Miriam rolled over and with long practised habit blindly grabbed the earbuds off the bedside table and burrowed them deep into her ears.

‘Good Morning Miriam’ Pancake whispered in her ears, her personal AI knew that anything above a soft voice too early in the morning would get it swiftly modified.

‘No update on the Avon Advance Project, no outstanding jobs for today either’. She felt a mixture of old annoyance at the first and relaxed at the second. Pancake was getting better.

The smell of fresh coffee was finally enough to get her to open her eyes and begin pretending she was going to get out of bed. Sitting up she forced her caffeine deprived mind to focus on her arm monitor. She knew that most people had already gotten digital overlays linked to their eyes, it was mandatory in some of the Enclaves around here. But Miriam had spent too long digging through the filth the Internet had turned into to give any of that direct access to her vision.

Besides, any time she left her house she wore her Facemorph which was good enough. Not that anyone really left any more.

No, Miriam was okay being the butt of jokes from her Collective; old lady Miriam, scared of the future.

‘Pancake, can you bring my coffee please?’ She asked while flicking through the feed on her arm, too lazy to switch to the projector at the end of the bed.

‘Sorry Miriam, the replacement parts for my BodySuit seem to have been waylaid.’ Pancake smoothly replied in her ears.

‘Again? Any idea who it was this time?’ Miriam tried to not be annoyed. She had not paid for multi-drone protection for the package. She didn’t think that it would get destroyed again though. The damn Warehouse was only a few blocks away at the outskirts of Winchester proper. Scared of the Future indeed.

‘I checked with Charles as he still has a few connections with b.b.b and Mukross. b.b.b said that the delivery drone was destroyed by an s-bird once it left the Warehouse’s Defences.’ Pancake proudly said.

Miriam knew Pancake felt proud that they had the answer to her question however she couldn’t help but smile at them. No matter how much she tweaked it, when he mentions the Sentient controlling the local grid, Pancake’s West Country accent saying b.b.b always made her happy.

A damn s-bird though, a flying bomb. The cheapest way to disrupt and enter a market.

‘Pancake, have you heard who sent the s-bird? Do we have a new Sentient trying to setup a Warehouse ‘round here?’ That was usually why Suicide Birds were used these days. Miriam’s defensive programs meant that the flood of advertising about the new hotness coming to town never made it to her Deck. She really did not want to have to change Warehouses, EuAI was a pain of a Sentient to deal with however they had kept a stranglehold on Winchester for the last few years and so things had at least been stable. Unlike the rest of the world.

There was a fraction of a pause which was enough for Miriam to know the answer, Pancake did not like disappointing her. ‘Sorry Miriam, no one knows where the s-birds came from.’

Great. Just great. Not only was her supply line compromised but she had no idea by who or why. ‘What about our Enclave? What does Charles have to say about it?’ Miriam asked.

Was it just her packages? Surely Charles, the Enclaves Sentient, would have said something if his residents were being cut off. Miriam didn’t even bother asking about EuAI, that damn Sentient never responds to anyone, they leave all communication to their Daemons who would be useless in this situation. Miriam quickly thumbed through her Deck to check that she had been refunded and compensated for the package though, which she had. EuAI was a pain but always paid their dues.

‘Charles informed me that the Enclave is still being serviced by EuAI, it was only those packages that were destroyed.’ Pancake told her.

Miriam felt cold. Just hers. What the fuck did that mean? Was she being targeted?

Miriam covered her tracks on the Net better than most Hackers but that did not mean she couldn’t be found. She thought back over the last few jobs she had done, was there anything there that pointed to a retaliation? What kind of retaliation was this anyway?

The parts were simple control chips for a Sentient’s BodySuit as Pancakes’ had burnt out a few days ago. Miriam had not been worried about no longer having Pancake physically around as Charles ran a tightly guarded Enclave. Some of the members did not even bother with BodySuits here, they would not be happy that she knew that but of course Miriam kept an eye on the people she shared an Enclave with.

‘Pancake, run diagnostics on the control chips again, send the logs to my Deck.’ Miriam said as she started grasping for the coffee, now wide awake. The chips had burnt out from overuse, they had been the cheap ones from EuAI as the only thing Pancake used the BodySuit for was to bring her coffee and clean the place. Miriam had not seen the point in buying top of the line for Pancake, they were not living alone, she didn’t need him at combat grade.

Or so she had thought.

Now she was second guessing Pancake, what if the chips failure had not been an accident?

Miriam felt a panic attack coming on, so used to dealing with the stress of being a Hacker, she could deal with that. This new sensation of being in physical danger was sending her into overdrive. She never left the Enclave anymore as it was not safe out there, to think it was not safe in here either was too much. There was not enough air in the room, she needed to breathe.

‘Miriam!’ Pancakes voice cut through it all, startling her out of it ‘Its okay, its going to be okay. Just breathe for now. I have sent you the logs.’ The West Country accent, the reminder of her Father, allowing her to get a handle on the panic before it reduced her to uselessness.

Slugging back the coffee, Miriam started digging through the logs on her Deck. Nothing obvious stood out to her however the schematics were too detailed for her to fully grasp with her naked eyes. Miriam headed over to her work space, past the slumbering form of Pancakes BodySuit and unhooked her Facemorph from its charging dock. It was covered in dust, its pliable black fabric feeling sticky on her fingers.

When was the last time she had worn this? Miriam knew things had been getting worse out there in real space, the World had been losing its mind for a while now and every day there was some new horror to be uncovered. So, Miriam had simply stopped going outside and locked down her feed, there was nothing she could do about the War raging across the Net and real World except try to survive in her own little corner of it all and hope.

Stretching the Facemorph over her head and feeling it caress her neck as it moulded into place, Miriam shivered and tried to not think about the last time she had touched another Human. Opening her eyes with her eyelashes brushing against the inside of the Facemorph the darkness slowly gave way to flecks of light, then the Facemorph was gone from her vision. Her room snapped back into view. At least an approximation of it as thousands of lines of light per second were being painted onto her eyes by the Facemorph.

Miriam breathed in the slightly musty and powerfully plastic smell of the Face and triggered her Hacker overlay into view. Bringing up the logs now, the schematics that had eluded her before were no longer static images on her Deck, now with careful control she could expand them to fill her view and slide through them, annotations and additions flickering out from everywhere aided by Pancake.

Miriam lost herself for a while in the familiar work, her eyes leading the search, sub-vocal commands transmitted to Pancake through the Face. Her body found the edge of the bed to lie down while her mind kept diving, deeper into the BodySuit. Her search long expanded beyond simply the control chips.

‘Alright Miriam’ agreed Pancake, his West Country sparking a memory in the back of her mind of her Father as it usually did.

Her Father. The Avon Advance Project. Her body froze while her mind raced ahead.

‘Pancake. Collect and Isolate every piece of data we have on the Avon project into a Garden then do the same to everything we have ever gotten from my parents into another Garden. Full Defences.’ Miriam Sub-vocalised.

Her overlay and data dive hitched for a fraction of a second as two new Gardens were created in her Network and a prodigious amount of Data was shifted around.

‘Done, Miriam’ A voice uttered in her ears. A strange, alien voice.

Miriam’s heart stopped for a second until her thoughts caught up with reality. Of course. Pancake had done exactly what she had asked, and shifted everything from her parents into the new Garden. Including her Fathers West Country voice modelling data.

She took a moment to mentally shake herself before diving back into the BodySuit, not sure of what she was looking for exactly but certain she was right.

It took her hours. But looking for something that was not there is like trying to find a hole in space. Find it she did though. Rebuilding the schematics of the BodySuit from scratch as large chunks of it had been Walled off, Miriam was finally able to run a comparison and it was right there. On the edge of the Control chips should be a bleed channel. Instead, on the BodySuit that was slumped against her wall, there was a tiny additional feedback loop.

Absolutely minuscule.

Just enough.

Just enough commands would be ghosted back into the chip. That is why it had failed. It was not from overuse, not from Miriam trying to save money. A deliberate feedback loop had been embedded into the chip forcing it to run the same ghost commands over and over until it had burnt itself out.

The loop had been part of an upgrade package sent by her Father. Sent only a few days before her parents Enclave of Avon Advance had been cut off from the World. Miriam had been treating the Avon Advance project like any other job, ignoring the reality that this was no impersonal Hacker bounty. Her parents had disappeared, they had been locked out of reality by the Enclave Sentient.

The same Sentient that had intercepted and modified the upgrade package from her Father, it had destroyed her last line of physical defence, the Bodysuit. The Sentient knew where she lived and what she had been doing, it had gotten into her Enclave, into her house.

Miriam lay there, dragging her Face off, leaving a trail of tears. She had spent so long pretending that the nightmare of the War could be ignored, that she could hide in her little pocket and not be involved. She was brutally reminded that the World did not care. It would easily keep tearing everything apart, including her.