By James Parsons

Nimble fingers worked against the edges of an old newspaper clipping, swift and sure. With a crease the square became a triangle, giving way to the form of a diamond before each bend, pull, and practiced fold began to transform into a familiar shape. After a final bend of a wing the crane was placed on the edge of a nearby console with three other siblings, cut from the same newsrag material, all articles indirectly concerning the meteoric rise to power of a certain Weyland Consortium executive.

The necessity of this run had become more and more apparent to Quetzal over the last few years. One crane was a Weyland puff piece in a previous life, imminent domain masked as urban renewal, trampling on the rights of the disenfranchised and making a fortune in government grant credits in the process. Another concerned the establishment of a new division - the geostrategic research and neothermal development laboratories - off the coast of the Galapagos. The third was a Perrault article on the massive ecological devastation and loss of life resulting directly from G.R.N.D.L’s efforts to “achieve humankind’s true potential.”

The fourth and final news clipping was the boldest and most blatantly cruel of the bird quartet. An entire apartment complex had been leveled in the pursuit of a single runner, with several nearby Consortium-owned buildings - and its occupants - deliberately offered up as collateral damage to avoid accusations. It was an overwhelming show of power, and none of the hacktivist underground had dreamed Mills was capable of orchestrating such an event. The message was clear - stop screwing with us. And stop many did.

Quetzal, however, had prepared a response. With a swift swipe of a gloved hand the origami cranes were scattered to the floor, revealing a button on the console beneath. Dark eyes narrowed, a finger twitched, and with a jab of the button the process began. Eyes dilated before rolling back into skull, involuntary muscle spasms and electrical current shocked through flesh as an invisible hand reached through meat for the base of the brainstem, and reached further still into the soul. A genetically-modified body clad in black, framed in feathered green hair, sat idle as Quetzal was removed, the vessel cast aside. A run began.

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Quetzal was a streak of neon green in the folds of cyberspace, approaching the Weyland nerve center in downtown New Angeles. The perimeter was graced with the feeblest of intrusion countermeasures, projected into the digital void in the form of a carved glacier, cold and brittle. The usual method for circumventing such protective barriers would be to stop, analyze. Find the path of least resistance, activate a program that could avoid detection or, alternatively, utilize a backdoor to avoid the encounter altogether. Somewhere in the meatspace of Quetzal’s quarters a mouth curved into a subtle smile, and a fingertip flicked involuntarily. The neon streak blazed forward with reckless abandon, a vibrant green comet against the infinite black backdrop of the Void, until the comet’s crest hit the glass-like surface of the ice wall. There was a crackle of bright orange. Quetzal’s brow furrowed slightly in a dimly-lit room, and suddenly the carved ice shattered into a million sharp shards. The green comet blazed on.

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“What’s going on?” Elizabeth Mills shouted into the command room as she exited the elevator, woken in the penthouse suite far above by the quiet beep of a low-sec intrusion in the early hours of the morning.

A nervous man glanced up from his desk-unit, the de facto leader of the seven-person security team ever since his supervisor was forced into early retirement in a shallow grave. “We’re not certain yet, ma’am. It looks like a standard breach in the fourth tier, but….”

“But what?” She asked, glancing over the man’s shoulder at the red blinking on the unit below.

“There…was no attempt to hide it or leave it intact at all. The wall just…shattered.”

“Bring it up on the overhead. I want eyes on all asset, server, or encounter irregularities. Mark point of breach on tier four and tell me where our runner is headed the moment you detect it. And you…” She growled, snapping her fingers and pointing a sharp nail at an older man in the seventh seat, “…this chair is mine now. Go start a pot of coffee.”

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The green comet blazed forward in the pseudo-physical projection of the Net, shards of ice dissolving back into the Void in its wake. Quetzal’s eyes shifted beneath eyelids while the comet ducked and weaved with both measured grace and razor-sharp efficiency, dancing like electricity charting a path through a feeble conduit.

Finally, a hazy shadow appeared on the horizon of the Void. As the neon green streak approached the shadow remained obscured in the digital haze of the unknown. Undeterred, the comet blazed forward, crest once again making impact against the shroud of the intrusion countermeasure.

The new ICE did not yield. Slowly the shroud began to fall away as if evaporating, revealing transparent clouds swirling with blues, greens, and hot pinks against a backdrop of twinkling stars. A groan fell from Quetzal’s lips in meatspace, admiring the beauty of the cosmic nebula manifesting in the Net, but predicting a harsh penalty for witnessing it. Portions of the glowing cloud began to twist, pieces of cosmic material and planetary dust weaving into an ethereal arrow. A bow of stellar matter bent, and the nebula itself willed the arrow forward. It pierced with a blinding crack of light against the streak of green, and in the recesses of Quetzal’s mind the sound of pained hissing from the console itself could be heard in the physical realm.

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“Activity detected at the Nebula, it appears to have repelled the intruder.” The security team leader reported, relief plain on his face. The overhead display buzzed with rapidly flashing information, but at the center were four constants - one faded red rectangle at the lowest point, one blinking green outline above it, and two solidly-bordered shapes further upward.

Elizabeth Mills sat with a steaming cup of coffee in one hand, legs crossed, eyes narrowed. She continued to stare upward at the large overhead display, first at the blinking green rectangle, then to the faded outline of red before glancing back upward at the current encounter. “Shattered the wall, huh?” She muttered, taking a sip.

“None of you get too excited. That ice-shattering display was brazen, either we have a fool or someone who wants to be seen. A moralist sending a message….moralists have a particularly annoying quality.”

The leader’s face twisted with worry again, glancing over at Mills. “What’s that?”

Elizabeth placed her cup on the surface of the desk-unit, crossing her arms, eyes still staring with fiery intensity at the overhead display.

“Persistence.”

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Quetzal willed the body into partial physical awareness, continuing to perceive the twisting nebula while fingers simultaneously groped at the multi-keyed console on the table. Fingertips cycled through, two pre-loaded tools ready to launch. Physical awareness receded, fading back into full attention to the cosmic repelling force.

The green-streak of Net awareness that was Quetzal shifted, folded and twisted, tail of the neon comet firming into a narrow shaft leading to a body of light. The body split into two and tapered, then each half split in turn, tapering to a point again. Each fractional piece split with blinding speed, small, slivered green bristles guided by a narrow shaft until the new form was complete. Floating in the void of the Net before the Nebula was a paintbrush glowing with neon-green intensity.

The brush streaked forward and plunged amidst the colored clouds of the nebulous, interstellar entity. The astrological force seemed to crackle for a moment, pulsing with static imitating signal interference, before clouds tinged in hot-pinks, blues, and faint greens began to take on a new hue. Each swirling part of the Nebula slowly began to take on the same color of Quetzal’s hair, still set amidst a twinkling background of stars, as the image of the brush began to disintegrate. Rendered particles from the brush faded away, falling into the nebula until there was nothing but the clouds of stellar matter themselves, now imbued with the runner’s will.

Quetzal’s hand fell away from the console, reaching for a crude black box. It was taped against the modified flesh of a forearm, wires laced around a single narrow tube that penetrated skin - direct access to a vein and indirect access to the nervous system. After a brief second of hesitation fingertip met switch, flicking. Quetzal’s entire body convulsed. In the Net, the swirling green clouds of hijacked cosmic matter blazed, suddenly shining with enough neon intensity to drown out the flicker of rendered stars in the background. In meatspace, a faint trickle of blood dripped from Quetzal’s nose.

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Mills stared with quiet anger and confusion up at the overhead display. The green, blinking box marking the current third tier of the runner’s encounter blinked out of existence for a brief moment before appearing once more, wedged between the first and second tier.

“What is this?”

Six security techs furiously pounded against their desk-units, two cycling through known intrusion breaking programs, three desperately running through Nebulous code in an attempt to understand the ICE-shift taking place, and one wondering if he would live to see the morning.

“I…I don’t know, Ma’am. The runner appears to have found a new means to bypass security tiers without….encountering them.” The lead managed to stammer, his forehead beading with sweat.

A young technician threw her hands up in the air in frustration, marveling up at the overhead display as the blinking box disappeared yet again. “Surfing….” she said quietly, under her breath.

Elizabeth Mills turned her attention to the muttering technician. “Elaborate.”

“The…the runner. They appear to have partially re-written the Nebula code and is…now riding it. Using it to surf through the intrusion countermeasure tiers.”

Everyone in the command room glanced upward as the blinking box reappeared on the overhead display, now nestled in the most inner tier. The sweating security lead’s voice quaked, eyes turning to the ground. “Ma’am, the runner now has access to the refinery files.”

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The green Nebula hovered above a sea of black, blinking text scrolling across a massive, pixelated sheet of ancient copypaper, rendered against the darkness of the Void. The rapidly scrambling, blinking text revealed flashes of coherency:

“GEOTHERML FRACKING RECORDS”

“THERML VENT CORDS 0.6519° S , 90.4059° W”

“4TH QUART. PROFITS ACCT # 367334598”

In meatspace Quetzal’s mouth curved once again into a faint smile, and the console began to hum with the copying of data. Blinking, pixelated text began to peel from the sea of ancient eggshell white, floating upwards before disappearing into the folds of neon-green interstellar clouds. The streaming river of data leaked upward into Quetzal’s nebulous Net-presence, blinking black text still present on the pixelated page growing smaller and smaller, like a pond of digital data quickly drying up.

The last line of information floated upward into the hijacked astrological entity, and somewhere in the physical world a console ceased humming. The only thing left below was the manifestation of a solitary white sheet of paper against the infinite black of Net nothingness.

Quetzal’s smile widened, and the green Nebula descended onto the ancient piece of copypaper.

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Three grueling, silent, tense minutes passed as the group in the command center waited. It was all they could do, simply wait until the runner abandoned the attacked site and primary control reverted. Quetzal had chosen the perfect target - just low enough in priority that certain servers weren’t immediately imploded in corporate poison-pill fashion, but high enough that Elizabeth Mills would see significant personal monetary loss. Finally, the intrusion warning icon dissipated, the overhead display flickered, and all ICE-tiers returned once more to their normal places. The run had ended.

Mills leaned forward in her seventh seat, opening the GRNDL Refinery file. She snorted in disgust, flicking the contents up for the others in the room to see. The overhead display flickered, and the image of a folded origami crane appeared on the massive screen above.

Elizabeth Mills stood, fingertips straightening the dark fabric of her skirt before calmly handing her empty coffee cup to the older man, starting towards the elevator. Once inside she paused, turned, and leveled a calm glance at the lead tech. “Unfortunately I’ll require your letter of resignation signed and on my desk tomorrow morning.” The elevator doors shut.

The soon-to-be-deceased security leader fell to his knees.





END