56 – Cyber theft done the analog way

The city under the city was a world in its own right. Here lived the outcasts, the exiles of society, the renegades that had been forgotten and abandoned. Here was the place where dreams went to die. Hidden in the waste of the sewers. Nestled in houses dug in the stone between the foundation pillars of the skyscrapers. Damp.

The team thought they were safe. They thought nobody had followed them, especially after Mekano detonated his house and collapsed the small service tunnel that snaked around the underground for miles before returning to the city. They were not completely wrong in their assumptions, except for the fact that they assumed only one group was after them.

By this time the team of adventurers also had all they needed, and they could very well leave. The reason they didn’t was that Ishrin could never leave his friend in the deep end of a river of veritable shit like this, especially since Mekano had not one but two favors to bank with Ishrin if he wanted. The first one, and he asked it explicitly even though he didn’t need to, was to help him get out of this situation. The second one was not relevant now, although he was confident that he would still be around to cash it in one day in the near future.

“Where do we go? Do you have safe houses, or perhaps I could drop you in another universe until things calm down…”

Mekano thought about the possible options. “Mekano doesn’t want to hide. It would make no sense, Mekano says. Samurais will always be looking, no matter how long Mekano waits. The waters will never still.”

“Understandable,” Ishrin conceded. “How about we set up a new base of operations for you then? We find an abandoned building in the outskirts of the city, clear it out, set up shop there. I can steal some tech and get you back up to speed in no time flat!”

Mekano clicked his beak. “Now that is something Mekano likes to hear.”

Finding an abandoned building was easy. In the periphery of the city they were the norm more than actual populated houses, a remnant of a less centralized past when the outskirts housed tens of millions of people emigrating from the country in search of jobs and better living conditions. The last vestiges of classical capitalism, before corporations and conglomerates began to take power and everything changed. The old concrete and brick structures still stood, dark and heavy. Their walls were stained by the polluted water of decades of dark rains, and streaks of moss and plants thrived in the damp.

They were also the hanging places of yet another segment of society. The misfits.

“Lisette, scout the area.”

As the girl in black disappeared, the other three approached the heavy steel doors. The windows facing the road were all smashed and broken, but the structure seemed more intact than most. It was one of the better buildings, a three story concrete parking lot that could be repurposed into whatever Mekano desired. The roof had collapsed onto the topmost floor, which meant that seen from above the building was as unassuming as they were. And it was no problem for Ishrin either, in fact the first thing he did was cast a quick and easy ritual that strengthened the support beams against further collapse and sealed off the cold air and rain from the middle section of the structure.

This was where the new base of operations was going to be. The ground floor instead was going to be left empty, save for a slew of weapons and explosives in case anyone wandered too far inside. The door was to be replaced with a new reinforced one, as were the windows. The only thing to note was that scattered through the ground floor were the remains of fires and supplies, mostly rotten food and intradermal needles, as well as some cheap samurai gear. Which meant that this place was inhabited, although not constantly, by junkies and lone samurais. They needed to be gently but firmly invited to relocate.

This was where Lisette came into play. She was to roam the area and wait for the dwellers of this place to return and scare them away. Without violence, if possible, although Mekano wasn’t too confident about the non-violent option being feasible. While Ishrin casted his rituals, Melina and Mekano went to work to move all the debris from the first floor, building a makeshift wall with the collapsed concrete that would become the walls of a new room at the center. With the issue of wind, rain and sound fixed by magical means, as well as the issue of concealing being fixed by the collapsed roof, the room could be as spartan as needed.

Mekano’s only request, and he insisted, was that he had a big space instead of a cramped one, for good reasons.

The work mostly consisted in Melina doing the heavy lifting under Mekano’s direction, while he worked on recovering bits and pieces of old tech that had survived through the years. They were mostly parts of vending machines and CCTV circuitry of no value, but the scavenging kept him busy. It was cathartic for him to just disassemble old cameras, hunched over the wires and parts set haphazardly on a scavenged plastic table, something he sorely needed after all the hectic action of the day. He was a hacker, not a fighter, and the look in his eyes was something Melina knew very well. She had seen it countless times in civilians who were unlucky enough to be close witnesses of guild activities of the non-fun kind, although it begged the question of why did Mekano choose to be a hacker with all the risk it entailed.

Lisette was still missing by the time both Ishrin and Melina were done. And Mekano claimed to have heard no sounds coming from the ground floor, which meant that Lisette’s job was not done yet. It was not a problem, Ishrin claimed and, after instructing Melina on what to do while he was gone and giving her some mana-rich food for her and Lisette to eat, he left.

His task was to steal enough equipment to rebuild Mekano’s workshop from scratch. Normally that would have been problematic, but with an inventory skill and magic to help him he was confident that the job could be carried out without issue. The only real problem was going to be figuring out where to steal all the stuff from, but even this was not a real issue because Mekano had one very simple request. He wanted to best tech the city had to offer, and the only place to find it was the AQ tower. Fortunately Ishrin knew very well how to get back there, how to enter it and where all the goods were.

“Ah,” Ishrin muttered, studying the entrance from the other side of the road. There were five armed guards standing outside the double sliding doors, and another three were inside. “I didn’t think this part through.”

He could not enter from the main gate like he owned the place anymore because, even though the disguise ritual was still in effect, the guards were bound to recognize his disguise from last time. And he didn’t exactly leave without a fuss. The woman they scammed when they told her they would take her stuff through the elevator all the way to her lab must have given the guards the description of Ishrin’s Terirgenean disguise by now. The ritual was never designed to be adaptive. There was a version that was, but the mana pool constraints forced Ishrin to use the less sophisticated version.

The same constraints also meant that Ishrin could not teleport inside and avoid the problem altogether. Even though the growing mass of complications made him consider that particular strategy as worth the cost.

Liù can help! I know the schematics of the tower, we can use an old service tunnel!

The good ol’ forgotten service tunnel. According to Liù’s hologram the tunnel was not actually forgotten, but it was much less heavily guarded than the main gates for sure. What’s more: there was only one guard and one camera watching the hatch leading from the tunnel into the basement. He could incapacitate the guard before they gave the alarm, and in the meantime Liù could deal with the surveillance system.

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Perfect plan. It was time to act. Ishrin felt the childish giddiness of fun rushing through his veins as he slid into the shadows, navigating to the highlighted entrance to the tunnel. Stealing with an inventory skill was outright cheating, something the guys at AQ were not prepared for.

He followed Liù’s rough map of the city center, courtesy of Mekano, which they used to locate where the tunnel was located. It was hidden under the pillars of one of the nearby buildings, no doubt owned by a satellite company. There were two guards, hidden and trying to pass as random undercity dwellers.

Ishrin concentrated. He could take his time with this, and since Terrigeneans were not magically gifted he could apply his Telekinesis directly to their bodies. It was all a matter of finding the right veins to pinch to temporarily restrict the blood flow to their brains and… They collapsed in a matter of seconds.

After going through the cramped space of the tunnel, which was nothing more than a long corridor of concrete and electric lights deep in the bedrock beneath the city, he finally arrived at the hatch. There was a vertical drop into a room he could see through an air vent, clearly something that had been built prior to the construction of the tunnel. Were it not for the guard stationed there and the laser shimmering in the dusty air, someone might have thought the room completely unassuming.

Ishrin and Liù coordinated their attacks. The exact moment the guard collapsed after being exposed to the same treatment as the guards outside, the camera and lasers were deactivated. Ishrin checked his mana reserves and noticed that he still had two thirds of the tank full. He briefly thought about returning to Mekano’s place using teleportation scrolls instead of walking, but eventually thought against it in favor of using the Cultivator running style boots.

They might find us after a while, isshi. Liù said, flying around him in a spiral.

“Uh, why?”

I felt something at the top of their digital world. Watching. Something like me, maybe more than one too! :s

“An AI? That makes sense. How long do you think until the AI finds the patch and sees us?”

Uhhhhhhhh. Five minutes!

“Shit.”

This changed everything. Ishrin rushed through the building in a hurry, past the lab coats and the engineers working at the low levels of the place. All the while Liù scanned the rooms they encountered, trying to be as stealthy as possible and disabling all cameras in the vicinity. They didn’t care much if the actual people saw them acting strange, for the ritual worked its job and they didn’t seem to care. Even if questioned, it wasn’t like they could give any actual useful information.

Eventually the duo found the prize they were looking for. An entire room filled to the brim with server racks, screens and peripherals. Most of which seemed quite high-tech compared to the gear at Mekano’s old place.

It all disappeared into Ishrin’s inventory in less than two minutes, aided by his strength and telekinesis while Liù directed the flow of materials into the dimensional window like a little fairy. She was more than mildly amused at seeing the stream of items disappear into the hungry maw of the inventory, and the two shared a laugh when they thought about the poor guy who was going to find this room expecting to see servers and instead seeing only empty space.

“Imagine! They send the IT guy to check if the servers are online and why they aren’t working, and he’s going to find the room completely empty! Wiped down to the last speck of dust! Can you imagine his face?”

Liù cannot! Terrigenesis lizard-people are weird to read!

“You’re right! But still, imagine the faces of the CEO and the board of AQ when they get told that someone stole a room full of servers from under their noses!”

***

“Mekano doesn’t know what to say…”

The servers occupied almost the whole room. They were all powered down and a faraday cage had been hastily erected around the room to block all signals from entering or leaving. It wasn’t that there was any danger of being tracked, it was that Mekano did not expect Ishrin to steal a whole set of server racks from AQ.

“Do you have any idea of what might be on these things? The data, the secrets? Screw the hardware, it’s the software that’s the motherlode! These things might have files in them worth billions of credits… Oh Ishrin, you will be the end of me!” Mekano said, then he seemed to remember something and fumbled his last words. “M-Mekano says!”

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