chasers of the end
chapter one: departures
The first experience Seija Kijin ever has with cyberspace is when she is seventeen, in a dilapidated bar below the streets of the Village; a place so closed and cloistered off, basement level sorts, below solid concrete floors, that she thinks she is hallucinating when she opens the creaking iron door and realized everyone here is hooked up to rigs. One by one she examines them, lanky script kiddies lurched over their keyboards, their eyes wide open unmoving but mouths mumbling and fingers tapping unconsciously, faster than gunfire. There are probably ten of them, plus the nonchalant bartender, who continues wiping the edge of a glass as if trying to wear it down to sand, and they are all somewhere else. They are somewhere Seija isn't, drifting into a world she's only been able to imagine for herself, their distance apparent in the glaze of their eyes, the quiet adjusting of their pupils.
She takes one look and scowls, jealously gritting her teeth. Money has never been accessible to her, and now that she's looking for some sort of hustle, Seija feels envy eating at her in ways she once thought impossible. The units are small enough, portable as something so advanced could get, and she's not a stranger to old-fashioned, complex terminal interactions. When you have to talk directly to a system of memory and processing, something so robotic without the ease and glide of the user interface, you learn about computers from the inside out. You learn how to manipulate every corner of it, create your own fucking interface from scratch. Seija has done that, explored the entrails of a computer with delicate surgeon's hands, and with a glance around the room she sees it on them- the pilots are so spoiled. Cushy pseudo-hackers with no knowledge of the true form of what they're inside. They can see the brain just fine; but the veins, the limbs, the lungs and kidneys and liver are invisible under the skin of their pretty glossy systems. None of them deserve it.
She quickly resolves that by the dawn she would have one of these rigs, still warm from the buzz of another amateur programmer's hand, and the corners of her mouth turn up into a pointed, vicious smile.
Cut to: Seija, behind the bartender's counter, pressing the barrel of a pistol into the back of the man's bald head. The kids are still absorbed, still compromised. They can't see anything other than their alternate universe and maybe an inch over, but Seija doesn't blame them. It's probably much prettier down there; less gritty, and once she pulls the trigger, it'll be much less bloody.
She wonders if it's black and white down there, or if it's rendered in shiny glinting colors. She wonders if it'll be harder to adjust to than green text prompts.
She wonders this, as she slams the bartender's head into the worn granite counter, and then fires.
Only one pilot buzzes out at the kicking sound of the gun, and Seija leaps off the counter as he struggles upwards, dizzy now from his return to meatspace. She gets to him, first, and he's utterly powerless as she pistol whips him and shoves him against the brick wall, the nose of her gun prodding just under his chin. His breath gusts out against her shoulder, eyes wide like a rabbit backed into a corner.
"Still coming back to life, huh, greenhorn?" she grins. "Not happening." And then the trigger pulls and he's slumped over on the floor, bleeding from the neck, limbs tangling in ways that probably aren't natural. Seija checks his pulse for good measure, and silently praises her luck- the gunshot sound didn't kick anyone else out of space, either, and this rig is as good as hers. She pockets the jack, silently zips the screen inside her multipocketed hoodie, and walks back behind the counter to delete the evidence.
Bartender's still logged in- how precious. No password to unlock. She opens the terminal to open the security system app, selects the evidence, admin overrides it, and it's suddenly like she never killed anyone at all. Not here, at least, and not today.
She offers a few more prompts to the terminal before killing all the processes and deleting app histories from the past hour or so. She pulls up the order screen that all bars and restaurants have on their computers, sets the mouse back where she found it (halfway across the screen plus 200 pixels to the right, moved all the way to the top) and makes sure she takes her shoes off so she doesn't track blood everywhere.
The door flies open in a raging wind and Seija finds it so fortunate: blood on her white shoes fades back into foam in the relentless rain. She doesn't have to walk home barefoot today.
Home for Seija at this point is a dilapidated apartment at the top of an endless-seeming spiral staircase, that goes up and up against black walls covered with posters and pounding breakcore music from just outside the stair shaft. People say about the city that certain youkai gravitate to certain neighborhoods, and Seija considers this quite true. She and about 35 other amanojaku live within the echoing spine of this apartment complex, plus two crow tengu (nuisances in person, but close in her circle) and one strange youkai living on the 3rd floor that no one really knows enough about to describe even their species, much less what they do. Seija is still quite curious- a human living undercover? Or a youkai so powerful that no one even understands their presence? She doesn't even know what gender they are, or if they even have one. The person never leaves their room, not that she knows of, and she's never seen their name on the apartment records.
She slams the door, this thought still buzzing in her head, and picks up a Sharpie and Post-it note to write herself a memo. "Research that weird one in my building," it reads, in her scrawled, abrupt handwriting. "DO NOT let them find out."
After that's done, Seija opens her hoodie to find the jack hanging out from her inner pocket. A thrill of anxiety goes through her as she remembers: she's got this now, her own (well, sort of) cyberspace rig. She pulls it out from the wide pocket and sets it carefully on the desk, checking it for dents and scratches before opening the screen and admiringly stroking the edges. Grinning, she pulls out her creaking chair and falls into it with a slight crack of plastic, watching her screen flash as she wraps the cable around her right ear.
The jack is sitting there, temptingly, on the table. All she would need to do is buzz in. And then? she thinks, and for some reason the thought sounds unsure, worried.
And then, her mind fills out, you're going to fuck shit up.
Good answer, she thinks, and places the jack behind her ear.
Contact. The thumping of the repetitive, sped-up Amen breaks suddenly fade into clear, dark silence. All senses collapse into the pulsing of her heartbeat, like the sound you hear when you're under the water. Sharp, cold, transparent nodes of data tumble about beneath her, each glowing a different color. A golden stream of millions of connections divide the thrumming darkness, like a highway: people browsing the social networks, traffic high and bumper-to-bumper. Seija does a joyous loop, in midair.
Although her earthly body is lithe and athletic and doesn't deter her from her jobs, she can't help but feel free; she's cast off the layers of dense flesh that make up her amanojaku body and gained an infinite, inexhaustible lightness. Another couple of twists around herself, effortless and excited. Seija feels dizzy, drunk on freedom. She drops, then, hurtling like a comet in space, earthbound and ready.
She doesn't even know what her objective is yet; she just knows that she wants to fuck shit up, as her inner monologue put so succinctly. What that entails Seija isn't really sure herself, and seventeen might not be the best age to plunge Gensokyo City into anarchy, so for two years she learns the innards of the system. Working through loops of code that are as stubborn and frustrating as she is, watching from above as low-level youkai and neophyte humans struggle in the crowds of information, Seija finds herself ensconced in this new, glassy-eyed universe. She journeys through caverns of illegal data, traces and pranks a couple of amanojaku in her building (so worth the trouble!) and learns how to unravel the protective ice around sensitive corporate databases.
This leads to a discovery. One late-night long diving and coding session, she rockets north and immediately hits high-level, puzzling labyrinths of trap-laden ice. In an instant she feels a sharp, unrelenting pain pierce her skull, and blood is running down her incorporeal forehead before she can even think. Panicking, nearly blinded by pain, she buzzes out, and immediately collapses onto the concrete floor of her apartment.
"Augh- fuck, what happened-"
Her hands shake as she brings her fingers to her forehead and trace a long line of warm blood running straight down the middle of her hairline. Eyes shooting open in fear, she yanks her hands away, wipes them on her cutoff shorts. She had heard about this: some ice was lethal. Some of it had traps upon traps, that could spiral right through your mind like a drill and destroy your conscious brain. Some of it was like a nightmare; an unseen monster ripping apart your head, one you wake up from and realize that you're still bleeding.
Even as she scrambles back up into her seat, takes a long swig of black coffee (cold by now, but caffeine!) and buzzes back in, the only thing on Seija's mind is: what could be behind that wall?
It takes days to find it again. She comes across it by accident, and takes care to slow down once she feels the familiar ache of twisting code traps in her head. Floating backwards, suddenly intensely aware of her corporeal body she's left behind, she reaches out her left index finger and pricks it deliberately on one spike.
Blood falls from it, morphing straight into data. She winces, catches the strings of code in her right hand: cyberspace DNA. Seija Kijin. Age: 17. Species: Youkai - Amanojaku. Criminal Record: Two infractions of underage drinking. One petty theft. (This was back when she was 14, when she stole a pair of headphones from an electronics store in the uptown Bamboo district. They only found out five months later.) Seija quickly resolves to start working on dissolving her net presence, and shoots back downwards towards the crevasses of danger and vice, Hellwards.
Gensokyo itself corresponds to its relative location in meatspace. Directly above Seija's head, where the city turns to bright and star-encrusted palaces, stands the shining castles and glimmering borders of government, most action past that invisible to average divers. Higher up is the Netherworld, the mist-covered, haunted back streets of the abandoned district that was ruined in the nuclear disaster, nothing left behind there in cyberspace but old mysterious archives and dangerous ghosts. Myouren District is the mainly empty, calm labyrinth in the center of the broken wasteland of the Netherworld. In cyberspace inexplicable visions are seen there: sailors with bottomless ladles that drown unwitting explorers, huge pink clouds leading people astray, magicians with long glowing hair distorting their forms into stars and lotuses. Seija has heard that a node exists there that you can never escape from once you enter, an endless spiral of silent code, down into an echoing grave frozen in time.
To the east, the Human Village, Mayohiga and Hakurei: citizens, average hobby programmers, stroll there on most days. Just east of center is where the social networks lie, laid out in grid patterns not unlike those of the Village. With all the hapless humans buzzing around there it could be a great place to attack, if security wasn't upped in the past few years to protect the innocent neophytes. Where the Bamboo district is in meatspace, Eientei stands instead, a monumental corporate building with ice so thick you could die from a graze. To get there you'd have to wander through endless forests of data, though legend has it a strange apparition leads potential rebels through the maze and up directly into the middle.
To the west is Youkai Mountain district, where the less mainstream news flows in erratic, disguised packages. The tengu and kappa, pioneers of alternative media and hacking respectively, live there and spend most of their time buzzed in, circulating ideas and truths that are in code languages no one but those of the Movement can decipher. While the kappa developed the tools, and the tengu spread the word, it was the amanojaku that really gave hacking its anarchist connotations, and Seija has been one of them since long ago- since cyberspace was only command lines and prompts, green text on a CRT monitor.
Two of her housemates, the talkative crow tengu couple Aya and Hatate, are actually renowned out West for their discoveries: those of the puppet government, run in secret by Gensokyo corporations, led by four legendary warring AIs. Eientei is the most famous, and outwardly the most benevolent, but Seija has heard stories of their ruthless AI leader, the Lunarian. Then there's Chireiden, based Hellwards, with an AI leader that is said to read minds- and an equally dangerous, more unpredictable sister. Yakumo is based somewhere in Mayohiga, but no one knows exactly where, and their AI, the Ancient, is said to be the most mysterious and merciless of all. The fourth corporation is unknown, unrevealed; no matter how close Aya gets, she can never unravel the mystery of what and who it is. Hatate nearly died on an intel run on Yakumo trying to get more information, and the rumor is that Aya never really got over it.
Then south- Hellwards, directly under Seija's feet, there run the caverns of illicit trade, copied archives, and incomprehensible phenomenons. Nobody goes there without a guide or at least decent knowledge of hacking, since it's so dangerous simply because it's unmonitored by government. Thieves and rogues, hidden spies, or brute-force prowlers can leap out at you, dig you into a hole of code so deep you can't see yourself, or just kill you there on the spot. The legend circulating there is that there's a group of youkai more powerful than the government down there, who dabble in cyberspace every so often and cause complete chaos. Plus Chireiden is down there, and even if you could get through the ice, no one really wants to encounter a mind reading AI.
Seija has seen all of this from green text and command lines, but now that she's here, she makes the connections easily. Things that were once just ideas come to visual life; the words become sounds, the directions colored. Netherwards becomes purple, Villagewards goes yellow, Mountainwards turns green, Hellwards is a deep and disturbing red. Seija's senses are dazzled by the magic and fluidity of it all as she descends into Hell, watching crimson data nodes tumble and gyrate in the waves of black space.
Then a sharp pain in her side. Seija feels something cold digging into it, something distinctly metal. It starts to grow in size, and the pain is agonizing as the knife slides between two of her ribs and she screams, screams till her ears bulge in the silence, and buzzes out.
When she comes to, she's on the floor of her apartment, bleeding from a wound in her ribs- but it's wrapped, bandaged, and Seija touches it tentatively. It wasn't ice, she knows that; it was a much more physical, brutal pain. She looks down at her wrapped side, in confusion and silent thankfulness.
The rig makes an awful keening, crackling noise, and the whirring of the fan comes to a complete stop. Seija gapes.
"Are you fucking kidding me," she screeches, roundhouse kicking the rig from the desk and letting it fall to the floor. Even from that, nothing is broken hardware-wise; these new Yasaka models are tough and portable. But Seija senses something distinctly wrong with the software.
She pulls her flip phone from her pocket and dials the only number she can think of.
"Hello, Kawashiro Repairs here. This is Nitori, how can I help?"
"'Tori."
"Seija?! Oh gosh, lemme guess: monitor problem again? You really gotta get a rig one of these days, I'm tellin' ya-"
"Nah, I got one. Jacked it off an amateur hacker. But it kicked me out, injured my side. Nothing's wrong hardware-wise, I think it's the user settings?"
"Wait, what? You got one?!"
"Yeah I just told you I did. Anyway, is there-"
"Hold up. You said you jacked it?"
"Amanojacked it," Seija says, with a grin. Nitori bursts into laughter.
"Okay, okay. You win this pun contest, for today. Seij? I gotta get you into my system for later this afternoon. You're free then, right? You gotta tell me all about this, yeah?"
"Yeah, yeah, got it. Help me reset the user protocols and I'll be good; I have no idea how to get into this sort of hardware."
"Gotcha. At four sound good?"
"Why not."
The receiver cuts off with a solid click. Seija sits back down on the bed, holding her side with two hands, as her blood dries on the bandages and between her fingers.