"Yes!" Uber said, his hand slamming down on the stopclock. "PB!"

"Watch it, I'm busy," Leet called.

"What are you building?" Uber asked, putting down the controller as the console's main screen showed an ending video he'd seen twenty times already.

Leet looked like he'd missed one too many showers, and his gaze was more than a little manic.

"Something I've not built before," he replied, bending over a weird looking assemblage of wires and crystals and what looked awfully like a glowstick.

"What's that, anyway?" Uber asked, pointing at the thing that looked like a glowstick.

"Glowstick," Leet answered. "I couldn't find something that would work better as a signal strength gauge… I've built almost everything else that could fit in there, but an adaptor into a glowstick is at least workable."

He swore as his soldering iron emitted a fat blue spark. "Ow!"

"Are you sure this is safe?" Uber checked.

"I'm not!" Leet replied. "But who gives a toss?"

He flicked a switch, and the glowstick lit up green.

"All right, we're in business!" the inveterate geek declared, and plugged in a USB keyboard, mouse and monitor into a multi-way USB adaptor. "Okay, plug and play…"

Uber had never been great at following what his friend built, but it seemed to be worse than normal this time. The USB adaptor was plugged into a quartz crystal, and the other end of the quartz crystal was apparently connected to the rest of the computer by a circuit diagram drawn in pencil but not actually etched – but it seemed to be working anyway, as the screen lit up and showed a simple command line interface.

"...so, what is it?" Uber asked, eventually.

"Answers," Leet replied, and tapped out a question mark.

The screen immediately filled with a blizzard of code, only some of which Uber caught and none of which looked like it was in a language he knew, but Leet reached out and pulled a USB stick out of his laptop before plugging it into the multi-way adaptor.

"Show time," the Tinker added. "Let's see how long it takes him."

"Him?" Uber repeated, glancing at the glowstick – still burning a steady green, with occasional pulses of blue and yellow.

"Built an AI," Leet answered. "Iterative code, matured last night. Calls himself Hax. I knew I'd only ever manage one so I saved up until I had something like this in place."

Code continued scrolling up the screen, and Uber closed his eyes, then did a reverse blink – trying to get a moment's view of some of it to analyze.

This only helped a bit.

"What language even is that?" he asked.

"Not sure, but Hax should be building something on top of it," Leet replied. "Proper user interface, graphical if he has time, but command line to start with."

The screen suddenly cleared, and a new prompt window appeared.

"All right!" Leet declared, steepling his fingers and pushing them out with a click. "Let's get started!"

"Started with what?" Uber demanded. "You're not making any sense!"

"It'll be obvious in a moment," Leet replied, typing out df -h. "Okay, two main volumes… weird names for them, and I don't understand where they're mounted… but this is working! Now, uh… what do I want…"

Considering for a moment, he tapped out echo $PATH.

"...there!" he declared. "And… man prototype…"

Leet hammered the page down key, once every two or three seconds, then clapped his hands when something lit up in neon green. "Great spot, Hax! Wait, I should plug in a microphone…"

He looked around for one for a moment, then shrugged and wrote down a note on his notepad before going back to the command line.

Print "Thanks, Hax," he typed, let it hang there for a moment, then deleted it again.

A thumbs-up bit of ASCII art scrolled up the screen, and Uber chuckled.

"At least he's got a sense of humour," he said. "But what the hell are you doing?"

"Sudo," Leet replied. "Prototype –supersede –refresh -h -f."

He hit enter, then shook his head.

"Phew," he declared. "Now that is a rush."

"Okay, you're scaring me, man," Uber said. "You haven't explained any of this."

"I just reset my power," Leet answered. "That is a super-user terminal."

He got a manic grin, and cracked his knuckles. "And once Hax has got us a better GUI or help system, I'm going to find out who fucked up my power, and I'm going to get revenge… but until then, want a lightsaber?"

"...you have no fucking idea how much I want one," Uber admitted.

AN:

I wonder at what point Prototype realized things might have gone too far.

Possibly not just yet.