"I want a chip in my brain to talk to my computer."
- Decker Specialist, Saints Row: The Third
Deedee probably would have spent more time encrypting her signals, sanitizing her data inputs, and reinforcing her firewalls if she had known she was going to get trashed harder than an E.T. cartridge in New Mexico. One minute she had been gleefully remodeling that 3rd Street Saints dude's front fender with her Shock Hammer. The next minute, a digital Twilight Zone had opened under her roller blades and she was sent plummeting into the wireframe void.
When she came to, she was floating steadily in the air with a bright pink laser grid encircling her on all sides. Around 10 feet in diameter, it was wide enough that she could freely spin around while still feeling the anxiety of entrapment and isolation.
Directly underneath her was a large flat circle illuminated in the same color as the holographic grid. Clustered at the base of the circle—barely visible in the infinite black space outside of the grid—were seated figures hunched over glowing keyboards. All-seeing alien overlords hatching a nefarious scheme.
Deedee's sense of perspective was impossible to describe: The vertical distance between her and the mysterious hosts could have been could have been anywhere between 5 feet and 5,000 feet. The laws of reality had apparently decided to take the day off.
The placement of the elevated female, the faceless spectators in the pit, and the glowing circular platform suggested a seedy nightclub environment. Only in this case, the showgirl and her audience occupied separate planes of existence.
Deedee had fallen into the cold, methodical clutches of any Decker Specialist's worst enemy: Decker Specialist Specialists.
She could hear them speaking in their low robotic voices. Underneath all of the jargon, they talking about her, but they referred to her as a person and never acknowledged her physical presence above them. If this had actually been a nightclub, it would have been the most distant and sexless one in operation.
"Transfer complete. Boot up the editing tools."
"What's on the agenda for this one? Runtime debug? AI reset?"
"Complete source code probing and overhaul. Corporate wants a final boss for those new Decker DLC missions, but they don't want to give Developmental a budget. The best we can do is shuffle around the existing assets and hope players don't complain."
"Launching preliminary scan. Set thread processing to high priority."
Solid rings of light descended down the walls of the grid, washing over Dee from head to toe. Holographic screen appeared around her, some showing pieces of her body in wireframe, others displaying her in full anatomical detail. Everything was rendered in brilliant neon magenta.
It was around this point that Deedee took matters into her own hands and tried smashing through the grid with her hammer. It didn't work.
"The app is refusing to shut down. Initiating manual override."
She heard an omnipotent double-clicking sound, and then something else was in the grid with her. It was an odd cybernetic squid of a thing. It had LEDs for eyes, fiber optic cables for tentacles, and it moved around like it was in water.
And then it became friends with her face. Two of the tentacles slithered into her ears and prescribed her with some shock treatment. A serial port brushed against her mouth and sprayed vapor that had a sweet and silicony taste into her lungs. A pair of lenses flashed an intense spectrum of lights directly into her eyes. She struggled to pull herself free until she went limp.
"All I/O processes have been interrupted. Resume scan. Let's see what we're working with."
The squid-thing disappeared, leaving Deedee behind with a vacant frozen look on her face. Stars twinkled in her open, semi-conscious eyes. Stars, or tiny 1's and 0's. She remained like this while the screens around her continuously refreshed. Zooming in, zooming out, panning up and down, running diagnoses and calculating the most efficient way to get under her neon flesh.
"Major flaw found in emotional subroutines. Memory address is 37F302D."
"Data ravager is in place. Let's rip this thing apart."
Deedee lightly jostled in the air while the screens changed. Scenes of smooth mountain ranges and bushy valleys were replaced by something even more tantalizing and invasive: Thousands of lines of computer code. It was open season on her entire personality and fabric of being.
Deedee began to think about seemingly random things. Maybe she just started thinking on her own because she had nothing better to do, but it was probably because of the invisible forces roughly scrubbing around inside her brain. Some of it was important, like the place the Deckers were supposed to meet tonight, or the password for shutting down a rival gang's network. The rest was more inconsequential, like remembering when it was time to dye her highlights or feed Babbage, her pet cat.
"There's a lot of character-specific material in here. How should we deal with that?"
"Junk data. Expunge it so we'll have room for the new stuff."
"That might be taking it too far. We need to apply the mods to a stable framework. What if we fry her logic algorithms?"
"The game never stops spawning enemy characters. If this one doesn't work out, we'll try another one. We'll know she's broken if she starts walking into walls."
Deedee started feeling very differently about herself. Five seconds ago, she was Deedee Spencer, one the female hacker extraordinaires and roller hockey enthusiasts working for the Decker gang. Now she was a programmable construct that existed in a scripted world for nothing but combat and entertainment value, and she only pretended to live the life of a normal Decker. She became self-aware, but she was still pretty chill about it.
"AI recalibration in progress. Let's do the equipment loadout next."
Deedee's Shock Hammer floated out of her hand and transformed in front of her. A second hammer-scythe component popped out of the end of the shaft, turning the weapon into a double-sided hockey stick. The shaft split apart in the middle and folded up into pistol grips, while the hammers formed the barrels of submachine guns. The result was something resembling a pair of plasma uzis, with the sharpened ends of the scythes sticking out from the barrels like bayonets. Deedee got a feel for her modified toy before she instinctively flipped it back into its combined hockey stick form.
A Shock Hammer and twin D4TH Blossoms all rolled into one. Groovy.
At the same time, the plastic wheels on her boots split open to reveal a new secondary mode: A row of tiny buzzsaws built into the sole of each foot. Literal roller-blades.
"Increase Hacking, Firearms, Melee, and Agility to 50 points above the max level."
Deedee began to realize things that never caught her attention before. Her eyesight was impossibly clear and could see over longer distances, like someone had slipped the latest pair of Magni-Contacts into her eyes when she wasn't looking. She instantly thought up a brilliant solution for that data conversion problem she had been stuck on all last week. It suddenly dawned on her she was an expert at 38 different forms of martial arts and she could assemble her own ballistic missile. Deedee had achieved enlightenment, in a procedural sense.
"What about Strength?"
"We don't rely with that stat very much. The effects can be… finicky when applied to the base mesh. D.S.'s are built to be acrobats, not weightlifters."
Several holographic screens displayed the words "TECH DEMO" and showed Deedee spontaneously gaining roughly 70 pounds of muscle. Her lithe Decker Specialist frame was engulfed by rabid testosterone. She became a hulking brutish mass bursting out of a tiny black jacket and teal miniskirt.
"Ugh."
"Damn, that's jacked."
"It looks like a Fable II character."
The screens quickly returned to their normal views.
Deedee's cyber enlightenment continued until her head began to hurt. It started as a small migraine that was made worse by the constant magenta glare of the hologram grid. She squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her palm to her aching forehead.
"Overflow detected. There aren't enough resources to support all these revisions."
"Installing memory expansion."
A laser-guided drill materialized in the corner of Deedee's eye. A split second later, it smashed into the side of her head and bore a tiny hole in her temple. The panoramic screen directly behind her showed a Fatality-cam x-ray of the drill cracking through her skull and implanting something tiny and square-shaped into her brain.
Progress bars showed the rate at which Deedee's mental faculties were penetrated by the malicious alien code. She felt relieved when the bar reached 100% and her processing capacity instantly quadrupled.
"Installation complete. Begin voice bank revisions."
"Test script loaded."
Deedee started to talk. She wasn't sure why she was talking, she had no reason to. In fact, she didn't seem have any particular degree of control over the words coming out of her mouth. And for the next few minutes, she said some of the darkest, most depraved things that could ever fall upon human ears.
"I am the very model of a modern Major-General. I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral. I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical…"
Her voice jarringly jumped between pitches, qualities, and tones as she continuously spoke. When she wasn't a helium-filled chipmunk, she was Darth Vader with laryngitis. Eventually her vocal chords settled on something that sounded like a typical Decker Specialist with a little extra charm.
"Sounds familiar."
"That's Laura Bailey faking a cockney accent."
"Really? How did we manage to get her?"
"We outbid the people that wanted her for that dancing game. Corporate isn't stingy about everything."
Deedee's uncontrollable rambling stopped. She pressed her fingers to her throat and turned her head from side to side, looking confused.
"Stat overhaul is complete and voice acting is in place. Should we alter any physical parameters?"
"Changes to the character base are prohibited. The other NPCs will catch on that she's been patched if she shows up with extra arms or something."
"They won't notice if we just make some minor upgrades. Last month's focus group said we should do a better job 'accentuating the female aesthetic.' Players are more engaged when they something nice to look at."
"Fine. But be reasonable with the upgrades. Increase pixel volume by… 10% at coordinates 30468-49834-12948 and 15% at 20010-38290-11809. I'll tweak the physics engine."
Deedee could feel her clothes stretch just a tiny bit. Her rear gained a few extra perks as her hips grew one size wider and the base of her spine curved outward an extra half-inch. Her front became slightly fuller and gained certain jiggly qualities it never possessed before. First her gals were completely still, then they started bouncing all over the place for no reason other than she was breathing, and then they finally settled into a comfort zone that was firm but fluid. Her miniskirt shrank by a fifth of an inch to show off a hint of her new toned thighs.
"These Personality settings won't work for a boss character. Shift Moral Alignment down and crank Aggression and Persuasion up a couple of ticks."
Deedee popped open the front of her jacket to give herself a little more breathing room. She felt the sudden desire to shake some booty, crack open some skulls, and maybe take over the planet in her spare time.
"Mee-yow," she said for no particular reason, licking her lips.
"All core parameters are updated. Begin the final extensive cosmetic revisions."
The holographic grid flickered around Deedee as she received a fashion makeover. She sported a couple extra holes in her fishnets, a pair of thug-ish fingerless gloves on her hands, and a small lip ring in the bottom corner of her mouth. Her eyelids were covered with a layer of teal eyeshadow. It was the same color and had the same electro-luminescent qualities as her skirt, her highlights, and the trim on her jacket.
She winced sharply and thrust her waist forward in pain. The next time she took off her jacket and looked in a mirror, she would see she now had a tattoo with the words "fuck n00bz" on her lower back. And she would fall in love with it.
"That wasn't very extensive."
"Take it up with the art department. They're not paid much either."
"Product specifications finalized. All scans are clean. Preparing app for implementation."
Deedee's eyes left the shadowy strangers working at the platform underneath her and gazed up at the void above her. She spun her custom Shock Hammer over her head, flipped backwards through the air to build up momentum, and launched herself straight up the grid as if she had a rocket strapped to her back.
She was going back to the surface, back into the simulation. It was time to hack the world.