The digital world of Earth had seen a lot of upheaval. Digital fairies were slowly returning back to their native world to find the home they had made destroyed. Backups were affected, and they had to start entirely from scratch.
Amy, one of the architects and most important developers of their world examined the damage. The reason Earth (or rather the physical realm of Earth) was suffering so many glitches was because of a severe disruption to their E-cosystem. In the world of the digital fairies, it took the form of rainbow clouds, that defused and changed the electronic signals as they travelled from the users (which appeared as stars) to the local severs on their level. Lines were doing crazy loops, being re-directed... it was chaos.
Amy sighed, as she browsed code after code. The strange clouds affected their world making code more... motile, or mutagenic. It was hard to describe quite what it did, but it was affecting the Real World and they were the only ones with a chance to try and repair it.
"How's the processors doing?" Effie asked climbing up the broken steps. The plinth of what was the center of their world. Everything was so dark... lights were slowly coming back on, but the strange shades of the digital world were quite scary to her, especially if she looked up and saw the chaotic clouds.
"We're under constant attack by alien code," sighed Amy. "I don't know. Its some alien internet and the code is... alive."
"Alive?" Effie asked disturbed.
"Yes, but not sentient. Not like us... more like a virus. We've made contact with some other digital realm and its almost like electronic war-fare out there. We have strength in adaptation, but they seem to have superior run time. It takes all the runtime of the servers just to keep them out."
Another digital fairy was amongst them, looking very sour. She was incredibly angry and seemed a little glitchy. "None of us are alive any more." She said angrily. "We're just existing... we have to be real to be alive, and we don't have real bodies."
Amy sighed. She wanted to slap him but this one needed a... lighter touch. "Hey Brad," she said as comfortingly as possible. "You... feeling any better?"
The digital fairy looked to have very thin layers of clothing, exposing a mid-rift. She had a cheap look to her, almost tacky, and given that a digital fairy couldn't help her appearance... especially one like this, it was little wonder Brad was a touch unhinged. "No!" She shouted with an almost 'artificial' aspect to the resonance of her voice. "I hate this place, I hate being this and I hate... urgh!" She fumed as she turned away going down the steps.
Effie looked down awkwardly. "I'm sure she'll adjust eventually," said Effie. "I think she's just more upset that she's a.. famiclone digital fairy."
"Well, we can't help what we are," sighed Amy. "But her attitude is not helping the situation. Why didn't the sun change her back?"
"I have no idea," said Effie in thought. "Actually, come to think of it, I don't know of any digital fairy that did changed back. Well- besides Hiro. He got lucky, being able to go back and forth-" She stopped at Amy's glance.
Amy tensed. Right there.. was Nathan. The PS3 digital fairy, and he was fuming.
"You knew?! Nathan demanded to the two of them.
Amy looked to Nathan with a stoic expression. The Amiga digital fairy was like a wall, when she gave her stare at times of crisis like this. "I knew. I knew Hikari's secret mostly from the start... Effie found out later."
"And you let her get away with it?! Parading herself as a girl when she was a guy? For God's sake I-" He couldn't even complete the sentence. He loved Hikari... He was so into her and got along with her so well- hell even Hikari seemed to like him! But it was a lie... an illusion, shattered. He felt used, so used by Hikari. It was like it was all just some cruel game to him, and he felt so sick just to even think about it.
But what was worse was knowing people who ran this world seemed to know this secret, and still let him be used. For all their talk of being united, this was betrayal of the worst sort.
"...Hikari and Hiro are... the same and different at the same time. It's parallel processing at work," explained Amy. "Hiro can say 'I am Hikari' and still pass a conditional check."
"Shut up! You could have told me!" Nathan said smashing one of the blocks of broken code with his hand. The PS3 fairy was very strong indeed.
Amy sighed again and walked up to him. "Right now, Nathan, I don't care. I lost a good friend. Hikari and Hiro, was capable of feats of programming that benefited us all. We lost that... Hikari was also the only one able to treat a fairy who was so glitched they became Daemons. Do you honestly realise, what we lost? What we all Lost?!"
Effit gupled. "Amy..."
"She was like a sister to me! She was! And you are telling me she was 'just a guy'. Screw you Nathan, I have work to do." Amy went back to her console to survey the system... not even showing a single tear.
Nathan stared for a moment, then quietly walked down the stairs.
Nathan still felt angry and upset... nobody could understand the sheer betrayal he felt. He was lied to...
"Hurts doesn't it," said a girl's strange artificial voice, tinged with the imperfections of a speaker.
Nathan turned to see the strange fairy. She looked so... well... she didn't have the nice clothes most digital fairies got. "What do you know," he said scoffing.
"More then you might think. My name's Brad."
"Oh." Nathan said with a shrug as he looked at her again. "So.. the sun turned you into a..."
"I used a Pirated NES console," she said without any remorse in her voice. "So the sun punished me. Who would have thought the sun was so moral and cared about copyright," with a touch of insane laughter. "And if that wasn't bad enough, I lost my dick too. But as bad as I am, I don't lie to people. Hell, my nature is pretty evident for all to see." She said gesturing to her self.
"So what's the issue with you?"
"Well, I still like girls, despite what the sun tired to do to me. I still like being in the REAL world. We're just ghosts here, and now that the digital world has gone to hell, we should be looking into getting back to the world we belong in. Back to the bodies we deserve. I don't know about you, but I don't want to be code that can be erased by some person on a computer. Not me man."
"What.. are you proposing exactly?" said Nathan.
"Hikari's workshop. You can get into it, she gave you her key."
"So what? Only she could make use of the software there," Nathan said as he took out the small key. It was a curious looking oriental like symbol. Hikari did seem to like that kind of thing... made her all the more exotic. Urgh... he didn't want to think about it.
"What we need to do is get Hikari's daemon. We go to her workshop, activate the recall sequence and snag her. We then go through her memories and find the program needed to fix me, and we can use Hiro's shell to exist in the real world... as living flesh again. He's dead now anyway, so... its a prefect idea."
Nathan looked blankly. "Only one of us... would get to do that."
"We'll figure 'something' out. Besides, I thought you would want to get back at the guy that hurt you like this. Taking away his body and making it ours... heck his programs allow us to change it physically. We can be ourselves again! Reborn... we'll have to share the reward of course but... with Hiro's body, nobody would dare touch us in the digital world. What do you say? You game?" Urgh the way she said those last two words... on her modulated voice it was just a bit disturbing.
Nathan stared at the key then to the pirate digital fairy. "...yeah alright. I'm in."
