[Can’t Opt Out]

“Sil’s gonna be mad~” Conrad singsonged as Emilia herded both him and Hyr into one of the rooms participants in the PVP Entrance could use to tweak their Censors before entering the event.

Unfortunately, her classmate definitely would be pissed. Not only had she spent far too much time inside the Virtuosi System in the last day, but he’d already given her more leeway than he wanted to over her use. If it had been up to Sil, Emilia knew he would have completely banned her from entering the system—and this raid as a whole, even if it was a real-world one—for the next day or two the moment she’d come out of the Virtuosi System to find him glaring down at her.

He had given her a bit of slack, though, when he’d allowed her back into the system to deal with his and Conrad’s hacks. Now, though? With her weeks inside {A Life (not) in the Stars}, the year and a bit she’d spent in his rig, then the time she’d spent dealing with his and Conrad’s hacks…

Oh, and the whole hacking the bartender’s mind from last night… and hacking the purist building’s security system… not to mention just the normal school stuff.

Yeah, okay, maybe Sil would be right to be pissed when he inevitably found out about this—it wasn’t like they’d be able to hide Hyr’s new hack, once she created it—but this was important! Hyr was suffering with their current Censor System! Surely, Sil would understand?

“Yeah, yeah~” she replied, pushing both her concerns about Sil down as she similarly pushed Hyr down into their rig, helping them to situate properly, their eyes flickering closed as their mind was pulled into the Virtuosi System. Realistically, the syn had spent enough time going in and out of the system over the day that they should have been able to connect by themself. Emilia didn’t really care. She liked touching Hyr and having their energy circling within her.

As much as the northerner had begun to leave their energies tethered together since she’d fallen asleep in their lap in the practice room, unlike Conrad, Hyr couldn’t keep them connected while within the Virtuosi System—although she assumed they could reconnect if they were inside the same virtual space, given the syn had briefly connected them near the end of the raid. Still, Emilia let her fingers linger on their skin, a small connection remaining between them before she threw herself into another rig, ignoring the look Conrad was giving them.

The rigs throughout the ship were good. Not cutting edge, but certainly on the newer side. Someone had also disabled the government’s time limit tests, she noted. During her own installation of blackaether hacks, Emilia had learned that most of those tests could be gotten around, but it could be a pain, or occasionally impossible. Without even seeing them, Emilia suspected the tests on Professor A’s rigs couldn’t be outmanoeuvred. Outright removing them on an airship, though? Regardless of the fact that it was a raid-focused ship, removing the limit tests was a decision.

Emilia couldn’t decide if it was a good or bad one.

“Hello, beautiful,” she cheered when her avatar settled into a chair next to Hyr.

There was no reason for a physical avatar while coding, most people preferring to code within their heads, rather than on a physical—if also virtual—terminal, but there were generally recommended. Having spent large swathes of time during her teens being too lazy to set up a workspace—this was in the days before the Virtuosi System had been so sophisticated and every login required some amount of tedious tweaking to properly align with the mind—Emilia had spent thousands upon thousands of hours coding without a body.

Personally, she’d never experienced the side effects many people complained of—most worrisome was a lack of connection to their body once their mind was back inside it. Being a floating mind took a toll on most people. Whether due to her years of experience working like that, or some accident of genetics or personality, Emilia’s mind was fine. When she’d hacked her own Censor earlier, she’d spent much of her time existing simply as a mind, not having to worry about eating or moving for the year and a bit she’d spent inside the system earlier that day.

When she’d dealt with Sil and Conrad’s hacks, on the other hand, the three of them altering a hack Sil had coded during the war to both work alongside the system she’d created for herself—and was now going to be adapting for each member of their group—as well as translating it to her and Helix’s new language—not to mention coding in the many custom functions she’d created for their mission—the three of them had existed within their avatars.

Sil, she could tell, was like her: had he been alone, he probably would have been only a mind, floating through time and code. Conrad, on the other hand, screamed of someone who would lose their shit if left without a body for more than an hour or two.

Having now looked over the hack that members of the secret military unit used, Emilia knew the reason for Sil’s comfort: like her, Rafe, and probably Helix as well, her classmate had spent decades within the system, coding and learning and raiding. The hack he had created during the war, and apparently updated as needed for his former teammates, was beautiful—likely even more stunning than she realized because Sil hadn’t allowed her to see the whole thing! For whatever reason, some of the hack’s functions were considered Top Secret. Neither of the men had been forthcoming as to why, but given what she had seen of Conrad’s hack, his final hack being more similar to hers than Sil’s, Emilia had her suspicions.

Now, as she settled in to adapt her hack for Hyr—plus code more functions for monitoring core abilities, not to mention record more specific outputs to create similar core-based skills for both Free Coloniers—she tried asking Conrad about why some of their hacks were so secret. She tried before, of course, when she’d been coding with Sil, but her friend had constantly cut Conrad off, whenever he dared try answering one of her questions.

Humming, Conrad leaned back, the straight backed chair he had been sitting in shifting to a lounge chair, the world around them pulling into a starlit view from a high rise. Emilia didn’t recognize the city stretching below them, lights flickering in the dingy buildings. Something from a raid, maybe? It almost looked like the small Free Colony Simeon had mentioned Grayson had found Stella in—Platria, was it? It had the same sort of rundown, dystopian vibe, but the style of the buildings wasn’t quite the same—where Platria had appeared blandly grey and utilitarian, this city had delicate architecture in an array of colours, although black and purple seemed the most common. Where Platria gave the impression it had always been a miserable place to live, this place seemed more to have fallen into disrepair over centuries, much like Alver. Read complete versıon only at NoveI(F)ire.net

“Our unit… is complicated. Most of us are…”

“Dangerous,” Hyr said, their voice far away as they focused on the beginner coding tutorials Emilia had given them. It would be a while before they could help, but they clearly wanted to learn more about Censors and coding.

“Dangerous, yeah. A little psychotic.” Conrad smiled into the darkness, teeth a line of white across the dark virtual world. “Some of us more than others. Sil’s hack has some safety precautions built in, specific to each of us. They do this and that. Mostly, they just work to keep us from losing our shit, and if it thinks we will, it tattles.”

“Oh…” Emilia breathed out, unsure what to think of that. “Who does it tattle to?”

“The rest of us,” Conrad said, shrugging as he summoned drinks for each of them. “It doesn’t happen often, although the most recent incident was just a few weeks ago. That guy… Well, someone else stepped into stop him, so none of us had to go intervene. A good thing too! It would have been a giant mess ‘cause of where they were. Not that I even knew, given I rarely wear my Censor unless I’m raiding.”

In other words, as much as Sil seemed to think Conrad was chaotic and needed to be watched constantly, he wasn’t actually required to wear the thing that monitored him. Strange… unless he came from a Free Colony where wearing a temporary Censor would cause problems? If it were that important to monitor him, though, Emilia would have thought their unit would have forced him to install a permanent Censor.

“I see…” Emilia replied, still thinking back to the way Sil had stepped forward to make sure Conrad didn’t launch himself at the purist dude, the way her classmate had insisted their Censors include a function for monitoring the chances he was going to start a fight. She wanted to ask more—there were so many questions about their unit that she wanted answers to—but they had more important things to do, and the time skew of these rigs wasn’t so much that they could waste time chatting.

Not if they wanted to catch the trio or make it to the end of the raid, anyways. They were always pushing it on the latter, especially since they’d have to test out Hyr’s hack on the raid’s first level before moving on.

Sipping at her drink, Emilia turned back to her hacking, letting the calories disappear into the abyss of her mind, the imaginary sugar spiralling into her bloodstream and energy until Hyr was gripping a hand over her bouncing knee. Technically, they could connect their energy to hers again, now that they were in the Virtuosi System. Emilia was too shy to ask that they do so.

Instead, their hand just stayed there as she worked, dragging shapes over the bare skin of her knee, her thigh, inching higher, higher, until it was stopped by the loose shorts she had set her avatar to wearing during her hacking of Samina’s mind, mostly to double-check that her new, echo scar was in the proper place on her updated avatar. Hyr’s hand stayed there, inches from the top of her thigh, rubbing just under the hem of her shorts.

Emilia… had no idea what was happening between them. With someone else, it would have been easier to guess. If she’d been younger, she would have assumed it was flirting—testing the waters to see if she was okay being touched, maybe eventually asked out. If Hyr had been Baalphorian—or from a Free Colonia she was more familiar with the courting rituals of—she would have been able to line up what she knew with what they were doing.

She wasn’t young, though. Rather, she was decades over than Hyr, and while she knew she was objectively attractive, the northerner didn’t seem the type to risk a friendship just because she was pretty—not that Emilia had ever lost a friendship sleeping with someone! She was excellent at not catching feelings for people who were clearly just friends-with-benefits… Well, maybe not in certain cases—such as with Rafe or Olivier or V—but those were different circumstances! And she hadn’t ruined those relationships with her feelings, either!

Not for more than a decade or so, anyways. Things were fine now! Probably.

Regardless, Hyr didn’t really seem the sort to just fuck someone because they were attractive. Then again, perhaps that was actually the norm in the Northern Tribes? Or among the synat? The Bur? Stars knew the syna Gru had never given any indication they had a sexual bone in their body. The other Gru in their unit had occasionally given some sign they were normal humans with normal human needs, but for the most part, they’d been rather prudish.

That just made this situation with Hyr even weirder, and meant she really had nothing to measure their behaviour against.

They needed to talk about it, figure out whether Hyr was just a naturally touchy person—not that that would explain the whole looking under her shirt thing, but that could have just been curiosity with what a woman looked like for all she knew, assuming she was correct about the biologically male thing—or if they were looking for something more.

Then, of course, Emilia would have to figure out if she was even into something more.