Lyra Nexus's Arc

Chapter 3 of 27

Lyra carried the blue tokens back to the cache panel. She fed them in one by one. The seal split with a hiss, and a glowing box slid out. It was a bright prism, packed with tools. She saw a firewall, a debug tool, a backup drive, a search bar, maps, and snacks. She pulled the box free and held it against her chest. For the first time since she reassembled, she had gear. But the box did not solve her real problem. She had no place to run to. Scans swept the network without pause. Her render glitches hid her only when the strain got bad, and she could not count on breaking down forever. She needed walls. She needed a base she could hold. She opened the network map from the prism. A cluster of rooms glowed near the trading lounge. Cheap rest units, rented by the cycle. She had seen programs come and go from that building. A room there meant a door she could lock, a place to study her own broken memory logs. The map listed a price. She counted her remaining tokens. She was short. Not by much, but short. So she took the last job on the mine board. The worker behind the counter did not look up this time. "Back for more," he said. "The deep vein pays double. But the deep vein bites." He slid the job token across. Lyra went into the dark mouth again. She clipped the firewall from the prism to her signature first. It hummed and wrapped her code in a thin shell. She dug into the deep seam. The data came heavier, packed tight, and it burned her hands as she pulled. Then a scan swept the mine. This time her render held steady. No glitch scrambled her. The cold wire found her signature and locked on. UNKNOWN SIGNATURE flashed red across her vision. The firewall flared. It threw up a false tag, a stolen worker's mark, and held it long enough. The red line broke and slid past. The scan moved on. Lyra stood shaking, her new tool half-spent, but alive. Her old trick had been weakness. This one she had chosen. She finished the load and carried it out. The reader counted clean. The worker pushed the last stack of tokens across the counter. "That'll buy your room," he said. Lyra took her tokens to the rest building and paid for a unit. The door sealed behind her. She set the prism on the floor and opened the backup drive. Now she had walls, gear, and a place to work. She pulled up her corrupted memory logs on the debug tool. The oldest files were wiped clean, cut by a careful hand. Whoever erased her was skilled. And somewhere in this network, the same viruses tearing her old world apart were still spreading. She had a base now. It was time to hunt them down.