IC - Neura Flux

[Black]

"This is starting to piss me off," the dark figure snarled into the ether. The deadly staff crackled with pent up energy as if to emphasise Necron's anger.
This was Charles Munro's history, and although clone number #1103 had been briefed on the elf's family the background was not extensive.

Perhaps sometime in the near future would be a good time to look into this in more depth.
The trouble with that was the possibility of flagging up Transys Neuronet's interest. Not something the skeletal machine wanted any more than his flesh and blood self.

[arcanus]

The Druid turned and an incredibly annoying mirthful grin crossed his face.
"Aye, It is Charle's Monroes story, but its unfinished and as his ken it falls to you too bring final resolution" he paused
Necrons staff positively throbbed with enraged power.

Again the Druid smiled "That and your chapters begun, by resolving Monroes legacy you begin your own, the choice is whether you resist or get on with it!" with that he turned and continued his trek onto another hillock.
Black turned his attention back to the screens rotating in front of him, he saw two places of note, any persons memory stirred filling the gaps.

The first was an underground carpark which filling in the gaps 'Black' guessed was in Seattle, the other was a broken down avenue in Chicago, not far from the Pyramid, he thought.
The architecture provided a pleasant sea breeze 'Nice touch, well done' thought Black.

[arcanus]

"Pick a card" smiled the Druid
Angry power flared from the top of Necron's staff
"Don't be foolish" a harder edge came from the Druid
Necron's eyes pouring greenbalefire narrowed, for the first time he got a measure of the druids programming, its scale and it was indeed mighty.
The cards showed pictures of locations within the flesh and blood, Necron growled in frustration "Determined little shit ain't ya" he rumbled.
His reply was that mirthful grin.

[Black]

"Calm down," Caliburn Black instructed his virtual self.
It seemed that Necron had become more and more angry recenctly and Black was concerned as to why?

In the flesh and blood his emotions were controlled, were supressed until he felt it was appropriated to display them. Was he angry? So angry that the pent up feeling was being released into the matrix?

Necron was really just an extension of himself, an icon representing him. Okay, so Transys had designed the icon to be a ruthless killing machine, not at all unlike his true self, but since the loss of his cranial cyberdeck, and everything that was associated with it, Necron seemed to be becoming his own entity. Yet, that said, the ancient looking machine was still him, and still obeyed his wishes.

Necron shuddered next to the druid, and calmed down.

[Black]

Necron cast a sideways glance at the druid before growling, “Excuse me, I have work to do…”
The druid gave a courteous nod of his head and smiled. “I’ll find you when you have more time.”
Yet another growl emitted from the ancient looking robot, a noise that indicated the machine’s annoyance at the fact but also of his grudging acceptance of the inevitable.

With that the Necron disappeared form the virtual representation of Raferty’s bar.

The world was black for a moment, in reality a hundredth of a nanosecond. Then a sickly green glow began to permeate the nothingness.
Necron emerged into a nightmare landscape where sharp glass like shards or rock jutted upwards at acute angles into a twilight sky.
The unfriendly land was crisscrossed with narrow pathways, sometimes delving into gorges and other times sweeping up to form narrow bridges over seemingly bottomless chasms. Each pathway was edged with the razor sharp rocks, emphasising the lethal ambiance of the virtual terrain. Veins of energy ran through and beneath the rocks like an alien lava which sometimes erupted through the surface into pools to cast an unhealthy pallor on the surrounding landscape.
All the pathways interconnected with a single ring road of giant black flagstones and then ran from there in straight lines towards the hub, a gigantic obsidian pyramid that looked to have both Egyptian and Mayan influences.
The land within the bounds of the ring-road was flat, but still bore the lava like veins and pools.
The virtual realm did not go on forever and when travelling out from the hub the path would eventually come to a huge obsidian gateway, flanked by two obelisks of black marble.

Through one of these gateways Necron now walked. The gate hummed a deep almost threatening sound as the figure entered, but fell silent after the ancient robot had taken no more than a dozen paces. The guardians at the gate satisfied with the figures authority to be there.
This was Necron’s realm, his virtual kingdom. The place had been designed and built solely for him, it was not a place for others to dwell uninvited.

Necron continued to the pyramid, ignoring the strange looking robots that patrolled the land. They had a beetle like lower body that hovered over the ground. The humanoid upper torso at the front end made them appear as robotic beetle centaurs and they looked as ancient as their master Indeed they were similar in appearance except for their right arm which had been replaced with some sort of disruptor weapon that glowed with a green energy.

Making his way to the arched entrance, Necron passed within, quickly navigating the darkened corridors until he came to a cell like room with a thick door of petrified oak.
Politely he knocked before entering.
Within the room was another skeletal robot. This one smaller than Necron and more hunched. What made the entity stand out from the Dark Lord of this realm was the flesh robe it wore. Supple fresh skin that appeared to have been recently peeled from some hapless victim was draped over the robot’s back like a cloak and still dripped blood upon the floor where it stood.

“Yes o’ master?” the robot hissed in a vile voice.
“Zuul” Necron named the entity. “I have a task for you.”
The sprite already knew what the Necron desired from it, it was after all it’s master’s servant.
“Come with me to the ‘World Chamber’. There you will await my summons.”
Leaving a trail of blood that slowly faded and then disappeared, the robot shambled along behind the stooping form of the Necron Lord.

Within the World Chamber, a tall room at the summit of the pyramid lit with eerie green flamed braziers, Caliburn Black’s matrix alter ego walked across to a small circular dais in the centre of the room.
The sloping walls faded away to be replaced with a ghost like view of the Oakland Matrix as viewed from the top of a pyramid in the southeast of the city.
Necron reached out a skeletal finger tapping in an LTG reference into a virtual keyboard that had materialised before him.
The first part of the LTG address indicated that it was outside of the California Free State borders, somewhere within the UCAS.
The matrix ghost-image changed to show a very basic view of the electronic North American continent. As more digits were entered, so the matrix image changed again showing the American west coast, then Seattle and eventually stopping at the communications node in the Downtown district.

With a mental click from Black the room shone a bright white, swamping out all other images.
Outside, the top of the four sided pyramid broke apart with a deep rumbling stone grating on stone noise. Once open a beam of bright green energy shot up into the starless heavens.

Fractions of a second later the beam had gone.

Necron stood within the comms node, a part of the Seattle public matrix system, the normally smooth surface blackened and cracked from his landing. He snarled a chuckle, amused at the fragility of the program for this part of the matrix structure.
Opening a window Necron consulted the seeker complex form he had left running. The form pointed him to Slasher’s phone.
The Troll Killers had been asked to take out a hit on the Foundation and now Necron/Black was looking to pay them back for the attack. But first he wanted to know who had put them up to the task. For that he needed to make use of Zuul.
Zuul was a sprite, the matrix version of a spirit. Like an olden day virus he would insinuate himself into a location, hiding beneath layers of disguise subtly and covertly going about his given task.

In the matrix, Necron closed in on the Slasher’s phone icon, crossing the virtual city, noticing the thousands of information highways that crossed the vista, throbbing with data. How much of this could information could be valuable to someone like him. It wasn’t easy intercepting data packets though, not easy at all, and came with a high risk. He didn’t pay much attention to the various iconical representations of the millions of businesses and private nodes as he passed. He even ignored the majority of the icons representing other deckers. He only really cared about the signal.
Then in a quiet part of the Downtown matrix was the small, almost insignificant icon of Slasher’s phone.
The phone was in passive mode, indicating that it wasn’t in use.

Necron pulled his cloak around himself and as he did he became translucent, activating his stealth complex form.
Now was the time to see just how secure this phone was; he tried to access the phone’s internal system.

Hacking & Stealth CF roll: 18 dice: 10 9 7 5 5 4 4 4 4 3 3 3 3 2 2 (6 hits)

[arcanus]

Hacking & Stealth CF roll: 18 dice: 10 9 7 5 5 4 4 4 4 3 3 3 3 2 2 (6 hits)

The Node of the phone resembled a pulsing transluscent rectangle, as Necron circled around the matrix point, analysing it for weaknesses, a hairline crack that would allow him access.
Like a vampire seeking invitation into the virgins abode.

Then he saw it, a play of light, a momentary window and Necron took it, his form surging through into the inner system.

Make a scanner+computer roll?

[Black]

Make a scanner+computer roll?

12 7 5 5 5 4 4 4 3 2 2 2 2 2 (6 Hits)

[arcanus]

After three months their patience was rewarded, the patrolling smartframes identified a change, sutle at first then gaping fissures across the archologies host walls.
Since the fall of the SCIRE its RTG had been inpenetrable, enterprising deckers had set a small army of stealth, spoof and penetration frames across the wall, like vultures circling a carcass they’d waited.
The paydata within the SCIRE was a veritable goldmine, plus the common concensus was that with the military in control they wouldn’t know their arse from their elbow.

The jackhammer programs seemed to be having an effect, part of the perimeter barrier was breaching, pathways were opening into nodes, entry.
2XS was awakened by the signal sent by his smartframe, as he logged in he instructed the coffee machine to get the ‘Jo’ on, his virtua form blurring as he tranversed the Seattle grid in seconds.

Arriving on the code tower of a neighbouring LTG to the SCIRE, 2XS swept his virtua trenchcoat back as he stepped onto the rooftop, his partners in crime allowed their personas to grin, truly the Cheshire Cats.
‘Zoom’ resembled a metallic fluid man, with different bands of colour flowing through his limbs, ‘Bear’ their self styled combat decker, his personal a large troll sized armoured suit, carrying copious outrageous weapons. A foxy leather clad cat burglaress and a luminescent serpent.

Zoom shook 2XS’s hand “This is the big one, buddy”
“Sure is” he replied, “We gotta remember this is the grand daddy of systems, was before all this, won’t be any different now!”
“You getting boring in your old age” Nim chided him
“Just don’t want people getting fried” replied 2XS
“Sorry man, forgot you got zapped a few months back” said the serpent
2XS had not long recovered from major neurological damage, inflicted on him by Shotozuma deckers, being comatosed for a fortnight had brought a sense of prudence to a once rash decker.
“Bear, got the ordinance” asked 2XS
The combat decker nodded
“Nim, defensive softcodes” he checked
“By the bucketloads” she replied
“Time to go then, before the vultures clean the carcass” and with that the hacker crew descended across the intervening grid towards the code breaches in the SCIRE.

[arcanus]

The agent cautiously made its way through the wreckage.
The Node was trashed, the damage was hardcode deep into its core, part of the problem had been its prime code had been fundamentally
altered, altered by something with hideous processing power and scale.
The agent was formed, born with stealth as its primary function, despite this both it and its creator felt an intense nervousness, that for all
its capability it wouldn’t be enough.

Icons floated, shattered, rended, some a mere remnant of their former selves, each an indication of the trauma often lethal that had been inflicted
upon their owners meat bodies or brains. The agent electronically shivered as the severed icon head, that of a once glowing snake drifted by.
Subtlety it ran a scan, sweeping across the node, looking for a familiar signature.
It suddenly shot backwards, stealthly merging with the remains of a once wonderfully sculpted tree.
Ominous clear crystal spheres slid up through the ground, horrifically parting the autumnal ground, destroying the leaves, displacing them, eroding their coding.
Something about those spheres filled the agents master with absolute fear, almost uncontrollable.

The agent made a decision, there was no sign of 2XS, even among the virtual dead or destroyed.
These entities or knowbots were on a scale it had never seen before, it knew that escape was possible but would lead them to its master.
Lacking any significant offensive programs, it mustered what it had and launched firing everything.
Its attack delivered little in the way of meaningful damage, the agents form was mercilessly dismembered, taken apart piece by piece, destroying it utterly,
which fortunately also destroyed any datatrails back home.

Black raised his head, allowing the matrix to slip away, worrying indeed.

[arcanus]

Agent Mark Kemp rerouted his auxiliary shields, the ‘Fedwatch’ mainframe boosting power into his deck shoring up his defences and repair soft codes.
Upon his bed the medics monitored his readings, his ECG flashing warnings, his like his fellow combat deckers, cranial activity was lit up like Christmas. The medical technicians exchanged worried glances.

He pulled himself from the wreckage of the Matrix plaza and stared in disbelief as the quarter mile wide hole that had been Ameribanks Tacoma Node descended down beyond his sensory range, a chasm into the abyss.
His icon blurred as his evasion programs initiated, as a Multiplier Beam erupted from the chasm.
A crystal sphere rocketed up, several deckers blasted away from it as it overcame them in cybercombat, a combined force of UCAS Army, the Feds, Lonestar, Mitsuhama and Microdeck had engaged the enemy.
The beam disrupted several icons, its code similar to a ‘Blackhammer’ utility but with seriously unpleasant viral content. He was still moving as the beam swept across the remnants of the node, in turn her returned fire with his own blaster utility, the code uselessly reflecting off its crystalline shell.

The amassed force of Deckers regrouped and attacked once again, hopefully they wouldn’t have to take the scrorched earth route they’d had to do with the Fargo Industrial Plastics node.
The casualties suffered when the Orbs had emerged within the plants Node had become prohibitive, in the end they’d dropped a viral bomb and destroyed the whole Node taking the spheres with it.
The damage the the grid and infrastructure was ranging into tens of millions of Nuyen.

Another pass and the Crystal Orb had send a further twenty deckers offline, some now cerebrally offline.
‘Kemp’ turned to face the orb as it rose from the crater, pixellation and corrupted code crackling around it.
Kemp initiated his shutdown protocols, garbled orders were streaming into their icons to retreat the order was being given to burn the node, a blaster beam ripped into an offensive smartframe to his left, the frame resembling a cuboid tank.
Ordinarily Frames or IC of that level could take any amount of punishment, this one imploded its core destroyed and dragging its icon and surface programming into itself.

Kemp wondered whether he’d make it out, it wasn’t as simple as just jacking out, both the Node and SAN were full of viral code, which slowed any IO operations down, plus there was the risk of some rogue IC coding infecting the persona as it exited.
Rather like a diver having dived too deep then encountering a shark, he had to soft exit, milliseconds passed as his deck relays slowly closed down purging themselves of infection.
All the while the diver waited at a safe point to prevent the bends the shark circled up toward him.
The orb rotated releasing pulses of hostile IC, picking off the deckers as they slowly withdrew.

A beam of emerald green energy struck the orb, blowing it backwards, another slammed into it.
A discolouration spread across its surface, the orb spun, and this time much quicker and released a barrage of attack utilities.
The stranded combat deckers watched as a similiarly emerald crystalline figure flew into the Node, further beams lancing out, striking the orb.
The orbs responses were now more urgent, its attacks flaring around significant shielding on the figures part.
They watched as the two crystal forms exchanged fire, until an aperture opened on the surface of the Crystal orb, a green beam flew into the opening and the orb splintered into a million crystalline fragments.

Kemp looked up at the figure his sensors compromised by his soft exit, but he was sure it wasn’t a decker, then he opened his eyes.