Interlude 1: BOOT LOOP (CONTROL STATE)

//ARCHIVE NOTE: recovered transmission fragment
//integrity: stable (control state)
//audio tag: boot_loop / swing / chopped-vocal

Rikka does not sit like a normal person.

Normal is for people who don’t have to keep three doors locked while they laugh.

She’s half-kneeling on the cracked tile behind an old arcade cabinet, one shoulder pinned against warm metal that still hums like it remembers being useful. A coil of patched cable runs from the cabinet’s service bay into a splitter she built out of junk and spite. The splitter runs into her wrist port. The wrist port runs into everything.

Above the cabinet, a dead screen reflects her face in pieces. Silver hair. Tiny ahoge. That grin that looks like trouble even when she isn’t trying.

Rikka taps twice.

A map snaps into her head.

Not a clean one. Not a city-approved one with friendly colors and polite labels.

Her map is made of leaks, old maintenance lines, forgotten rails, and the way patrol patterns repeat when nobody’s watching. Flood drains. Siphon galleries. Catwalk sectors. The route toward Gray Block 17 that Semireiya and Usagi are taking right now.

Two points move on her overlay like someone drew them with a shaking hand.

They’re alive. Still moving.

Rikka lets out a breath that becomes a quiet laugh before it can become anything else.

「よし。」Alright.

Her fingers start dancing.

Not on a keyboard. Not even on a proper panel. Just a flat plate of salvage glass with her own layout burned into it. Every tap is a command, every swipe a lie she tells the system so it stops looking in the correct place.

She doesn’t “hack.”

She plays.

A loop kicks in, inside her chest, inside her skull, inside the part of her that hates silence.

I jump in the noise, break rules on beat.
I jump in the noise, break rules on beat.
Hands go up when the system shake.
Hands go up when the system shake.

It isn’t poetry. It’s a metronome. A repeatable charm she uses to keep her timing sharp when the grid tries to squeeze her.

Rikka marks the next thirty seconds in her head like a rhythm count.

Patrol sweep. Pause. Re-sort. Patrol sweep again.

She’s watching the under-city like it’s a dance floor and the security units are bad dancers who keep stepping on the same tiles.

“Okay,” she whispers, grin widening. “Let’s make you step somewhere else.”

She drags two fingers across her overlay and drops a fake maintenance ping near a junction farther down the route.

A Purifier tail shifts.

Not toward the girls.

Toward her decoy.

Rikka’s grin goes feral for a second.

「ざーこ。」Weak.

She flicks her eyes to the two moving points again.

Semireiya’s point is steady, direct, like a blade that doesn’t wobble even when the hand is tired.

Usagi’s point jitters, then steadies, then jitters again, like she’s constantly arguing with herself about whether she’s allowed to exist loudly.

Rikka clicks her tongue.

“Don’t worry,” she mutters at nobody. “I got you.”

She sends a micro-burst across the private channel.

Not words.

Just a small pattern: two short pulses, one long.

A direction hint without giving anything a voiceprint to copy.

She watches Semireiya’s point adjust by a fraction.

Good. She’s reading it.

Rikka leans back against the cabinet, satisfied for half a heartbeat.

Then something slides across the channel.

A voice.

Too clean.

Too… performed.

“…left, little star.”

Rikka goes still so fast it’s almost funny.

Her grin drops into something sharp.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”

She rewinds the last two seconds of signal like it’s a video clip she wants to roast.

The timing is almost human. The endearment lands like it was learned from a file. The compression is wrong. The noise floor is wrong. It’s pretending to be a person in a place that hates pretending.

Rikka’s eyes narrow.

That isn’t Semireiya’s world. That isn’t Usagi’s.

That’s something else stepping onto her channel like it owns it.

LATCHER-9 behavior. Or the same kind of parasite wearing a different badge.

Rikka’s fingers slam down on her panel.

A firewall she wrote herself snaps up like a blade guard.

The voice keeps talking anyway.

“…left,” it says again, patient, friendly, like friendly is a weapon.

Rikka bares her teeth at the cabinet reflection.

“You’re not taking my lane.”

She shoves a counter-signal into the channel, a messy burst designed to ruin the “clean” delivery without ruining Semireiya’s ability to read the pulses.

The voice stutters for a split second.

Not enough to disappear.

Enough to prove it can be hit.

Rikka inhales.

Her boot-loop chant comes back automatically, as if her body refuses to let her panic without permission.

I jump in the noise, break rules on beat…

She watches the route ahead and sees why the fake voice wants “left.”

A micro-sensor net disguised as a harmless leak pattern. A trap that looks like nothing until you’re already in it.

“Ah. That’s cute.”

Rikka’s grin returns, smaller this time, meaner.

She pings the channel again: one long, one short, one short.

Her code for: Don’t take the obvious.

Semireiya’s point shifts away from the bait.

Good.

Let the fake voice keep smiling into an empty corridor.

Rikka rides the next minute like a wave.

Decoy here. Jam there. Spoof a broken status light so a disposable lens looks at the wrong problem. Nudge patrol timing so a gap opens just wide enough to slip through. The kind of invisible work nobody applauds, because applause is loud and loud gets people killed.

The grid tries to tighten.

Rikka keeps it loose.

She laughs once under her breath, because she can’t help it.

「まだまだ。」Not even close.

Then her overlay pings a second time.

Not from the drains.

From somewhere higher up the stack.

A signature that doesn’t belong to patrol logic.

Doesn’t belong to the Mercy Hymn.

Doesn’t belong to her.

For half a second, it feels like someone standing too close behind you.

Rikka doesn’t turn.

She doesn’t look away from the map.

She just taps a new note onto her panel, a tiny tag she can recognize later:

::BOOT LOOP — CONTROL STATE
::keep moving
::don't trust voices

And under it, like she’s daring the system to read her attitude:

try harder.

Rikka exhales.

The two points keep moving.

She keeps playing.

And somewhere out in the drains, a fake voice keeps pretending it’s kind, waiting for someone to make the old mistake of believing it.

Rikka’s grin flashes again in the broken reflection.

“Not today.”