I exited out of the tunnel system, slid the manhole cover back into place, and headed for the seafood place. I immediately spotted Feras talking to a waitress as I worked my way over to his table.
The waitress left as I sat down, and the guy frowned at me. “I thought it was zero hour.”
“It is.” A smile sprung to my lips as I pulled out my deck. It was so nerdy. I messed around on it for a moment, pulling up all my programs and the connection to the worm hiding in the receptionist’s terminal. I then sent a code to my little tapper to start and turned to watch the fireworks.
I zoomed in with the dual zoom augment of my eye onto the workers across the street. Immediately, several of their faces dropped after I set the tapper to work. In just a matter of minutes, they grew increasingly frustrated and started to move about in a panic.
“Nova, they’re mad. Now what?” He asked as he bit into a- a shrimp burrito? Gross. Where'd he even get the money to buy one? He's been living off my dime this whole time.
I held a finger up and waited patiently. Eventually, there was movement from the receptionist's desk as she started to call a number. Days of work and hours of planning all for this moment. Immediately, I went to work and messed with the line, redirecting the phone call to my phone while spoofing it to look like Artoras’s. It ate two of my activations from the Alpha-Tres Worm, but this is exactly what I had installed it for.
I made my voice slightly nasally and higher pitched. “This is Artoras Solutions, how may I help you?”
Steffany’s voice came across the line. “Hi! I’m with Ajay Insurance. We’re one of your clients.”
“One moment please.” I clacked around on my deck, making noises like I was actually using it as Feras eyeballed me weirdly. “Ah, Ajay Insurance. Yes, how can I help you?”
“Our Net connection is going haywire here. It's glitching out and rapidly blinking on and off. Can you send someone to take a look at it?” Steffany's stress levels were apparent not only in her voice but also in her actions as she practically paced around while rubbing at her hair.
“Of course, ma’am.” I clicked around again as I checked the name on the badge I stole. “Our technician, Seki Yusoko, has been dispatched. She’ll be arriving shortly. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
Steffany let out a relieved sigh. “No. Thank you so much.”
“No problem, ma’am.” I hung up the phone and settled back into my chair. I had my PA set up an alarm for twenty minutes.
Feras glanced at me before looking out the window. Rain started to fall, and the drops lightly tapped across the neon-lit surface. “Could use some work.”
I closed my eyes and shook my head. “My specialty lies in subtlety in the first place…” Hopefully, the next one will be more in and out, and less week-long planning and more execution. Coming up with a workaround was a draining process.
“Still. If she was more attentive, she would recognize that your voice was stilted…” He shrugged. “I reckon that woman is in a world of her own though. She seemed like the type that spends more time reading romance novels than anything else.”
“Yeah? Why do you say that?”
Feras looked at me and shook his head. “The same reason I’d say you have no friends and are quite the loner based on your antagonistic attitude and mannerisms. It speaks of not being fully socialized in your youth…
“Step one of the grift; know who you are conning. Steffany practically ate out of my hand when I acted the gentlemanly type that shows up in fiction.”
I stayed silent… his words kinda hurt? He was right, which was the worst part. Mira, quite literally, was my only friend around my age. Granted, it's not really my fault. When other kids were joining gangs or going to school, I was busy trying to earn money for food… or was that just an excuse I gave? I enjoyed being alone, sometimes…
There was a strangled silence between us. Feras continued to look out the window at the office space and I followed suit after a time. I mentally rehearsed everything as the timer ticked down.
Eventually, it hit zero. I immediately stood and looked at myself in the window. The Artoras uniform clung to me, and the badge sat just over my chest. I had my backpack full of tools, and my deck sat just at my hip. I pulled my hair into a bun and settled the Slashers’ hat back on my head. Something was missing…
Right. I pulled the virtu-goggles out of my bag and threw them around my neck. “Alright… you ready?”
“Yeah. I’ll call out anything weird.” The guy tapped his commlink. He threw on that annoying boyish smile. “Good luck, Zuku.”
That name was cringe. “Thanks.”
Without further adieu, I left the neo-seafood restaurant and headed across the street. The first floor was a lobby area for the entire building with the landlord’s offices filling in the space. I made my way through it while moving my hat to block the camera’s view of my face and moved up to the second floor.
Four corporations, all just as small as Ajay Insurance. The blueprints for the building had already been memorized, so it was rather easy to make my way to the right one. I entered the office space and was immediately noticed by Steffany. I made a subtle adjustment to how I held my head, blocking the majority of my face under the bill of my Slashers hat.
“Oh. You’re finally here.” Her reaction to me was entirely different than how she met Feras. She had on the typical mask of every corporate drone, though hers showed several stress cracks.
“Nice. Now sell the part, and act completely disinterested in everything she says. You are superior to this plebian from a small corp.” Feras’s voice came across the comms.
“Artoras IT specialist… what seems to be the problem?” I imitated the drone mask, trying my best to ignore his voice in my ear. He was right, back seat driving got very annoying.
Steffany headed out of the desk area before turning back. “Right! C-can I see your badge? I need to add you to the system.”
“Here.” I smoothly unclipped it and handed it over to the woman with the artificial confidence of being from a bigger corporation. This was the moment of truth right here. About a week of planning and setting up all for this moment. My heart pumped in my chest, beating pure adrenaline through my system.
She grabbed it and inserted it into the black box. “J-just a moment.” She then clicked around on her terminal. After a couple seconds, all the terminals in the room stuttered and she let out an aggravated sigh.
Feras was right, the thing was an IRF scanner. He was rapidly proving to be quite a useful person. If he hadn’t said something, I would’ve been caught right here and needed to make a run. He was still super suspicious, but- well… he was handy. It was beginning to reinforce the notion that I ask him about the next gig to see just how helpful a second set of eyes could be.
The woman looked down at her terminal and then looked back up at me several times with a slightly confused daze. “You uh- erm… you look quite a bit y-younger than the image here.”
Feras’s voice sparked to life in my ear. “Put some pressure on her. She showed a weak will when I spoke to her; she'll crack under the stress and ignore her suspicions.”
I followed his advice. “I had some work done… I hardly see how that matters? You want me to fix your Net issues, or what?”
“R-right.” Steffany clicked around a bit more with a look of concentration on her face. Then she pulled the badge back out and handed it to me. “Okay, do you n-need anything?”
I moved a hand to my chin and looked like I was thinking quite deeply. “Hmm… should probably start with the servers. Make sure it's not a city-side error.”
“I-I’ll take you to them.” Steffany moved out from behind the desk for real this time and led me further into the office, passing several annoyed-looking workers.
We moved back towards the rear of Ajay Insurance. I shifted and moved my head to hide my face from the cameras the best I could, disguising the act as if looking around the office. The servers were located right across the hall from the boss’s office. Probably so he could keep a close eye on them.
Ajay’s door popped open and the man himself stepped out. “Steffany! When is-” His eyes met mine, and he was quite the expressive person. “Oh. Nova!” He crossed over and unlocked the server door. Full biometric locks including print and retinal on a vault-like metal door. Would’ve been a bitch to crack if I came in the usual way.
“Just let me know if you need anything. The sooner this issue is fixed, the sooner these gonks can get back to work.” He headed back into his office as lightning cracked in the distance.
“Of course, sir.” I held the dead drone smile as Steffany started to move back towards the reception area. Corporate culture was disgusting, but it was damn easy to imitate.
I wasted no time getting into the server room. Several server banks were set up along the walls, casting moody blue light everywhere as they ran. They stuttered harshly as I pulled out my deck; the tapper just hit once more.
I moved over to a terminal in the room and flashed my Artoras badge over a scanner. The screen blinked a few times before letting me through the lock screen. Pulling the jack from my wrist, I shoved it into the small deck and then connected the deck’s output jack into the server’s terminal.
Before I did anything, I pulled up the diagnostics of the server on the terminal screen. I had to make it look like I was actually doing something in case Ajay decided to check up on me. Then I threw on the virtu-goggles and plugged them into my deck too, turning them on as they connected.
Immediately, my vision changed as they started up the Augmented Reality of the Net. I could still see the meatspace, though there was a dark grid pattern laid over everything like some kind of retro outrunner art. On second thought, it looked almost exactly like the space I had learned about Land Vehicles, though quite a bit less defined. Weird.
Laying under the grid and over meatspace sat ancient-looking stonework covering the actual structure of the building. It looked as though I stood in some kind of ancient castle. Bookshelves covered the walls, each of them filled to the brim with glowing books of various shapes and sizes reaching far into a vaulted roof that reached several times taller than the real size of the floor.
Every line and pattern overlaying my vision were bits and pieces of code. Netrunners in this space ruled absolutely and could shift and twist everything in here at will if they were good enough. I was not a Netrunner. If anything, I was a tourist lost in another world of confusing - albeit pretty - grids and art. At most, I could run the simple commands built into my deck’s operating system. Thankfully, that should be all I would need.
A tall figure loomed in the doorway, fully visible through the virtu goggles. It was a gnarled mass of twisting ooze roughly in the shape of a person. It looked at me, two glowing red pinpoints in the dark. After a moment, the thing nodded its grotesque oozy protrusion of a head and information popped up next to it in a similar box to how the interface looked.
It was the daemon of Ajay Insurance's system and a rather high-end one at that. The thing was a type called a Mimic according to the information that the system fed to my goggles. Daemons were interesting creations. They were very expensive and acted like the virtual guard dogs of systems. They were half AI, though the people who made them were very careful about limiting a daemon to being only half. True AI has been incredibly illegal ever since the K-10 Convention.
Apparently, this daemon’s primary defensive tactic was copying the code of whatever comes at it and sending it back. Quite the annoying daemon to fight, especially considering the other defenses that were bound to be spread throughout the Net Architecture. It might not win against a strong Netrunner, but it would surely slow one down long enough for an alternative solution to arise. 'Course, it would've wiped the floor with me if I had tried to hack into it.
The entire sequence of events was an AR visualization of code and the system accepting me as an admin. I don't know who originally set up the coding for the AR visualization, but they had my thanks. It was far more interesting than just looking at long lines of code.