Quantum Cultivation by Jace Kang (simple e reader TXT) 📕

Still, she used a Level Two Cloak, which allowed her to slip by unseen. Thus hidden, she jumped from droid to droid, installing a subroutine that would make Ryu’s robes invisible to them.

Aya jacked out and returned to the real world.

Besides the usual mental sluggishness, her chest was tight.

And not from the phlegm.

No, this was an entirely different sensation, one that was combined with a racing heart and trembling hands. She didn’t suffer from these mortal frailties in the EtherCloud, and it had been months, maybe even years, since she’d felt them.  Her racing thoughts, so accustomed to being connected to the perceptual stream of the EtherCloud, felt disjointed in real time.

Taking a deep breath, or at least as much of a deep breath as her lungs would allow, she rose from her cushioned chair. Her legs wobbled, atrophied from sitting most of her life, which added to the disorientation of returning to real time.

Her home’s surveillance equipment was child’s play to hack via the wireless connection to the quantum computer in her brain, without her consciousness even having to transfer to the EtherCloud.

With a few thoughts, she used her room’s projectors to create an image of herself jacked in, programmed with basic algorithms to respond to her parents’ terse greetings. Then she made herself invisible to the cameras.

She retrieved a portable holoprojector, a signal jammer, and EtherCloud bridge; all three black cubes fit in the palm of her hand.  Satisfied, she left her room and crept out into her family living area. No one was around. That was no surprise for this time of day, especially because of the Peacekeeper emergency.  She went to her sister’s bedroom and into her closet.

Her own wardrobe consisted of comfortable casual wear for the home. In contrast, her sister had all of the latest fashions hanging from the rows of racks, above shelves of jewelry, shoes, and other accessories.

Aya pushed past those and chose one of the Peacekeeper tactical uniforms.  Form-fitting on her sister, it was a little loose at first until the nanocircuitry adjusted. While her own clothes were relaxed, the uniform made her feel almost naked.  The helmet, which her sister usually eschewed, covered her short hair. The interface connected to the jack in her skull, but for now, she activated her brain’s virtual buffer to prevent linking with the helmet’s tactical functions and Peacekeeper Central.

Activating the projectors, she viewed her image.  She looked like any other Peacekeeper from the elite tactical units. There was risk to both her and her sister if she stole her identity, so it was time for some more hacking.

“Ai, create a tactical Peacekeeper identity for me.” Aya lowered her buffer, which opened the connection to Peacekeeper Headquarters. As Peacekeeper equipment, it would bypass the lockdown. The high-level Sentinels which she couldn’t trick on her own would ignore her for about a thousandth of a second—long enough to add the forged identity to the HR database and erase the log of her visit. She reestablished the buffer to go invisible on Peacekeeper monitors.

Satisfied, she cleared out her lungs, took a deep breath, and left her home for the first time in years.

The building’s hallways were empty, and she took the maglift down the sixty floors to ground level. The rapid descent felt strange to her real body, even though the tactical suit’s inertial dampeners moderated the sensation.

When the maglift doors opened, she took another deep breath and stepped into the vaulting atrium, whose transparent walls allowed the natural light of dusk in.  A handful of people were walking through, the dampeners in their footwear making their steps nearly silent on the slate-grey floor. No one paid her any mind beyond a respectful nod.

She crossed the atrium, went through the double doors, and breathed real air for the first time in a long while. The suit didn’t have a water ionizer—hopefully the updated model would bypass the functional conflicts—so she activated a portable one to disperse the rain in a bubble around her. It left her dry as she hurried toward Kyoto Central’s garbage area.

As she got closer, where Peacekeepers would see her, she activated her fake identity and lowered the buffer.  The helmet again interfaced with the Peacekeeper Headquarters’ EtherSpace, and would make her appear on their maps.

She turned into an alley that ran behind Peacekeeper Headquarters. Buzzes and whirs grew louder as she approached the waste processing building she’d virtually visited just moments before.

In an open alcove, refuse tumbled down chutes and landed in piles.  Droids trundled through the trash, picking up specific items with their pincer arms and putting them in their bodies for reprocessing into reusable base components.  One, currently at full capacity, rolled to the entrance and shat out cubes of differing colors and textures. A Purebred sorted and stacked them, though he paused to glance at her before returning to his job.

She scanned the tops of the piles closest to Peacekeeper Headquarters. It wasn’t long before she spotted Ryu’s robes atop a mountain of trash. She hurried toward it.

“Where are you going?” the Purebred yelled.

She ignored him, like all XHumans ignored Purebreds.  He might be a witness, but nobody would bother to question him when they could review the logs from the droids.

Using her mobile EtherCloud bridge, she hacked back into the building’s EtherSpace. In a millionth of a second, she shut down the garbage chute so she wouldn’t get hit with trash, and then jacked out.  On all fours, she climbed up to the robes. With muscles poorly developed from extended time into the EtherCloud, her arms and legs burned, even with the tactical suit’s strength enhancers.  It took a few tugs to free the robes from a broken chair, and she nearly fell backward off the pile.

Rolling them into a ball, she eased her way down.  This was the most physical activity she’d