promise/src/chapters/1/1.1.tex

She had to be frank with herself, the code displayed on her screen was boring.  Brilliant, sure, but boring.  Only someone truely as depraved as herself, or maybe her hacker friends, could enjoy such bland code.  There were no funny tricks to it.  Nothing extraordinary.  It was just really well written code that performed extremely well.

Her thoughts swirled.  She knew better than to let that happen, yet here she was.  It was obvious, wasn't it?  It didn't compile.  It was brilliant, but more than half of it was throwing errors when she tried to turn it into machine instructions.  The worst part, she knew, was that it was all valid and extremely slick.

``Eilidh,'' a voice broke into her thoughts.  ``Eilidh, I need some help with my medicine dear.''

``I'll be there in a second,'' she replied, closing the file full of pilfered code.  Eilidh rubbed her eyes.  It didn't make sense to her how it could be both syntactically and logically correct, yet still throw errors at compile time.  She knew she wasn't missing anything, after all, she had stolen everything on that private software forge.

Eilidh shook her head.  She knew better than to underestimate the machinations of the megacorps like that.  Maybe they were using a custom compiler or something to make the code more optimized than it was.  She exhaled a deep breath she didn't know she'd been holding.  She'd spent a hundred hours trying to get this to work.  She needed it to work.

Finally getting up, perhaps a little too late given her adoptive mother needed her help, Eilidh stalked over to her door.  Her graceful dance of meticulously trained movement showing itself.  She knew she shouldn't let herself spiral on a problem like this, especially for so long, but it was the one missing piece of the puzzle to be able to build the medicine she was about to administer at home.

It was the missing algorithm needed to find the last bit of chemistry required.

Eilidh wondered why they hadn't stored the method to produce it in a document.  It would have been more convenient than running a program every time they needed to produce it.  The answer only took her a bit of thought to come to: to prevent little thieves like herself from getting a hold of the formula.

As she moved over to her adoptive mother, she made a stop at the medicine vault to get the dose prepared.  It was ultimately an intramuscular injection, but she knew from experience that this one only did its best when it was injected into the muscles of the butt.

``Alright mom,'' Eilidh said, walking over with the syringe.  Her mother had already exposed just the right area for her, and it appeared that there was already isopropyl alcohol drying on her skin.  Eilidh gave the area another wipe with a fresh pad, just in case, before allowing it to dry and delivering the injection.  ``You'll feel better in an hour.''

``Thanks dear,'' her mother responded.  ``You gotten that program figured out yet?''

``No, mom.  I think we're getting close though.''  She knew it was a lie, but she didn't want to give the impression she was wasting her time.

Her mom, of course, didn't know exactly what Eilidh was working on, just that it was something that she thought could help.  Eilidh lamented the fact that it might not be as helpful as she'd thought, especially when she could have been taking more jobs to help fund the next shipment of medicine.

It was frustrating to her.  Eilidh probably wasn't going to figure the problem on her own.  It hurt her pride, too.  She and her friends were known as some of the best hackers outside of a corpo intelligence group, yet it appeared they'd been bested.

It wouldn't stand to remain that way.  She resolved that she'd break it, but maybe it would do her some good to get out of her room and away from her terminal.  Maybe she'd even shower.

Before that, though, she really needed to talk to her team and see what they'd come up with since she made the last discovery.

Eilidh moved back to her room, her terminal screens the only light source illuminating the wall opposite the door.  It was a comfy room, all things considered.  She was lucky to be friendly enough with the gang controlling the area that they give her cheap rent.  She was even luckier that she had the skills required to be friendly with them.

There were plenty of other people who lived their entire lives on the streets.  She hoped one day she could fix that, but it was unlikely.  The ph@ntomfr34kz were doing what they could in this little heaven.  Since they took control of the area, homelessness had dropped to record lows.  But people were still on the streets, still unable to qualify for the gang's capsule apartment program.

She grabbed a headset from her desk before setting her computer to VR Lock mode preventing external access while she was exploring cyberspace.  She laid on her bed, merely a matress on the floor covered in a soft fitted sheet, adjusted her pillow, snuggled under a blanket, then fitted the headset in place.  With a deep sigh, she fiddled with the cable on the headset, attaching the cold metal of the cable into the warm socket at the base of her skull.  The temperature difference between the port and the cable always caused a slight discomfort for her, but it was usually over the moment it began.

When Eilidh was transported into the virtual world.

She let her virtual body settle down before she moved.  It always took a few seconds.  Once the wave of nausia inducing materialization was over, she was free to move.

Eilidh immediately ran to the closest teleporter setup in her virtual home: a shortcut to her crew's digital hideout.  The teleporter was just beyond the infrequently used couch, down a hallway, behind a triple encrypted door -- just for good measure.  Once she'd had the door decrypted, it dematerialized.  It rematerialized behind her as she walked through.

Digital portals were weird.  Walking through one added just a slight latency between your environment and your body.  Someone could hand you a coffee, and you would grab it a few milliseconds too late.  They could have thought you'd grabbed it already, but maybe you hadn't.

This portal was nothing like that.  Eilidh had a direct connection to the gang's hideout, meaning the latency between her and this server was merely a few fractions of a second, the speed of light through fibreoptic cable over the course of a few kilometers.  All of her teammates had the same, courtesy of the ph@ntomfr34kz.

Once she was fully through the portal, she walked through a short hallway into the main room, modeled after an abandoned airplane hangar Eilidh had played in as a child.  She had been distraught when the real one was demolished.  Desks lined the walls, enough remote terminals for a small army of hackers to lay seige to a megacorp's precious networks for days on end.

Charon was sitting at the desk he'd pronounced as his the day that the space was finished.  His grey eyes locked onto his terminal, windows upon windows surrounding him, floating in the air as he worked.  He hadn't looked up to see Eilidh approach.

``Hey Charon,'' she greeted, now close enough to see the shimmer of colour in his fuzzy white hair.

``Hey El,'' he replied, giving her a half-hearted wave before returning to his work.  He froze suddenly, and turned around.  His eyes were wide as saucers, straighening out the age lines in his olive skin.  ``El!  Hey, what do you make of this?''  He began moving windows from where they were locked in space, out toward Eilidh, expanding until they could both see them.

``I don't think this code is actual the language we think it is,'' he said, gesturing to a window that had a pdf open.  Eilidh gave it a curious look over before sticking her hand into the window and pulling out a book opened to the same page displayed on the screen and giving it a closer look.

``Its an instruction script?'' she asked the older man.

``For an Easern Hills medicine machine!'' he exlaimed, excited.  ``Of course, Maloch ripped it off to avoid doing their own engineering, so the EH-M2143 and the Maloch MediMagic are the same machine.  It would be hard to get the freaks to fund an actual run on a physical Maloch location, since the closest one is half a continent away, but we could easily justify a run against Eastern Hills!''  He was barely containing his excitement.

Eilidh was shocked.  She'd genuinely thought that there would be no progress on this when she couldn't figure it out.  ``Have you told the other's yet?  Is Marvin looking into a source for one of these Eastern Hills machines?''

``He's already found one,'' Charon said, but the look on his face said it wasn't good news.  Eilid nodded for him to continue, and he did.  ``The high security building at EHSC.''

Eastern Hills Space Corporation, a relatively small campus dedicated to all of Eastern Hills' funny space operations.  One of their most profitable divisions, little wonder given it was their first specialty more than a hundred years ago.  They engineered and manufactured the very first faster-than-light space fighter.  But the high security building?

Nobody had broken in there before.  She wasn't sure that her crew even could be the first.  Every crew that ever tried was never seen again.  Every run against that building in particular ended precious lives.

Eilidh cursed.  ``What shit luck.''

``But there is a silver lining, Marv thinks its possible anyway.''

``Well, he can explain it to me later,'' she said, rubbing at her eyes.  ``Tell everyone to be at Quriosities in two hours.  I gotta say my goodbyes to mom before we go do something stupid as hell.''

``Tell Berdie I'll be by after we wrap up at the bar,'' Charon said, winking at Eilidh.

``Fuck off Charon, you're not dating your boss' mom,'' she retorted, then added, ``pervert.''

Charon was laughing to himself as Eilidh retraced her steps, walking back to her portal home.  She could have just disconnected, but that always left her nauseous and she needed to be in top shape for everything that came next, and an hour of cuddling the porcelain throne didn't sound like the best use of her time.

Once she was finally out of the headset, Eilidh decided that she'd get ready for the bar.  Pulling clean clothes from her closet, she made her way to the restroom.  Upon entering, her nose was assaulted by the detrius of the greywater system of the apartment.  Somebody must have washed eggs down the sink again.

She flushed the toilet, hoping the tank would fill up with untainted greywater.  She was thankful that the first few gallons of shower water were always fresh before it was recycled.  She made a mental note to talk with the fr34kz about a better greywater filtration system for the building.  Maybe at least something to filter out organic detrius so people's bathrooms didn't smell like sulfur every day.

Eventually, the smell did go away, much to Eilidh's joy.  She was able to shower and take her time in the slowly cooling recycled water without that awful smell ruining the experience.  After, she got dressed and made sure to do her makeup.

When she was done, she didn't really appreciate what she saw in the mirror, but at least she was passably cute.  Her dyed black hair framed her aventurine eyes perfectly, even if she didn't know it.  Her freckles dotted around her face, only parted by the few scars left from her years of experience out on the streets, raiding corpo convoys or breaking into corpo facilities.  She hated those scars, but they were beautiful.

Her makeup was lighter than most, just a dusting of eye shadow to bring her eyes out, and a touch of pink blush to add colour to her pale skin.  The least beautiful thing about her was her clothing.  A simple black muscle shirt, cut for men and entirely too tight around her chest, and a pair of black tactical pants, which is to say, regular cargo pants with many more pockets.

She eventually finished off the look with some steel-toed combat boots.  She was dressed for another raid, not a night out at the bar, but nobody would really notice.

Once Eilidh was done getting ready, she plopped down in the living room chair, which was next to where her mom was laying on the couch, watching the news.  It was one of the ones that the fr34kz setup after the takeover.  Community run, even, so the news wasn't even worthless, just the good stuff that affected our home, or world news.

``They're saying Eastern Hills is getting uppity about the border,'' her mother spoke.  ``Lots of people calling for retaliation after the attack up north.  They want another war council to be appointed.''

``Great,'' Eilidh muttered without a hint of sarcasm.  ``More work for me puts food on the table and keeps us stocked up on the meds we need.''

``I understand that you work with the gang sweety,'' her mom said, a hint of danger in her tone.  ``But you do not work for them.''
Eilidh stewed in that for a moment.  It was something that her mom had drilled in her.  But work was work and it was hard to remain a contractor on the side when there was only one major player in the game.

``You got to dictate what jobs I went on when you were the handler, mom,'' Eilidh finally said.  ``But I'm running the show now, and that means I get to pick what jobs I think are the best.  I'll work for the freaks if I want to.  In fact, I want to work for them because they're the ones that have given us the opportunities we have.''

``Yeah yeah,'' her mom said, laughing.  ``After that bank job I'm not sure any corpos would hire you anyway.  Hell, half the gangs probably want you dead, too.''

``No joke,'' she responded, worrying the back of her neck.  That job had nearly killed her.  Cemented her and her team as the best hackers.  Also painted huge targets on their backs.

``Just be careful, okay dear?''

``I will, mom.  Anyway, I'm about to head to the bar.  Charon wants to come back here after.'' Eilidh got up and headed to the door.  ``Probably wants to shoot his shot with you again.''

Mom broke out in laughter.  ``I am half that man's age!  I can't believe he works for you with how much experience he's got.''

``Better than the time Marvin tried to get your clothes off,'' Eilidh laughed.

``I will never understand why those two are enamoured with me.''

``You did see yourself five years ago right?  Had you not been acting as my parent at the time, I probably would have been onto you too.''

``Eilidh!'' her mother gawked.  ``Get out of here and don't come back until we've both forgotten that admission!''

``Yes ma'am.''