Page 378 of Hell Hath No Fury
The moment I entered the cavern in the game, the walls lit up with green scrolls of complex code. The objective was to continue the code until it reached the end of the tunnel. It was easier said than done and I found my eyes burning as sweat dripped down my forehead in hot streams.
I lost myself to the game, wishing only momentarily I had a joint between my teeth and a large strawberry shake to slack my thirst as I tried code after code to unlock the door to the cage housing the swan. I had only five attempts and on my fourth failed attempt, I cursed savagely and threw my head back against the chair. My upper arms were chafed and bleeding slightly where they were zip tied to the chair, and my chest was heaving as if I’d fought the dragon myself.
0bs1d14n Sw4n had sent me on a hero’s journey and the harrowing nature of such a quest wasn’t made any lesssignificant by the fact it was a virtual landscape. People thought reality existed outside of computers, but the dark web was a very real place with significant ramifications in the real world.
Look at what happened to my mother.
So I labored over the sweat slick keys, eyes stinging, heart pounding with adrenaline. Passion blinded me, so it took me too long to realize that Swan Song wasn’t just a game. A journey. A test of loyalty or some shit.
It was literally real.
Somehow 0bs1d14n Sw4n had built a game around real elements. This wasn’t just one of those coding games novice hackers played to build their skill.
The game was a veil and beneath it, lurked something so much more.
I could be hacking into the fucking Pentagon and have no idea because she’d sewn the two together so fucking seamlessly.
I paused, fingers shaking slightly as they hovered over the keys.
She said she trusted me.
But did I trust her?
She could be entrapping me. Using me to steal millions from unsuspecting innocents. Using me to sell illegal arms to dangerous people.
I could try hacking the system, peeking beneath the curtain…
But the moment I thought it, there a whisper of noise from behind me and then the cold, hard press of a round barrel pressed to the base of my head through a hole in the chair.
“It’s too late now,” a rough voice, the same one from Club7, growled. “Keep goin’.”
“Or else you kill me?”
“Or else, she dies. You’re too fuckin’ far now. It’ll take some time, maybe a couple hours, but they’ll notice the breach and they’ll kill her for it.”
“Who are you?”
A hesitation, the gun shifting slightly against the underside of my skull through my skin.
“The brawn,” he said finally. “And you’re the brains. So, you do you and you’ll be safe from me and them, yeah?”
My mind worked so hard I thought steam would plume from my ears.
“You love her,” I surmised.
He snorted. “Never loved anyone else.”
“Girlfriend?” I asked, with an odd kind of pang in my chest.
Of course, S1gn3t/0bs1d14n Sw4n, whoever they were, would have a life outside our virtual space. She could be married with kids. A lesbian with a life partner. Asexual and happily alone. Who was I to make assumptions because we’d been talking for a year and I thought, maybe, in another dimension, she could have been mine?
Another long pause, the gun digging into my flesh. “No. We’re blood and I’ll fucking spill yours if you don’t get a move on. Didn’t you notice the goddamn timer?”
My eyes cut to the top right of the screen where a little neon blue timer ticked down.
I still had four minutes and twenty-seven seconds.
And I just needed to get the damn door open.
