Participants:
| Scene Title | なんて電脳人 |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Unable to find a way into PISEC's system from the outside, Asi is forced to consider less-savory options for gaining quiet access to the island facilities. |
| Date | December 27, 2019 |
A utility shed in Orient, New York
“Fuck,” Asi murmurs, wiping her thumb over her lower lip while she sits crouched with her elbows on her knees. It does nothing to ease the migraine building or actually help solve the issue before her, but no one else is around to care but her. She rolls her jaw and then lets her head sag, trying to both soothe and ignore her throbbing eyes all in one go. She breathes in, and she breathes out.
She breathes in—
and it hitches.
Her hand flies away from her face as a fist before she can stop it, colliding with the metal of the utility box in front of her and sending the now-dented door to it swinging. Her knuckles ache, almost as much as her head. Her hand comes back to cradle the side of her head instead, rocking on her heels once in silence as she tries to figure out a way to overcome this obstacle.
She couldn’t get in. No matter what she did, she hadn’t been able to breach into PISEC’s protected network. She tried monitoring for outbound traffic, but all the traffic she’d seen was encrypted and abstracted in a way unfamiliar to her. She didn’t have the key. If she pressed any harder on the matter she’d draw attention, and she’d run herself ragged as it was. “なんて電脳人…” Asi curses herself in a whisper anyway. She was so close. It was the equivalent of being stuck on the wrong side of a plexiglass wall. She could see the traffic, but was unable to do anything with it. Likely not until she got her hands on an authenticated device.
“考えて、あさみ。ちょっと待って考えってね,” she murmurs to herself. She breathes in, and she breathes out.
Assuming they had devices on the network that weren’t wired— phones, tablets, laptops— she could monitor the ferry traffic to look for employees going to and from the island. Maybe one of them went to happy hour near here. Maybe they took their work home with them occasionally.
These were all massive ifs. Too massive, and they all operated under the assumption that top secret materials would be allowed to go home with a person. Not likely. Not very likely, anyway.
And yet she had a feeling she was going to end up either employing a stalker or be doing some unsavory slipping around herself, because ifs like those weren’t large enough to not be maybes. What a low to have to stoop to. She was a technopath, not a pickpocket. What if she had come all this way to just be noticed slipping her han…?
Asi lifts her head slowly, releasing the loose grip she had on the side of her face. She blinks once as an idea comes over her. Then she rejects it immediately. Frowns at it. “いや。” she voices adamantly at it. Not a chance. But then she considers it again and settles back on her heels, closing her eyes as she works through an even more unsavory solution, one that’s the same… just one step to the left.
The breath she lets out is a hiss that comes between her teeth, one that she wishes would carry away this terrible idea with it.
Perhaps she’d not get it all, but she could get enough, with the help of a skilled pickpocket. She could swipe an ID card that would grant her access, copy it, and return it before the owner knew better. With the credentials, if she were able to physically get in the building and onto a connected terminal, she’d not have to worry about cracking their security— she’d already be behind the gate. And hell, she’d not even have to worry about being caught physically at a terminal … if she had with her the trickster she was thinking of.
Her blood runs cooler at the thought of trusting her life, the mission she’d been ordered on, under his hand. Asi’s eyes narrow a touch harder as she thinks it through, working out a rudimentary plan for how all of this would work, both with and without him.
And she can’t help but come to the conclusion infiltration and extraction might be grades easier if there were a Silas Mackenzie by her side.