I squinted in the dim morning light.
tom
Shit.
It hadn't worked.
Again.
Forgetting the cables I tried to sit up, only to be jerked back onto my pillow. I removed the clasp round my chin and hook the helmet off.
Cold, pallid light filtered into the room through gaps in the cardboard taped to the grimy windows. Lights blinked on and off on the mound of electrical equipment that surrounded the sagging mattress on the floor. One of the lights stayed persistently red. These fucking protocols...
I sat down at the computer and ran my eyes over the last nights logs, idly sipping at yesterdays coffee. Lines and lines of log messages flashed past my eyes as I tried to figure out what went wrong, mumbling to myself.
"Delta wave sleep detected at 11:57...great... sino-wave correlation... yep... frequency spikes at 3Hz... fine... aha... packet loss detected... ah... no... packet loss corrected... routing tables updated... uplink established... ah fuck" I realised the cause of the problem, I had guessed the wrong hashing algorithm and was getting kicked out of their systems.
I corrected the cryptographic functions to use SHA-256 and re-compiled the binary.
Tomorrow, I'll be free.
Tomorrow, I'll be waking up in the Metaverse.