Coding the Night Away (Mia)

[Reeve Rzeznik]

"Hello, Reeve," Reeve's computer spoke to him in a lightly Russian-accented male voice as he shut the door to his sparsely-furnished room.

"Hey, Comrade," he replied, crossing the room quickly and sliding Brains, Comrade's keyboard off the side. "I've got a new friend for you to play with."

"A friend? What kind of friend?"

"One of these," Reeve replied, setting the cardboard box on the desk and opening it to reveal a new laptop. "Care to help me reprogram it?"

"I shall do what I can, Reeve," the computer said in reply, going quiet as the young boy removed the laptop from the cardboard box and tossed the box off to the side. Not a word was spoken as Reeve opened the laptop, finding it completely wiped of everything, as he had asked it to just a bit earlier.

"First, I could use some music," Reeve ascertained, and Brains, Comrade replied wordlessly, loading up Reeve's mp3 collection and choosing a song to play as background music. "Thanks, BC," Reeve intoned politely, taking a deep breath and putting his palms on the new laptop's keyboard. He closed his eyes and spoke again to the desktop computer.

"Can you access this computer via its wireless card, BC?"

"It is within my programming, yes."

Reeve winced slightly behind closed eyes. Despite its remarkable grasp on the English language, both in reception and in replying, Reeve sometimes forgot that he intentionally programmed the artificial intelligence to be fairly basic. "Access the laptop via its wireless card. I will give you requests through it, and I will need you to find those programs, whether on the 'net or in your systems, and upload them onto the new computer for me."

"Certainly, Reeve," BC replied, and the silence thereafter was followed by a small mental pinch inside of Reeve's mind, BC's way of telling Reeve through the laptop that he was connected.

With a little sigh, Reeve began the process of writing an operating system from the ground up, using Brains, Comrade to access the internet for help and tutorials where needed. It was a slow process, to be sure, but the most interesting thing about it all was that, to any outside observer, the process was entirely static.

In fact, if someone were to be, say, peeking outside of Reeve's window, they would see nothing but a boy, eyes closed, with his hands on a computer, as code flew across the laptop's screen at record speeds.

[Mia Keystone]

If there was someone, say, dressed fully in military kaki (camouflage face paint and leaves in her hair included) peeking into Reeve's window, it was fair to say that person was clearly interested in Mr Reeve. Sonofabitch's a techmeta," Mia thought, her eyes wide as they peeked over the windowsill. It made so much sense! No wonder her necromancer hadn't been able to break down the shields, the little bastard had recoded them! With his brain!

Mia quickly sunk below the window and pulled out her handy dictaphone. She'd rejigged it to pick up much lower volumes then it was originally designed to, so she did not need to raise her voice above the slightest of whispers. "Subject W is, on visual evidence, that kid Reeve, a meta with technological capability," she whispered lowly, eyes darting around as she made sure no one was spying on the spy. "Operation Fuck that Paladin is now in progress. Subject W is male, about..." she snuck another peak, "16 to 17 years old, using a computer named," the wrinkle of Mia's nose expressed her feelings, "Comrade. Could be possible Russian spy. Has recent music taste. Shepard out."

Mia's code names changed regularly, and the demos of Mass Effect 3 she'd 'borrowed' from Bioware had her in a nostalgic mood. With a thumb pressed to the audio recorder, the sound file was quickly sent wirelessly back to Kaylee, to be stored amounst the thousand other files just like it. Subject R had his own special folder, built swiftly over the last few days as Mia had poured her energy into tracking the Online account back to a bank provider. Usually it would have taken a few more traces, but as she was running the many programs her computer set up with each trace mission, she got a hit almost instantly from the one list she'd ever managed to get out of Hammel: the present students.

Seriously, Reeve? The quiet guy from last year's science class? He was a tech?

Mia couldn't decide if this news was good or bad. Fishing in her bag, she quickly found her modified palm polite. She was close enough to be able to slip in, surely? Concentrating hard, Mia started tapping out keys as her mind started streaming through the streams of code. Fuck, his protections were great, the main computer was as airtight as a submarine, but there were two....

The automatic help needed flagged by coverage at the blink of an eye was already embedded with one of Mia's trojans as it opened up. Bingo. A grin of victory had started to spread across Mia's face when her palm pilot pinged.

Fuck. Detection.

[Reeve Rzeznik]

Without the need for speech, ideas travel faster than the speed of light. Connected as they were through the new laptop, Brains, Comrade and Reeve could communicate on a level far faster than a person's fingers could type or their voices could speak. In this pseudo-cyberspace, the computer and Reeve may as well have been sharing a single consciousness, trading information across it much like one can trade files across computers linked to a single network.

When the new computer, still without it's anti-virus and spyware protection, was attacked with a Trojan, the desktop computer detected it, passed the information to Reeve, and Reeve bid him to go about ejecting and counter-tracing it, all within the span of a second or two.

His eyes remained closed as Brains, Comrade fed him the details, tracing back the IP address through not one, not two, but three dummy address somewhere in New Zealand, only to find that he was actually being hacked locally. A second or two later, and BC detected that the culprit had to be within a radius of no more than twenty feet away. Reeve had Brains, Comrade pull up a schematic of the dormitories, complete with the room assignments to each. A quick scan through pulled up no names that Reeve, via general snooping and keeping his eyes and ears open, would know to be that particularly tech-savvy, which meant that the person was not living in the dorms. He had BC draw a circle with a twenty-foot radius around his exact position on the blueprint using a GPS program he'd written a year or so ago, and found that his outside window was within the circle.

For the first time in minutes, Reeve's eyes opened and he looked out the window with a certain intensity. Like any good tech-meta, Reeve was not particularly fond of people messing with his computers. Now with an area in mind, Reeve stretched his tech-consciousness out to the window to see if there was some sort of electrical activity in the area, and sure enough, he pinged back almost immediately. Sitting up quickly, Reeve's desk chair rolled back against his bed as he went over to the window and closed his eyes, speaking out in binary a simple command directly into her Palm Pilot.

"01001001 01101110 01110011 01100101 01110010 01110100 00100000 01110100 01100101 01111000 01110100 00100000 01101101 01100101 01110011 01110011 01100001 01100111 01100101 00111010 00100000 00100010 01001100 01101111 01101111 01101011 00100000 01100001 01100111 01100001 01101001 01101110 00101100 00100000 01110111 01101000 01111001 00100000 01100100 01101111 01101110 00100111 01110100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00101110 00100010"

There was some slight resistance, but being as it was a very basic hack, not particularly intrusive at all, Mia's firewalls were barely alerted as the handheld device registered a new message, covering the screen.

"Look again, why don't you."

And if she chose to do what the Pilot said, she would find Reeve leaning against his windowsill, looking less than impressed at her sneaky little antics.

[Mia Keystone]

Bouncing the trace was sort of like pong. That old video game, with the paddles? Yeah, that. At faster then light speed. Usually Mia was quick enough to dump any automatic trace into any of the phoney ips the random generator she'd programmed threw out to anything trying to narrow in on her. But her pong paddle slipped.

Time to get out. Mia started back peddling, frowning hard as she felt the GPS pinging her like some sort of demonic bat sonar. He had her location. Fuck.

Two options. A: barrel roll the fuck out of there, and deny everything
B: comando crawl the fuck out of there, and deny everything.

Before she could really settle on her chosen mode of escape, a tiny tap on her mind alerted her to the message being steamed to her palm pilot. Her mind caught the stream of binary as it slid past the defences, and despite the awkwardness of her current predicament she was in she had to tip her hat to his style.

Quickly, without a trace of embarrassment, Mia got to her feet and stared at Reeve. Sure, her face was covered in dark makeup and her hair was full of twigs and a bit of snow, but Mia wasn't really one to feel ashamed. "Your paladin's shields were boosted. My necromancer can always get past holy shields." she said flatly, arms crossed. "Nice firewalls, by the way. Your computer's 'Comrade', right?" Sure, she may have sounded a bit snarky, but he made his computer sound like a soviet soldier. "What voice recognition software is that? And are you using a standard or personalised AI program?"

It would maybe occur to most people that it was not appropriate to suddenly bombard someone with questions when you'd just been caught under their window trying to hack into their computer. Mia was not most people, and Mia always had questions. Subterfuge had failed, so the direct approach it was. Her audio device was on with a thought, ready to add precious data to her files.

[Reeve Rzeznik]

Reeve continued to lean against the windowsill, one eyebrow cocked up in an unamused half-glare as the girl stood up to confront him. Without even stopping to consider, she began to ask him a rapid-fire assault of questions. The sudden, up-front nature was such a drastic change to the stealthy approach she had been taking up until that point that Reeve actually reacted to it, raising his other eyebrow to match the initial and stepping back from the windowsill to get a better look at the girl.

Whoever it was, it was definitely a girl, but she was almost comically decked out in what looked like a full-on military ghillie suit, complete with sticks in her hair and dark makeup on her face to hide her appearance. Reeve had honestly no idea why anyone would be stalking him this way, until she spoke.

Necromancer... holy shields... it hit him all at once. This whole fiasco was over that online game he'd been playing recently. Bored of the usual level grind, Reeve used his powers to get into the game's source code and, with that, switched a few numbers around until his Paladin was built far beyond what anyone at his level should be. He tried to remember any necromancers, and one did come to mind. Normally a necro folded under the holy might of a paladin, but for once, one stood up to him. Would have beaten him, too, but he managed to do a little last-minute recode and super-boost his shields just in time to keep from the necro's dark magic to break through. The realization brought a tiny smirk to Reeve's lips.

"Wait," he said, at least, holding up his index finger to silence her. "Are you telling me this is all because of World of Warcraft?"

[Mia Keystone]

Mia was used to getting a bit of a reaction when she was found out in her commando getup. The last person had fainted. Sure, it had been a 70 something year old lady, but still, a part of Mia was almost disappointed. The sight of a tiny girl dressed like she'd just been dropped out of 1970 Vietnam was worth more than a raised eyebrow, surely! This guy was one cool cucumber. As he took in her outfit, Mia's own sharp eyebrows rose over even sharper eyes.

Wait.... had he just... shhhed her? Really? Hidden under kaki and black makeup, it was hard to see Mia's eyebrows rise any higher, but they practically disappeared under her hairline. "What?" she snapped, impatient to hear about Comrade's AI program.

Well, when he said it like that it sounded like something only a crazy person would do. Mia just looked nonchalant. "You just logged on, your stats were sky high and you didn't show the tech signs. It was unexpected," she said flatly. That was about as much of an explanation as she was likely to give to someone she'd only just met/stalked. And sure, it didn't justify anything but like she cared. She didn't have to justify why she'd hidden under a fellow student's windowsill while trying to break into one of his computers! That was for normal people.

The heat from inside the room was melting the snow in her hair, and the cold water collecting in her collar was not particularly comfortable. "It's cold as a witches tit out here, I'm coming in," Mia declared, and hooked a leg over the windowsill. "Don't worry, I won't fuck with your stuff." With a slight grunt, Mia hoisted her small frame up and over the windowsill, and sat on it. Water dripped off her combat boots and onto the carpet, but she didn't notice. Instead, she was already going with more questions. "Was it a standard source hack, or did you just do a profile specified recode? You were fast." That was a compliment, from Mia. She gave it grudgingly but she gave it. "Your account wasn't connected to any of the tech guilds though."

It was a secret jealously guarded that the younger generation of technopaths and electronic communicators created secret chat rooms and forums that were hard to find and even harder to get an invite to. There, you could find bounties on personal dossiers, get commissioned codes and viruses, help on getting past the strongest firewall or obstacle, even step by step instructions on how to shut down and effectively rob an electric train. If you were good enough, and tech-savy enough, you would find a way in.

[Reeve Rzeznik]

Perhaps Reeve's deteriorating emotional state was, at least in this instance, a boon. With no clue exactly how one is meant to react to the strange ways this girl acted, Reeve's emotional response was one of a mostly complete shutdown. Stuck in that way as he was, it was just a simple matter to paste on whatever emotion he wanted to portray. In this situation, it seemed the most likely and effective one would be a lack of surprise coupled with slight disappointment. From the slight changes on her face, Reeve deduced that he'd made at least some kind of impact.

She wasn't about to budge from the World of Warcraft incident, though, and so Reeve decided the best way to get her to shut up and/or go away would be just to talk about it.

"It wasn't really much of anything. I don't like grinding levels in my games, especially if there's no real end to a game. So I boosted my stats a little. Big deal, right?"

Reeve shrugged, and glanced around the room. Brains, Comrade blinked at him, not speaking but showing some matter of concern. Perhaps it was still fighting off a wayward attack from his technopath 'friend' here. When he looked back, however, the girl was climbing through the window. His eyes widened a bit and he stepped back, holding his hands up in front of his chest in a 'back off' moment, but only for a moment, before they came back down slowly to his sides.

All the while, she was still asking questions.

"I wouldn't even try, were I you," he began, quietly threatening, at her admission to stay away from his things. Even so, he didn't think she would try anything funny, regardless. She must have been a tech-meta just like him, and as such, he assumed she understood his dislike of people touching or messing with his computers.

"If we're talking about the same time, and you were that bad-ass necro, it was just a profile reception fault code. Had to be something quick, so I just faked the account into sending the main servers false stats. Normally they're buffed less than that, but it's a straight server recode, tied off with a special redirect line that projects the reworked Paladin code into my account, only." Some part of Reeve was aware that he was slipping into techno-babble mode, but he figured the girl would understand. He took a step back and plopped onto his bed, his eyes still coolly regarding her now that she was in his room.

"Most of those tech guilds are a bunch of pimply-faced hacker wannabes," Reeve says coolly. "Usually I redirect their channels to the Yiddish-language servers, just for kicks." Reeve grinned slightly, his lips curving upwards just enough to break his previously solemn-looking facade.

"Hey, Comrade?"

"Yes, Reeve?"

"Lower music volume to seventeen percent, please."

Wordlessly, Brains,Comrade complied, and the beating trance tunes lowered to a dull background noise, allowing the two to converse more, since the girl seemed so insistent on grilling Reeve about anything and everything.

[Mia Keystone]

”Duh,” Mia rolled her eyes. She’d done the exact same thing. So had every other tech meta she knew. But she’d known them. That was the point. Anyway, she already knew that. It had been the work of minutes to get a character history and see how quickly the paladin had been leveling and boosting.

Was he deaf? Mia was many things, but she was not a liar.

Well, she was, but that was only if she was on a mission. Or was asked about a mission. Or anything she didn’t want to answer. The point was, Mia never lied point blank. ”Already tried, didn’t I?” she snapped, then, just to show she was going to play nice, she blinked the room’s lights on and off. Just once. She grinned. ”See? All nice and sweet and shit, like bubble gum and crap.”

With one of her sleeves, Mia started wiping her makeup off. Smears of sun deprived skin showed under the green and black. The stuff was gross; thick and sticky and it wasn’t really needed any more. Pretty sure he was staring straight at her so camouflage wasn’t important.

She nodded, smirking at the idea her playing of a bad-ass necro. Everything she did was bad-ass. She could make jiggilypuff be bad-ass if she wanted. His explanation was sound, and pretty advanced too. Mia’s methods when it came to WoW were usually more direct: either just hack another character’s account and then recode the attack programs to give them a bit more juice. Or, if she really wanted a bit of fun, hack one of the GameMaster accounts and start turning everyone into giraffes.

Mia’s eyes lit up, but her mouth just twitched. She was laughing on the inside though, and laughing hard. ”Do I look like a pimply-faced hacker wannabe?” she demanded, still holding back laughter. ”Man, that was you? That was good work, dude. It took them over a day to get that up and running again. Had them running around like chickens with their heads cut off till one of them just rebooted the servers. Idiots overcomplicate things.”

Mia shifted a bit, getting comfortable. This was interesting. First interesting person she’d talked to since those years back when she’d had to verbally bitch slap some dick giving a certain deaf telepath a hard time. ”So, you’re into electronic communication, or technopath or technokinesis? Which one? What’s with the AI?”

[Reeve Rzeznik]

Mia would find that, as she spoke, without directly asking Reeve anything, he would not bother to reply with words. Instead, his reactions would be various and mostly subtle facial expressions. As she spoke, Reeve first backed up a step or two, finding the corner of his bed and sitting himself down upon it, arms crossed over his stomach. When she flicked the lights on and off, as, apparently, a manner of a truce, Reeve simply regarded her with a little smile, then quickly pursed his lips, as if accepting her offer of peace and then immediately offering for her to continue.

At his joke about pimply-faced hacker wannabes, though, he could tell that he'd elicited some kind of reaction out of her, from the twitch of her mouth and the question she asked of him quickly thereafter, which, as far as Reeve could tell, demanded an answer. So he gave her the only answer he felt was appropriate for the situation:

"I don't know. Do you?"

He quirked his eyebrow up slightly to punctuate the question, and then exhaled, his face resuming its usual mask of mild indifference as he stretched back, putting his arms behind him and resting on his hands. For the first time, Reeve registered the makeup she'd removed all over her hands and fingers; he looked at it with yet another short, subtle look of disdain, one that likely read something like 'she better not wipe that off in my room anywhere.' If she noticed, she made no mention of it at the moment, instead choosing to continue to talk about the game, and quickly follow up with some more questions about him.

"I never really put much thought into it," Reeve answered her first question, pausing for a moment as if he was finished before finally clarifying somewhat. "Computers and stuff? I just get them. I talk to them, they talk to me. I want something they have, all I have to do is ask nicely. When I ask them how I can help them, they tell me how to upgrade their systems, or how to use them in other ways. This one," he nodded his head in the direction of Brains, Comrade, "Is almost entirely parts I put together myself."

In talking about himself, Reeve almost forgot she'd asked about the AI. Remembering, he nodded toward his computer again. "Speaking of which... hey Comrade," he spoke to the computer. "Show her why I named you that."

Without a word, Brains, Comrade pulled up a picture that Reeve had photoshopped himself, of a zombie that looks just a little like Josef Stalin with an even more stereotypically Russian hat.

"I thought it was funny. Brains, Comrade. So I named my computer after it." He shrugged, as if photoshopping a stupid image and naming your computer after it, and even going so far as to program a Russian-sounding artificial intelligence to give life to the joke, was nothing at all.

"I spend a lot of time at my computer, probably no surprise there. So I figured I'd add some voice recognition so I didn't have to type all the time. Then I figured I'd add a vocal acknowledgment. And from there it just kind of spiraled out of hand until I'd built a rudimentary AI from the thing."

"Rudimentary, Reeve?"

"Can it, or I'll toss you in gulag."

He glanced back over to Mia with a little grin and a 'what can ya do?' kind of shrug.

[Mia Keystone]

He was a quiet one. Ah well, he answered her questions and didn’t seem too phased when she started playing with the lights. And he wasn’t acting like she was about to explode, as people had been known to do when they’d caught her in disguise. She’d give him a point for that, and for the cheeky remark. So far, he was on two. The highest anyone had reached with her was four.

”I’m the best looking Hacker you’ve seen, mate,” she said with a smirk.

Mia followed Reeve’s eyes and looked down at her hands, then back at him. She was sorely tempted to just get up and draw cat whiskers or a mustache on him with the makeup, but even Mia figured that might be a bit much from a girl who’d been caught under his windowsill.

”You talk to computers?” Mia knew everyone’s abilities would be different, no matter if they were grouped similarly or even did the same thing. ”That’s not how it works for me... Cool though.” she paused for a moment, thinking. Did he even need an AI if he could talk to them? Maybe he just wanted a reason to talk out loud...

”My laptop’s been fixed up so much there’s not much left of her originally,” Mia replied happily when she heard about Comrade. ”Kaylee doesn’t look too flash, but she’s been going for over six years now. Nothing you can buy on the market like that, unless you’re willing to send it in every year.”

The picture was funny. Mia grinned, then shook her head. ”You named your comp after that though? You really carry a joke on for a bit, eh? Kaylee’s a character from Firefly. You know it?”

It was nice, talking about computers with names. Most people (even Jonah, really) just didn’t get why Mia was attached to something that wasn’t even alive, by most standard. But, as Reeve had said, she spent enough time on her computer to count it as her best friend, so it made sense for it to have a name.

”I type out of habit, don’t really need to,” Mia shrugged again, then narrowed her eyes. ”You weren’t typing before!” When she had been spying, she meant. The way he talked to Comrade was nifty, Mia could see that. But there was something maybe a bit off about a kid who, as far as she could remember, didn’t seem to spend time with anyone else. ”Bet you I could crack that laptop you’re building in ten minutes,” she said quickly, to get her mind off it. ”You’re leaving huge gaps.”

[Reeve Rzeznik]

Reeve chuckled a bit as she spoke, proclaiming that she was the best hacker he'd ever seen. For all that he could try, Reeve couldn't really dispute the statement, and so after a moment of pause, he nodded, a singular dip of his head, and when it came back up, his eyes meeting hers again, a wry little smirk was plastered upon his face.

"Certainly not untrue," he teased her mildly.

In truth, Reeve was still at least somewhat put off by the girl's intrusion. She had, after all, been spying on him beneath his windowsill, and when she'd been caught, she had, without really asking permission, decided to barge right on into his room anyway, and engage him in conversation. However, so far, her promise of not screwing with anyone continued to remain legitimate, and he began to feel like he could let his guard down a little. After all, there was nothing she could do to him in his own room that she, as a tech-meta, couldn't try to do from damn near anywhere else on campus, anyway. And so, with a quick little exhalation that could almost be construed as a sigh, Reeve leaned back fully, stretching across the width of his bed as they continued to speak.

Reeve listened quietly as she spoke out again, sounding fairly incredulous at the fact that he actually spoke to computers. In truth, it wasn't quite so simple, but he felt the metaphor was accurate enough. Information he wanted from them, he was able to get, and he did so, generally, by at least thinking at them in human speech. Somehow it was translated into machine code and they understood. In all truth, he really didn't know the specifics of it, only that it worked, and it made him good at all sorts of tech stuff. Apparently, her ability didn't work quite the same way, and that actually intrigued him. Much as she had, Reeve assumed that different technopaths had different routes they traveled to achieve their powers. He opened his mouth to ask her about hers, but before he could say anything, she was on a different topic, going on about her computer, and his computer, and the like.

He smiled, somewhat absentmindedly, staring up at the ceiling while she spoke of Kaylee. It was a good name for a computer, and from the sounds of it, Kaylee and Comrade would get along just fine, if the chance arose. Both were in the hands of skilled tech-metas, both had been upgraded and refined so much that the only real evidence that anything on them had been store-bought was the brand on the side of the casing (and even that, Reeve had scraped off during an upgrade a few years ago). The only difference seemed to be that Brains, Comrade could talk.

"I know of it," he answered her during a pause in her words. "All my geek friends rave about it, but I've yet to come around to watching. I don't really like Buffy or Angel, though, so..." he trailed off with a shrug.

It was her last comment, however, that caused him to sit back up again. She thought she could crack through his code? Huge gaps, she said? Leaning up on his arms again, Reeve's eyebrows shot up, one slightly higher than the other, as he regarded her with a dismissive look.

"I'm leaving holes because I'm still interfacing while I'm talking to you," he replied, overtly challengingly. "Heck, I bet I could seal this puppy up tighter than anything you've ever coded while you're trying to breach it!"

With that, Reeve sat up fully, a playful grin set upon his face. The challenge had all but been set forth.

[Mia Keystone]

Mia cleared her throat, raising an eyebrow as Reeve seemed to stare absently at the ceiling. Well, seemed too was not entirely right. Weird kid, seriously weird kid. In all fairness though, she wasn’t giving him much of a chance to talk. Mia was used to her brother or whatever cutting her off when they had something to say. With Jonah, well, they didn’t really talk much. You couldn’t interrupt a text.

That little remark got the scoff it deserved. ”You can’t compare vampires and outer space, dude. Except for that movie about Dracula in space but that was just a slow brainfuck of a film so it doesn’t count.” She shook her head in disgust. ”Download it.” It was not a suggestion. And as rude as it seemed, it was actually sort of a big deal for Mia to start telling you how to live your life. Usually, she really didn’t give a shit. It was just, well, annoying to be on the receiving end of it.

Mia’s eyebrows mirrored Reeve’s, and to anyone looking in it would have been pretty amusing. She’d got a rise out of him, which was more relieving then she expected. With a crooked grin, Mia flexed her fingers. Her knuckles cracked like gunshots, her eyes glinting as, mostly for appearance, cracked her neck. ”It is so on,” she chuckled, then glanced at the new laptop. ”So, fifty bucks?” Closing her eyes for a moment, Mia’s eyelids flickered as she gave the beginnings of the codes she saw a quick look over. Eyes open again, she laughed and looked down at her palm pilot. ”On your marks, get ready... go!”

Reeve had said he talked to computers to get them to do what he wanted. With Mia, when she was working on a computer, she went straight for the codes. It was like reading english, only instantaneous. And when you started looking at at a computer’s center, it was sort of like a main road; there were pathways leading off everywhere. Those were the access points. It was an over simplification but she’d tried to explain it like that before and it was close enough. It was a matter of exploring and testing the pathways, but being able to do it quickly enough that the detection software didn’t trap you in a dead end.

In other words, it was insanely fun when you could do it just for kicks.

Reeve was good, but the time it took him to ask the computer what to do or whatever was a tad slower then it took Mia to try different entry points. Even though the two teenagers were going at it full pelt, they were both sitting silently. Mia’s eyes were glazed over slightly; she rarely fully closed them.

And there! A crack! Mia grinned internally and dove for it. Reeve tried to stop her, and stop up the crack but just a millisecond too late and...

She was in. There was nothing really to look at; it was an empty computer, but she did get the screen to show HAHAHA in bright red letters.

Mia shook her head, shaking out the green numbers from behind her eyes. ”I am the master!” She grinned wickedly, then laughed. It was a show of, well, not quite friendship, but nice-ness that she didn’t immediately demand her prize.

[Reeve Rzeznik]

Reeve, sitting up by this point, nodded, once again just a little bit absentmindedly, and scratched the side of his chin, where his beard would be if he grew facial hair. Meanwhile, Mia proclaimed that not only was he stupid for comparing the two, she then, in no small terms, demanded that he download the show and watch it. For starters, Reeve didn't even know what movie about Dracula in space she was talking about, and so that little diatribe was processed, analyzed, and summarily ignored. As far as Reeve's thoughts on Firefly, it had honestly been something that had been in his mental 'check it out' list for a while, as something he would watch eventually. At Mia's insistence, however, Reeve decided to mentally bump it up a few notches in priority.

Even higher on his priority list, however, was paying attention to what Mia was telling him at the exact moment. Lost in thought over when he should actually download and watch Firefly, Reeve had almost forgotten about the challenge set forth. Mia had not, though, and was even going so far to issue a hard monetary amount to the bet, an amount that Reeve had, as far as he could remember, not explicitly agreed to. The amount (and the fact that she wanted cash out of him, at all) startled Reeve back to reality, and his eyes widened a little.

"Did you say fifty--he-hey wait, hold on!"

But it was too late, Mia was already looking around, and Brains, Comrade was yelling inside Reeve's head about it, too urgent to go over the vocal AI programming. Reeve gritted his teeth and began to talk.

Unlike Mia, who was actually completely silent, Reeve worked in a slight mumble, spitting out 1s and 0s under his breath, far slower coming out of his mouth than they were actually zooming across his mind. He conferred with BC, then with the empty little laptop on the table, and began building up his defenses. A hastily-built firewall was quickly broken, but it gave him enough time to seal off multiple ports from intrusion. Mia tested at one of the ports and Reeve quickly moved to fortify it with a few lines of code that would re-route it back to her Palm Pilot, but the whole thing had been a charade. Inside a computer's code, Mia seemed to fly with pinpoint accuracy: Whereas Reeve certainly understood machine code and could manipulate it, he did so under the guidance and, in some cases, tutelage of the machines that said code belonged to. He could change, but he often would consult with the machines on how to do so correctly. Mia, on the other hand, seemed to just be the code, and knew exactly how to dodge and weave through his defenses to get to where she needed to be.

It was with this ability that she found the crack in his firewalls just a bit before he did, and even as he compiled a program he'd been writing simultaneously while defending the computer, a program intended to completely lock out her IP permanently, she slipped through, and the blinking red laughter popped up across his laptop's screen.

Reeve's eyes flew open and he stopped muttering binary, instead letting out a long, slightly wheezing breath. The ordeal had been a bit much for him, and he let out another low breath and shook his head.

"You..." he said, lifting a hand to poke an index finger in her general direction a few times. "You're good." The look of shock and amazement slowly faded into a small, but genuine, smile. "You are the master," he conceded at last, shaking his head once more.

[Mia Keystone]

It was rare that Mia had to hack as another tech actively blocked her. Well, it happened whenever she tired to access Hammel stuff, but she'd learnt quickly that no matter how fast she was, they were faster. She secretly thought they were all Japanese. (it wasn't racist! She was part Japanese! She knew their terrifying power over technology) But it was hugely exhilarating... like a really really really fast game of hide and seek. She'd caught the hint of his IP locking program, and if she hadn't been trying to avoid everything he threw at her, she'd had admired it a bit. But, it spelt game over so she just went faster.

Mia rubbed her eyes, smearing makeup even further as she did so. Blinking to clear her eyes properly (they got a bit dry from all the staring into space), she saw Reeve looking a bit warn and not a little disbelieving. A short sharp laugh burst from her mouth and her head tilted back for a second as she felt the adrenaline start to fade. With a slightly tired smile, she brushed her hair back from her face and grinned, eyes bright. "Fucking A I am," she chuckled, then sighed and slumped back against the windowsill.

This was... well, cool. No one else at this school got computers, or what you could do with computers. Technology wasn't just being able to ignore it and adapt around it, it was about being able to live with it, and living with it in all it's forms as you would the people around you. No one got that, or why she was perfectly happy to sit inside and look at screens all day and not going for a run or chasing butterflies or whatever it was people did out there.

Still chuckling quietly, Mia shook her head and with a glance cancelled the text on the screen. "Nice work though. I could see what you mean about talking to a computer." she quirked an eyebrow, and absently chewed on her lip rings. "0101100101101111011101010010011101110010011001010010000001100111011
011110110111101100100001011000010000001100100011101010110010001100101"

It was a bit of a tell, in poker terms, to mutter your suggestions for defence in front of the person you were trying to defend against. It was impossible to speak binary at a speed even one tenth as fast as a computer could produce it and they could read it. But hey, a clue was a clue. "Nice setup though. You're building an operations system? It's good!" She kicked her heels against the wall for a second, hands gripping the windowsill she was sitting on. "You're not a hacker though," she shrugged, "I mean, I could be wrong," doubt it, he wasn't an aggressor, or well, hadn't been one long enough to put himself in the mindset of one.

[Reeve Rzeznik]

Reeve gave a little shrug of defeat as the girl proclaimed her victory one last time. The adrenaline rush of power-coding was starting to fade in him as well, and Reeve couldn't remember a time before that he'd had so much fun. In almost any and all competitions with others in the realm of technology, it was always far too easy to get a one-up on his opponents, whether it be in a game or otherwise, by simply asking the computer how his opponent was winning and getting, in great detail, an accurate report on what he was doing right and what Reeve was doing wrong. From there, it was always a matter of correction, usually with some assistance from the machine in question, and Reeve was once again outstripping his opponent. It was almost too easy, sure, but when one had such gifts, and when one was stuck in an unfortunate position, it was almost impossible not to put them to use.

Here, however, he was matched up against someone who was not just his equal, but his better when it came to navigating inside a computer. That alone gave the girl an air of intrigue that captivated the boy more than most would, and the fact that she was a girl and not a 'pimply-faced hacker wannabe' made things all the more interesting. During the short pause, as she rubbed her eyes and cleared them of the haze from their extended coding session, Reeve watched her, taking in her form with a gaze that was not necessarily lustful or curious, but not quite entirely coldly analytical or scrutinizing either. He broke contact when she turned to look back at him, not entirely sure he'd done so quickly enough for her not to notice.

When she started spitting binary, Reeve looked back at her, a little surprised, and more than a little pleased, and a smirk crossed his features. He took the compliment with a nod, and fired back one of his own: "01001110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01110011 01101111 00100000 01100010 01100001 01100100 00101100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 01110011 01100101 01101100 01100110" he spoke, spitting it out with the same rapid delivery as usual, but without the cold machine-like intensity usually reserved for computers. As he spoke, he got up, moving across the room to grab the laptop as she spoke of it. Once there, he glanced down at the comfy-as-hell office chair he'd ordered specifically, knowing he'd be spending the brunt of his time there. After looking at it for a moment, he glanced back to the girl, sitting on the rather small windowsill. Another glance back to the chair, and finally, making a decision, Reeve grabbed the laptop in his hands and kicked the chair lazily over to her direction, opting instead to take a seat cross-legged on his bed. It was perhaps the greatest offer of generosity he'd given during his stay at Hammel thus far.

"Thanks," he nodded, his gracious smile a bit smaller and less honest this time. "And no, I wouldn't really claim to be one, either. I don't think it's really hacking, all I'm doing is asking a computer to do things a little differently than it has been."

With a shrug, he put a hand casually on the side of the laptop, practicing his ability to work silently through touch signals instead of vocal cues. He was getting a little better, but it was still slow going. Either way, he wanted to finish the laptop's personalized OS, but he also didn't exactly want to shoo the girl away just yet. It was an amusing though, especially since naught but ten minutes ago she was spying on him from beneath his window.

"That stuff's never really interested me, anyway. Don't feel the need to get into other people's junk, usually. Most of it isn't worth sifting through in the first place." He glanced up in her direction, looking for a facial reaction. Their similar interests and abilities gave him an easier jumping-off point for conversation than he had with most, and unlike most, he found her genuinely interesting, but that didn't make it easy. He had a feeling he was going to be treading into uneasy territory with this train of thought, and needed to see how she took it to process exactly how to continue.

"Generally I just use what I know to protect my own."