Jacq had lost all awareness of the world outside her own head, to the point that even her body seemed far away from the shapeless form that was the essence of herself. The feeling was reminiscent of a dream, except she'd never been lucid for this long without waking up.
She was submerged in an awareness -- her own awareness, as it made her dizzy to examine it too closely. Layers upon layers of synthetic self were being placed around her, the awareness she was submerged in, growing.
She was vaguely aware of what was happening; She'd yearned for an interface expansion beyond the pittance Eatermere had allowed her, since it severely limited her programming hobby. Now, she would be able to store any quantity of sensory data she could think of, and run programs based off that live input, like live searching what she was looking at -- she could even build her own local database in case she became disconnected from my networks!
She dove deeper into the construct, as if leaning into the wall until she began to melt with the atoms. Such a fractal she found, a pattern so complex it was recognizable only for its incomprehensibility. Even so, she found her interface far easier to understand from this perspective; her soul recorded the incomprehensible like putty pressed into a carving, except the feeling was more like expansion than compression.
She floated through this quantum reality, and though it was still incomprehensible it began to seem familiar. She tried paying closer attention, not to the incomprehensible pattern, but to anything else. She first realized she was indeed spinning in circles, then the hidden part of the pattern that kept turning her around. It was part of the same construct, and yet it was foreign -- or at least, it viewed her soul as such.
Jacq shied away from the detached pattern at first for fear she might mess with some core aspect of the interface's programming, but this shadowed fractal didn't warn her away -- it denied her entry.
This would not do.
After returning the the floating void of self awareness, she had an idea: the interface wouldn't allow her to enter that part of her interface, a she instead tried approaching it as a program:
"This==Jacq;" she probed, sending herself as a variable.
"This==Jacq.Partition_CD;" the program returned, identifying it as a specific, separate section of her interface as a whole.
"function() EnterPartition == fn(partition, Jacq){
partition.Jacq.AllowEntry = True;
}" Jacq explained her request to enter, then commanded to be let in, "EnterPartition(Jacq.Partition_CD, Jacq)"
The interface returned a response almost immediately:
"Error: Jacq.Permissions[i] != Partitions_CD;"
None of her permissions included this one small part of her? Jacq would have frowned, had she a face. "Debug: Jacq.Permissions;"
"Jacq.Permissions==" the program returned, then listed partitions labeled from A to Z, then double letters, and finally ending after more triple-lettered partitions than she cared to count. All of them she had permission to access except for two: Partition_CD, and Administrator.
This. Would. Not. Do.
"Jacq.SetPermisions(Administrator, true);" she ordered.
"Error: Jacq.Administrator==false;" the program snarked. At least she couldn't see it smirk at her bubbling frustration. She tried rewording her command, but whoever had set the administrative permissions on the firmware had made sure they couldn't be changed from the inside.
Jacq stepped back and examined the shadowed fractal, "Partition_CD", from a distance. Now that she was aware of its presence, it no longer tried to hide, simply coloring itself darker to denote it as separate from the other partitions. Seeing this, Jacq noticed something else: any other partition she observed labeled further than CD, she observed through Partition_CD.
She returned to Partition_A, looking inward at her old interface for any programming references she could find. The thing was a microchip in comparison to the additions being built around it, a winter coat compared to the intellectual power-armor of the new firmware, but within it she found what she was looking for: an old program she'd written to visually represent the interface's memory.
It took a little setting up as the firmware hadn't added the new partitions to the directory yet, but she was able to add the ones she needed manually. She added A through Z, then skipped ahead to CA through CG and figured that would be enough. She ran the program, and got an unsurprising error -- Partition_CD not found. She narrowed the scope of the program to render only CA through CZ, but removed CD, then ran it again.
The program rendered her interface as a sphere with herself at its core, the System Operator. There was an unidentified blank space between herself and the Partition_CA -- all the partitions she hadn't rendered -- but the rest of the partitions took up equal segments side by side on a checkered sphere as they traveled around the core. The outer edge of the sphere wasn't completely even, but what Jacq found more interesting was the unidentifiable blank space that surrounded the entirety, separating Partition_CC and Partition_CE as well as anything beyond.
Jacq set to work immediately -- whoever had limited her permissions had built themselves a perimeter, presumably to install some form monitoring program or other means of controlling her. They hadn't intended to build a wall since she was allowed to pass data through the partition that separated her from a majority of her interface, but they hadn't wanted her to be aware of their presence either. She would have smiled had she a face, bubbling frustration turning to hot, coiled metal ready for the forge.
Jacq accessed her old interface's security system, bypassing the safety warnings -- her original interface may have been small, but it was one of the best available. Estermere used them to monitor the orphans, and so it had been one of the first things Jacq had set about learning to dismantle. She reactivated the protocols to block unauthorized commands, but only on partitions CC through CD, as well as ordering it to delete any file or other signal that originated from them. She set no barriers for commands and programs being sent into them, however -- if Dawn wanted to mess around in her interface then fine, she hoped he enjoyed his little prison cell. If she wasn't allowed to access Partition_CD, then whatever ended up in the partition wasn't allowed access to her.
She would have laughed, had she a throat.