Pacem Per Tyrranidem

A hacker discovers a Reptilian conspiracy. She can't beat them, but she does join them. Mature.

Four in the morning was a terrible time to be awake. It was when Alyssa worked best. The noise from outside her windows, the endless waves of the city's shore, was quiet, reduced to a ripple when a wayward car meandered through the tight streets. Anyone with sense was sleeping, but Alyssa was searching.

But it was alys_null who was really searching. Alyssa was the young woman, the stringy dark hair, the hunched back, the salty noodles and empty soda cans congealing behind her keyboard and around her monitor. Alys_null was her on the inside, the more accurate approximation of who she was. Alys had no creed and she was not fed by ego. She wasn't looking for fame. She wanted a challenge, and here she had found one.

A program on a computer, an average node in a banking network, was running a peer-to-peer file transfer. Each chunk of the file was copied and sent, and once the 'received' message from the computer at the other end came through, the chunk was deleted. The same program was running on the other computer. The file was stuck in constant motion, scrambled between the two computers.

A secret, a little hidden thing someone had tucked away into the hard drive of a computer in Singapore, had given up its puzzle to her, and now she could solve it. This was when Alyssa felt best. A small line of code she added duplicated each chunk that was sent and sent the copy to her own computer. To speed up the process, she tracked down the other computer and stuck the same code in the program there.

The reflections were another reason to work at four in the morning. Without the sunlight, it was harder to catch a glimpse of her own face in the monitor. But with her screen dimmed, mostly black but for the progress bar slowly ticking, she could see her reflection faintly in the screen. She closed her open lips and brushed her hair over her forehead and raised her eyebrows to reduce her dull stare. She hated seeing herself in the monitor and being reminded of her unpleasant look.

The progress bar vanished. The file was a video, encoded so that unless one had the entire file, it was unreadable. And now she had the entire file.

She typed in the command to open her media player.

The static moved in a loop, shifting to the right, shuddering, then returning to the beginning. The silhouette of a face revealed itself in motion, but the features were lost. Alys stared into the slowly rippling white noise as a voice came crisply, a little too loudly, through her speakers.

"You have found this because you are clever and you can question what society tells you. This is only the first step, but it is essential. You have separated yourself from the masses. You feel that they distrust you because you are not predictable the way they are."

Alys knew the message was pandering to a disillusioned shut-in like her, but it was flattering. It was hard not to listen.

"You are not weak the way the masses are. You will be able to understand our message and act on what you will learn. If you wish to leave your ignorant state, know that you will never be pleased with society's lies ever again. Follow us."

The video erupted into static above flickering images. Alys sat up straighter and crumpled a Ramen wrapper and rolled her chair closer to the desk. Her toes spread wide as she curled her toenails into the carpet. Her fingernails needed clipping but she didn't bother. She scratched at a patch of dry skin until it was flaking.

Alys made up her mind. She wanted a challenge, and she had found more than just a dull security flaw, she'd found a challenge. Whatever this was, she'd see it through.

She bit the pointed tip of her tongue. Programs rose from her fingers to analyze the static in the video file, to scour for the logs which could tell her what computer had placed the file in its state of flux to begin with.

Her excitement took a toll on her muscles. Her hunch was too intense, she supposed, tightening her back and straining her shoulders. While programs ticked away on her computer, she put her arms up, stretching from her biceps down her back, then put her arms behind her, feeling the burn against her chest. Beneath her skin, the muscles slid, shifting, adjusting to their thickening size.

Her hunt led through a hospital server in Argentina and a government computer in Moscow to a computer in a private military contractor's offices in Virginia. Another video file, now with an encryption key. She fed the strings of encoded data taken from the first video's static through the key, trying longer lengths, shorter lengths. Twenty-four character length, a string near the end, and she was in. A smile spread across her lips. Four of her incisors were sharp and extended.

Static radiated outward in front of her. The same voice began to speak; it spoke clearly, every word calculated and approved by an unknown committee.

"The first lie society tells you is that the will of the masses is right. But you can see that desire does not make anything right. Who they desire to rule them is not who should rule them. That they desire war does not make war right. The masses desire freedom, they desire self-determination, but these are not right for them."

Alys should have risen from her chair at the last words, furrowed her brow, frowned at her screen, but she sat, glassy-eyed, jaw slack, budding fangs hidden behind her dull stare.

Dead skin, loose and dry like tissue paper, or softer like still-live flesh, budded along her arms and her legs. She scratched and tore tiny holes in the whitish, crinkled skin. Her nose poked out between her eyes, but her brain told her to ignore the growing mass at the edge of her vision. Her mouth elongated with it, more like the snout of an animal, flat at the front.

"Society tells the masses that the way they want to be governed is best. They act as if the misunderstandings, the idiocy, and the confusion of the masses are illusions; as if the masses know how they should be ruled."

Alys's third eyelid blinked across her eyes. Her fingers returned to the keyboard and her half-inch claws tapped indentations into the keys. She had to find the next video. She didn't have a reason why; the reason wasn't as important as hearing more.

Her molting skin reached past her elbow and past her knees, creeping beyond her shoulders and hips. Picking at her shed skin, she tore a rip, then followed that rip down along the underside of her elbow. She shuddered as she pulled off a sleeve of dead skin. But inside her brain, the video's programming told her to ignore it. The hesitantly disgusted expression on her half-reptilian fanged snout was replaced with dull notice.

She shucked her other arm and her legs, allowing the soft, scaly skin to breathe. Though the computer light bathed everything in a sky blue, her scales were mossy green. The sinew of her frame slowly twisted. Her back tightened, pushing her neck forward; her shoulders broadened with the muscle beneath; her thighs swelled and tendons bulged down to her feet, allowing her four-toed feet to dig her talons into the carpet and tear at the fabric. When standing, her legs would push into more of a wide-hipped reptilian squat.

The trail of the second file was even harder to follow. Half-hidden, half-deleted logs, proxy after proxy to work through. Alys grunted at the tension and heat gathered against her lower back. Her thigh muscles twinged, first on the left, then on the right, as she reached back. With clawed hands, bony knuckles, dry, scaled fingers, she grabbed her tail.

Momentary shock went through her, doused by the programming. Of course, her tail. She let it go, draping it to the side of her seat. Only six inches now, but growing, longer, thicker, more muscular. The fangs that jabbed out of her mouth protruded over her lips, forming a crooked, jagged grimace on the outside of her growing snout. Opening her mouth, stretching her jaw as her teeth found new positions along it, her tongue tumbled out amid the lace of saliva stretched between her fangs. Her tongue reached the level of her chest and hung there, curling slowly.

The file was split into four pieces, each with its own encryption key. The hunt for them had been harder; now it just took a short time, her two-foot tail twitching, a bit of drool dripping from her tongue while she waited.

"The second lie society tells you is that being told how to live is wrong. They equate totalitarianism with oppression and war. In the hands of a poor leader, this does happen. But this does not mean that the system itself is flawed. If there were a way to select the best, the people who could make the wise decisions, and let them rule, would that not prove ideal?"

Alys clung to every word she heard. Reaching up with her claws, she gripped both the collar of her shirt and the husk of skin that she had molted. With a closed-mouth, tongue-flickering snarl, she tore through the seams of her shirt, pulling away with it the dead skin around her torso.

Her chest was broad and her breasts hung heavily in front of her with her back hunched the way it was. Her claws scraped over the new scales there and she grinned savagely. Her hips, where powerful, meaty thighs met her four-foot tail and bulky waist, barely fit in her chair any more. The webbing between her talons spread as she shifted her weight onto her digitigrade feet, standing up in her lizard crouch, amber eyes still focused single-mindedly on the screen.

"That is why you were chosen. You are intelligent, you can solve difficult problems, and you are not constrained by the lies of society. You will join us in our efforts to bring a new age of peace through rule. Welcome."

The static flickered again, and the video ended with 'pacem per tyrranidem' repeated until it filled the screen.

Alys clawed at her face, removing the dead skin and revealing the tough green scales in full. Her hair was gone, but in its place was a tall, pale, spined crest, starting in the middle of her scalp and running the length of her spine to her tail.

Hissing, growling noises leaped from her open mouth as she stood, knocking over her chair, hunched and drooling and wide-eyed. She was nearly there, nearly to the point that her programming was trying to reach. But the human in her was complaining. Though her thrashes and violent outbursts were mentally dramatic, there was no sign of her on the outside, aside from Alys's hesitation at the turmoil in her mind.

Moss-scaled claws parted her folds, digging into her curiously different anatomy. Her huge talons tore the carpet as she rocked back and forth, letting out groans and bellows, her crest tight and unfurled. Her tail replaced her fingers while she propped herself against the bed. Deep gasps traveled in ripples along her elongated form, tugging the wrinkles of her scaly skin along with them.

The sound that left her mouth was the human Alys's final groan as claws groped at her neck and twisted it apart. There was nothing left but the reptile, roaring as a hot mess dripped along her tail and onto the carpet, joined by drops of drool from her hanging jaw.

Outside of the apartment building, a white van pulled up and idled. In the dark mid-morning, the only thing anyone could see was a hunched figure leaving the building and slipping into the van. Crouching, Alys grunted a thanks to the female reptilian in the front.

"Always good to see a new member," the driver said in hissing snorts and growls.

"How could I resist?" Alys asked, a grin visible behind her fangs. The van drifted quietly away into the night, while in Alys's old apartment, her computer scrubbed its hard drives clean.