Onigiri looked over the datachip she was offered up earlier in the evening. Nothing out of the norm for its type. Standard gray casing with an input jack for the usual rigs. No visible branding on it, which was also usual in the sense that nobody in their right mind would want leaked intelligence being traced back to them.
As good as Onigiri was, this wasn’t her favorite thing to do. You never know what you would get in these things, considering the lack of identifying labels. You could get some script kiddy’s horribly copied encryption code with barely any countermeasures in place, or you could get some highly customized anti-intrusion that was nigh-on impossible to navigate without spending days at it, getting a nosebleed, or frying your equipment. The equipment, in this case, being Onigiri’s brain.
A bad encounter with ICE—that stands for Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics, if you're not into this whole hacking thing—is a headache, oftentimes a literal one. One of the main reasons she kept hospital-grade painkillers on and around her workbench. Onigiri couldn’t count the times she knocked herself out cold trying to brute force open one of these chips before she learned better. Even the most careful hacker wasn’t immune to getting their bell rung. It was a constant war of escalation when it came to encryption, so it wasn’t abnormal to get blindsided by a new countermeasure that the corpos put in place to keep out the curious type.
She lived for this. It was a thrill. The closest rush she possibly could get short of snorting a line of illicit substances. Ironically, that hesitation was still there. She really didn’t want the headache.
Harry sitting opposite of her, staring boreholes through her skull with those dead eyes didn’t help matters much. Onigiri didn’t even notice her come in.
“Did you do it yet?” The blonde haired woman asked in her usual flat tone. Onigiri had no idea as to why Harry was here, but she wasn’t going to waste half an hour trying to chase her off.
“No, I just got the friggen thing.” Onigiri rolled her eyes and sighed loudly. “Gimme ten minutes and I’ll have it done. Okay?”
She didn’t know if that was an underestimate or overestimate, she was just throwing out numbers. It’s not like Harry was her boss. Or even part of the gang. She just made herself at home since everything started rolling downhill. She was used to the weird, but Harry was a different kind of weird compared to what she was used to.
Onigiri sighed, turning the chip back over in her hands. Her technopathy at least ascertained there wasn’t a digital landmine waiting for her when she accessed the thing. Anything beyond that was a mystery. Game face on. If she messed this up, they’d be out of luck on this lead. She took a deep breath, took one quick glance at Harry—who hasn’t seemed to have blinked in this entire time—and focused on diving straight into the thing.
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A flash of color, a burst of static. It took Onigiri a few scant seconds to reorient herself in the datascape that was contained in the chip. Virtual reality. Her home away from home. It was much the same as connecting to any other digital device, but the difference being that there was almost a hollow sullen silence. There was always something off about the insides of these datachips. Whether it was the simulated smell, the tinny soundscape, or the distorted visuals. Onigiri didn’t know why this was the case, she just assumed that the data went sour after being disconnected from the waves for so long. She’s not even remotely close to being a scientist, so it’s debatable how accurate that assumption is.
The surrounding datascape materialized itself as a seemingly never ending row of cubicles and offices. Plain gray and boring offices. Encryption usually shaped itself in some way that the human mind could comprehend, into digital landscapes or otherwise. It could be shaped by hand if you were good enough at making the things, but otherwise data might as well have been a living thing that grew on its own volition.
Onigiri knew this better than anyone. Shit. She talked to technology on a daily basis.
Once she was sure that her feet were solidly planted on the digitally-simulated cheap linoleum tiling, she set off. Even though encryption was supposed to keep things obfuscated by design, it wasn’t hard to find what you were looking for once you started reading between the lines. Hallways slightly misaligned at points indicated that they were a loop into infinity, designed to waste your time. Offices that blatantly stood out from the rest were usually bait rigged to databombs, easily catching anyone who doesn’t know any better. At the minimum, its overt nature warded off the people who knew their head from their ass inside the matrix.
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Databombs being the only form of security was reserved for the lowest tier of hacker bait usually employed in prank wars, and so far this datachip has been anything but. And judging from the heavy footfalls that clomped about in the distance, she wasn't alone inside this datascape. Multi-layered security. She jumped inside a vacant cubicle and held her breath, waiting for whatever made those sounds to pass her by. A patrolling intrusion countermeasure, rendered as a faceless CorpSec in full kit, stomped its way past her cubicle and continued down the hall. There was a non-zero chance that this datachip was loaded up by a corpo themselves and smuggled out to whoever Viola got this from.
Everything about this smelt off, even in the literal sense. It screamed high security, but the only thing that screamed that were the intrusion countermeasures. She couldn't say the same for everything else she encountered on this ongoing adventure through the internals of this chip. The traps were obvious, the layout was rudimentary. It felt all sorts of wrong. She’d have brute forced most other chips by now with security this supposedly poor. The entire corporate overtone put that line of thinking on hold, though.
Her initial trepidation went from confidence back to trepidation. Whoever made this either had something up their sleeve, or they were a masterclass troll. Or both. Something was itching at the back of her brain as she traversed her way through the chip. Obvious security measures were given a wide berth, and the subtle ones were given an even wider one. There’s no way—
A voice blared through the digital environment, as if it was booming through loudspeakers that surrounded Onigiri on every side. It was in a language she didn’t understand, or even recognize, for that matter. She didn’t need to know what was being said to figure out that she was in a hot pile of shit. The pulsing red lights were enough to clue her in. Fuck. She must’ve hit a tripwire in the midst of all of this. Security was going to be descending on her like a falling sledgehammer. And if security catches her? They're going to hijack her connection to broadcast her location to people she has no interest in meeting.
And it’d be a serious ding to her cred if she got taken down by an automated intelligence.
Trepidation made way for anxiety and adrenaline. The previously lethargic footfalls of the security bots turned to a near thunderous stampede that sounded as if it was practically on top of her. There was no fighting this. She did all she could. Ducking under desks. Simulated paper scattering. Vaulting cubicles. Accidentally tipping chairs. Cutting through offices. They were sticking to her like glue. All the while the environment around her started to glitch and falter.
Shit. The chip must’ve had a wipe failsafe. If she didn’t hurry up and find where the data was hidden, the thing is gonna cook itself. And her alongside it. The clock was ticking, and she only had time to go off a hunch. If security didn’t catch her first, that is. The loud cacophony that grew in intensity with each moment reminded her of that.
She dove under a desk, narrowly avoiding getting tackled from behind. She’d never been inside of an actual office building, but easily dozens of digital replicas. Digital replicas in all of the games that she played. Thousands of hours of gaming, and she finally had something to show for it.
The hacker scrambled to her feet, kicking a swivel chair behind her to trip one of her pursuers. She was looking for the biggest, nicest side room, with the biggest glass pane. Bingo. Right to her left, a few paces out. It wasn’t marked as the manager’s office, but—
The environment began to fragment and falter again. The floor began to crumble away under her feet as she continued her panicked sprint. There was no way she was going to make it in time before the entire place fell apart without pulling something out of her deck of tricks.
She focused on her connection to the Thread, conjuring up a sprite of a small fluffy white dog. An easy enough feat. Another. And another. And another. What was normally trivial quickly became a literal migraine as she summoned up dozens of yipping digital canines. Neither Oni nor the digital environment liked that. The prior, given that she knew that she was likely bleeding from her nose at minimum in the realspace, and the latter as it struggled to process the presence of several simple AIs who didn’t do much beyond run in circles and bark.
A measured action by Oni, as pushing the chip any further would’ve caused a crash. Still, it was akin to running through sludge as the datachip struggled under the weight of what was going on. There was no consolation for Oni in this, given that she knew better than to dive through the glass panel of the manager’s office. That would risk crashing the overwhelmed virtual reality. It took several moments before the door stopped glitching out and she was able to enter the office proper.
And there it was. Right in front of her. A floating green orb right in the middle of the room. Pure, undiluted data. All there for her taking. All she needed to do was—
The virtual space started to stutter and lock up. Crap. Did she overdo it? She flailed and clawed at the orb as everything around her started to fade…
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“You are bleeding,” Harry said, her dead eyes practically drilling into Oni’s from a literal hair's-breadth away. It wasn’t exactly the best thing to return to consciousness to.
Onigiri reached up to weakly push Harry away. Hazarding a guess from the fact that she felt like death warmed over, she was more than likely bleeding from her eyes too. She didn’t want to even think about grabbing a mirror at this point. The datachip sat on her work bench, smoking. The acrid smell of burnt plastic began to fill the garage.
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
“Damn straight I did.”