System Failure (An Adesa Fanfic) [Originally by Littlewolf65]

Chapter 3

"Barney and I got two worms, twice," Ross said, putting away his phone in his coat. "It felt like deja vu actually."

Jerome suddenly gave a shout of excitement and put down his winning hand of cards on the table. "You owe me lunch!" he half-yelled to Mitch, then continued in a much more normal tone while Mitch sighed in annoyance. "Mitch and I had, like, six different jobs today, it was crazy."

"And we had one spyware too," Mitch added, packing away the cards.

Spyware were a very tricky kind of virus, and hard to spot. They would hide in the background of your computer, gathering information like passwords, browsing habits and bank details. They were similar to trojans, but they couldn't disguise themselves like trojans could. Instead, they ran and hid, so to get rid of them you had to play hide and seek, which was more than a little irritating.

"Have you guys checked in with Jin and Jason yet?" Quentin asked.

"I'll do that," I offered.

Jin and Jason were sitting where they usually were; at a long desk filled with fancy multi-screened computers and TV monitors showing footage of several places around the city, mainly because it looked cool. There were several others sitting further down the desk, each with a black headset and mic on. These guys are a glitch's 'eyes in the mainframe', if that made sense. Without them sitting here, telling us where the viruses were and repairing the firewalls, all of us glitches would be dead.

There were a team of about 7 of them but only a few were sitting at the desk at the moment. I knew a few of them by name and all of them by sight. The two down the end were cousins, both with bright red hair. The girl kept her hair back with a white headband and the guy wore a long sleeved back shirt with a small golden necklace. The two others who were sitting down, Jack and Mark, had the tops of their black hair dyed green and red respectively.

Jin, wearing his usual purple-and-white jumper, was watching lines of code that ran across his screen, faster than I could process but it obviously meant something to him because he nodded to himself every now and then. Jason with his light blue, dark blue and orange clothes was sitting next to him, doing something techie that I couldn't understand. These two led the team as well as running our base of operations. Jason spun around in his wheely-chair as he heard my footsteps.

"Hey Adam!" he said cheerfully, taking off his headset and putting it around his neck. Jin glanced up at me, grinned and then went back to looking at the code.

"Hey Jason," I said back. "Thanks for the warning earlier today with that trojan. I was about to lose my head."

"Haha Adam, very funny," Jason said in a not-so-funny tone.

"Sorry, I had to."

"You and Ty got back alright?"

"Yeah, we just had that crazy lady at the end of the street calling about the end of the world and stuff like that."

"What is her problem?" Jin muttered to himself.

Jason grinned, put on his headset again and tapped his mic twice. "Hey Seto, how's it looking?" he asked into the mic.

I heard a voice saying back from the headset "Well I can confirm that that email about the free coupon to a spa bath does not have a virus in it. But I've also figured out that the place that's giving away that coupon isn't all that great, you're better off going to the place next door."

I grinned. Trust Jin to make an AI that has a sense of humour.

"I'll keep it in mind," Jason said. "Did any virus try to get in today?"

"Nope." This was a different voice, slightly lower than the first one. "Third virus-attempted-attack-free day in a row."

"Hey Brice," I said into the mic. Well, the outside of the mic, but it still worked.

"Is that Adam?"

"Yup."

"Hey Adam! Seto, it's Adam."

"Oh, hey Adam! How are you going?"

"Good, good. What about you guys?"

"Same as always."

Seto and Brice are two Artificial Intelligences that Jin made to better protect our server. They live inside the mainframe and they're a lot more human than the AI's that were around several decades ago. With them looking after our base, we can all concentrate on taking out viruses.

"Seto, Brice, I'm gonna take a break," Jason said. "Jin will still be here. I think he's spying on someone again."

"Am not!" Jin said, clearly able to hear the entire conversation through his headset. "I'm looking at the algorithm outputted by the city hall's system."

"Anyway, have a good night guys," Jason said, shutting down his computer and taking off his headset. "Man, that was a long day."