The Freedom Fighters made frequent use of salvage when making their gear, usually from busted swat bots and badniks, but occasionally they would find some other old tech worth saving.
Given that she didn’t have to sleep like the others, Nicole would usually take the task of programming, analyzing present data, cataloging what was worthwhile before reformatting and reprogramming the the Fighters’ use. Among tonight’s workload of busted bots was an old, bordering on ancient, hard drive, probably far beyond saving but worth a check if nothing else.
As was to be expected, the drive was a mess, barely usable, almost unreadable, but she could find severely fragmented data and a heavily corrupt or damaged program…
Hexadecimal.exe…
On nothing more than a lark, Nicole began a full analysis of the program against the other fragmented data, unaware she had unintentionally activated hidden but still, if barely, active subroutines. Data began to replicate, firewalls were breached, and before she could stop it, her processes were already beginning to slow. It was a program unlike anything she’d seen before, older than any she was protected against and one she was wholly unprepared for.
It was incomplete, though, and itself unprepared for the Mobian technology as well. The two programs were at odds but completely mystified by the other.
But the ancient program had enough of itself to rebuild, and Nicole provided perfect building blocks. The virus spread, and programs changed.
In the dark lab of Freedom Fighters HQ, the light of a monitor broke through the night, and she laughed just like the old days.
The Queen of Chaos was back!
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Don’t lecture me on the impossibility of a drive holding data over a thousand years.
