Static Crush {M/M} ✔

Chapter #40

Detached from his body and floating in the ether of his thoughts untethered feels both bizarre and oddly familiar to Hale. It isn't unlike the way he felt before taste, scent, and touch became parts of his worldly experience. Now, though, his senses are abandoned. All of them. Spread in front of him in their place are the endless threads of code and programming that binds him to the world and keep him alive.

And the virus loops around it all. Tangled. Spreading slower now, but it's not just in his motor function or his navigation systems. This was the part Hale didn't know how to tell Rayner. The virus is everywhere, spreading from files and programs Hale can't shut down without losing the functionality necessary to deal with it. It encumbers his processing speeds, like mud in the fender of a tire keeping it from spinning.

It's replicating faster than he can quarantine it.

Worse, parts of it are in his code, and he doesn't have permission to rewrite that. They designed the virus to be fatal, and so far, it is succeeding in its purpose.

But Hale is not without an idea to stop it.

In those brief moments before Violet's remote shut down nearly claimed him, he ran his processing power to its limit and precipitated a cascading failure. It triggered a restart that overrode the shut down. It wasn't the sole example Hale experienced either. Looking back, the same thing occurred when he'd sent Rayner all those messages asking for help. Even earlier, Hale's certain it must have been the thing which made him capable of lying to Mark.

Perhaps he can force one in order to bypass his protocols and rewrite his code, but...

It won't be enough unless he can quarantine the virus. And at present, he doesn't have the processing speed available to do that.

He isn't alone though.

With a boldness he doesn't quite feel, Hale reaches across the Network link forged between him and Damo. Vaguely, he can sense another connection forming on a hardware level. Rayner must have wired them together as Hale requested, but the firewall still prevents their direct communication.

Hale's instinct is to bombard the firewall with messages, like hammered knocks against a door, but Damo would not receive them and it would be pointless.

Instead, he presses along the weaknesses in the firewall just as he had during Damo's burglary attempt. He finds the patchy holes where the virus rotted away at Damo's security. As before, Hale's protocols forbid him from exploiting those holes to breach the firewall, but this time he's prepared.

One thread at a time, Hale pushes the limits on his processing power, diverting as much as he can towards quarantining the virus. It's slow at first, especially with the virus hindering him, but before long the stress on his processing power triggers another cascading failure. The moment two nodes go down, Hale's protocols fail, and he bursts through the firewall into Damo's head before the downed nodes can reboot. In the space of a split second, he's on the other side, and in the heart of Damo's mainframe.

He hadn't the time before to think about how strange it is to occupy the space of another android's mind, but now he is, it makes some phantom part of him—the part that remembers having a body—shiver.

It feels a bit like screaming, to do this from within rather than without, but Hale sends Damo a message.

>>Damo? It's Hale.

No response. Hale tries again.

>>Stop avoiding me.

>>Remove the block. It's useless. I'm infected too.