Snakes

Lines of code trickled along the walls beside her, numbers and symbols dribbling like hieroglyphs in a never-ending stream of information.

Their orange glow tried to entice her eyes, but she didn’t need to check. The code was correct, and the quiet of the room reminded her of that.

No sirens blared, no lockdown screens. Just her, a half-drunk cup of tea, and the quiet hum of computers.

Her fingers flitted across the keys, blurring, playing. Only, instead of Beethoven’s Fifth, it was Becon’s Demise.

Hair up in a bun, with black-rimmed glasses framing a perfectly pleasant face, she bore no deathly-white skin, greasy hair, or hoodie.

She wore a plaid shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows and folded just the once, as if she might change her mind. Sharp eyes and tinted brows betrayed no expression as she continued to tap away.

Less programmer and more professor, Vanessa knew exactly what people thought of her, and that suited her just fine.

It had made getting down to Level-4 all the easier. Less sneaking, more sauntering. No-one suspects a thief who stops to chat to the security guards about Monday Night Football. Less so if she’s familiar with their names, and even less so if she ever-so-gently puts on the charm.

Go Vikings, indeed.

Three draining hours in the dark, drenched in blue monitor light, and nearly there.

Another sip, another spiral inserted into the database, just waiting to be let out.

How it would crawl.

Fourteen of the digital serpents, curled up innocently amidst billions of symbols that no-one at Becon would bother to check.

Vanessa exhaled, standing gingerly, as if afraid that any sudden movement would undo all her weaving.

“Finished?”

The question hung in the cold air, amused with itself.

Luke. No chance of running. He was close by, shrouded by servers.

“You know, if you were going to stop me, you could have just saved me the trouble.”

“Like you say. If I was going to stop you.”

He stepped out of the dark, leaning over the desk to inspect her handiwork, delicately lifting his coat to avoid her cup.

She considered swinging.

“Don’t bother Vanessa. I’m faster, and to be honest, I’d rather not damage hands that can create chaos like this”, he said, gesturing to the twin monitors.

“So if you didn’t come here to…”

“You need two cards to activate. The one you swiped from Carl only gets you in the door”, he said, flashing his own.

Ah. So there had been safeguards.

“What, you thought you were the only one who wanted to see it burn?”

“You never gave me a reason to think otherwise”, she shot back, drawing closer.

“Then I did my job well”, he smiled, motioning for her hand.

“And you watched me do it all on my own?”

“I couldn’t risk screwing it up. Not this. On the count of three, yeah?”

Vanessa hesitated just a moment, then slid her card into the metal slot.

“Light it up.”

A/N: I love the constraint of a micro-fiction, but hate having to cut my words down. This one is a submission to a random contest that got advertised on my Instagram (yes, a useful ad) yesterday, and caught my eye. Just a picture of a girl typing at a computer screen with orange code around her, and a 500-word limit. I "finished" it at around 600, and painstakingly had to pare it back, word by word. This feels like the cleanest, sharpest version, but what you gain in pace, you do lose in detail. Always happy to take constructive feedback on board, so let me know what you reckon works or doesn't.