Alia Rhodes sat at her desk, eyes locked on her monitor waiting for the tir on the screen to hit zero.
No, she wasn’t waiting for the legendary windows update to complete which would have required a lot less nerves than this.
She was instead waiting for the tir to complete on OmniTech’s CryptCall app.
Finding a way to get in touch with him was a whole lot harder than she thought, impossible even. After all, every eting they’ve ever had was always cleanly wiped from her systems.
And she had not a single way to trace him, except he got in contact first, or so she thought.
As he had shown in all their previous communications, OmniTech was soone who never does sothing in the way she expected.
From his avatar to even the last ssage he sent her when they tried copying Sentinel, they all seem to show that he was a playful individual.
But Alia was not one to be fooled, a thinking that was not wrong per day, but it was what caused her to overcomplicate the search for Ethan.
She had tried searching online, hacking into black hats forums, tracing deep web chatter, and even fed a few carefully crafted baits into honeypots just to see if anyone knew who was behind OmniTech.
But everything led to a a dead end.
It had taken her two weeks to finally realize that a clue was right under her nose and she wasn’t even actively looking for it.
______
Alia collapsed into the chair in her ho office, utterly drained from yet another fruitless day of chasing a lead on OmniTech.
She booted up her PC to complete so work before finally getting the chance to rest.
But the mont the machine turned on, she was stuck in the boot up screen with the windows update.
"Damn it," she muttered under her breath before leaning back on the chair, waiting for the update to complete.
She sighed again and closed her eyes, letting the tension in her shoulders lt.
But when the update bar finally filled and the desktop booted to life, sothing imdiately caught her attention.
Her background had changed.
Instead of the usual dark the she always kept, the screen now displayed a pixelated version of the CryptCall logo except it was now glitched.
The disconnected parts of the logo ford a certain trail which her eyes followed, leading to what looked like a docunt she hadn’t rembered saving.
Her first thought was that she had been hacked, but that thought was quickly discarded due to the familiar logo on her screen.
She had rembered seeing it on the software usually sent by Ethan for them to communicate.
Narrowing her eyes, she clicked on the docunt and the screen imdiately went blank and lines of binary started scrolling across her screen, confusing her.
Was she wrong in thinking that the update was from OmniTech? Had she been caught off guard by so black hat hacker?
But soon enough, with every few lines of binary, a letter scrolled past. After a couple of letters, she realized that a word was ford, forcing her to imdiately take out a pen and writing pad from her drawer and started noting down each letter.
By the end of it, the binary disappeared and the PC booted back up, everything resetting back to how it previously was.
Alia looked down on the notepad, on it was an arrangent of letters that seed to be completely random.
She stared at the jumble of letters.
rFa2-KmT9q-vQbZ0-XuLw7-pNgE1
It didn’t look like a ssage. It looked like a license key... or perhaps—
Her eyes widened as the realization struck her.
"A one-ti access link," she muttered.
She opened her terminal and ran a sandboxed virtual environnt, then launched a secure browser instance.
A habit she had developed even though she knew it was useless to open the link in a secured environnt, since her PC had just been hacked without her being able to do anything.
She pasted the code into the address bar, and hit enter.
The browser flickered.
Then the screen faded into black.
White text appeared one line at a ti, in a minimalist, monospaced font:
"Curiosity killed the cat..."
Alia arched an eyebrow.
Another line appeared:
"...but satisfaction brought it back."
Then the screen shifted, and a blinking cursor appeared beneath a simple prompt:
[ Solve : 13, 1, 20, 8 ]
She frowned. Numbers?
That didn’t give her enough clues to work with after all, those numbers could an anything and she has no idea where to start.
But that’s when a text box at the bottom of the screen caught her eye.
She imdiately jotted them down, then cross-referenced each number with the alphabet.
13 = M
1 = A
20 = T
8 = H
"Math," she said as she typed it in the text box that she assud was for the answer.
Almost imdiately, the screen changed and a new prompt appeared:
[Good, now let’s see how far down the rabbit hole you’re willing to go.]
[Decrypt this: U2FsdGVkX1/Je5AqvpKtk9pJSKF9W7whL0Rzla==]
She blinked, recognizing the encryption format instantly.
"OpenSSL encrypted base64," she muttered, already opening her decryption tools.
But it needed a password. Of course it did.
She paused, glancing back at the original docunt na [rFa2-KmT9q-vQbZ0-XuLw7-pNgE1]. A one-ti access key, a website link... or was it more?
She tried it.
The terminal loaded for a while, then spat out a new ssage.
[You’re so close, just a few more puzzles.]
________
It took puzzle after puzzle before she finally got a link that allowed her to send only a single email.
Although Alia was a bit annoyed at the fact that she had to spend over an hour deciphering clues, she couldn’t deny that she was relieved in finally finding a way to get in touch with OmniTech.
The tir finally hit zero and her screen soon changed, showing the sa Chibi avatar sitting on a cube with a smile on its face.
"Hello Alia," it said, "I must say, it has been a while."
Alia sighed before nodding, "yes, it has."
She expected him to ntion the attempted copy, especially since he’d already made it clear he knew. Fortunately, she had a well-prepared excuse ready.
"It seems you were satisfied with Sentinel’s demo," the avatar stated with a smile.
Ethan deliberately avoided ntioning the fact that they had previously tried and failed to copy a simple demo since this was a business eting and not one ant to taunt them, after all, he needed them as much as they did him.
"Yes," she replied in an even tone. "Satisfied... and intrigued. But I think you already knew that."
The Chibi avatar tilted its head playfully. "Curiosity is a powerful motivator. I counted on that."
"So we’d like to officially et and discuss the terms," she calmly said.
"Is that so?" The avatar placed a hand on his chin, almost as if he was thinking about it.
"I’m inclined to entertain the offer," Ethan finally said. "But as you may have guessed, I don’t exactly do face-to-face etings."
"I figured," Alia replied. "That’s why we’ve prepared secure channels—"
"No need," he interrupted gently. "You’ll be dealing with soone else. My Chief Operations Officer will handle the neotiations, you might know her from Sentinel’s launch announcent."
"She’ll be in touch within twenty-four hours through this sa channel," he continued, "you’ll discuss the negotiation dates and co to an agreent."
There was a mont of silence on Alia’s end as she thought about it. Knowing OmniTech’s identity—or at least soone close to him—would give them an advantage. Not just in negotiations, but in understanding his limits, his vision and his blind spots.
His anonymous status made him seem completely untouchable and although Alia had no intention to agitate OmniTech since he has more than proved dangerous enough, that information might serve a purpose later.
But knowing him, she knew that he wouldn’t reveal his identity just like that, else he wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of hiding it anyway.
With another resigned sigh she said, "fine, we’ll be waiting for the contact then."
The Chibi avatar’s smile playfully widened.
"I thought you’d say that," Ethan said, his tone soft and amused. "Oh, and Alia?"
She looked up.
"I wouldn’t recomnd trying to dig into her past searching for a weakness either."
Before she could reply, the screen went blank and rebooted again, restoring her usual Interface, with the CryptCall software completely gone from her PC.
"Alright then," she stood back up, "let’s hope this goes well."
_______
Ethan leaned back on his chair as the software closed. This was where Lillian’s test began and he really hoped she impressed him.
"Athena, start fanning the flas Jas created." He said, "let’s keep Nathaniel busy until the deal is done."
{Got it,} she replied, imdiately getting to work, collecting every single questioning post as well as releasing so proofs that Nathaniel really was supporting Avance and Jas.
"This should keep him for a while," Ethan said with a grin.
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