RETALI8ION: The Cobalt Code

RETALI8ION
The Cobalt Code

by

Amber Neko Meador

Copyright © 2015 Amber Neko Meador

-1-

The blue colored code flowed freely before her.  It arced in and out of other objects and libraries, revealing its true purpose before finding its inevitable end in some random function or another that connected to a second library of programs and code located on the other side of the country.  It was these connections that Regina was searching for, to find the secret connections that few could.  Connections that numbered beyond what most would ever, or could ever, count.  The hidden links that revealed the truths of their designers. These links always seemed to reveal themselves to her.

“Coming in,” came a voice in Regina's headset.

Regina reached up and pushed the headset up and away from her eyes, letting it rest on her forehead.  “Thomas O'Malley, you are late!”

“Not Thomas fault,” came the reply.

Regina glanced at a monitor that showed the live video feed from Thomas.  She couldn't make out much at night, other than some lights coming from what she assumed were other hotel rooms at the Kogami.  She stood and walked to the window of the room to look out at the black starless sky in anticipation of Thomas's arrival.  “Really?  You didn't stop on your way back to kill some birds again, did you?  I was almost late delivering the package last time because of that.”

“No eat birds that smell funny.  Metal taste bad.” Thomas replied.

“I bet camera parts taste bad, too.  Try not eating spy birds next time.  There is a reason it wasn't moving.  But anyway, you still haven't told me what has you running late.  Did you stop for food?”

“No.  Humans at meeting,” Thomas replied.

“Humans!  What do you mean?  Is that why your video feed disappeared for a while?” Regina asked quickly.

“Not know feed gone.  Humans delayed data deliver,” Thomas replied with a strained voice. “Can Regina talk later? Climbing now.”

“Yes.  Sorry, Thomas.  My fault.”

“Okey dokey,” Thomas replied.

Regina waited patiently for a few moments in the comforting blue glow of her rig's monitors, the only light source currently on in the hotel room.  Several seconds later, she looked out the window and saw the large furry black paws of Thomas O'Malley slowly reach up over the edge of the balcony and into the light coming from the hotel room.  She watched as Thomas's other paw reached out a bit further as the genetically engineered, cybernetically enhanced, black cat continued his slow climb onto the balcony.

“Why so high?” Thomas asked.

Regina took his question as a request for help and quickly slid the door open to help him over the balcony.  “Sorry,” she said, as she helped the large black cat over.

Thomas looked at Regina with his large blue eyes for a moment with a somewhat confused expression on his face.  “Why so high?” Thomas asked again with a tilt of his head.

“We're always up high when we're on a job,” Regina replied, somewhat confused.

“Why!?”

“I've tried to tell you a dozen times, Thomas.  I really don't have time right now.  I'll tell you later, okay?”

Thomas tilted his head the other way as though he was trying to interpret Regina's words.  “Okay.”

“Alright.  Come here,” Regina said as she held her hands out.

Thomas took a few steps toward Regina, and she gave him a quick head scratch as he came towards her.

“Do you want the harness off?” Regina asked, as she started scratching Thomas under his chin.

“No.”

“No?” Regina questioned.

“Last time,” Thomas replied.

Regina let out a sigh.  “Okay, turn around then.”

“Okay.”

“I keep telling you that last time was an accident.  It won't happen like that again,” Regina said, opening one of the side pouches on Thomas's harness.

“Accidents happen lot,” Thomas replied.

Regina pulled out a data stick from the pouch and started inspecting it.  “Wow, this is one of those new Hilatchi data sticks.  I didn't even know these were out yet.”

“Ignoring Thomas.”

“I'm not ignoring you.  I'm admiring a new piece of tech.  Plus, accidents don't happen a lot.  Just... sometimes,” Regina said with a shrug.

Thomas turned back around to face Regina.  “Sometimes often.”

Regina tilted her head at Thomas in response, and waited a few moments.  A tilt of the head indicated confusion to most domestic splices.  “Do you want me to take the headset off?”

“No.  Might go out.  Might sleep.”

“Sure, go out.  Have fun.  Grab something to eat.  I'm sure no one will notice the three-foot-tall harness-wearing black cat roaming around by itself,” Regina said sarcastically.

“It night,” Thomas replied with a tilt of his head.

“Yes.  It is night,” Regina said reluctantly as she stood up.  “And I suppose you've never caused any trouble before.  But what will you do if someone asks where your owner is?”

Thomas grinned his best toothy smile and said, “Meow?”

Regina laughed at Thomas's meow.  “Alright.  Have fun.  Stay out of trouble, and come back before sunrise.”

“Will,” Thomas replied.

“I'll leave the door open for you,” Regina said, pointing at the doorway.

Thomas walked over and rubbed himself up against Regina's legs.  “Thank you.”

Regina gave Thomas a quick pet and head rub.

An alarm on Regina's data pad went off.

“Ah shizlin, I'm late,” Regina said as she reached for the data pad that was hanging from her belt, and headed into the hotel room.

She reached her dive rig chair, took off her trench coat, placed it on the back of the chair, and slid comfortably in place.

“Well, let's see what we're stealing tonight,” Regina said as she slid the data stick into a reader slot bank on her right.

After a few clicks on the interface, a new screen opened up with a pass code request.  Regina looked down at her data pad, and started to key in the code she had just been sent moments earlier.  A red flashing message on the screen caught her off guard.

“Wait... what?”  Regina said aloud.

She again entered the code from the message she had received, but the red error message again popped up.

“They are either testing you, or something is wrong,” Regina said to herself as she bit her thumbnail.  She needed to either start cracking this pass code or abandon the job shortly. Clients don't wait for results in this market, and she'd be blacklisted if she didn't deliver, or at least drop the contract, she thought to herself.

Regina tapped her fingers across one of her keyboards for a moment of pondering.  “The pay is too good to say no to.”

Regina reached under her seat and pulled out a small corded device.  She pulled out the data stick from the reader slot, and plugged it into the device.  “Here's hoping,” she said as she continued to work.  She then plugged one of the device’s cables into the reader slot, and pulled another keyboard on her lap.  She started typing commands as quickly as she could.

“Come on, Dyna.  Momma needs a new pair of processors,” Regina said to herself as she executed the last command on the keyboard.

She watched as the code scrolled continuously up on the monitor.  Every few lines told her that her program and the device had failed to remove the barrier file from the device.  Regina waited and watched as this event was repeated hundreds of times over, and waiting for the single line of code that would read as 'success' instead of 'failed'.

Growing impatient, and slightly concerned, Regina stood up and let the program continue to run its course.  Looking out at the windowed balcony, she noticed that Thomas was gone.  “Happy hunting, my friend,” she said as she started to pace.

Impatiently she kept a watchful eye on the blue lines of code scrolling across her screen, still waiting for success.  She started to think it was taking too long.  It had never taken this long before.  “It's brand new,” she said to herself as she continued to walk about the hotel room.  “Perhaps I can't break it with the old Dyna?”

Just then, the code stopped scrolling, and the program played a positive sounding tone.  Regina walked over to the monitor and studied the code.  The last line showed a success message.

“Seven minutes to crack.  Shit!” she said aloud.  Regina knew she had already gone past the point of no return.  If she were going to get out, she needed to have done so already.

Regina looked over the video monitors she had set up.  One showed feeds that she had hijacked from the hotel, showing the front and back entrances, as well as the roof.  She couldn't see anything out of the ordinary there.  The second monitor showed hallways from the floor she was on, and the ones above and below her.  Again, she couldn't see anything out of the ordinary going on.

“If SecFor was coming for me, they should already be here,” Regina said, as she started to calm down.  “And for the fifteen mil I'm being paid, I doubt they are playing me just to catch me.  I've covered my tracks too well on my other jobs for that.”

Regina jumped into her rig seat, took a deep breath, and pulled her headset down over her eyes.  “Go, Gina, go,” she said reassuringly to herself.

She quickly read through the contents of the data stick that detailed the job.

“A snatch and grab on a pharm co?” Regina said aloud.

Regina quickly pulled the registered server list for MPHarm, her target for the night.  From the list, she quickly pulled what were obviously decoy servers out of her way and focused on the few remaining.  It took her a few minutes of sifting through traffic to find the ones being used for corporate e-mails.  Diving in, she started looking through the day's data.

“A company of hundreds of thousands, and it's a Friday.  I doubt all the sheeple who got their passwords reset today bothered to change them,” Regina said with a smile.

A few hundred subject lines later, she found a single new password request, with no follow up e-mail to the user, and a new password contained in the body of the message.

“Bingo.”

A few trial and error email programs later, she made her way into his inbox.  A few minutes after that, she was remotely logged into Mr. Neal Gibson's work computer terminal.

Regina let out a sigh of relief, and pushed her headset back up on her forehead.  She took another look at the video feeds from the hotel, and still could only see minimal foot traffic, mostly drunkards, roaming through the lobby.  No one was walking the hallways of the nearby floors, and there was nothing happening on her floor's halls.

“Okay, pharm co. It's time for the Cobalt Code Thief to do her thing,” Regina said as she pulled the headset back down.

It took a little while for Regina to sort through all the random office bullshit that was sitting around, mostly birthdays, so-and-so not pulling their weight on this project, or that.  She then found her way through some human resource stuff she could care less about, mostly personal stuff about medical accommodations, gender transition, time off requests, and upcoming promotions.

“I'll give it to the security designer.  They made it look like a lot of this was in a more protected area than it should be.  Maybe they used to be a code slicer,” Regina said with a smirk.

A few moments later, she started working through machine schematics that looked as though they were about to be put into production in one of MPHarm's factories.  She didn't exactly know what she was looking at, but she recognized proprietary information when she saw it.

“Let's just save you,” Regina said, as she brought up another program to start downloading files.  “And everything else from this point on.”

After several more schematics, production designs, and employee listings, she ran across a contributions spreadsheet showing to whom, and how much the company was paying out to politicians, lobbyists, and Super PACs.

“We're starting to get to the good stuff now.”

A moment later she finally spotted the file she had been sent in to find.

“Hello there, Ph000455893-20610529,” Regina said as she opened the file to view it.  “Or should I call you CEL P7?”

It didn't do her much good to read past that.  Her knowledge of chemical components and all the little lines that connected them was very limited.  But she felt fairly certain the four thousand page document was, in fact, what she had been sent here to find.

“Let's just go ahead and take all of your friends while we're here,” she said as she initiated a program to dump the entire folder on to her rig's hard drive.

She watched as a percentage bar slowly started to fill.

“Thomas, where are you?” Regina asked aloud.

“Roof,” Thomas replied.

“Head down in a few minutes.  I've got what I need.”

“Okey dokey.”

Regina leaned back and again pushed the headset up and out of her view.  She took a quick glance at the video monitors, and everything still looked normal.  “I guess I was worried for nothing.  Maybe some dumb ass that worked for my client just typed the pass code a few letters or numbers off when they sent it?  Or maybe transposed something?”

She looked up at the code lines that had given her the success message and access to the data stick.  She realized that it didn't look anything like the code she had received.  The one she had been sent was a simple alphanumeric code, but the one her program had generated was made entirely of symbols, some of which weren't even available to most domestic units, but was something she'd seen some overseas equipment use from time to time.  “That's... odd.”