19

Jeongguk closed his eye as Taehyung fiddled around with the output ports at the back of his neck. Once he was plugged in—everything felt different. Plugging in sent an odd chill down his spine, activating sensors that hadn’t been live in decades. For a brief moment everything went black, he lost all of his senses in a wave of unexpected energy. Everything came back when his retinal display started to go crazy, displaying messages that Jeongguk had never seen before in several languages he didn’t understand. He watched them flash across his screen one after another, trying to make sense of words and commands that were little more than letters to him.

            External source detected…

            Processing signal…

            Taehyung is attempting remote access, allow?

            Yes/No?

            Yes

            Access granted

            Casting…

            Casting…

            Casting…

            Connected, firewalls intact

            Admin access is maintained by Jeong-Guk

“Holy shit…” Taehyung muttered, covering his mouth. “This is—this is incredible!”

Opening his eye, Jeongguk was just as shocked as Taehyung was. His computer screen was being flooded with information, error messages, power readings, connectivity reports, everything he could’ve hoped for and more. After weeks of struggling on his own, Taehyung finally had a helping hand. All of Jeongguk’s processes, all of his well kept secrets, they were right in front of his eyes clear as day. There was hope yet.

“Where do I even begin?” He grumbled. “There’s so much here… let me—I’m going to get familiar with your programming, I think that’s probably the best place to start.”

They spent the next few hours in silence as Taehyung delved deep into Jeongguk’s hardware. Nothing was too insignificant to him, each line of code was scrutinized with the utmost precision. He catalogued almost everything he came across, every detail, every message, every reading, anything and everything. Jeongguk almost felt that it was a bit excessive. Everytime he opened a file or program he wasn’t familiar with he called his friend Namjoon and they would figure it out together. Taehyung was nothing if not determined, Jeongguk was coming to understand that.

He admired him for it.

“Wait—what’s this?” Taehyung asked suddenly, his cursor hovering over a black file. “Memories? I didn’t know Canary’s logged memories. That’s strange, let me see what’s in here…”

Video clips, moments Jeongguk had knowingly or unknowingly recorded with his own eyes, cluttered Taehyung's screen. They were all stashed away in folders with obscure names, names that only really held meaning to him. Some that made Jeongguk feel like he was drowning, like the world had opened up and—

            DATA BREACH

           Taehyung is attempting to access memory file: Songbird

            Deny access?

            Yes/No?

Jeongguk’s eye opened wide in terror.

Yes!

            Access denied

            Create a copy and corrupt it?

            Yes/No?

            Yes!

            File corrupted, opening corrupted file for Taehyung

“What the hell is going on?” Taehyung questioned out loud. “This file—it was fine a second ago? Maybe—was it a false reading? Let me see if I can recover—shit, the data’s destroyed. There’s no way I can salvage it.”

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