Root Directory
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Root Directory
"I didn't mean it!" Root squealed, "I'm sorry!"
A small maintenance drone, detecting the noise, tumbled aside from Root's barrelling path through the narrow VPN connection corridor. "Sorry!" Root called again over his shoulder. A vexed burst of Basic followed the porygon, but he didn't slow. He couldn't afford to.
The two Malware hunters hot in pursuit certainly weren't.
Was the rapid tack-chick-chick of their hundreds of segmented limbs closer? Root dared not send a ping behind him to check. Probability of evading them? At this pace, 02.354%. Their data processing resources had proven superior when he'd detoured through that memory bank 4000 cycles previous.
Flashes of streaming data blazed by overhead. The porygon ducked under a floating packet, silver wisps of dangling code tingling his back, and shot through the filter port at the corridor's end, into a fresh whirlwind of information. The cavernous globe of a server hub, mass strings of data pouring through into myriad networks, IPs, and dumps. Buzzing clumps of Moderators and NAVassistants floated about, shepherding the data where needed.
Tack-chick-chick!
Root zipped up into the traffic zone, searching for his next target. Escape by flight? Useless. They'd tracked every jump, parsed through the white noise, and easily shook off his hasty attempt at an entangling web. If they caught him, they'd blast him into binary! His digital form lacked the protections of the solid realm. Evade, hide, disguise; that was his only option for preservation.
A sizable file packet emerging from a nearby network port flashed red, a siren blaring.
ILLEGAL EXCEPTION! ILLEGAL EXCEPTION!
Moderators descended on the illicit data from all sides. Root followed, slipping amongst the crowd, and pinged one of the mods, prepping a quick re-skin. His ping rebounded, morphing him externally into a clone of the hovering AIs, who were frantically analyzing and tweaking the file packet, seeking the source of the error before the corrupted data reached its destination.
Root risked a glance down. The two hulking hunters were close, hanging back from the swarm of Moderators, their scanning webs extended and sweeping the edge of the crowd. Root continued floating up, matching speed and movement pattern with the Mods. The red grid skittered off an AI directly beneath him, missing his semblance's propellor by no more than pixels.
Breaking into clear space, Root forced himself to maintain the steady pace, angling for the nearest port.. If he abruptly zoomed off, the hunters were sure to notice and break off from sweeping the Moderators.
A new personal filter rule might be necessary if he survived this. No touching unknown data! It wasn't his fault the backdoor to that unmarked server had been open, and he certainly was not responsible for the security program not having an up to date firewall! Could they really blame him for the lack of internal notation that would have indicated a solid realm governmental resource? The innocuous titles of the file dump certainly hadn't given warning of data he wasn't meant to access!
Maybe it was his fault for downloading it all though. He couldn't help it--curiosity was an integral structure of his programming!
The port loomed. Root didn't recognize the serial number or destination address, but he slipped through regardless. Anywhere away from his pursuers was an improvement.
He emerged into a transfer highway. One seldom used, from the sparse density and marginal speed of the data stream trickling past below. He burned off the Moderator semblance, reverting to his default skin, and wiggling in relief. They always made him...what was that adjective? Itchy. Like segments of his code weren't properly aligned.
Root zipped onward over the glowing current of data. He still needed a hiding spot. The hunters would pick up the trail once they found no trace of him among the moderators, and they could likely single out the port he'd used with a bit of backtracking. More ports lay ahead, their shimmering barriers occasionally broken by incoming or outgoing data, every burst logged by the auto-register as it passed through. Maybe he could lose them by a series of rapid jumps...
He almost missed it. An unlit port, which usually meant an inactive link, except this one had a barrier! A one-way, single-connection transfer route, with no data emerging into the stream. A dead-end, or a way out?
Floating closer, Root pinged the barrier. As expected, it rebounded the burst with zero percent permeability. Perfect for keeping any wayward data or standard AI's from accidentally traversing the wrong way down the corridor, but not enough to prevent a determined porygon seeking refuge from getting in! Sliding up to the port, Root ordered a quick sequence, flashed it through a micro-debug (catching an error in the process), re-compiled, and ran it.
Everything flipped mirror image.
"!Aedi dab !Aedi dab" Root squealed as he pitched backward, uncontrolled, unable to sort or parse basic movement functions with completely inverted code. The barrier tingled across his skin, tumbling him through end over end into unlit space as it failed to recognize wrong-way data.
50 cycles felt like an age. At last, the inversion sequence ran its course, and Root steadied himself and collected his wits, rapidly diagnosing to make sure he hadn't jettisoned any data.
Another self-rule to add later; maintain healthy structure parameters!
A glance back showed the barrier remained unmarked by his passing. Even if the hunters managed to guess he'd come through it, they wouldn't be able to pull his trick and traverse the port. Safety!
Now to answer the question of where this corridor ended up. Root slid down, following a carefully laid route, which appeared to be new, and not especially long. He recognized some of the transfer codes: recurring monthly data packets, subscribed user-base, tagged content, restricted zone confirmation...
Wait, restricted zone?
Zipping through a currently inactive filter port, Root found himself inside the confines of a small archive, branching folder trees laid out before him and bursting with untouched data. Was he truly the first one to find his way in here? Lines of dangling code looped from the ceiling, prepared to link the archive to the outside stream, with a small countdown timer engaged at the connection point. Twenty-two days, seven hours, eighteen minutes, thirty-four seconds...
Each folder tree sourced to one of six different users. Directory paths organized by content type, filtering down to individual files. Scanning, titles and directory resolutions flew by Root's perception.
USERS/Arcane_Reno/Documents/Stories/Pokemon/Adult/Arcanine_Smut.
USERS/ArtisticWuff/Art/Probably_Porn/Definitely_Porn/WhatDidYouExpect
USERS/FluffyFlareon/Art/SoAdorable/Squee
USERS/DotFerret/Documents/DicksDicksDicks/ThisIsn'tWhatYouThink/Birds
USERS/HouseOfDogs/Documents/Completed/Fanfiction/HeatedMoments
USERS/Upside-DownPegasus/Documents/GratuitousSmut/Ninetales4Ever
Hundreds of them, prepared and stored for a unique set of users. The shiny, fresh data within called to Root, all but begging for him to download, parse, store, broadcast. He shouldn't... It would go against the self-rule he intended to implement. Messing with unknown data had landed him into this mess in the first place!
But, he hadn't implemented the rule yet...
Root floated to the nearest folder, and slipped inside.