Happily Humming Heather

[Narrator]

Really, being a shapeshifting digital code transmitted into a camera feed is simple. He just walks towards what feels right and is actively tugging at him. At some point the street turns into a very narrow strip of land above a whole lot of nothing but he gets the feeling that he can't really step off the path. It has a gravity all of it's own that is keeping him grounded and moving along. There's not even any guards at the gates when he reaches the fortress. Just a whole bunch of drop-boxes all lined up in multiple rows in the fortress wall. He's not alone here either, there's a constant stream of weird wireframe-figures with vaguely human proportions and a much more detailed camera for a head. They're all carrying various data storage. Film reels, hard drives, little black film canisters, negatives, stacks of image print-outs, flip-books, USB sticks. They all reach a certain drop box, open it up and throw themselves into it head-first.

[Will Stanton]

Never one to be impatient, Will lined up behind some of the wireframe figures, awaiting his turn to dump himself into the the dropbox.

"Some weather we're having, isn't it? Hail, an Eclipse, Lightning and then Precipitation? Crazy," he said conversationally. The odds that anyone would be a) able to see this conversation or b) able to figure out what the hell he was on about seemed like it would be close to zero, but it was worth the shot. Maybe.

The line moved up, with Will fidgeting in line. The throbbing commands in his head from Conduit's programming remained loud and persistent, stopping him from stepping out of line and plunging into the abyss.

And so, when it was his turn, Will opened up the drop box, leaned over, and tossed himself in, head-first.

[Narrator]

The other data packets don't even react to Will's attempt at a coded message, though miles away in a data-center the visual feed of one camera view glitches out for a moment. It even draws some attention and the person monitoring it pulls the feed up to their main screen. Of course, he has no way of knowing that the figure that (if it wasn't black and white) has green hair only exists on the video stream and not reality.

And then Will throws himself into the chute and tumbles down a slide. Nearby the wireframe-camera-heads land on their feet in defiance of gravity, while Will unceremoniously gets dumped on the ground. Around them a mile-high racks of shelves with boxes upon boxes, labeled with long alphanumerical strings.

[Will Stanton]

Will tumbled, ass-over-teakettle, down the chute, landing with an undignified *oomph* at the bottom.

Very fortunately, that didn't cause him to explode with the bomb still sticking out of his chest. That would probably not have been good for anyone.

Dusting himself off, Will squinted at the strings, his programming continuing to keep him walking forward. Somewhere out there was the hole box made for him, after all, and surely Conduit would let him know when he found it...

[Narrator]

As he's walking the payload does, in fact, assist him. By beginning to beep ominously and increasing in speed the closer he gets to his detonation destination.

[Will Stanton]

"That's probably not ideal," Will noted, testing to see if he could push the bomb further in to himself. Absorb whatever sort of...metaphorical explosion this brings with it.

Whether or not he was successful, however, didn't stop his programming from marching him towards a particular box...

[Narrator]

He can certainly shove it inside, though it's a bit awkward based on the dimensions involved. Tilting it a little helps, but how much resistance he can provide is anybody's guess. He finds out soon enough as he reaches the right box, incredibly non-descript but peeking in reveals stacks of slates each playing surveillance footage of what appears to be the inside of a data center. Does proximity work like that in cyberspace? No time to really deliberate as the beeping reaches a fever pitch and the box explodes in a bright burst of sparkles and glimmer, splattering Will's torso wide open to disperse a colorful cloud of sharp, angry geometric shapes that immediately begin zipping around like dragonflies, zeroing in on particular boxes and zooming off the burrow themselves into the data. All over the giant shelf boxes take on glowing hues of pink and yellow, some of which are beginning to vibrate ominously themselves.

[Will Stanton]

Will gasped, and digitally glitched some as his torso splattered open, the bits of him flying out dissolving into a stream of 1s and 0s that vanished into the ether. The force of the explosion knocked him onto his backside, the damage to his structure revealing a field of blue static and interference patterns where normally the squishy bit of organs and meat would be. The edges of the blast glitched and pulsed, spreading out slowly towards the rest of his form. Conduit would receive a number of error messages indicating that the 'virus' was decompiling; whether she wanted to actively do anything about that or just let it happen was up to her.

Will watched as the geometric shapes spread and vibrated, the aftermath of the successful package delivery beginning to do it's work in the data center...

[Conduit]

With the virus doing it's work Conduit does begin to get glimpses into the system directly, evidenced by the fact of her cackling 8-bit chibi face appearing on some of the boxes and peering around. Some of them produce a hand to give the decompiling Will a thumbs-up but otherwise not particularly caring about her delivery mechanism. If he survives that's interesting in it's own right. If he doesn't then, well, that had always been the plan.

[Will Stanton]

Will slowly began to collapse in on himself, becoming less and less defined and detailed -- blocky and polygonial, and then a flat texture stretched over a rapidly shrinking sphere as he finished 'decompiling', with Conduit having free reign over the data she had used Will to gain access to.

[Conduit]

Back in the real world Conduit is sitting slumped on the couch with an empty look in her eyes and with her body still (mostly) slack and a blank stare she starts cackling.