Chapter 33:// Making out

 

They logged on the stolen wifi named Silence of the LANs. It was a standard commercial home connection but it was going through a few walls so it was iffy, to say the least. The devices were spread apart all over the bathroom and had employed a bluetooth network. It was short-range and couldn’t really be detected unless the authorities were a few meters away.

They were whispering amongst themselves in the steamy bathroom.

 

eyed> Who doesn’t have net access in their own home?

parrotd> It seems she was raised without much technology.

armd> That curvy meatbag! And to think I liked her at first.

parrotd> How are we on the encrypted tor connection?

httpd> The neighbour is downloading a ton of data. Please wait.

 

The session leader parrotd had ordered a non-trackable onion connection called tor, to download the clean video file they had requested earlier without anyone tracing it back to them. The email they used was legitimate-looking but was actually a throwaway address routed through Estonian servers. Since it was taking so long, httpd had displayed a loading swirly icon made out of ASCII characters. The rest of the daemons sighed and moaned in protest. It turns out, nobody likes loading screens.

 

walkmand> Hey! Won’t the water damage your circuits?

armd> I’m already FUBAR as it is. Who cares…

eyed> Now you can’t hurt anyone else you buggy maniac!

 

There were tens of lines of chat logs after that, but there is no need to waste precious storage space. They argued, like only daemons do.

The user was taking his time in the shower, humming an old rock song to himself since his walkman wasn’t connected at that moment.

 

eyed> How clean does he need to make himself anyway?

 

The door opened and antoniou.katerina@apollomedical.com walked in the bathroom carrying fresh clothes and Khaki outdoor pants, two sizes too large for the user.

 

fingerd> Fingered! She is-

eyed> We know! Dontcha have a cache memory or something?

fingerd> Yeah but it’s only 4 kilobytes.

armd> That… Explains a lot.

 

She put down the fresh clothes and took off her own as well.

 

fingerd> Poor girl. It’s too hot in here.

armd> It’s about to get hotter.

fingerd> Oh no! Isn’t this faucet electronically connected? Can’t we do something?

armd> Shuddup.

walkmand> Is it time for seductive blinking?

 

Antoniou.katerina@apollomedical.com stepped in the shower. The user’s heartrate jumped. She touched his body, his cleaned up wound, his limping cyberarm, the scar tissue that lumped over his bowels that contained the synthetic insulin gland. Her fingers found the circular magnet underneath his skin at the height of his belt and traced the subdermal wire all the way up to the back of his ears.

She kissed it.

The daemons cheered and took screenshots.