Chapter 20: Overclocked
Slave to Memory [21 of 44] - Omni was supposed to hide. Instead, she’s a ticking time bomb in the middle of the Stacks.
<We don’t have time for this,> Syn said, her voice sharp with urgency.
Standing in their blank training shard, Omni yelled back, “I’m trying, Syn!”
Her voice echoed in the formless white space, a room without shadows or corners, like an endless blank void. But even so, for Omni it felt deceptively close, suffocating. The walls pressed in on her, amplifying her frustration. There was no horizon, no mountains, nothing to distract from her failure.
<There is no try, just do it!> Syn shot back, hands on her hips, her tone biting.
Omni gritted her teeth and refocused on the odd gestures Murph had shown her before he’d vanished into whatever memory had him now. His connection with their shard kept breaking down. He’d dissolved into pixelated dust, leaving her alone with a half-finished lesson and a ticking clock.
Her lips moved as she repeated the instructions to herself, miming the actions that to her at least, felt very disconnected from reality.
“Movements to clear. Movements to center. Movements to conceal.”
<Murph and I are confusing the reccie drones as best we can, but it won’t last,> Syn pressed, her voice tense.
She cast up a glowing holographic map of the circling drones and the overlapping sensor fields tracking them. Red dots blinked in an ever-tightening circle around their location.
“Shhh…” Omni hissed, trying to maintain her focus.
<They’re pouring in resources now — you’ve gotta get this, kid.>
Omni squeezed her eyes shut and thought about the image Murph had described.
Erasing yourself.
Blending into the world.
Lost in the noise.
It sounded so easy when Murph explained it. Like a trick anyone could master if they just knew the steps. But this felt like something else—something that required a part of herself she didn’t know how to access.
“This isn’t keyboard hacking,” sighed Omni, frustration tightening her voice.
Hacking was easy. Desk jockeying, running scripts, and specialist modules—that was comfortable. That was home.
But this… this was different.
She had to project an intention out to Syn, to visualize an effect and communicate it through their link, as if they were two parts of the same mind. And then, if she did it right, Syn would amplify it exponentially.
Focus and clarity were everything.
“Much more powerful,” Murph had said before flickering away. “If you can get it.”
“If,” she muttered bitterly, when Murph’s image had broken up again, she’d felt the sting of abandonment.
It would have been easier with Ada.
She slumped to her knees, cradling her head in her hands as the throbbing ache returned.
She’d had migraines before from staring at cheap grey-market displays, but this was far worse—sharp and pulsing, like someone was running an a whining overclocked system right inside her skull.
She felt a gentle touch on her arms.
<Don’t give up,> Syn said, <I’m not Ada, but we can do this,> her voice softened as she gently lifted Omni back to her feet.
Omni felt Syn’s grip through her implant, the sensation woven directly into her brain’s sensorium. It was data made tactile, lines of code transformed into a pressure against her skin. A reminder of how deep Syn could reach, how thoroughly she was embedded in her mind.
She looked up at Syn, the image of young fragile girl, she’d met only days before, even though it felt like months. Now revealed a hidden strength, solid and unyielding, that made her appear far older.
<Think of it this way: imagine yourself as something clear, like glass, that doesn’t register on sensors, you know, like a—>
“A piece of glass?” Omni guessed, her gaze darting back to the Seeker’s surveillance net. The circle of red-hot dots tightened around them, moving in with relentless precision.
The countdown on the right wasn’t helping her nerves either.
“Do we really need to have that up?” she asked, swiping it away with an impatient gesture.
Syn frowned, but a moment later, the countdown reappeared, hovering stubbornly in her peripheral vision. <Sometimes the proper motivation helps,> Syn replied. <Dammit, they’re slippery buggers. Keep trying—I’ll be back.> With that, she flickered out, vanishing into a halo of light that pushed against the red dots on the map.
Omni gritted her teeth, “Be calm, disappear.”
The lights in their private shard turn green, held steady for a second… and then, once again, collapsed back to red as that effing buzzer blared.
“Dammit.”
The real-world sensations bled into the shard, icy sweat crawling down her spine, her heart pounding with cortisol and adrenaline. Her palms were clammy, and each failed attempt only made her feel smaller, more exposed.
“Action cures fear,” she muttered, recalling Murph’s words. She rubbed her face with her hands, massaging her eyes and trying to clear her fatigue.
Breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth, “It’s almost like meditation,” Murph had said.
He appeared in front of her, cross-legged on the floor like some kind of stoic monk. His presence was steady, grounding, and for a moment, it cut through her frustration.
Is this real? she thought or a memory.
“Sit,” he instructed, calm as a Hindu cow, his expression serene.
Omni hesitated, then mirrored him, sinking down to the floor and crossing her legs. As she settled, Murph continued in that maddeningly calm tone, “Close your eyes.”
She listened.
“…and breathe. In through the nose and out through your mouth.”
And felt the tension draining from her muscles, her pulse slowing.
“Forget about what’s happening out there,” he said. “Just breathe. In and out. Now make yourself—”
And then, he was gone.
“Argh!” Omni kicked out at the spot where Murph had been, her foot passing through the empty air, scattering the greying pixels of his fading image.
She thought about those eyes in the alley—the monster, part man, part machine, that Murph had fought the first night. Those cold, calculating eyes that looked at her like prey.
She glanced up at the messy grid pattern of the Stacks, a digital map hanging in the sky. Syn’s attempts to hide them flickered, the protection running in fits and starts.
Murph’s hacks were being shut down— Omni had to get this.
Syn was rationing Compute, sipping from the limited power they had left. And if she drew too much, she’d throw up a flare that might as well shout, Come get us!
That was the real problem.
Stealing the enemy’s resources against them. They had nothing of their own. If they just had their own servers - we could do amazing things.
A flash of light appeared beside her. <Not the problem for now, kid. Maybe you’re not getting who we’re up against, hey?>
Without warning, Syn shoved her forward, right through a wall and into another room. Omni landed hard on a rusted steel floor, her hands coming away sticky, red.
She looked up, confused, to find Syn’s face flickering—shifting into the smooth, chiseled features of the news anchor, Herman Shaw.
“The Stacks are always a problem,” his voice a low growl, as he gestured to the crime scene around him, “Yet again, Stack gang violence spiraling out of control.”
Spitting each word like he was chewing on something foul.
Then he vanished, and Syn’s face returned, her expression serious. “He’s lying, but look around.”
Omni spun, heart hammering, as she took in the bodies strewn across the floor.
“What the hell?”
<It’s a sim, kid — relax, it’s not —>
Omni stumbled backward, her heel catching on a limb. She tripped, falling over a man, his body twisted and bloody. She stood, slipped and fell again, her clothes now were smeared with blood, and her hands drenched in it.
“My fault,” she murmured, panic and nausea rising in her throat as backed away. “This is my fault.”
<No, no, no,> said Syn, waving a hand to clear the crime scene. But Omni was still retreating, her face pale, her hands shaking.
“He came for me,” Omni whispered, swaying on unsteady legs.
<Yes, but that’s them, hon, not you. They’re bastards — >
“He did this because of me!”
Guilt seared through her, followed by a wave of white-hot rage that made her entire body feel electrified. Her vision narrowed, focusing into a pinpoint of anger and frustration. The scene around her—the blood, the broken bodies, the accusation in Shaw’s voice—all fuelled a deep and dangerous well within her.
Syn didn’t interrupt.
She didn’t try to tell Omni that the men killed by the Seeker had brought it on themselves—trying to rob a cyborg for parts, desperate and foolish. Instead she watched, still and silent, as a profound intent took shape in Omni’s mind: a raw and seething.
A rebellion of rage, building and building. An invocation crystal clear and ringing through their Connection.
Omni’s heartbeat quickened, feeling a strange pull in her chest, connecting her to a vast pulsing. Compute. She could see it, like an ocean of light, swirling just out of reach. Calling to her, a pull so strong it felt like gravity. Her mind, in that moment of fury something inside her snapped—like a dam breaking open, she reached for that ocean without hesitation.
She drew in the energy like a storm funneling debris, reckless and ravenous, and in an instant, everything flipped.
She flung her arms out wide in two sweeping arcs, fingers splayed as if reaching to tear open the very fabric of the air around her. Syn, temporarily bonded with Omni, responded without question—too eager, too inexperienced in this connection to recognize the full extent of Omni’s intentions.
The surge was immediate. Together, they tore into Blue Nile’s resources, siphoning raw computational power as if ripping it from the bones of the Verse itself. Security measures shattered like glass. A thousand alarms triggered in a cacophonous symphony, each one feeding her rage instead of slowing her down.
Omni barely noticed. Her mind was already a thousand steps ahead, every thought unfolding into complex paths and chains of attack vectors. Data flows redirected, split, and multiplied. Each thread amplified, doubling, tripling, until she felt like she was wielding a burning blade, slicing through the networks that surrounded them.
They bundled the data into waves of denial-of-service attacks, crashing every open port, overloading every firewall with massive, indiscriminate bursts of malicious code.
Together, they burned out every connected device between them and the Seeker.
The real world around her dimmed as her vision tunneled, her pulse a steady, deafening beat in her ears. In the distance, she could hear the metallic clang of reconnaissance and delivery drones plummeting from the sky, their dead shells clattering across the Stacks like a brutal hailstorm. Surveillance cameras blinked out, one by one, until every feed broadcasted static.
Exhausted, Omni collapsed to the floor.
The deadly barrage ended as the last drone crashed down, smashing into metal roofs and through fragile solar panels.
Routers, uplinks, repeaters, sensors, implants—everything within a fifty-meter-wide directional blast area went dead. Overridden and burnt out.
Omni collapsed, her legs buckling beneath her as she sank to the floor, the world spinning around her. She was exhausted, her entire body trembling, but there was a flicker of grim satisfaction in her chest.
In the silence that followed, Syn’s digital presence hovered nearby, her expression somewhere between awe and horror.
<Who… are you?> Syn’s voice was barely a whisper, a note of fear and reverence threading through it.
Omni’s lips moved, her voice so faint it was almost inaudible. “I… I killed him.” Her pulse was weak, fluttering erratically. Syn reached out, checking her vitals through the damaged Link, feeling the faint thud of her heartbeat.
Slowly, the Verse around them crumbled, fading into static as Syn let the simulation drop. In the real world, Omni lay sprawled on the floor of her room, her eyes half-open, her breath shallow. Syn’s hologram flickered beside her, reaching out as if to cradle her, a look of worry etched on her young face.
The flickering image of Syn turned, frowning as Murph sat up in the bed shaking the last shreds of the dream from his head.
<We needed your help,> Syn said, her voice edged with accusation.
“I’m here.” Murph’s face was unreadable, but his gaze held steady on Omni.
His gaze shifted to the faint wisps of smoke rising from Omni’s neural implant, he sighed, muttering under his breath. “And now you see why I made your lamp.”
As Syn flickered out, the sharp, acrid smell of melted silicon and burnt plastic filled the air.