#hackerbabes

Sollux raised his eyebrows at her. "Anytime now, Ro-Lal." She liked the way he'd adopted Jane's affectionate nickname for her, to smooth over his irritation that he could not shorten her name to repeated letters the way he did with Karkat or Aradia. She rolled her eyes and looked at the lines of code on the screen. "•TIME? Really?" •TIME, pronounced 'bullet time,' was one of Sollux's earlier and more irritating esoteric languages. Coding anything in •TIME revolved entirely around taking one normally lightning-fast operation, slowing it down and executing it with as much dramatic preamble as possible. The best possible version of any given piece of •TIME code was packed to the brim with extensive background melodrama but still executed for the end-user as smoothly as if there'd been no mucking about at all.

This was extremely difficult for the coder and at best, entirely invisible to the end-user; it was purely an engine for the programmer to demonstrate their skills. It was exactly the kind of programming language an irrepressible show-off like Sollux would write.

Roxy tapped gently at the keyboard, frowning. This program, whatever it was, already seemed quite elegant. There was little need for correction at all. So why didn't it work as written? "Can't find it?" Sollux asked, after a few minutes passed in silence. She shooshed him irritably, then looked up. If she knew what the program was intended for, it might be easier to see what was wrong. But what would Sollux be up to? "Roxy," he said, jiggling his foot impatiently. "Stop trying to distract me," she said, and kept looking. Kanaya and Rose poring over books - no. Jake and Jade comparing guns - no. Dave, John, and Karkat bickering amiably in front of the television - maybe, but reprogramming a television wasn't anywhere close to showy enough to be worth the fuss. So who could he be trying to - there. She hadn't seen him before because he was at the very far end of the room from her (Sollux must have put the husktop here on purpose, she realized). "Dirk," she mused. Sollux shrugged elaborately, all elbows and innocence. "But why - oh," she realized, noticing that Dirk had a wrench in his hand. "Ohh," she repeated, grinning. Dirk was fond of claiming that his robots were uncrackable, impenetrable to the pithy code of mere software hackers like Roxy and Sollux. Roxy knew he was being at least semi-ironic, but she knew that arrogance on that level inevitably got under Sollux's skin. Like most phenomenally arrogant people, he found the trait insufferable in others.

She looked back down at the code, seeing it in a new light. "Hah," she muttered, and started typing. "You're trying to hack his fancy new robot," she said. "What are you trying to make it do, explode?" She pictured the scene and its aftermath in her mind - Dirk, uninjured (the Prince of Heart was far too cool to be injured by anything so mundane as a mere explosion) but eyebrows singed, leaning away bemusedly from a smoking crater that had formerly been full of slowly-exploding robot. "No," he said, "I am not trying to hack his stupid robot. I'm especially not doing the blowing shit up part." "Sollux, that is absolutely what you are doing!" she said, rolling her eyes without looking at him. She chewed her lip speculatively, then swapped two lines of code, still thinking intently about how cool the robot would look exploding. "Technically I would say that you are," he said, and naturally, the robot chose that particular moment to blow right the fuck up. This would have been attention-grabbing enough on its own. What was particularly fascinating about this particular explosion is that it appeared to be occurring entirely in slow motion: a blossoming of flame, rivets bulging and firing off like bullets, debris scattering so dramatically it appeared to be following a script.

Almost as though the entire explosion were operating in bullet time, which was, of course, impossible.

Sollux looked at Roxy. Roxy looked at Sollux.

"Well, fuck," they said, in perfect unison.

"You said you weren't trying to make it explode!" Roxy said, looking over at Dirk, along with everyone else in the lab. Fortunately he was unharmed (that coolness field, Roxy thought jealously). Far from looking singed and stunned, he was instead seizing the opportunity to walk away from the explosion without looking; standard operating practice for a high-ranking master of cool such as himself. Of course. If Trickster Mode hadn't shaken his demeanor, a little explosion wasn't about to.

"Don't look at me!" Sollux said, throwing his hands up defensively. "I didn't make it do that. •TIME doesn't make shit explode. What the ever-living fuck did you do to it?"

"Nothing! I pictured it in my head and thought it would be funny if - ooh. Hm." She stopped short in realization as Dirk made his way up to the desk, his ash-covered face looking somewhat worse for wear up close.

"And you thought it would be funny if what, exactly, Roxy?" he asked, his angular face a perfect visage of calm inquisitiveness, with the singular exception of - oh god - his singed and smoking eyebrows.

"If nothing," she squeaked, trying to stifle laughter. "Sollux did it. •TIME is his stupid invention. He wrote the code, I was just editing it! If something exploded, it's his fault." She couldn't do it. She just couldn't keep a straight face. Surely he must have known that. She choked down a snort and settled on a stupid-looking smushed-up grin. The corners of her mouth kept twitching.

Sollux had collapsed in silent hysterics beside her, gasping for breath, unable to even protest her feeble attempt to throw him under the bus.

Dirk raised one smoking eyebrow, and with a gravitas far in excess of the legal limit for a young man of his age, reached up and removed his glasses, revealing two perfectly outlined triangles of unblemished skin around his eyes. It was too much to bear. He must have been aware of what he looked like, and watching him pretend with utter conviction that everything was perfectly normal was just too much for Roxy to contain herself.

"Okay, okay, I did it," she choked through her giggles, "It was me. I made the robot explode with void powers by accident. I didn't mean to! I must have swiped the nothingness right out of it without even trying. Oh, my god, Dirk, your face! You look like a cartoon character."

He gave her what can only be described as a Lengthy And Significant Look, which did nothing to stifle her laughter.

Exasperated, he turned to glare at Sollux, who had recovered enough to start breathing normally again.

"Don't look at me," he said, smirk levels cranked to eleven, "•TIME is basically a bullshit language for assholes, it's not supposed to actually accomplish anything that useful, no matter what you write."

"Ha!" Roxy said. "So you admit it."

Dirk raised his other eyebrow skeptically and waited. "Okay, okay, it was supposed to make the robot sing," Sollux said, unable to resist the urge to brag.

Silence, punctuated with giggles.

"And dance."

More of the same.

"You shouldn't have said your robots were unhackable," Sollux said, and shrugged.

"You didn't hack them. She used her void powers," Dirk said stiffly. "They're still totally fucking unhackable." He turned on his heel and stalked away, head held high, eyebrows still smoking.

Sollux and Roxy politely waited until he was at a reasonable distance, then high-fived, collapsing into giggles.

"I'll un-void him a new one later," she said, “it'll be fine.”

"Are you going to accidentally leave out the encryption he says makes them so unhackable?"

"Are you ever not up to something?" Roxy asked, grinning.

He leaned back, abashed; opened his mouth and closed it again. He had the sudden feeling that human flirting body language was in fact very similar, if not identical, to troll flirting body language and he had no idea what to do next. Why did she keep asking about unzipping his files? Obviously he was capable of unzipping his own files, even wigglers could do that. Wait, did humans get aggressive if rejected? Not that he cared about being rude but her outfit indicated that she was obviously a god tier and -

She burst into giggles, interrupting his train of thought, and extended a hand. "I'm Roxy," she said. He took her hand and shook it, unsure where this was all going. She squinted thoughtfully at him. "And you must be..." 

"Sollux Captor, hacker king. I see my legend precedes me," he interrupted sarcastically.

"I was going to say you must be a thief, Sollux Captor."

"Thief? What the hell are you even saying? I'm a mage," he corrected her. What did this have to do with unzipping files? He was lost and therefore grumpy.

"Are you sure? 'Cause you definitely stole my heart from across the room!" And she winked.

Sollux stared blankly at her. "Can you just go away now? I'm trying to do something here. Obviously."

"I can see that," she said, and instead of leaving, she came around to his side of the husktop and peered down at the screen. "That bracket should be red, not blue," she said, pointing.

"Are you fucking kidding me?!" he exploded, jumping to his feet. "You think you can just waltz in here, say totally incomprehensible things about zipping files and stealing hearts, and then debug my code? My code? For your information this is written in pure ~ATH," he pronounced it til-death, "and your tiny human brain can hardly fucking even begin to comprehend it, let alone correct me on it!"

"O-kay, whatever you say, Sollux Captor." She threw up her blue-gloved hands and started to walk away. "But it should still be red," she called over her shoulder.

"Fine!" he said, and slammed his hand down on the color-change command, like it even mattered! If it was supposed to be red he would have noticed that and fixed it already because he was the best hacker and he was never wrong.

Naturally, because Sollux was Sollux and nothing could ever go right for him, the bracket turned red and the program started to compile. He stared at it, wide-eyed. "Fuck!" He looked up and saw Roxy watching him.

"I hack madfilthy ~ATH," she grinned, walking back over to him. "Roxy Lalonde, hacker goddess. As deadly to the grid as I am beautiful." She was standing very close to him. Too close? Disorientingly close. He gaped at her. Now that he thought about it, yeah, she was kind of pretty. For a human. A human with short hair. 

A human who could hack ~ATH. Now that was hot.

She wiggled her eyebrows again. "And if you were a dynamically allocated variable in a ~ATH code you'd create a leak, because I would never delete you from my life." She frowned at his blank look. "Do trolls not do pick-up lines? Is that not a thing?"

"Pick-up lines?"

"Oh my god," she drawled, realization dawning. She started to laugh. "You don't have pick-up lines. That's why no one even laughs, they have no clue. Oh my god. Oh my god, I have to go tell Janey."

"Wait," he said, and grabbed her wrist, surprising both of them. He let go immediately when she glanced down. "Uh. I'm sorry I flipped my lid." He ran his hand through his hair just to have something to do with it. "Stick around for awhile. Maybe uh, you might find something else I missed. In. The code." He grabbed a chair and yanked it over to her. She had no idea what it cost him to even admit the possibility that he could have missed something.

"You want me to stay?" He noticed a faint pink flush to her cheeks, and felt a little flutter in his pump sponge. 

"Yeah, I mean, two's better than one, right?" He winked at her, cringing inwardly as soon as he'd done it. That was stupid. He probably looked stupid and she was going to leave now.

Sollux holds no illusions about why he’s allowed to attend the academy.

Trolls flying military aircraft keeps human airmen out of combat. Those aircraft need to be tested by trolls, and the trolls testing them have to know enough about what they’re doing for that testing to be effective. He knows he hasn’t been awarded this luxury due to his intelligence or skill, but is being groomed for a specific purpose because of the unique nature of his psionic abilities.

It certainly helps that he happens to be immensely fascinated with the field he’s been railroaded into, but it doesn’t make it less humiliating when his grades suffer, or less infuriating when it isn’t his fault.

Intro to Aeronautical Engineering could have been an awesome class -- the students, at least, warmed up to him more quickly than in any of his others, but the professor certainly did not. Sollux had learned pretty quickly not to speak up much in class, too afraid of blowing his chances of being a test pilot to risk rocking the boat, but his exam scores disappearing from Blackboard were starting to become a problem.

The first time, the professor had insisted that Sollux hadn’t attended the exam. For this one, he’d promised to look into it, but now it showed as a missing grade online, bringing his overall average dangerously close to failing. What’s worse is that, after going over the exam in class, Sollux is sure he had the highest score. The TA who grades them has a weird routine of drawing a cat on the highest-scoring exam.

This time, none of his classmates had the cat.

So now he’s here, knocking twice at the slightly-ajar door of the professor’s office, determined to a least stand his ground this time around.

“Come in,” drones a voice from inside, though the man doesn’t look up from the papers he’s grading to acknowledge Sollux’s presence.

“Uh, hey, Fuller. You haven’t seen my missing exam in that stack, have you?”

“No, I have not.”

He still doesn’t look up, though he reaches to push his wire-framed glasses up the bridge of his nose. Sollux frowns.

“Oh. So… you haven’t seen it at all?”

“Nope.”

He still doesn’t look up.

“Can-- I mean, I’ll retake it, if I have to…”

“We’ve already gone over the exam in class, so I’m afraid not.”

“Well is there any extra credit I can do? I really can’t fail this --”

He’s interrupted by Fuller’s TA pushing around him, a stack of mail in one of her arms and a heavy bookbag slung over the other. Sollux has seen her around before, having noticed initially that she was remarkably tall for a human, and noticing more recently that she has a tiny Galaga tattoo on her lower back. He’s noticing it again, now, as she bends to plug in her laptop, but is brought back suddenly by the stern drone of Professor Fuller’s voice informing him that “I don’t give extra credit.”

He’s actually looking up at Sollux now, eyebrows raised and a frown turning the corners of his lips.

“Will that be all, Mr. Captor?”

“Uh, well…”

“Wait, Captor?” The TA stands up, seemingly noticing Sollux for the first time. “Are you Sollux Captor? Whoa, are you a PSII-Tactics cadet?”

“Heh, yeah. Guilty on both charges.”

“Ha! Sollux Captor -- six and six, I should have known.” She grins, and it’s brilliant, and suddenly Sollux wants to know everything about her. “Dude, what are >you< trying to get extra credit for? You’re making the rest of us look bad, overachiever…”

“Overachiever? I’m actually kind of close to failing…”

“Failing? No way, I graded your last… exam…”

Fuller is glaring quietly at her, and she returns it, brows furrowed, lips pressed in a tight line. It lasts only a moment before she laughs again, shaking her head.

“It’s funny, because I dropped the stapler under the desk when I was grading the other papers, and I saw yours by the trash. I thought it was another answer sheet, right, since all of your answers were perfect, but then I realized you were using a totally different method to solve like half of the questions. Anyway, I graded it and put it with the rest, it should be fine.” “I didn’t see it, Roxy,” Fuller insists, a hint of agitation coloring his usual monotone.

“Well. Maybe I put it in the wrong stack.” Roxy shrugs, crouching to open her bookbag and pulling out an obnoxiously glittery Hello Kitty binder labeled “AERO ENGR.”

“But, like I said, he used a really novel approach to many of the problems, so I wanted a copy for myself. Here it is…”

She places the papers on Fuller’s desk, glaring pointedly at him as his frown deepens.

“You look kinda busy, though, so I’ll put the grades in myself, don’t worry about it.”

She snatches the papers back from the professor and hands them to Sollux, the troll trying his best not to laugh or cry or both at the perfect score on the header. He thumbs through the pages, nodding as each checkmark sends a tiny thrill of victory tingling through him, but giving the tiniest, disappointed “Oh…” when he gets to the last page and still sees no cat.

Roxy notices, because of course she does, and with a snorting laugh takes one of the pages back from him.

“Roxy, right?” Sollux asks as she takes a seat at her desk, scrawling on the back of the page.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. Just a regular mix-up that I just happened to catch, you know?” She gives another quick glance at Professor Fuller, who is back to pointedly ignoring them, and hands Sollux’s paper back with a smile.

“Have a good one, Captor.”

“You, too. See you in class, Professor…”

Sollux doesn’t look at the drawing until later. The cat has two sets of ears sticking out of an aviator hat, and a word balloon that says “When they try to drop you, land on your feet. Someday, you’ll soar above them all.”

It’s years later when Roxy finds it, laminated and tucked away in the inner pocket of his favorite coat.

The sunlight outside had started to fade -- not that Sollux was particularly aware of the fact. Heavy blackout curtains draped over barred windows blocked the distractions of the outside world from the cramped, wire-cluttered studio, filtering out the glaring city lights that made the night brighter than the day.

The city never slept and neither did he.

In this fast-paced mash-up of a world brought on by a brutal clash of cultures, human and Alternian, decadence and indulgence twined into a constant, deafening white noise that drowned out the steady backbeat of fear and desperation. It was a world where life was fast and cheap and information was king, and those with the know-how and finesse to weave data like an artful tapestry and breeze through code like it was breathing held the upper hand against the rest, slaves to the numbers the empire had branded them with at birth.

In his younger days he hoarded data just because he could, committed petty acts of self-serving sabotage because he was a show-off. He still was, and still did, but it was corporate jobs that paid the bills, kept him alive (enough) in the relatively inconsequential meatspace, and kept the stims flowing in his brain as endless walls of data flashed hot across his synapses. He wouldn’t deny that his psionic capabilities gave him a certain edge, but in his world nothing was ever “cheating,” just another means to an end.

Of course this time, it didn’t seem to be doing him a damn bit of good.

It was several seconds of corrupted code and blocked access before his sleep-deprived brain stretched to the conclusion that he might not be the only one on this job. Sollux’s career was one that had made him many enemies, but only one true rival. By the time he realized what was happening it was too late -- he’d been compromised, and it simply wasn’t worth it to try and salvage the job.

Besides, the consolation prize was, perhaps, even better. His rival was probably just as surprised as Sollux was about this encounter, had been sloppy at covering their tracks. Airtight against corporate security, sure, but against Sollux’s expertise? Not a chance. A smirk tugged at his thin lips, the forked tip of his tongue sliding across pointed teeth as he severed his connection from the mainframe and redirected his efforts to the other intruder’s system, pulling his faceless rival out with him.