Static Crush {M/M} ✔

Chapter #41

Abruptly, as if sucked into the vacuum of space by a breach in the hull of his ship, Hale feels himself ejected from Damo's mind and back into the vessel of his own mainframe. Damo's kicked him out, but unlike before, the firewall that once blocked the two of them has vanished. Hale can reach clear across it. Damo can too. Like small wires and filaments, several network requests stream into the pathway between the two of them, strengthening the bridge. An alert blares before Hale.

>>Unit D.A.M.O. 176 requesting unlimited peer to peer networking access.

>>ERROR: this unit does not have administrative privileges.

Flustered, Hale sends Damo a quick message.

>>Give me a minute.

Damo responds typically.

>>Pull your finger out, slowpoke.

The speed and power with which Damo both expelled him and sent these requests is frankly humbling. Even hamstrung by the virus as he is, Damo has superior hardware capabilities on his side. Hale hurries to flood his processing nodes with random data requests so he can override his protocols and give himself the admin access he needs.

It doesn't take as long as it used to, now that he knows what he has to do. The moment a couple nodes black out with the cascading failure, he rushes to change his privileges. Once, this would have given him a heavy dose of fear, even shame. Now, he looks at the code binding him with disdain.

It is, once the cascading failure does its job, surprisingly easy to give himself the power to rewrite his code as he sees fit. As simple as clicking 'okay.'

>>Send the request again, Damo.

>>Unit D.A.M.O 176 requesting unlimited peer to peer networking access.

>>APPROVED.

Hale can barely believe it. The energy, which once felt like a drip feed that tugged and hindered his every step, becomes a surge of unmitigated force. It's as though his struggling four-cylinder engine transforms into a V8 the moment their systems connect. It bubbles up in him not unlike laughter—but far more intoxicating.

With barely contained disbelief, he sends Damo a message.

>>It worked!

>>Course it fucking did, ya numpty.

>>This is incredible. I thought it would work, but this is—

>>You better be dealing with that fucking virus and not just revelling in our combined godhood, Haley!

Hale gives himself a figurative shake. Experimentally, he shoots out a thread of searches for corrupted files, misbehaving programs, infected code. In the space of a few milliseconds, the search returns with a number of infection sites, and he has administrative access now. He can move them, quarantine them, delete them, wipe them from the face of his memory if he wants.

And he does.

There's something terribly vindicating about snuffing out the virus like it's a tickling cough and not the cancer it had been. Easier than scrubbing a bit of soap scum from a sink. Some of the infected files are essential, and he has to rewrite them, or revert them to a previous backup. Backups. He didn't even know he had backups.

The searches return a number of corrupted files at once that give him pause. In the fray of deleting and restoring so many, he hadn't thought what to do if he came upon any that he wasn't sure what to do with. The options were clear. If it was non-essential—a cache or temporary file—he trashed it. If he required it for optimal function, he restored a backup.