| From: | Cutter cutterspawn@****.com |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Insert cursing here |
| Date: | Sat, 04 Mar 2000 21:28:33 -0500 |
+++++begin video
The young decker sat patiently in a lotus position on the ratty bed,
breaking from his meditation every once in a while to take a slug of
Jolt. The dull thud of the club's music outside faded away as he
centered himself, awaiting the call that was taking forever to arrive.
Finally, one of his upper molars began it's familiar vibrations, and he
brushed his tongue over the the contact to open the link.
'Go...' he said impassionately.
'Got it....NA/UCAS-SEA-7735-SYSCOR99544.'
'Yer a god...' the decker replies with a smile, his fingers flying
across his keyboard as the address is relayed.
'Yeah...I know. Word has it there's not alot of Ice, but it's an Orange
system As....watch yer ass.'
'As always...' he says with a chuckle, disconnecting the phone with a
satisfied click of his tongue. With one last deep breath, the
red-headed rogue pulls the fibre from it's slot in the black-chromed
deck and pulls down a corner of his tie-dyed bandanna. The business end
fit snugly into his datajack, with his nimble fingers soon flowing over
his keyboard.
Combat utes.........check...
Defense utes........good to go.....
Sensor utes....smokin'....................time to go to work.
With a slight hesitation over the execute key, Asmodeon hits the button
that allows his mind to be ripped from the meat world outside and into
his home away from home.
The world of the Matrix exploded into his 'vision', the momentary
disorientation fading as his sensors took stock of the realm around
him. The neon floating geometric shapes filled his sight as the distant
'horizon' was dotted with larger structures and a serene
'mountainscape'. With a large flex and crack of his 'back', the persona
that was Asmodeon took stock of himself. To others viewing him, he
appeared to be a disembodied humanoid....completely black except for a
blood-red glow that eminated from where his eye sockets would be.
Everything from his torso down was non-corporeal, giving his persona a
ghostly look about him. In the meat world, his fingers flew over the
keyboard, inputting the address where his target was located........in
the cyberworld, the shadow took off through the matrix to
instantaneously arrive at the SAN of the Seattle Branch of the Systems
Corporation accounting office. Executing a few simple commands, the
doorway within the rectangular construct slid silently open, allowing
the shadow to drift through unhindered. As a force of habit, the shadow
turned, waiving his hands mystically at the doorway he had just
entered. He wasn't planning on exiting through this portal, nor did he
need intruders happening by while he was working. The exectuted
lockdown of the SAN gave a satisfying click, and the shadow returned to
survey the room. His sensors quickly located the dataline, and
informing him of the Orange-4 SPU that lay at the other end. No ice was
evident, so he dove directly into the dataline and appeared swiftly at
inside the large chamber beyond.
The dark shadow was clearly illuminated by the lights of the lines of
energy and pulsating databanks that lined the walls of this construct.
A quick survelliance of the room located the one and only dataline out
of the room, and again he quickly flowed through it to the first
Datastore. Rubbing his black hands together, his meat hands loaded up a
Browse program that allowed his red-glowing eyes to peruse the
information stored within.
Employee data........business contracts........history files........all
worth drek on the open market. No paydata here. His options out of
this room, however, were doubled from his previous navigation. His
analyse program was run again, the persona's eyes glowing a brighter red
as he glanced down the two datalines open to him.
SPU Orange-4...no ice.
SPU Orange-6......Barrier.
His meat mouth drooled as his option was obvious. There were no system
alerts yet.....so a simple sleaze and sneak was his best option. A few
keystrokes later, and the shadow sailed down the dataline, coming to an
abrupt stop before another octagonal construct. Here, the door was
plainly evident, existing as a an electrified field whose flashing
lights flared a light blue across his cyber-eyes. As his sleaze program
executed, there was no outward change to his personna. In the eyes of
the ice, however, he was undetectable....allowing his shadowy form to
flow between the arching lights and into the SPU beyond. He held his
breath for a moment, waiting for any alerts to signify that his sleaze
had been unsuccessful....yet no alert was raised. Glancing around with
his analyze again, his blood pressure in the meat world rose slightly.
Datastore Orange-5
I/OP Orange-1
SPU Orange-2
and the paydirt...........CPU Orange-6
He hadn't anticipated a large amount of resistance to this system. It
was, after all, a small satellite accounting office without a lot of
sensitive matierial. The SAN to the main office would be heavily
fortified, but he had no intention of cracking that open this eve. A
simple snatch and grab. Even still, his eyes grew brighter red one last
time in an attempt to detect any ice. With none evident, he sailed
through the dataline to the system's CPU.
The sight that greeted his eyes was familiar, yet never ceased to dazzle
him. The complex interplay of dancing lights, pulsating energy and
flashing data surrounded him, his fingers twitching in anticipated
victory. Flowing up to a wall, his hands waived across their
surface......initiating the commands that would pull up the system's
map. A section of the wall solidified, showing the schematic of this
system and it's architecture. The number of terminals, cameras and
other peripherals attached to this system. The location of the
datastores and the number of SPU's slaved to this mainframe. Each were
laid bare before him, as well as the lists of all the datafiles stored
in the four Datastores connected, including the one directly shunted
from this very room. Suddenly, his attention was drawn to a Slave Node
located near the fringes of the map.
*****Access granted EN-477242
*****Running file log 342445.AB23
His meat heart skipped a beat as the ramifications of the message flowed
through his brain.
Someone...a fellow decker? wageslave? was working from this access
point, using this system as his point of entry. With a blur of speed,
the shadow raced down the datalines back to the SPU and down an adjacent
line to the I/O Port which ran the security cameras. A quick flurry of
code, and all the camera displays from within the office building
snapped to life in the chamber that surrounded him. A quick scan
revealed his opponent.......a balding man in his late fourties. Sitting
at a desk, dressed in the corporate jumpsuit of a Systems Corp
employee. Legitimate business? This late at night? It was doubtful.
Especially since he was jacked in through a cyberdeck and not one of the
slaved terminals within the office itself. But this man was not
Asmodeon's concern. He was here for specifics, and this wanabee wasn't
it.
Flowing back to the SPU, he took yet another shunted dataline to the
attached Datastore. In his rushed state, however, his first attempt to
call up the datalists failed, causing the room to take on a slightly
yellowish tinge.
'Frag...' he muttered to himself, forgetting it was an Orange *5* node,
requiring a little more finesse than he had given. With caution, he
sailed back to the CPU, waving his taloned hands over a specific section
of the glowing wall, calling an end to the passive alert he had
initiated. The decker was still online, unaware of his
intrusion....giving him another shot at the datastore.
This time, the code that flowed from his meat brain to the keyboard
worked properly, bringing up the extensive datalists that he had been
hoping for. Executing the transfer protocol, his Fairlight Excalibur
hummed as the files detailing the numeric code designations for the main
offices, along with a few passcodes that had been carelessly left in the
cache's of a few of the slaved computers.
*****File Transfer Completed
'Thanx Bessy....' he muttered to the deck on the bed before him. His
physical hand began to move to the button that would disengage the
signals from the fibre optic link to his deck, dumping him from the
datastore his personna was currently in.
His curiosity, however, got the best of him.
With a grin that was evident on both his physical and cybernetic
presence, the decker moved along the datalines, through the SPU and
original datastore, down to the Slave Node that the decker was hacked
into. It was here that his comrade-in-silicon had entered the system,
exiting into the Matrix itself through another SAN other than the one he
had used to gain entry. As he stood in the cubical room, his hellish
eyes took on a glimmer of mischeviousness. With a shrug, the decker
flowed through the dataline and into the construct that was the Matrix
version of the man's deck.
His mind struggled to execute the code that would allow him to view the
inner workings of the man's deck without raising an alarm. Disguising
himself as a diagnostic protocol, Asmodeon's personna wandered through
the room, examining the MPCP, I/O and Storage Memory configurations on
this Fuchi Cyber-5. He stopped short, however, as he glanced at the
active memory file, which was currently in a download cycle.
*****File Transfer: Project_Tempest.scm
*****64% complete
*****66% complete
Company business this certainly was NOT. He could have spent the time
accessing the destination from where the decker was transferring the
file, but his impish grin and plan would not allow for such luxuries.
Touching his cyber-talons onto the terminal, his meat fingers created
the piggyback program and inserted it into the active memory of the
decker's code, moving the current file to his own deck and shunting the
remaining transfer along with it. His subtle insertion may still have
been detected by the decker......but if it had, there were no outward
signs.
*****File Transfer: Project_Tempest.scm
*****85% complete
*****File Transfer: Project_Tempest.scm\\redirect
384299.Project_Tempest.scm
*****83% complete
His smile widened as he wondered exactly what this Project_Tempest might
entail. Far be it from him to let an opportunity to cash in on another
Decker's hard work. It was the man's own fault for using his corp
passcodes to use this system as his entry point into the Matrix. If he
had just hacked in like any Decker worth his chips, he wouldn't have
discovered him at the CPU.
'Amateur....' he muttered to himself as Bessy's sultry voice sounded in
his mind.
*****File transfer completed
Moving quickly, the shadow exited the MPCP back into the slave node, and
stopped dead in his tracks. There, standing in the room with him, was a
cyber-dog. A bloodhound actually, pointing directly at him with one paw
in the air and his tail sticking straight out of his ass.
'Frag...'
The idiot had triggered Trace ice at his transfer point......and either
hadn't seen it or failed to defeat it. Whatever this file was, he must
have been jone'sin for it pretty bad to let the trace program finish
without pulling himself out. He was burned, but he had taken the risk
in order to finish the file transfer.
Sailing down the datalines, the shadow returned to the I/O Port where
the security camera's ran. They were still on active display, and his
vision centered in on the screen that showed the wageslave and his
deck. Believing the file to be safely in storage, the little man was
frantically disconnecting himself from the Slave Node, pretty well
yanking the dataline from the jack in his temple and thrusting the Fuchi
into a long briefcase.
Asmodeon's eyes drifted to another viewpoint offered by the security
cameras.......which showed four rather heavily armed gentlemen with
Systems Corp badges heading down the hallways with grim looks on their
faces. He could already guess the outcome of tonights little foray into
the Matrix for this chummer.
*****Execute: Videolog Recording <SysCorp 23:22:45/03-03-61>
The four men burst into the room, the wageslave dropping the briefcase
as his face took on four shades of pale. There wasn't any audio from
the cameras, but Asmodeon didn't need it. He could pretty much guess at
the verbal interplay among the goons and the poor drekhead.
His physical mouth opened wide in shock, however, as his shadowy
personna watched the lead goon pull out a nasty Predator and clip the
man square in the head, point blank.
No questioning.
No detaining.
Frag and burn.
These men were seriously pissed.
His panic grew to greater levels as he watched a second goon pull out
the dead-man's cyberdeck and attach the cable to his own datajack. It
wouldn't take him long to figure out that the Project_Tempest.scm file
was empty. And he would then go into the system to look for a
reason....namely, him.
*****Videolog Recording <SysCorp 23:24:05/03-03-61> ended.
*****File saved Fragged.log
With a quick keystroke, Asmodeon's connection with the Matrix was
terminated, leaving the leather clad man disoriented and breathing
heavily. Sitting back against the head of the bed, the Decker
disconnected the cable from his datajack and used the bandanna to wipe
the sweat that had accumulated on his brow.
Reaching for the Jolt on the bedside table, he took the last remaining
swigs of the burning liquid and began frantically thinking of his next
move..........
+++++end video]<<<<<
-- Asmodeon <23:28:55/03-03-61>
