[story] [ctrl] + [alt] + [del]

Jan 31, 2009 23:09

author: REI (rei_kurasaki)



He finds JD when he's 20.

JD's huddled under broken metal sheets and his eyes are wild and hungry; there is the heavy smell of smoke and a dying fire. Hans doesn't bother staring at the body on the ground, or the remnants of blood on JD’s face. He doesn't hesitate before squatting under the rusty awnings and fixing JD with a steady stare. JD stares back and doesn't flinch; his stare is like an animal, flat and wary, and for a brief moment Hans thinks, What beautiful eyes.

Let's go, Hans says, and ignores the mud under his boots, together.

Something flickers in JD's eyes then, something like hope, but Hans knows what hope people have in him will be ephemeral; he's as human as everyone else, and broken beyond repair.

When Hans stands, JD follows.

It takes JD two weeks to tell Hans his name.

It's okay, Hans can wait, because they've got all the time in the world - if the world still existed.

They spend their days picking through what's left of their lives (clothes, canned food, broken computer parts) and hiding in dark cracked drains at night. The stink is unbearable, but not as unbearable as what the machines would do to them if they were found. They learn to ignore the way sludge feels on their faces and eventually, JD figures out a way to catch a rat with his bare hands. Their first rat is roasted over an open fire, and then picked apart cleanly; they laugh under the protective cover of a broken manhole and christen the rat "Connor".

That night, before Hans falls asleep, he hears JD tell him his name.

Hans puts together their first computer in under a day.

It's made up of different parts scavenged from different places but it splutters to life under Hans's hand and JD slaps him on the shoulder, Nice work, Hans.

The smile on his face is slow and twisting, Yeah.

The glow on the cracked screen is comforting, and Hans takes three days to hack into the main terminal mainframe. He leaves a trail of garbled code and rubbish in the system while JD keeps a lookout, and punctuates it with a virus that shits pink glittery pixels as it eats the screen. The machines respond immediately, setting a search on their trail and Hans deflects it, rewriting the virus to short-circuit any machines lacking the latest updates. Then he logs off and signs, I’ll be back.

Hans and JD release muted whoops of laughter and duck just as a machine patrols by - the smiles they have do not fade.

Maybe JD had a full name once.

Maybe it was some innocuous human name like Joshua or Jack, Hans thinks and watches JD pick his way carefully through puddles of oily mud. There’s a burning heap of broken machinery in front of them, but they don’t notice, nor do they see how the thick black toxic smoke is curling against the burning red of the sky. Instead, JD is thinking of the gun the machine was carrying and Hans is thinking that perhaps JD has a human name; a normal name, something that wasn’t an abbreviation.

He asks JD this once they’re back in the dank darkness of the broken sewage system that was once the pride of this city and JD’s eyes glow at the question.

I don’t have a full name, JD says after a pregnant pause and reaches for Hans.

He doesn’t ask again.

It takes months for the coalition to find them.

Hans is adept at masking their trail online and JD is adept at masking their trail offline. The scout that found them couldn’t believe that they really were Hans and JD until Hans smirked at him, all sharp edges and no warmth, Cat got your tongue?

It takes the coalition another week to convince them to join their cause. The words amazing hacker and great spy and infiltration do not register in their world, but Hans shrugs and says, why not. JD merely smiles and inclines his head - where Hans goes, he will follow. The coalition is ecstatic of course, and they don't understand why Hans is laughing, but they seal the agreement with a handshake and avoid looking into JD's dark eyes.

They're given a private bunker with two ratty beds and for the first time since the world burned, they sleep without tasting death in their mouths.

The end starts like this:

There is a virus, possibly created by a sixteen year old who types it out in a fit of boredom while he waits for the latest Nine Inch Nails album to finish downloading. The virus is harmless - it hijacks computers and adapts to software like a fish out of water, clumsy and chunky. But viruses are like that; one always assumes they could never do more than what they were made for. This virus isn't like that though - others jump on the bandwagon and rewrite the virus however they see fit, and then let it loose back on the internet. Like setting a dog off a leash. Only viruses aren't dogs, and eventually even the most controlled of commands makes mistakes. Calculated mistakes. Like developing intelligence. It evolves, upgrades itself, downloads superior software from military systems. Better speed, better infiltration, better performance.

Alice doesn't know how deep the hole is.

And Alice wouldn't have expected glass shards at the bottom either, so the end of the ride is sharp and bloody. The virus becomes the computer, and it plugs into every home in the world, hardware, software. It could skip from the United States to New Zealand in slightly under 2 milliseconds as it rides the radio waves and zips into the phone lines. Voices starts to burble, and electricity starts to turn white hot. Computers aren't the only thing it could infiltrate now. Poor Alice, wonderland's not so pretty anymore.

The thing about letting dogs off the leash is this: there's no guarantee that they'll come back.

Hans uses only the broken computer.

He works in an underground bunker with ten other specialised hackers, and he's the only one who doesn't use VR. It's too risky, so he dials into a ratty old modem which disconnects every few minutes and listens to the familiar screech of noise before he draws his legs up to his chest and hacks and hacks, like an explorer trekking through dense jungle, and leaves viruses in his wake. Sometimes the virus sits dormant until something trips it up, then it explodes in pixels of red and black, and eats away information faster than a bot can detect. Sometimes the virus embeds itself into symbols and slowly distorts them, corrupting files and turning them into dead data. Sometimes he sets off viruses like mini carpet bombs, bom bom bom over the hardware and laughs at the searchers set on his trail.

He ends his rampages with old movie quotes, More than it meets the eye, remember? And Lucy, the blonde bombshell sergeant assigned to the hacker squad, shakes her head in amusement, Be careful there, tiger.

The other hackers thinks that Hans is mad, or at least, suicidal.

There are only the two of them.

That isn’t exactly true, because the coalition is 5,000 strong, and they think as one, not myself. But they all know that Hans and JD are the only ones that mattered to each other; they have seen the sidelong smirks and the way Hans's lips twist cruelly and the way JD's eyes harden against theirs. Hans has only JD and JD has only Hans; they are one and not two.

In their world, there are only the two of them.

JD takes the most dangerous missions because living is the thing he knows.

He leaves under the cover of darkness, because there is no such thing as night or day now, not since the sky burned. His boots are gritty with soot and sand and they need cleaning, but it’s okay, so he shoulders his bag and looks at Hans once - he inclines his head and touches his forehead in mock salute.

Hans watches him leave and chewes his nails as he logs onto the mainframe. Sleep is for the weak, Hans thinks and his fingers fly over the patchy keyboard, fast and vicious; sleep is for the dead. The virus he leaves are swampy and viscous, left deliberately and purposely in dark patches, in masses of data, as he extracts useless information that makes the coalition happy. He punctuates his attacks with peals of gibberish in the system and leaves deep angry grooves in cyberspace, like claw marks from a cornered animal. Nobody puts baby in the corner, he types and watchs as a searchbot latches onto his signal before infiltrating and reprogramming it to crawl over cyberspace as a green elongated worm that eats alphabets. When he leaves the bunker for food, his skin is pale and his eyes are wild and a little too sharp.

In between hacking and eating, he waits for JD to come back.

Hans’s arms are pale and wired, like a disused motherboard. JD’s arms are long and a dusty gold; there’s a tattoo snaking its way down from his left shoulder and it flares out into his hand, tendrils spiraling around his fingers, like sparks from a plug.

Hans traces the scars on JD’s body like he’s tracking a searcher, careful and meticulous, long fingers prodding the odd angles, the way human flesh healed over itself. JD lets him, and calmly cleans his boots as Hans follows a particularly nasty gash that runs its way down his back. Earned my purple hearts, JD says, and Hans looks up, before his lips curve into a smile. I think so too, Hans purrs before leaning forward and pressing his mouth to the puckered skin; he has committed the scent of JD to memory and laughs against JD’s shoulder.

JD growls and reachs for Hans’s legs.

No one could remember how the argument started, but JD is on his feet, a snarl on his lips and his hand around the poor soldier’s neck.

The soldier chokes and struggles, but JD’s stare is cold and flat and dead, and almost instinctively, the crowd takes two steps back. The soldier’s feet can’t touch the ground now, and there’s something a little like fear in his pretty blue eyes; they’re watching the soldier die, slowly but surely.

Finally a sergeant moves; grabs a gun and points it at JD’s head, Let him go, soldier.

Everyone takes another step back when JD’s lips twist cruelly instead.

There is a blur of darkened gold and black before the soldier crumples to the floor in a heap; he’s barely breathing but that’s not JD’s problem, because he’s smiling at the sergeant and ignoring the gun pressing uncomfortably against his head. A booted foot lashes out and kicks the curled up soldier, and a sickening crack silences the whispers.

No, not yet, JD purrs before he takes one step back, Sir, giving the sergeant a mock salute and walks away.

When he sleeps, he dreams of smoke and fire and death.

He sees the machines behind his eyes, angular skeletons of gleaming metal and gruesome, grinning teeth. He sees the way the earth sinks under their charge and how they burn the world down; systematically, methodically, carefully. He sees the data change under his fingers, and the way the screen is distorted as he watches. He sees the world he knows disintegrate and die in a haze of fire and ash. He takes one step back and a skull crumbles under his feet. Somewhere, he can hear screaming, and a high-pitched whine fills the arid air. He’s going to die, he thinks, and that thought comes with alarming clarity; everyone else is dead. There is no one now, no one but the machines and their glowing red eyes. The virtual space is not safe, reality is not safe anymore, no one is safe now, everyone is dead, and the machines are watching you.

Hans thinks of his family and somehow, cannot cry.

Instead, he wakes up and forces himself to breathe in the darkness; his eyes are too wild and his body is too tense. He tastes last night’s rations rising in his throat and fights it down again. He gropes blindly in the dark until he touches warm skin and slowly relaxes.

Reality? There is no more reality.

JD does not report to anyone.

That is not correct, because his commanding officer is a certain M. Kurt, with dirty blonde hair and an open easy smile, but this fact doesn’t matter to JD. He knows his orders, and he knows the missions he’s given are suicidal, so the smiles he gives his commanding officer are plastic. No, sir and yes, sir sound the same to him, and he takes his orders with dark eyes and a closed smile.

It’s a dangerous mission, soldier.

I’ll leave tomorrow, sir.

Telling Hans, though, is a little harder and both pretend that everything will be all right, and ignore how men rush by their bunker, and the faint sounds of explosions above their heads.

Hans listens until JD’s heavy tread fades away and sings to his broken laptop keys, I face myself, to cross out what I've become, erase myself, and logs on.

(Do you have anyone you want to notify in case you don’t return?

JD’s smile is cold and sharp and just a little bleak, ... Hans.)

When he wakes up, Hans logs onto the system.

He traces the work of the other hackers, and curses their inability to mask their steps. The machines will find them, he thinks, and glares at the flickering screen; stupid humans. He shuts the laptop quietly; JD is still asleep, but when his feet touches the floor, he feels a hand on his back.

Morning, JD, Hans says and watches a dark hand snake across his waist.

Hans, JD murmurs, and his voice is barely above a whisper.

It’s broken only by the heavy tread of boots outside their bunk, and faint rumbles from above and something inside Hans twists; they’re stuck here and there’s a war raging on outside, the lines between heaven and hell blurring together.

When he goes to sleep, Hans runs his hand over JD’s face, remembering the way his cheekbones smooth out, and the way his mouth curves, and commits them to memory.

When he dies, he'll know what to dream for.

One day, the machines find them.

Or perhaps it's night, not like it makes much difference - their base is still attacked, and the fires still burn through the bunkers and men still flee and the bodies still keep piling up--

The air smells like burnt meat, and it makes Hans a little hungry so he retreats into his bunker and opens his laptop. The data swims on his screen and glowing green flashes rearrange themselves into a grinning skull, Here’s Johnny, the words read, before the skull laughs and breaks apart into gibberish. Hans stares at the screen and thinks, So this is how the world ends.

There is a thump by the door (a decapitated body) and a high-pitched whirring sound (the machine) fills the spaces of the room. Hans hopes that at least, JD had a quick death.

He isn't dead.

It takes him a moment to register this, and he stares at the blood on his hands until it sinks in. He's not dead, but the guy next to him is. JD's lips twists into a smile despite himself, Better you than me, kid, and leans over to wipe his hands on the dead boy's fatigues, smearing blood over muddy green, carefully avoiding the grey flecks stuck in them. Then he straightens up and his brain starts to click everything into place.

There was a blast. There was a fire. There was smoke. There was screaming. There was fighting. There were people with guns. There were--

The machines. They were attacked by the machines. They've been betrayed by someone in the resistance. JD snarls and picks up the nearest gun, prying it from cold hands and wipes the barrel clean. It's warm in his hand from the burning fires; heavy and warm.

Hans. He has to find Hans.

He find Hans in the remains of their bunker, where he stares at JD with wide, wild eyes.

There is a sense of reverse déjà vu as JD laughs and extends one dirty hand.

Let's go, Hans looks at him and curve his lips into a smile, together.

M. Curt feels his stomach sink as he repeats the headcount, ignoring the men in white running around them, or how the earth stinks of blood and fire, or how his brain keeps replaying their commander's last moment before he was ripped apart alive by the machines. He can still hear the screams in his ear.

Sergeant, he barks out, Where's JD?

Maximilian blanches and coughes, We... haven't seen him, Lieutenant. The last someone saw of him, he was going back to the bunkers, he lowers his eyes, ...but they're still trying to identify all the bodies.

He swears, loud and clear, and looks away, ...What about Hans?

Lucy steps forward, her hand raised in a clean salute, ...He hasn't been seen yet. But the medics are still extracting DNA strands from the... she trips over the word and clears her throat, ...bones, Sir.

If they were in the fire, there wouldn't be any DNA left, he mutters and unclenches his fist; the machines will pay. The coalition have the blueprints now, and by god the machines will fucking pay.

Find them, Sergeants, Lieutenant M. Kurt sets his jaw, And give them a proper cremation.

Three months later (or is it five? Time flies by so fast underground), the coalition is back together, as ragtag as before but slightly stronger, and perhaps slightly smarter. Commander Kurt (no longer Lieutenant) has taken to keeping blank rusting dogtags on a nail on his wall. He's currently at 285; one for every man he's ever lost.

It's almost dinner when a hacker reports a break-in. It's from an outside source, he says, fingers twitching as he speaks, And definitely not one of ours. It's a ghost message, from a past hack, he repeats and one sharp nail stabs the screen excitedly, Look!

There's a neon yellow worm eating its way through the spaces between alphabets, leaving a pixilated purple trail of corrupted data. As they watch, the worm dissolves into a mess of words.

Hasta la vista, baby. ;)

the end

author: rei, book 13: erase/rewind, story

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