[K5pbem] Story Fragment - Asagiri's Run

[Logan Darklighter]

I was doing some reading on Kazei 5 stuff preparatory to getting back 
into writing for it, and came across this snippet from the "storys/story 
fragments" folder in my K5pbem folder. At first I couldn't remember what 
was the point of all of this, but as I read it, it started coming back 
to me.

I'm pretty sure this was going to be part of the "Raven Escapes 
Shiroko-Tsuhi" arc. This was a data-run that Asagiri was doing as part 
of the research trying to find either Johnny Carstairs or... er... 
something. Can't remember now.

Anyway. The first section here was a set of jotted down outlines of 
stuff that was to happen. I don't think these were mine. Anybody 
remember them?

The second part is the actual story scene I was writing. And if you're 
wondering - yes I WAS very influenced by Snowcrash. Heh.

ANYway - the whole point of this is - In going back over the story 
fragment, I was actually rather pleased with the stylistic presentation 
of cyberspace and the hacking. This from someone who most definately is 
NOT a hacker or even a programmer. But somehow I think it reads pretty 
well anyway. So I'm sharing.

Because frankly, this is never going to grace the official Kazei 5 pages 
anyway, since it never got finished. I think I must have been pressed 
for time and decided I needed to get Lora's sections done more urgently.

(Outline Section)
=====================

Figure that Asagiri gets the following:

A data file on a transaction for [pick an amount -- 25 million sounds 
good] in new yen.


The transaction is from [individual name -- pick something].


The money is being put into the account of Yoshiko Sakakibara [extra 
credit if Logan gets the joke]. ((No... actually, I don't get the 
reference. Would whoever wrote this enlighten me?))

This transaction is dated one week before the hit on Midori's familiy.


Additional files (some fragmented) show that the Yoshiko account is a 
front for the main BC account.


The person who did the hire works for a company that Asagiri can easily 
discover is a simple shell that apparently exists to make expenditures 
on behalf of someone else.


Part of the grab will be: finances (hardsuit repair, ammo, energy cells, 
etc.);

 

someone's collection of adult pictures -- apparently they like lesbians; 
Asagiri suspects that the pics are from a security camera... Asagiri: 
"Yes. The quality and positioning isn't what you'd call optimal in a 
porn flick. And it's the same three women in various combinations..."
 

a whole set of gun pics with specs; computer usage logs
(maintained by one N.R.); a cheat file for a popular on-line sim; an order
for computer memory (made by one Nene Romanova -- address included!); and
a listing of places that deliver in the Chicago area.

=====================

(And here's that fragment)

=====================

With a flashing, stepping disc effect, Asagiri rezzed into existence a 
few hundred meters from the Black Company database and surveyed the 
scene before her. She was out in the hinterlands of the Net. Of course, 
that term was a bit subjective, as was the sense of distance.

This really wasn't a completely isolated system. There were plenty of 
linkages to major servers and systems all around in the underlying 
structure, but no actual addresses had been claimed closer than an order 
of six to this particular location. On the horizon the bright lights and 
towers of the endless night city that was the relative "center" of 
cyberspace rose toward the sky. Asagiri could see the edges of general 
development encroaching on the unclaimed nodes nearby; a seething 
borderland of creativity and opportunity.

Personal chat rooms, data storage blocks, web pages and the like resided 
out here. The nearest structures other than Asagiri's target were the 
tall spindly pylons staking claim on domain names. Small businesses came 
into existence and died just as quickly, forgotten before they could be 
noticed out here on the fractal border of chaos.

It was also a good place to place something if you didn't want too much 
attention. The Black Company's home computer network was a rather 
respectable datafortress, though it wasn't much to look at from the AV 
interface of the net. The featureless dark gray cylinder looked a lot 
like the empty shell of an ISP that had been bought out by one of the 
corporations.

Sensible, Asagiri nodded to herself. Nothing to attract attention, and 
so few would come out here to look anyway. Nothing to give away what it 
actually is; the first line of defense is always stealth. The sysop 
probably moves it out further every few weeks ahead of the borderlands.

Asagiri brought out the password from her jacket and activated it. A 
stylized suit of power armor formed over her icon, replacing her regular 
outfit. It wasn't actually a combat program; it was, however, apparently 
stylized to look like one of the Black Company's hardsuits.

Interesting. Asagiri mused. Midori had guessed that this was likely a 
low level password. However, this seemed to be a personal code of one of 
the Black Company themselves. Perhaps not every core member had high 
level access. That said interesting things about the level of trust and 
the command structure of the Black company. She'd file that for future 
reference.

All right then, she would enter the Datafortress disguised as one of the 
Black Company itself. Convenient, but it could lead to problems if the 
person she was impersonating was in the system at the same time. She 
shrugged to herself, nothing for it but to take the chance. But all the 
same, she made sure her combat utilities were loaded, including a 
customized version of Hardsuit-3 that she modified right there on the 
fly to match the appearance of the Black Company suit she "wore". Now 
she was as ready as she would ever get.

She scanned one more time around the surrounding area with the sensors 
in Hardsuit 3. There were no active security programs out on the 
surrounding plain. There was just the door and the datawalls. Just like 
the last time she had scouted it.

She activated the jets on the hardsuit and flew toward the cylinder. 
Skimming around the base of the structure, she quickly found the 
entrance, a darker gray, almost black, section of wall in front of her. 
She walked up to it and laid a hand on it. It opened obediently in front 
of her. The black slab retreated behind a curtain of green code that 
parted a moment later itself.

Asagiri scanned the system out of curiosity as it acknowledged her 
password, shifting her perceptions with easy familiarity to ignore the 
AV interface and look at the naked code behind the simulated reality...

...And then she whistled low in appreciation. This was one of the 
cleverest - and meanest - hacks she had seen in a while. They had a 
randomized data stream running through the primary layer of the door 
program, so that if someone touched the door to codebust it, their 
cybermodem's data stream itself would be randomized. It looked like they 
had killer Black ICE buried in it too, ready to pounce once the hacker's 
systems were scrambled - nasty.

If she had touched this without a password, she might not have been able 
to get back out of the system before it fried everything important to 
her, including her mind. She was incredibly fast and adaptable, but this 
might have been beyond even her. She'd have to try a variation on this 
herself sometime. She lingered a moment to record some of the code for 
future reference, then moved on.

Inside, the system architecture was just as bland and unexciting. She 
was standing at the bottom of another cylinder, this one much larger 
than the one visible from the outside. Around her were low level blocks 
and polyhedrons representing datastores, I/O ports, CPUs, SPUs, slave 
modules and the like. Glowing datalines ran everywhere, connecting 
various subsystems together. There wasn't a shred of original 
personality to be seen in the architecture. It was all standardized 
matrix icons.

Something moving caught Asagiri's attention, something that looked out 
of place in this otherwise bland dataspace. An eight legged bug... no... 
an eight legged rabbit-like creature moved from one CPU to another in 
the distance. Zooming in on it, she used her sensors to probe past the 
outer AV shell to peek at it. A low level system maintenance drone, she 
noted. The visual reference was vaguely familiar to her, but she 
couldn't place it just yet. Kinda cute, though, she smiled to herself. 
So whoever maintained this datafortress wasn't completely devoid of 
personality after all.

Her attention was brought back to her immediate surroundings by a 
proximity warning from the Hardsuit. Another icon was approaching her. 
Her hardsuit HUD identifying it as a "boomer" security construct. 
Asagiri tensed, ready to fight or flee if she had been identified as an 
intruder. The boomer swung its optics toward her. It was a hulking 
monstrosity based in part on the Jinsei BU-65-A combat chassis.

This one, however, was painted not in a dull camouflage pattern or the 
neutral blue that all factory models carried by default in real space...

...but a shocking hot pink.

Oh. My. God..., Asagiri thought to herself, I know who would be sick 
enough to do that...

The boomer looked her up and down, then said, "Identity confirmed - 
Linna Yamazaki, Level 4 clearance, access to non-sensitive database only."

Asagiri noted and recorded the name for future reference. So that's 
whose password I have.

Acknowledging the boomer and scanning it, she then walked past the 
security construct and over to an I/O port represented by a guide window 
floating in midair and a glowing stepping disc at the edge of the 
platform she was standing on. Datalines attached to it and branched off 
into the rest of the structure. Calling up a map of destinations on the 
window, she saw that more than half of them were blocked off and 
inaccessible to her level of clearance.

She did a detailed passive scan at this point, looking for other 
security protocols. She found indications of several lurking in the 
background. Now it gets interesting, Asagiri thought to herself. Keeping 
her exterior icon immobile, she called up a file structure on her own 
internal system and brought up another of her own programs.

Pointing to one of the accessible datablocks - one that looked like it 
held accounting and payroll information in it by the looks of the 
filename - she entered it into the I/O port destination. Stepping onto 
the disc, she was translated to another platform with more data screen 
windows surrounding the edges of the platform and overlapping each 
other, with a another guide screen in front - a basic file system. 
Looking for Linna Yamazaki's payroll files, she quickly found she had 
access to them. She began checking "her" account. This should look like 
normal activity to any security watching. Making copies of the 
information and filing them in her own system, Asagiri then turned to go 
back to the I/O port out of the room.

As she stepped onto the disc for translation, she activated the program 
she had called up.

As the hardsuit/password construct appeared back at the entrance to the 
datafortress and walked past the security boomer standing there, one of 
the hardsuit's gloves flickered out to brush the boomer as it went past.

The Yamazaki icon appeared in another spot within the database 
unrestricted to it. Then it began to hop from location to location in a 
semi random fashion.

Asagiri was no longer associated with it. She had duplicated the 
hardsuit/password and left the copied shell to wander randomly.

Her own network presence was now only a pinpoint in cyberspace, a random 
packet of information bouncing back and forth through the data transfer 
protocols, but not stopping in any one place long enough to register as 
a presence for the system to render. The experience was jarring, and not 
something that was pleasant to endure for too long. But it had the 
advantage of making her invisible to the surrounding system. Asagiri had 
her sense of personal time dilated as much as possible, and even so, the 
flickering of system environments past her spectral "eye" was happening 
once every subjective half second. Just enough to get a decent view of a 
location before bouncing somewhere else. In real time, she was 
flickering in and out across the system at a rate measured in picoseconds.

She was not truly in control of where she wound up. The program she had 
created took her in a random "drunkard's walk" through the system. After 
a few moments of this activity, she had a general idea of the layout of 
the datafortress and where the important secure information was. As she 
dropped in at each location, she had a brief moment to decide if it had 
something worth getting. If a location node looked like it had something 
worth looking at, she dropped a codebreaker and a retrieval program in 
before she was shunted to a new location. As she passed locations a 
second time, she had a moment to retrieve updates from her 
semi-autonomous programs.

She was falling behind in processing all of this information though. 
Bandwidth limitations between her home system, the net, and this 
datafortress meant that she would quickly be forced out of this loop she 
was in and take up a position in the virtual reality of the 
datafortress. When she stopped and the system rendered her, the security 
was likely to take notice of her. She needed to already have a foothold 
on the systems she was compromising before that happened.

There... financial transaction files... transition... personal 
accounts... transition... client lists... transition... security camera 
logs... transition... someone's collection of adult pictures (huh?)... 
transition... expenditure and maintenance logs... transition... a cheat 
file for a popular on-line sim... transition...

Then she flickered past a virtual room with a

=====================


And that's where it ends. Sorry about that. I think she was seeing 
Nene's own control room there, and was going to go back to it. At that 
point, in order to have some conflict to the story, I believe I was 
going to have Nene actually "there" (in the virtual sense) and have them 
duke it out in a hacker battle. It would inconclusive in terms of who 
"wins" because neither of them brain-burn the other. But Nene would 
drive Asagiri out of the database, and think she'd won. Only for the 
reader to find out that Asagiri "lost" because she'd "zombie 
processed/duplicated" herself at the start of the fight, and part of her 
was elsewhere doing the actual hack! Thus she did get the info she was 
after. And left a little "surprise" for Nene in the form of a derisive 
"gotcha" message that would appear later on time-delay.

That's what I've reconstructed from my spotty memory. Anybody else 
remember circumstances surrounding this?

-Logan
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