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Eden frowned. She had always thought Loir couldn’t have been older than her by more than ten years, but perhaps she was wrong... It was hard to tell how old this alien was.
“The Edge emerged from a congregation of innocent, cute, hungry little hackers like me! The oddest thing was we were united by none other than the Grand Master himself in an international, clandestine competition! Oh, those were the good days...”
“Wait... The Architect was the one who created the Edge?” muttered Eden, shocked once again. “I thought... I thought the Edge is the Core’s nemesis!”
“Oh, thank you for the compliment, darling! …Sure, we are, but it doesn’t change the fact that someone claiming to be the Architect himself threw the bait!”
“So what, you believed it? That it was really... the Architect’s idea?”
Eden couldn’t understand this whole ordeal. Why would the Architect have created something like the Edge? He already had his own students, and although none were nearly as talented as he was, there were definitely a lot of promising young people, and many had tried to take over his work after his disappearance...
However, creating something like the Edge just didn’t make sense for him. If Loir was telling the truth, a man working for the Core had gone to look for underground, illegal hackers! The cyber-underground was openly trying to fight the Core’s System at the very end of the twenty-first century; Eden couldn’t understand why the Architect himself would have wanted anything to do with them...
“No? I mean, I don’t know, I didn’t really care,” shrugged Loir.
“What was it? A competition, you said?”
“Yup. The Architect promised a huuuuuuge prize for everyone who managed to beat him! This was a funny man!”
“Beat him? How?”
“Oh, there were a lot of fun little games involved, and a lot of rules! My favorite was the preliminary one: we had to hack into the Congress President’s Office and take pictures! You don’t know how many weird passwords those people have...”
Eden and Dante exchanged a glance, both at a loss for words. This was going beyond what they could have ever thought. Actually, it sounded more like some TV show since Eden thought this was incredibly insane and unbelievable. Yet, Loir was saying all of this as if... as if it had been true!
“...What did he want?”
“Well, he had those twin secretaries, an amazing duo of very pretty blonde ladies, Veronica and Arabella, and they–”
“Not the Congress President, Loir; the Architect!”
“Oooooh, the grandpa? Well, I told you, he wanted us to beat him. Or, more exactly, to defeat the Core. Yes, if we could manage to hack the thingy, the whole prize was ours! Not easy, I’ll admit, but what a challenge! Everyone in the chat rooms was jumping on their little unicorns!”
“What prize?” insisted Dante.
“Well, the Core itself, of course. There was also a lot of money and hardware involved. Oh, I still dream of that magnificent, sexy holo-luminescent keyboard...”
“...The Architect had promised the Core?” repeated Eden, with a smirk. “Loir, it can’t be. The Architect wouldn’t have given the Core to anyone... I don’t even think he owned it himself. The Core went independent from the Architect as soon as it was launched!”
“Of course,” shrugged Loir. “Why else would he ask us to try and retrieve it? The Architect just wanted us to overpower the thing, to beat that little monster he had created. I must say, it was very fun, but not so easy! I mean, the first levels of his little game were relatively easy, so we pocketed some nice money, kaching-kaching! But then, when we got to the annoying part, everyone started dropping like worn-out fleas! Dumb-dumbs! A lot of people fled; I mean, we did get a bit naughty and may have caught the attention of a few governments by then...”
“Like the Russian Government?” said Eden, raising an eyebrow.
“Oh, don’t go there,” grimaced Loir, shivering. “Do you know what the Imperials did to us...? Well, I don’t wanna fry my brain processor thinking about it again, so let’s just skip that unpleasant part... Anyway, we got to the part where we could hack the old Cores, per se.”
“We?” repeated Dante.
“The group, of course! Come on, I’m a marvelous genius as we all know, but I can’t do this much by myself! We needed Dive Hackers, Back Hackers... The whole shebang! I think there were about... thirteen people left, at that stage?”
“That’s more than the members of the Chicago Zodiac,” Eden scoffed.
“Oh, don’t worry, half of those cute little chickens left before we got to the next stage...”
“Why?”
Loir chuckled.
“Well, we may have been burning our cheese a bit too close to all those governments... It began to smell bad for everyone! I mean, I’m a bit offended my bounty went down since they think I am dead, but...”
