Hacking the Sun - The Re-Remake

Chapter 11 Pets For Memes 1/1

Pristine stars adorned a noir sky.

One Azarean guard stood oblivious to the beauty above, upright, astute, and stiff in scanning the blackness of night. Back and forth, he purposefully walked along the roads of suburbia. Down the sidewalk, between luminescent lamps and down midnight greens, he continued toward nothing out of the ordinary. As a result, his attention relaxed until he dared to surrender to peace. He looked at the moon.

Perhaps, he sought to remove his helmet, and behold unadulterated space, to contemplate life as it may have survived on his home planet. Then Jessica touched and shocked the hell out of him through the voltage in her glove, so toppled his motor functions and made him shake like a fish out of water. His face became intimately acquainted with the ground as the seizure continued. Eventually, he would stop moving altogether, settling into a sleep's calm.

"And that's how you make men quake in their boots," said Jessica. "Hehehe."

"You know what?" started Valerie, caressing her forehead in shame. "It's literally too late to be cracking one-liners."

"Stop misusing the word literally."

"I'm not dealing with kids, right now!" exclaimed Shannon. "I'm just not. Get your shit together before I lose mine." She turned to Valerie. "Now Val, where is this place?"

"I'll know it when I see it. Come on," she said, waving them along.

They found scarcely a shape in the dark realm of suburbia, except for the late-night liquor store that had come to define humanity's nocturnal habits. The indoor bulbs of a 711 solicited their thirst in passing. The midnight run had invited sweat, sore legs, and dry tongues.

"Why don't you hack one of those cameras, Jess?" Shannon panted. "That way we don't have to die of thirst before we die of conspiracy, know what I mean?"

"McFly!" Jessica jumped on her board to alleviate the spent energy of her legs. "Pfft! Who's tired? For a girl who knows karate, you need to work more on your cardio."

"Oh, haha, it's mixed martial arts. Need a lesson? Let me borrow the board."

Jessica replied with a stone face and an L sign on her forehead. Before either could throw another sassy remark, Valerie turned North on the street, giving Shannon the vain hope of a break at the store, but they proceeded at a relentless pace.

Tablet in hand, Jessica used her technical skills to erase any trace of their excursion, via recorded snippets. She fed a single-second thumbnail back into every cross-walk camera. As she did so, Valerie scanned the streets for law enforcement. Together, they skimmed security patrols, alien or otherwise.

***

Up ahead, Valerie had reprised her role as navigator, following the map of her mind to their destination. "Whatever you do, don't look back," she told them.

"Shannon," called Jessica, holding back a chuckle. "Did you actually know what the hell those guys were saying?"

"I was guessing," she said with a smile. "Not that hard, though. You should know this, but every derivative of cool is just a derivative of black culture whether or not they actually pull it off. You just gotta navigate and wade through the intonations of dialect, no matter how much it sounds like nonsense. Descriptivism is a double-edged sword."

"Well, I dig it!"

"Don't say that!"

"Sorry."

"I'm kidding."

They stopped under the glow of a corner street lamp, vibrant like angels in the dark. "Ay, we're close," said Valerie. She pointed at a shabby, worn-down building across the street, and, after double-checking every direction, led them to the other side.