Edge of the City of Lights
Fillydelphia, the city of lights.
Circuit Echo was hunted. Not physically, her feathers were safe from that chase for today. Even her usual 'friends' up in the Guard weren't coming around for lunch until tomorrow. Her pursuer was somepony new, at least she assumed it was a pony. Tech being what is was, they could be a manticore for all she could tell.
'Left.' The message flashed up in the corner of her vision, banished with a short command. A ping revealed what appeared to be a solid wall to hide a poorly hidden, barely large enough for her to fit through. Her brushing against it was enough to disrupt the cover, allowing her to squeeze through the crack. A "security expert" was probably responsible.
"You could at least tell me why you're chasing me!" It was slow going, but after an unacceptably long second she made it through. She was immediately assaulted with dozens of images and browser windows, staggered enough to skip directly to killing the processes. Able to move freely again, she bound through the node, appearing very clearly to the other Operator with access as a half corrupted grayscale mare bursting into the Node. "Sorry about this, we'll return to your regularly scheduled drek once I'm done." The other Operator scrambled to kill the node's Matrix connection, actually having a program to load up for just that purpose. Booted with administrator privileges. Three milliseconds later, and she had full access to the node. An absent thought closed the program just as it loaded. "Smart filly, but you need a kill switch. Try something analogue, it'll be faster." An elaborate door poofed into existence with a shower of sparkles, opening just so she could she gallop through. An afterthought killed the newly formed access point with the last of her admin rights before her new friend could close the node. It was a sloppy job and would leave a trail, but it was enough to buy her some time.
'Keep running, right then left.' Her patience had started to run thin with the impersonal messages, and it was infuriating that whoever it was had been able to send this many directly to her. She was Circuit Echo, she'd been Decking since before that was a word! She didn't have much choice though, that was the job. This had quickly turned from her favorite kind of Run into one of her worst in memory; but when you consider prancing into a bank's best kept secrets to be fun some might question your dictionary. She did slow for a moment to stare at the massive onyx spires spearing the skyline. Even from this far down in the virtual city they could be seen easily. Echo still had a strange fascination with the three towers. Hard to ignore them when they made Runs like this possible in the first place, holding up the Matrix after the first big Crash.
Her gallop brought her into one of the more populated server nodes of the city: a rather massive shopping center going by the name Hoof Trade. Full of bugs and holes, like any corp held "public" node, but the service staff was pretty spot on in their work. It really was impressive to look at, a massive spiderweb of silvery streets lined with vendors selling everything under the sun. Avatars of all kinds galloped along streets, flew between strands, and generally did a good job of giving euclidean geometry rude gestures. The problem was what Echo found upon taking her first step: a hole in the node made by the thousands of interconnected systems. Glitchspace, or "fragging potholes" as they were affectionately called by Runners, was the kind of node glitch that was both everywhere and made your everything hurt until you were fished out. Hoof Trade's service bots proved to be more reliable than it's structural programmers though, catching her before she even finished falling.
"We are sorry for the inconvenience valued shopper. Hoof Trade would like to offer a forma-" Was as far as the prerecorded message got before Echo cut it, starting to run again. It would take more than a 20% off coupon for a specific brand of hoofwarmers to slow her down, even if she couldn't hear that infernal buzzing closing in again. The outdoors hardly compared to the Matrix, and she had six pairs of the dang things already.
'Stop.' Echo continued for a few steps before registering the message, skidding to a stop in the middle of a crowd. A few bots approached her, deviated toward another poor fool with a quickly spoofed command. Echo glanced around, seeing nothing but near endless kiosks and stores, thousands of Operators going about their own business, a hive of avatars and consumerism. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, though she rarely went here, preferring more reliably structured shopping servers on principle if nothing else. A flicker beneath her hoof, flicking a mental switch to turn on Silent Running. Her avatar melted into the obscenely large data pouring through the node, and more importantly out of sight from the average Operator. 'Run.' A sigh rolled through her as she started off again, darting between the crowd as best she could. Most Operators didn't pay her any attention, that part of her rig still working. Those that did were careful to hide it, conventional wisdom claiming it to be better to keep yourself hidden in the crowd. No Runner worth their cred messes with shopping time, the only thing sacred to the lot of them.
Echo burst out of the crowd to leave Hoof Trade behind, the messages' guidance leading her out the administrator access terminal into the underlying Matrix. She skidded to a stop at a massive crossroads, relatively alone among mere hundreds of busy wageslaves trying to keep the whole network from crashing down. There were too many systems connected here for her to just choose at random, most of them commercial from what she could see. When no message came she listened, and only breathed a sigh of relief once she discovered she couldn't hear that infernal buzzing anymore. She pulled up her diagnostics, checking herself over in the brief lull. She'd need to make a new tail, her current one was eight kinds of corrupted from whatever that thing had done to it, a static-y mess of garbled code that barely even resembled her precious tail. Besides that she was mostly unharmed, though her attempt to disconnect was once again intercepted by something. Linklocked, still. She didn't have the time to attempt to trace whoever sent the command, not with as much jumping around that she'd done, but she had to guess a bot of some sort to have that kind of speed. She had jumped through a thousand nodes easy since this little chase started a few days ago, so there weren't many options as to who could do that. They'd need administrator rights in every node she tried to leave from, and would need to relock her each time she'd switched to one they didn't have control over. It was illegal to deny a disconnect, not that legality ever stopped corp security or Runners, so whoever was doing it had to have a serious beef with her. Or was hired by someone with enough cred to pay for one of the best and a massive chip on their shoulder.
Thinking back, it wasn't hard to pick out a few who might want her taken down. The Guard for one, though they weren't the type to resort to this kind of trick unless she'd recently attacked them directly, which she had been saving for the coming weekend. There were a few Runners she could see attempting it, but they usually didn't have this kind of cred or skill. That ruled out most of the newbies who usually came after her or the Shadow Orchard BBS. She had drawn the attention of a few of the Princesses' personal servants over the years, but they'd need personal oversight of the Princesses to target someone as universally valuable as her. Miss Moon was too busy overseeing the refitting of her moon bunker's Moonshot Cannon, and she'd always been relatively willing to turn a blind eye towards Echo's shenanigans thanks to their ongoing contract. Sunshine was in the middle of replacing her "secret" position as head of Solar Heavy Industries with redisguised self, and she had hired Echo plenty of times to slag her sister's dealings. Too valuable to try to send this much expertise after her. That left the rest of the Megas, and of them only Fluttercord Pharmaceuticals and NeoLibrary really had much of a reason to try and geek her right now. Discord had never really cared much about her, but she had recently sabotaged part of his Panacea project, so if his agents traced it back to her he might want her dead just for Fluttershy's sake. Razzle and Dazzle, the twin CEOs, had been trying to have her wiped out since the Carrot Cake Incident, and NeoLibrary in general had a pretty vicious attitude towards Deckers in general. But even with the hatred born of being the world's biggest electronics innovator, they had cut a deal with her two years ago in exchange for a certain fragment she'd found in Crystal Shield's vaults.
"Life of a celebrity, nopony will leave you alone. Hey, bot. You still there?" She didn't expect an answer, simply throwing the message out attached to a ping following the clearly spoofed address the last incoming message had. Needless to say she was very surprised when she got a response.
'Yes.' The message hovered in her center vision, stubbornly refusing to vanish like the others. Echo sat down, more a formality than anything in the Matrix, and turned her gaze toward the Spires.
"Well then, what next?" This was starting to get tedious, and worse her biological warning alerts were starting to go off. She had about two hours left, give or take, before she'd be waking dehydrated. She should have packed the IV with backup drips, but she hadn't seriously expected this to turn into a Deep Dive, only using it out of experience born paranoia.
'Wait.' That was not the answer she was looking for. She assumed that whoever this was couldn't see the various rude gestures she made, but it certainly made her feel better and it wouldn't be the first surprise today. To kill time until something happened she drew up one of her older bots, tinkered with it's programming and tried to convince the darned thing to do more than catastrophically fail when it boot up. If she had one failing, it was as a bot programmer. The failure kept her humble though, at least in her head, and there was some fun in poking something until it worked. The logic behind the things never appealed to her much, and it didn't seem to appeal to her ghostly watcher either. A hole opened up in front of her as another message appeared above it in her vision. 'Jump.' She stared down the pit into nothingness, ignoring the fact that there should be at least twenty more layers directly below her.
"You have got to be kidding me." She saved her changes, killed the bot application, and steadied herself. "You aren't kidding. Well, I've done stupider, probably. What did I always tell newbies? Never jump into the Sea if you don't want to get a do or die test for Technomancy?" She snorted and dived muzzle first into the pit, spinning forward to watch the nothingness rush up at her. The Resonance Sea beneath the Matrix, the foundation from which the Spires sprouted, was gone. The Matrix was gone. Gravity was gone. Everything melted into shining code beyond her comprehension, melding together into an impenetrable wall of everything. Far away, and yet right in front of her, something watched her. Something she couldn't see so much as feel, a sensory overload that send shards of ice through her brain as her headware tried to translate it into experience. All she got was a low buzzing that, if she listened particularly hard, sounded like singing. It hadn't been a bot, no bot could be this. No AI could be this. It was something far, far beyond anything she had encountered before, and yet she felt a familiarity beyond comprehension. It reached out, and with a hoof of brilliant everything, plucked away her Avatar's tail.
'Thank you. Disconnecting.' Flashed in the center of her vision, and apotheosis blinked away.
Circuit Echo stretched, every joint in her body stiff from laying still on the couch for the past two days. Most of the rest of her was pretty sore too, and more than anything she was starving. She pulled back the leg of a bright pink, fluffy hoofwarmer and tapped the band on her left forehoof, her homemade Conductor glowing a distinct crackling red. The Avalon Telekinetic Conductor worked well enough to open the fridge across the room and levitate a bottle of water most of the way to her. Though as with most of her prototypes, especially one like this one build off of cutting edge stolen blueprints, it failed just when she thought it'd finally worked. She grumbled to herself, flopped onto her side and grabbed the bottle's top between her teeth. She made a mental note to disassemble the thing and keep meddling with it, Nightmare Munitions hadn't invested billions into this project to frag it up this close to release. Especially with it being marketed as the first Manatech conductor to actually be able to handle a spell bigger than a flashlight, over sixty years of progress since the Awakening and magic broke. Mental note made, and cap finally off, she got to the busy task of downing an entire bottle of electrolyte water.
A glance back to her discarded Deck, the big keyboard sized computer sitting forlornly on its stand. It was more expensive than the apartment and everything in it, including almost all her extensive augmentation, and hoofbuilt by her with the best parts someone could get from having a majority stake in Fairshine Incorporated. The Runner's Spike was still connected to the port hidden under her mane; it's wire snaking to the Deck. Another prototype touch, a souvenir from a project the Corporate Council had... challenged her to crack through. It had been her motivation to build a proper Deck again, and probably the worst omen she'd had in a while. A message, more a virtual sticky note than anything, flashed in the center of the screen over a dozen disconnect errors. It wasn't her's, she'd wouldn't use such a flowery cursive script if somepony held a gun to her head. Maybe if it was to her Deck, but that just wasn't a fair choice.
'Packet received. Compensation for lost Runner Avatar Style #186 deposited into Cervine Orbital Bank account #3894018452. Runner fees deposited into Tree House Bank account #1863052896. ~The Librarian.'
"... You know what? I think I've earned eating out. Something fancy and expensive." A hoof reaches back, letting the Runner's Spike fall to the carpet with a heavy thunk. A small bag of carrots for the road, another bottle of water in her saddlebags, and her deck stashed away behind a literal wall of booby traps and electronic countermeasures. Everything taken care of she locked the oak door to her upper Fillydelphia apartment. Outside in the cold crisp air she looked up, smiling at the empty night sky. Not a hint of onyx in sight, and for once she was glad. She stretched out her wings, lights flickering along the old cybernetic prosthesis to her left, and was gone.
