The impromptu party had drained me socially, but I was still feeling physically energetic. I didn’t really want to go work out, so my options of what to spend my energy on were limited. Typically when I felt like that, my default was to start poking around where I probably shouldn’t, but with the numerous incidents that had happened around me recently, I didn’t want to give the suits more reason to dislike me.
It was a hard decision to make between entertainment and laying low. Or it was until I remembered I could just not get caught or do obvious damage.
For most people ‘just don’t get caught’ would be worse than useless advice, but in my case I could construe it as a training goal. I had specialized in being slippery, but hadn’t gotten much practice with that skillset. There was that one time I BS-ed some guards to break into a research facility, but that had been pretty sloppy. With my new physiology and better use of old perks, I should be able to break back in much easier- even if they had taken my security report seriously.
As I wandered over to the more military section of the campus, I decided on some rules I wanted to follow to make my infiltration more… training-like. Definitely not to make it more challenging and thus fun. First was no complete takeover of the security systems. I wasn’t sure if that was something I could even do, but on the chance it was, I likely wouldn’t even need to do anything else. However, individual devices were still fair game. Second, no using [Act] or [Unremarkable] unless it was absolutely necessary. Again, with them, I probably could get away with doing nothing else but a little acting.
A quick survey revealed that someone had been either annoyed or disturbed enough by my previous actions to follow some of my advice. Cameras now looked like they covered the entire perimeter fence and exterior doors had motion detectors to tell when they opened, although I still had some ideas of how to get past these measures.
While it was a bit suspicious if someone reviewed footage, I walked the fence until I reached the gatehouse from the side opposite the gate itself. The guard inside was fairly relaxed like every other one I’d seen on this island, so I was able to walk up and hide in blindspots in the windows and gate-overlooking camera created by the little bit of wall making up the corners of the building. It was one of the few times in my life I appreciated being a little small.
A push of will and ULE- hopefully small enough to not be picked up by the detectors- made the wall grippier and more sound absorbent. I readied myself to do something similar to the gutter and backed up a few steps as the guard started to pull out their phone.
My little run up gave me just enough force to kick off the wall and catch the gutter- strengthening and quieting it as my fingers made contact. From there I had to awkwardly scramble onto the roof, definitely because I had to stay behind the slight slant of the roof to not be seen by the cameras, and not because my flesh arm was significantly weaker than the metal one.
Now out of sight from most angles, I snaked my tail down behind the camera and braced myself for another bout of sickness. When the tip poked the housing, I once again felt a shadow on the edge of my mind. With some trepidation, I lightly pulled it into my mindspace and allocated most of my inorganic computing power to breaking in.
As expected, when the shell of the object and the edge of my mind touched, I immediately started feeling bad. However, my preparations must have taken the stress off my body since I only got a little stomach pain and a stuffy nose. Not wanting to risk being snuck up on while my perception sphere was down, I put a little bit of my body into the cracking process.
After a minute-ish more of generally feeling under the weather, I finally breached or overruled the protections on the camera. Immediately, I could feel another connection leading off out of my mindspace and had some general idea of where it led to in the real world, but there was nothing I could do through it. Even if I achieved nothing else, this venture already let me figure out my weird hacking abilities were touch-only. My control of the camera let me see what it did and control its motors to look around- pretty underwhelming. There was some good news in that I could tell the exact field of view the cameras had and add little projections representing that to my perception like what existed in some stealth-focused video games.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Assuming all the cameras were the same, the very top of the roof I was on should be in the out of focus section right at the top of the main building’s camera’s field of view. Judging this to not be good enough, I brought out a canister and formed a ball of polymer. A few low tosses with my mechanical arm let me get a feel for how to throw it before I threw it in a high arc towards the camera that would just be able to see me if I stood up from behind the slight incline of the guard shack’s roof.
The throw was pretty good, and clipped the edge of the housing- nudging it down and to the left. New projections of what it could see would put me in one of the top corners. That was good enough that I applied the noise dampening to my shoes and took a running leap off the roof. I winced at the still somewhat audible thumps my feet made as I leaped, but the guard inside my launching platform only briefly glanced up before returning to their phone.
My trajectory kept me just at or above the top of what the still poorly placed cameras could see- hopefully appearing like a bird or something if the guy supposedly watching the cameras decided to look at the monitors.
When I landed, I made a quick dash to be directly under the camera I had been avoiding. After checking that the coast was clear, I hopped onto the first floor’s window’s lip and stretched uncomfortably at the edge of what I thought it could see to be able to touch the security device’s housing. Like before I dedicated my computing abilities to taking it over, however, this time it was much easier and quicker.
Attributing that to previous experience with a device of this type, I made it reangle itself comfortably away from where I was.
Since I was still out in the open, I quickly retrieved my screwdriver from its place in my magical pocket and jammed it into the crack between the window’s frame and outer bits. After struggling to do anything, I softened and plasticized the frame with the strangely widely applicable [Improvised Weapon Proficiency], and was just able to slip a wire in the new gap to pop the latch.
After crawling inside and closing the window behind me I relaxed and took a minute to make sure no one in the building was acting weirdly.
Satisfied that no one I could see had changed their actions, I still held onto some lingering nerves due to the basement anti-magic zone. It wasn’t as disturbing to be around as previously since with my new eyes, instead of cutting off most of my power, slowly killing me, and blinding me it would only cut off my power and slowly kill me. If part of the central security system was in that void, there could be alarms going off and people suiting up for a fight and I’d have no idea it was happening- and more importantly, no way to gain control over it should I decide that was something I desired.
Getting up from where I was sitting on the floor, I visually checked the room on the off chance my perception had missed something. Aside from appropriate from being updated with appropriate colors and display information, all the printers, reams of paper, laminators, and other assorted printing and copying supplies were the same level of boring as I expected. There was some temptation to eat a printer or two’s systems, but I doubted that would help me in any way.
The landline phone and fax machine on the other hand did strike my interest. I’m sure there was some documentation on how the processes that let them identify themselves and interpret information, but it was just easier to directly take that for myself. It only took a couple of minutes each for me to bring them under my control and strip the relevant systems for later analysis and tinkering.
Sure, doing this did leave two very dead machines that would be noticed, but if everything went well, that wouldn’t be connected back to me. Someone particularly paranoid might say there was an external attack, but most people would probably just assume it randomly died for no discernible reason and leave it at that.
In fact, I could better sell it as a mundane failure; a few rooms over was a break room where an office worker looking person was waiting for a cup of coffee to finish brewing.