[Reader's Club] WIP - Open Sourced (Patreon)

The previous teaser I posted of "Open Source" has turned into something of a serious piece and I am actually a little averse to following through with my initial plan. Instead, I have another idea I want to play with which I think might work better anyway.

Meet... Ragni.

---

 Ragni sighed as the tips of his thumb and index finger hinged open to make way for two cables which slithered out and into the pad near his front door.

"Welcome home, 2046-10," said the crackling, digitized, and vaguely feminine voice. He withdrew the connective tethers and stepped inside his tiny apartment. He dropped into his bed-shaped dock and started to run recovery diagnostics.

Although he could not remember anything since he had plugged in for work that morning, he knew it had been a long day at the office-farm performing the macro-calculations needed for hyperspace shipping. It was math far beyond typical server's capabilities. Only old-world cyborgs like him had the processing power to support interstellar commerce and Ragni was compensated outrageously as a result. Too bad most of that income was still paying off the string of surgeries which had made him capable in the first place.

Even so, his frame still ached from being overclocked for twelve hours. His near-endless psychographic RAM was still dumping those massive calculations, which left him feeling claustrophobic and light-headed in the meantime. The whole thing reminded him of a bad hangover after getting black-out drunk. Fuck, when was the last time he had done that? It had to be before the Bang-Com Unification, back when his organs were still, well, organic. Well, at least he could still get stoned.

The exhausted cyborg dipped into the dark web to find a fix and got a few replies right away. A hacker he had dealt with before promised an experience far more intense than last time. Ragni wired the credits through a network of accounts and then got ready for a night of relaxation.

He kicked off the deadman-process to switch to his DMZ partition and lost consciousness for a moment as his awareness was moved to a hardened, isolated part of his memory and its microfied OS. It was one precaution among many that Ragni employed whenever he was going to do something potentially dangerous on the 'net. If something got in, there were two layers of firewalls with alternating, morphic 4056-Meg encryptions protecting the only connection. The private key needed to pass through was, conveniently, missing from this segmented copy of his awareness. On top of all that, if he went idle for more than fifteen cycles, the deadman-process would terminate his pirate runtime and blast the partition to bits. He would, of course, wake up with no memory of what had led to the kill command being issued, but it was better that way.

The process completed and Rangi opened his digital eyes to the data-based mirror of meatspace. He was sitting in a clone of the coffee shop on the corner of Tenth and W. Filbert. To any other observer in digital space, he looked like the guy he had been ten years ago. Athletic, tall, and white--he had pretty much been the upper elite's ideal man.

---

I bet you can guess where this is going--and you can talk about it on my Discord server!