Access Denied

Literally every way up to the top of this tower's control center wasn’t working! I tried the elevator, but nope… Locked. Gravity lift? Nope… Disabled. Teleporter? Nope… Malfunctioning!

It seriously hit me hard how much control Janus had by simply being able to hack these systems. Either he was something seriously special or something else was going on. Regardless, our security sucked!

With my very spotty luck, I found some stairs that lead up to the very top floor, but those took forever to climb up. My legs were sore from climbing up nearly forty flights of stairs. It felt like it was never going to end, but finally I reached the top floor and felt as blissful as this lousy crisis would let me.

This hallway looked like the last one. The map in my head showed me that just at the end of this path was the control center. As the map stated, I found it. A big door with symmetrical red lights on it was my last obstacle. I stretched my hands forward and put all my will power into a single command.

"Open sesame!"

...But nothing happened...

"Open sesame, please?..."

Nothing.

"...with a cherry on top...?"

Shoot. It didn't respond to my voice command.

The only way to get this door open then was to either pull it apart with my bare hands, or manually override the controls.

If my name was Sampson, I could probably force it open easily, but I wasn't the strongest man ever.

Have you ever heard about that guy? One of my books mentioned him. He had long hair and...

You know? I wondered who was stronger... Sampson or Hercules. Hercules is supposed to be the strongest hero ever. So who would win, Hercules, the strongest hero, or Sampson, the strongest man? That would be an epic battle!

Oh darn, I was getting distracted... Focus Yalda! The world is at stake!

My only other option was to find the control panel that was linked to the door, and I discovered one on the right side of it. Luckily it was still active, but I couldn't wirelessly access it due to the jammer.

I started tapping away at the virtual keypad, trying to put in my security override code. "123AB…"

-Access denied-

"Darn it!"

Even before I finished typing, I wasn't allowed in. The whole panel screen started to get all fuzzy and distorted. The jammer must have messed it up or something. No way to access it now.

I started to check the signal of the jammer, just to make sure if it was strong enough to even reach this part of the tower. It was still active, but I also detected another two signals along with it.

The first one came from the tower itself, which was what the jammer was blocking. Tapping into that would give me access to everything, if only I could. This third signal though was weird. Strangely, it was coming from me.

Usually machines won't point out their own signals because that’s redundant information, but my sensors were telling me I had a radio signal coming from my hands.

“How the heck is that possible?” I took a look at my fingers and palms, closely inspecting them.

My hands still had a little crystal stardust on them from when I used it in the vents. It was slowly dissolving away through radiation. This radiation was producing radio waves that my body could detect.

To get a better read on the single, I needed to deploy my antenna. I twisted my left ear around clockwise and a small antenna popped out of the top of my head. It sounded kinda’ like when toast comes out of a toaster.

Not only could my antenna pick up on signals, but it could amplify them too.

The jamming signal from Janus, along with the tower and the Stardust decay had a similar radio frequency. But only the jammer was able to overpower everything else in the area, except the stardust.

My hope was that I could amplify the stardust signal and use it to counter jam Janus's jammer, allowing me access to the control panel.

That's a lot of jam... I'll need some peanut butter to balance it out.

-Advisory! Signal amplification in process-

-NOTICE: May disrupt air traffic communication or other wireless signals…please use responsibly-

-Continue?- (Yes) (No)

I chose 'yes,' then the stardust signal blasted out with sparkles and blocked everything! It worked!

Oh rats, there was a catch. I didn’t realize that now my stardust was interfering with the tower signal. This wasn’t going to work if I was jamming the tower now.

Maybe there was a small differences between the jammer and the tower I could analyze to make my counter jamming work better? Some little glitch that only existed in the jammer that made it different enough to match?

-...-

Oh, I found one! Well, kinda.

So the frequency of Janus’s jammer had this really odd tick in it. Every 2 seconds there was a skip that happened. It lasted for about .003 seconds. That must have been caused when uncle damaged his crystal heart.

I guess that’s what allowed me to download that map from earlier, I must have accessed it at just the right time. Talk about lucky timing.

So here was my revised plan. Now I didn’t need to counter Janus’s jammer, I just needed to access the control panel during the very small window every 2 seconds. That small window was less than a millisecond, so I had to really put in some work to get that just right.

“Oh man, this stuff is so complicated…” If I didn’t have a computer for a brain, I would honestly have given up by now. The timing and patience needed for this was crazy.

Alright, so I basically had to play a timing minigame in my head to interface with the control panel at just the right moment. Long story short, I wrote up a script of commands and waited for an opening to send it to the door.

-...-

Got it! My timing was perfect. Thank goodness my head could calculate all that.

Hurray! The door turned blue and opened up for me. I let down my antenna by twisting my ear back, then walked inside.

~☆☆☆~

There she was, the Tower Control Computer. TCC for short. Her monitor was so big and bright that it turned the whole room blue from its glow.

She felt kinda intimidating, like looking at an old ancestor. She had to be a few thousand years old by now maybe even more. It was crazy to think she'd been here for such a long time, functioning without a hitch.

I didn’t need to wirelessly connect to her, I could do it manually. That probably was more efficient anyways given how old she was.

My fingers tapped away at a mechanical keyboard under the monitor. Each press of the keys made a satisfying *click* sound. I had goosebumps listening to that piece of history.

I used my admin privileges to log into the computer and the TCC started making some funny sounds, like something was grinding inside of her.

Was she supposed to make that sound? Old computers were noisy.

“Hello, Mistress Yalda. How may I be of service to you today?” TCC asked.

I was glad she could talk, that made things easier.

“Listen, TCC, please reactivate the tower's defense mechanisms and stop the intruder!”

With a series of hums and beeps, followed by that grinding sound behind the screen, the computer screen lit up red with a big X shape on it. The whole room was bathed in a crimson glow.

The sudden shift in colour caught me off-guard, and I scrunched up a little, trying to shake off the worry.

“This task is currently impossible,” she replied.

Must have had to do with either the jammer or something else Janus broke.

"I see. What's causing that not to work?"

"Nothing at all."

-...-

"Excuse me? Then what's the issue?" I asked.

“The issue is that I have no desire to allow such a thing.”

What…wait...what was that supposed to mean? Did she just deny a direct order from me, the daughter of her own maker?

-☆-

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