Page 377 of Hell Hath No Fury
“Stop being so fucking cryptic!”
The words disappeared.
I let out a string of curses as the entry point of a game called Swan Song flashed onto the screen along with a playful little jingle. I’d never heard of the game before, but that didn’t surprise me. Clearly, 0bs1d14n Sw4n had created their own hardware on the arcade machines ROM disk and inserted it back into the machine.
Play now?
The question mark flashed red like a flag before a bull.
Did I want to keep fucking with things so outside my realm of control? I had no idea what I was getting into if I pressed the big red button on the control next to my right hand. Only a vague sense that answers about my mother’s death lay on the other side. Only that, for whatever reason, my friend, S1gn3t needed my help and this was the way to help her.
The first thing you learned as a hacker was not to trust.
Not anyone.
You backed up your back-ups on encrypted servers. You turned off your computer whenever it wasn’t in use so no onecould hack it while you slept. You used aliases and IP masking devices and any matter of disguises to bury your true identity six feet deep. There were white hats and red hats in the hacking world, people who weren’t there to ruin the lives of innocents, but there were also any number of black hats willing to take advantage of anyone with the misfortune to cross their paths.
It was stupid to think I could trust S1gn3t and this game when she’d never told me any truths. When she’d had me hit over the hit and dragged to this godforsaken arcade on Christmas Eve.
When she hadn’t divulged that she was really the 0bs1d14n Sw4n.
But even as I battled with myself, I knew what my choice would be.
Crystal had named me after a famous Celtic hero for a reason. She’d taught me that goodness was rewarded, and bravery was a form of magic human beings could actually possess.
She would have wanted me to help.
She would have wanted me to find the men who murdered her and set things to right.
And the sad truth was, the only friend I had left in the world had just asked for my help.
I didn’t have it in me to refuse her.
So, I sucked in a deep breath that tasted of stale air and hot plastic from old, overheating equipment and pressedplay.
Swan Song was a first-person adventure arcade game that opened with an introduction to the story. A princess was cursed to live in the body of a swan and caged in an elaborate trap deep within a mountainside by an evil tyrant. Every day, she was tortured so they could harvest her feathers to use for their magical properties. She was tired and she was dying, losing her sight and her mind all alone in the dark.
And it was my job to save her.
I looked down at what I had available to me. There was a joystick, the big red button, and––fuck yeah––a keyboard. It was old, the letters on the keys partially scrubbed off, but it would do.
I could hack anything with a WIFI connection and a keyboard.
Just as I was about to do so, the Santa looming beside me crackled and broke off mid ‘ho’to be replaced with a mechanical ‘play fair.’
My sigh ruffled the hair that had fallen into my face.
Fuck fair.
But fine, I’d play it her way.
The game was easy enough to follow, but the tasks were surprisingly complicated, clearly built for a hacker. I had to find a way around a dragon that presented itself as a kind of virus in the code, hunting it down and shooting it through the chest with a barbed bit of code I imbedded myself. It dissolved into falling blocks, showing the entryway to a dark cave.
