Code. Part One. Chapter Four

On the way back in the taxi, Ayame felt a cold, ancient hunger stirring within her.

Not a hunger for money — money was merely a tedious byproduct. It was the hunger of an artist for a blank canvas, the hunger of a god for unformed clay. Those two barbarians in their tasteless suits had, without knowing it, just commissioned her to paint Guernica. Only instead of a canvas, she would use the global financial system, and instead of paints, she would use their own greed.

It was there, at the Russians’ villa, amidst the hiss of an opening energy drink, that she remembered. She remembered the thing that would solve their problem. Solve it once and for all.

The memory surfaced not as a clear image, but as a forgotten taste, like the ghost of a scent from a distant past. Meihua. An old, abandoned cryptographic library she had stumbled upon years ago in the farthest, cobweb-choked corners of the darknet. It had caught her eye because of its name — delicate, poetic, and utterly out of place in a world where everything was named something like “Hydra” or “Chaos Toolkit.”

The library was strange. Written in several long-extinct programming languages, it resembled the manuscript of an alchemist attempting to turn lead into gold using punch cards. Its primary — and essentially only — function was absolutely useless and yet mesmerizing: it allowed any data — be it an executable, a text document, or an image — to be transcoded into elegant, calligraphically precise strings of Sanskrit using the nearly defunct Siddham script. Ayame had thought then that it was the creation of some brilliant programmer-hippie from the 70s who had lost his mind to Eastern philosophy.

The main flaw that rendered the library impractical was its weight. Attached to it was a colossal text file, also titled Meihua. Likely some sentimental novel or a collection of poems the author had used either as an encryption sample or as an attempt to write a «novel in code.» Amateurish. Touching in its naivety.

But now, in the sweltering box of the taxi, Ayame realized: this useless, elegant oddity was exactly what she needed. The perfect tool for a poetic murder.

Back in her apartment, she transformed the living room into an operations center. The curtains were drawn, creating an artificial night. On the giant screen that usually displayed fake fireplaces or aquariums, only terminal lines now glowed. The cursor blinked steadily, like the heart of a surgeon before a critical operation.

Finding Meihua was like searching for a specific grain of sand on a beach. But she knew where to look. After several hours of diving into digital catacombs, she found it. The library sat in an encrypted archive on a derelict server that appeared to be physically located somewhere in Iceland, powered by a geothermal spring.

She unpacked the archive. Again, she smirked at the amateurism. The file meihua_library.so/.dll/.wasm weighed a few kilobytes. But the file meihua_narrative_backup.txt.gz was tens of megabytes. “Useless bloat,” she thought with professional contempt. “It’s dragging down the whole system.” She didn’t even open it. Why bother? To read someone else’s hack-work novel? With the ruthless elegance of a surgeon removing a benign but ugly tumor, she hit «Delete.» The system hesitated for a second, issuing a warning: “This component is an integral part of the architecture. Deletion may lead to unpredictable module operation.”

“Unpredictability is exactly what I need,” Ayame thought, and clicked «Confirm.»

Now, the canvas was clean. And she began to create.

It didn’t feel like programming. It was an act of pure art. She wasn’t writing code — she was weaving it. Every line was a thread in a tapestry of logic. She was crafting a virus that was simultaneously a predator and a ghost. It didn’t enter the system like a thief, but like an idea — a thought that couldn’t be shaken. It didn’t break through defenses; it convinced them it was part of the system.

Her fingers flew across the keys. She wrote recursions that devoured themselves, creating black holes in security protocols. She designed “ghost transactions” that existed and didn’t exist simultaneously, obeying not the laws of mathematics, but the laws of quantum uncertainty. They took money from Point A, but never arrived at Point B. They simply… dissolved in transit, leaving behind nothing but an elegant void.

And into the very heart of this masterpiece, she wove the lightweight, optimized Meihua module. Now, every annihilated transaction, every stolen dollar, every bit of financial entropy wouldn’t just vanish. It would be transformed into a string of Sanskrit. Into poetry in a language that existed before money. Into a Shloka.

She named her creation ŚLOKA.

When everything was finished, she leaned back in her chair. On the screen lay a tiny executable file, weighing only a few kilobytes. Perfect. Lethal. Poetic. It wasn’t a virus. It was a requiem. A requiem for a world built on greed, written in the language of the gods.

If Ayame Yoshikawa was destined to disappear, to dissolve into the world along with Miyako Ikeda, what would remain in their place? She had grown too accustomed to her new name… and so she added a key, a seed phrase for the virus: “Ayame Yoshikawa.”

Thus, she became Ayumi Sato once more. All that remained was to wait for the call from her new “partners.”

The show was about to begin.

Part Two. Chapter One →
← Code\Coda
← A Road of a Thousand Years
← Paths
← The River
← The Observer Effect
← The Battle of Bun’ei