The air in the coffee shop where Tara and some friends sat was thick with the ozone-scent of a polluted plasticized sea. Tara cradled her cinnamon-laced artificial cappuccino, eyes locked on the flickering digital heart before her.
It was a jagged mosaic with shards of emerald and sapphire swirling with many colors emerging from its core. She felt a concentrated beam of light hammer against the encryption layers within the structure, bleaching the air until it turned into clinical white shades.
"Looks like the repair meme reached its target," Tara whispered, in a voice splintering beneath the mechanical howl of the ventilation system. She watched the primary defensive firewalls dissolve into glowing ash as the "Heart Seed" code took deeper root.
Gwen raised a skeptical brow, her hand resting idly on a drained mocha cup with several psycho-active ingredients. A projection shimmered across Tara’s hair: cascading data, beautiful and catastrophic, like a galaxy mid-collapse. "Human hearts are so unpredictable," Gwen said absently to herself, in a frog-like mutant voice. In a world of surveillance and cold steel, she knew nothing was more volatile than flickering human emotions.