Page 83 of The SongBird's Love

Suddenly, a beeping sound was heard.

“Loir?”

“...They aren’t here for you, but don’t slow down.”

Eden nodded, not wasting her breath on words. The sentinels must have spotted another intruder. There were always one or two hackers who tried to enter the Core at the first real border. If not backed up properly, they were usually spotted within a few seconds. For Eden to run this long and Dive this deep meant that Loir was doing a great job of shielding her presence.

The stressful beeping quickened, meaning the sentinel was closer, but so was the screen that Eden wanted. She wasn’t even worried when she finally reached it.

“Loir, I’m there.”

“I know, I know...” he sang. “Paw on the screen, purr-etty please!”

She rolled her eyes but obeyed. Immediately, the screen read her cat-like hands with an obviously-fake identification. Eden briefly read the information the System received about her.

“‘Pink Kitty Cat’? Seriously, Loir?” she hissed.

“You are so unappreciative.”

She didn’t have time to curse him. The screen validated her arrival and Eden was once again blown into the server, the real one this time.

She fell down on her knees while the world around her changed.

This time, it was much more precise and somewhat... scary.

“What the...”

Gigantic cubes appeared all around her, in so many vivid-colored blocks. Eden had never seen that type of defense before and she kept looking in all directions, nervous. This place was creepy. The cubes of different sizes moved, going up and down, left and right, moving in any one of their six faces’ directions. It was like being in the middle of a toy box, but in a large space that would have its own laws of gravity.

“Loir, where am I?”

“Hm, they have funny programmers,” he chuckled. “This has been one of the entry points for the Core’s main security archive for the last month or two.”

“Here? Are you kidding?”

“Yup. This is only the first level. From what I can see, there are probably one or two more to cross before they give you the information. I think they might have been inspired by a kid’s game. Anyway, business as usual. You gotta find the key to access the next level.”

Eden kept looking, but with so many cubes moving in different directions, she would get thrown to the other end of the room within seconds. The giant blue cube she had landed on was simply moving up and down, and like all the others, it changed direction if it met another one.

“Any clue?” she grimaced, trying to look around her.

“It’s like a pointer game. You have to find the one spot that looks a bit different.”

Eden kept looking around nervously. There were so many different blocks of color everywhere; how could she spot something different? She jumped to another cube that was flying laterally instead, looking around.

“There’s some sort of timer hidden in the code, Kitty. Hold on.”

That was basically all that she was doing while looking around frantically. Every different color meant another cube. Even the walls were covered in various-sized squares and they were coming out at any moment to start gravitating in the room. Some were bouncing off the walls but some stuck to it and joined the rest of the wall. This room had already changed a hundred different times in size and shape since she had gotten there.

These were typically the kind of tricks programmers of the Core would put in place to chase intruders. A real battle of nerves, where one had to keep calm no matter what chaos was going on around. Eden tried to control her breathing but so many cubes were moving all around her, she was scared she would miss the clue she needed. As the platform she was on joined the wall, she had to jump to another one. Every time she looked down to see where she’d fall if she were to, she couldn’t see the floor. It seemed as if it was a bottomless pit with no ceiling either. No matter how long she looked, there was nothing but moving cubes, which meant her clue could be much higher or much lower, and she couldn’t decide which way to go.

“Loir, I need a clue!” she insisted while jumping again.

“I’m digging, Kitty, I’m digging. This thing is a loop, which is good news...”

“Meaning?”

“Well, if you fall, you’re not going to fall anywhere. The ceiling is the bottom, the bottom is the ceiling. Upside down! So fun, isn’t it? I need to beat the genius who conceived this...”