Mourning, Part 2

Are you there, Satasha?

The words appeared suddenly among the debug information on the access pad. It scrolled past as quickly as she noticed. Satasha wiped a drip from her nose and rapidly swiped back. Imagined, right? Had to be.

But no, there it was, in plain font. Right in-between Access Node Corrupt: 0x00002B3CFFFF99 and Node Retest: 5 seconds. That was not a normal diagnostic code. She was pretty sure she would have remembered.

How do you respond to an anomalous debug command? There wasn't a direct text interface. Besides, where would it send it to? Maybe if she had access to the source, she could puzzle out something, but this was -

We need your help.

Okay, that confirmed that she very likely wasn't going mad. Not that she'd ever been, so frame of reference was poor. Someone needed help. It was obvious who. Although Satasha was a little miffed that her kill program hadn't worked as advertised. Part of her was already trying to figure out how any of Dee remained active.

Server address 1eff:8c99:ffff:ea77:dee1:dddd:00aa

Hard link only.

StcPv8 comms only.

That was – that was an off-campus CSO server. One of the third tier backups. Now she was even more curious! She'd written some of the security on those layers herself.

She could be at that building in ten minutes or so, if she took a rail. She just needed to come up with an excuse to get away.