00000011

Figures doesn't it, right when we're about to dole out sweet justice we get kidnapped. Hexadecimal was always fun to scan. Her power levels were off the scale. I was stuck scanning her with sight now and she seemed a lot more frightening… she had an unhealthy fixation with my guardian, read most obviously by her tone:

"I don't know whether to kiss you or kill you"

We both gulped.

"Hex," Bob said, a little panicked, "this is great and all, but we've really got to get going."

"Going?" Hex cried, putting on a sad face. "How rude! We have just begun to get reacquainted!"

Bob was having a hard time coping with the situation. His heart was pounding in my ears. I tried to take matters into my own hands as it were, running another statistical scan, trying to remember how in the net I'd done it before all these strange sprite senses appeared. She'd been changed by Megabyte, her code wasn't quite as tight as it used to be, she was once an impenetrable fortress of viral energy, but I could read weaknesses in her now, places where her code was patched, like she'd been reconstructed out of recovered data with non breaking spaces and strange characters. The biggest hole was in her mask, a crack on her cheek. Bob and I had learned that the mask was the plug for all her power. I tried to send him a hint.

Like I said, we both understood each other better merged, he read my nudge loud and clear, on the inside I think he was pumping a fist in victory. "Hex… your mask, what happened?"

Hex covered her face. Cha-Ching! I win, clock one up for the keytool.

"It looks painful, please, let me touch it."

"I-I don't think I can let you do that Bob."

Her power over Bob's body was failing. He got up and went to her, trying his best to put his charm on her. He'd gotten a little older and a little wiser in the web, it had made him a bit more sincere an actor. I wondered what kind of adventures I'd missed. Bob leaned in. "Let me help you."

It was working, I began calculating up what kind of energy pattern I'd need to take advantage of this weakness and delete her. Bob let his intentions be known to me. He wanted to heal her. I aborted and took a second to recover. It shouldn't have been a surprise. I mean this was Bob. I guess I'd gotten too used to Matrix and his thirst for deletion. But I shouldn't have been so eager to erase her right on the spot. Helping was a part of my programming too. Perhaps I was still broken.

Oh well, the guardian gave me a command, time to get back to work. I reformatted my strategy and when he was ready and I was ready, we fired energy into and through Hexidecimal. I aimed the defragmenter to hit all her frayed edges but it healed much more than even I had anticipated. When she looked up her face was one piece, all her emotions at impulse, changing on the fly. I felt a deep satisfaction. Doing good is good! We like doing good! See, I'm okay. It helped of course that she pledged allegiance to Bob and sent us back into the fray just in time to miss Megabyte's demise.

Cursors.

….