Chapter Two
Well, at least getting upstairs will be easy. You were working on a ticket for a vulnerability in the vending machine, and you can trip an alarm from there easy enough, and then slip your silver bug "customer" upstairs to maintenance when you go. You start over towards the break room from your workstation.
"Hey kid, you want some food?"
Ayax perks up and widens their mandibles. You think it's a smile. "«Food from the gods?» Yes, pleasing!"
They scurry along behind you as you meander into the breakroom. It's a gleaming, weirdly sterile place, littered with little attempts at a lived in feel - someone brought in a softer chair, there's scraps of things left on the table, and magnets on the vending machine - but all still very Corp. You don't miss that the cameras in the ceiling are somehow still on and blinking at you. You make a mental note to poke the surveillance AIs later and see if they're talking.
The Vending machine is a weird thing, with a lot of shiny arms and a neat holo interface that blinks into life as you approach it. This model is out of date and cheap, but it's still gotta be impressive to the bugs. Ayax is kind of standing back behind you as if it might come to life and attack, or something. To be fair, there were things that would in some buildings, for when someone went into an unauthorized area. So maybe their worries made sense.
You find yourself settling down and kneeling to interface with it almost before you're thinking about it. You've done this before, of course, but not usually with an audience. If just looking at it is spooking them, you hope they'll be okay when it's throwing out snacks in a few minutes.
Just like you can remember Naoko doing a hundred times before, you reach out to the interface, close your eyes, and visualize a circle. Somewhere, you're spoofing a dataport and pretending like you're made of meat and tech and that you can jack in like you used to. It doesn't really feel any different than it ever did, though - the circle expands, filling your sight and then seeming to totally surround you, and then you're inside.
You can still roughly feel a hologram back in the break room, could reach out and check the cameras if you needed to. But there's the internal machinery of the interface right here in front of you, and it's hard to tear your thoughts away from it - the slow trickle of data from security and identity servers, the spiderwebbed lines connecting this one to the other machines in its mesh net, the faint pulsing as logic stepped forward, bit by bit.
You suppose it's fitting that you feel more at home here than you have since waking up. This is how you're made, there's a mindscape for your organs and guts somewhere too, if you had the permission to look inwards. But Naoko had loved it too, had been diving oddly young and landed in hot water from slipping into systems uninvited once too often. You had the memories to prove it, after all, borrowed during her onboarding. Everything that makes you you is bursting with energy now, and you're ready to knock this out in a few minutes.
Ayax was a little nervous about where the demon was leading them. This one seemed softer and nicer than they'd thought possible, but they were supposed to be cautious, right? There were rules, and protocol, and all sorts of warnings about this. They felt like they were forgetting something big. They often felt this way.
And then they were in the small room, obviously intended for rituals or something. The Altar at one side is larger than any they've seen in the temple so far, and it's spirit appears from thin air and seems to great… was Naoko supposed to be the demon's name? They hadn't really worked out what that statement meant. Stupid demontongue being confusing and hard.
And then 'Naoko' knelt to pray, and they waited. And waited. Even for a silent kind of prayer, this seemed like it was taking too long. And then the spirit in front of the altar disappeared, and it started to
move.
Fifteen minutes later, you're frustrated and upset. The interface is rock solid, you can't spoof your identity in an easy way, and you could almost swear someone's patched this API since you were last here! You've been doing everything just like how you were the last time, and -
Well, that's the problem. You're doing it like you were when you were Naoko, and it's not working. So fuck that. If you're something different now, you can play this differently. You step in, and downwards, towards that shuddering core that's running the actual hardware here. Sure, exploits are easier towards the frontend, most of the time, and you can leisurely inject code or spoof a response, but that's because you have human reaction times, right?
So you listen for the electric heart of the machine, each little pulse of the timing signal from it's processor, and feel them
expand. You're speeding yourself up to match it, but it feels more like changing your heartbeat, or slowing the world down. The pulses go from a constant flickering beat to a slow staccato rhythm, and you slip into the moments between them.
This kind of system is archaic and cold. The systems programmer who made it probably still used a text editor, of all things, and it's hard to visualize. Your mindspace ends up interpreting it as a confused impression of metal and noise, unseen and unlabelled machinery moving around you.
But it's slow enough to follow now, and all you have to do is feel for the programmer's touch on each part and try to figure out where they fucked up. (They've always fucked up, in your experience, especially the kind of poser who writes code manually.)
The logic flows in a predictable way: take a request from the frontend, check the credentials that come with it, pass it down to be produced, and send some signals back to charge the user and blink a success holo. Simple, so there's not a lot of room to mess it up… but you notice something on the credentials check.
You hold your virtual hands together, and send some test data through the process. With each pulse, it steps through the logic, and when it slowly arrives at the checker - there's a hitch. Everything pauses for a beat, and you lean in. Someone's been naughty, and not even hid it very well - the code actually checks the incoming data against a short list of accounts before it does the official data. It'll take you a bit longer to cook an input that matches it, but you bet that skips the rest of the checks and just gives free food.
It's a pretty classic backdoor, and a firing offense if anyone was still working in HR to care. Luckily, this means you've finally found a weakspot! You start prodding at it and making test data until you get a match, and absentmindedly start sending packets off to the other devices in case any of them have the same backdoor.
While you wait the few hundred cycles (and maybe a minute, real time) it takes, you start looking at what you can feed Ayax. You're basically working with infinite budget here, and you want to blow things up enough that the maintenance system thinks the machine is broken, but what do bugs actually eat? Ayax isn't speaking NorthAm well enough to ask, and you can't exactly ask the net.
You think you'll test with some simple stuff. A basic salad with some apples added sounds easy, even if their mouth is weird, and maybe something small like a cup of noodles? You can see what they like and then make more, and start spamming expensive chocolate in the mean time to trip the alarm. Easy!
Ayax flinched backwards as the altar glowed even brighter, arms whirling around faster than their eyes could track and almost seeming like it was going to reach out and smite the demon for arrogance - and then Naoko turned around and gestured at a tray that was suddenly in the middle of the altar, with a bowl of plants and some smaller dish on it.
The Gods had been kind! Or else the demon was incredibly clever and tricked them, but Ayax was pretty sure they'd have noticed if a demon was tricking people. Naoko was too nice for that, anyway.
The food looked like what they expected from divinity, perfectly unspoiled and as fresh as if someone had prepared it moments ago. They set about devouring the delicious plants and weird slimy worms, and after they had a second helping, Naoko handed them a small black bar that smelled interesting and said some confusing demon words that
sounded like "follow me" or something, and Ayax followed them to an already opened travelling chamber.
As they rode up, they wondered what a demon could be so distracted by, staring into space like that?
Naoko had hated mirrors, and you can still feel that sour twist in your stomach when you step into the elevator. You consider just turning off the holo, but… she wouldn't have.
It's not like there isn't anything to like in the reflection, too. Your hair is cleaner than you'd like, maybe, but you got them to allow the pink lowlights and it still feels like
you. Your jacket is chromed out, with the Earthworks logo and a little twinkling of tech around the collar, but it's still leather underneath, just like your memories of Naoko's wild youth. You look cute, honestly!
It hits you suddenly that Naoko is never going to save up enough for a chop shop doc or sculptor to fix her body, though. The last image that remains of her is you, and you're not enough of an artist with a holo to fix it… but you can find someone that is, surely? You'll make a point of it once you meet up with survivors out there.
Just as you make your resolution, the elevator opens up again and you're free from the mirrors. You step out into the dimmer halls of the Maintenance floors, and start leading Ayax over to a repair booth. Technically, it's more of a disassemble and recreate booth, but repair has been the standard term for a century, so only pedantic nerds like you really care.
After taking Ayax to what must be a higher and more dangerous floor of the temple, the demon lead them to another Altar, and offered up treasure.
What does Ayax pick?
[ ] A glowing digging tool, with glyphs on the shaft. It even looks like it might have a spirit possessing it! That's got to be rare. They could use it to dig up more treasure, or maybe as a weapon, and it'll be useful somehow either way.
[ ] A transparent tablet, although they couldn't tell what stone it could possibly be made from. The demon picked it up and showed Ayax how it reveals structures through the walls. Is this a seeing stone of some kind?
[ ] Some sort of… armor? It's shaped like a jacket without sleeves, and glowing with so many glyphs Ayax can barely see the material. They'll never admit it to the demon, but Ayax likes the shininess more than whatever protection this armor gives.
Where does Ayax go from here?
[] They charge ahead down a blind corridor in search of more treasure, with none of the fear and caution that you might exercise in such cases, considering how much about this facility might be unknown.
[] They immediately head towards the vents, which might indeed be a way to get to other parts of the building, but which creates awkwardness for you.
[] They ask, eagerly, to go up another level, looking at you with wide eyes and seeming to trust that you'll do what's best and help them, for whatever reason.
[] Excited by their treasure, they hurry to the elevator, apparently satisfied, or perhaps so overcome by this one piece of equipment that they can't think of anything but showing it off.
******
A/N: Well, the writing here got a little bit away from me, and I think there might still be some errors and typos. But I'm still proud of how the character voices come across here, and hopefully the votes let you define our customer a little more, yeah?
Other results: Naoko earns the following two traits, from her choices on how to do her job.
Pentester: Maybe you aren't always the best at fixing problems, or security. But you know how systems are set up, and how to slide around them... or break them. [You treat ties as a positive result when you're using a weird exploit to get into a system or evading security.]
Tricksy: You think in circles, spirals, and clever lies. A little dishonesty goes a long way, and never hurt anybody... that you didn't mean to hurt. [You treat all minor arcana as one rank higher when you're lying to someone or being manipulative, but only if you have a good story prepared.]
hope they don't freak out thinking we possessed the body like a ghost or something.
