The Hacker Marionette
S.R. Weaver
That moment when all that stands between you and the screen is your mind. You stare long enough into its space, and then you unwind. Dialing back the clock, dreaming of cherry trees and weeping willows on a rainy evening, hearing nothing but the wind.
The classical version of science fiction is that of distant spaceships traveling multiple galaxies, but for this hacker, life manifested in a very different kind of way. She had had trouble with finding social network to stay on, with most of these clinging onto different extreme idealogies, and even centrists were not completely loyal to any one person. But usually Gitea instances remained consistently promising to not have to rely on socializing, at least to the same degree as social media. If you worked on your own, then all that stood between you and a new software package is a few lines of unwritten code. While dreaming of Flamenco and Hafestran mode. Lines of code crawling the page like lines of Kanjikana.
She dotted the map of an AI system, broken down between social and puzzle solving forms. But it was difficult to get into the specific scripting process after weeks of lacking focus and drive.
Yet now she slid into another mode.
The mode of code like music wave. Between the brackets were different numeral values that indicated different parts of an array to point to, so she could call from a list of commands: three times do this_command[0]. This command a stand in to whatever was in the array, generally called from a set of training examples.
Unlike code, her life ran without a script.
She was like body without a mind, the core script missing. Her life going full speed while going auto-pilot into a new social direction, with her the passanger of space pilots without a license to operate the flying wings, hoping she wouldn’t crash onto a rogue asteroid.
Things explode onward.
Chattanooga had become several degrees hotter, and by the early 2010s it had already begun to average out at the high eighties even during the Winter time. So it was somewhat of a treat that today was about ten degrees cooler, with drops of acid rain dropping on the street as they numbered like grains of sand on the beach. With the humidity clinging onto windows, until once again the sky requests its presence once more, and becomes the rain for more delayed days during the year. The lake under the bridges near where the Eiffel Tower and Toriis stand, were filled with scattered parts of old Windows computer no longer used, many of which were falling from the city in the sky. And Shinto Temples would have occassional sightings of the statue of Mother Mary wandering the forest. The sound of Yo Scale filled the airwaves from station blaring out of gas guzzling cars, even just a month after the pandemic.
But this isn’t a lecture about cleanliness. For one thing most people would probably not listen to such a thing, and when you’re fending out a weaponized payed parking booth, sometimes things take a backseat. If that seat remains when not blown to smithereens. In the grocery store was cans of sardines, which were only occassionally restocked in the local convenience market, where homeless people would congregate. Chattanooga and Atlanta merged into a super city, with plans to expand it into Nashville.
It is here that we begin begin and end this story.
At the point the hacker finds a different script.
The hacker knew people that related to the other mythological things, but for her for related more to the vampire. Not in the sense of being a gender, but based on what her fetishes were. She fantasized about the flow of blood draining down women’s neck, as their heads rolled onto the floor. Rolling, rolling, rolling on the floor. Convulsing, rhythm like classical music. To the sound of moonlight sonata Piano.
While others her age clung onto various cliques, she spent her years looking at various horror magazines, while holding her dick. And caressing the pillow as the sounds of a Piano rained down as the window flowed. And the humidity of Du Sang arousing the deepest part of human sensation. She lusted after the flow of women in French Revolutionary dresses, and their demise in these centuries. And dreaming centuries drawn to a close. Et avec le jeune, c’est rouge et noir. The harpsicord paving way to the Piano, and to synthwave music. Until eventually all she could hear was the sound of the rain.
The midnight hour felt as if drawing to a close, and yet the night was permanently long. The daylight never coming, the forest never eluminating. The hour of statues drawing near, with the vacant eyes of a forest deer. All all the forest creatures of the night scurrying for the demon the forest hungered for their blood and life force. She would watch reruns of Elven Lied, Saikano, and other anime that she liked better than other shows on at the time. But it never solved the emptiness she felt inside.
The marionette is one of the first children’s dolls, brought about before the invention of the radio. It would frequently have strings attached, and the relationship between the child and her doll would act in such a fashion. Now the children’s dolls have pre-recorded voices played at random. And soon machine learning will soon make this out od date. And the only thing that remains of old fashioned toys is the wooden shoes they came with, and their tattered dresses as they stare into the rainy night. Even as the hack boarded the space vessle, she found herself a marionette flowing in a wormhole of dying stars, slowly waiting for her destruction.
Her breaking apart, like dust in the wind.
She unwinds.