Techies and Their Tech

[Mr.Ling]

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Ling had squinted in suspicion, but it was invisible behind his sunglasses. He had mentally dismissed the vocal errors in favor of what he saw behind them: a flurry of code that just didn't look right. He elected not to say anything. Getting mixed up in some freelancer's problems couldn't have been any less dangerous now than it was 34 years ago, and we all know how that went down. Instead, Ling simply followed him out of the bar. "Fair enough. Noise ain't home for everyone."

. . .

Walking down the hallways, he'd started cataloguing the strange bits of code. He'd noticed two particular strains: one with characters he'd never seen before, and one with horribly abnormal density. Code, to him, was like a puzzle. It was a little hard to not try and solve them. He quarantined and filed samples of both, then set up a virtual machine to begin prodding at the dense one. It was a slow, tedious process, they'd made it most of the way to their destination before he had the smallest breakthrough. The designator for the source of the dense code was "gmu:flr:sd:gvt:mk10." He would have continued trying to pick apart the code sample, but there was another cascade of information gracing his augmented eye, so he simple settled for waiting for them to get there, and for Caliban to introduce his ship.

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