Chelen City: Chapter Twelve, Part Two

 Notes: Back today! Have some plot and angst and plotty angst for sticking with me ;)

Title: Chelen City: Chapter Twelve, Part Two

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Chapter Twelve, Part Two

 

Elanus wasn’t capable of actually directing his own movements at this point. He had dived straight into his implant with every facet of his conscious mind, opening his connection to his daughter and his home with a reckless disregard for his own mental well-being. It wasn’t until the first tendril of the virus snapped his way that Elanus remembered to put up his personal firewalls, but it was a distant thought at best. This virus wasn’t targeting him. It was targeting Catie. His baby. His sweet oldest child, the person who had changed his entire life for the better, and seeing lines of living code curl and crush around her mind in an effort to winnow through it was enraging.

He felt his body move, felt hands holding him upright and a short but sturdy body hauling him into someplace colder than he’d just been, if the way his skin pebbled was any indication. Then they were on Lizzie, and ah, that was perfect, they could work together to—

But carefully. Carefully. He wouldn’t risk his other child, he couldn’t. “Mordecai Protocol,” he murmured as soon as they were on board.

“Yes, Elanus.” Lizzie retained just enough processing power to handle flying them home—the rest she gave into Elanus’s direction, along with full safety measures. Elanus had a moment of uncertainty as he began to direct Lizzie’s actions to help Catie—she was an incredibly advanced intelligence, after all. She might be able to do a better job than he could when it came to figuring out the best way to help her sister, and yet…

Catie was just as advanced, if not more so, and she’d been taken by surprise. Her efforts to protect herself had come too late, and now it was all she could do to hold her own. Elanus had experience fighting off direct viral attacks, both personal and professional. He would show them the way this time, and if—when—it happened again, his girls would be better prepared.

Both of them would. There was no other way forward.

“We need to block the trawlers, you see them?”

[Yes, but they’re matching her code upon impact. I might attack a part of Catie by mistake.]

“Look at the base numbers. Follow those in.”

[But they match.]

They were, in fact, very close to matching Catie’s own code perfectly, which was terribly concerning. And yet…there was something about them that was different. Like listening to a person with a very faint accent that you couldn’t quite place, or looking at a picture and being unable to decide if the color was blue or purple. “Look closer. Get as deep as you can and feel for distinctions. Check for timing issues, look how the code reloads, see the—”

[Ah! I see it now, Elanus.] With Lizzie reassured, she made much better time dismantling the tendrils doing their damndest to crawl inside Catie’s crumbling reinforcements. Elanus knew he wouldn’t be able to do any better, so he went deeper instead.

This was something he hadn’t done with Catie since she was a brand-new person, so new he hadn’t quite been sure she was a person yet. Once she had the capacity for speech, it felt intrusive to be present inside her thoughts as she put them together. In fact, he’d been on the verge of severing the bonding node that he’d accidentally created when making her entirely, both because it was her due as a maturing individual deserving of autonomy and because he didn’t need the temptation to go straight into her mind and tell her when he thought she was being unreasonable. But right now, he was glad to have it.

It felt uncomfortably like resetting his own brain, but one reboot later and Elanus was inside of Catie’s main program. It was light in here, beautifully light, but then the distant structure around them seemed to shudder, and with it the light turned gray. Catie had always communicated her feelings best through color, light, and sound. “It’s okay, baby,” he said, holding out his arms. “I’m here.”

[Daddy!] A warm cloud of pressure and light enveloped him, like an all-over hug. His daughter shivered in time with the assault, but he could tell his presence was giving her some much-needed support. [I don’t know how to make it stop.]

“I’ll help you,” he promised. “Let’s start by making you more comfortable, hmm?”

[How?]

“Let me see…”

Every mind was different, and so was every virus. Elanus had taught himself to use his implant to think in actionable code when he was just a child, and he’d practiced relentlessly as he aged up and became interested in moving into a higher class on Gania. He had to be the best, utterly and absolutely, and when it came to overwhelming Ganian code of any kind, well…he was the best. And this virus, for all its tenacity, was still fundamentally Ganian. If the saboteur had gotten another kind of mind to make it, things might have gone differently, but this…

Elanus strengthened Catie’s safeguards, pouring out strong, protective code that benefitted her while simultaneously attacking the virus. It flinched at the sharpness, the newness, and more and more of it began to fall prey to Lizzie’s dogged cleaning efforts. Once Catie stopped trembling, Elanus really went to work.

He ripped and wrenched at the virus, throttling it into nothingness and burning it to ash. He split his efforts into a thousand encoded knives, hunted it across the surface of his daughter’s mind and stabbed it to death. He enclosed the whole thing in a shield that would hide his efforts from the originator, if they were watching, so they wouldn’t learn any of his tricks as well, and he killed and killed and killed until the last remnant of the virus finally dissolved in a pathetic fizzle.

[Daddy…]

“Yeah, baby?” God, his head fucking hurt. Ow, it hurt so bad, but it was so worth it. But ow.

[I’m sorry I shouted at you.]

“I’m sorry I didn’t listen better.”

[I—Daddy!]

“Yeah…ba…”

[You’re bleeding!]

Huh? Was that what he was tasting? Elanus tried to raise a hand toward his face to figure it out, but he couldn’t quite remember how to connect to his hands again. His body…what did his body feel like? How far behind had he left it, and what was happening to it now? It had to be bad if the pain was affecting him this deep into his mindspace.

“Kieron! Kieron! Help!”

“I’ve got him,” a familiar voice said, and then there was a squeeze, pressure somewhere, a tilt that made his mindspace spin, and a round of cursing that made him want to smile…if he could only figure out how to make his mouth move.

“Oh my fucking god,” Kieron muttered, followed by the loud sound of him fumbling with something. “Don’t you dare do this to us. Don’t you dare.”

“Kieron…”

“Kee. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing I can’t fix.”

Then why do you sound so worried? Elanus wanted to ask, but a second later something cool washed over his mind, cool and soothing and it made him so sleepy…

A second after that, he was out.