Proxy .Exe.'s Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Proxy .Exe wanted to crack the secret global network, and she was doing it from a basement under a punk club. Her three-panel laptop threw blue light across her face. Green code scrolled past her green eyes. She rolled the lollipop against her cheek and typed faster. One rule kept her alive down here: stay hidden. No pings. No trace. A cat-girl in a metal hoodie couldn't afford to be found. A red alarm cut through the bass overhead. The club's speakers died. Boots pounded down the basement stairs. Vex Riotborne shoved the door open with her bare foot. The barefoot singer with the purple Mohawk never knocked. She and Proxy had built this arrangement together: Vex ran the stage above, Proxy ran the shadows below. "Outside," Vex said. "Now. Something's wrong." Proxy grabbed her laptop and followed. The street behind the club held one thing. A scrap golem stood swaying between the dumpsters. Broken gears and rusted plates hung on it. One eye glowed orange. It jerked its head side to side, like it was searching. "It's been circling the block," Vex said. "For an hour." The golem's eye locked onto Proxy. It took one grinding step toward her. "Hold it down," Proxy said. She dropped to a crouch and opened the laptop. Vex hit the golem low. An old stagehand lumbered out from the loading door and grabbed its other arm. His work shirt hung in strips. His eyes burned like two dull coals, and his beard was matted with grime. He said nothing. He just pinned the thing with dead weight. The golem thrashed. Metal screamed against metal. Proxy jacked a cable into a port on its neck. Her fingers flew across the keys. "Come on. Give me your guts." Code filled all three screens. It wasn't machine code. It was something folded, layered, alive. She fought through it and found the kill command. "Down," she said, and hit enter. The orange eye went black. The golem sagged. Vex and the stagehand let it drop. It hit the pavement and stopped moving. Proxy breathed out. Then she saw what her screen had pulled from inside it. A shape spun slowly in the center panel. A glowing cube, nested with smaller cubes, blue and purple edges bleeding light. It sat where the golem's core should be. She had never seen anything like it. It wasn't scrap. It was reading her back. Text crawled under the cube. GREETINGS USER. Proxy wasn’t sure what she was seeing. The thing that had wandered here shouldn’t have been conscious. Scrap Golems were just moving junk as far as she knew, but this one was different. Another large me of text crawled across her screen. RETRIEVE… Her screen glitched and went black. "Vex," she said. "Think you and that zombie can open up that hunk of junk?”