A young man stands in his bedroom. It is a room built not for leisure, but for TACTICAL SURVIVAL and HIGH-DENSITY DATA RECOVERY.
Your name is CAIN.
Behind you, your shortwave radio receiver softly hums with ambient static from across the Pacific. To your left, a row of impeccably alphabetized filing cabinets holds every hardware manual and network schema you have acquired since age eleven. To your right sits your pride and joy: AGENT FERN, a thriving Boston Fern currently undergoing systematic light therapy beneath a dedicated grow lamp.
Though it occurred five minutes ago, OPERATION STUDIO BREACH was an unqualified success. You successfully bypassed your mother’s studio keypad, commandeered her workstation, uncompressed the raw SBURB installation image files, and transmitted the Client installer directly to Finn’s terminal.
You should feel a sense of stoic triumph. Instead, your CRT monitor is flickering violently because FINN HAS GONE COMPLETELY OFF THE RAILS AGAIN.
-- cainineAgent [CA] opened private secure node #001 -- adrenalineCarver [AC] is currently typing...
[CA]: Finn. Cease the transmission immediately. [AC]: CAIN BROOOOOOO!!!!!!!! DID YOU SEE MY BLOG ENTRY??? I GOT 420 WAFFLE CLICKS IN TEN MINUTES!! [AC]: THE BETA IS ON MY DESKTOP IT'S WAITING RIGHT THERE LIKE A FRESH TUBE OF SURF WAX! [CA]: I am painfully aware of your weblog. The glowing pink animated fire divider is causing a 12% frame-drop on my secondary terminal monitor. [CA]: More importantly, you are saturating our shared dial-up node with raw 8-bit audio packets. Neve is not ignoring you out of ignorance; she is ignoring you because she is physically trapped in her living room. [AC]: BUT BRO! SHE IS MY SERVER PLAYER! SHE HAS TO CONNECT TO MY CLIENT OR WE CAN'T PLAY! [AC]: I HAVE MY WAFFLE READY! I HAVE MY MOUSE READY! I AM READY TO ENTER THE MATRIX! [CA]: SBURB is not an arcade cabinet, Finn. It is an enterprise-grade spatial architecture program with an executable size that defies standard 1996 data compression algorithms. [CA]: If you launch the Client executable before Neve establishes a stable Host socket from her end, the system buffer will flood and your computer will crash directly into a BSoD. [AC]: pffft BSoD stands for Big Slick Ocean Wave of Destruction right? [CA]: No. It stands for Blue Screen of Death. Which is what your hard drive will experience if you keep spamming her screen with a spinning bitmap of your face while she is trying to finish watching a musical film. [TG]: ALLY HAS ENTERED THE CHATROOM!! 🎉🎉🎉 [TG]: cain is totally right finn u cant rush the host connection!! also cain ur blog link on the webring is broken again it keeps asking me for a 16-digit security clearance code!! >:P [CA]: That is because my web log contains classified operational logs, Ally. It is encrypted for a reason. [AC]: CAIN HAS A PASSWORD ON HIS BLOG SO NO ONE CAN READ HIS POETRY ABOUT PLANTS LOLOLOLOL 🧇 [CA]: It is not poetry. It is a botanical maintenance ledger.
You take a slow, deliberate breath, resting your hand on the cool casing of your computer tower.
Out on the street, a sudden, heavy gust of coastal wind rattles your bedroom window. A strange, metallic thud echoes somewhere up on the roof—loud enough to make Agent Fern’s fronds tremble slightly under the lamp.
You freeze. That didn't sound like wind.
> Cain: Investigate the strange noise on the roof.