Since when had chatting with Halen been so enjoyable? Sure, there had been times when they’d cooperated in designing this or that, their minds managing to work together for single sentences until their ideas on how to proceed collided, and they were left growling at one another and throwing around insults like the children they were. This, though? Sitting and chatting like they were friends, the snide remarks they sent each other’s way holding more teasing energy than malicious intent?
Yeah, this was new—new, and enjoyable.
As much as Valor tried to keep up with her when it came to hacking, he didn’t have a true passion for coding the way she did. Even before things with Rafe had become so tense, his own interest in skill design had generally been dedicated to more practical matters: he was, even now, the one who tested her skills, submitting whatever she wanted legitimately released under his own name to D-Tect for her.
While he was still struggling to tell his mothers, Emilia knew he wanted to go work for the agency that managed skills. Some of his job would be coding, but it would be more testing and designing the frameworks that would be used to stop each of the approved skills, which would then be forwarded on to law enforcement, including The Black Knot. Her friend—yes, despite their current issues Rafe was still 100% one of her best friends—might be worried about his family’s reaction to his desire
not
to go into the family business, but she didn’t think they’d have a problem with it for the simple fact that he’d be able to give them more information on the skills that weren’t being approved—the place where the real danger lay.
It was the skills that D-Tect rejected, for one reason or another, that tended to be the most dangerous. Most skill designers weren’t stupid enough to submit skills they knew would be rejected—seriously, while all counterskills were officially coded by D-Tect, it wasn’t uncommon for skill designers to make one themself, just to make sure they didn’t end up on some watchlist for being able to design skills D-Tect, and therefore law enforcement, couldn’t stop. Still, occasionally someone would submit an unstoppable skill, although their inability to be stopped was usually more accident than intent—after all, it wasn’t like there were that many unregistered, unstoppable-by-design skills out there, being used by criminals; rather, after the clones pulled the code for an unregistered skill out of a criminal’s head, D-Tect was almost always capable of designing a counter and all was right in the world again.
That said, there were a few of them out there who had theories on designing unstoppable skills. Most of them—herself and Halen included—weren’t stupid enough to actually implement any of those methods, and the few hackers who had?
Well, they didn’t last long. It didn’t matter that they usually worked for criminals—often against their will, unfortunately. Even criminals knew that unstoppable skills weren’t a door to be opened; it was for similar reasons that they kept their lavender codes on such short leashes, understanding the danger of using their nigh unstoppable human weapons
too much
. If they had skills that even law enforcement couldn’t stop, it was only a matter of time until other criminal organizations—and law enforcement themself—had them as well.
The point was, Rafe was worried about
letting his mothers down
for nothing. D-Tect was notoriously tight-lipped about exactly how many skill designers they had on watchlists. With Rafe in their organization, they’d be able to get a better picture of the situation—not that Emilia thought it was that bad.
If anything, she and Halen were the two of the most high-risk hackers, due simply to their constant creation of skills they had no intention of submitting for official approval. It wasn’t that any of them were overtly dangerous, more just annoying… with a high risk of causing damage to the surrounding area, the school they had trashed being a prime example of just how destructive their skills could be. Few of their skills, even the occasional one they’d shared between one another, had a counter, no way for either of them to stop it, were it used once more—and many of their skills had been used multiple times in their war. That just wasn’t part of their game—and stars above, did Emilia enjoy the confirmation that Halen enjoyed their prank war just as much as she did, that he even missed it.
So, no. Emilia didn’t think Rafe’s terrifying mothers would care that their child wanted to go into another career, nor was Rafe, even in their softest, most enjoyable moments, the sort of person who vibrated with excitement to be discussing random theories about skills and what they could program, if they could only work around some issue or another.
Halen, though?
Halen was the perfect person to talk to, and as they ate their lunch and began slowly making their way through the northern district, back to the Seer’ik’tine end of the restaurant bridge, they chatted about this and that—since when had Halen had such firm opinions on vegetarian food?—eventually settling on discussing a research paper that had recently come out of The Ridge Rind Institute.
The Ridge Rind was a research institute located near the northern tip of the First Tide, which edged up against the Rind mountain range that acted as a barrier between Baalphoria and The Northern Tribes. Despite being known for the stunning views of its outer buildings, set into the snowy peaks, the majority of the institute was actually far underground—like,
far,
far underground. Far enough that, even if they massively fucked up in testing something, the damage wouldn’t even hit the surface; rather, the aether’s inability to support skills that grew too large would lead to skill failure nearly two kilometres from the base of the mountain range.
Granted, anyone in the underground portion of the institute might die, and given how big the institute was—it extended almost a hundred kilometres under the spread of the mountain range, while also being several hundred floors deep and another four kilometres wide throughout much of it—that section of the mountain range might very well collapse.
Like the Twintides, however, the Rind Range was artificial! The nearest fault line—which was parent to the Turneus range that bisected northern and southern Baalphoria, The Penns, and The Strats—was hundreds of kilometres south, so, probably, there wouldn’t be any catastrophic earthquakes if disaster struck?
Maybe?
Hopefully?
Better to perhaps just hope nothing bad happened and bleeding-edge skill and aether research continued coming out of the institute for centuries to come!
That didn’t mean most people weren’t still a little wary of The Ridge Rind and the research they did, and combined with the fact that the shit that came out of it was simultaneously obnoxiously bleeding-edge and confusing to anyone who didn’t already have the firmest gasp of their previous research, most people just tended to ignore its existence altogether.
Out of sight, out of mind—seriously, even news organizations that covered skills, rare as those organizations were, didn’t touch the things that came out of The Ridge Rind. They’d cover Hail’s innovations and wait until a normal university released a less confusing paper confirming whatever research had come out of the institute decades earlier; ignore until it was actually relevant to people, with applications that didn’t require massive computers to compute code Censors would balk at.
Emilia didn’t ignore its research; Halen either, apparently.
How had they never talked about this? Apparently they’d both had alerts set up for new papers out of The Ridge Rind since before their Censors were installed, all their knowledge of skills theoretical, the papers showing up in their kiddy computers for them to read over on the screens that usually disappeared from Baalphorians’ lives the moment their Censor was installed. Yet, it had never come up and that was a fucking tragedy—one they needed to remedy, immediately.
The good thing about never talking about it? They now had
centuries
of research papers to discuss!
“Did you design this system?” Halen asked as his mind dug through the system she had designed after her and Olivier’s exchanges of annotations and whatever side quests they found themselves on had grown excessively, gloriously large.
“Yes,” she replied, letting her Censor do the hard work of setting up each of the papers that had come out of the institute into a mirror of her annotations system, “but I never bothered setting it for more than myself.”
“Didn’t give the cute lawyer a copy?”
“You think Olivier is cute?” Emilia asked, glancing over her messy code and trying to determine if she could extend it to Halen without actually logging into the Virtuosi System. While Baalphorian embassies always had rigs she could borrow for the time skew, she wasn’t sure she’d have a chance to stop at the Seer’ik’tine one before they left, and who knew if wherever they ended up next would be near an embassy.
Halen gave a noncommittal noise as he left a note on one of the class transcripts about a disagreement that had occurred between his family’s company and their landscapers over some damage a skill had caused. Apparently, the damage hadn’t been enough for his family to sue over, but the company had mentioned something about an obscure law that, in very specific circumstances, meant the designer of the skill had to be sued before whoever had fucked up its execution. As this had been related to him secondhand over twenty years ago, Halen had no idea what the law was—and a poke at her Censor revealed it had no idea what the law could be either, although that wasn’t exactly uncommon, what with so many strange and specific laws on the books, many only applicable to certain D-Levels or in certain locations—but it had always bothered him. While he didn’t say as much, clearly, he was asking her to ask Olivier about it.
“Can’t say I’m into men, but if I were going to have a threesome that included another man, I’d like someone nice to look at,” Halen replied, blinking out of her notes and into the code for the system she’d opened to him.
“Meaning, if you were gonna have a threesome, Olivier and some pretty girl would be acceptable?”
“Mhm…” her former classmate replied absently. “Fucking stars is this code a disaster.”
“Quick and messy~ Just how I like it~”
“Quick? Really?”
“Quick and messy and plentiful~” Emilia amended. It wasn’t a secret she enjoyed some good group sex. Quick just meant more partners, more mess, more hands on her skin, more smiles and laughter and soft, panting breaths burned into her memory.
“Are you giving this to me so I can attempt to make it work for both of us?” Halen asked, so much pain laced through his voice as he grimaced at the code, Emilia had to fight down a laugh.
Generally, it was a bit of a toss up whether her code would come out more pretty or more chaotic. While it was always a bit of both, this particular code had been done up in a moment of panic because the situation with the annotations had suddenly become so overwhelming that
something
had to be done. It had been done in the early hours while she was hopped up on caffeine and sugar and sex, Taelor eventually appearing to drag her back to bed. Even then, he’d had to force her to sleep—there had been more sex and Taelor wiggling his way into her Censor and dragging her under with a firm grip on her mind. A couple hours of snuggly sleep later, she’d woken, eaten a piece of fruit, and gone right back to it far, far from Taelor, lest he drag her back to bed.
“Why is the last bit of code so…”
“Perfect? Beautiful?”
“Deranged.”
“What!? It’s perfectly reasonable!” It was, truly. After the sleep and sex and fruit, she’d been in a more sensible mood and finished the system off with some perfectly legitimate code.
“Yeah,” Halen laughed, “that’s why it’s deranged. The mood is completely different. If I hadn’t seen how varied your code can be before, I would assume two different people coded this.”
“Rude.” Probably also correct, but mostly rude.
“So… I can take this and make it work for two people?” Halen asked, all innocent helpfulness that was definitely suspicious.
“Totally~” Emilia agreed, popping a piece of candy Halen had been too slow to stop her from buying into her mouth. Would Olivier reprimand him for returning her on a sugar high? Emilia kinda hoped he did. Watching the older man reprimand Halen might be nice…
“And add in any other features I think might be useful?”
“Sure. It’ll look like three people coded it.” For all that their coding styles were quite different, if he were just expanding her system to allow multiple hosts, Halen might very well have matched her style, just because. There was no way he’d be doing that, if he were going to start adding in new features—the man’s code was too deliberate, and him coding her chaos for more than a tiny addition would drive him mad.
“And I’ll just tidy up your code while I go.”
“No way.”
“Oh, come on, Emilia,” Halen all but whined. It was so close to a whine, Emilia could practically taste it. If she pushed a bit more, would he whine? She kinda wanted to try. “At least let me change the last bit—”
“No.”
“But—”
“No.”
“It’s weird.”
“So?”
“So, if you were going to release this—”
“Who says I want to release it?” Emilia asked. Granted, she’d already been thinking about releasing it. There were similar functions that schools and workplaces used for collaboration, but when she’d tested them, none had felt quite right. Plus, most had cost a small fortune. So not helpful to friends who just wanted to discuss this or that in a simultaneously organized and chaotic manner.
The look Halen gave her suggested he could read her thoughts—he couldn’t; while she was letting him into her Censor to examine the system, she had locked him out of her thoughts—and that he was going to clean up her code whether she agreed or not.
Fine; she’d get him back for it later—she had his permission to fuck with him now, after all.
Arc 9 | Chapter 307: Absolutely Deranged
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