottom of each tube with chromed complexity. The specimens in the jars were a seemingly random cross-section of society, here a young woman with long hair split down the middle between purple and pink asleep on the floor, there an elderly man who looked like he would answer to Jeeves pacing the close confines. Somewhere unseen, further down the rows, was the man who was our backup plan.

Along with the stolen floor plans, we'd gotten a sizeable haul of patient records. We'd gone through the stolen records of every patient in Mechanical, looking for the most effective problem we could cause, and there was simply no comparison. Most of the poor souls in here were brothers in spirit to the ones back in the field: the ones who didn't ever properly mesh flesh and plastic, who broadcast feedback that grated along functioning implants like a dental drill in the brain.

Most were dangerous through no fault of their own, locked between the dampeners as AI locksmiths forever cycled through potential fixes with mechanistic determination. Most were victims. Brockwelter was absolutely not.

Brockwelter had managed to convince a doc to do some kind of black-market mods to his implants, though no one had been able to confirm just what. We were pretty sure that what he was doing was similar to our own override activation. Probably.

Rather than just break free of the spiderweb of data around him, though, his own id was broadcast at megawatt force. According to another file the doc who'd made the mods was in one of those chairs back in Corrective, working his way through his time spent in Brockwelter's head.