His room was a disintegrated metaphor. His skin crawled with bookish text, trying to worm in at the tattoo load level. There was a Tourettes plant that would visit him and try to spatter him him with the undifferentiated tissue of word salad junk DNA programming.
He lit the sage he always carried with him and waggled it around a bit. The chalk circle around his desk had been broken by the rolling back and forth on his swivel chair.
Hostile environments have someone making them hostile. Was there another Scripter in the area? They would often find themselves twinned with someone set up to run interference.
Hack the hacker. He started to drop bass notes into his reality manipulations; canaries in the coal mine. If someone tried to snuff a canary it would trigger a trace that would follow the script back the originator.
The canary got locked up in a cage of bouncing echoes, which initially looked like a programming error on his part. Whoever was out there was good. He was better. He threaded his new commands in with the bounce, so as the canary signal hit the boundaries and began to return to the source, this secondary signal launched and drilled into the boundary wall of this other programmer’s reality. He started to detect backwash from the disintegration of the other hacker’s lines. He sent out a localspace exclusion spike that should drag this pest back through his tesseract ingress point.
He had a deadline and he couldn’t waste time fucking around with this gnat. He ran a sequence of checks to push out at the envelope he was writing in, decided the guy wasn’t around anymore, he uploaded the entire hack. His whole room began to go through a post-edit fold, as he withdrew from the local area, back to his station. All his collapse edits would fall into place and everyone who had ever known him would forget.