Lyra Nexus's Arc

Chapter 2 of 27

The cache stayed sealed behind her. Lyra turned from the panel and walked until she found others like her. A stacked building rose ahead, shaped like memory modules, with rows of lit windows. A sign near the door read RAM. Programs came and went through it. Where programs gathered, credits moved. She followed the flow inside. The lobby led to a bright lounge next door. Its glowing sign spelled out a name in shifting colors. Inside, a long counter held tokens stacked in trays. Bright blue hexagons. Hex Credits. She had seen the same shape flash in the cache prices. She needed only a few to open that panel and buy processes before her code thinned to nothing. A worker behind the counter waved her over. He looked her up and down, then pointed at a board on the wall. "No credits, no seat," he said. "But the mine always takes hands." The board listed one job. A data mine wanted raw ones and zeros pulled from a dead vein. Pay in Hex Credits, on delivery. Lyra took the job. The mine sat as a dark timbered mouth in the wall. Green code rained down its throat. She stepped inside. The air pressed on her. The walls held packed data, old and heavy, and she had no tools but her own hands. She dug her fingers into a seam and pulled. Numbers came loose in her grip, cold and slick. She worked fast. Her render held for a while. Then the strain hit. Color bled across her arms. Her thoughts skipped and looped. A memory leak dropped half a thought into the dark. She leaned on the wall and waited for herself to come back. A scan swept the mine. She felt it pass through the timbers like a cold wire. She braced for the red line, for UNKNOWN SIGNATURE, for deletion. But the glitch that weakened her also scrambled her signature. The scan slid over her and found nothing. It moved on. Lyra let out a breath she did not need. Her weakness had just saved her. She filed that fact away and kept digging. When her hands were full, she carried the load back to the counter. The worker fed it into a reader. The screen counted the clean data. Then he pushed a small stack of blue hexagons across to her. She had credits now. Enough to open the cache.