My fingers were flying at a speed similar to Mach two. There had to be a way to stop this cascade. Every time that I hit the enter key though, the system kept sending out error messages telling me that I was not entering a valid command.
"Come on stupid thing, just work!" I pleaded. All around me the sound of security doors slamming shut was deafening. At this point the second floor was pretty well sealed tight. If I didn't stop it soon then the entire building was going to be on lockdown.
There wasn't a way for my fingers to go any faster. My mind was racing. What command could possibly stop this action? From what I had read in the user manual the cascade was designed to be instantaneous. The fact that the system was lagging so much was a testament to how little time the school had spent on maintenance. If it had been properly maintained I would not even have the few desperate moments that I did to solve this before the school locked down.
The solution seemed just out of reach, but I knew that if I had any chance of stopping the coming disaster, I would have to reach past my own limits and find it. What could possibly stop this? Think!
Worrying that I was not going to be fast enough would do nothing to solve the situation. I had gotten myself into this and I would have to get out of it. I resolved myself to quit panicking and just get the job done.
"You little bitch! You let me out of here right now!" the one bad guy that I had managed to capture swore at me from the other side of the emergency door that was currently turning the girl's bathroom into a makeshift prison cell. The vibrations of his fists smashing against the barrier were more jarring than I would like to admit.
Determined not to show fear in the face of the enemy, I replied with a sure voice, "Just sit tight and shut up. You're not going anywhere. Now stop distracting me, I have work to do."
The string of swear words of his reply were only slightly muffled by the titanium door but I'd say that you would be better off not having me repeat them. If a sailor were here, he would have such a crimson face right now. Yikes!
I need to focus! I told myself. There wasn't much time left. If there was any time for a single moment of inspiration to hit it would be right now. Come on! Right now!
As if it were a gift sent by the very gods themselves, all the dots connected themselves perfectly in an instant. "Oh, thank you, Athena! I could kiss you right now!" I shouted to the heavens with incalculable joy. The ancient Greek goddess of Wisdom had probably been pitying me, if she existed at all, but I didn't care. I had my solution and there was no time to waste.
The cascade as a system process was designed to be a failsafe. As such it was hardcoded to serve as a on and off switch. There was simply no way to rewrite it on the fly to allow for a partial lockdown. that was what I had been doing wrong. If I was to try to go about it this route, then by the time the code was changed the whole school would be completely locked down.
In order to halt the systemwide shutdown, I would ironically have to abandon the possibility of stopping the shutdown. Instead of using the code panel to halt the cascading doors, I instead needed to interrupt the signal. This meant that the longer that I wasted time here the more damage would be done to my plan. I had to leave Mister Murderer to cool himself off.
With my path decided, I erased my latest attempt to stop the cascading shutdown. The solution would be found by causing another issue, not by preventing the first one. With a lot of time on my hands during skipped classes in the past, I had gotten the hang of pretty complex coding from studying those boring old user manuals located in the Satcomm room and fooling around hacking into things online.
Stretching out my weary fingers to eliminate any soreness that might have crept in, I launched into a typing a new code. This would be a bit trickier than the first program that I had initiated so I would need a lot of focus to get it right the first time. I was trying to initiate something that this panel was not designed for. While it was a multiuse terminal in theory, the engineers that had programed it had placed a lot of emphasis in emergency controls. By placing such a high priority on messages bearing the lockdown and releasing protocols there was going to be a slight delay on other commands.
In order to stop the signal from reaching the rest of the system, I would be causing the mother-of-all raptures, or at least the computer located in the school would think so. Instead of preventing a single emergency signal from escaping, I would be making it so that the system would simply be unable to process what any signal it received meant. This method of attack was what some in a certain community would call a 'DoS' attack. Though I prefer to call it a 'Lag Out' attack since I would be pretty much causing so much lag that it would stop everything from moving. Simply put I would just need to flood the server with so many different alerts and warnings that it would be paralyzed, unable to decide what which signal needed to be acted on first.
While this style of attack would only be a temporary fix, with the right commands I might be able to loop the code into extending the time the system lagged until I was able to get the rest of the invaders away from any students that might have been caught up in the crosshairs.
Precious seconds flew by faster than a blink of an eye. I had to go fast, but I also couldn't afford to be reckless. If my code was wrong in any way, even a single mistake could cause the whole thing to fail. With the built-in security system in these panels, if it didn't execute properly the first time the whole station would become inoperable for five minutes. This lockout was the first stage of a defensive structure against terrorists who thought they were pretty smart with coding.
Finally, my code was finished. After looking it over twice just to make sure that it was correct, I hit the enter key and held my breath. If this went sideways, I would only have a little bit of time to sprint down the stair before the rest of the school went into lockdown. Though, I knew deep within my mind that if this failed, I wouldn't be able to outrun the cascade. I might be pretty decent at sprinting, but there was no way in hell that I would be able to outrun a computer signal, lag or not.
Withheld breath, I awaited the moment of truth. I didn't have to wait long, luckily. My fingers barely left the computer panel when it started making all sorts of noises that it shouldn't make normally. The whole thing was having a meltdown of cosmic proportions.
Sparks started to fly from the machine as it tried to process every disaster known to mankind all at once. Things that made no sense to be happening at the same time were suddenly all showing up on the sensors at once. A wildfire was apparently ravaging the third floor, while there seemed to be a flood and tornado simultaneously destroying the first floor.
The code had worked! This thought rang through my head in a gleeful shout of triumph. Take that software industry! I'm better than all of your whitelist crap!
With the proverbial doorjamb stuck in the computer system, I was free to continue on my crusade to save my school. I hope that things go smoother than this disaster, I thought to myself. If things kept going like the last surprise I had been dealt, I might just go hide in a secluded area and wait for the professionals to arrive.
Oh, who am I kidding, I'm probably too invested in this thing by now to turn tail and run. Besides, how could the cavalry save anyone when they couldn't get through the forcefield surrounding the school in the first place? At the very least, I would have to find a way to disable said shield before they could help.
But first things first. I had to find the source of this shield before anything could be done about it. Considering the path that the giant intruder must have taken from the front entrance, it looked like I had intercepted him before he had gotten a chance to check out any of the rest of the school. With this in mind, my best bet for finding whoever this brute was working for would be to retrace my steps and head towards the front entrance to the school.
The sounds of the malfunctioning computer system to a while to fade from earshot. Luckily for me though, I didn't run into anyone on my way down the stairs this time. By the time that I reached the bottom of the stairway and came across the spot where I had encountered the big beast of a man there was no sign of anything being wrong with the school building. That is to say, except for the giant hole that the man had left in the stairwell.
It was quiet on the first floor. Although the second floor might sound like there was a small nuclear war going on with all the alert sirens blaring, this floor was awfully quiet. I had to be careful, there was something about this silence that was unnerving. I had absolutely no idea how many people had invaded my school. For all I knew, the brigand that I had encountered earlier was only one of dozens of sentries.
It took what felt like forever for me to inch the length of the hallway towards Mr. Dancer's classroom. I could feel that the other shoe was waiting to drop. Yet, try as I might, I couldn't see where it was coming from.
The first sign that I had reached my destination was when I heard the sound of a gunshot. After walking all the way without a single sound besides my own heart pounding, the echoing blast caused me to jump back in shock. It was a subconscious action but, probably an understandable one given the circumstances. Here I was, a complete noob when it came to these sorts of situations, suddenly confronted by the cold hard fact that this was a dangerous position that I had placed myself in by choice.
The fact that the people who had invaded the school had decided to shoot someone was a horrifying prospect. Despite what the media would have many people believe, not every criminal is willing or even capable of pulling a trigger. There has to be something wrong deep within you as a person to deliberately decide to hurt another human being. While it is possible that you could pull the trigger accidently, the times when a criminal will chose to pull the trigger out of nothing more than spite are rare.
From my vantage point, I couldn't tell what had caused the gun to go off. All that I knew was that it had connected with someone. To my shock, I realized from the sobbing and the begging that the intruders had an entire classroom full of hostages. Things were not looking good. From the exchange it sounded like Mr. Dancer and my classmates had not managed to reach the shelter before the men holding them captive had arrived with guns drawn.
"Well, this complicates things" I said under my breath. How was I supposed to fight a group of terrorists when my every move could cause a bullet to end my classmate's life?
While I could have just walked in there and ordered the terrorists to throw down their weapons and surrender, or worse if I was feeling vengeful, doing so would most assuredly cause me to head down a path where my curse was revealed to the world. Once that secret was out, I would either have to go full dark side or live a life on the run for the rest of its short duration until I was hunted down and killed. There would be no other option.
What I could do was so dangerous, that there was no way that anyone would allow me to live in peace. With mere words I could reshape the world as I saw fit. With how close the world had come to disaster so many times, the Alliance could not allow for such a threat to sit unopposed. Even if I did nothing wrong, I still had the potential to destroy the world order. Heroes and villains alike would do anything to get ahold of me.
This potential future was not something that I would wish on even my worst enemy. With the direct approach not an option, there was only one thing that I could hope to try. I would have to confuse my opponents and all the witnesses of what I could do. My misdirection would be key to my safety. Of course, I also had to make sure that I didn't get myself killed. Fancy wordplay may be a superpower, somehow, but it did not make me bulletproof. If they shot me, I could and most likely would die.
Well, here we go, I thought to myself. Things were do-or-die right now. With my classmate bleeding out as I hovered just out of sight, there wasn't much time. Something had to be done, and quickly.
With a deep breath, I prepared myself. From now on things would have to be different for me. There was no going back. Here I go!