Layered Reality Players. Platformational Reality Wars. One hack-rig is trying to work at your space, while you work at theirs. Who can write code fast enough to penetrate and unseat the other player?
Tom has a Burroughs-Gysin Cut-Up Machine appended to his rig, and he is rattling off word-virus like a champ. Ferley has a Kerouac and is trying to win with paper-roll volume. Kathey is writing in shorthand on an Interpolation Hack Tablet.
Space tatters around them. Time skips and loops and pirouettes around moments that fix and unfix. As something locks up Dismantle Scripts are unpacked in someone’s spatiotemporal index packet, and they begin to disassemble out of reality. If it weren’t in a Re-Set Shell then they would have to worry that the failed student wasn’t coming back. Once the game ended everyone would be recompiled that fell foul of an effective hack.
There was only one time the safety protocols failed, and they couldn’t contain the erase mechanisms that someone was writing. The guy was a plant – a Reality Engineer that had been back-dialled and Cuckooed by The Nest, so that he could destroy their outpost.
The whole room started to run on a Sticky Loop, time stalling out in some areas and speeding up in others, changing the laws of physics depending on who it was affecting. As they tried to tamper with it new aspects to the trap unfurled, and it started to spider out through the Re-Set Shell command lines to attack the base.
Kathey takes an early lead, but Ferley picks up speed and his stream of consciousness flow pours into the room. Tom smiles as he drops a Vampire Feed And Redirect into the mix of both of their hacks and their work starts to run away from them, and turn on each other and themselves. Tom sits there and watches the decompile, and smiles as the klaxon announces his victory.
Recompiled and aware that they have lost, the other two look crestfallen, but know that there are other wars to be fought.