excerpt from Deviation: Android

CENTRAL DATABANKS, File 31010215a
---DATE: 2001/02/15
---AUTHOR: Dovelin, Liya K
---SUBJECT: Slide
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I am a white shadow. You do not see me. I am supposed to be here, a natural thing, I belong in this system. I am a white shadow, you do not see me.
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This isn't my job, it's my life, and that life could be on the line if I make one wrong move. There isn't room for mistakes when you're hacking into a top of the line system. Barrier programs are simple enough to breach, it's the ICE you have to watch out for.
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My avatar is a smokescreen. I'm merely a piece of code, a snippet of White IC. I'm harmless, innocent. I belong here. You do not see me, because you have no need to see me.
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I'm already inside. Condition normal, no alarms, no IC has been alerted. That's the way a run should go. It doesn't always work that way, and then you have to get out with your tail and the data intact. It's the data that matters most. Scramble the data, chummer, and it's all over -- unless you're really good, and if you were, you wouldn't have been caught.
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Having to pay someone to fix your mistakes is the quick way to early retirement.
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I've been doing this for as long as I can remember. My memory is eternal, boundless, vast and cavernous in the grips of my pet AIs. I never make the same mistake twice. You make mistakes, you're out of a job. Or your life. Or your deck.
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Risky business. I like it that way.
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Passive alerts are easy enough to slide through without setting off system alarms. A coy toss of the mane and the right snips of code, and the 'doorman' doesn't see me at all.
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I am a white shadow, I am a ghost, I am supposed to be here. You do not see me.
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Some runners think it's more fun to set off the alarms and fight their way out. Builds up a rep that way. They give themselves flashy names, give off attitude. They burn out fast.
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I think it's stupid. Better to be nothing but a ghost in the machine, a spook only discussed in the most quiet corners, in the darkest of whispers, a myth, a legend that has never been proven.
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I am only a rumour.
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It's not ego. There's no room for ego. You don't get paid for being loud, you're paid for being good. I'm one of the best. It's simple fact. I've been in your system, and you never knew. I am a shadow, and you do not see me.
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I am the ghost in the machine.
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Passive alerts are common on every system capable of supporting IC. They can be set off by almost anything, including power surges. If you're good, you create the surge yourself. Most ICE is dormant until triggered. That's what the white ghosts are for, the doormen, the triggers, the tunnels and gates. Motion detectors. Their effectiveness depends on both the programmer, and the ability of the hacker sneaking past it. More importantly, their effectiveness depends on the IC linked to it.
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There's a disturbance across the system. I hear the code go yellow. Hunter goes on the alert, and I'm tracking. I find what I'm looking for, and my avatar is grinning. It's not me. Someone else has tried the slide, and are in the process of failing it. The system is alterted to an intruder.
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It will be harder now, but they're still not looking for me. I am a white shadow, I'm supposed to be here, you do not see me.
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But now there is a new player in the game. There's no room for ego, but there's always room for a lesson. The fledgling trying to hack in needs a lesson. The system is reacting. So am I.
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He's easy enough to spot. Kid is using a crap deck, with substandard software. I'm impressed, though. He shouldn't have made it this far on his gear. If he survives this run, he's got promise. He's trying the shadow trick as well, but the White Knight is too hexagonal, too blocky. He doesn't belong, and the system knows it.
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I wonder what he's after. I won't have time to find out.
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As if to taunt his inferiority, the Grey Samurai coming after him is poetry in motion, fluid code enhancing each menacing slash of the blade towards his prey. This kid is toast, unless he's fast.
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I sit back and watch. I have time.
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Direct combat is something you want to avoid. Feedback can be a pain in the ass and in the deck. Walk into the wrong system, and Black IC will keep you there. I've seen some of the less savory results of failing to slide past the Black. Game over, man.
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The intruder is trying. The Knight is putting up a valiant defense against the Killer IC of the Samurai, but he's just not fast enough. If he was smart, the kid would have dumped the run. He hasn't. Proof that he's young, and new. The Samurai is playing with him, waiting.
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Tiny spiders flicker across the landscape. They're all heading towards the Knight, leaving glimmering webs in their path. Tracers. This is what the Samurai was waiting for. This is bad. It's also informative for me. The programmer knew what he was doing, but he was counting on intruders to expect minimal reaction.
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A spinneret raises, and a hit is scored on the Knight, webbed lightly across his back. He's in combat, he doesn't notice. The Trace has begun. If he's lucky, he won't get Burned, too.
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Game is already over.
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I turn and go on. It's not my job to save his ass. I have a job of my own to take care of, and holding the hand of a newcomer isn't my problem.
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I am a white shadow. I belong here. You do not see me.
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Your data is mine.
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And you never knew I was here.
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END FILE

Wow. I liked that a lot, CP. Only two things that threw me off - I may have missed it but I didn't read where IC was explained. Perhaps it's not supposed to be explained - then I understand. "You do not see me" worked okay for me in the first lines but later it snapped me out of the prose. I think because the narrator is directing the read away from the reader for awhile and suddenly the word "you" pops up again and brought me out of my reading hypnosis. Know what I mean? Like if it had read "I cannot be seen" the reader will continue focusing on the story, forgetting themselves. I think your skills are f**king fantastic. I'm envious. Your prose reads very easily and pulled me along wanting more. I liked the techie speak and insider words like "deck" and "chummer". The lingo made me feel like I was in the company of a narrator who knew what they're talking about even though the words could just be made up. Wow. Two thumbs and two big toes straight up!!! Awesome crafting.

"Slide" is part of a much bigger project, so sometimes details and explanations get missed out on when I post excerpts. (Pssst, it's Intrusion Countermeasures. :) ) One of my favourite Pure Geek pieces is "Not that kind of game," which I may end up posting here eventually. Sometimes I get carried away with or other complicated ideas (get me started on epidemiology, and you'll be talked to until you're out cold from boredom), and it's hard to keep in mind that not everyone reading knows what I'm talking about.

I was pretty certain I'd reveal my low-tech level of knowledge with that question. :] I hope you post more work.

Remember you said that when you start regretting it later. ;)

Well, that certainly was different! Reminds me of a less-technical venture some time back called, "Tron". Now that I have read this short extract, I'll have to "double" my firewall efforts, CB. Nice work. A bit repetitive here and there, but, knowing how a program loops, I wonder if that was the intent.

Ooooo, nice catch!

I agree with nu-be, the "you don't see me" lines should be used sparingly. It took me a bit to realize that was a defense screen. At first, I thought the character was just a program, but then she starts talking a bit cheeky, so it through me for a loop. Maybe if you put that part in italics, it would help separate it out. The one thing I'd suggest is to change a few of your more "techy" paragraphs so they show more rather than throw information at us: Passive alerts are common on every system capable of supporting IC. They can be set off by almost anything, including power surges. If you're good, you create the surge yourself. Most ICE is dormant until triggered. That's what the white ghosts are for, the doormen, the triggers, the tunnels and gates. Motion detectors. Their effectiveness depends on both the programmer, and the ability of the hacker sneaking past it. More importantly, their effectiveness depends on the IC linked to it. Why not have her do something, such as send a small surge, and let us see the reaction, instead of telling us how a reaction would happen? You also have a few run on sentences and misplaced commas, here and there, but I'm sure you'd catch them when you're at the editing stage. I definitely enjoyed the story, and I think that it would work nicely as a longer story - perhaps about the job that sent her into the system, or part of a book. Cheers!

I think the repitition "of you don't see me "is a good emphatic tool. Its kinda like when a speaker pounds his hand on the podium several times to emphasize a point, or when the rev says "We all see the light, we want to walk in the light, we want to live in the light, we want to be the light, the light of the living God"....exhale while the crowd says Amen. Well CP it was a long night here in the shadowland of the nightworker. I hear my pillow calling.

"Slide" is part of a many hundred page on-going project. A single entry excised from a "journal," thus the weird format. I tend to sneak in a lot of code loops and spirals when doing "run" posts like this one. Yeah, it can get repetitive, which is why I don't do them often. And I've tried to keep the tech out of them, but after seeing the people that actually read the journal daily, I end up writing more for and from me than writing "down" and it's probably a bad habit on my part. The journal is done in "her voice," with her sometimes free-association thinking (makes for a lot of incomplete sentences), weird comma emphasis, and other "errors" that are deliberate but don't really make sense out of context like this.