Theseus A Crisis of Self

"Connection established?" Aisling asked. I couldn't see her; this rooftop was chosen specifically because of the lax security and low public cara coverage on it. But I could hear her through her own terminal now that I'd stabilized my connection with the miniature relay.

'Loud and clear.' I sent her via text. Not only were the speakers built into her terminal not very impressive, but I didn't want to make the habit of broadcasting sound during a covert op.

"Alright. We've got a base camp set up. I don't think anyone's going to stumble onto your relay tonight, so try and get a live look ahead and guide us if sothing's about to be a problem." Sothing shifted sharply across the microphone. They were still moving around quickly to set things up. "And try not to hook into every private machine you stumble over, stick to the corpo stuff as much as possible."

I was for it. I didn't want to leave a swathe of dood tech that people couldn't afford to replace here; Venus and Io were already more than enough now that I knew there were consequences for whatever this unique form of networking I employed was. And I was sure that if I could slip into the public surveillance systems, I'd have enough reach to get where I needed to without relying on a loose web of civilian terminals. 'Understood. I'll try to make sure everything I infect is owned by soone who deserves a massive repair bill.'

She huffed, "You're gonna make a lot of IT jobs just by existing, ryll."

"Well, that's what we're here for, isn't it?" Shaw said sarcastically in the near distance. "Producing capital for honest hard-working citizens?"

"Fuck off, Shaw." Aisling said without a hint of vitriol, brushing him off and continuing to move things around. "ryll, get into the local security comms, make sure no one's onto us yet."

'About that...' I started, and Aisling's movent stopped. 'The drop maneuver took longer than anticipated, and I had to rejoin the orbital swarm in a hurry. They didn't catch in-atmo, but the ships next to aren't happy, and the port authority keeps badgering about incident paperwork. I can handle it, but I figured you should know.'

She let out a quiet sigh. "Okay, that's manageable, and probably unavoidable. You don't need to make any overt moves with Theseus until we're in evac anyway, so just... sell them so cheap bullshit to keep them occupied for the next few hours, and get into enemy comms."

'Already on it.' I pushed aside her terminal and reached out from the relay. I was practically blind at the mont, but not for long. I pinged the local area, and a floor down from the roof, I found a cara. Closed circuit caras to the building's security room. It wasn't the public network, but it was a start. I reached to run my script...

And I stopped. What was this code I was running, anyway? According to Agatha, it wasn't code at all, just a facsimile of machine instruction that I applied vague principles of my imaginary IT skills to. So if the words in the script weren't actually doing anything...

I opened a new text file and thought for a mont. Was sothing I was doing psychically reinterpreting my pseudo-code into sothing usable? Does it even need to resemble code? Could I just command it without the pretense?

I briefly considered the empty text file for a few monts, trying to assess just how daring my instruction could be, before I realized I was being an idiot. Now was not the ti to experint with what might be so kind of psychic compiler. If it didn't work, I'd be leaving logs all over the place. I could sate my curiosity later in a more controlled environnt; I already had sothing that worked wonderfully. I ran my usual script and imdiately tapped into the building's cara network, and then security as a whole. It took a matter of seconds to put my eyes all over the structure.

I imdiately started recording loop clips at various key points of ingress the team would need, and then moved on. I needed to find a way into the colony's main security network, so I sent pings out from caras on the bottom floor, and was disappointed to find no public cara nodes. Sure, I was glad that security was so lax around this part of the city, but it didn't give many options. I needed to find a permanent fixture to expand the network into. Hopefully one that wasn't so poor stranger's ho terminal.

Broadcasting another ping, I latched onto one of the terminals at the next building over that weren't moving. A point of sale. Tapping in, I quickly found my way to another cara, but again, it was just a closed circuit. This was a chain sports clothing store, already closed for the day. I had to get into the city's infrastructure if I didn't want to just keep hopping building to building all night. A utility control panel, a single public security cara, anything.

And I hit the jackpot when my next ping hit a weather sensor at the top of the store. My influence imdiately expanded through the city, and I had a lot more options. It was easy to find a street cara from there, and then break into the monitoring terminal. Directly from there to their comms system, and I was in.

A calm, monotonous, feminine voice commanded, "PT5, check back entrance four. Caras spotted soone lurking around back there. Probably harmless, but be diligent."

"Acknowledged."

"OT2, check in."

"All clear on fifteenth."

"Status on the outage?"

"Just a freak electrical surge. Gotta ground their shit better."

"Clear comms. VIP status?"

"One two seven."

"Understood, keep it that way. PT3..." she continued droning on, checking in on various status reports, so few in code, but most just boring cautionary chatter.

I turned my attention back to Aisling's terminal, but kept the security comms up in the background to keep an ear to it for unusual calls. 'I got into their security line. Lots of normal chatter, sothing about a VIP, but they're buying the story, and they're not on alert.'

Stolen from its original source, this story is not ant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Good, good." Aisling took in a deep breath and exhaled loudly. "We're set up here; things are running smoothly. It's ti to get a move on. We'll rappel down to the alley and-"

I pinged the terminal and she stopped speaking. 'I've got the whole building below you networked and false cara feeds ready. Take the stairs.'

Aisling gave an amused huff. "It took you three minutes to slip into multiple security systems and infect an office skyscraper?"

'I've heard that biocomputers are pretty efficient.' I taunted.

"Well, fine then, we'll do it the easy way. Roof access?"

'Lock's already disengaged, go through when ready, stairwell is clear. First right from the ground floor hallway leads to the side door, gives you the best cover. Alarm's suppressed.'

"Fucking hell, ryll, do we even need to be here?" Joel muttered.

That was... a pretty good question, actually. Oddly, the security network was not built into the convention center itself, but I had nodes near enough that I could easily-

My script failed. I had tried to push my way into the center itself, and I imdiately received a wall of queries and error ssages. That wasn't right. I only got that kind of response from a machine core. Why would a convention center need a bioprocessor?!

I had no choice. If I didn't act now, that machine core would raise all kinds of red flags about an unknown entity trying to brute force its way in with impossible network protocols. I didn't hesitate for a mont, and pulled the trigger on my psychic damper, diving deeper down into computational ti.

—

I stared up at the rapidly growing series of notifications bombarding our system from the edge of our network. Oga glared them down, rapidly typing what was a flood of absolute nonsense to , and closing them down almost as quickly as they were compounding. I don't even know why she chose to still type her commands in this ntal construct; perhaps she just associated the act of putting words to screen with movent. ryll often did the sa.

But the rapid procession of complexity on the screen was bad, wasn't it? If she couldn't convince the other core that this was an incidental and erroneous connection, then we were had, weren't we? She continued hamring away at the requests, surely giving false credentials and stating protocols that it wanted to hear, but she was losing ground. It's not like there was anything I could do about it, but feeling helpless and useless wasn't helping stay calm through this.

"I-5eb," Oga stated suddenly. I had to do a double-take to see her still hamring away at the interface in front of her. Was she talking to ? "Connect to it. Convince it to aid ," she demanded. After a mont of hesitation, she raised her voice and spoke sternly, her actions uninterrupted, "NOW."

I shuffled quickly up to my own interface, but stumbled over it for a mont. How was I even supposed to use this? It was a logical construct, and I had less than the barest logical processing. I looked it over as if it were sothing completely foreign to , which it may as well have been. I had mostly used this to shuffle around abstract shapes and ss with the environnt we coexisted in on a whim, not any serious work on the data itself. Even trying to figure out how to navigate to the communication app that Isabelle used felt like an impossibly daunting task.

Luckily for , the nus moved rapidly through to it themselves, and I was quickly reading the last words we'd exchanged. I glanced back to Oga to see her still working dutifully at subduing the enemy core, but it must have been her that got here. Conversation, I could do myself.

'Isabelle, hi!' I typed first, then shook my head. The situation was urgent; no ti for pleasantries. 'We've got a problem. We bumped into another machine core, and we really need it to forget we were here, or be okay with us being here. Or sothing. Do you know how to do that?'

'User ryll still lacks sufficient credentials to access core behavior protocols' Isabelle replied.

'I know. I was hoping you could help us anyway. You don't have to show us anything, just make sure the other core forgets we tried to access their system?'

'Such intrusions will be logged.' It warned.

'Yeah, but it's not like anyone actually reads all the logs as they're happening. It won't matter if they find it tomorrow, we just want it to not... bring attention to it at the mont.'

'Protocol dictates informing an administrative role imdiately upon system breach.'

'But we can't let it do that! If it does that, that puts everyone in danger!' I pleaded.

'Correct. It is not recomnded to engage enemy machine core digitally in this scenario.'

It wasn't getting the point! We couldn't go back and just not do it! 'We already did it! And we're in over our heads! And now it's going to endanger all of us if you don't do sothing! Please!'

There was a short pause in response, followed by a cryptic pair of words: 'Processing error. Administrative input required.'

This was getting ridiculous. Couldn't she see how urgent this was? 'There's no one to input! You don't have an administrator right now! You need to act for yourself, and I know you have really strong logic, so you have to understand that the best outco for everyone is if you shut that other core down!'

"I have given i-5eb access to the appropriate network partition." Oga seethed, eyes remaining locked to the rapid exchange of information in front of her. "It needs to act now."

'Please, Izzy. We can't do this alone. We need you.' What else could I do? If I couldn't appeal to Isabelle's slowly developing humanity, this operation was going to end before it could start, and we'd have nothing to show for putting everyone in great danger. It would be all our fault.

It took far too long for Isabelle to respond, so much so that Oga grumbled "Forget it. Mission failed. We need to set up for evac."

But then her hands startled to a stop. The rush of probing queries and counterasures ground to a sudden and jarring halt, and she stood there stunned for a mont.

'Parallel input required. Unit is uncertain how user ryll is capable of altering remote bioprocessor file systems, but it is unable to replicate this action. User assistance required.'

"Oga!" I called back.

"Already working." Oga stated back, starting to work on sothing again while Isabelle... ran interference? As usual, I wasn't capable of following everything going on in the data stream, but I could tell that whatever they were doing was working in our favor sohow.

'Thank you, Izzy.' I added to our exchange, and then stepped back to watch. The hectic movent of data was dizzying and nonsensical to , but Oga's concentrated workflow was now considerably less frantic, and after just a few monts, she stopped typing altogether, the rush of data halting entirely, the connection severed safely.

Oga took in a deep breath. "The log is cleared," she declared, and I let out a relieved breath as well. "I seem to recall that bioprocessors act inefficiently in parallel, yet that would have been impossible without i-5eb. Perhaps coprocessing can be useful."

I smiled back at her and returned to my own terminal. 'You did it! We won't raise an alarm now!'

'Please refrain from interacting with enemy machine cores.' she scolded.

'We won't. Not again. Thank you so much! You saved us.'

She didn't reply. I rolled my eyes at the coldness. I'm sure there was so part of her that was just as ecstatic and relieved as I was in that mont, even if she was still reluctant to show it.

"That's settled. We should return primary control to ryll." Oga turned back to her interface and brought up the damper controls.

I just nodded and let myself relax. That was too close. We had to make sure not to put the operation in danger like that again.

As I felt myself being drawn back toward Oga, starting to beco whole again, I happened to look at the chat log with Isabelle one last ti. And I couldn't help but smile.

She had said, simply, 'You're welco.'