For what could have been an utterly frustrating experience, testing out the app safe was surprisingly interesting. My eyes were a little strained after almost two hours of squinting them every time the glitches started up, but the progress was worth it.

  Whenever I fired off my quickhack shotgun, the code script stuttered and faltered before pushing back. This let me spot exactly where the thing was thickest and the safe most protected.

  That revealed some interesting information.

  First, the safe defenses were not uniform. Any area covered by black script was inviolate. I could probably take the netspace equivalent of a nuke to the safe, and those bits of it would remain proudly standing.

  The rest of the safe was not nearly so well protected. Oh, the code swirled and ebbed and did its job, but it didn’t seem quite as dense, nor as tough.

  I even managed to notice several spots where small gaps in the code opened up. The gaps were not large enough even to think of shoving my hand through, which I was tempted to do and which my weird instincts encouraged. Even so, I quickly realized I could simply… encourage things to develop to my advantage.

  What else is owning a shotgun good for?

  And so, I spent an inordinate amount of time and effort tracking down the biggest blank patch in the code I could find. Ironically, it was on the front of the safe, left hand side, right on what normally would be the rim of the door.

  Once I had my target, I started blasting again. From close up, from further away, at all kinds of angles, again and again until I could see through my glitching vision how the safe reacted to it. The process was drawn out slightly by the fact that I didn’t want to shoot too many times in a row without a break, but I liked to think I’d learned my lesson about overheating.

  Finally, an hour and a half later at least, I spotted what could be my window. When I shot the quickhack shotgun at the thing from just the right angle, the ‘hole’ in the safe’s defenses widened enough that I could feasibly fit my hand through.

  I almost started salivating at the thought of sweet, sweet data, but managed to keep my head in the game.

  I positioned myself at the best spot, just to the left of the safe. Then I aimed my shotgun at that spot and fired.

  It took five tries before my vision glitched again, and I spotted the opening. I rushed for it, dropping the shotgun on reflex, and tried to stick my hand through.

  My vision glitched more heavily for a moment, but I was off in my timing. Only a couple of my fingers made it through. They almost got stuck there, which was… not particularly pleasant. It sent tingling shocks racing up my arms and through my body, which was encouragement enough to pull away as swiftly as I could.

  I scowled at my inanimate nemesis, all the more set on breaching its defenses.

  I failed at my next attempt. And the one after that. And the one after that, also.

  But about sixty shots in with the shotgun, which I’d had to rematerialize after dropping it, I finally managed to get somewhere.

  I timed things just right. When I lunged forward, I stuck my entire right hand into the gap, up to my wrist. The code began to tighten again, of course. The tingles I was getting now felt like they were about to make nonexistent muscles in my weird splotch of a digital body seize up. Still, I had made progress. I wasn’t about to give up at that point.

  With a bit of a snarl, I shoved my right arm further in while trying to widen the gap with the fingers of my left hand. When I first put pressure on the code, it refused to budge, but that only held for a second or two. The structure finally began to shiver, then quake, and then yield.

  It felt incredibly odd when I closed my fingers around the code and pulled at it with my whole strength. My vision began to glitch much more heavily. But the strategy was definitely working. The opening was getting bigger.

  My arm was in the safe up to the elbow at that point. And while I should have been able to touch the other wall of the thing from the inside, I experienced no such sensation. In fact, my questing fingers couldn’t find anything.

  So, with a great heave, I started pushing my right elbow against the code in the opposite direction of where my left hand fingers were pulling the other side of the gap. My will strained against the code. The glitching in my vision rose into a crescendo of flashes between code and netspace.

  And something finally gave.

  Thankfully, it wasn’t my avatar body. I have no clue what would have happened then, but I seriously doubt it would have been pleasant.

  Instead, I was treated to the sight of code tearing apart.

  When my vision glitched, it looked like lines of code vanishing in bursts of light. When my eyes weren’t glitching, I saw a large flickering tear in the side of the safe. Its edges squirmed in a way that made me vaguely ill. They were still fighting to close on me.

  I grunted at the increasing intensity of the shocks bursting through my body. But I still managed to twist my arm in a way that let me wedge my right elbow against one edge of the tear while keeping my right palm on the other, which finally freed up my left arm to materialize my breach quickhack inside the safe.

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  With what would have been a malicious smirk, if my digital avatar had a face with actual features, I stuck the barrel of the shotgun into the gap and started firing. My vision glitched. The entire code structure of the safe quaked with every shot.

  Finally, the damn thing took one pellet too many.

  The safe froze, then burst apart into sparkly little bits that rained down around me.

  I almost collapsed in relief, to be honest. The shockwaves had been getting unbearable. If the safe had managed to hold out for just a minute longer, I might have decided to give up, no matter how close to success I was.

  But it hadn’t, and I was the victor!

  That thought was enough to draw my attention to what the safe had left behind after imploding.

  It was a simple, unassuming file folder. The only notable thing was the black crest emblazoned on its front. It was a black eye, dripping tears, and it looked almost like it was staring back at me.

  I couldn’t suppress a full-body shudder. Suddenly hesitant, I scowled at the folder. All I had to do was lean forward and pick it up. And yet…

  “This is ridiculous,” I declared, to no one in particular.

  I scooped up the folder, ignoring the small tingle of something like vague awareness that raced up my right arm as soon as I touched it.

  “Well, let’s see that code, then,” I announced cheerily, again to no one in particular. And I cracked the stupid thing open.

  Instantly, code scrolled across my vision in several separate streams. It was almost overwhelming, like the entire app was unspooling directly into my brain. It took me several seconds of frozen shock to realize I could manipulate it with a thought. I simply pushed my intent at it, and the flood compartmentalized neatly into hovering windows of scrolling code.

  I breathed a sigh of relief at the newfound separation between me and the code, though that was swiftly followed by an annoyed scowl. I should have known that would happen, and been ready to handle it. I probably would have been, had I gotten to learn everything the simulation shard was supposed to teach me.

  Granted, I still had the entire inheritance shard series to go through, but all of them were of the simulated reality type. And since I wasn’t sure how those would interact with my eyes… Well, I was still reluctant to open those shards, more for fear of ruining them than because I dreaded another encounter with the shadows.

  I told myself that, at least.

  Prompted by those thoughts, I took a moment to scan my surroundings. Thankfully, there were no cracks in the netspace, no black tar, and definitely no weird grinning faces. Either netspace was a lot more stable and harder for my eyes to mess with, or it was something about simulated reality shards that triggered them.

  I groaned when I realized I’d require further testing before I could come up with an answer either way. Simulated reality shards weren’t cheap, not even the most basic ones. Buying them with the express intention of ruining them through experimentation did not appeal to me.

  But I could take care of all that later. For the time being, I had my prize to admire.

  And admire it, I did. The code was unlike anything I’d seen before. It was leagues beyond even the most complex lessons I got from the shard, and obviously newer than any of the code I’d encountered up until then, too.

  At first, I was simply lost trying to make sense of it. To really understand it, I would probably need to learn an entirely new coding language. On my own.

  I didn’t want to admit that. The idea seemed ludicrous. But as I scanned through the coding files, I realized I had no choice.

  That was exactly what I was about to be forced to do.

  Oh, I could kind of guess what some of the stuff was and did. I saw several interesting tricks I could apply to my own version of coding. But it was woefully obvious that I’d been toying with machines and code that were many generations behind what was currently available commercially.

  The realization wasn’t as crushing as it might have been to someone else. I knew I had no privileged background to back up my attempts to learn netrunning. Still, that wouldn’t stop me. Older code or not, it was proven already that what I was learning worked in the netspace. In fact, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the backbone of the netspace infrastructure still relied on coding even older than what I’d been learning.

  Maybe I’d need some ingenuity and tricks to face off with the latest gen defenses and netrunners, but I had no business tangling with those yet anyway. By the time I did come around to that, I’d hopefully be much better equipped. I also hoped I’d actually know what I was doing by then, instead of relying on vague, distressing instincts.

  It was this boost to my confidence that encouraged me to continue examining the code, and it was rather lucky that it did. The deeper I dug into the coding, just appreciating the way it was done, the more something felt… off.

  Sure, the entire program was well-written, and it was a true masterpiece of the company that had published it. But bits of it, well… some bits felt downright otherworldly in their quality. While I could somewhat intuit what the rest of the code was doing, those bits remained stubbornly opaque, resisting all attempts to figure them out. I literally could not even recognize the symbols used to write the code, let alone the approach used in their writing.

  It didn’t take long after that for me to hit upon another truth: most of the particularly ‘weird’ code was buried under tons and tons of ‘regular’ coding. In fact, I was quickly growing certain that the majority of it never even affected a single thing on the user end of the equation.

  The question, then, was simple: what was that code even doing?

  By then, I was invested. It was late, sure, but I’d take a night of lost sleep in return for figuring out a mystery, and this was starting to look like a good one.

  I kept prodding at bits and pieces of the code. Eventually, I discovered a preview function that would show off what each bit of the normal code actually did. Random stats flickered at me. I was presented with a few scanning functions, and even a database of different diets.

  The ‘weird’ code, on the other hand? I kept trying to poke at it, only for nothing to happen. At all. I did get a weird readout once or twice, but it was nothing that made sense to me. Even the info it presented was in that weird script, and…

  A shiver ran down my spine as realization hit me like a truck.

  I know I’d made some mistakes, but I wasn’t a complete idiot. So, as I stared at a weird diagram with all sorts of readouts and symbols I could make neither heads nor tails of, it finally solidified in my head what I was looking at.

  The odd stats. The same stats I’d never found a single explanation for. This was the foundation that let the app offer them to me. It had to be.

  That did, of course, leave me wondering if I should keep poking around.

  Then again…

  Isn’t this the kind of thing I decided to take risks for? I wondered idly to myself, even as my eyes hardened.

  Yes. Yes it is.

  I kept pushing. I kept prodding. I was desperate to find anything that could help me understand, until my finger poked another line of the code at random.

  Pain blossomed inside my brain as my mind swam. Netspace twisted and threatened to fracture. For just a moment, I thought I would pass out.

  Then my mind cleared, and I discovered my virtual hand had lifted without my input. Held in it, looking painfully unassuming, was a black leatherbound journal that looked like a historical play prop.

  On its cover, the weeping eyes gleamed in a shade of black somehow darker than the surrounding leather.