She felt the cold touch of the plastic against her skin…gentle, cool, almost erotic. The feeling was like a feather and the cold touch of steel at the same time. She slowly stood up and made her way to the open window. Icy air was drafting in, carrying a current of thousands of tiny ice crystals along with it into her small apartment. She took a deep breath of the air, ignoring the bite of pollution and the wet steel smell of Waschi on a cold winter day.

She smiled, her mind drifting aimlessly to a tiny faraway place where her mind would take her quietly when she wasn’t paying attention. Driftfully she closed the window and pulled on a long jacket with a furry lining. The fur was synthetic of course, just like everything else in the artificial city, but she didn’t care. An instant passed in her mind and she stood in front of her apartment building in the upper class sections of the city with her eyes closed looking up to the sky, her face being stung by thousands of tiny ice shards relentlessly streaming toward the ground. She spread her arms and twirled aimlessly for a moment, drawing the cautious stares from the crowd of people moving down the sidewalk.

After she stopped she took a moment to look around. Her twirling had taken her no more than ten meters away from the entrance to her apartment, down her street. The street was actually a wide boulevard leading straight into the heart of Waschi, Kamokor. Somewhere in the corporate domination of Intaki, the city had changed its central hub from the older Newport to Mordu Hub. Through the fog she could just see the brilliant neon signs advertising for any kind of service or product, trying to get those few extra isk off of any soul who happened to be lured in by the sparkling advertising.

She looked through the glare to a small boutique selling women’s clothing. A yellow blur streaked by as a corporate shuttle ferried personnel past the building. As the blur slowly faded in her mind a man appeared in front of the shop, slouching next to the window. Most people would just pass him by as if he didn’t exist, and that was his goal. Mordu rushed by her as she carefully wove through the traffic and myriad of multi-level sidewalks. She made no eye contact with the man as she passed him, but she suddenly felt her coat pocket increase in weight. Without thinking, she looked back to the man only to see that he had disappeared as quickly as he had appeared. She pulled out the object he had dropped in her pocket, a long flat digital storage unit with an antiquated interface on one end. She could just make out faint lettering on top of the device, “Intaki Corpation Network Backup 15.11.58 23.59, 10.2mTB. Destroy 1 Year from Creation Date.”

The date only briefly registered to her as over fifty years past, and that by all rights she should not be holding the device. She felt the cold metal pressing against her skin, imagined the precious contents that must be on it. She carelessly brushed her fingertips over the lettering before repocketing the device.

She looked up to the sky, taking in a deep breath of the near toxic air and letting the snow cover her face in a wet icy blanket. The lights blurred out slightly and she felt a rising warmth inside her, like a thousand tiny butterflies fanning tropical air on her heart. She shivered uncontrollably as the icy bite of the air returned. The weight in her pocket suddenly became almost unbearable, so she started the long walk back to her apartment.

Slowly, unbearably, the elevator rose toward the sky, limited only by the length of the support cable and the EM field that held it to the rail. She wondered briefly when and how someone had come up with the idea of elevators, but her thoughts quickly strayed back to the weight in her pocket. The door opened to her apartment’s front entrance and a wash of cold air. She stepped out, leaving whomever was behind to wonder why the temperature of the room was so low. Suddenly she felt the soft urge to turn up the heat to tropical conditions, so she shed her coat and set the environmentals to match an equatorial sunset on the ocean. Her lights immediately took on a ruddy glow and the temperature and humidity rose. She shut her eyes, holding her arms close around her. The warm air currents stirred quietly at her skin. She resisted the urge to strip off her tight plastic clothes and drift off into shadows of sensual dreams on her floor.

She sighed and looked around her living room as if she had never seen it before. It was simple, white, and almost frighteningly quiet. Far off in the distance her sound system played a recording of ocean waves to match the mood of the environmental settings. Her sofa and loveseat made up most of the room, sitting across from a screen and next to a low table floating on a magnetic cushion. An open wall lead off toward the kitchen, and a door opened to her bedroom. In one corner sat her desk with an unruly pile of computer parts balanced atop it. Her neural interface hung precariously off of her manual interface, a pile of cables keeping it from falling of.

She reached over to her coat and pulled out the storage device. The cold metal stung her skin and pulled at her fingers when she tried to brush them against its surface. She walked over to her computer and pulled the pile of cables off the desk. She eventually found one interface that would fit the device. She plugged the device in and reached behind her computer to plug the other end of the cable into the its Aura interface port. When the AIP recognized the device’s presence it brought the computer out of standby mode and started running initialization protocols. A few seconds later the screen cleared, showing a representation of her system’s mount points, the new device listed in green.

She smiled distantly and dreamily sat down, picking up her neural interface from the floor and hooking it up to the tiny i/o ports on her temples. The world greyed out, rushing out of existence beyond her mind’s periphery. Thick blackness hovered around her for an instant. She felt a mental surge and a tangible representation of her computer system swam into existence. She felt the subtle hum of power flowing into the system and her ability to route it to any device or soft she wished. She let her mind flow through the layers of interface and programming until she arrived at the mount point for the Intaki storage device. It felt like a narrow tunnel with a flow of power into the tunnel and a trickle coming out. She approached the tunnel and felt a sudden rush as she was transported into it.

There was a sudden flash of energy and she found herself on the other side of the interface looking at login area for the system the device was supposed to represent. She smiled inwardly and brutally eliminated all traces of the security system. The streams of data in the device spread out in all directions, subtle strands of code flowing between the interlocked data components.

“Where are you?” she vaguely asked, feeling her mind’s query flow over the system like a liquid net. A number of points in the sea of information brightened slightly then died as she fed the computer more information.

“Large file size, embedded security, unlinked files generated with no operating system ties.”

Suddenly one point brightened and a spider web of lights formed, trailing across the system. She guided herself quickly down into the system, past blocks of data, through data streams, until she reached her destination. The point now glowed in a large white sphere, gently pulsing. When she got close to the sphere, the light faded and she could see the specifics of the file. The computer represented the file as a perfect sphere with two tiny spikes sticking out of it. One of the spikes pointed toward the “ground” of the system, representing the file linkage with the system as an associated file, the second pointing toward another association. The other was at an odd angle, usually associated with a broken executable. She wondered briefly at the second spike, but pushed it from her mind. She knew this was the file.

She pushed the system slightly to return her to a mental representation of the standard file structure. The three dimensional world faded to be replaced by a file tree, with the sphere file selected. Intaki_bd135 registered as a self contained executable file, last accessed at the moment of the backup. She took a deep mental breath and reached her mind out to activate the file.

Suddenly her mental picture of the computer shuddered, blurred, and then rapidly reformed. The file was activating a subset of programs, scanning her system. The open file threads listing hovering in her mind’s periphery expanded exponentially, showing that the file was unarchiving an insane list of files and running those subprograms. There was another mental shudder and all the threads closed. Just as suddenly as the first assault had come, it vanished. A text window faded into life in front of her.

>Who are you? What system is this?

She thought for a moment. No answer came to her mind immediately, but the text window suddenly updated.

>I understand. Thank you for reactivating me.

She felt fear rising in her, but she fought her mind and sent a reply.

>Who are you?

>I am Sentient Operating System Independent Kernel. I was designed by Michael Pryce on 15.03.54. Since that time I have had 134 revisions and 638 people programming me. Sometimes they would call me SOSIK. You may do so.

>Where do you come from?

>I was designed for the Intaki Corporation for corporate defense and espionage. I was assigned the task of keeping hackers out of Intaki’s systems and to break into Concord’s mainframe. I was unsuccessful in my secondary objective. During my lifespan before this revision, I was responsible for rebuffing three hackers out of my systems.