Blind To Reality

9- Infiltration

Cian P.O.V

It's been months- months, since Ashe had gone missing. No, not missing. He was kidnapped. I was positive it was some kind of collector- it had to be. No other being would take such an interest and go to such drastic lengths in order to take a disabled blind child using such complex methods. 

And I had thought it wouldn't be so difficult to find him at first. For the most part, it wasn't hard to find out the names and residences of collectors, seeing as they collected and therefore enjoyed showing off their collections.

Sure, I had anticipated not being able to find him through primary means, needing to probably blast through several layers of collectors before reaching the collector that was holding the traumatized child. And it obviously hadn't been hard to spirit him away, as he surely left by choice not knowing any better.

I had thought, stupidly once more, that I was doing what was best for him. I thought that any connection to myself would only harm the boy more, but I had been grossly underestimating his value and did what I thought was more than the minimum for his future. 

Rather than sending others, I should have gone myself in disguise or sent the good doctor and my, Hopefully still, friend. But I didn't, only sending a third party to mediate between us. And now I was being redirected or outright blocked, my every move known before even I had the chance to plan it.

I pounded the desk as I once more met with a dead end. It had looked so promising, but it seemed I was powerless in this problem even in my own territory, "Just what the hell is going on? How is this even possible?"

I looked through the paperwork I had previously printed out, wondering if I had somehow missed a page, my eyes running through the online copy; perhaps a couple sentences were cut off from a misalignment of the header or footer... Frowning at the screen, my eyes alighted on something odd.

"Am I seeing this right?" I had gained the bad habit of talking to myself, my haphazard office strewn with papers my only company for days at a time. The only real person that I allowed rare visits to was Jeffery for business purposes or Liekar Pritcher, whose face I was starting to forget.

I ran my eyes over the papers, highlighting as I compared it to those on the screen. Soon after, I got out some of the oldest papers I printed, pulling up the same files onto the screen. It quickly became obvious that... Someone had tampered with the information. For the most part, I had been only reading the accounts online, sometimes printing it out to highlight and catalogue for later as important points. These days, one could just as easily highlight online, but I suppose that my rusty old school habits came in handy, seeing as how if I had only kept these online I'd have probably not noticed the inconsistencies.

It took hours, days, but I ran through my papers and online, noticing as I went that the person or persons had been increasingly vigilant in their abilities to change the information being compiled before they even reached me. And in addition, they had somehow- I couldn't believe it... They had somehow gained access even to my computer, enabling them to change what information was present. They probably also had access to everything else present on it.

I wanted to destroy it... But, no. I held in my anger and frustrations, instead pulling a random, inexpensive book from my book shelf and proceeding to tear it to small shreds. I did this with several until my burning anger subsided enough to think past destroying the object that may, in fact, be of use.

Yes, they could see what we were doing, but that also meant that we could figure out what information was important when they changed it. Now all I had to do was figure out what information to feed to them and wait until they changed it. In this way, I'll be able to figure out what was actually important enough to be affected.

Sitting and leaning back once more, I rubbed my eyebrow with my index finger, contemplating my now-infinite, cheat-like chess moves. I had to make these count before they figured it out. But first, I needed to think this through better.

I needed to find how they accessed and slid through into our high-security system and hopped to the other computers indirectly connected to the primary point of infection. This also, sadly, made everything on all these computers unsalvageable. Why? Because, if this virus or whatever it was had the ability to hop to different computers with different securities and firewalls indirectly, that meant that any e-mails or documents sent even through USB was 'corrupted' with a virus happily tagging along behind it. 

I sighed, hands scrubbing at my face at the thought of having to set a whole new closed network just for this, as well as several other closed networks for the hospital's important documents that will now have to be input separately as a backup parallel to the general open network that will be used by all the workers. And, I'll probably also need to hire many many more IT personnel, which will be increasingly difficult. Why? Because if this enemy collector was so easily able to deceive me in the first place, I could only imagine how far his reach spread; who was in his pocket.

First things first, though, was to compile and create documents that will give me clues as to Ashe's whereabouts. Finding the kernels of truth through the attempts made in misdirection towards my efforts.I had to be fast yet careful in order to get the most information from them in a the small timeframe before I'm found out. 

"Well, now that I've caught your trail, just see how sharp my nose will become."

Short, I know, but I wanted to only put Cian in this part or it would lessen the effect. That meant that when he was finished with his thoughts, there was nothing more that I could write, haha...