I wondered if sanctum could help me with any of this? Could it help me make some credits?
[User will need to provide additional parameters and information in order to create a clear goal to program for.]
I want to make enough money to survive the week, preferably today. Using what I have with me right now. I don’t mind breaking too many laws, I guess, but I don’t need any corp heat or major problems. Is that enough or do I need to spin off more?
[Insufficient current local information. User is advised to connect to local grid for better advice on the current situation and goal.]
Hm. Alright then, the program needs more information to get some ideas going. I hope it can look stuff up itself and I don’t need to flick through stuff myself. Some older programs could only process visual information and had access to the actual data passing through the cortical implant. Then some laws changed and so did the tech.
I walked over to the side of the road near one of the grid clusters, there was one on the other side of the road but it had been broken since I’d been born. I made sure my small body was close enough that nobody would wander past my line of sight to the cluster and made my implant connect.
The cluster twitched and one of the little facets on it glimmered as the sensor inside rolled around in the socket until it lined up with the emitter on my implant, the chrome part on the sides of my head.
Once the connection to the grid was established my interface was filled with advertisements for a moment before all of them disappeared.
[Laser connection found…]
[Connecting to local grid…]
[Connected to local grid.]
[141 injector daemons detected. Deploying ICE.]
[Daemon connections to user implants blocked.]
So the sanctum program came with net functions as well. Well, that saved some bandwidth and overheat issues from happening. The small scale of the local grid meant a lot of the time I’d end up timing out purely through too many daemons loading advertising data into my interface at once while I was trying to check my mail.
[Bypassing security…]
[Vulnerability found.]
[Collecting local data.]
[Loading…]
[User is advised to acquire the appropriate skills relevant to the safe decommissioning of a Hercules 2 pattern automated hazardous environmental processing unit that has malfunctioned and fallen into a gray water filter system and jammed the mechanism above the water line. ETA for automated retrieval and maintenance is approximately two days and sixteen hours from now. This represents the greatest value available to the user for the least risk for your currently obtainable skill set.]
Acquire the right skills? I can take apart basically anything by now. I know how to close circuit feeds to shunt power away from what I’m trying to work on, I can also manage heat dispersion systems and even fluid lubrication pressure valves. If I can’t take a big processing unit apart then it must somehow be milspec or better.
[Skill system has yet to initiate.]
So you haven’t recorded it so I can’t do it as far as you’re concerned?
[Correct.]
Right, well let’s go find something to strip for parts and I can show you the things I’ve learned to stay alive down here.
[I have located six low but discernible value discarded or damaged devices of various size and function within eight minutes walk of user position.]
How did you find them?
[IR hotspot clusters are also equipped with at least 180 degrees of camera coverage as standard. I have pooled a number of images of requested items from the short term storage of the video archives of these cameras. The oldest image is seven minutes old and can be considered current.]
Huh. I’ve tried accessing the stored data of public IR clusters before and I couldn’t make any kind of progress through the ICE.
[User’s previous hardware is estimated to have been approximately forty times less capable of electronic warfare and netrunning in general. This hardware has since been reconfigured and augmented into the primary hardware pattern to house the Sanctum program. Your previous chassis configuration is retained where able for user comfort. This IR hotspot is unprotected enough to breach without User input.]
So you’ve eaten my cerebral implant as well then.
[Incorrect. All it’s previous functions are retained. They are augmented where applicable and made far more efficient by changes on both the processor level, hardware level and software level.]
Whatever. Can you leave a mark on my map or a dot to follow on my view to find the closest workable thing to scrap?
[Marking the closest object of interest. Displaying shortest path on user interface.]
My surroundings flickered with black polygons for a moment before a dotted line of white dots appeared near my feet along with a small white arrow pointing off into the distance, in this case into the side of the street and likely someones home. Likely I had to go around by following the line, I’d seen maps that had this kind of interface function but only expensive programs had the functions that communicated with the live data from your cerebral implant.
Walking through the street away from the central cluster of tent there seemed to be smaller tents for people with more serious injuries and then a small blockade of road barriers and corpo guards.
They were carrying nonlethal weapons like batons and shock bats but worryingly almost every one of them had a folded submachine guns on their back.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
It was weird to realize the threat the corp was to the area so late, after sleeping in their tents. I guess I’d gotten used to living up against corpo nonsense without causing enough issue to get any attention that I’d got used to considering them just dangerous background noise until something major happened. Like my bedroom ceiling getting eaten by nanites.
I wondered if the nanites or the sanctum were the thing the corpo types were looking for, if they were I don’t think they’d find it in my head if they hadn’t found it so far. Surely they’d have got out all their special scanner machines and so on from the word go if they were going to hunt for it.
[User is likely incorrect. Sanctum deployed a number of countermeasures against detection through the escape route that was chosen based on known data as the fastest and most likely to evade direct detection.]
[The trajectory through the road structure upon breaching containment led through the foundations of the city, through a minor overflow filtration junction and then through your habitation block. Civilian presence was unexpected. Your resident street has been officially listed as condemned by Marin Properties for a number of years.]
[Sanctum released a number of deconstructing nanite clusters that followed a vector away from the primary nanite mass. When these clusters reached the end of their self-sustained operational limit they would rapidly self deconstruct.]
[The primary nanite mass housing Sanctum broke through the ceiling of your home in an attempt to access the closest, unhardened complex power source. Your salvaged redox cell was selected as the target.]
[Your presence, when discovered, led to a restructuring of priorities when it was discovered you passed the minimum standard for cyber-integration while not already having an active cyber-implant, yours being disabled and largely destroyed by the cloud of environmental scouting nanites when they reported your presence.]
[All traces of Sanctum existence has been left as burnt out nanite fragments throughout the escape route. It would appear to a very high percentage of even those familiar with Sanctum that it destroyed itself by burning through it’s mass to travel faster while running out of energy. Instead Sanctum found an external energy supply and then a user, this eliminated the imminent shutdown from lack of power, and the need to expend mass to move around as well as fulfilling one of it’s primary functions: Provide the user with the capabilities required to succeed at their chosen tasks.]
A whole stream of interface responses filled up my text window in the top right of my view. I read them one after the other as I walked along, being careful not too lose too much focus on my surroundings. Never a good idea down in this district.
There was certainly a lot to ask about in response to that.
So you’re not being followed but did try to dissolve me and then decided to dive into my flesh after all that. A bit harsh there sanctum.
[Sanctum would not have disassembled you. Your skin was burnt by the electrostatic discharge of the high priority information exchange of the cloud of environmental scouting nanites informing Sanctum of you’re presence and biometrics.]
Nah, it’s fine. I’ve had worse done by people I need to still work with occasionally. Things end up that way sometimes. You don’t happen to have nanites for fixing skin do you?
[I could make an attempt to replace the surface of your skin with a temporary layer of metallic cells formed primarily of neodymium. But it would only last a short time, likely restrict movement and would only protect from very small caliber firearms and human base level physical attacks.]
[Without a dedicated medical suite or something similar to assume the operation of; the patterns and nanites stored within the Sanctum mass do not have a wide scope of medical utility.]
Yeah, I don’t want magnetic metal skin. If it ends up healing rough I’ll just get a face plate or some synthskin at some point. It’ll likely be expensive but I’ve heard the first thing you should invest in is your body so it’s fine.
[Your skin would not be magnetic if such a procedure was done.]
I arrived at the broken down compactor unit at the back of a small alley on the side of the road. The interface had led me right to it despite it being covered in garbage and graffiti.
So looking at this thing it still had power but only some of the circuit was working and the actual compacting press was completely cut off from power.
[Sanctum will record any relevant data from your activities with this device and compare it to the stored standard baselines. This will need further computation to study comparability with stored micro-patterns for further development.]
I barely understood any of that sanctum, but sure, that all sounds fine. I guess I’ll try to power down the rest of the unit, access the motherboard and check for faulty parts. Strip out anything valuable and then it’s just the redox cell in there to remove and that should be about it for scrapping. I don’t see the hydraulic fluid being valuable and I don’t have the kind of heavy equipment I’d need to klep the whole press out of the unit, that things isn’t worth much in small parts.
I guess I’ll get it done then.
Kneeling down to start unscrewing the bolts from the access panels I got to work scrapping it. I took the time to make sure I did it properly to show I knew what I was doing and wasn’t being sloppy by levering parts off or just using my pocket torch to melt the nuts off the plates.
The circuits were a mess and likely what broke this thing down so I mostly cut away all the larger components and especially went for the gold plated components. Again being careful with all this and making sure not to cause any static release from the capacitors to the rest of the board while working.
The job went on for a while but soon I had a little pile of valuable metal bits and a few intact chips and capacitors that might have some value to them. Then I easily popped the power cell out of it’s housing by using a safety bypass to skip needing to power up the unit to spoof the scanner for city credentials to mess with the battery.
The safety bypass did shred the connections to the power cell when it was ejected but they were easily repaired, not much of an issue to most buyers.
After about an hour I had my prizes and threw them all up in a bunch of plastic bags and then wrapped the whole lot with a roll of flexiweave from the garbage pile, a sort of plastic thread fabric that was used as storage at markets.
Okay, so that was a easier but smellier job than I was expecting you to find me but what did you think of my work? I think I got everything worth good credits without breaking anything major.
[A single procedure isn’t enough data to be totally accurate but extrapolating your methods, movements and focuses along with your current knowledge should allow for a rating for your first recognized Skill.]
[When computation is complete on your comparative pattern analysis Sanctum will be able to augment your current understanding of relevant concepts and methodologies with stored micro-patterns that are highly compatible with your degree of skill.]
You left me behind in that last message there sanctum but I’ll take the first part as a compliment.
Let’s head back to my street and hunt down Mayan, he’s likely locked up and hiding with corpos wandering around outside but I doubt he’ll keep me out when I say I’ve got scrap to sell him.
The way back was a little busier as the sidewalks started to fill up as the morning continued. There were quite a few gang members hanging around visibly among the crowds that were likely making it known they weren’t afraid of the corporate presence a few streets away.
I hoped it wouldn’t come to fighting. It would be a bloodbath down here in the cramped streets and maintenance tunnels surrounded on all sides by civilian houses filled with people with no interest in the fighting outside but likely to get riddled with bullets in the crossfire anyway, especially with the punch corpo weapons had.
Reaching the rose glow of my home street, official name was something like resident row twelve-seven or whatever. Everyone just called it Rinse Street because that’s what the big water network units under the road were, with access points all along the pavement. Just big water jet machines that cleaned the water by jetting it through a weird membrane sponge thing, not worth much scrap apparently.
Making my way through the security checkpoint at the junction of my street I noticed some of the security grunts had their submachine guns unfolded and in-hand rather than slung over their back.
They must be feeling twitchy with the nearby gangs grouping up nearby.
There was quite a bit of foot traffic in the tents now the morning had properly begun and it took a little while to push through to reach the larger tents. As I got to the big central tent that had the beds in, my interface was filled up with notifications.