Tiger Laredo [THREEPIO] (cybersexual) wrote in theinvincibles, @ 2015-08-15 00:35:00 |
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Entry tags: | !narrative, !plot, !plot: act i, tiger laredo |
Narrative: Tiger Decryption [ 3 of 3 ]
Who: Tiger Laredo.
Where: The Armory, Sublevel 2, Facility 003, Chicago.
When: Friday, August 14th. Afternoon.
What: Armed with new tactics from his cyberpathic friends, Tiger attempts to crack Paul's computer security and finally satisfy the director's interest. Part 3 of 3.
Warnings: Rated R for Revelations. Also bad language.
Compared to his previous visits, the Armory felt crowded today. It was Friday: by all logic the place should have been empty, agents and support staff alike looking forward to the weekend, and the chance to cut loose. Tiger knew it didn't work like that, though: in their own little bubble world, the mayfly dimension that was the Lock, weekends weren't a thing. They were something far-off and alien that happened to other people. Life at Facility 003 was twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Tiger Laredo knew that better than anyone: his computer brain had counted every second since his powers activated, making him aware of exactly how long he'd spent locked in the Chicago facility. He knew, down to the millisecond, how long he'd been a prisoner of the U.S. Government -an uncharged prisoner of his own democratic government- and how many weekends he'd lost to good old-fashioned human xenophobia. He knew all of it, the whole unfair sentence, and he sympathised with anyone who wanted to break free of it - but he also knew that Paul had never been one of them. He hadn't been smart enough, for starters...and Tiger had spent days crafting the perfect conversation when it came time to report back to Kellogg. He looked around the Armory, what of it he could see. Hephaestus sat some distance away from him, but close enough to intervene if it looked like he was going to cause trouble. Agents milled around, either genuinely hard at work or else spying on him extremely well; all in all, it seemed like a normal day. Tiger flexed, his t-shirt rising up to display his stomach, his hands reaching up toward the ceiling as though grasping for inspiration. Or maybe he was just showing off his abs to any agents who might've been watching and interested. It was difficult to tell with the impassive, angry young man. "OK, let's do this," he said out loud. It was a statement of intent, but who knew who he was saying it to? He might've been commenting for the benefit of the cameras, who had watched him spend 70 hours in the last four days down here, hard at work. He might've been speaking directly to the computer: his nemesis, who he had been locked in battle with for, relatively speaking, years. Tiger hadn't been lying when he told Zeus he could do in fifteen minutes what would take a human hacker days. Over the course of seventy hours, he had done what would have cost a non-meta years of their life. Hell, even most cyberpaths he knew couldn't have worked at the speeds he did: Tiger matched computer processing byte for byte, always faster and slightly ahead of any inorganic machine. When people said that the human brain was nature's most powerful computer, they nodded and marvelled at such a neat little sound bite. Nobody but Tiger really understood how right they were: as he tore through the computer's defences, he almost took pity. He had unlimited memory, an infinite hard drive and unparalleled user interfacing. He could make judgements that computers couldn't, and had learning capabilities that the most advanced robot couldn't hope to match. He also had friends that were almost as smart as he was. Finally, it came to the last layer of encryption. The neural feedback that had disabled him last time was paralysed now, its processes locked as Tiger traversed the code gap with ease and deployed algorithm loops to tie up Paul's final firewall and stopped it from targeting him as a threat. It was like using a virus to piggyback an infection: by giving the firewall a tempting enough target, it allowed him to create an unshielded port to slip through. It was ingenious, and Tiger made a mental note to send something to his gnome-playing friend as a thank you. He was inside Paul's personal computer, but for how long and how securely, Tiger didn't know. He began to work, swiftly decompiling the desktop's security measures and switching off everything that could BE switched off: time was still of the essence, even though Paul remained dead. Still working against the security systems, and fighting off renewed attacks now that the firewall had noticed something awry (but robbed of its ability to give him neural shocks), he began to search through all of the personal documents he could fine: it was one thing to record and upload raw data, but if there was something in this mess that could exonerate Paul outright, Tiger was certain that he'd make use of it. His attention was briefly distracted by a folder titled C://DefinitelyAbsolutelyNotPorn/ and Tiger hesitated for 0.8 seconds (an extremely lengthy time to a cyberpath) before adding it to his mental download queue. Nothing seemed particularly odd, until he ran up against a file marked "Notes". Tiger flipped it open, and regarded the contents with interest. Starting with the Alpha-level Operatives, moving down through the ranks and then onto the facility's agents, Paul had been making notes on them all. It wasn't that unusual: Tiger himself made lists on everyone, including the most appropriate methods of taking them down if it came to it, but that was merely a subset of his powers. He couldn't turn that off - Paul had had to sit down and consciously come up with this. They were all here, and all written in a style that was at once both familiar and extremely alien. It disturbed Tiger to read, and marking it for download he carried on. He hadn't gone for more than twenty seconds before he ran into another hurdle, however: a section of encrypted code that he wasn't expecting. It wasn't difficult to cross-reference the encryption used, but Tiger found he'd need a keyword - and, lacking one, began the process to brute force it. While he waited for it to decompile, the folder he'd spotted earlier began to draw his attention once more... Tiger was almost regretful when the files alerted him that they were ready for viewing, but nowhere near as regretful as he was once he began reading. There were times, and places: nothing connected to each other, and no obvious pattern without cross-referencing to anything else. He began searching for local public transport times, and came up blank: what did they mean? Had Paul been planning an escape? It wasn't until Tiger began picking through Paul's communications that the bad penny dropped. Blood thundered in Tiger's ears as he read through correspondence between Paul and...Tiger stopped breathing. As he read through the lengthy conversations that Stonewall had shared with Shade, Tiger's world fell away from him. He felt tossed adrift, searching frantically for a lifeline that wasn't there. This couldn't have been right: there was no way, it had to have been planted for him to find. Even as he thought it, Tiger dismissed the supposition: he'd seen it himself, he was the first and only one to have been in here since Stonewall's death. It had to be real. Nobody was good enough to fool him, not completely. Stonewall had given those coordinates, those times and locations, to Shade for APEX to intercept transports and missions. He'd been her spy, APEX's spy for who knew how long. Agent X-Ray had been right. For just a moment, one dark moment, he considered altering the data. Corrupt it, change it, shift the blame onto X-Ray and away from a metahuman. They’d spoken using a simple text program, but one with hefty encryption. Functioning a little like a military flash code, it was more than likely that the program had been written with this one particular need in mind, and had expected it to stand up to most surveillance and attacks with its apparent simplicity. It had fallen swiftly to Tiger, who knew that a complex system showed up more easily. The smart money said that the more secret a system, the more simple it had to be to hide - and that meant it could be edited. Any thought of rebellion, however, was silenced when his eyes fell upon one particular line. Don't worry, the message read. The others in the facility won't be affected by this; they'll continue their missions. The others in the facility. There were others in the Lock, other spies and APEX agents. Stonewall had been just one of...who knew how many? Tiger looked around, but this time he looked for suspicion, for betrayal: people he had eaten with, gamed with and slept with. Any of them -all of them- could be working for the enemy. The thought horrified him and angered him in equal measure and, for once, his towering intellect was no help at all. He was paralysed, unwilling to read more and yet simultaneously unable to look away: the more he saw, the worse it got until everything he thought he knew about someone he'd respected lay shattered at his feet. Numbly, he finished downloading everything he had to an external drive: every last megabyte formatted and decrypted, with a report at the forefront explaining the key points of what he'd found: detailed notes on his friends and colleagues, communication with terrorists and information passed, and revelations about further operatives. Tiger felt sick, right down to his core: a horrible, leaden burning that didn't go away. Maybe it wouldn't ever go away. He slid off his chair and padded over to Hephaestus' workstation, his skin grey and eyes bloodshot. "You'd better come and look at this," he said dully. "You have some big fucking problems." |