Back on her bed, she closed her eyes and relaxed her body. Enter soul room. The scenery around her flashed white briefly before returning into the view of a peaceful lake. Only she had not wanted it to be so peaceful.

Adjusting a few sliders, the calm landscape around her quickly turned into a relentless storm. Gazing at the flames of lightning streaking across the coal black sky, the clogs within her mind began to churn as they attempted to decode the mystery that was the capsule.

She pulled up the outline view once again, boring a hole through it with her intense stare. There has to be some kind of mechanism that operate it. She tinkered with various scanning options, checking for signals and abnormalities but still found nothing.

Not giving up, she continued probing it with various electromagnetic waves and watched for any kind of feedback. There were no response still.

Sighing, she dismissed the windows and glanced back into the stormy abyss surrounding her. All of her previous life’s knowledge concerning the very existence of technology itself was screaming at her that the capsule did not operate within this world’s normal bounds. It was impossible for her to disable it the say she would an electrical device.

Wanting to confirm such an insane theory, she left the soul room and turned on her computer. As she was fumbling through the search page however, a foreign chat program opened itself.

“Hi there Ellowyn, we forgot to mention that you can also contact us through this chat too! Also since you’re looking for it, here is the information you wanted about the thing we’ve put inside you ” Attached was links to various websites that mentioned the capsule.

Ellowyn sighed for the eighth time. Don’t you know what the word privacy means?

According to the sites, the capsule, nicknamed “Bargaining pill” had been used in various other hostages situation within recent years. The side taking hostages had been called a “fanatical group” based on popular media. She hadn’t the time to study what that group was, only focusing on whether there were ways to disable it.

As she had expected, the scientists also had no idea how the thing operated and having found no trace of the mechanism behind its operations. This info had confirmed her suspicions, but rather than being discouraged, she had saw hope.

Back in her soul room, she began searching through the system’s options, looking deeper and deeper into its confines. To her dismay, some of the modules were unavailable or returned errors when she tried to access, can’t expect anything better from a fragmented system I guess.

Her tired eyes slowly drooped over as she looked through more options, many of them are trivial or unusable. But then she found something within Carl’s module.

Trigger scan for world stream system abnormalities

If there were an option to check for otherworldly contraptions, it had to be that one. She selected it excitedly.

Access denied, admin status required

Shit! She had gotten so far, only to find it impossible to continue. Her chest tightened, she wanted to scream and wail, to vent her frustration in some way. Calm down, me. She readjusted the surrounding weather back to its original calmness. Sitting with her eyes closed, she tried to reassure herself.

Its not the end of the world, and even if things do go sour, I can at least save my own ass. But if she ever had to use the system to disable the capsule with brute force, her new family would know about the system’s existence and would question her. Chances were she’d even be separated from them once that happens, Tom could fear her of harming Alice. She couldn’t let that happen, ever.

She scanned through the rest of the options, slowly taking note within her mind what tools were available for her to exploit. She needed to gain admin access and time was not on her side.

Input Command_

Nice! She found the command line interface in Carl’s module. She couldn’t trust anything made by him anymore than that of a troll hacker, but there were no other choices, after all it was his module that saved her life.

-help

Command line interface for easier access of native functions. NOTE TO SELF: delete this before compiling so those suckers can’t abuse the system!

List of commands:

-xxxx

She rolled her eyes, this Carl guy was clearly the lazy type. Looking over the help files, she was amazed to find that the processing capabilities of the system surpassed much of anything she had ever known. In fact, it was using what was considered farfetched even in her current world, parallel computing.

Despite many advances in the processing field, all major computing systems in Liona still used a linear instruction by instruction system as a basis for all operations. While parallel tasks could be done with multi threading, it was not anywhere near the scale of what her system can do.

The smallest processing unit was called a node, with larger clumps of them parent nodes, each assigned to do a specific task. Parent nodes are assigned and reassigned dynamically when the system as a whole distribute its processing load. Kind of like the human brain. She chuckled. She’d even sell her soul in the past had it allowed her access to something that amazing.

Shaking her head, she dispelled her daze and started probing the commands to find out the limits of what she could do without admin power. She had a vague idea of the plan, but it was risky.

As her fingers glided through the keyboard, she was bewildered at her own efficiency. Just a few moments ago, she was finding trouble trying to connect logic problems in ZStar and yet at that moment, she found herself blazing through the commands like a horse on thrusters. As if the problems created by a previous identity whom never worked on program logic disintegrated and she became her very self back on Earth. She could only shrug and smirked, I guess its one of those -finding strength through adversity- moment that people used to make inspirational speeches about.

There. She had gathered what she needed. Pausing for a moment, she reconsidered what she was doing. Failure would mean a fatal crash and there was a chance that the system could never restart again. Without the system, she would die from her mysterious heart disease that not even the futuristic system can cure.

Closing her eyes, she recalled the happy memories of her past, of a life once worth living for. If she could make herself a part of something like that, she’d give her life. And if I fail, she shrugged, then I guess my extended journey is over. She felt no regrets.

She checked life support status and had the system restart her non beating heart that it was repairing. She was glad to know the heart had been mostly restored and would work well for at least a few weeks.

Here goes nothing. She pressed the execute button and watched as numbers whirled by. The plan was to inject a minor node she had access to with a recursive function. The function itself had two goals, to use up processing resources and take over neighboring nodes until it reaches the node storing the user authorization data, then it’d overwrite her account and give her admin power.

She knew well they’d have countermeasures against it and was hoping that the system creators had never expected the attack to come from their own module. The other problem would be once the function managed to give her admin status, there would be no stopping it and the malicious code will likely expand until the system crashes into emergency reboot. With the system as fragmented as it was, there was a chance the reboot would fail, leading to her imminent death.

She exited the soul room and prepared herself.

Notice

Abnormality detected within running processes, running integrity check

No! She frantically searched through the directories and launched more instances of the function in the maintenance nodes near the node where the scan was processed.

Scan interrupted, reallocating processing nodes

She continued pulling the tug of war for processing power as her function crept closer to the user data node.

Warning! Insufficient Processing power, disabling lower priority functions

Sensors offline

Environment scan offline

...

She swallowed, her hands cold and her stomach churned as she watch the code’s expansion and the system failing. Will the system failure happens before then? The question echoed over her mind.

Warning! Major module failure, emergency reboot in 5

Hurry up! Sweat covered her forehead and she was on the verge of hyperventilating.

Notice: ...

Success! Admin power granted, woooo!

She chuckled at her own silliness for writing such message. The system went into reboot mode a few seconds later and all of the virtual windows surrounding her dissolved into nothingness.

I'll have to save the surprise for tomorrow, its not ready yet T.T Gdoc link feel free to comment any edit suggestions