“Yumaaataaaaa,” she only remembered him saying her full name twice and the second time she had he had tried to strangle her. She started sending ranged zapps from his Zappa that she had found on the floor. The electricity didn’t stop him completely but it made it easy for her to hit him with the follow up shots, he groaned at each hit. She followed it up with a good sized touch-based zapp from herself.
Jack started gulping in big breaths, he felt a bit dizzy.
He looked at Yuma who had the tip of her finger extended towards him. He placed the tip of his finger against hers and she zapped him. She saw something that he didn't get and she handed him the Zappa.
He grabbed it and looked at the faces looking at him.
Too tired to think of anything else, “I’m going to rest for a bit.” He picked off a blade claw he had punched off the last crab, walked over to the wall and dropped into a seat on it, and fell asleep.
Yuma walked over to the blue disk she had knocked off the Terminal. Others did other things.
----------------------------------------
Somewhere far and across the Labs.
It was perfect. An advanced Pod, a Terminal cut off from the SI, two base DNA fluids. It was slow but still, It watched it grow.
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He hadn't been able to go to sleep but instead he rested his eyes and listened to the other's talk, they didn't talk much.
Jack kicked at the crab that had been thrown through the blue dome. It felt, well, he wasn’t sure. He reached down and grabbed the crab’s arm. It felt, hollow. Just as he started to try and pull off the claw it cracked at the joint. Looking inside, the crab meat he was expecting, instead was grey, lifeless, uniform.
He poked it with his middle finger and something released and it flowed out as dust. He played around with the crab’s corpse and didn’t find any biological, well, anything. Only the hardened chitin stayed behind.
Jonah walked up behind him and stood next to him, “was that Nano coming off of it?”
Jack looked at the duffles hanging from his hips. “Nope, none of its getting picked up.”
Eyes wide Jonah looked towards the bags, “How many?”
Jack wasn’t listening as he interrupted, “anything organic in the crab has decayed into, this.” The odd dust drifted from his upturned hand.
Jonah was thinking and he turned to look at the man, he liked him, he was a thinker. “What do you think, doc?” He wasn’t sure why he called him that, it just kind of fit the bedraggled wandering engineer with his white, wild hair.
“I, well, that depends. What does it look like to you?”
“Well, all the crab skin-”
“It’s chitin actually, well maybe that part is more crab skin.”
Jack stared at him, “like I was saying. The crab skin is the only thing left, the chitin too. Anything organic turned into this dust. It’s like all the life got sucked out of it.”
“Beats me. I’ve never seen this energy before.” He slid his goggles onto his eyes and pulled a foot off of the corpse. He sparked different fingers with different energies. He cursed himself for not studying the dome earlier.
Jack resisted rolling his eyes and studied the corpse again, he picked up the chitin skull and looked inside. He disturbed the gray mass and watched as the dust emptied out of the exoskeletal skull. Huh, no internal skull. Weird. Gross. Thank God he didn’t have to do surgery on these… things. He put his head through the skull and looked around. It was a bit tough to see, the eyes didn’t line up well, but still doable.
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The shriek blew through everyone’s nerves as guns, cannons, and assorted weapons were made ready.
There was a man with a crab skull over his head, pincer raised. Jonah was on his ass one hand raised in defense, the other fumbling for the Wrist Rocket.
Jack pulled it off and started laughing, Jonah paused for a second then stared back and forth between the skull and Jack’s face.
Kala had a twisted look then started to join in with her bark. It was hard to tell with Yuma but the zapp she sent into him when she came over to join the inspection came across as friendly.
There were chuckles and a few groans of “no more crabs.”
It probably wasn’t that funny, but not a lot about the situation in general was funny. It did ease some of the tension.
Jonah looked grumpy, Jack went over and said a few words, then brought something up that refocused Jonah’s mild annoyance. Jack passed him the skull and they both smiled.
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Uller had just finished working with Jonah to make Yuma some bullets. He had tried to pretend he couldn’t make the explosives for the bullets but the pressure of their combined stares had worn him down. So now he was tired and he was having a real bitch cracking the Door Terminal. This was heavy stuff but at least it wasn’t as odd as the last Terminals. This one was running a variant of Terminal OS.
He worked his way down the list of authorized users, the entire section was only 2 entries long, starting with “Administrator” and ending with “Captain.” Authorizations at that level took a lot to break down, if it was even possible. He didn’t know anyone that could. First he had to try and clone the environment and unlike the prior Terminal this one looked to be standard. While running the flashed clone on his portable he would falsify User Authorization profiles and granted them with untested Authority. Once he had a good build he would inject the data containing the false profiles, replacing and modifying the sections running on the Terminal. He had to do this without alerting the SI.
And done! He was a bit surprised but it had accepted his handmade Authorization profiles below that of Captain. Administrator and Captain he was completely unable to access, but he expected that.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
He shuffled around certain portions of Access and Authority in exchange for others, trying to balance the lowest Authorization Level realistically possible for him to crack while also trying to retain as much Authority as possible, in order to open the Door.
Ideally he'd end up with enough Authority to Access the Door controls, but if not that, then enough to set up a backdoor to try to crack a higher Authorization level where he could then, again, try again to mix and match the proper Authorities to get control of the Door.
There, he loaded and sent over a freshly compiled clone of his SI-shell from his portable to the Terminal. The data transfer flagged some automatic safeguards in the Terminal's firewall. He severed the executables responsible for the alerts and the data continued to distribute across the Terminal.
There, he was in.
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Jack looked at the bullets Jonah and Uller had made for Yuma.
“Uh pretty cool I guess.” He couldn’t say nothing, even with his abysmal EQ he caught the eager look in Jonah’s eyes as he went over them.
Yuma helped him out, “They said these bullets should have a better time penetrating the crabs,” she shrugged, “well see. Better than being empty.”
“Well that’s true. What you don’t want to fight up close and next to me?”
She gave a flat stare in response and Jonah laughed.
“I don’t think anyone wants to fight next to you,” Jonah said than hurriedly added, “no offense.”
Jack waved it away, “none taken. When I fight things usually get a little… hinky? That’s not quite the right word…”
“Insane.” Yuma finished the thought for him, his retort interrupted by Jonah’s quick and resolute agreement.
“It’s not that insane!”
“Look at you!” Yuma yelled in exasperation, Jack was pretty sure it was ‘mock exasperation’ but wasn’t sure enough to call her on it. He looked down at himself. Maybe she had a point. Oof, he tried to roll his shoulders.
“Hey Yuma can you put the Zappa in my shoulder?”
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Watching his shoulder muscles, even bone, reform visible to the naked eye, was something she’d never seen in the Labs. It wasn’t even close to anything else.
Never mind how he could discharge the electricity to boost his Mods, the Shield Bash and the Slicing one. That would have been normal, something within a frame of reference.
This level of regeneration shouldn’t have been possible but it was, she was looking at it. She wondered as she alternated between shaking and shocking him with the Zappa. It took a matter of minutes, focused electrical discharging minutes, but minutes nonetheless.
Did the AI he was carrying with him do something to him? It would have been controlling the Terminal whenever he leveled up. She had been using the Terminal with the AI loaded onto it. Did the AI do something to her?
Shaking the Zappa created enough motion in her that she was forced to discharge her own zapp into his shoulder. She put a free hand over her heart. Well, technically it already had modified her. Maybe she’d already be dead if it hadn’t. She knew that Jack had figured he would be dead if the AI hadn't been doing extra things. He never really mentioned the AI. It was probably an uncomfortable thought. She kind of liked the insight into others that her increased EQ had given.
Still, only a fool trusted Sentient Intelligences, Artificial or Simulated. This, she knew.
“Hey, help me put this on, you too Jonah.” Jack asked as he turned around towards her. Dammit, he was smiling.
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Shit, he could barely read it but he was in. For now at least. The instability wasn’t great though, it meant the virtual environment of his SI-shell was having trouble fighting off the Terminal’s native antivirals. This close to the Core, accomplishing anything gave him a jolt of pride.
Unauthorized Usage… No User Detected.
BootBios... Custom Shell Boot Interrupt.
Uller's Heavy Metal ShellHell v.6.6.0
Enter Administrator Co... Interrupt…
Enter Captain Cod… Interrupt…
Enter Supervisor Access Code:
[https://i.postimg.cc/8CvGz8yj/Screen-Shot-2022-09-30-at-1-28-05-PM.png]
This was tough, a Third-Tier Authorization in the Labs? On one hand, he'd never even heard of someone getting that level of Access before, there had to be a reason why.
On the other hand, he’d be able to do anything, especially once the SI was gone. With that level of Auth he’d definitely be able to open the Door and he’d be able to Access some pretty juicy parts of the Labs. Places no one had looted, native Terminals, security lockers, the Good Stuff. This could open a lot of doors, literally as well as figuratively. He still was tempted to go down a couple of Authorization levels to be safe.
Still, he’d never managed to crack into a Terminal at this level before. He typed out the usual suspects.
It was referred to as The CookBook and engineers would occasionally share the lists between themselves. Next to the SI-shells and the portables, it was one of the most important pieces of knowledge for their kind. The “recipes” really weren’t written down anywhere either. He continued to type the strings.
password; password123; password12345; Password; Password123; Password12345; PassWord; PassWord123.
There. That was the one.
Preliminary Supervisor Access Granted.
Higher-Tier Authority Access Authorized…
HandPad Required to Access Supervisor Authorization and Authority.
Apply Hand to HandPad…
Here Uller started to sweat a bit. His greed fought an innate and hard-won caution. Placing your hand on the HandPad was the ultimate sign of confidence in your work.
It wasn’t unheard of for something to go wrong on the Pad. It wasn’t the most common thing but it couldn’t be that rare either. Everyone had a story about how someone they knew, or had seen, had bitten it at the palm end of a Pad.
He had never spoofed a Supervisor Auth before. If he was being honest with himself he wasn’t that good of a hacker either, he liked to blow up things with other things. Simple, big payoff.
Still, the chance to hack this? The things he could unlock around the rest of the Labs if he was able to capture the Auth… the temptation pulled him deeper in.
He wiped the sweat building above his eyes. Muted sounds pushed at the edge of his hearing. He was hovering his hand just over it, slowly coming down. He was sweating. Someone touched his shoulder and he jumped. His hand came down on the HandPad.
Supervisor Authorization Granted!
Welcome Supervisor Personnel, Uller!
[https://i.postimg.cc/bw7JT9WS/Screen-Shot-2022-09-30-at-1-33-32-PM.png]
He grinned, wide and happy as he continued to read.
He tapped on the screen, exploring the somewhat stabilized SI-shell he still had running on the Terminal. Download Map? Yes please. He managed to catch and isolate the fatal error that occurred in response.
Not wanting to risk losing his newly found Access he stopped poking around and went for the Door control.
Denied...
Door Control Restricted to proper Authority.
[https://i.postimg.cc/sgddHHfz/Screen-Shot-2022-09-30-at-1-34-07-PM.png]
That didn’t make sense, this Authorization level should have the required Authority as standard. He patched together a few miscellaneous scraps of unassigned Authority.
Native Door Control Access... Unsuccessful (3 of 4 Authority Challenges Successful)
Attempting Bypass…
User/ Supervisor Personnel, Uller.
Insert Access Disk with relevant Authority or Use Current Authority.
[https://i.postimg.cc/gJD8Q7bT/Screen-Shot-2022-09-30-at-1-35-13-PM.png]
He didn’t touch a thing. It didn’t matter, despite that fact, the text kept scrolling.
Prepare for Authority Challenge...
Authorization Access Contested.
Shell Environment Contested.
Physical Integrity Contested.
Authority Challenge Imminent…
User/ Supervisor: Personnel, Uller.
vs
User/ Administrator: Cryo-Core SI
[https://i.postimg.cc/tRsF22m2/Screen-Shot-2022-09-30-at-1-36-15-PM.png]