Nanowrimo 2011 - Day 16

[KAT - SACRED MARRIAGE]

Kat felt appalled at the thought of eating rats, but there was no denying she felt better now having eaten them. She closed her eyes and sniffed the air, yes, others lurked nearby. She gave herself to the hunt - this way and that around piles of junk until she came up with a wriggling creature in both hands. Almost in congratulations there was a squeal from Shawna and one of the webcams exploded in a shower of sparks.

[SHAWNA - SACRED MARRIAGE]

The experiment - reversed polarity and using the microphone as a miniature speaker - failed dismally. Worse than losing sound she lost sight as well. The little webcam exploded. There was nothing wrong in her calculations, she was certain of it. Well, no, not any more. Doubt began eating at her.

“What? Try again? Are you insane?” doubt goaded, “Screw it up again, and mark my words, you will screw it up, and you’ll lose not just a webcam but binocular vision. Can you say the risk is worth it?”

It ate at her and yet she could taste the answer to the puzzle. Calculations said it ought to have worked … but in her enthusiasm she had shouted pumping more power through the tiny device than the numbers asked for. Question was, did she have the restraint to whisper at such a low level? Could she manage it?

Doubt stood there, arms crossed shaking its head, “You’ll screw up your vision again, you know you cant maintain that level of discipline right now.”

Shawna suddenly felt motivated to try, but it was going to cost everything if she didnt manage to restrain the urge to whoop with joy at re-establishing a communication channel with the outside world.

[KAT - SACRED MARRIAGE]

Kat tossed away the corpse of the first rat and started into the second. The thrill of the hunt, and life-giving pleasure of feeding was all she could sense. She felt restored.

Across the room the two green lights of the webcams were joined by a third, red light, on one webcam for just a moment.

“Can you hear me?” a whisper said.

Kat looked around, then back to Shawna. The voice was flat, without emotion, tightly constructed phonemes.

“Can you hear me?” the voice said again.

Kat nodded, finishing feeding from the second rat, “Yeah, I hear you.”

[SHAWNA - SACRED MARRIAGE]

Joy welled up inside Shawna and she clamped down the elecrical connections to and from the webcams. It didnt matter, blind or not, the joy filled her. She was free of the prison. Sight, hearing and now speach.

She restored the webcams.

“I want to try a local-net connection.” she said.

“What?” Kat said

“Come here, I need to touch you.” Shawna explained.

Kat moved within reach of Shawna’s badly damaged arm. She reached out and laid her hand on Kat - there was a tingle of an electrical connection between them. She could feel the warm glow of Kat’s skin in temperature sensors. She tried initiating a connection and was met with failure - she looked deeper for a log file - and saw the problem,

[### CONNECTION TERMINATED: INVALID PROTOCOL HANDLER ###]

What else had she lost in the frenzied attack? Her core personality was intact, and the heavily encrypted and compressed backup of The Watcher remained solidly present. Lower level routines were attempting to scan and fix invalid data sectors. She scanned the logs again,

[### CHKDSK ERROR 9185: INSUFFICIENT FREE SPACE ###]

Free space? She looked long and hard at the code that was executing and she saw the issue: it required safe, contiguous data storage to store a copy of a possibly damaged sector. Once the sector was verified it could be marked as safe, and used for the next in line to be checked. The storage checker was stuck though - her memory had sufficient free space but it was all marked as not having been checked, and therefore suspect. She’d lost too much and was running with the bare minimum. The problem was that if the storage checker could validate and fix the corrupted data segments she would gain free space enough to break out of her emergency mode of opperation. Ideally data files would be moved around in single blocks - defragmentation being a positive side-effect of the storage checker’s execution.

Seeing no other alternative she tweaked the bits of the storage checker and set it back to active processing status. It began using the empty space, despite it not being marked “clean”. A few data blocks later, and there was clean, contiguous space for it to work with. Then she noticed her mistake. In removing the safety check she had also removed a block-length check also. Large data - her executing core-conciousness - would be treated as a single file to be moved and the data space reclaimed and maked as “clean”. The problem was that the checker would write the copy into blocks far too small to accomodate all the data. She had limited time until deletion. She tried to slow the checker down but it was now running with priority status having had to archive some small system files. The clock began ticking.

She looked outside, “Kat. Problem!” she whispered.

[KAT - SACRED MARRIAGE]

“I have maybe three minutes left until I am erased.” Shawna said, “I need data storage, and I need it now. I need something capable of storing my core-conciousness.”

Kat scratched her head, then slapped herself on the forehead, “Duh … Between us, we have 2 copies of The Watcher, right?”

Shawna saw where she was heading, “Yes.”

Kat nodded, “If you upload into the implant and overwrite what is there, we lose only one, right?”

Shawna compared her executing core-conciousness with the compressed image of The Watcher, considerably smaller in volume.

“Yes. About 2 minutes remaining.”

Kat grabbed a fibre-optic cable from the staock of electronics and inserted one end into a waiting connector on Shawna’s body.

She paused, “Are you sure this is the only way?” she asked.

Shawna spoke quickly, “Local-net connection failed we need a hardline.”

Kat grabbed a jagged shard of metal from the nearby pile and nodded. One. Two. On three she slashed at the side of her head just behind her left ear. Again, slicing through skin to the bone underneath. She ran bloody fingertips across the exposed skull until she found it - a small hole, matching the dimensions of the fibre-optic connection in her hand.

“One minute…” Shawna said.

Kat pressed the connector into the hole.

Nothing seemed to happen.

[SHAWNA - SACRED MARRIAGE]

One moment she was watching the storage checker moving bytes of data, the next she was in complete darkness. She ran a diagnostic and found the storage checker wasnt executing in this new address-space. Had she…? Was she executing in the implant? She pressed outward, noting that there were no processing errors. There were no data errors. Storage was considerably more than she had anticipated, better than was available to the remains of her body in fact. New hardware caught her attention - interfaces between flesh and electronics - connections out to (she tested them) the visual cortex, motor cortex, hearing, and sensation processors.

She moved back to the hardline and found the connection terminated, cable gone.

No! Not agan!

She shook an impotent fist at the powers that be for trapping her once again.

[KAT - SACRED MARRIAGE]

Searched the other piles of junk for anything of use and noticed the battered chassis of a cherry picker was buried inside. There were a couple of power packs she she lift those and returned to Shawna. She plugged them in. Those would help. She gave herself to digging again, looking for other items of use. Finding nothing obvious she stretched out on the hard dirt floor, resting head on her arm, and tried to sleep.