The Six: Genesis | A Reverse Harem Novel

Thirty-Nine

Hacking isn't easy.

It's not like the movies, where with a few keystrokes the entire banking system comes down like a house of cards by a gust of wind. It takes work—patience, perseverance, and politeness of a prickly porcupine. I possess two of those things, but the third not so much.

My fingers fly across the keyboard, tuning out Chris and Charlie as I go into the belly of the beast. Iris is right there with me, her systems move faster than I care and intuit where I fall short. She and I are in perfect harmony.

With malware infecting nearly 400,000 organisms, we're sitting ducks. They haven't attacked the general public or their military handlers, but they are destroying one another. This isn't a bid to only compromise my integrity, but also to reduce my organisms by the thousands without lifting a finger.

Frustration wells inside of me as I type, flickering through lines and lines of code to find the Achille's heel of my attacker. If my contract holders hadn't made this stupid decision, we wouldn't be in this mess. They let them in.

Provided passwords and complete, unsupervised access for a random nobody into the most advanced system on the planet. He'd planted a seed of discord and milked it for all it was worth. The panels of television on the east side of the lab flipped on and scrolled so fast I could barely keep up.

Now the dumbasses were calling. The help center and the self-service portal were exploding. Ticket after ticket came in, marked as high priority. My in-house techs were swamped, doing everything they could to get our clients access to the systems they'd lost to him, to Sharife SolJourner.

"You've got this, Blue. I know you're frustrated, but you've got this." Chris' voice is like a balm to my soul and his hand comes up to wipe away the tears trailing down my cheeks. "It's okay. Whatever it is, you'll figure it out."

I chuckle, "And if I don't?"

"You will." He vows. "If you can't figure it out, no one can."

His words boost my confidence and the tension pulling my muscles stiff relaxes. I can do this. Though, hearing it makes things ten times easier to believe.

Charlie moves to my other side, his arms crossed and his eyebrows furrowed. He's scanning my work and the loads Iris processes. If I had prior knowledge of his systems, it would make this easier.

Sadly, I don't, and all I can manage is a brute force assault on his systems.

With everything I've got, I hit him. It's enough to break his concentration, and instead of hacking me directly like he was attempting, he swerved to prevent us from gleaning anything from his systems. A smirk works its way onto to my face, but I hold the pride welling in my chest down.

I can't afford to get cocky, not when he held so much under his control.

While he worked to keep us at bay, I rerouted half of Iris' attention to the hacked organisms. We had enough of a hold to block the next malware attack. A few password changes and redoing protocols knocked off his grip, but it didn't stop him from using the organisms he controlled like battering rams.

They broke into one another on the battlefield. The carefully constructed strategies of the fighting nations fell into an all-out brawl. Unable to control their organisms and unwilling to risk their human soldiers, the nations backed out of the warfare to watch from far off as the machines tore each other limb from limb.

Two bombs detonated in the east, sending 10,000 organisms sprawling across the desert lands. Bits of broken machinery peppered the golden sand dunes and littered the abandoned vehicles. Red eyes, twitching limbs and liquid oozed into the earth, painting it horrid shades of black, green and light blue.