The Core: The First Guest

11. Cha-ching!

My return to my own VR space was a bit nostalgic. Everything was how I had left it, the never-ending shelves of books and the walls to my apartment were still there. One thing that was different was Tutor's expression on her face. The moment that I appeared back I swear she had a worried look on her face. That was wiped away in the next moment as her eyes glowed and an array of colors seemed to spread from me to her. This spurt of color and ever glowing white eyes lasted all of three seconds. When it was done Tutor's eyes changed back to normal and she tilted her head to the side while giving me a puzzled look.

"What? What is wrong Tutor?" I asked as I stepped off of the disk that I had started to refer to as a "travel disk" in my head. I walked over to stand in front of her and to look into her eyes. No more sign of the Goa'uld glow was showing up in her eyes which made me a little bit nervous.

"Everything ok in there? Your eyes glowed and there were lights around us there for a second." I said as I looked around. Maybe I should start learning how to look up all my own settings rather than asking someone else to do it for me.

"Yes, everything is perfectly fine. My worry was because, while you were gone, our connection was severed multiple times. While it was happening I looked up what could have occurred and it said that in instances like that... law enforcement was usually involved. Only they have the keys to cut off access to the Core and Home VR. I was afraid that you had been put into prison or something horrible like that." She said before pausing for a second. 

"The lights as you put it were you upgrading your home VR's security settings from the changes you made. I must say Kevin that your understanding and expertise of security are flawless. Your home VR is now running some very interesting protocols." She said as she waved her hand to show three screens that had seemingly random dots moving in various patterns across each of them. The more I looked and studied the dots the more details stood out. They each seemed to be doing something different. The left screen was intercepting other color dots and tearing them apart chunk by chunk. The second screen would take those chunks and merge with them, seemingly absorbing and testing them, the last screen would assemble the individual dots, having already removed any color from the dots.

As I watched an interesting thing occurred, a dot entered the left-most screen that was almost the same color as my dots. This caused a flare of colors across all of my dots and they started to change and gain patterns before they all converged on the imposter and tore it to shreds.

"Is this my security?" I asked as I watched, dumbfounded by the rapid activity going on in front of me. "And were we almost just hacked?"

"Yes to both questions Kevin. It seems that with your rise in fame some Citizens are trying to access your data and to find you." Tutor replied as she moved the screens over next to my library browsing computer setup so I could watch them whenever I wanted.

"What? What rise in fame?" I asked, breaking my gaze away from the screens as her words made their way through to me. I willed my notifications to display in front of me and was gifted with a flood of information in front of me. "Ehhh... is this spam mail?" I asked as I tried to start to sort through some of what I was seeing. 

"Yes, you have received and continue to receive these sendings from departments of the Core. It seems that since you are still a Guest that you don't yet have a mailbox so in order to attempt to find you there are some corporations that are flooding the system with offers and ads in an attempt to get you to respond." She said as she gazed away from me for a second with a thoughtful look. "The protocols that Hxerdinand the 9th left for me have filters and could help in this situation if you would like to create another AI like we spoke of before."