On the High Frontier

2. Just One More Thing (part 1/5)

You never know what you might find in the virtual corridors of Twilight Shadows. Officially just one of the more obscure environments in the Multuocity social gaming hub, but if you know where to look it is a world of possibilities.

Kimiko's Sayoko avatar rides through the gates of the Lost Spire and climbs the broad stairs to the inner sanctum. Before her is the portal to the Night Keep, but with her modified glyph of sight the portal rather takes her to the Dark Drop, a strange misty area of glitchy caves . But if you move to a particular point and wait you are ported to the Grifter's Rift; a place of meeting and business in the Shadowscape. It is one of the messier accesses, but it has the advantage that few people know of it and even fewer use it, and Kimiko wants to get in without being noticed.

As she waits she builds her toolset. Rather than spawn processes, her passives watch for expiring meshes then salvage and re-purpose them. No resource footprint or framework initialisations, and her passives also shed fractured allocations to fool the garbage collectors. Once she is in with a good working set she loads the match patterns and watches for an echo.

There it is, in the booths at the back. She always finds it useful to plant debug trace patterns into the avatar link of unfamiliar individuals. All it takes is a handshake or similar contact. Now that she has her quarry she needs to be careful that they don't bolt. Her big deck allows her to spin out passive blocking HAIL keyed to the trace pattern across the local transfer nodes. She moves forwards and around a column into the field of view of her target. She watches their eyes widen slightly, amateur, apparently their facial input is directly linked.

It is a low-life fixer called Marcus, he is using his familiar shell this time. "Sayoko." He indicates a seat.

"Marcus." She pointedly remains standing.

"Long time no see."

"Funny, I thought it was only last night you were setting up one of my people to take a fall."

His reaction gives the truth to her accusation. He glances around nervously, does he have no idea how these simulations work? "I don't know what you are talking about."

He looks like his fight or flight might kick in. "I wouldn't try zoning out. There are passive Access Intrusion Lockouts on all the nodes. You'll make it, but they'll shred any resources you try to take with you. Carrying any volatiles? Hate for you to lose any S-Coin."

"You ..."

A large glowing blue and purple sphere appears above the table. "Is there a problem here?" GenKen is the controller of this zone. No one has any idea who or what they are, but they run a safe and secure establishment.

"No problem GK." She waves her hand in emphasis. "Marcus and I are just discussing an old deal." An S-Coin token appears in her hand and she tosses it at the sphere. "Though a privacy shield might be nice." Marcus is too intimidated to object.

"Fair enough." The sphere fades and their booth is surrounded by a pale golden wall. Now she sits down.

Sayoko throws an active token onto the table. It flashes and causes a matching glow in his avatar. "I tagged the link of my contact last night. I'm insulted, you didn't even use a burner ID against me."

"Okay, okay." He folds, it is almost too easy. "Do you know how much it would cost to get a burner in here?"

"I don't know. Probably a lot less than, off the top of my head, repairing a small industrial manufacturing module, possibly with external guns and a few suits thrown in." His eyes widen, it looks like his paymasters hadn't shared the full extent of last night's debacle with him.

"I knew they weren't happy. Apparently they can't figure out how you did it."

"My people are good, scary good, and motivated. You might like to point out to them that my operator didn't raise a sweat. Imagine what could happen if they were really under pressure. I mightn't be able to take out a corporate, but I can put a real dent in Sanderheim's bottom line."