The glassware rattled like bones every time the fume hood fan kicked on. She leaned closer to the flask, watching the thin coil of vapor snake its way up through the condenser tube. The liquid inside shimmered an oily purple under the lab lights, promise and disaster swirling together in a slow, mocking dance. She pulled her goggles tight against her face, heart thudding in rhythm with the stir bar. This was supposed to be the run. This was supposed to finally hold together.
She whispered to it like it gave a fuck. "Come on, don't screw me over again. Just... hold."
The solution bubbled, gained body. She dared to believe for a breath, her chest tightening with a fragile thrill. Then, as if fate had been holding back just to laugh in her face, the purple collapsed into an ugly brown curdle, fizzing like sewage.
She swore, slamming the glass rod down on the bench hard enough to splinter wood. A streak of brown slop spattered her sleeve.
"Motherfucker!" she hissed, tearing the gloves off, then whimpered, "Why can't you just work?"
The stool shrieked against the tiles as she kicked it back, pacing. Weeks of tweaking the scaffold - one more carbon chain, one more adjustment in pH, one more midnight epiphany scribbled down in notebook margins - and it still broke apart every damn time. The analog should've stabilized the psilocybin derivative. It should've been a clean separation, a crystalline lattice she could scoop up and be proud of. Instead, sludge. Always the sludge.
She gripped the counter until her knuckles ached.
"I'm still missing something..."
This wasn't about getting high, really. It was about breaking chains - the right trip, the right mind-rewire, could unshackle trauma so deep no therapy could dig it out. That's what she wanted to build: a mind-bomb that healed. A drug that burned the rot away. And every failed batch wasn't just wasted effort - it was one more reminder of how far she still was from tearing down the bars around her.
The door creaked behind her.
"Amy," her mother's voice. Clipped and sharp enough to cut steel armor like it was paper.
Amy froze, back still turned.
"What," she said flat, not even bothering to accentuate it as a question.
"You've been down here all day," her mother said. Heels clicked on tile as she stepped inside, voice carrying that brittle note of someone forcing composure. "Your supervisor called me. He said you haven't shown up to seminar in three weeks."
Amy turned, goggles still strapped across her forehead. Sweat beaded at her hairline. "I told you, I'm working on something more important."
Her mother's eyes darted to the flask of brown muck, then back. "Important?" A bitter laugh. "Cooking drugs in the basement is important? Do you want the police at our door again?"
Amy's throat tightened. "It's not-"
"I don't care what you call it. Research. Experimentation. It's illegal, Amy. And disgusting." Her mother's tone sharpened even more. "I didn't raise you for this. I raised you to be-"
"Perfect?" Amy snapped. Her voice cracked, years of splinters shoved into one syllable. "Your perfect daughter who never curses, never fails, never disappoints? Newsflash! I'm not her. I never was."
Her mother's mouth tightened, a wrinkle between her brows like a scar. "You could be, if you tried."
"I am trying!" Amy slammed a palm against the counter, sending glassware rattling. "Just not at the life you want for me. I'm my own fucking person, mom!"
"No wonder your father left."
Then, the slam of the door, sharp as a gunshot.
The silence afterward was suffocating. Glass trembled faintly on the bench where she'd hit it, a fragile echo of her anger. Amy stood there, chest heaving, throat raw, the words still burning holes in her mouth. Her hands shook, fingers stained with chemical dust and ink, like they didn't belong to her anymore.
Seconds passed. They turned into minutes. Time felt blurred. She finally let herself sink onto the lab stool, her knees giving way under a weight that wasn't physical at all.
Her forehead dropped into her hands, and the harsh sob broke out before she could choke it down.
Her mother's words wouldn't stop replaying. "No wonder your father left."
Amy had been thirteen when he walked out. She still remembered the rain hammering the windows that night, the sound of the front door closing softer than she'd expected - like a sigh instead of a goodbye. He hadn't said her name once. And ever since, a quiet part of her had whispered that it was her fault.
Her temper. Her sharp tongue. The fact that she never wore the dresses he liked, never behaved like the other "nice girls." Never the daughter he wanted.
And now her mother weaponized that silence, pressed it like a knife into the softest part of her. Because deep down, Amy still believed it. She was the reason he left. She must've been.
Her sobs came in waves, leaving her trembling, cheeks wet, now streaked black where her eyeliner had run, chest aching like she'd swallowed a handful of rusty nails. She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes until it hurt, but it didn't stop anything.
A couple more minutes passed until she finally stabilized.
"I need that fucking drug," she whispered to the empty room. Her voice was hoarse, hollow. "But as much as I hate it, I need some help..."
She pushed herself off the stool like it was a lifeboat about to sink. Feet slapped against the floor as she stumbled down the hall toward her computer. The glow of the screen was waiting, a pale square of promise in the dark.
Amy dropped into her chair and hammered the keyboard awake, fingers twitching as though speed alone could save her. She opened window after window, half of them garbage search results, the rest useless chatter. Forums full of posers, some corpo pharma sites that wanted her to "schedule a consultation," paywalled scientific journals with more jargon than answers.
"Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you," she muttered at the screen, slamming the desk hard enough it squeaked. Every dead end made her blood simmer hotter, until the anger was covering the grief just enough to keep her going.
She dove deeper. Shady message boards. Abandoned blogs with dead links. A dozen pop-ups promising miracle cures, half of them probably malware. She clicked through anyway, desperate, teeth grinding. "I don't need a goddamn detox tea, I need something real!"
Then, finally, a crack in the noise.
/\/\ DUMP/WARE /\/\ ---> where bad code comes to rot <---
Scrolling through the chatter, Amy finally froze at a thread three pages deep, pulsing with someone's attempt at flair: >>> whispers of the forge <<<
Inside, the thread unrolled like a scratched tape, fragments of paranoia and half-bragging stitched together.
[NULLbaby :: 13-Aug-2039 01:55:44]
okay listen up, half of you ain't gonna believe me but I brushed against the forge last night. looked like an abandoned BBS until the ICE woke up........ that fucking thing smiled at me. ICE. that's not supposed to happen.
[DeadSector :: 13-Aug-2039 03:12:02]
^ can confirm. tried dropping a ghost-script to probe the outer layer. it came back rewritten. like it learned me. fucker piped my own home address into my VR overlay with a "nice try" message. I unplugged so hard I almost snapped the jack.
[LoRezLuv :: 13-Aug-2039 04:01:09]
y'all scaring tourists again. that forge thing's just a myth, urban-legend-tier. every few months someone claims they saw "her." how "she" knows people and can get anything "she" wants. always the same fucking bullshit. always the same fucking troll.
[Cinder_Zero :: 13-Aug-2039 05:55:30]
no myth. a friend of mine in the Lagos cluster tried getting a trace. he's missing. three days. ICE fry, biofeedback burn, pick your poison. his rig still responds to pings, but he's cold on the floor. tell me that is a "myth."
[Sp1tMask :: 13-Aug-2039 06:10:09]
can't believe no one said it yet: the Forge belongs to Void. you know, the girl who doesn't crack EXEs. she cracks people. backdoors aren't lines of code to her. they're human. stop poking that thing if you know what's good for you.
[RustHalo :: 13-Aug-2039 06:18:55]
tried DM-ing her once through a drop relay. reply came 0.42 sec later: "wrong door." then my entire mail spool was shredded into white noise. I don't touch that side of the net anymore.
[Blackh4nded :: 13-Aug-2039 07:40:07]
saw her ICE once. not a wall, not a gate...... it was a forge in the literal sense, searing code hammered into shapes while you watched. everything I threw at it melted. then it sent one response back: my own face, webcam feed. didn't even have the cam plugged in.
[Sp1tMask :: 13-Aug-2039 07:45:11]
the Forge tests you. fail the test, it owns you. pass... maybe she talks. maybe.
Amy scrolled slower now, every line tangling deeper in her gut. Most of the replies sounded like the same paranoid rambling she'd seen in a hundred other fringe threads - but the repetition of the name, the consistency of the fear, that was different.
Void
Binary Forge
Names whispered like curses.
And at the very bottom, barely visible against the background, someone had left a single reply with no username, no timestamp. Just a link.
pubnet://bin_f0rg3/0xA991C4/gate?sig=9f3a:7c1e:ff00
Amy's cursor hovered over the link. Her fingertip trembled against the mouse, pulse racing like she'd swallowed lightning. Every red flag her brain could throw up was screaming "don't," but curiosity gnawed harder than fear. With a muttered "fuck it," she clicked.
The page loaded in a blink. No fanfare, no skulls, no flaming neon banners screaming "hacker paradise." Just plain black text on dark-purple background. Minimal, almost boring. A directory listing, each entry cold and sterile:
lost+found/
__index.html
readme.txt
gate.exe
Nothing that screamed come hither, but nothing that screamed trap either. She frowned. Too clean.
Amy exhaled slowly, opening a folder with a small toolkit of scripts she'd cobbled together from tutorials and warez dumps. She wasn't a netrunner, she was a biochemist. But she could poke around networks, brute force weak passwords, fuzz something until it spat up blood. But this was different. She felt it in her teeth. Respect - that was the only word for it. So she treaded lightly, probing instead of forcing.
The probe barely touched the gate.exe file before the air in her room felt colder. Her screen flickered, and something answered back.
access flagged. node ice active.
A crawl of text spilled down the terminal like it was breathing. Then came words, not code:
[ICE]: unauthorized entity detected.
[ICE]: Amy L. K., age 22. current address: Gdynia, Parkowa 26A/11. gpa 2.9. pending tuition notice.
Amy's stomach lurched. That wasn't just a scare tactic. That was her. Information she hadn't put online.
"Holy fuck..." she whispered, hand covering her mouth.
The ICE pulsed again, letters strobing like a heartbeat:
[ICE]: you got guts, rookie. wrong gate. get. the. fuck. out.
[ICE]: got a tip for you, pretty thing.
[ICE]: maybe don't run any random executable you find online next time, hmm?
And then... Everything froze. Her computer screamed as every fan roared to max. The display fragmented into violent static before collapsing into a dead black screen. Amy yelped, slapping the power button like that could save it.
No luck. Dead.
But then, faint magenta letters crawled across the dark:
check yo dump. this better be worth my time.
It took Amy three reboots and a half hour of muttered curses before she finally coaxed her box back into life. The fans whined like wounded dogs, the boot logs spat warnings she didn't even recognize, but the machine limped along. Her filesystem looked intact, but the crash dump..? Jesus. It sprawled across her drive like a landfill, a dozen gigs of raw RAM vomit.
Amy opened it in her hex editor, instantly regretting it. The screen filled with incomprehensible chaos: broken pointer tables, half-rendered textures from whatever browser window she'd had open, fragments of Discord chats, Unicode soup. A living autopsy of her machine's last gasp.
"Alright," she muttered, tugging her oversized hoodie tighter, "needle in a burning haystack."
She started scrolling, eyes blurring at the neon of hexadecimal codes. It was like staring into static, waiting for ghosts to emerge. Occasionally, something vaguely human popped up-bits of cached text, a song lyric she'd been streaming, a filename from her downloads folder. False positives.
Amy tried grepping for keywords. Void, forge, contact, sig. Nothing. Garbage.
She bit her lip and switched strategies, leaning on some half-remembered online advice: look for markers. Compression headers, magic numbers, anything structured. Sure enough, buried 3 gigabytes deep, a suspicious 78 9C grabbed her attention.
Her pulse quickened. She dumped the block, ran it through a decompressor. It spat back nonsense... At first. She almost closed the window in frustration, but then her eye caught on a strange repetition: @@ symbols, punctuating the mess like breadcrumbs.
She dug deeper, isolating each block, trimming off the padding. One chunk decompressed clean, unfolding into legible text - right there in her terminal:
@@contact: pubnet://bin_f0rg3/0x7E9A/ctx/
@@key: amethyst:29:01
@@comment: don't fuck this up.
Amy froze.
For a second she just stared, eyes wide, unable to move. Then she leaned back in her chair, exhaling hard, wiping her forehead with her sleeve. Her heart pounded in her ears, a wild drumming that almost drowned out the hum of her overworked machine.
It wasn't an accident. It wasn't a random string caught in memory. Void had planted this, hidden it behind compression schemes only a determined crawler would bother untangling. A puzzle, left for her.
Her lips trembled into a whisper she barely recognized as her own voice:
"...she noticed me."
Not fried, not erased. She'd been warned, sure, but also... Invited.
Void had seen her, that was evident. The question she had no answer to was "why."