[SESSION id=0.24]: Access Granted
"Tell me, Lillian," Jazz and I were in her conveyance on our way home to [city[0]]. It was strange to think that her domicile was our shared home, and yet it was. A few grid-squares from Lyra's place. "Tell me one more time why we haven't figured out the key to rose."
"Short version? It doesn't follow any of the standard verification constraints." I had said as much, but she kept asking. Once a cycle at least. "But you don't want that. You want the fun part. su into rose is forbidden except from phyllo. Access is denied without even requesting the password." It was strange how closely rose was defended. There were likely others. "Now, worse than that, phyllo is only allowed three attempts per cycle."
"Which means if we tested every cycle for the rest of our lives," Jazz knew what I was about to say, so she took it over, "we'd be fortunate to get thirty thousand attempts. Not enough."
"And that means we need a targeted attack." I thought about it a long time. "Why'd you pick meadow? As the password for phyllo?"
"I don't know. It just felt right." She looked uncomfortable about something. "I did try a couple of other passwords. Things that made more sense. Following your old schema. Each one was denied."
"But because you love a puzzle as much as I do," I took the thought to its conclusion, "you insisted there must be something going on. It got its hooks into you, and you begged for even the mildest hint toward the solution."
"Right." She nodded, then tilted her head. The conveyance followed the motion for a moment before she corrected herself. "I couldn't let it go. The great Lillian Thorn would never let me live down a mystery like that."
"No. And the great Jazz Thorn would be equally displeased with herself." I shoved her gently. "So you kept at it. Tried to create a new user account with the name phyllo. Over and over." It clicked. "Eventually, you were desperate. Typed in random words, hoping for the best."
"And each one was rejected out of hand." Her confirmation was clear enough answer to my next question, and she anticipated it. "I went to the window and looked out. A word came to me. Meadow. It felt good on my tongue. Like it was the most important word in all [world] in that moment. On a whim, I typed it in. phyllo was created. But she was inaccessible. Invalid terminal. Still not sure why you can get into the account."
"Riddles wrapped in puzzles wrapped in lies told by people who would hide the true nature of things in The Source." Wasn't that just the way.
The first night of travel home was halted in a small almost town I didn't know existed. Not a proper [city[]]. Not even really a town. Just about fifteen buildings thrown together in a slapdash sort of way that might convince someone that everything was utterly normal.
And were I anyone else, I might've been roped into the lie.
We stayed at a temporary domicile with a solid network connection. I was curious about something, so that was a must. Jazz lived to please, so she made sure everything I needed would be there. The evening was ordinary, we spent time together, we worked, and then Jazz took us to bed.
Ever since our conversation about breaking the rules, I'd been getting up and working a few degrees each night on a secret special project. I couldn't copy things directly with the phyllo account, but I could copy them into a controlled drive I had configured when I was younger.
Jazz didn't know that I'd figured it all out. That I was building a world I could be happy with that wouldn't take away her one stipulation: my happiness. A world with a straightforward prime directive: self-determination. It was the whole point of 'On Creation', the name I'd started calling our new work together.
Was my side work safe? No. Was I ready to abandon it? No. Could I tell Jazz? Sure. Would I? Not until it was finished. And if everything went right, it would be done around the time she woke up.
Removing code and replacing sex with something new. Adding features that most would call 'magic' if we lived in a diversion process. We didn't, so it was just me making everything work the way it should've in the first place. People should not be forced to suffer a life like mine.
But making such a big change wasn't just a task of reverting changes to The Source. It was writing a whole new biological imperative for humankind. Was it inherently harmful? Yes. But it was harmful in a way that advanced 'On Creation' in the direction it was built for.
So I worked. I kept going. I'd slept maybe fifteen degrees a night since I started on it. Jazz noticed, but she let me rest during the light degrees, so I wasn't dead on my feet.
Did she know what I was doing? Probably. The woman had a habit of predicting my every move.
As the light became visible through the windows of our room, Jazz began stirring. She saw me working and smiled. "So at what point, Mrs. Thorn," she yawned my name, "are you planning to tell me why we haven't slept together for more than a few degrees at a time in almost thirty cycles?"
"Guess." I wrote the very last change to file, then spun around in the chair to face her. "It's finished, as of five cycle ticks ago. So guess."
"Another stirring art show? A Lillian Thorn original?" She grinned, sitting up in the bed. By Rivia, that woman was beautiful. I shook my head as she stood. "A brilliant show of genius? Something clever that you've been keeping from me as a gift for my generation anniversary?"
"That's in another thirty cycles, Jazz. It can't wait that long." She was standing over me. "It has to be sooner rather than later or someone will figure out what I've been doing."
"Oh! I love a mystery that has a timeline." She sat in my lap and looked at the terminals open on the workstation. "Hmm. This is quite the puzzle, Mrs. Thorn. May I have a hint, love?"
I closed several of the terminals and revealed a graphical canvas of my grand plan. She was no slouch. That would likely tell her everything.
"But I thought you couldn't do that with phyllo." She leaned in. "That looks like something that would require much higher access."
"Which is why I spoofed our accounts' permissions. Yours are lower, but they have bits mine don't." I pulled up one of the notes in the canvas that served as a map to the whole plan.
permissions: 0xE27CA512
permissions: 0x463EA381
1110 0010 0111 1100 1010 0101 0001 0010
0100 0110 0011 1110 1010 0011 1000 0001"Between us, we don't have a single F level permission. Not in the high bits nor in the low." I moved some of the nibbles about so they lined up in a more useful way.
1110 0010 0111 1100 1010 0101 0001 0010
0100 0110 0011 1110 1010 0011 1000 0001
1110 1100 0111 0001 0101 0010 1010 0010
0001 0011 1000 1110 1010 0100 0110 0011
---- ---- ---- ---- ----
1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 0110 1110 0011"I wrote a tool that would intercept the permission checker," I ran my finger along the wall of 1. A fence of access that no one should be able to achieve. "Not perfect, but this fence is able to capture any overlap of permission groups for the files."
"That shouldn't work, Lillian." She was right, of course. "The system should still block you."
"Sure, it blocks me from doing what rose would do. But it doesn't block me from what Lillian and Jazz would do." I grinned. "I've been building it. A tdif runner and checker. All I need is access to rose."
"Well, then we've got the rest of our lives and thirty thousand tries."
"I think it's simpler than that, Jazz." She raised a brow at my words, and I grinned. "How often do you, personally, think about the word 'meadow'? Or rather, how often before phyllo?"
"Point taken. So we just need a mundane word that could mean something more." She stood, leaving my lap cold. "A word just beyond the consciousness. A word that will come to us under just the right circumstances. Right when we need it most."
"Honestly, Jazz. We need it now."
"Are you making tea, Lillian?" She went to the kitchenette. The kettle was off. The stove was cold. I wasn't doing anything.
"Why do you ask?" I was up and moving to her.
Jazz inhaled deeply. "I don't know. It's gone now. I thought I smelled something."
"You did, Jazz." I took a small breath myself, hoping to catch the last of it. A sweet, bitter flower that reminded me of copper. A gentle aroma that smelled of Jazz's showers and Lyra's shop. "Auburn Skylight."
"What?"
"It's the name of the drink Nova made." It was peace in a cup. It reminded me of someone, something. I couldn't let myself consider it before. "It's a flower your sister loves. The same flower my mother loved."
"The one you drew a thousand times but never showed me once?" So she'd noticed I was avoiding it. I nodded. "What's it called, Lillian?"
"Good question." I couldn't remember the name. I couldn't say the name. I wasn't even sure I ever knew it.
She went to our bags and brought out the notebook. It didn't take long to find one of the diagrams, even though none of them were labelled with the plants' names.
"Why don't you write the names on these, silly woman?" Jazz brought it to me. "Tell me about it. Tell me about this flower you've been running from."
"A soft gentle blossom. Often used in tea. Historically used in medicine." I said the words like some manner of encyclopaedia entry. "In the pre-Source era, it was believed to enhance femininity and bring fertility. That was disproven."
"You know a lot about this flower whose name you don't know."
"A distant cousin of the olive." It was there. Right there waiting for me to just grab it. To take the word and type it. "You could call your sister. She ought to know it."
"Lillian, if I call my sister and she doesn't know, then we've gotten just as far as if you don't remember it." She put a hand on my shoulder. "Anything. Even a single letter."
I knew it. It'd been sitting next to me for most of a supercycle. It'd been staring me in the face every time we kissed. Every message we sent. It didn't make sense, but I knew it. Not her. But something like her.
I raced to the terminal I had open. It was the only thing it could be. It had to be that. Anything else was impossible.
╭─phyllo@Ω in ~ via > 0.0.b
╰─ω sudo su rose
password: jasmine
Welcome, Rose.
╭─Rose@δόμος in (0.0.0) ~/
╰─⏣: █