Zoe shot through the gap between two cabs causing both to blare their horns. She laughed as she swerved left to avoid a large delivery truck parked on the side of the street. Zoe immediately swerved right to avoid a cab in the opposite lane as the passenger foolishly opened the door into oncoming traffic and blared her horn. The corporate suit flipped her off.

“Can I just get home without getting into an accident?” Zoe asked herself as she threw a Hailstone at the cab’s passenger. Zoe’s rearview camera showed she missed the butthole that had opened the door but had hit the cab. She shrugged and gunned her throttle. If the Hailstone froze the cab’s engine, it would serve the cabby right since they stopped in the middle of the street.

Zoe was anxious to get home because she had thought of an idea for a new denial of service daemon, she wanted to try coding. The idea had come to her while delivering the data crystals for Zach.

One of the wealthy customers at the second spa had been talking to the receptionist about Biblical plagues, specifically the plague of locusts since the pests had eaten the wheat crop in another country, which caused wheat futures to go up. The woman had seemed giddy at the idea of people paying a lot more for food increasing her personal finances or starving. Zoe had tuned out the rest of what the woman was talking about as the idea took root in her mind after slicing the woman’s Frame and leaving a Squirrel behind.

Zoe had made a few net searches to be sure nobody else had already done what she wanted to do. Unfortunately, there weren’t any that did exactly what she wanted, though there were several daemons that did similar things. Still, maybe she could borrow some code and save herself some work and time.

What Zoe wanted her new daemon to do was attack a system and “eat” its resources using them to multiply just like a swarm of locusts did. This would cause the attacked system to either shut down, lock up, or glitch as the swarm grew and proceeded on to the next system in the network. She figured if the swarm was used on a person, it would take over every cybernetic implant they had at a rapid pace causing the implants to cease functioning. Well, that was the hope at least.

“I’m going to have to code in some safeguards since I don’t want the daemon to attack vital organ replacements and kill someone,” Zoe mused running a red light. “Ugh! It’s going to need safeguards to make sure the swarm doesn’t leap from one targeted network to another unless instructed to since I don’t want it to take down the internet making me a criminal or terrorist too.”

*

“I’ve never seen such a mess! Whoever wrote this code either didn’t know what they were doing or just didn’t care,” Zoe complained. She had spent the last couple hours going through the code of several of the DDoE attack daemons she had found on the net. The coders and slicers must have shared code or copied from each other since most of the daemons were coded in the same way. “This code is such a mess that I’d be better off starting from scratch.”

Zoe checked the time and shook her head in frustration. She saved her work and closed her coding app. It was time to get something to eat and go for a run.

“I can hit up Riverside Bakery and Café for something and some lemonade on the way home from a run,” Zoe told herself walking to her bedroom to change into something to run in. She smiled and set her music streaming service to play rock songs from the 1970s through the 1990s. She was in the mood to experiment with her musical tastes a little. “Plus, I can then see what that greedy woman has going on.”

*

The heatwave had finally broken, and the weather had turned quite a bit cooler after a cold front had blown through. Zoe knew the humidity and dewpoint being lower was the biggest reason for the cooler feeling day. With that change in mind, Zoe had opted to wear blue leggings with a gray long sleeved shirt along with her running shoes. She put her NanoHair up into a high ponytail instead of shortening it and had the ends start alternating colors every two minutes. Zoe’s sunglasses completed her outfit. She had grown to quickly love the things despite not needing them.

Instead of just running around the park at the Boat Basin, Zoe decided to run to Central Park and visit Belvedere Castle, loop around The Lake, and then hit Riverside Bakery and Café on her way home. This would give her a nice change of scenery for her run as well as making her harder to track if she goofed while seeing what her Squirrel had found in the greedy woman’s system.

Zoe made a loop around the Elephant Playground before heading down 78th Street towards Central Park. While running she loaded up her disguise daemons and made sure to bounce her signal through several systems, cities, and states before checking her Squirrel. While she hated her time in the Purity Church now, Zoe would always heed the lessons she had learned there. Well, almost always heed them. There were exceptions to every rule.

Zoe neared Belvedere Castle smiling or waving at other runners as they did the same to her. She ignored the people sitting around in the grass or playing games. Zoe smiled at the song she was listening to.

“Ha. ‘I kept the right ones out and let the wrong ones in,’ is true in more ways than one,” Zoe said to herself. The song’s title was Amazing. “The name fits. I really like this song.”

Zoe made a note to look up the band and search out more of their stuff later. Deciding the time was right as she passed Belvedere Castle, Zoe checked the Squirrel she left in the greedy woman’s system.

“Oh! Come to mama,” Zoe muttered fighting to keep from shouting in joy. The sneaky little daemon had already found passwords for the woman’s bank accounts, her stock market app, home security system, private jet, and more. Zoe checked the woman’s bank account. Her eyes widened in shock and alarm as Zoe stumbled almost tripping over her own feet. Cynthia Rockford was worth hundreds of millions of credits!