MakoStory2

Mako sat at her desk and pulled the sleeve of her sweater over the heel of her hand to wipe the dust from her keyboard. The keys smacked down and sprung up in a quick, sharp glissando that bounced off the walls. The clean, mechanical sound put Mako at ease. She was finally home.     She reached over to the computer and thumbed the machine awake. The fan whirred to life, hiccupped and sputtered once, before settling into a low hum of white noise. The apartment had been empty for weeks and the computer made it known it was happy to be needed again. A series of chirps and ticks greeted Mako and filled the room with energy. On the far side of her desk a headset kicked on. The inside of the lenses splashed white light onto the wall, then blue, before dimming into a soft glow. She grabbed them and frowned at the sudden weight in her hands. They’re old, nowhere near the current model she used on her last real job, and they seemed so obsolete in comparison. She ran through the figures in her head. It would only take a few odd runs to earn enough bitcreds for something newer. Something military grade, lightweight and matte black. Or something flashier, like the chrome headsets they sell at the Chiku Street market in Singapore. But it was that or next week’s rent. It wouldn’t be both. These would at least get the job done.     Mako put the headset on and stared at the blank gray screen that now surrounded her. She reached her hands out in front of her. Her fingers found the keyboard immediately, the perfect marriage of muscle memory and training. Her pinky tapped the ENTER key and her eyes squinted and adjusted to the brightening lights. It was time to work. <center>[[CHAPTER 2|ch2]]</center>

Everything suddenly went dark. Mako waited in the blackness for her connection to complete. These moments never lasted long but they were enough to send some people running. All it takes is a little bit of darkness to push the imagination towards the terrifying. It’s the back channels of cyberspace. The matrix. The Supermesh. Dangerous, but it will never match up to what the mind can create when you’re alone in your apartment and trying to hack for the first time. Some would never jack-in again, but they would go on to tell stories of what they saw in the dark. It was the best defense the corporations could ask for. Hackers warned hackers, on and on until a culture of fear was created and the barriers of entry were thought to be too great. No matter what you want to do – be an activist, make some quick cash – you can’t do it if you’re afraid of the dark.     Pinpoints of blue light drew Mako’s gaze downwards. They spread out all around her, a rolling wave of lines that overlapped and intersected in a grid and created a sort of ground. Some lines shot upwards, bending and breaking off to create building-like shapes. The colors morphed into neon pinks and greens and yellows, glowing reds and oranges. It didn’t take more than a second or two before everything went still and Mako found herself surrounded by the framework of a city. A server farm turned urban landscape.     The Supermesh took many forms and most were welcome to anybody. Each version was finely tuned to the needs of the consumer or the worker. Sometimes cyberspace was a shopping mall with textures so realistic you’d think you were there – a playground for people with more money than time. For Mako, for a hacker, cyberspace was something else entirely. She remembered a shop she worked in during the summers when she was younger. It was a small boutique that sold knock-off handbags and shoes. The front of the store was beautiful, all glass and warm light. The back room was a mess. Dark and ugly, with a chaotic organization that only an employee would understand. To the uninitiated, this version of cyberspace was nothing more than a random smattering of boxes. But Mako knew what to make of her surroundings. She had been here before. It was just another back room.     Mako took a step forward. In reality, she was still sitting at her desk, her knees tucked up under her chin to support the extra weight of the headset. The first time you jack-in it’s almost impossible to move properly. You can always spot the noob hackers. They walk in circles or run in place or just lock up and fall flat on their embarrassed, digitally rendered faces. Tricking the mind into finding a physical plane when there isn’t one takes a lot of concentration and practice. Eventually, the neon representation of the ground beneath the neon representation of your feet becomes real. Mako walked in between servers and looked around. The servers always rearrange and refresh and she took some quiet moments to make sense of her new surroundings. The quiet was short lived. A small envelope popped into the corner of her vision. It floated there, existing in some place between herself and the servers. It was an email. Mako smiled. Emails meant jobs. She opened it and her eyes went straight to the subject line – “help.” <center>[[CHAPTER 3|ch3]]</center>

<center>[To be continued]<cl1|</center> (click-replace: ?cl1)[To be continued 06/05/15 10:00am PST <a href="http://store.steampowered.com/app/311800/">Check out Black Ice on Steam!</a> <a href="http://store.steampowered.com/app/316680/">Find a good song to hack to!</a>]

<div class="boxed">help <hr> From: y.soga@mail.ice I got your email from a man at a teahouse. He says you can help me. He says you're a cowboy. That you use the wires to see the zaibatsus from the inside. I take great risk contacting you but I can no longer afford to hide. I worked for Taikomex Mechanics. Worked the nights to make sure their machines ran. One night I found a folder. All these papers about chemicals being dumped in the water. I went to my boss. Thought I was doing the right thing. But they told me not to talk. Threatened me. My fear grew and I ran. But they had given me the company implant to check my shift changes. I know they are using it to track me. I found a doctor who will remove it but I need the code to deactivate it. I can pay you. Please. I beg you.</div>     Mako’s eyes took in the word “implant” but when she read the word “code” she stopped and cursed to herself. She wanted an easy job. Digging through files for the name of a back alley surgeon would have been a cut and dry run. But the deactivation code? That was something much, much bigger. Implant codes were accessible only to high level executives and the Chief Medical Officer. That not only meant hacking directly into Taikomex’s servers, but also digging through root files to access the codes. That would allow for a lot of time to screw up.     She pulled the email open again.     "Help." "Please." [["I beg you."|ch3passage7]]

Mako ran through the servers and let her mind drift towards planning a strategy. Taikomex Mechanics was a big zaibatsu, no doubt armed to the teeth with ice. Older corporations were easier to pick off. Sometimes they relied on a security team of a few wireheads who knew their way around cyberspace. That was a cakewalk. Humans are easy to predict. But with these newer, bigger corporations, everything was automated. Often times, fully AI-controlled. Their actions existed outside of human understanding. It didn’t need to make sense to people, and that’s what made them so hard to outwit.     The server in front of Mako looked like all the others. Large, black, and lined with electric neon. It pulsed a bright green. Her sources said this was the right one and the information panel on the front confirmed it. She thought of the email she received asking for help. Sure, it mentioned payment, but hacking into the servers of a corporation this large was a tall order. Maybe it wasn’t worth it. Depending on what kind of ice they had, she could be booted offline or caught. Her hardware could be fried. She turned it over again and again in her head. Helping people was great and all, and even better when there were bitcreds involved, but was it worth the trouble? She could hear her heartbeat thumping in her ears. It was too late to back out now. She turned up the volume on her headset and her heartbeat was replaced by a hard-hitting bassline. She smiled and hummed along with the synth. It was a good song to hack to.     Starting the hack was easy enough. Mako had a few lines of pre-packaged code that would get the job started. She initialized the hack and waited. There was a split second of stillness. The security measures had yet to recognize the code she was injecting. Mako held her breath. The music she was listening to swelled and the beat hammered against her temples. She exhaled. A shape burst to life in front of her. Glowing neon like everything else, its outline of a body twisted in on itself until it formed a shape she could barely recognize. At first glance, it looked like a spider. Mako froze. She knew it was something much, much [[worse|ch4passage4]].

When Mako was in school, she would study at the teahouse down the street from her parents’ apartment. It was a magnet for amateur hackers. She would peek over the top of her laptop and listen in on their conversations, desperate to learn everything she could about that way of life. There was a man who went by Sigkill who she quietly learned the most from. Out of everybody there, he seemed the most skilled. He touted safety above all else. Research your target. Know what you’re getting into. Sometimes she felt like he was directing advice at her, recognizing her thirst for knowledge. He was gone for two weeks before word about what happened to him got around.     The black ice he encountered while hacking was fully AI controlled. All at once, it tapped and stimulated various sections of his brain. It felt like a month’s worth of migraines concentrated into a millisecond. Then it was over. He finished the hack and walked down to the teahouse, just as he had every day before. He drank a beer. He talked with his friends. He smiled at the kid pretending to do her homework. Day in and day out, for two weeks. The reality was the black ice had created a simulation and trapped him there until he starved to death, alone in his apartment. They found him at his desk, neck bent back from the weight of the headset, hands still on the keyboard. His skin looked vacuum sealed to his bones and his lips were curled back in a horrific sort of smile. “Poor Soni”, they said at the teahouse. Your handle goes with you when you’re iced. Then you’re just another idiot script kiddie who got in over their head. It wasn’t always a quick zap. It didn’t matter how black ice killed you. It only mattered that it did.     Mako ran backwards away from the spider-like creature. More of them started to pop into existence in front of her. They danced on four sharp legs, their pointed feet darting at the grid and running towards her. She typed out some code to shut them down. The spider closest to her flashed, a quick glitch in the outline that let her know she was at least dealing with ice that could be bested. She tried to steady her breathing. Her chest felt tight and she thought of Soni, skin stretched thin over his ribs. The wave of creatures came closer and she fought to stop herself from screaming. Her fingers hammered the keys as she sent out line after line of code. She kept up her end of the dance, running backwards, sending out code then darting forward. She saw Soni’s smile, warm at first then growing wider, his lips blackening and peeling back like a wilting flower. It could have been the ice that made her think of these things, but Mako knew it was her own fear. Her hands slipped on the keyboard and it was enough to ruin a whole line of code. A spider jumped forward and something in her head rattled. Her arms felt like they’d fallen asleep. The black ice was testing its limits. She was lucky Taikomex wasn’t strong enough to off her in [[one go|ch5passage4]].